Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  “Maybe he didn’t trust the local cops?” Tonica was always willing to assume someone was on the take; she’d always blamed that on his being from Boston.

  “And then someone else killed him for hiring me? And my info was on him when he died, as the person he was going to squeal to? Great.” Her stomach went sour, and she couldn’t blame that entirely on the cheap coffee. “I’m packing up and heading back to Seattle now. Screw this.”

  “And never know who hired you, and why?” He was flipping her own argument on her: she hated when he did that.

  “Easy for you to say: nobody’s gunning for you. Come down here and help me!” She paused, thinking. “And why aren’t they, anyway? Gunning for you, I mean. If someone hired us in that capacity, why didn’t they hire us?”

  From the silence at the other end of the line, she assumed he didn’t have an answer for that.

  “No, much as it would be nice to think we’d been called in to save the day, I think someone was just screwing with me, and this is totally unrelated to him getting killed. Maybe there really was a job, if not the job he actually told me about, and he just didn’t want it traced back to him. . . .”

  That actually made sense, the kind of sense she could understand and work with. Something he wanted arranged, that he didn’t want to be associated with? It didn’t have to be illegal—maybe he wanted to do something nice for someone but not have it traced back; she’d arranged that sort of thing before. “So yeah, maybe he wanted me to manage something, and used that as a way to get me down here, and then maybe, I don’t know, hire a woman to play the client? Or fess up and try to hire me for whatever . . .” She shook her head. “No. That doesn’t make sense, either.”

  No matter how she tried to twist it, she couldn’t find a good—or even a non-bad—reason why someone would have hired her using a fake name and false pretense. And an older woman, that wouldn’t raise her suspicions the way a younger male client might, asking her to meet at his home.

  “Or maybe someone wanted me out of the way so they could burgle my house. I mean, if we’re going to go wide-scale paranoia.”

  “The most expensive thing in your apartment is a two-year-old laptop,” Tonica said. “Unless you have diamonds stashed somewhere?”

  “Yeah, right. Tucked away right next to the Rousseau and the T-bills.”

  “So.” There was silence from his end of the phone. “How much will it kill you to never know what really happened?”

  She already knew that: it would bug her the entire ride back to Seattle, and probably for weeks afterward, and she’d already cleared her schedule for the next two weeks for the job that wasn’t, so it’s not as though she had anything she had to race back to and distract herself with. “I’ve gotta know, Teddy.”

  She rarely used his first name, a habit she’d fallen into when they first became friends.

  “Okay then.” And as simple as that, he was on board.

  “So, are we taking ourselves for a client now? Because we’ve agreed that’s a dumb move.”

  “Nope,” he said. “We’re not a client if we aren’t paying. This is . . . making sure that our backs are covered. Or your back, anyway, since mine doesn’t seem to be hanging in the breeze.”

  “I can feel the support all the way down here, Tonica.”

  He laughed, and suddenly she felt better. He might not have gotten side-eyed along with her, but he was there. Well, he was there, but he was here, too.

  “Okay, assuming the cops tell me I can go today—or tomorrow, more likely—I’ve got one more day I can poke around down here, but then I need to return the rental car, or shell out more money to extend it.” She’d figured she would keep it to run errands when she was back in town, so long as the client had been paying. Without a client . . . “That gives me two days, at least, to poke around on-site. So what’s the next step in operation ‘Why Am I Here?’ ”

  She’d no sooner asked the question than Georgie’s head lifted and the dog looked toward the entrance, just seconds before someone rapped sharply on the door.

  Ginny glanced down at the dog, then at the door. “Georgie, did you order room service again without checking on me?”

  “What?” That was Tonica, not Georgie.

  “Someone’s at the door,” she said, still watching it as though it might suddenly bust open on its own.

  “You ordered breakfast?”

  “No.”

  She could imagine his expression: those wide-set eyes alert, but his face gone still, the way it did when he thought trouble was coming and wasn’t going to give a hint of what he was going to do; what she called his bouncer face.

  There was another rap at the door, this time more obviously impatient. “Ms. Mallard. Open the damned door.”

  A woman’s voice, and familiar in the way that had Ginny getting off the bed and heading for the door, phone still in her hand, without questioning.

  “Gin?”

  “Hang on,” she told her partner, but kept the line open. If this suddenly went bad, he was too far away to do anything but he could tell the cops what he’d heard, anyway. Which was morbid as hell, but—

  She unlatched the safety locks and opened the door, aware that Georgie had gotten up and was pressing against her leg, as though to say “you’ve got me here, too, Mom.”

  “About time. Here, I brought coffee.”

  Ginny took the offered coffee automatically, staring as the tall, dark-haired woman moved past her into the hotel room, pausing only to give Georgie a passing scrub on the head. “I figured you’d bring her, so I checked the dog-friendly hotels in the area first. You just can’t stay out of trouble, can you?”

  “I’ll call you back,” Ginny said into the phone, and hung up.

  8

  Mallard? Mallard!” Teddy stared at the phone in his hand in disbelief. But no matter how much he glared, the screen told him the same thing: she’d hung up on him. “All right, I’m going to assume that wasn’t a mass murderer or the cops coming to haul your backside down to jail, and if was the cops, don’t be calling me for bail money after that.” He could put up with a lot, but being hung up on was a serious do-not-push-the-red-button thing, and Mallard knew that.

  Then again, she had said she’d call him back, which suggested that whoever had come to the door wasn’t an immediate threat. Unless she’d said that to tell whoever it was at the door that someone would be waiting for her to call?

  “Damn it, Mallard. . . .”

  No, her voice had been surprised, and maybe a touch annoyed, but not worried or scared. He’d heard her voice when she was scared: it tightened up, and her vowels flattened.

  The only thing he could think of, other than a highly dubious morning booty call, was that someone had come by with information about the case, and they didn’t want her to share it with the unknown person on the other end of the line. It didn’t make him feel any better, but short of annoying her—and possibly scaring off whoever it was—by calling back until she answered, he was shit out of luck. It wasn’t as though he could call the local cops and say, “I think my partner is being menaced by someone having to do with the case of yours we’re poking our noses into, sorry about that.”

  Not unless he was sure there was a real threat, anyway.

  “So I guess that’s my cue, too. Time to get to work. Coffee, then work.” He’d been woken up by the early morning call that made him in turn call Ginny, and now that the mental adrenaline was running down, he could feel the caffeine craving kicking in. He checked the time, and considered if he had time for a run before work, or if today was going to be one of Those Days.

  There was a soft thud, and a slight dip in the mattress next to him, alerting him that he wasn’t alone any longer. He looked to his left, to see Penny picking her way across the bed toward him, her tail held erect, her ears forward. He hadn’t even thought about telling Mall
ard about the cat demanding to come home with him the night before. She would have gotten a laugh out of it, and God knows it sounded like she needed a laugh now. Well, when she called back.

  “And good morning to you, too,” he said now as the cat settled herself on his pillow as though he’d bought it just for her. “Did you have a good snooze?”

  The tabby had hung around long enough last night to sniff at the food he’d picked up, then turned her nose up at it and disappeared. How a cat could disappear in a six-hundred-square-foot studio apartment he didn’t know, but she’d managed it.

  “Clearly you didn’t want to come home with me for my company. Or the tuna.”

  Penny meowed once, sharply, and he laughed.

  “Okay, maybe it was the tuna.” He’d put it back in the fridge when she didn’t seem interested, figuring she’d be hungry in the morning. Looked like he was right. “Coming right up, your highness.”

  * * *

  Penny followed Theodore to the kitchenette, where he busied himself making coffee, and putting food on a plate, then placing the plate on the floor next to her. It still smelled strange to her, but it looked like that was her only choice, and since she didn’t know how to get outside to hunt and her stomach was starting to grumble, she tucked into the strange food without further delay. She hadn’t gone without food in years, not since Theodore had picked her up off the street and taken her indoors, but she still remembered the panic of hunger.

  “So, looks like we have another job,” Theo said to her, his hands busy with something on the counter out of sight. “Ginny got herself into trouble.”

  Penny knew this: she’d been listening. But Theo forgot that, sometimes. That was all right; she liked it when he talked to her—he knew things she didn’t, sometimes. But she already knew that Ginny and Georgie were somewhere else, and that they’d found a dead body, and someone thought Ginny was responsible.

  Penny sniffed at that again. She knew what violence smelled like, and there was none of that on Georgie’s human. She was the kind to release a mouse, not eat it.

  She didn’t know where Ginny and Georgie were, though, or when they were coming back, or how she was supposed to figure out a solution, stuck here. So she meowed, encouraging her human to keep talking.

  “Ginny’s going to poke around, see what she can find out. Normally I’d be running interference with the in-person interviews, because she’s still not as good as she thinks she is at finding someone’s sweet spot, but, well, can’t do that, stuck up here.” Theo had a mug in his hands now, the bitter smell of coffee making her whiskers twitch. He moved away from the counter to sit at the table by the window, and she abandoned the rest of the tuna and went to sit on the windowsill, grooming her tail to encourage him to continue. “So she’s on her own, God help us all. Although she’s gotten better at listening, rather than trying to talk her way to an answer. But that means the only thing I can help with right now is research.” He laughed. “And you know Ginny’s shuddering at the thought. She doesn’t think I can even order food online, much less dig for information, just because it’s easier to let her do it. All right, I’m nowhere in her class when it comes to digital research, true, but let’s see what fact-finding magic I can work.”

  He reached across the table and pulled a thin book from the top of a pile of papers. “Papa’s Little Black Book to the rescue. Portland, fake IDs, prank-hiring. Who do we know who might be able to help with that?” He stared at the book, then opened it and riffled through the pages. “No, no, no . . . God, I need to update their address at some point, no, maybe . . . huh.” He stopped and stared at the page, then tilted his head and looked at Penny, who stopped washing her tail and looked back at him with grave courtesy.

  “You think Becky’s forgiven me yet?”

  Penny had no idea who Becky was or what he’d done, but she had confidence in her human’s ability to charm anyone into anything.

  “Yeah, she’d know if anything shady was going on down there. A little too early to call her out of the blue, though. Especially if she’s still pissed. Email would be better. And while I’m at it, I should probably run through the news accounts, see if anything’s been written up about our dead body that might have an angle we’ve missed . . . look for news stories about identity theft, maybe, instead of murder investigations?”

  He sighed, and reached out to rub behind Penny’s ear. “Yeah, so much for a run this morning. And we’re gonna need more coffee.”

  He pushed the book aside and got up from the table, grabbing something off a counter and coming back to the table with it. “I probably should upgrade my computer, if I’m going to get stuck doing this,” he said. “God knows Mallard would love to take me computer shopping. No, scratch that, she’d just go out and buy me something and then I’d spend the next year trying to figure out how to do anything. Never mind.”

  Penny had no interest in the screens that so fascinated Ginny: what was displayed there was a meaningless blur to her, unless there were pictures, and even then it was hard to tell what was happening unless there was also sound. How humans communicated without smell, she’d never been able to understand. But she liked it when there were people on the other side of the screen, like the night before. She wanted Theodore to do more of that, so she could talk to Georgie, and find out what was going on on the dog’s side of things, even if she couldn’t nose it out herself.

  But he was typing and there were no pictures, and he wasn’t talking to her now, so she jumped down from the windowsill and went to finish the food still on the plate. No wise cat ever left food for the taking; you never knew when you might get the chance to eat again.

  While she ate, Penny pinned what she knew under one paw.

  Someone had died, and someone else thought Ginny might be involved.

  Ginny was somewhere not-here.

  Georgie was with Ginny, wherever that was, where the action was.

  She was stuck here, dependent on Theodore to tell her things.

  He didn’t always remember to tell her things.

  She needed to be where Georgie was. Or find some way to get them back on the screen so she could find out what was going on.

  Short of learning how to turn it on herself, she was going to have to rely on Theodore to do that.

  Penny finished the last scrap of tuna and cleaned her whiskers. She didn’t know how she’d manage that, but she would. Otherwise they’d never figure this out, and Ginny and Georgie wouldn’t come home.

  * * *

  Ginny stepped back from the door as the woman walked in, dropping her phone as unobtrusively as possible on the desk. “Agent Asuri. This is a surprise.” That was putting it mildly. Special Agent Elizabeth Asuri hadn’t been all that keen on their “playing detective” the last time they’d met, and had, in point of fact, told them to cut it out. Certainly she hadn’t expected the other woman to make a point of looking her up—unless it was to arrest her, but why would she have brought coffee, then?

  “Be glad it was me, and not someone else,” the federal agent said dryly, still petting Georgie’s ears. She was wearing a pair of dark slacks and a button-down shirt that had clearly been tailored to her frame, and Ginny would bet good money that there was a matching blazer in her car. No visible gun or holster, though. That was good. Wasn’t it? Did federal agents carry, off duty?

  “I beg your pardon?” Being polite never hurt anyone, her mom claimed. And it would probably do her more good than “what the hell are you doing here and what do you mean, ‘someone else’?”

  “I happened to be on the wire when your name and description came in yesterday, and told my boss I’d take this visit. And you should be thankful for that. Trying to explain your continuing idiocy to someone less informed as to your hobbies would have taken up most of your morning and probably would have gotten you at the very least a hard slap on the wrist.”

  “Okay,
first of all, none of this is my fault,” Ginny said indignantly. “If you know what’s been going on, you know that. I came down here on what I thought was a perfectly normal, ordinary, boring life-management job.”

  “Life management?” Asuri looked amused, like she’d just seen a kitten do something particularly adorable. “Is that what you’re calling it now?”

  “You know, you seriously piss me off.” Probably not the smoothest thing to say to a federal agent, and her mother was sighing loud enough to hear all the way from Edmonds, but Ginny figured the woman had barged into her hotel room, never mind that she’d brought coffee—one taste proved that it was more of the free coffee from the lobby—and now she dared make snide comments about Ginny’s job? Both of her jobs?

  “And that fact has truly ruined my morning,” Asuri said, dry as bone. Ginny had forgotten that about the woman: she might look like a hard-ass fed on the outside, but on the inside she was a hard-ass snarky fed. “Look, Mallard. I warned you two over a year ago that this hobby of yours was going to get you in trouble, and now it has.”

  “It’s not a hobby, and I wasn’t here to investigate!” Ginny raised the hand not holding the coffee, and then modulated her voice when Georgie pulled away from Asuri’s hand and gave her a considering look, clearly wondering if the command to “hold” or “guard” was about to be given. That’s all she needed, for Georgie to attack a government employee. “I told you. I’ve told everyone. I was hired by—”

  “By a little old lady who didn’t exist. Yes, I read the report.”

  Of course she had. Asuri was a hard-ass, but she was good at her job, too, from what Ginny had been able to observe. “And you’re still giving me grief?”

  Asuri shrugged, turning the desk chair around and sitting in it. Taking the authority position, Ginny recognized, and sighed. “If you know all that, then you know that I’m really not in the mood for more games. Or getting my leash yanked. So why are you here, in my hotel room, at oh God early in the o’clock, with or without coffee?”