Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  Georgie took her down the sidewalk and around the corner, to the south. This street looked the same as the last one, although the houses were on slightly larger lots, and some of them had attached garages. Georgie kept moving until she came to the house two from the edge of the block, a house with dark green paint and white trim, and two teenage girls sitting on the front stoop.

  Whatever scent Georgie had been following, it led here. Ginny checked her watch, pretty sure that the girls should have been in school.

  Georgie tugged at the leash again, and Ginny pretended to lose hold of it, curious as to what Georgie might do. The dog trotted happily up the walkway to where the girls were sitting, and shoved her nose into one of the girls’ hands, causing her to shriek—thankfully with excitement, not fear.

  “I’m so sorry.” Ginny came up the walk and clapped her hands to get Georgie’s attention. “She’s usually so good on the leash but sometimes she just wants to make friends. Georgie, sit, girl, play nice.”

  The girl Georgie had zeroed in on had dark auburn hair in a long ponytail, and dark freckles across pale brown skin. Her companion’s hair was blonder, in the same style of ponytail, with blue eyes, but otherwise they could be siblings, dressed in the same uniform of jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts, barefoot and letting bright blue polish dry on their toes.

  “No, it’s okay,” the blond girl said. “She’s sweet.”

  The redhead pulled her toes out of reach, and was petting Georgie cautiously, making the familiar “oh, good doggie” noises she seemed to bring out in people.

  “She likes it if you scratch—yeah, right there,” Ginny said, as the girl found the spot, and Georgie collapsed onto her back, paws limp with pleasure. “I’m Ginny. That’s Georgie.”

  “I’m Kim,” the redhead said.

  “Nancy,” the blonde offered.

  Ginny hesitated, then offered up what she hoped was a Tonica-worthy grin, hoping it came across as willing conspirator rather than interrogator. “Should I even ask why you guys aren’t in school?”

  They looked at each other, and then at her, and then seemed to decide that she wasn’t about to rat them out.

  “It was too nice to stay indoors,” Nancy said. “And we’re seniors.”

  “Fair enough.” She’d cut classes enough times to understand, even if it had been a while ago. She thought about trying for more small talk, then decided she’d better cut to the chase, before they got bored or weirded out talking to a stranger. “So you guys heard there was some excitement in the neighborhood yesterday?”

  “Excitement? Here?” Nancy was slightly scornful, but both girls tried to look politely interested, the way you would when someone too old to understand what real excitement might be started talking. Ginny tried not to take it personally.

  “Well, for kind of sick levels of excitement, I guess. They found a body a few blocks over.”

  “A body? Really?” Nancy lit up with vaguely ghoulish interest at that, and Ginny wondered if she was related to Daisy, from yesterday.

  “A human body?” Kim was more cautious.

  “A human, yeah. In one of the houses over on the Terrace.” She waved her hand vaguely over her shoulder in the direction she’d come from. “The pale blue one? There were cops all over the place.”

  Both girls had gone slightly green when she mentioned the street, and tensed when she described the house. Interesting, although they probably knew enough people in the neighborhood—had they known the victim? He was older, but a slightly older single male could be of interest to teenage girls if he was good-looking. She hadn’t looked at his face long enough to see anything other than blood and bone, and she pushed that memory down hard so she could focus on the moment at hand.

  “You hear anything about it? Who it was?”

  “No,” Nancy said, clearly speaking for both of them. “No, we didn’t. If you’ll excuse us? We promised to meet friends for lunch.”

  “Of course,” Ginny said, picking up Georgie’s leash and tugging her away. “Have a nice day, girls.”

  Georgie hadn’t taken her there by accident. They hadn’t known about the murder. But they knew who had lived there—now that she thought about it, they were the right age to have gotten fake IDs there, if someone were dealing in the neighborhood. The way they’d reacted, Ginny would put good money on them knowing something, even if it was just a bit of gossip that could be horribly relevant. Should she mention that to Asuri, have the agent follow up on it? No. If they weren’t willing to come forward on their own, without any more evidence Ginny wasn’t going to force the issue. Not on a federal level, anyway. No teenager needed that in their life, if their only crime was being teenage-level stupid.

  If they were clients of the dead man’s fake driver’s license business, though, that would explain why Georgie picked up Kim’s scent: she must have been at the house recently, to get an ID. If so, then her fingerprints were probably inside, too, and the cops might be paying a visit, anyway.

  She suspected that neither girl would get the chance to cut school and sit in the sunshine for a while, after that.

  * * *

  Teddy pulled his car into the parking lot at Mary’s just before noon on Thursday to find Stacy waiting at the back door. He lifted a hand to say hello to her, then opened the passenger door to let Penny, graceful as a duchess, leap down from the seat to the sidewalk.

  His waitress/bartender had gaped, then started laughing. “You are so, so whipped, boss.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “She wanted a change in scenery, okay?” They walked in together, Penny darting ahead to take up her usual position on top of the liquor shelves.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously. She came out with me last night, and got in the car, okay? What was I supposed to do, kick her out?”

  “Seriously?” Stacy said again, incredulous. “She went home with you?”

  Seth chose that exact moment to walk in the back door, shucking his jacket and hanging it on the employees-only rack. “You got lucky, boy?”

  “Shut up, Seth. She’s talking about the cat.” He glowered at Seth’s back, hearing the old man’s cackle, then turned and glared at Stacy, who gave him a wide-eyed innocent look that didn’t even come close to working. “Thanks for that note of astonishment. Everyone’s always telling me she’s my cat, or I’m her person, whatever, so why is it so incredible that she decided to come home with me?”

  “Because cats are like the original Republicans,” Stacy said, pushing a table back into position from where the cleaning crew had moved it. “They don’t like change. At all. And Mistress Penny is a bar cat, not an apartment cat. Did she sleep on your bed with you?”

  Teddy shook his head. “No. Although she was pretty quick to take over my pillow, once I woke up.”

  “Huh.” Stacy pursed her lips and hrmmed. “Interesting.”

  “Please. Like you know anything about the psychology of cats?”

  “Maybe she’s lonely,” Stacy said. “Georgie hasn’t been in for a week, and Ginny’s been gone, what, three days now? Maybe she just wanted to make sure you didn’t disappear, either.”

  Teddy wanted to say that was a crackpot theory, except it was pretty close to what he’d been thinking, too. “Makes as much sense as anything, which is to say, not damn much. Stop psychoanalyzing the cat, and get the tables in back set up.”

  They’d agreed to host a reading group that afternoon. Or rather, Patrick, Mary’s owner, had agreed, and left them to deal with it. It was their second meeting, once a month, and while nobody in the group drank beer, they did do a rousing business in soda and coffee, and they kept it quiet enough that Teddy could get work done at the counter. All in all, it could be worse.

  The extra business didn’t hurt the bottom line, either, which meant that Patrick was happy, and a happy Patrick meant he left them alone.

 
And speaking of a happy Patrick . . . Stacy had that look on her face, the one she usually got whenever there was something she needed to say but didn’t want to, and that usually happened whenever the owner came around and raised stress levels. Teddy stifled a sigh, wondering how he’d missed that.

  “All right, out with it. What did Patrick do this time?”

  “What?” The look of surprise on Stacy’s face was real. “No, I haven’t seen him since . . . last month?”

  That was the last time Patrick had come around in person. “So what’s up, then? You’ve got that line between your eyes that says you’ve got something to say and don’t want to say it but if you don’t you’re going to be fretting all shift, and your tips will go down.”

  “That’s just it.” She hesitated, then plunged on, picking up Penny and cuddling her as though for comfort. “The tips are already down.”

  “Oh?” The regular crowd were decent tippers, usually—everything went into a communal pot at the end of the evening, lion’s share to whoever was waitressing, the rest split among the bartenders—and he hadn’t noticed any dip in regulars. But he also didn’t pay much attention to the tip jar, since he’d become manager and opted for a smaller cut.

  “It’s probably nothing. I just . . . I’m doing okay, right? I’m not . . .”

  “You’re doing fine,” he assured her. “It’s probably that Tricia hasn’t gotten up to speed yet, and they’re giving her less.”

  That response didn’t sit well with either of them, since the new girl had enough charm to compensate for any newbie gaffes, but it was the only thing he could think of. “Maybe it’s just one of those downturns, people feeling pinched. It’ll come back up soon enough.”

  She nodded and put Penny down to go behind the bar and start the day’s setup, even as Seth banged around in the kitchen, setting things to order.

  Ten minutes later, there was the further sound of muddled cursing, and Seth yelled, “Who’s been eating all the damn bread?”

  Teddy and Stacy looked at each other, waiting for the follow-up. Sure enough, a minute later Seth came out front, his face creased in a scowl. “Tonica, what’s the point in having a cat if she don’t eat the damn mice?”

  “Is the plastic wrap bitten or torn?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then it wasn’t mice. Unless you left it out on the counter, unwrapped?”

  Seth scowled at him, then turned on his heel and marched back into the kitchen, muttering under his breath.

  “Are you making after-hours toast, Stacy?”

  “Not me, boss.”

  He considered the possibility of mice, and then shook his head. They’d done renovations to the kitchen recently, and if there’d been signs of mice then, the workmen would have said something. But he’d lay down some traps, anyway, just in case Seth wasn’t eating it himself and then forgetting.

  “You want I should go out and get more bread?”

  “After you set up, yeah.” The book club usually brought their own food, so he wasn’t worried about them, but the sandwiches had been popular with the happy hour crowd, and he’d rather feed them that—better alcohol absorption—than having them chow down on the smoked nuts and pretzel chips.

  Satisfied that everything else was as under control as Mary’s ever got, Teddy finished doing the setup behind the bar, making sure all the taps were ready, the tanks refilled, and the speed rail supplies restocked. After a decade of doing that, it was muscle memory, allowing his mind to go over his conversation with Ginny that morning. The fact that Asuri was there was actually reassuring, he decided. If there was trouble, they could trust the agent to watch their backs, even if she wasn’t entirely on their side. He wished he’d gotten better responses from his own outreach, but most of it had turned up dry, or simply not responded. He wasn’t good at that, not the way Mallard was; he didn’t maintain his contacts, didn’t play the favor game as smoothly as she did, and his Internet search skills were, as Ginny had said more than once, laughable.

  But not trying to help wasn’t an option.

  He was running over a handful of theories, based on Asuri’s presence, the fake driver’s license business, and someone getting beaten to death, and was so caught up in the multiple what-ifs that it took him a minute to realize that Stacy was standing on the other side of the bar, trying to get his attention.

  “Oh. Sorry, what?”

  “Now it’s my turn to ask—boss, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” He looked to the top of the shelves, an ingrained habit now, and reached over his head to tug lightly at the tail dangling behind him. “Just a little distracted, is all. Gin may have stumbled onto a job while she’s in Portland”—he wasn’t going to give her the details; Stacy was a friend but she was also an employee—“and my brain’s kind of working that, too.”

  “Huh. Sidelined while Ginny’s knee-deep in the good stuff, huh? No wonder you’re grumpy, stuck here with us.”

  It was too close to the truth for comfort. “I’m not grumpy. You want to see grumpy? Have those tables not ready by the time the book ladies show up, I’ll show you grumpy.”

  “I’m done!” She waggled her fingers in front of his face, and then pointed one finger toward the back, where the chairs had been rearranged to suit the fifteen or so members, with the tables moved to support positions. “And now I’m going to pick up some lunch before we start, and a couple of loaves of bread, to shut Seth up. You want anything, while I’m gone? Pizza? Alka-Seltzer? Prune juice?”

  “Get out,” he growled, and she laughed and flipped him off before heading out the door. It closed firmly behind her, and he remembered the days when they used to leave it open except in the very worst weather. Before they’d twice had goons come in and try to wreck someone’s face, because of jobs he and Ginny had taken.

  “Why do I do this again?” he asked Penny. She poked her head over the shelf, wise cat eyes in a little tabby face, her ears perked forward, whiskers quivering, and blinked slowly at him.

  “You’re no help at all,” he said. “I take back the partnership offer.”

  She didn’t seem all that impressed.

  “Oh, you think you could do so much better? I’ll bet—shit,” and he looked at his watch. “We’re late to check in with Herself.” He ran his gaze over the counter, determined that everything was ready, and headed for the back office.

  Penny blinked again, then leapt lightly down to the floor and followed him.

  * * *

  Theo was already settled at the desk when she entered the room, and the soft sounds of a phone ringing filled the air. She leapt up onto the desk, narrowly missing a glass that had been left there, and wound her way across the desk to step delicately into his lap. He lifted an arm absently to give her access, then rested it on her back, petting her absently. She let a purr rise up, but didn’t let herself forget why they were there.

  The ringing stopped and the screen changed from a single color to moving imagines. Concentrating, Penny was able to recognize Ginny’s face, a second before they heard her voice.

  “Hey. You’re late.”

  “Yeah, all of three minutes. Sorry. We were getting ready for the terrorist book club you sicced on us.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to call them. Nea is perfectly nice people.”

  “Yeah well, I don’t trust anyone who carries that many knitting needles in one bag.” He stopped petting Penny and she butted at his head until he continued. “So how did it go this morning?”

  “I’m not sure. Georgie picked up a scent, and we followed it a few blocks over.”

  “She’s part bloodhound now?”

  “You had a better idea, you should have told me beforehand. You want to hear what happened or not?”

  “Right, sorry. So Georgie picked up a scent?”

  There was a scuffle, and G
inny said “ooof,” and Georgie’s face was in the middle of the screen.

  “Hi, Penny!”

  “What did you find, Georgie? And don’t hog the screen or she’ll make you get down.”

  “I found a girl!”

  Penny’s whiskers twitched, and she looked up at Theo, then back at the screen.

  “Georgie, down,” Ginny said, as Penny had predicted, and pushed the dog out of the screen, so Penny could only see the top of her head and one ear.

  “We followed it to a house a few blocks away, and two girls sitting on a porch,” Ginny said.

  “See!” Georgie said, slightly muffled now. “I found a girl!”

  “Shhh, Georgie, just for a minute.” She needed to hear what the humans were saying, too.

  “They were about sixteen, maybe seventeen. Still in high school, and ditching. I let Georgie soften them up, then asked them about the murder, if they’d heard anything, if they knew who it had been.”

  “You think teenagers care about someone dying a few blocks over?”

  “They did. I’m pretty sure they knew that house, Tonica. I mean, other than the fact that Georgie went straight from the back porch to that front porch, both girls looked a little sick when I said they’d found someone dead there. And they couldn’t get away fast enough after that.”

  Theo scoffed. “You seriously think that two teenage girls killed him?”

  “No. Probably not, although with how many sisters and cousins, you should know better than to underestimate a teenage girl.”

  “Point taken.”

  “No, I think they bought fake IDs from the dead guy.”

  “So did half the underage population of Portland, from what you said about the stack of IDs you saw. Which means what?”

  “I haven’t a clue.” Ginny laughed, but it wasn’t her usual happy sound, and Penny pricked her ears, wishing she could see better, or smell, or . . .

  “Georgie? What does she smell like?” There was only one “she” in Georgie’s world, no need to clarify.