[Cutthroat Business 01.0 - 03.0] Boxed Set
Page 71
“Really?” She pushed her chair back. “Let’s see.”
We walked side by side down the hallway toward the room where I’d been working. I had to hustle to keep up with her long legs and low heels.
“Hmmm,” she said when she bent over the computer terminal I’d been using, peering at the picture. “This is the guy?”
“I’m pretty sure. It looks like him, and the description says he has a tattoo of a dragon on his back.”
She glanced at me over her shoulder. “You’re not totally sure?”
“As sure as I can be. Ninety nine percent. It could be someone else, but I don’t think so.”
“That’s too bad.” She straightened.
“Why?”
“Because this guy is bad news.”
I snorted. “Thank you, I know that. I met him.”
“What I mean is, I was hoping the man you saw would turn out to be some two-bit hood with a grudge. Obviously that’s not the case.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “This is Jorge Pena. He’s wanted in several states and foreign countries. Colombia. Venezuela. Brazil.”
“An international hit man?” Surely they didn’t exist in real life?
She hesitated. “It’s mostly in books that you get the shadowy assassin with the sinister nickname.”
“So what is he, then?”
She folded her arms across her chest. “Oh, he’s a hit man. Of sorts. Someone who gets dispatched to take care of business. Mr. Collier must have pissed off some pretty bad people if it’s come to this.”
I felt a chill go down my spine, like a caterpillar with cold feet. “He’ll be OK, won’t he?”
“Mr. Collier? He’s good. He can take care of himself.” She hesitated. “Although I’m not sure he’s this good.”
The caterpillar moved, and settled like a clump of ice in my stomach. “You’ll tell him, right?”
“That we’ve identified Mr. Pena? Of course. Or you can.”
I shook my head. “I’m staying away from him.”
Her mouth quirked. “Afraid you’ll grab him and drag him back to bed?”
I blushed. “Something like that.”
She smiled. “It might be just what you need. A couple of nights of sex hot enough to knock your socks off. Lose some of those inhibitions. Join the human race.”
“I lost a few inhibitions already, thanks. And believe me, I’m very human.” Human enough to regret the fact that I wouldn’t be losing more. But the truth was that a couple more nights with Rafe wouldn’t just knock my socks off and let me lose the rest of my inhibitions, they’d also ensure that I’d be hooked but good, and that I’d spend the rest of my life lamenting what I couldn’t have. Sleeping with him once had given me something to remember; sleeping with him more than once would be self-indulgent and dangerous. No matter how much I wanted to.
Tamara Grimaldi shrugged. “Your loss.”
“If you like him that much,” I said, “go for it. He’s available.”
“You think?” She shook her head. “Thanks, but no thanks. I told you, he’s not my type. I need someone steady, someone who doesn’t court danger every day. He’s all yours.”
“I don’t want him,” I said, but we both knew I was lying.
* * *
I left the news about Jorge Pena for Detective Grimaldi to tell—she’d warn Rafe, and he’d take proper precautions—and then I went to the office. I still hadn’t heard anything from Gary Lee and Charlene’s loan officer about the results of the appraisal, and after several days, that had me a little worried.
Brittany was behind the front desk as usual, her blonde hair in a cute little ponytail, her cute little face in its habitual pout. “What’s the matter?” I asked when I stopped inside the front door to check my mailbox.
Brittany tossed her head. She’s in her early twenties, barely out of college, and still has the teenage attitude down. “Tim’s driving me crazy.”
Tim drives everyone crazy. Of course, I didn’t say so. “What has he done now?”
She sniffed. “He thinks I forgot to set the alarm last night.”
“What makes him think that?”
“It was off when he got here,” Brittany said with an annoyed shrug. “And it wasn’t me. I had a date with Devon yesterday—” Devon was the boyfriend, a long-haired musician type, “so I left right at five. And I set the alarm!”
The last person out the door at night is supposed to set the alarm. We all have the code; I keep mine in my wallet and on a piece of paper tacked to the bulletin board in my apartment. Along with a spare key.
Brittany rolled her eyes. “One of the agents probably came back after hours to pick something up or drop something off, and forgot to set the alarm again when they left. It happens all the time.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“Wasn’t anyone else, either. Or no one who’s come in this morning.” She shrugged. “He probably turned it off himself, and just forgot.”
“Maybe so.” I gathered up my mail—nothing exciting, just some postcards and fliers. “Any messages?”
“I would have sent any calls directly to your cell,” Brittany said.
“Of course. Thanks.” I headed for my office.
While I waited for the computer to boot up, I checked my voicemail and found I had none.
Sometimes I really wonder why I bother coming in to the office. I mean, there’s nothing here that I can’t do from home with my laptop and my cell phone. There’s just something official about going to the office as opposed to working from home, I guess. It’s more legitimate, somehow. Even if I do exactly the same work. And in any case, Officer Slater was living in my apartment, so I felt a little weird being there.
I opened the file on Gary Lee and Charlene Hodges—the only file on my desk; clients have been hard to come by in this tough economic time—and dialed the number for the mortgage broker who was working on the Hodges’s loan.
“Brandon? This is Savannah Martin with... um... LB & A.” I was still having problems remembering the most recent name of the company I worked for. It started out as Walker Lamont Realty, then became Lamont, Briggs & Associates, and now that had been abbreviated to just the initials. Tim was doing everything he could to make people forget that Walker Lamont was a murderer, yet without actually dropping Walker’s name from the company he still owned.
“Yes, Savannah,” Brandon’s smooth voice said, “what can I do for you?”
“I was wondering if there was any news on the appraisal for Gary Lee and Charlene’s place. I let the appraiser in three days ago. He should have filed his report by now.”
“Let me see,” Brandon said and put the phone down. I could hear him rustle through papers, and click on the keyboard, and I could hear him mutter—and I probably wasn’t supposed to hear that, since I think he was muttering about me bothering him. After a minute he came back on. “I got it. Yesterday.”
‘And you didn’t call me, why?’ trembled on the tip of my tongue. I bit it back. “Any problems?”
“Actually, yes. It didn’t appraise.”
Uh-oh. “What do you mean, it didn’t appraise?”
“Mr. Cobb looked at it and determined it isn’t worth the amount the bank has been asked to loan.”
“Thank you, Brandon.” My voice was rather heavy with sarcasm, I’m sorry to say. “I do, in fact, know what the expression means. I was hoping you’d explain how that could be. I followed Mr. Cobb around the place. I pointed out all the upgrades. I told him what the other units in the development sold for. I provided comps for the area.”
“I don’t know,” Brandon said.
I took a breath. And another. “How far apart are we?”
Brandon dug through his papers. I could hear the rustle. “The contract price is $145,000. The appraisal came in at $139,000.”
“So six thousand dollars difference.”
“Uh-huh,” Brandon said, not sounding if he cared.
“Wha
t happens now?”
“We can’t loan.”
Thank you, Einstein. “I mean apart from that.”
“There is no apart from that,” Brandon said.
“You mean the deal is dead?!” After all my work? And all this time? I needed this commission! I was close to hitting bottom in the savings account, and there were no other transactions lined up behind this one.
“Afraid so,” Brandon said, without sounding like he meant it.
“What can I do?” I opened the top drawer in the desk and fumbled for a pen while Brandon told me my options. The first thing I pulled out was a knife, and I put it aside, my entire focus on the phone call.
“You can try to talk the seller into dropping the sales price by 6K. Or you can ask your clients if they can come up with six thousand more in cash.” His tone of voice said as clearly as words, fat chance.
I had to agree with that. The sellers wouldn’t want to drop their price, and Gary Lee and Charlene didn’t have six thousand dollars sitting around. Six thousand more dollars, on top of the money they were already putting down. However, I had another concern now.
“Thanks, Brandon. I’ll have to call you back, OK?” I hung up without waiting to hear his reply. And then I pushed my chair back, as far as it would go, away from the desk.
There was a knife on my desk. A sharp one. One I recognized from my kitchen.
It could have been worse, I suppose. I could have touched the blade instead of the handle and cut myself. There could have been blood on it—mine or someone else’s. Or if this was a Barbara Botticelli novel, the knife could have been rigged, via some intricate mechanism, to embed itself in my throat when I opened the drawer. It didn’t. And it was singularly bloodless. It was, however, big and scary. And sharp. And here, where it had no business being.
I dialed the phone again. “Detective? Savannah Martin. There’s a knife in my office.”
“I beg your pardon?”
My voice started shaking. “A knife! In my desk drawer. At work. A chopping knife! Mine. I recognize it.”
“The knife that disappeared from your apartment? Are you sure you didn’t just bring it to work sometime and forget?”
“Of course I’m sure,” I said, my teeth chattering. “There are knives in the kitchen here; it isn’t like I’d have to bring one from home. And even if I did, I wouldn’t keep it in my desk drawer. This is a threat. From whoever broke into my apartment and slashed my nightgown. The Hispanic guy. Jorge Pena. There’s even a thread caught in the handle!”
“All right. Calm down.” She took a couple of deep breaths. I did the same. It actually did make me feel a little calmer. “How would someone get into your office to leave it there?”
“The code to the alarm was hanging on my bulletin board at home. Along with a spare key. Just in case I lost mine. I didn’t think about it in the excitement the other day. I mean, I still had my key in my purse, you know? And someone was here last night. Brittany set the alarm when she left yesterday. This morning it was off.”
“Fine,” Detective Grimaldi said. “Bring me the knife. Don’t touch it. Wrap something around it when you pick it up. Like a handkerchief or a scarf.”
“Kleenex?”
“That’ll work. Hold it by the blade, that way we may be able to get prints off the handle. And be careful not to cut yourself. Put it in a bag or something. And bring it to me.”
“OK.” My hands shook as I followed the instructions. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Just leave it downstairs at the desk. I’ll have someone from the lab pick it up and dust it for prints. I’ll call you as soon as I know something, OK?”
“OK,” I said.
I was just about to hang up when she added, “Oh, by the way. We’ve released Mrs. Johnson’s body. Her husband will be burying her tomorrow. In Sweetwater.”
“Cletus?”
My surprise must have been clear, because— “They’re still married,” Tamara said.
I supposed. And then, of course, there were the children to consider. They didn’t need to know about the problems their parents were having, if they didn’t already know. Cletus probably didn’t have much of a choice but to bury the wife who had left him and her kids.
“Are you going?” I’d seen Grimaldi attend funerals before. Brenda Puckett’s, Lila Vaughn’s.
“Not this time. I figure I’ll leave that to the locals.”
Bob Satterfield would probably be there. To support Cletus, Cletus being a deputy and all.
“I may go,” I said. If I went back to Sweetwater, I could pick up the rest of my belongings from the mansion at the same time.
“You’ll let me know if anything interesting happens, won’t you?”
“Like, if Jorge Pena shows up?”
“That, of course. Or anything else.”
“Sure,” I said. “If anyone throws themselves into the grave, I’ll be sure to take notes.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Um...” I waved to Brittany as I walked past the desk and out the front door, clutching the bag with the knife inside, “did you tell Rafe about Jorge Pena?”
“I did.”
“How did he take it?”
She hesitated. “He didn’t seem concerned, if that’s what you mean. Just said he’d keep an eye out.”
“Oh.”
“And asked what’d happen if he killed Jorge.”
“What?!”
Her calm voice didn’t change. “I told him it would depend on the situation, but would likely be considered self defense. Depending on the circumstances, of course.”
“You don’t think he’ll try to find Jorge, do you?” Or stake himself out as bait? It was something he’d do. It was pretty much what he’d done last night.
“I have no idea,” Detective Grimaldi said cheerfully. “But if he does, and if Jorge ends up dead in the process, I don’t think anyone will grieve.”
Except me, if Rafe ended up going to prison for murder.
“Don’t worry,” Tamara Grimaldi said, reading my mind, “he’s been inside before. He’s not going to do anything to land there again. If he kills Jorge, he’ll make sure it looks like self defense. He doesn’t want to go back to prison.”
“Good to know.” And I couldn’t believe what I was saying. After just two months of hanging out with Rafe, I was already talking about cold-blooded murder without batting an eye! “I’m getting in the car. I’ll drop the knife off in the next ten or fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I know something,” Grimaldi said, and hung up.
* * *
Gary Lee and Charlene were not happy about the news from Brandon. They didn’t have an extra six grand sitting around to make up the difference between the sales price and the appraised value of the townhouse they wanted to buy, and they weren’t sure they’d want to pay more for it, anyway, even if they’d had the extra money.
“I mean, really, Savannah,” Gary Lee told me over the phone, “why would we pay more than it’s worth? What happens in two years, if we decide to sell it?”
“You’re planning to sell again in two years?”
“I don’t know,” Gary Lee said, “but what if we did? We wouldn’t be able to get our money back, would we?”
“Probably not,” I admitted. “If you overpay now, there are no guarantees that in two years, or whenever you’re ready to sell, the market will have appreciated enough that the house will be worth more. Or even worth what you’re paying now.”
“So what are our options?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “If you can’t come up with the money to make up the difference, and you’re not sure the house is worth 145K to you anyway, now that you know it won’t appraise for that...” When, dammit, it had been worth 145K to them yesterday! “...the only other option is trying to talk the seller into lowering the price. The loan is contingent upon the appraisal...”
“What’s that mean?” Gary Lee said.
“That if the appraisal doesn’t match or exceed the sales price, you won’t get a loan. Right now, the bank can’t lend you the money you need to buy the house, because they’ll be lending you more than the house is worth, and that’s not in their best interest.”
“Uh-huh,” Gary Lee said.
“Either you come up with the difference in cash, or the price has to come down.”
“Can’t you just tell the people who own the house?”
I smiled tightly. “I can try. But since that means they’ll be making six thousand dollars less than they thought they’d make, I’m sure they won’t be happy.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Gary Lee was silent.
“I’ll talk to the other agent and do my best, OK? But we may have to start from scratch.”
And wouldn’t that be fun? Especially if Gary Lee and Charlene had to test-drive every bedroom the way they’d been doing when I first started showing them around. They’d been having quickies upstairs in every house I took them into, while I stood downstairs wondering what was taking them so long. They’d finally told me they’d been looking for the one that would give them the biggest bang for their buck.
“Really?” Gary Lee said now, in response to my warning that we may be forced to start the house hunting process over. He didn’t sound as resigned as I felt.
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I’ll talk to the other agent and see what we can work out. I’ll get back to you.”
“Sure,” Gary Lee said.
I dropped off my carving knife for Detective Grimaldi and headed back to the office. Where I bearded Tim in what used to be Walker’s office, and explained the situation. And heard what I expected to hear: Tim did not think his sellers would be willing to take six thousand dollars less for the townhouse.
“Why don’t you ask your clients to make up the difference, Savannah?”
“I have,” I said. “They can’t.”
“So you expect our clients to take the loss?” He glanced at Heidi, whom he’d asked to sit in on the conversation, as well. She was chewing, and couldn’t contribute anything but a tight-lipped smile.