by Liliana Hart
I also ran a search for bars within three blocks of the Olde Pink House and came across a place named Charlie’s. I marked it on the map to pay a visit to, and then opened the police file on the similar crime that had occurred in Hilton Head.
Jonathon Hunt had been a forty-one-year-old man in the prime of his life. He was married with two children and worked as a broker at a top firm in New York before going out on his own. He did even better then. He was a financial genius. He and his family had been on vacation when Jonathon had gone missing. His wife had immediately called the police and filed a report. She’d known something had to be wrong for him to disappear like that. His body was discovered in a hotel three days later by the maid. There was no sign of trauma except for the hole where his heart should’ve been.
Jonathon’s last known whereabouts had been the Shrimp Shack, a restaurant on the water in Hilton Head. The wife said he hadn’t been feeling well after a couple of drinks, so he got up to go to the restroom. Witnesses also placed him there. He briefly bumped into a woman who was coming out of the ladies’ bathroom, but witnesses said it seemed like he was in a hurry and just moved around her. He went into the bathroom and never came out. He just disappeared.
The autopsy report came back with a minimal dose of Ketamine in his system, as well as traces of GHB. The medical examiner presumed the GHB was used to incapacitate the victim enough to get him moved, and the ketamine was what was used for the surgery, as it was a common anesthetic.
There were contusions around his wrists and ankles, indicating the drug had worn off before the surgery was complete. That, combined with the amount of blood loss arterial bleeding would’ve caused, led the medical examiner to state the victim had more than likely been awake during the surgery.
I shuddered, thinking of the unbelievable terror Jonathon Hunt must’ve endured before his death. He’d been awake and aware as his killers took out his heart. And it was killers, plural. The hotel room where Jonathon’s body had been found had been spotless at first glance. But blood was hard to clean up, and traces of it had been found with Luminol. They’d had to throw a tarp on the floor and bag all their clothes after the surgery had been done. Most likely anyone in the room would’ve been covered in blood, especially if the victim had been awake and struggling. The medical examiner made a note that the lack of blood in the body would’ve been due to the high stress rate of the victim, making blood spurt if they hadn’t clamped it off.
It was a surgery that couldn’t have been done without medical training, as the autopsy showed that the heart had been removed cleanly.
That was as far as the investigation went. There was no weapon, and no suspects. And nothing even remotely similar had been done in the resort community before, so there were no like crimes to compare it to. And just because someone stole a heart six months ago in Hilton Head didn’t mean it was the same people who took Anthony Dunnegan’s kidney, though my gut was telling me the two crimes were very much related.
I was going to have to take a trip to Hilton Head and do a little investigating of my own. See if any memories had been stirred since some time had passed.
I looked back through the hospital report that Anthony had given to Kate. A mix of Ketamine and GHP had also been found in his system. And it was notated in the chart that the removal of the kidney had been done professionally. He’d been sutured and put on ice to slow his blood flow until the paramedics could rescue him. Anthony and Jonathon also had something else in common. They were both O-negative. And if I remembered right, only a small percentage of the population had O-negative blood.
I did a quick Google search and learned that transplant recipients that had type O blood could only receive transplants from donors that had the same blood type. It was a thread I could tug on later for sure.
My office door banged open and I jumped in surprise. And then I almost screamed when I saw Scarlet standing in the doorway. The swelling on her head had gone down some thanks to the ice, but her face was more colorful than it had been when I’d left her. Her papery thin skin was shades of purple, black, and green, but she’d taken the time to reapply her bright red lipstick, as if that would be a distraction from the rest of her face.
She’d left her fur coat in Kate’s office and was wearing a siren-red velour jogging suit that matched her lipstick and the bright white tennis shoes with the hidden knives in the toes. She didn’t look altogether sane, but her hair hadn’t budged an inch. I was thinking the military should weaponize whatever she used on her hair.
“That medicine Kate gave me was a doozy,” Scarlet said. “I feel like a million bucks. It’s been seventy years since I haven’t felt any aches and pains in my body. Not even the bullet lodged in my hip is paining me today. I need to find a man before it wears off. Think of how good sex would be if you didn’t have to worry about pulling a muscle or popping a joint back into place.”
“I don’t know, Aunt Scarlet. Your face looks like it hurts pretty bad. It’s very…colorful.”
“It’s no wonder you’re not married if you think a man cares about what your face looks like when you’re horizontal. Not if you’re doing it right. I knew a girl in France who was ugly as homemade sin. Best spy I ever met. Men didn’t care what she looked like. Taught me a few tricks too,” Scarlet said, waggling her eyebrows.
“Or you can just put a bag over your head and a man can pretend you’re anyone he wants you to be. That’s what I do. The men in my age bracket aren’t anything special to look at. Use paper though, not plastic. I once had a lover who liked plastic bags. Come to find out that’s a whole different kind of sex. I didn’t particularly care for it, but that was back in the seventies, so sexual exploration was a little bit of a grab bag.”
“Sweet baby Jesus,” I said softly.
“Or you can just turn the lights off. That’s probably an easier solution.” She came inside my office and looked from side to side. “This here is an embarrassment of an office. I thought you and Kate were best friends.”
“I’m a junior agent,” I said. “I’m lucky to have an office at all.”
“You’re a Holmes, and Holmes women don’t take crap from anyone, especially their best friends. Sometimes you’ve got to make demands and not back down. Stare them straight in the eye like a snake charmer.”
“Uh, huh,” I said. “Kate will love that.”
“So what are we doing today?” Scarlet asked. “It’s Saturday and I hate being cooped up inside on a Saturday. I know you were sitting here waiting to make sure I was okay, but now that you see I am, I think it’s important to get back to work while we still have daylight. I heard the weather is supposed to get real nasty tonight.”
“I was actually just working on a new case,” I said, the thought of working another case with Scarlet sending a cold knot of fear straight to my belly.
I was almost positive that therapy would never undo the damage of what I’d experienced at the nudist resort.
“Since you’re not on the single’s cruise, where are you staying?” I asked her.
“I’ve got a suite over at The Ballastone. They don’t riffle through your things when you’re out, so I always stay there. Leave pieces of tape stuck to my drawers just in case though.”
“Why don’t I take you there so you can get some rest? You probably have a concussion.” And then I remembered I didn’t have a car and sighed.
“Of course I have a concussion, girl. Did you just fall off the turnip truck? I think being an old maid has made you wonky. I was on my third husband by the time I was your age. Bless their souls. You’re going to dry up like a raisin if you’re not careful. Best thing you could do is dip your raisin in the ocean and plump it right back up.”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure what that means, but I think my raisin is still plump enough, thank you.”
I wasn’t going to get rid of her. She had that look in her eye I occasionally saw when looking at my own reflection. There was only one way I knew to get her to go rest,
and it was playing dirty.
“I need to stop by Mom’s. There are still a few of my things there I need to pick up.”
Scarlet was silent for a few seconds, her red lips pinched tightly together, and she drummed her fingers on the corner of my desk. I would’ve hated to play poker with Scarlet. She finally nodded and said, “That’s fine. I probably need to pay my respects to your mother anyway. Haven’t seen her since your father died. Heard she got remarried. Should probably get her a vase or something. Or maybe her new husband a bottle of whiskey. He’ll probably need it.”
“Be nice, Aunt Scarlet,” I told her.
“I am, I am. Well, let’s get going. I’ll probably need another one of Kate’s magic pills once I see your mother.”
“I need to buy a car first,” I said, gathering up all the files on my desk and sticking them in my backpack. “I gave Nick’s Audi back.”
“Well, that was dumb. Who’s Nick? Is he hot? Does he have a brother?”
“Nick asked me to marry him. He’s Senator Dempsey’s grandson.”
“Herbert Dempsey?” Scarlet asked, brows raised in surprise. “I knew Herbert’s daddy back in the day. And not in the biblical way either. Herbert is good people. His son is a real a-hole though. Hope the grandson isn’t. If he is, I can tell you how to get rid of the body without too many questions.”
I took a deep breath and grabbed my handbag. “Nick is a lot like his grandfather. He’s not an a-hole. He’s a cop.”
“I always wanted to marry a cop. I hear they’re dynamite in the sack.”
We headed out the front door of the agency and Lucy was mysteriously gone again. I had a feeling she just wanted to stay out of Scarlet’s way. I helped her down the front stairs since her balance was a little off due to the black eyes and her not being able to see all that well, and I hailed a taxi that happened to be passing by.
The cab driver gave a horrified look at Aunt Scarlet and then muttered something under his breath. He was a middle-aged Indian guy with salt-and-pepper hair and bags under his eyes. His name badge clipped to the air vent said Jayesh.
I gave him the address and we mostly rode in silence out of downtown Savannah and across the highway. It wasn’t the best part of town. In fact, it was a pretty bad part of town, and I was glad I’d remembered to grab my Glock from the shower caddy. We crossed the highway and Jayesh hit the automatic locks on the doors.
“Don’t worry,” Scarlet said. “I’ve got my sneakers on. And my handbag is loaded.”
“Right,” I said, thinking that would be the weirdest news story ever. Private investigator and her ninety-year-old aunt gunned down in the projects after buying stolen van filled with snacks and a working toilet.
“Lady, I don’t know what business you have here, but it can’t be good. I hope you’re not expecting me to wait for you.”
“No worries, Jayesh. You heard my aunt. She has her sneakers on. I wouldn’t want you to do the gentlemanly thing and wait for two women who are in a bad area of town.”
“Good,” he said, nodding.
“I don’t know where chivalry has gone,” I said, shaking my head.
“Right in the crapper,” Scarlet said.
“Yep,” Jayesh said. “This is 2016. Women’s lib and all that junk.” He came to an abrupt halt on the corner of Graves and Stiles and idled there, hitting the fare button so we could pay our tab.
“Oh, no,” I said. “You’re not dropping us at the corner. Take us all the way. I’m not walking a half mile down this road in these boots. And look, it’s starting to drizzle.”
“You’re crazy,” he said. “Look. Everyone is staring at us. We’re sitting targets.”
“Time’s ticking, Jayesh.”
He blew out a sigh and skidded out on the loose rocks in the street. Maybe street was being a little too generous. The road wasn’t paved and it was half overgrown with weeds. A semi-truck graveyard sat to the left, and a bunch of overgrown trees and weeds taller than the trailer houses grew on the other side.
A couple of Hispanic guys leaned against one of the dead semis, the trailer colorful with graffiti, and stared us down as we passed by. The sky had turned gray and the wind had started to blow. The drizzle was coming a little harder and faster.
“That guy either has a hell of a boner or his gun is bigger than mine,” Scarlet whispered. “He better watch out or he’ll shoot his pecker right off. Happened to a good friend of mine. Never could pee standing up again. Kept hitting himself right between the eyes.”
“Why are you whispering?” I asked.
“It seemed appropriate. Where are we going?”
“A place called Ugly Mo’s. He’s a car dealer. Kind of.”
Jayesh hmmphed and drove all the way to the end of the street. It was a dead end. Only one way in and one way out. A couple of metal buildings with peeling paint sat in front of us, and in the parking lot to our right were several rows of cars in various stages of disrepair. It wasn’t looking too promising. I was starting to think Jimmy Royal may have set me up big time.
“This is the end of the road, lady,” Jayesh said. “Twenty-eight-fifty.”
“Hey, at the corner back there it was only eighteen dollars,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
“This street’s an expensive fare.” I handed him thirty bucks and opened the car door.
“What about my tip?” he asked.
“I was going to give you thirty back at the corner. You could’ve pocketed it but you decided to be a jerk. Now your boss gets the money.”
He called me a bitch and put the cab in reverse, speeding back down the road to safety.
“I have a mind to shoot out his tires,” Scarlet said. “There’s so many laws nowadays. I liked it back when it was an eye for an eye. People these days take offense to every damned thing.”
“Especially having their tires shot out,” I said. “Come on. My hair isn’t going to last with this weather. Let’s go find Ugly Mo.”
“I hate to break it to you, but you already look like Troy Polamalu. I’ll take you to my salon. You need someone who can tame that hair. If we get out of here alive we should stop by and see if they can squeeze you in.”
“I’ve been thinking of making a drastic change.”
“That’s your hormones talking. You’re not ready to have a baby, so you’re needing to change something about yourself. Sometimes I’d get those hormonal urges to have kids. That’s when I’d come visit your dad and his brothers. They were the best birth control on the market. Horrible children,” she said, shuddering. “And then I’d go buy myself a new pair of shoes or a handbag.”
I could kind of understand where Scarlet was coming from with the whole kid thing. I knew I wanted to have kids someday. But I’d spent a good portion of my life in a classroom full of semi-adults that were given a license to operate a car, but didn’t know how to balance a checkbook and wrote complete sentences with emojis. It was kind of depressing. And I really liked buying shoes and handbags too.
“Someone has some real artistic talent,” Scarlet said. “Wonder if they’d do a wall in my bathroom.”
I was assuming Scarlet was referring to the graffiti that covered a good portion of the metal building. There were a lot of creative curse words and a portrait of a scantily clad woman with breasts that defied gravity. Ugly Mo’s was written in big block letters in lime green.
“What would you get them to draw on your wall?” I asked curiously.
“That Jason Momoa fella and me and Tom Hardy on one of those heart-shaped beds. I’ve always been attracted to men that look like they won’t break.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m dead and caught in some kind of horrific purgatory,” I said, wondering why I’d asked the question in the first place.
“What’s that, dear?”
“Nothing. I don’t see anyone. Let’s go inside and get out of the rain.”
The only door in sight was one of those big garage doors like at a mechanic’s shop. There was one fluo
rescent light hanging from the ceiling, and it smelled like motor oil with a hint of dead animal.
A piece of metal scraped across concrete from somewhere in the darkness of the building. I froze and immediately felt chills crawl across my skin. I glanced at Scarlet to make sure she was okay, and then did a double take. She’d unzipped her jogging suit and was hiding her .44 inside it like an old school gangster, her hand wrapped around the butt of the gun.
“Put that away,” I hissed. “You’ve already been in one shootout today. This is a non-hostile mission. I just want to buy a car, for cripe’s sake.”
“I’ve never seen a car lot like this one. What kind of cars do they sell here? Maybe I need a new car.”
“Your license got revoked ten years ago,” I said. “You can’t buy a car.”
“I can do whatever I want to. What if I just want to buy a car and look at it? Who’s going to stop me? The government. Those bastards don’t know what it means to serve their country. See how many of them could walk around with a musket ball in their hip. Bunch of sissies with manicures.”
“A woman after my own heart,” someone said from the shadows. His voice was deep and smooth as whiskey. “That’s why Ugly Mo bypasses the government at all costs.”
When he came out of the shadows it took everything I had not to flinch. Scarlet wasn’t so subtle.
“Good Lord, you’re ugly,” she said. “I’ve never seen somebody so ugly. Would you look at that, Addison? Are you ugly natural, or did you have some kind of accident?” she asked him. “That’s how superheroes are born, you know. Maybe you fell into a meat grinder or some radiation.”
I grabbed Scarlet and pulled her close, clamping my hand over her mouth. About twenty years ago Scarlet had reached the age where she’d decided she could say whatever she wanted to and ignore all social niceties. She called it an old lady pass. I was pretty sure she was the only one who enjoyed that particular freedom.
“I apologize for my Aunt Scarlet. She has an old lady pass, so she thinks she doesn’t have to be polite anymore.”
