Reckoning and Ruin

by Tina Whittle

  “Where is she?”

  “That’s one secret I do need to keep.” She looked at me from under her lashes, almost flirtatious. “Are you going to rat me out?”

  “To Trey? Of course.”

  “No, not Trey. Lovett.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  She smiled. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say. Because that means we can still help each other.”

  “How?”

  She pulled a flyer from her bag and handed it to me. It was a photocopied announcement from a storage facility in Thunderbolt, right behind the marina.

  “Jasper rents a unit there,” she said. “He stopped paying for it months ago, so it’s being auctioned at noon. If you want to dig through his secrets, I’d get there before some junk hound snaps it up. I would go myself, but Lovett’s got me chasing something else.” She held out her business card. “And if you’re feeling generous, a call letting me know what you found would be appreciated.”

  I took the card. Couldn’t help trying to reconcile the fake image on her website with the woman across from me, a woman who never looked the same twice. A woman I definitely didn’t trust.

  She inhaled briskly. “Well. It’s been lovely, but I have to go. Don’t worry, I’ll keep in touch.”

  She waggled her fingers in a little wave, then flip-flopped her way across the street.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  The flyer rested in the middle of the bed, untouched. I sat on one side, Trey on the other. He had a mug of vanilla rooibos resting on his knee, I had my third cup of coffee in hand.

  “And yet another example of possibly good information from a definitely suspicious source,” I said.

  Trey examined the flyer like it was a bear trap. “Indeed.”

  “This is what I meant about things getting weird.”

  “I know.”

  “So I entirely understand if you can’t—”

  “I can. The question is if I should. I mean, if we should.”

  He’d been assessing the situation since we’d returned to the room, but had reached no clear verdict except that since we had no reason to believe that a crime had been committed, we were entirely within our rights to investigate the unit. If we wanted to.

  “Was Finn telling the truth?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t read people at a distance.”

  “It feels like a set-up.”

  He took a sip of tea. “It could be.”

  “Or it could be nothing. A false alarm, a red herring, something to get us out of the way while she wreaks havoc somewhere else.”

  “Correct.”

  I grabbed his wrist and checked his watch. “Damn it! We’ve got an hour before the auction. But what if we show up and there’s nothing happening? These places have security cameras. We’ll be forever on video stalking Jasper’s old junk, looking suspicious. Or worse, tipping his hand in some way.”

  “It’s a problematic choice.”

  “Right.” I shrugged. “So all things being equal…”

  He put his tea on the bedside table and reached for the phone. “I’ll have the valet bring your car around.”

  ***

  The manager of the facility had a deep tan and golf hair and a paunch like he was smuggling a watermelon under his Georgia Bulldogs shirt. He also had two hole-in-one trophies and a stuffed sea bass on the wall of his office. I could barely hear him over the air conditioner in the window, which he had cranked to full blast.

  “Y’all the ones called about the unit up for auction?” he said.

  I tried to keep my teeth from chattering. “We are.”

  “You friends with the guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “The one who rented the unit.”

  I considered my words carefully. “Jasper’s more like family.”

  “I been trying to get in touch, leaving messages at the number he gave me, but nobody would return my calls. And the back rent’s been adding up.” He got a squinty look in his eyes. “There’s a lot of back rent.”

  Trey stepped forward, already pulling out his wallet. “We’ve got that covered.”

  The manager grinned big. “In that case, done and done! My son in there will take care of the financial matters.” He grabbed a clipboard from the table. “Now if one of you will follow me, we’ll get the what-not all seen about.”

  He hoisted a pair of enormous bolt cutters—the tool of all things what-not—but Trey didn’t budge. I pointed into the office, where a younger version of the manager sat behind a desk in a matching red golf shirt. Behind him hung a wide-screen array showing a whole buffet of security camera feeds, including every storage unit in the place.

  Trey cocked his head, and his forehead uncreased just the slightest. “Oh. Okay.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “Join me down there when you’re done.”

  ***

  The manager walked me through the rabbit warren of red-roofed units, most of them climate-controlled. He’d carved his facility out of marshland, strung up some heavy duty chain link around the perimeter to keep out the meth heads and horny teenagers.

  He held the door for me at the final building. As I entered, I glanced up and saw the security cameras, one above each entrance, and knew Trey’s eyes were behind them. They had a good view of the hallway, but the interiors of the units were in the blind. I’d have to manage my position carefully so that I didn’t disappear from his view.

  The manager pointed. “That one right there.”

  Twenty-two DD was a five-by-ten unit, which—to my dismay—was secured with a disc lock. They were excellent for storage units because the slide mechanism was covered with metal, making them almost impossible to cut through. Which made for a lousy afternoon if you needed to do exactly that.

  The manager raised his bolt cutters. “Usually the auctioneer does this. Takes a DeWalt cordless grinder to it. That’s noisy and dirty, but it’ll get you through a mid-grade lock in a few minutes. However, if you know the secret—”

  I held out my hand. “Wait!”

  I crouched down and took a closer look. Yes, disc locks were almost impenetrable, but that hadn’t stopped whoever had tried to penetrate this one.

  I pointed out the scratch marks to the manager. “Any idea who did that?”

  He looked surprised. “Well, I’ll be durn.”

  “Those security cameras, how long do you keep the footage?”

  “I don’t know, my boy Jimmy’s the one keeps track of all that.”

  “Can you give Jimmy a call? See if he’ll run through the footage for this unit, maybe let us know who might have been trying to break in here?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I could, but that seems like a police matter.”

  “We’ll be glad to pay whatever civilian access fee you think is fair.” I let the implication sink in. “I assume that’s calculated by the hour?”

  The manager caught my meaning. “I believe it is.”

  “Excellent. Now, can you cut this off without messing up any fingerprints that might be on it?”

  He thought about it, hefted the bolt-cutters once again. “Yes, ma’am, I surely can.”

  It took only one minute. Remembering the possibility of fingerprints, I used the tail of my shirt to roll up the corrugated metal door. The contents were a haphazard mess—shoes, housewares, blankets, sheets, a corduroy armchair with an orange sticker that perfectly matched its burnt orange upholstery. Every single sticker was color-coded and hand-generated, not a bar code in there.

  “It’s a decoy,” I said.

  The man looked confused. “A what?”

  “A decoy. You get a storage unit, use your real name—which trust me, Jasper would never do if he really had something to hide—then jam it full of crap, in this case, crap he got in one haul from a thrift
store. Then you see if the cops show up to take a look. That’s how you know they’re on your tail about something.”

  The manager scratched his head. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “See?” I pointed. “He didn’t even bother peeling off the price tags.”

  I heard the door at the end of the hall open and assumed it was Trey. So did the manager. We were both stunned to see Ivy storming down the corridor, the very picture of righteous indignation. With her curls blowing and her breasts heaving, she looked like a Greek harpy, ready to shred some entrails and peck out some eyes.

  She jammed her hands on her hips. “What are you doing here?”

  I straightened. “Checking out my new stuff.”

  “That belongs to Jasper.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Ivy balled up her fists like she was ready to take a piece out of me. The manager looked nervous. He had not been expecting a catfight, but he was smart enough to avoid getting caught in the middle of it. He got out his phone, pointed it at us.

  “I don’t want any trouble!” he said.

  I ignored him, planting myself between Ivy and the unit. “What’s up, Ivy? You come to take a peek at Jasper’s junk too?”

  “None of your damn business what I’m doing here!”

  “Hell, yes, it’s my business. You knew this unit was going up for auction, and you were happy to see that because that’s the only way you were getting in because Jasper didn’t leave you a key.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I lost my key, that’s all.”

  “Uh huh. That why you tried to cut your way in?” I shook my head at her, tsk-tsked. “Why doesn’t Jasper trust you, Ivy? Not even with the key to a decoy unit? You ever considered that?”

  Ivy bit back whatever bubbled behind her tongue. Glared at me, glared at the manager. She was running her options, but I knew she was straight out of them. She didn’t want the cops out there. I didn’t want the cops out there either. And the manager certainly didn’t want the cops out there because cops had a way of hauling off evidence and not paying for it. Trey was perhaps the only person who wouldn’t have minded one bit if they’d shown up—indeed, who may have had them on speed dial as we spoke—but otherwise, it was a three-way standoff.

  She threw a hand in the air. “Fine. You want this mess, it’s yours. I was trying to be a good fiancée, that’s all.”

  And then she stomped out of the storage building and into the hot damp sunshine just as Trey barreled in the other door.

  He was only a little breathless. “Who was that? Where is she? Should I—”

  I put my hand on his arm. “That was Ivy, and she’s probably screeching tires out of here right this second. She did not like the idea of the police coming down here, not one bit.”

  He looked at the slamming door, then at the unit, then at the manager, then back at me. “But—”

  “Come on.” I took him by the elbow. “I wanna show you the boring load of crap we just bought.”

  ***

  Trey spent the next hour and a half meticulously examining our haul, emptying every drawer, running gloved fingers along joists and seams. He tapped for hidden compartments, slit open cushions, did lots of peering and frowning and professional poking. In the end, he found exactly what I had—nothing.

  “Decoy,” he pronounced.

  “Damn straight.”

  He dusted off his hands. “And the security footage?”

  “The manager’s kid showed me—it was Ivy who tried to break in. Otherwise this has been one lonely unit, at least for the past month. No cops, no criminals, no nothing.”

  I knew Trey was thinking the same thing I was—that since the facility only kept four weeks of archived footage, other people could have scoped out the unit and we’d never know. Of course, Jasper probably had several such units scattered about, some of them with shady managers willing to drop a dime if anyone poked around.

  Trey nudged an old mattress with his shoe. “Is any of this valuable?”

  “Not a lick. No antiques, no relics, no interesting papers. The furniture is all fiberboard, nothing worth resell. I say we let the manager auction it off after all.”

  “Agreed.” He shucked his gloves. “Do you have a theory as to why Ivy was so anxious to get in here?”

  “I have two hundred and fifty thousand theories.”

  “That sounds valid.”

  “Yeah. Ivy’s a creeper, all right, and she was anxious to creep right in here. But she doesn’t have Jasper wrapped as tightly as she thinks, otherwise he’d have given her the key to that lock. Otherwise he’d have told her what this was.”

  “So he doesn’t trust her.”

  “Not completely. It’s one thing to get engaged, after all, quite another to…hang on, my phone’s ringing.”

  I squinted at the display. Another unknown number. I held up a finger to Trey and answered it. “Hey, Finn, thanks for the tip and all, but—”

  “Tee, listen to me.”

  Not Finn. Jefferson. And he was upset.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “They just called me from the hospital. Daddy’s gone into PICU—”

  “What?”

  “Pulmonary intensive care, and they say I’ve gotta get down there. But I’m eight hours out of town. I need you to go.”

  Suddenly I felt sick. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. They just said to come, and quick.”

  I started walking toward the exit. “Of course. I’m on my way.”

  Trey followed right behind, the unit forgotten. “What’s happened?”

  “Something bad.”

  He put his hand in the small of my back and steered me forward. “I’ll drive.”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Jefferson’s news evidently qualified as a “life or death” emergency, because Trey broke every rule in the book getting me to Memorial. Red lights ducked through, speed limits scorned.

  He dropped me right at the lobby with a screech of brakes. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Park and come on up. If it’s bad…” I swallowed hard. “Just hurry.”

  He peeled out toward the parking lot. My stomach growled, but the hunger was no match for the anxiety. I tried to keep my hands from shaking as I got directions to the Pulmonary ICU, which lay behind a set of alarmed doors next to a call-in box. I picked up the receiver, and a male voice answered.

  I made my voice as calm as I could. “I’m here to see Beauregard Boone.”

  “Hold on a second.”

  A few seconds passed. Then the voice came back. “I’m sorry, we don’t have anyone here under that name.”

  “But you called. You said it was an emergency.”

  “I have no record of such a call.” Another pause. “Perhaps your family member is still on the floor?”

  I stood there clutching the phone, baffled. Was I caught in some bureaucratic circle of hell? Or was there something worse going on? Had Boone… I shook off the thought.

  “I’ll check, thank you.”

  I hurried back down the hall and took the elevator to Boone’s regular room, murmuring to myself, please let him be there, please let him be okay. I walked faster, as if I could outrun the panic, breaking into a jog past the nurses’ station. When I got to Boone’s room, I skidded to a stop, steeling myself for the worst. Then I pushed open the door.

  Boone had the remote in his hand, pointed at the TV. “Jesus Christ, girl, what the hell’s chasing you?”

  The relief almost knocked me off my feet. “They called Jefferson and said you’d gone to ICU!”

  “Well, I haven’t!”

  “I can see that!”

  Now that I’d found him, now that the crisis was averted—heck, had there even been a crisis?—I could catch my breath. Had Jefferson been pullin
g some kind of con? Or was this some other subterfuge beyond even my own suspicions?

  Boone put down the remote. “You look like you seen a ghost.”

  “I feel like I have.”

  I saw Trey get off the elevator at the end of the hall. He made a beeline for me, his expression take-no-prisoners serious.

  I waved him over, offered a shaky smile. “It’s all right. False alarm. Or maybe some more of Finn’s shenanigans. Or Jefferson could be—”

  “Stop talking.” He stood too close, his mouth close to my ear, his voice so low I could barely hear him. “We need to leave. Now.”

  “What?”

  “Please trust me on this.”

  “But Boone—”

  “—is in no danger. You, however, have to leave. Now.”

  I knew that look. I wasn’t about to argue with it. Some part of my brain was sending up signal flares of speculation—was Trey trapped in a hypervigilant hallucination again?—but I decided that no matter what I was dealing with, it was best to deal with it away from Boone. Trey stood in ready position, weight on the balls of his feet. Whatever had him spooked, it was imminent.

  I stuck my head inside. “I know this is nuts, but Trey says I gotta go.”

  Boone nodded. “I’d do what the man says.”

  “I—”

  “Go. I’ll be here when you get back.”

  Trey headed for the elevator at a fast clip, and I had to hurry to keep up. Once the elevator doors closed, I turned to him.

  “All right, what’s the—”

  “Not yet.”

  His expression remained blank, and he faced straight ahead, as if we were strangers. He kept it up all the way through the lobby, eyes locked in front of him, until we got into my car. He cranked the engine, revved it a couple of times, then took it out of the parking lot with a roar.

  I fastened my seatbelt. “You gonna explain?”

  “You were being surveilled.”

  Surveilled, not watched. “There were cops there?”

  “Yes. Two of them at the end of the hall, the men in blue work shirts loading the laundry hamper. They were undercover, probably local.”