“I have a little time before I have to be there.” He grinned down at me. “May I kiss the bride?”
“Of course.”
—
“Drugged and stuffed in a laundry basket, then put on a truck to Memphis…” Stan murmured, alternating between chuckling and being appalled. “I have to tell you, Juliet, this is your wildest story yet.”
I sat back in the comfy chair at our secluded table at Sambuca and finished off my coconut mojito. “You know it’s not my intention to have ridiculous things happen to me.”
True to my word, I’d gone out to dinner with Stan and told him my whole sad story. Even though he was a gossip, I didn’t mind confiding in him. He knew when to keep his mouth shut. Plus I had enough dirt on him to bury him alive, so I figured we were even.
Smiling, Stan replied, “Sure. I know.” His brow furrowed suddenly. “Juliet, in all seriousness, I’d be careful when dealing with Xander Leonidas. You think I’m a cad when it comes to women—but next to him, I’m an altar boy. Plus when he doesn’t get what he wants, the first thing he does is get violent. I’ve seen it firsthand.”
“Well, at least he doesn’t know my real name.”
He shook his head. “Don’t think for a moment that he can’t find it out if he wants to. The Leonidases are known for being well connected and ruthless. As for what happened to you, my money’s on him. Not only did you turn him down, you embarrassed him in front of his mother and got him in hot water with her. Being cut off from the family fortune is a big deal to us trust fund babies, believe me. I want you to watch your back.”
Stan wasn’t usually so serious. If he was bothered by this, it was worth worrying about. “I will. Thanks for the heads-up. And thank you for getting Pete and me out of our jam. We had a real dark ‘oh shit’ moment there.”
A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “I bet Pete couldn’t stand accepting help from me, could he?”
I rolled my eyes. “I wish that just once two of my male friends could get along.”
“Everyone seems to like your boyfriend well enough. Or tolerate him, at least.”
“What’s not to like?”
He regarded me for a moment. “Nothing, but he’s a bit…dull, perhaps. Not quite an equal to you and your fiery personality.”
Frowning, I replied, “But he’s sweet, and he makes me not so hot-tempered.”
“Personally, I enjoy your feistiness. And though I’m loathe to admit it, I believe you were happier when you were with your angry detective.”
“Ryder? But we drove each other nuts.”
Stan was never a fan of Ryder’s, and the feeling was mutual. However, Stan was always willing to listen to me talk about any aspect of my relationship with Ryder, and over the past few months, sometimes I’d had a lot to say.
“Yes, but at the same time you couldn’t get enough of each other. It was obvious to everyone around you.”
I accepted another drink from our waitress and downed a big gulp of it. “It was not.”
“It absolutely was, in the way you looked at each other. Can you honestly say that you and your dull detective have achieved a comparable level of passion?”
I thought back to earlier in the day when Stafford had whisked me away to my bedroom. Sure, it was nice, and…sweet. But—
Interrupting my thoughts, Stan said, “It’s just as I thought. This is a ‘safe’ relationship for you.”
I said vehemently, “No, it isn’t. I like John. Very much.”
“But?”
“But nothing, Stan.”
“Is he unimaginative in the bedroom as well?”
Strange as it was, Stan was the only person I felt completely comfortable speaking to about my sex life. At his prompting, some thoughts I’d been keeping to myself came tumbling out. “You know I think John is wonderful in every way. Except…he’s only got one move. I keep thinking that if we do it more, he’ll break out something else, but he never does. Not that his move isn’t a decent one, but…I like a little variety once in a while.” Immediately feeling bad for complaining about John, I clapped my hand over my mouth.
Stan took my other hand and gave it a squeeze. “It’s okay to have these feelings, Juliet. Although it might be more useful to voice your concern to your boyfriend instead of to me.”
“Since when are you Dr. Ruth all of a sudden?” I grumbled, hating to admit he was right.
He smiled. “I met a woman.”
“You meet lots of women, Stan.”
“Touché. Remember when I had to cancel on coming to your party last weekend?”
I nodded.
“I was meeting with the owner of a local furniture company that Hollingsworth Industries is hoping to acquire. The two of us hit it off quite well.”
“Is it kosher for the CEO to hit on someone his company is trying to buy out?”
Ignoring my question, he said simply, “I think I’m in love.”
My jaw dropped. “Stan Hollingsworth is in love? And after only a week?”
“When you know, you know, right? I’ve had my fair share of women. This feels different.”
“Aww, congrats, Stan. But you know I’m going to have to meet her and give her my seal of approval.”
“I know. Baby steps. She’s still reeling from meeting my mother yesterday.”
I wrinkled my nose, remembering the first time I met his snooty mother. “I hope Delta likes her more than she liked me.”
Grinning, he said, “She does. But then again, she likes everyone better than she ever liked you.”
—
Monday was kind of a blur. I didn’t feel completely recovered from my crazy weekend, and I still had some late-night surveillance to do at Wonder-Gen. According to Gentry, Wonderlich had been out of town for the weekend, and he was pretty confident none of Wonderlich’s underhanded dealings ever went on without him. So it actually worked out that I had the weekend off to work at the wedding expo and be trucked to Memphis. Unfortunately, though, with Maya out of the country, all the investigating and surveilling for the coming week fell to me. I wasn’t completely sure I could handle it all on my own, but Maya insisted she had faith in me.
A narco cop named Brody Callahan came into Java Jive to get my statement about my role in helping them bust Candace Monroe for dealing, but thankfully he was businesslike and to the point, so it only took five minutes and didn’t make my head hurt any more than it already did.
Pete had gone to lunch with Brooke, so I hadn’t had time to sit and talk with him since we’d been dropped off at our homes by Stan’s driver. After his workday, he came to Java Jive and headed straight for me, wordlessly nodding his head to ask me to follow him to the office.
Once we were inside with the door shut, he asked, “You look like shit. Are you still feeling some effects from whatever drug we were slipped?”
I rubbed my face. “I don’t think so…But it probably didn’t help that I had a few drinks with Stan last night.”
Pete rolled his eyes. “Way to take care of yourself, Jules. Nice adulting.”
Changing the subject, I asked, “What are we going to tell Shane? He’s been looking at me funny all afternoon, but I wanted to wait for you because I thought it would be easier if we both talked to him at the same time.”
“You mean you didn’t want to talk to him by yourself.”
“He doesn’t like me. Never has.”
Shaking his head, Pete replied, “I’ve taken care of it. He called me yesterday. I knew you were wiped, so I met with him and told him everything.”
“Thank you, best friend. But I thought you didn’t want him to stress over what happened to us.”
He shrugged. “Once it was over and we were back safely, I felt like he could probably handle hearing about it.”
“How did he take it?”
“Well enough, but now he’s ready to take on Xander, Kacey, Mrs. Leonidas, and Candace all at once.”
“For my money, Candace is out.”
&nbs
p; “Mine, too. But that still leaves us with three people to investigate. What’s next?”
“Well, don’t forget we didn’t get anywhere with finding out who could have been angry enough with Josie about the Brock Flint release party fiasco to kill her over it. And I’m not sure who to ask. Rex, maybe?”
“It’s a good angle to explore. Let’s get to work.”
I gave him a contrite smile. “With Maya away for the week, my time is tied up with the case she and I were working before she left. It really needs my attention.”
“So does this one.”
“Even Stan told me to steer clear of Xander Leonidas, so he must be pretty nasty.”
“Well if Stan says so…” he muttered under his breath.
Ignoring him, I went on, “I don’t know how we’re going to get close enough to find anything out yet keep a safe distance from that psycho.”
I could already see the wheels turning in Pete’s head. He said, “I’ll think about it, okay?”
“Okay. But no more undercover stuff. It wouldn’t work, anyway, since he knows what we both look like.”
“You got it, boss.”
—
The stifling heat and humidity were beginning to get to me as I sat in Maya’s van on the street around the corner from the loading dock at Wonder-Gen. My dinner churned in my stomach—not the best idea to have a heavy chicken-fried steak sandwich (Brandon’s amazing special of the day) before spending the evening being slowly steamed to death in the Tennessee summer air. I didn’t dare hydrate myself adequately for fear I’d have to use the restroom. Maya, badass that she was, could relieve herself in a cup inside any vehicle, and I’d unfortunately witnessed her do it a couple of times. I couldn’t imagine having that level of commitment to any job.
I sat there for hours staring at the deserted building. Just as I was getting ready to call it a night, an old, unmarked box truck came lumbering up to the loading dock, followed by two vehicles. Finally, some action. Excitement sent a jolt of much-needed energy through me. I grabbed the camera and snapped several shots, but it was too dark to make out any faces until the people exited their vehicles. I positioned Maya’s parabolic microphone in their direction and began recording, hoping to catch enough of their conversation that we could glean some information as to what in the world was going on here after hours.
A man got out of the first of the two vehicles and hopped up onto the loading dock. I recognized Wonderlich from his photo on Wonder-Gen’s website. He fished in his pocket and brought out some keys, then opened the back door and disappeared inside. While he was doing that, two men got out of the other vehicle. These guys had guns. Big ones. In fact, they were semiautomatic rifles. Unfortunately, the men were wearing baseball caps pulled down low over their brows, casting shadow on their faces and totally obscuring them from my view, even with the camera fully zoomed in.
I took a couple of shots of them, then zoomed out a little, hoping to get an idea of who they were by studying what they were wearing. The first guy had a pretty nondescript all-black outfit on, but he did have a tattoo on his muscular forearm, which I was able to get a fairly decent shot of. It could have been an eagle, but I couldn’t quite make it out on the tiny screen. No matter, I could blow it up when I transferred the photos to Maya’s computer. I trained my camera on the other guy, and when he came into focus, I was struck by his movements and his gait. He reminded me a lot of…
I sucked in a gulp of air as I heard a voice over the parabolic mic say, “All clear.”
“John,” I breathed.
Chapter 19
I shook my head to clear it. I must have been seeing and hearing things due to my lingering fatigue. That man wasn’t John. There was no way he was my John.
Rubbing my eyes, I trained the camera on the men again. They were facing away from me now, watching Wonderlich lift the bay door so the truck could back in and unload. I stared at not-John’s ass for a good minute, only to become less and less convinced I was wrong about his identity.
So what if I was right? Maybe what Wonderlich was doing was on the up-and-up and John was…protecting him and his shipment of toys for needy kids. That was one explanation. Only if Wonderlich was taking shipments of toys for needy kids, he wouldn’t need to do it in the middle of the night with an armed escort, and he wouldn’t hide it from his friend and business partner of thirty years.
Also, John was a detective, and he was on duty tonight. Maybe he was working undercover to bust up whatever underhanded scheme Wonderlich had going on here. That was another explanation. Except that John only worked cold cases and missing persons, which meant he never worked undercover. And even if he were to work undercover, it wouldn’t be to infiltrate some kind of illegal goods trafficking. An operation like that would have been handled by narcotics or robbery or ATF or some other department.
Unless…the goods being trafficked here were people. Like missing people. The missing people my sweet John worried over daily. That had to be it.
I quit taking pictures on the assumption that the whole thing was a covert police op. I quickly shut off the audio recording as well, although I left the mic live so I could hear what was being said. I didn’t figure anyone at the MNPD would have been happy about me surveilling one of their operations without their knowing it, so I thought having no proof of my presence was the best idea. However, that did not deter me from itching to know what my boyfriend was doing here, not to mention that it was kind of a thrill to see him in action.
The truck driver jumped down from the cab and went to the same door Wonderlich had gone in earlier. He said to Stafford and the other gun-toting guy, “Hey, how about you two help us this time instead of standing around all night?”
The other guy fired back a few expletives in refusal, but Stafford didn’t say anything. The driver gave them the finger and slammed the door shut behind himself. Stafford and the other guy made another sweep of the area.
A few moments later, Wonderlich appeared in the doorway. His voice a bit garbled from the sucker he had sticking out of his mouth, he barked, “We don’t need both of you to play security guard.” Evidently the driver had run to tell the boss that Stafford and the other guy declined to help. “Jensen, you stay outside. Stafford, get your ass in here and earn all the money I’m paying you.”
Stafford obediently hopped up onto the dock and followed Wonderlich through the door. It struck me as horribly odd that in an undercover operation he’d use his actual name. He was asking to get made.
There was not much to watch with just the one guy—Jensen, as Wonderlich had called him—patrolling outside while the rest of them were inside the loading area, obscured by the truck backed into the open bay. If they unloaded their cargo and I never got to lay my eyes on it, how was I to know if what they were doing here was legal or not? I had to get inside that building, and pretty much the only way to do it was to call Gentry and have him let me in, but I couldn’t do that until these guys were gone. I had a feeling it was going to be a long night.
After a few minutes, Jensen either got bored with patrolling or had a sudden change of heart about helping, because he, too, entered the loading area like the other three men had. I laid my head back against the headrest of the driver’s seat and closed my eyes for a moment. The whole situation was off-putting. I could only speculate as to Stafford’s role in all this, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t adding up.
Suddenly, a knock on my window shattered the silence, sending my heart into spasms and causing me to shriek out loud. I fumbled for the pepper spray Maya always kept in the console between the two seats, but when I heard a familiar voice, I froze.
“Would you relax? You’re going to wake the neighborhood.”
Ryder of all people was standing there, smirking at me through the partially cracked window.
Fixing him with a steely glare, I replied, “Are you stalking me again? Because at this point, it’s harassment.”
He shook his head and
went around to the passenger side, then pulled open the door and hopped in next to me. “I was here first, Scooby.”
I felt a twinge at his use of the pet name he always called me when he was teasing me about my sleuthing. “My ass. I haven’t seen you lurking anywhere tonight.”
Grinning at me, he said, “That’s because I’m excellent at surveillance. And I’m stealthy like a ninja.”
“So are you saying you’re not here because of me?”
“Contrary to what you might think, the world does not in fact revolve around you.”
Giving him the evil eye, I said between gritted teeth, “What are you surveilling, then?”
“Same thing you are, only I have a much better vantage point.” He pointed to our left. “Inside that house.”
I glanced at the house, which was decorated within an inch of its life with painted ceramic yard ornaments. “How did you manage that? Doesn’t someone live there?”
“Yes, a sweet old lady named Betty. She and her seventeen cats welcomed me into their home and allowed me to set up shop in the spare bedroom. It has a window with a perfect view of Wonder-Gen’s loading dock. Jealous?”
“That you’ve got yet another octogenarian girlfriend? No.” I’d had enough of his smug attitude. “Now get out.”
“So you don’t want to talk about the fact that your boy Captain America is on the take, providing security and police cockblocking for a smuggling operation, and you just witnessed it?”
My jaw dropped as I turned to him. “He’s not, you giant ass! He’s undercover.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Um…no…but he’s on duty tonight, so that’s obviously what’s going on.”
Ryder shook his head, his eyes suddenly devoid of the haughtiness they’d held before. “He’s not on duty tonight, Juliet. Just like last time when I told you he lied to you about being at work.”
The biggest liar I ever met was trying to make me think that John was the liar here. In my current state, I thought I might actually strangle him if I had to be around him one more minute. With extreme restraint, I whispered, “Get. Out.”
Brew or Die Page 16
