Whiskey, You're The Devil: An Addison Holmes Mystery (Addison Holmes Mysteries Book 4)

by Liliana Hart

  The temperature had dropped at some point between my blueberry scone and finding Priscilla Loveshack with her face bashed in, and I shivered and pulled my coat tighter around me as I made my way up the steps and opened the door. A warm blast of air enveloped me and I sighed in relief.

  Kate was all about class and reputation, and the inside of the agency reflected that. There was only a certain income bracket of people who could afford her services, so the interior of the building made sure they’d feel right at home as soon as they walked through the door. Despite the “old southern money” decorating scheme, she’d also managed to make it feel like a home.

  Except for one thing. Lucy Kim sat in the foyer behind a massive U-shaped desk. She was the gatekeeper and personal dragon for anyone wanting to purchase Kate’s services. She did all the initial background checks on the people hiring us, did the billing, kept the office in immaculate shape, and I was pretty sure she fed on the blood of young innocents to keep her youthful glow. I’d tried doing a background check on her once and the only thing that popped up on the page was her name.

  Lucy was Asian American and her hair was so black and shiny you could see your reflection in it if you walked behind her. Her eyes were black, her cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, and her lips were perpetually red—probably from her latest feeding. Her stilettos were always sharp and lethal, and I couldn’t think of anyone else in the entire state of Georgia who could wear leather pants without the humidity making her thighs stick together. Lucy was just unnatural.

  I’d never heard her speak one word in the months I’d been working for Kate, and it had become a personal mission to get something to come out from between those lips. For all I knew she was hiding a forked tongue.

  “Morning, Lucy,” I said, pulling off my winter gear and hanging my coat in the closet. She kept her gaze straight ahead on the computer screen, but I wasn’t deterred. Nothing much discouraged me. At least not for long. And then it hit me. A brilliant idea. I got them every now and then.

  “You know I was thinking,” I said, taking a seat in one of the plush chairs across from her desk. “After my P.I. exams tomorrow it would be fun to have a girls’ night out to celebrate. We could go have some margaritas and judge people from an alcoholic haze. It’s been forever since we’ve all gotten together to do something fun.”

  In truth it had been never. Lucy didn’t exactly socialize with her coworkers. Kate assured me that Lucy had a skillset that was extremely valuable in the private eye business, but I had yet to see what it was. I also hadn’t managed to get Kate drunk enough to spill the beans, and my curiosity was killing me. Secrets weren’t meant for the South.

  Lucy took the file folder that was sitting next to her keyboard and handed it to me without ever looking up from the computer screen. I sighed and took it and then sat there a few extra minutes staring at her in uncomfortable silence just to see if she’d look up. She didn’t.

  “So it’s a plan then for tomorrow night,” I said, getting up from the chair. “No need to bring anything. Just your company is enough. Have a wonderful day.”

  I remembered my manners and smiled before heading back to the offices. And then I muttered the entire way down the hallway about rudeness and the lack of social skills in some people. I was on a personal mission to break Lucy Kim. I didn’t care if I had to spend years devoted to the task. I would get her to speak to me before it was all over.

  My office at the agency was a converted janitor’s closet. The paint was fresh and the carpet was new, and if I stayed at my desk with the door closed for too long I’d get high from the carpet glue fumes. If I laid down on the floor my head would touch one wall and my feet the other. There was barely room for a small desk, a computer, and a printer, but I’d managed to add my own personal touches anyway, mostly because I had an addiction to Pier 1 and I needed some place to go with my animal print fringed floor lamp and red rug since it didn’t really fit in with Nick’s décor.

  My office was at the opposite end of the hall from all the other offices, right next to the bathroom and across the hall from the conference room. I veered in the opposite direction and headed towards Kate’s office. She always had coffee and something from the bakery sitting out for potential clients.

  I knocked once and stuck my head in the door. “You busy?”

  “No. I’ve just decided to throw the stack of files on my desk in the trashcan and pretend they never existed.”

  Kate had been my best friend since birth, so we didn’t feel the need to be polite with each other. She was only a couple of inches over five feet, but she was a force to be reckoned with. Her blonde hair was cut chin length and her green eyes dominated her elfin face. She was cute, but it never took people very long to realize she wasn’t someone to mess with. Her body was solid muscle and it was one of my greatest failures as a human being that I’d never convinced her to wear anything other than ugly boxy suits in browns and grays.

  I arched a brow before heading over to the credenza to grab a cinnamon roll and put a pod in the Keurig for a fresh cup of coffee. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess from the zit on your chin and the snarl that you have extreme PMS. Here, have a cinnamon roll.”

  Her eyes narrowed at me, but her gaze cut to the gooey roll in my hand. “I’ve already had two. It hasn’t helped. And I’m buried in cases. I need to hire two more full-time agents, and Lucy could use an assistant. Business is booming.”

  “Most people probably wouldn’t sound depressed when saying that.”

  “Well, I’ve never pretended to be most people. I’ve been working sixteen-hour days for months. I barely see Mike. Sometimes I roll over in the middle of the night and scare the hell out of myself when I realize someone is sleeping beside me.”

  Mike was Kate’s husband, and he was a cop with Savannah PD. He worked erratic hours, so when combined with Kate’s erratic hours I could see how they might have issues spending quality time together.

  “I don’t even remember what sex feels like,” she said, dropping her head down to her desk.

  I took a bite of cinnamon roll in sympathy, but mostly to keep my mouth full so I wouldn’t say something stupid. I wasn’t having any problems remembering what sex felt like. Nick reminded me every chance he got, including in the shower about two hours earlier.

  “Look on the bright side. I’ve got my exams tomorrow and then you can legally add me to the roster.”

  She brought her head up slowly and her stare was blank and dull. And then she thunked her head back onto the desk. So maybe I wasn’t her first choice for the new employee additions, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. And she’d already promised me the job if I performed at the top of my class, so there was no way I was going to let her take it back.

  “So I have some news you might want to hear.” I went back to the credenza and got Kate another cinnamon roll and brought it back to set it beside her head. I’d never seen anyone who needed a third cinnamon roll so bad in my life.

  “You and Rosemarie found a dead body this morning. I heard it on the scanner when I first came in.”

  I blew out a breath and gathered up my file, coffee, and cinnamon roll. “Nothing is sacred in this town anymore. I can’t even spread my own gossip without someone beating me to the punch.”

  “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

  “Have I ever told you how much I enjoy your PMS weeks? It worries me that you’re armed.”

  “Not as much as it worries me that you’re armed.”

  “Touché, my friend. You leave me no choice but to get some work done.” My exit would’ve been more dramatic had Kate bothered to raise her head from the desk and see me out. Instead she turned her face to the side and took a bite out of the cinnamon roll without using her hands. I could relate. Sometimes a girl just needed to eat pastries with no hands.

  Chapter Three

  Most of the cases passed my way were pretty routine for the agency. A lot of adulterers and a lot of fraud. What can
I say? Savannah is a hotbed of scumbags and reprobates.

  I trudged the six blocks back to where I’d parked my car and sat inside with the heater on full blast while I looked over the file. I was grateful for the working heater. I was also glad the car had brakes and didn’t have a hole in the passenger side floorboard. I hadn’t been so fortunate with my last vehicle.

  “Hello,” I said, my brows arching in surprise. “What have we got here? Looks like the Enterprise is going down, Spock.”

  Up until I’d moved in with Nick I’d been renting a small house on a quiet street on the west side of town. The neighbors were nice, the trees were big, and the sidewalks were cracked. Best of all, the rent had been cheap enough that I could almost afford it. If I was being honest, I kind of missed my little house.

  My next-door neighbor had been Leonard Winkle, or Spock, as he liked to remind everyone to call him. Leonard was a good guy. He spent too much time watching Star Trek reruns and having Lord of the Rings reenactment parties, but below the nerd was a decent guy who I couldn’t see veering off the path of the straight and narrow. He’d also saved my life once, so I kind of owed him.

  According to the file, Leonard had had a break in about two weeks before and a very rare model of the Enterprise was stolen. It was estimated to be worth just under a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  I shook my head at the tragedy of it all. The neighborhood was going to hell in a hand basket, despite the efficiency of the neighborhood watch. The NAD Squad, or Neighbors Against Delinquency, consisted of six of the nosiest people on the entire street. They didn’t miss much, which meant whoever broke into Leonard’s house knew the weak spots in the neighborhood and how to get around them. It wasn’t an easy task. Especially considering the fact that a very capable FBI agent lived on the same street to handle whatever the NAD Squad couldn’t.

  The problem with having a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollar replica of the Enterprise in your home was that insurance companies didn’t really see the value, and their fraud investigator became suspicious when he started digging and noticed Leonard didn’t own anything else even close to the value of the Enterprise.

  Raymond Free, the fraud agent, was convinced Leonard was trying to collect the insurance on a piece that had never been stolen. Leonard’s finances were in good shape. He didn’t have any debt other than his house, and his job as a computer programmer paid well. That wasn’t exactly painting a guilty sign on his forehead in my opinion. But insurance companies didn’t particularly care about justice. They cared about money.

  My job was to find the Enterprise and see if Leonard was guilty of insurance fraud. The insurance company seemed to think it was a slam-dunk case. I had my doubts, but I worked for the big guy this time around.

  I squenched my nose and tossed the file into the passenger seat. My stomach felt kind of squishy and my conscience was having an argument with the practical side of my brain that knew it needed to earn a living. I didn’t feel right about ratting on a friend. The best I could do was dig around and see if maybe there’d been a mistake made. Or maybe Leonard had just forgotten where he’d put the Enterprise.

  I put the car in gear and was grateful for the camera in the dashboard that showed the rear view. I wasn’t the best parallel parker. But in Savannah that’s what you did if you actually wanted to get out and do things. I backed up until the car started beeping a frantic warning that I was getting too close to the car behind me and then I threw it in drive and joined the rest of the traffic.

  Gray plops of mush had started to fall from the sky again and I shook my fist at no one in particular. The little old lady driving next to me flipped me the bird and sped ahead, and I sighed in defeat against the heated leather seats.

  “Get a grip, Addison. What is wrong with you?” My fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “Snap out of it. Be cheerful. Life is good. You’re blessed.”

  And then for no reason at all I burst into tears. I wasn’t a good crier. I always wanted to cry just like Demi Moore in Ghost, where perfectly formed teardrops slid down my cheeks artfully and my eyes and nose didn’t get red and puffy.

  By the time I reached my old neighborhood I was in full ugly cry mode, so I pulled into the driveway of the house that used to be mine and let it all out. I don’t know how long I stayed there with my face buried in the steering wheel, but it was long enough that my nose was completely clogged and I was down to the occasional hiccup.

  I took a couple of deep breaths and realized I did feel a little bit better. Maybe it was the stress of so many changes in my life and I just needed to vent a little. I was going to go with that explanation instead of any other likely possibility.

  I raised my head and then yelped when I saw a row of faces staring through the windshield at me.

  “Holy mother of God,” I said, placing my hand over my racing heart. “A girl can’t even ugly cry in private. Unbelievable.”

  It took me a minute for the haze to clear my vision and realize that I actually knew the people standing there, instead of them being axe murderers waiting for me to get over my crisis so they could chop me up into little pieces.

  I threw the car door open and moved to get out but was thrown back by the seatbelt. Mrs. Rodriguez held onto her walker with a two-handed grip and shook her head at me disgustedly. Mrs. Rodriquez had little patience for anything that breathed, so I wasn’t surprised.

  I jerked against the seatbelt and finally felt the latch to unbuckle myself. I slid out of the car with as much grace as someone who couldn’t really see or breathe could.

  “Jesus,” my sister Phoebe muttered under her breath.

  “Scary,” said Spock.

  Byron from down the street nodded. “You look just my granny did after the aliens brought her back. She was never the same after the anal probe.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said, narrowing my eyes at them both. “You haven’t even seen scary yet. Go ahead, suckers. Make my day.”

  Spock never blinked. I wasn’t even sure the man had eyelids. It was one of the creepiest things I’d ever seen on another human being, and I was amazed his eyes didn’t pop right out of the sockets every time he sneezed.

  I’m not sure how it was possible but his brown orbs grew to twice the size at my threat. He reminded me of one of those stress dolls you squeeze until their eyes bug out. Byron never had much of a reaction to anything. It was hard to see his face at all behind the Duck Dynasty beard and trucker hat he habitually wore.

  “I’ve got brownies just out of the oven and a half-gallon of rocky road,” Phoebe said before all hell could break loose.

  “Deal.” I veered around the group and headed up the stairs that led into the house, not realizing everyone was going to follow behind me.

  In all honesty, I was feeling much better after my cry, but with everyone staring at me I needed to save face so I could forget how mortifying my lapse in control was. It also gave me an opportunity to observe Spock in a group setting instead of one on one. It was all part of my masterminded plan to get to the bottom of the whole fraud thing. And I got free brownies and ice cream to boot.

  The smell of chocolate from the kitchen almost brought me to my knees and I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. The pan of brownies sat out on the counter where Phoebe had left them to cool, and they were pure perfection. I sat down on one of the barstools, grabbed the knife next to the tray and cut a big square at the corner. I didn’t care about plates or napkins. I was on a mission.

  Byron and Spock took the remaining two bar stools and Phoebe and Mrs. Rodriguez stood behind the bar. I’d never actually seen Mrs. Rodriguez sit down. She was probably the oldest person I’d ever met in my life and she barely came up to my chest. She moved at the pace of a turtle and had a mouth like a sailor. And I’d seen her do bodily harm with her walker. Mrs. Rodriguez was nobody to mess with.

  I inhaled my brownie and was cutting my second piece when Phoebe set a bowl of ice cream in f
ront of me. I grunted in thanks and dug in.

  “Rough day?” she asked.

  “Found a body this morning. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.”

  “Not necessarily,” Byron chimed in.

  I watched mesmerized as brownie crumbs fell into his beard and then disappeared completely, as if the beard ate them. There was no telling what was in there, and I didn’t want to know.

  “There’s lots of factors to consider,” he said, grabbing for a second brownie. “Like the method of killing. Sometimes there’s more blood and brains with one kind of death than another, and you might react differently depending on how sensitive you are to seeing it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We all handle morbidity differently.”

  I knew he was smiling because his beard moved upward, but I couldn’t see his mouth through the copious amounts of wiry hair. Sometimes it was difficult to remember that Byron was a well-educated individual with multiple advanced degrees and a successful security business.

  “I saw a body that had been hacked to pieces with a cleaver one time and I couldn’t keep food down for a whole week,” he continued. “You wouldn’t believe the mess a little cleaver can make.”

  A piece of brownie dropped out of Spock’s mouth and he went a little green. I moved my bowl of ice cream out of the way and scooted my stool to the right just in case he couldn’t man up and keep his brownie down.

  Mrs. Rodriguez nodded and clicked her false teeth together. “I know what you mean,” she said, her accent thick. “My second husband was eaten by big mountain lion, rest his soul.” She made the sign of the cross and then immediately spit on the floor. “Jorge was pussy. Never marry a man who is not stronger than mountain lion.” She looked directly at me and then Phoebe, her black eyes small and intense.