Union Jacked

by Diane Vallere

  And a second figure stepped out from behind the plants. It was a man in dark clothes with a rotund build and a porno mustache. Bob, the security officer. He said something to Taryn, and she pointed to me. He switched on a flashlight and aimed it at me. I sunk into the seat.

  But just before my eyes dropped below the dashboard, I saw Taryn raise something into the air and bring it down on Bob’s head. It was dark, and my vision was restricted, but I’d swear it was a gun.

  30

  Sitting Duck

  Bob crumpled to the ground. Taryn dropped her hand to her side, but I could tell she was still holding the gun. I was a sitting duck in the parking lot, and I’d already lost the element of surprise.

  I grabbed my phone and called 911. “This is Samantha Kidd. I’m in the parking lot outside of Tradava. A woman just assaulted a security guard. He needs help, but if I get out of the truck, she might shoot.”

  “Stay in your car. I’ll send help.” She hung up.

  I felt more helpless than I’d felt in my life. Any action on my part could result in the death of an innocent person. But inaction on my part could result in the death of an innocent person. Talk about indecision. Should I stay or should I go? I was more conflicted than The Clash.

  I stared in the direction of the store. Bob’s body lay on the macadam by the front of the store. He hadn’t moved since Taryn struck him.

  I had to do something. Starting the engine would give me away. Not having the safety of the truck would make me vulnerable. If Taryn didn’t pose enough of a threat, my indecision might kill me instead.

  Starting tomorrow, I was going to work on that.

  I quietly opened the door. The interior light went on. It took seconds to claw the plastic cover off and remove the lightbulb. I shoved my phone into my pocket and climbed out of the truck, resting the door against the frame but not slamming it shut.

  I reached into the box of Loncar’s belongings and pulled out his long-outgrown Kevlar vest. It was an older model, from Loncar’s early days on the force, and hadn’t benefitted from the technological advances that made vests lighter and less bulky. It was several sizes smaller than Loncar, and at the time I’d discovered it, I thought it would be funny to showcase the man he was when he first joined the police force.

  I slipped off my blazer and pulled the vest over my crown sweater. The vest weighed more than I imagined. My whole torso felt weighted down, and I took a few unsteady steps while trying to get a feel for the additional weight. I stumbled into the upright steel poles that marked off the party quarters in the parking lot.

  I rested against the pole and gave myself a pep talk. “Come on, Samantha. Get it together. Help is coming.”

  Except I knew help wasn’t coming. Not before Taryn Monahan realized I was no longer in the car. And before I could reason through why she knocked out Bob, why she shot her brother and Detective Loncar, and why she pretended to be so helpless less than half an hour ago, a crack sounded through the parking lot and tore a hole through the Union Jack over my head.

  31

  Retailers Are Greedy

  A second bullet struck the pole behind me. I fell to the ground and scraped the knee of my ivory tights. Two more shots were fired, and I scrambled to the far side of the tent. There was nothing to hide behind. Nothing to give me shelter.

  I should have stayed in the truck.

  I shoved my phone into my boot. I reached the far pole and undid the cord that held the flag into place above me. When the rope was loosened, the wind caught the corner and flapped it up into the sky. A bullet tore through the stripe in the center of the flag, and it snapped and floated above us both.

  How many shots had that been?

  I leaned against the tent pole and stared at the building. My phone rang, and in my panic to remain silent, I rejected the call. My thumb slipped, and I activated the voice memo from inside Tradava. John Jones’s voice came out, instructing Bob to leave after midnight if no one showed up for the vigil.

  A bullet whizzed past my head, and I got into motion.

  I stood up and put my hands in the air. “I know it’s you, Taryn. I saw you knock out Bob.”

  The gun came into focus first. It was almost impossible to look away, to follow the line of the gun, up the arm, to Taryn’s face.

  “Stay out of this, Samantha. It doesn’t concern you.”

  “Who does it concern? Your brother? You killed him. The police? You’ve shot one and assaulted another. You won’t get away with this.”

  “My brother never trusted me. I had a winning strategy. Force a strike, turn over staff, and bring in a team to help move drugs to new customers. It’s worked before, and it would have worked again.”

  Drugs? The task force. Loncar had suspected this scenario. “Stores have security,” I said. “They would have seen what you were doing on their cameras.”

  “Retailers are greedy. They don’t care what you sell as long as the numbers go into the cash register. Haven’t you noticed how much gets sold and returned from a new store opening? It works like a charm every single time.”

  I pieced together what she wasn’t telling me. “You hid the drugs in the merchandise? And ring the merchandise up like a sale?”

  “I told you my plan was smart. You almost caught me last week when you bought that stupid Keep Calm sweater. I had to tear the stash from the garment.”

  “That’s why my sweater didn’t have tags.”

  “Oh, now you’re Agatha Raisin all of a sudden?”

  “So, what? You attach drugs to the garment and ring up the garment? The money goes into the register. If it’s credit, you can’t touch it, and if it’s cash, it would get caught at the end of the day when the registers are balanced.”

  “The customer brings their item back for a return, and we get the cash before we process the refund. We sell the highest priced items we can find to make sure our customers come back.”

  “That Keep Calm sweater wasn’t that expensive.”

  She shrugged. “Dime bag.”

  While neither Bridget Jones’s Diary nor Spice World provided the intel to know how much a dime bag cost, I was pretty sure she’d just insulted my taste.

  But it didn’t matter. Piccadilly Group had wanted to stock the grand reopening with pricey items to force on customers. She’d believed that the people who shopped that night were predisposed to buy high-ticket items based on reports from previous store openings. If she had listened to me and let me plan a party our customers would have wanted, we would have shut down Taryn and Harvey’s plan before anybody got shot.

  “You shot your brother,” I said.

  “The police were onto us. Harvey was a liability.”

  I looked over my shoulder. “What about your son? What’ll he say when he comes to pick you up and sees you holding me at gunpoint?”

  “Get with the program, Samantha. There is no son. There is no lost phone. But you’re a fixer. You want to help people. The only way to get you off my back was to play the victim.”

  I’d spent months listening to Get PoPT! and working on my personality flaws, and the one thing I’d always considered a strength—my desire to help people—was going to get me killed. Taryn was crazy, and aside from a flapping Union Jack and the metal tent poles jutting up from the parking lot, I had no weapons at my disposal.

  I crouched behind the farthest tent pole, knowing with full certainty that my position had done nothing to make me less of a target. I pulled my phone out of my boot and texted the first number. Call me back, then pushed my phone across the macadam toward where Taryn stood. Seconds later, my phone rang. Taryn whirled around and shot it. The phone jumped from the impact.

  “You,” I said. “You were Harvey’s sister. Family. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  She smiled. “Family’s overrated.” The shadows cast from the flapping Union Jack made her face look cold and blue, and then flushed red.

  She pointed her gun into the sky and fired several shots at the
spotlight at the edge of the parking lot. At least one bullet hit. She turned and fired at the next closest. I didn’t believe Taryn was so good of a shot that she could take out targets at random, but her confidence in pulling the trigger indicated she had enough bullets that she didn’t care if she missed. And as she picked off the lights, the parking lot grew dark. Black. Blacker than black.

  None more black.

  The line from This is Spinal Tap popped into my brain, in the voice of Eddie doing Christopher Guest doing Nigel Tufnel. I thought about the past four days, how much had passed since then. Nick in China. The pregnancy test. Eddie’s miniature Stonehenge. Bridget flinging water on me at Whiskey Mick’s. Detective Madden wanting to ask my friend out on a date. Piccadilly pulling their funding and Tradava filing bankruptcy.

  I thought of the mundanity of some days and the outrageousness of others. I thought about Detective Loncar at the middle of it all. A man who I’d once avoided the way I avoided horror movies, who had turned out to be as benign as Jack Lemmon. If I were going to die defending someone, he was a worthy choice.

  Except—what was I thinking? I didn’t want to die!

  A short figure separated from the shadows and crept up behind Taryn. My throat went dry, making it difficult to swallow. Taryn closed one eye and sighted me with her pistol. And an arm in a black fringed leather jacket brought a heavy object down on her head.

  Taryn dropped to the macadam.

  Loncar’s football trophy fell to the ground next to him.

  And Bridget MacDugal pulled me up from where I leaned against the tent pole and pulled me into a hug.

  Bob Pennino regained consciousness. He secured Taryn Monahan while I waited for the ambulances to arrive. Bridget took off her fringed leather jacket and draped it over the shoulders of my ivory sweater. The three of us waited for the police together. There were no words that could have created more of a bond than the silence.

  More police cars arrived at the parking lot of Tradava than I’d ever seen. It was like a red and blue ant invasion—at least that’s the thought that ran through my head after being given a healthy dose of painkillers. I was moved from the ground to a wheelchair and covered in a blanket. Muscles I didn’t remember using now ached: my biceps, my triceps, my delts. Had it not been for Nick’s commitment to our undercover trip to Loncar’s house, the two items that made the difference between life and death would not have been in the parking lot with me.

  Oh, and Detective Loncar hadn’t slipped back into his coma. He’d closed his eyes to try to decide if he should confide in me that he was working with two cops—Bridget and Bob—to surveil and expose a drug ring that had planned to use Tradava to move drugs, not department store inventory. That the shooting wasn’t about him.

  Ironically, in a way, it was.

  32

  One Week Later

  The party for Detective Loncar took place in the parking lot outside of Tradava a week later. Between recovery and last-minute details, I met with Frank from the Ribbon Eagle/Times to inform his series about the store, the drug ring, the detective, and the community. I figured he’d be happy to get back to his regular assignment when this was all wrapped up. He’d laughed at that. “Stress-free? This was a walk in the park compared to high school sports.”

  Frank had included a hotline for people to make pledges to offset the expense of the party, and they did. The outpouring of support exceeded anything Piccadilly had budgeted, or Tradava had left in their slush fund. It was enough to throw the British bash of the century.

  John Jones made good on his promise to arrange interviews for the employees of Tradava. New reports in fashion industry journals cited a fresh wave of interest in the retailer, but I tuned them out. Nick was moving on with his footwear collection. Loncar was moving forward with his retirement. For the first time since Eddie had started working at Tradava out of art school, he was moving forward with interviews. It was time for me to move on as well.

  But not until the party was over.

  The police processed the crime scene and released the parking lot. All along, I’d planned to use the tent for Loncar’s party. It was unclear whether I could, until John Jones gave me an envelope that Victoria had asked him to deliver. Inside was a letter, neatly typed on Piccadilly Group letterhead, that indicated Piccadilly’s buyout offer of the store was pending an internal review, but that permission to use the parking lot while the company made their final decision was granted to me.

  Under the letter, in neat cursive handwriting, was a postscript: Dear Samantha, I’d be honored to help in any way possible. Sincerely, Victoria Pratt.

  It wasn’t her fault the union negotiator had been using his position to staff stores with a team to move drugs into neighborhoods where Piccadilly acquired retail real estate. The poor woman had been gobsmacked by the news.

  Yet she attended the party anyway and volunteered to staff the tea station. I admired her commitment.

  We moved the party to the evening and rented heaters that stood around the perimeter. Instead of using the tent as a shopping venue, I’d lobbied senior management to mark items out of stock to use in raffle baskets and party favors. I put together an entirely new wardrobe for Detective Loncar’s life in retirement and packed it into a navy-blue steamer trunk with tan leather trim. I added a Union Jack luggage tag and had it delivered to his house. I assumed Peggy would make sure he got it.

  Nick and Eddie surprised me with a strapless ball gown made from Union Jack parachutes. It was far classier than the micro-mini Ginger Spice dresses I’d instructed the servers to wear.

  At the far end of the tent, Eddie anchored a backdrop for The Ex-Pistols while the women set up their equipment. He wore a short-sleeved T-shirt with a Rolling Stones logo over a long-sleeved white T-shirt, white painter’s pants with blue and red paint splatters, and his trademark black-and-white-checkered Vans. The backdrop said, “Keep Calm and Party On, Dudes.”

  Eddie had outdone himself with the decorations. In addition to the topiary maze and the Stonehenge, he’d crafted red phone booths out of refrigerator boxes that held the goodie bags for attendees to take. If the Visual Director thing at Tradava didn’t straighten itself out, he could hang out a shingle for party planning.

  I stared into the crowds of people, police in uniform, guests and employees in suits and dresses. The hostility I’d felt in the lobby of the hospital had been replaced with what felt like silent respect. I caught Bridget’s eyes and smiled. She smiled back. Bob Pennino approached her and handed her a glass of champagne. They both raised glasses to me and drank.

  “What a week,” Nick said. “I still don’t know how you pulled off a party with everything else going on.”

  “It was the right thing. I never thought about how much work it would be. I just made it happen.”

  “The power of positive thinking.”

  I accepted that Nick knew me pretty well, but I’d kept my podcast dependency on the down low. I turned my head and looked up at him. “Why’d you say that?” I asked.

  “That’s what you used. You believed this was right, and it was.” He tightened his embrace. “I’m proud of you. You found a way to make everybody happy.”

  I relaxed. “Not quite everybody,” I said. “Loncar’s still being forced to retire.”

  “Loncar knew, didn’t he?”

  “Bridget knew—more like she suspected something. She took her suspicions to Loncar, and they worked out a plan. They needed a third person, someone nobody would suspect was working with them.”

  “Who?”

  “Bob. Bridget’s ex-husband,” I said. “He was already working part-time security shifts, and nobody would question him being at Tradava.”

  “But Bridget didn’t want Bob to get the wrong idea,” Nick said.

  “No. Bridget got Loncar to agree to let her spread the rumors about them because it was the one way to maintain Bob’s distance.”

  It was such a silly thing. Bridget needed Bob to believe she and Lonca
r were involved to keep him on task—a task that would uncover how Harvey Monahan was using turnkey retailers to establish a drug trafficking operation. Bridget’s animosity toward me was because I threatened her cover story. Bob’s was to protect their sting. And all my digging into Loncar’s marriage and Peggy’s infidelity had led me on a wild-goose chase.

  “Both Harvey and Taryn were involved?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Taryn hasn’t been at Tradava for candlelight vigils. She’s been here to cover her tracks.”

  “A lot changed this week,” Nick said. He draped his arms around me from behind, and I leaned against him.

  “And one big thing didn’t,” I said.

  We hadn’t talked any more about the thought that I’d been pregnant, the proof that I hadn’t been, and where we stood on the subject. I was no closer to figuring out how I felt about the idea. I could handle killers, but I still didn’t know if I was ready to handle a baby.

  Nick relaxed his arms and stepped to my side. “Do you want something to drink?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer right away. I looked into the crowd and spotted Victoria talking with Detective Loncar by the tea station. He wore a navy-blue suit, white shirt, and black dress shoes. His necktie was red. The entire outfit had been in the steamer trunk I’d had delivered to his house.

  Victoria’s strawberry-blond hair was loose and flipped up at the ends. She wore a navy-blue sweater dress with a Union Jack knitted into the front with navy-blue tights and knee-high red suede boots. Ginger Spice x Parliament. Her peaches-and-cream complexion glowed, and her manner seemed more relaxed than it had been since I’d met her.