Gia Santella Crime Thriller Boxed Set: Books 1-3 (Gia Santella Crime Thrillers)

by Kristi Belcamino

  “?”

  I turned my phone on mute and set it down. It had taken all my willpower not to tell him about the pinky toe. I was so freaked out by it. Scared shitless for Sasha. Not telling the police went against all my instincts right then.

  I decided that if things went south between now and noon, I would tell James about the toe and the threat. Or else I could lie. If I told him about the toe, the police investigation would take off like gangbusters and Sasha could very well end up dead. If I lied, I could stall.

  For a second I considered calling Dante. His fiancé, Matt, had connections. Big time connections in Washington. Maybe it was time to look past our little corner of the world for answers. But would Matt know any dirt about the mayor? Maybe not. Besides, I knew Dante was probably asleep. He went to bed early every night so he could be awake at four in the morning to oversee the breakfast prep at his restaurant.

  Giving my laptop a glance, I decided the pinky toe had been a game changer. I needed someone who knew more about online searching than how to google Thai takeout.

  I PULLED UP THE COLLAR of my All Saints motorcycle jacket as I stepped off the bus near Market Street into the fog surrounding the Forgotten Island. The area was almost always enveloped in its own island of fog, which I’d heard was how it got its name.

  The streets were deserted and most of the lights were broken. Long shadows stretched across the streets. I hurried through the area, eager to get over to the Whoa-Man.

  This time I was able to avoid the fire escape because when I walked up, the drone was hovering above me. I looked up and saw Danny’s big red head hanging out the window.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” he said as if he were expecting me.

  “Buzz me in,” I demanded and without waiting for an answer headed under the small awning at the front door. Within thirty seconds the door clicked and I shoved it open. I took the stairs two at a time. The clock was ticking. Eighteen and a half hours left.

  When I got to 10D and tried the handle it was locked. I knocked. And waited. I heard shuffling inside. I pressed my ear to the door and heard him swear.

  Then the door flew open and I nearly fell inside.

  I glanced around. How cute. He had cleaned up after he saw me downstairs. The closet inside the door was partly open and I could see he’d thrown clothes and food containers in there.

  This time, I looked around his apartment as I followed him to the wall of computers. He had little bobble heads of most of the San Francisco Giant’s players and a bookshelf full of Star Wars action figures, some still in the box.

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  A flush crept up the pale, freckled skin of his neck.

  “Seventeen.”

  “Aw, you’re just a baby.” I smiled.

  He looked down.

  “A really, smart baby. Like a genius. A prodigy.” I was making things worse. His cheeks were now bright red.

  “Listen. I need your help again. It’s really bad.”

  He looked over at me. I’m sure he heard the fear in my voice.

  “They cut off my friend’s pinky toe and sent it to me because they know I’m dealing with a cop. He’s kept the lid on it, not telling his supervisors, but he is going to blow it out of the water at six tomorrow night. I need your help with a couple things.”

  He nodded, serious.

  “I need to find out all the dirt on the mayor I can. He’s somehow connected to all this. And I need to figure out who is following me. I thought maybe your drone could help with that last part and your tech savvy with the first.”

  He clamped his mouth together. He didn’t seem convinced so I reached into my pocket where I had a wad of cash.

  He held up his palm. Like his head, it was huge. He could palm my face.

  “Wait.”

  I waited.

  “I like to work on the barter system.”

  My body instantly tensed.

  He spoke fast. “My petition for emancipation is on Wednesday. But I’m having trouble providing proof of income,” he gestured at his bank of computers. “It’s all under the table. I can’t report it. Can’t show proof.”

  I tilted my head, listening.

  “And,” he said, “You throw around cash like money isn’t a thing for you.”

  “It’s not.” I said.

  “Can you come with me and say I work for you?”

  “To court?”

  He gulped and nodded.

  “Sure.” I didn’t hesitate.

  “You’ll lie to a judge?” He seemed surprised.

  “Yeah. Seems like a good cause.”

  His big shoulders sagged with relief. “Thank you. I can’t go back to my parent’s house.”

  “Understood.”

  His face reddened a bit and he turned back to his keyboard. “What’s Mayor McCheese’s social security number?”

  “No clue.” Uh oh. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  He kept typing and I sighed with relief. When he wasn’t looking, I put two hundred bucks on his table. I’d still show up Wednesday, but dude was doing me a service. I may be willing to lie to a judge for a good cause but I wasn’t a freeloader. I paid for my goods.

  Danny pushed back from the computer. “Here’s the pre-primary report—money he’s got so far.”

  I leaned over. It looked like a photo copy of a document that had been scanned. It said, “Campaign finance report of receipts and expenditures.”

  The first page showed that Mayor Evans had already received more than $500,000 nine months before the primary. Danny scrolled down to the actual spreadsheet listing donor names and amounts. Everything was sideways, so we tilted our heads. “You should look for the big donors first, right?”

  “Yup,” I said.

  About half of the donations were $1,000, the maximum an individual could donate.

  “Can you print this out?”

  While the sheets came out, I dug around in my bag. I extracted a hot pink highlighter and marked the thousand dollar donations looking for some common thread.

  There were a few that stood out. AKKI Industries. DKKI Corp. FKKI Construction. HKKI Specialist. LKKI Properties. PKKI Real Estate. RKKI Holdings. MKKI Imports. KKKI Trust. ZKKI LLC.

  The letter before the KKI made sure they weren’t lumped alphabetically together. Between them all, they added up to ten thousand dollars. Not a lot. But still.

  Then I noticed another similar group. These ten donors followed the same pattern. But instead of KKI, the common factor was KJR. And there were more. In all, if they were all related, they added up to about $100,000. That was nothing to sneeze at.

  By the time I looked up, it was three in the morning. Fifteen hours left.

  Danny handed me a cup of coffee. At first I turned up my nose at it, but I was desperate for caffeine so I took a sip. “Not bad.”

  I flipped to the back of the papers, to the expenditures. Boring stuff. But I paused on rent. Why did the mayor pay rent on five different places in the Tenderloin?

  “How do we get the addresses for these rentals?” I asked. Danny was slumped on his couch playing Minecraft on his TV.

  He stood and stretched. “I’m on it.” He ambled over to the computers and typed on one of the keyboards.

  “Why do you have so many computers anyway?”

  He looked at me for a second and then said, “I told you. My business.”

  “Okay.”

  I sucked down my coffee and used the bathroom. When I walked back into the main room, Danny held out a sheet with seven addresses. Six had the mayor’s name by them. One, in Berkeley, said Kraig King. I shot a glance at Danny. Had I even mentioned King to him? I wasn’t sure I had. I scanned the addresses again. They meant nothing to me. They were all in San Francisco on streets I recognized. Maybe I would need to go visit all of them.

  “Can I use one of these computers?”

  “Sure.”

  I sat down. Then noticed one of the six with the mayor’s name on
it had a star. “What’s this?”

  “His house in the avenues. His primary residence. Where he lives, you know, with his wife and kids.”

  He wouldn’t be hiding Sasha there. I started on the other ones. While, I didn’t know much about searching online I was an expert with Google maps. To my surprise, the rest were all here in the Tenderloin.

  “Wow. The mayor is investing in the Tenderloin? Or at least renting spaces here for campaign activity?”

  That explained his speedy arrival at Café Katrina’s the night of the protest. Or maybe it didn’t. “Want to go on a field trip?”

  “Not really.” He yawned.

  “Do you think your drone could follow me as I check out these buildings?”

  He shrugged.

  For some reason, I didn’t want to do it alone, even though I had my gun in my holster.

  The Whoa-Man was the Tenderloin area furthest from my place. I could hit all the addresses on my way back to Russian Hill. I marked them in order so I wouldn’t backtrack on my walk home.

  I’d hit one address in the Gimlet, one in Delicious Fields, one in the Panhandle, one in the Rambles, and the last one in the Forgotten Island.

  Danny was already fiddling with his drone. It took center stage on his huge dining room table in the middle of the room.

  “The battery’s almost dead.”

  “Crap.”

  “If you walk fast, it might hold out.”

  “Okay. I can do that.” I grabbed my bag, shoved the papers in it and headed to the door. “Thanks a lot. I’ll be there Wednesday morning.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WHEN I STEPPED OUTSIDE, I looked up and saw Danny leaning out the window. The drone was in the air nearby. I blew him a kiss. I could practically see him blush from ten stories down.

  The streets were silent so I could hear the slight buzz of the drone above me although I couldn’t see it.

  The first address, about two blocks away, led me to a small building in the Gimlet. The shades were drawn but a large “Evans for Mayor” sign took up most of the window. It looked official. And like a campaign office.

  The second address in Delicious Fields was a little more confusing. It was a small four-story building. I was ninety-nine percent sure the apartments inside were SRO’s. Cheap little single residency occupancy apartments. Could you write off the rental of an apartment for your campaign staff? I didn’t have a clue. It seemed a little odd. I glanced down at my sheet. Yeah, the mayor had paid only $800 for the first three months of this year. Suspicious.

  The next address in the Panhandle was another apartment building that looked like another SRO. Did the mayor have a string of kept women in the Tenderloin?

  The Panhandle was my old neighborhood, soon to be my home again. Passing Café Katrina, I wanted nothing more than to swing in and give Katrina a hug and down a bourbon, but every minute counted. James was going to his sergeant in mere hours.

  I stopped to peruse the construction on my new home. I couldn’t wait to move back. From the outside, the place looked finished, but when I’d gone by the other day, they were still working on the interior. For every tenant who had lived in the building before it burned down, I’d doubled the size of their original apartment. For my penthouse apartment, I was having the contractor put in some special touches.

  Like my old place, there would be a staircase to the roof within my apartment. But the door would be hidden. I would train Django how to use his nose to trigger the door if he needed to do his business on the roof when I wasn’t home.

  In any case, the roof was going to be my safe haven. It would contain fruit trees and a garden much like the rooftop being designed at Swanson Place. But my roof would also have had a few special turrets I could fire from in case all hell broke loose in the city. You never knew.

  In my penthouse, I had smart windows installed on all three sides. The windows not only had tint but also were made of bulletproof glass. The open layout of my floor was mainly so I had a big room to do my karate. As soon as I moved in I was going to start training again hard. That would also mean giving up booze and smoking for a while. Living in my Russian Hill apartment had led to me falling back on bad habits.

  My new place also had reinforced steel doors and a safe room tucked away in case someone did manage to get through that door. Unlikely. My safe room was grand central for the building’s security system that would allow me to put the entire building on lock down with the flick of a button. More than a dozen surveillance cameras were strategically hidden around the exterior and roof. Standing on the sidewalk, even though I had planned where each security camera was mounted, I smiled when I confirmed I couldn’t spot them.

  While I was looking up at the building, I hadn’t paid much attention to a homeless woman walking toward me. When I looked over at her, I gasped. For a second, I thought she was Ethel. This woman also had a scarf on her head. But unlike Ethel’s it was flowered. And she wasn’t black. She was white.

  “Hey sister,” I said.

  “Got any change.”

  I dug around and found a twenty. “You ever want to change your situation? Live in an apartment?”

  I was always recruiting for Swanson Place. Feeling people out, trying to get the perfect mix of residents.

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “I know of a place. You could work downstairs in the building. There’s a bunch of shops.”

  “I don’t want to work.” She cackled.

  “You might like it.”

  “Doubt that.”

  She turned to go.

  “Hey, what’s the word on the streets? I hear some people are vanishing, gone missing.”

  She rotated her pointy jaw toward me. “That’s true.”

  “Are you worried?”

  She thought about it a second and then shook her head. “Nah. They only want the blacks.”

  When I got to the address in the Rambles, my eyes were blurred from lack of sleep, but then I did a double take. 12 Eddy Street. Fuck me!

  I looked up at the building as I dialed James. But as soon as he answered, I hung up. If I was wrong, Sasha would die. They’d warned me about bringing the police into this in a way I’d never forget. I couldn’t take the chance. I dialed Baumann instead.

  He sounded sleepy.

  “I think I know where she is. She had some scribblings on her calendar that said 12 Eddy. I just found out the mayor owns a building at 12 Eddy and her story concerns the mayor. She’s got to be here somewhere.” I spoke fast, my words tumbling over one another.

  “How sure are you?”

  I swallowed. “Not sure enough to call the police.”

  Quickly, I filled Baumann in on the toe.

  He was quiet when I finished.

  “I’ll meet you at the Black Panther in thirty minutes,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AS I MADE MY WAY TO the Black Panther, a buzzing near my ear made me jump. It was the drone. It had dropped down by me, startling me so much I yelped. I’d totally forgotten about it.

  It hovered a few feet above me as if trying to tell me something. It started to go away and then came back. What did it want me to do? Then I remembered: The battery. I gave a thumbs up and that must have been the right thing to do because it zoomed away and was soon out of sight.

  The Black Panther, a dark, dive bar with sticky floors and chairs, was mostly empty. Only a few diehards slumped at the bar.

  I ordered a tap beer while I waited, figuring I better keep my wits about me.

  Baumann came in wearing a trench coat with his jeans and cowboy boots.

  I eyed the boots. They were made of snake skin and dyed black cherry. “Those are kick ass.”

  “Ready?”

  It was misting as we walked and I pulled my jacket collar up and tucked my chin into my scarf. Finally, the building appeared in the low-hanging fog.

  We stood under the awning and looked at all the doorbell buttons. There were eight apartments.
/>   “Start ringing doorbells?”

  Baumann said, “Might as well.”

  I pressed the first button and nothing happened. I did it three more times and then raised an eyebrow. “Okay. On to number two.”

  This time the door buzzed and clicked open.

  Baumann held the door, looking at me over his glasses. I took a deep breath and stepped inside. I gestured at the first apartment on the left. There were two apartments on each floor. “I’ll start here.”

  The man who opened the door of number one was bleary eyed. I felt bad. He’d been sleeping.

  “Excuse me? I’m sorry to wake you.”

  “No hablo inglés.”

  Baumann was by my side in a second speaking to the man in Spanish. When they got done talking, the man stood there yawning while Baumann translated.

  “He works nights. Says he doesn’t know who owns the building and he has never seen a girl who looks like Sasha here. All the other residents are single guys like him from Mexico who work in restaurants. Most work two restaurant jobs so they’re basically here to sleep for a few hours when they’re not working. It’s a really quiet building. He said he’d have heard something if a girl had been here.”

  “Can you ask him what time most of them get home?”

  Baumann spoke quickly in Spanish. The man answered and Baumann turned to me.

  “He said he’s usually the earliest one home after the restaurant closes at one.”

  According to her calendar, Sasha was supposed to meet King here at midnight. The building might have been empty.

  “Can we trust him?” I said it, but I already knew the answer.

  Baumann didn’t hesitate. “Yeah.”

  I looked at my watch. It was four in the morning. Fourteen hours left to find Sasha.

  “Then I’m not sure it’s worth knocking on all these doors,” I said. “I don’t want to wake people up for nothing. Sounds like most of them have to get up in a few hours.”

  “Check the basement. I’ll check the roof,” he said.

  The basement was a small space, mostly taken up by the stairs. There were five bicycles chained to a pole, including a bright red one that looked new. A door was at one end. I turned the handle and found a janitor’s closet.