No, I don’t mean I consumed chocolate to kick-start my little gray cells, although come to think of it, there likely was a Hershey’s bar involved somewhere along the line. That plus coffee are vital inducements to my muse. In fact, it’s rumored that Juan Valdez had to ditch the donkey and hire a mule train just to get my daily requirement of beans down the mountain. Coffee and chocolate to me are the equivalent of diesel fuel to a long-haul trucker. Without it, neither of us would get far, no matter how compelling the cargo might be, even if we got out and pushed.
But the chocolate that inspired this story wasn’t mine, it was Erika Balough’s, the intrepid female sleuth who tracks down “The Man in the Shadows.” When I discovered that this woman loves chocolate as much as I do, everything about her fell into place. The matter of who she was, where she came from and how she would get to where she wanted to go unfolded so vividly, I could, well, taste it.
Enjoy!
Chapter 1
Erika Balough was thinking about chocolate when she saw her lover’s ghost.
Neither event was unusual. Chocolate was Erika’s one remaining indulgence. She’d sworn off alcohol four months ago when she’d awakened in her car at the side of the Jersey Turnpike with no memory of leaving her uncle’s bar in Queens. She’d kicked her nicotine habit long before that because she didn’t like the smell of cigarette smoke and hated doing laundry. She’d even given up taping her soaps two weeks ago when the rubber bone she’d lobbed for Rufus had bounced off the floor and broken her VCR, but give up chocolate? No way.
So she was thinking about the Hershey’s bar that she’d stashed in the glove compartment, debating whether to break off another square now or to ration it so it would last to the end of the stakeout, when Sloan Morrissey flickered on the edge of her vision.
But as she’d realized, seeing Sloan wasn’t unusual. Over the past year, it had become an all-too-common occurrence. Erika understood it was a natural step in the grieving process, that reluctance to let go, the refusal to accept that a man as vital as Sloan could possibly be gone.
For weeks after the funeral, she’d seen him everywhere. In passing cars, in the crowd at a Jets game, in elevators just before the doors closed. He appeared each time a tall man on the subway platform shoved his hands into his pockets and angled his shoulders a certain way as he looked for the train. Or when some man cocked his thumb to push a lock of black hair from his forehead or chewed the inside of his cheek when he wasn’t sure what to say. Sometimes when she jogged through the park she caught snatches of Sloan’s laughter, or an echo of his footsteps just out of sight.
Damn, it was embarrassing.
At least with practice she was getting better at restraining herself from actually chasing the ghost. Experience had taught her that most men got nervous when they spotted a sobbing woman running toward them while screaming another man’s name.
Yet Erika had never learned how to get used to that first raw instant, when her senses trumped her logic and her breath caught and her pulse spiked and her heart shouted that the man she saw was real.
Oh God, yes. Please, let it all be a mistake. How could Sloan be dead when she still held him in her soul? How was it possible that she would never feel his body fit so perfectly with hers again? It couldn’t be over. She’d never had the chance to say goodbye.
Or to say that she was sorry.
Maybe, just maybe, he had managed to come back. What if…?
Exactly. The two most powerful words in the English language—what if.
She fumbled her can of root beer into the cupholder and snatched her camera from the passenger seat, adjusting the focus for maximum zoom.
Of course, it wasn’t Sloan. It was a shadow from the sign that overhung the doorway of the warehouse across the road. A gust of wind had set it swaying, giving the illusion of a large figure moving in the darkness. It was a trick of the poor lighting combined with the distortion from the rain that streamed down the windshield.
Erika lowered the camera and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. She held out for almost five seconds before she leaned over to open the glove compartment and took out the Hershey’s bar.
Her teeth sank into the chocolate, setting off a tingling rush of saliva. Comfort, sugar, pleasure and familiarity. She breathed slowly through her nose, holding the sensations on her tongue, waiting as the chocolate melted and the taste seeped into the emptiness that always followed a Sloan sighting.
Okay. This was reality. She wasn’t ready for the rubber room yet.
Good thing, since few people wanted to trust a PI who saw ghosts. Before that Jersey Turnpike incident had made her go on the wagon, her clients had been surprisingly tolerant about her descent into booze—it tended to fit right in with the whole hard-boiled private-eye schtick—but yes indeed, they got twitchy about cold-sober hallucinations.
She folded the wrapper over what was left of the chocolate bar and slipped it into the pocket of her raincoat, then checked her watch and picked up her tape recorder.
“November seventeenth, 12:35 a.m.” She had to blot her eyes on her sleeve again as she said the date. “Have observed no activity in the area for the past hour. Possibly due to the weather.” She squinted at the warehouse. “Advise client to install better lighting over the door beside the loading dock. What he’s got now wouldn’t discourage thieves, it would only annoy them.”
She paused the tape while she took a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose. Hartwell, the owner of the small appliances in the warehouse she was staking out and her current client, was phenomenally tight with his money. That was probably why one of his employees had decided to help himself to a few fringe benefits in the form of toasters and blenders. It would be cheaper in the long run to give everyone a raise to keep them happy instead of hiring Erika after the fact, but she wasn’t about to give Hartwell that piece of advice. A girl had to make a living.
She reactivated the recorder. “Recommend client hire Adeel to install video surveillance at all entrances. Note to self: call Adeel to negotiate possible finder’s fee if client follows recommendation to buy equipment from him. Second note to self: pick up dog food on way home—”
The recorder slipped from her grasp, clunked against the stick shift and thudded onto the floor mat. That shadow wasn’t from any sign, it was moving along the front of the building. Erika grabbed her camera again and aimed it at the figure approaching through the rain.
It was a man, and he was moving fast. The hem of his black raincoat billowed behind his calves with each long stride. He didn’t appear to be interested in Hartwell’s warehouse. He had his head down, with his chin tucked inside his upturned collar and his hands shoved into his pockets. Rain gleamed from his black hair and from the ridge of his bold hawk nose as he passed in front of the light above the door.
And for the second time in five minutes, a fist of hope slammed into Erika’s gut. Her pulse spiked, her breath caught. Sloan!
Before she could capture the image with her camera, he reached the corner of the building, turned into the alley and disappeared.
Erika thumped the back of her head against the headrest. “No,” she muttered. “Get a grip, Balough. It wasn’t him.”
Sure. She knew that. It had been months since she’d had a sighting this vivid. It was because of the date, that was all. The date and the spooky weather.
Okay, so what legitimate business could Raincoat Man have in this neighborhood after midnight in a storm? He very well could be Hartwell’s thief. And if he was, he could be planning to access the warehouse by some other entrance while she was sitting on her butt, obsessing about a dead man.
There. She hadn’t lost her mind yet. She had perfectly rational reasons to follow him. It would be staying put that would be crazy. She stuffed her camera into her bag, slung the strap over her shoulder and slipped out of the car.
The rain drove into her face like pebbles, making her gasp and duck her head. She pulled up her hood and sprinted across the road to the
entrance of the alley. A mini river was snaking down the center of it, carrying cigarette butts and the kind of mushy autumn debris typical of most paved surfaces in Brooklyn. Discarded crates, some soggy cardboard boxes and a heap of old tires huddled near the walls, but there was no sign of movement.
She jogged along the edge of the puddle, warily scanning the sides of both buildings as she went. There was a button factory beside Hartwell’s warehouse, but she couldn’t imagine Raincoat Man or anyone else being interested in breaking in there. The market for stolen buttons was even smaller than the market for hot food processors.
Wind funneled through the alley, bringing with it the distinctive fishy, oily smell of the East River. Erika reached the fence that ran behind the warehouse, but she could see no one there, either. She stopped to listen. Although it was tough to hear anything over the constant applause of the rain, she detected the rhythmic splash of footsteps to her right, heading away from her. She peered around the corner of the button factory just in time to see a tall, dark figure step into the next street.
He wasn’t heading for Hartwell’s warehouse, he was heading for the docks.
Sloan had always liked boats. He’d loved to sail. That was one of the things they hadn’t had in common. Erika got seasick the instant she stepped on the ferry. She didn’t care for the water and had never learned to swim, yet not Sloan. He adored his sloop. He’d named it after her, hoping to entice her on board, but she’d always refused.
Maybe things would have turned out differently if she’d made more of an effort. What if she’d swallowed a bunch of Dramamine and strapped on a life jacket and gone with him that last time? What if…
Oh, God. He was heading for the docks, for a boat, for the water. It was happening all over again.
But this wasn’t Sloan.
Yes, of course, she knew that.
Erika took a step forward. That one was the hardest. The rest got easier, especially once she hiked up her skirt and broke into a run.
She wasn’t insane. She did have logical reasons for this. It was because of the way the man had moved, head down and shoulders hunched, his body tensed and his strides eating up the distance. He might not be Sloan, but whoever he was, he was up to something.
And she always felt better when she was busy. She was good at her job. Through the rough patches, it had been the constant that had kept her grounded. Tonight, of all nights, she needed this.
So she blocked out everything else, the blisters that were forming on her heels from her new leather boots, the increasingly heavy yards of wet wool skirt that sloshed against her shins and the aching cold in that hollow place inside her chest. She concentrated on tracking the man who definitely, positively couldn’t be her lover.
It wasn’t easy. He changed direction twice before he got to the river, as if he were checking for a tail, causing Erika to dive behind a garbage bin the first time and duck beside a parked truck the second. She lost sight of him as a curtain of rain descended between them, then spotted his silhouette flit past the gaping doorway of a lit storage shed.
The shed was directly across from a moored freighter. Unlike the other buildings she’d passed, this one was filled with activity. A forklift hummed inside, moving long wooden crates from a stack. Men milled about just inside the entrance where they could keep dry. No, their movements were too deliberate to say they milled. They patrolled.
Erika slowed her pace. Her instinct for self-preservation had been pretty quiet for the past year, but now it was screaming out a warning. This seemed as good a time as any for it to reassert itself. What was in those crates, and why were people guarding them? Whatever was going on in there likely had nothing to do with Hartwell’s stolen toaster ovens. The body language of those guys by the door told her they were probably armed.
She stepped into the lee of a building beside the shed and did a survey of the area. The man she’d been following had disappeared again. He hadn’t gone inside, but how could he have passed those guards without being seen?
Unless he hadn’t been there to begin with.
Erika shivered. She had to consider the possibility that Raincoat Man had been a figment of her imagination after all.
Wonderful. Maybe she truly was cracking up.
But if someone was going insane, would they be rational enough to realize it?
Sloan’s ghost hadn’t appeared to anyone else. He’d been close to his family, but he hadn’t seen fit to haunt his mother or his sisters. None of his buddies on the NYPD had admitted to catching sight of him, either.
If he was going to haunt anyone, it should have been the guys on the force. Erika had never known a cop as totally dedicated to his job as Sloan. Coming from the other side, as it were, he could have given a whole different perspective when it came to informants. Who better to know where the bodies were buried? Dead men might tell all kinds of interesting tales.
And that’s what Sloan was. Dead. As long as she was aware of and accepted that fact, she had to be sane, didn’t she?
Yes. That sounded reasonable, she decided.
Headlights slashed through the rain. Erika hunkered down quickly, taking cover behind a stack of wooden pallets as the beams swept along the side of the building where she had been standing. A truck turned into the shed. As soon as it cleared the entrance, the overhead door lowered, cutting off her view of the interior, but not before she got a good look at the truck.
It was olive green, with large tires and a canvas back. That, plus the sign on the side of the door, led her to conclude it belonged to the U.S. army.
The army? Were those guards soldiers? Exactly what had she stumbled across?
Or had she been led here? Maybe Sloan’s ghost was trying to give her a tip…
Stop it!
She tilted her head back, letting the cold water pummel her face for a moment to clear her brain, then dug into her bag for her phone. Returning her gaze to the closed door of the storage shed, she fitted her phone under her jacket hood and thumbed the speed dial for her uncle’s bar.
Four rings, then a burst of rock music and male laughter in the background. A gravelly voice came through the receiver. “Cherry on Top. Hector speaking.”
“Uncle Hector, it’s Erika.”
“Hey, Riki, where have you been? The guys gave up on you half an hour ago.”
Her uncle was referring to the men from Sloan’s precinct. The Cherry on Top, with the vintage red patrol car light that flashed in the front window, was primarily a cop bar. Sloan’s friends had arranged to meet there tonight to toast his life. “I already told them, I had to work,” she said.
“You’re working too hard, Riki.”
“It runs in the family, Uncle Hector. Is Ken still there?”
“Hang on, I’ll check.” The phone was muffled, probably against Hector’s stomach, but Erika could hear him bellow Ken’s name. Detective Ken Latimer had been Sloan’s partner, a bond that made him feel some residual responsibility for Erika, so he helped her out with information when he could.
Half a minute later, Hector came back on. “Sorry, Ken already left. His kids have chicken pox and his wife’s going nu—” He caught himself before he could complete the word. “He went home to help. What’s up?”
“I’m not sure. I just wanted some info.”
“About what?”
She hesitated. “Have you heard any talk around the bar about an undercover government operation near the docks? Something involving the army?”
“No, nothing like that. Why?”
“I was following a suspect and I found something that looks suspicious.”
There was a pause. “Erika, have you been drinking again?”
“No, Uncle Hector. Nothing stronger than a can of root beer.”
“There’s no shame in it if you did, what with today marking—”
“I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol in more than four months.”
Another pause. “What kind of suspect were you following?”
> “That really doesn’t matter.”
“Tall, dark-haired guy who walks too fast for you to catch up to him?”
She recognized the sympathy in his voice and hated it. Just as she hated the way he avoided saying nuts to her. “Uncle Hector…”
“Was this the same guy who appears out of nowhere and disappears into thin air?”
She wiped her wet face with her free hand. “It’s different this time. I swear. I’m not hallucinating.”
“Riki, go home. Sleep it off.”
“I did see someone.”
“On second thought, I better pick you up. Tell me where you are.”
She terminated the connection and put the phone back in her bag. He meant well. Sloan’s mother and Erika’s friends meant well, too, but that didn’t make the situation any less frustrating.
Then again, why should they believe her when she had difficulty believing herself?
Another set of headlights glared along the pier. Two more army trucks drove up to the shed. Before they could come to a stop, the overhead door in the front of the shed was already lifting. Erika squinted against the sudden light, trying to peer inside, then belatedly remembered her camera. She pulled it out of her bag and went down on one knee, steadying the camera on the edge of the pallets as she zoomed in on the interior.
She spotted the rear of the first truck. The canvas had been pulled aside and men were unloading crates from the back of it, the same long, wooden ones that she’d seen on the forklift. Whatever was inside the crates must be heavy—it took three men on each side to maneuver one of them out of the truck.
None of the men wore army uniforms, though. Instead, they wore jeans and plaid shirts or denim jackets. Several had long hair and scraggy beards, and a few sported substantial beer bellies. They looked more like the type of people who would belong to a biker gang than to the military.
She managed to shoot a few frames before the door lowered and cut off her view again. What on earth had she stumbled into?
Whatever it was, it was more trouble than she was being paid to investigate. The smart thing—the sane thing—to do right now would be to beat a strategic retreat and call the cops from her car. She could phone anonymously. That way the credibility issue wouldn’t come up.
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