Goes down easy: Roped into romance

by Alison Kent

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked. “You want me to see what’s upstairs while you check out the first floor?”

  He hadn’t thought much beyond getting inside. “It might be best if we stay together.”

  “It might be faster, and warmer, if we don’t.”

  It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her…

  “Unless you don’t trust me?” she asked, backing toward the staircase with a dare in her eyes.

  The risers looked sturdy enough—though her expression left him unbalanced—and he nodded, listening to the metallic ringing of her footsteps echo as she climbed.

  Since there was nothing at the front of the bottom floor, the place having obviously been gutted and still waiting for a new tenant, he headed for the rear, where he found two empty restrooms.

  The doors were ajar, the toilet tanks long empty, the water pipes clamped tight to the bottoms of the sinks and the walls. He shone his flashlight overhead in both rooms, and found identical bare bulbs with pull strings. The floor drains were dry and as clean as they got in a place like this.

  He found no fresh graffiti, and no meaning in what he could read of that which was there. No wastebaskets, no toilet paper, air dryers that were empty of everything but air when he pried them from the walls.

  He made a cursory trip around the cavernous room, flicking his light up and down the walls from the floor to the catwalk above. Nothing. Anything Della had sensed had made no lasting mark here.

  Just as he started for the stairs, Perry called his name. He glanced overhead, saw her at the catwalk railing waving him up. He took the stairs two at a time, his feet pounding against the metal.

  Something in her face told him to hurry. Something in his gut told him to run.

  “What?” he asked, before he’d even reached the top. “What did you find?”

  She shook her head, her eyes wide and glassy, her face a deathly pale. “It’s not good.”

  He reached for her, wrapped his hand around her shoulder and squeezed. “Are you okay?”

  “I will be,” she said, her voice as faint as her nod.

  She took a step in reverse, then turned and made her way down the catwalk. His heart was pounding from both dread and adrenaline as he followed her to the third door in the long row of five.

  He stepped through, shone his flashlight around the small office space. Unlike the floor below, this room hadn’t been emptied. Industrial gray file cabinets lined one wall, a matching desk backed up to another, but he saw nothing in the low-ceilinged space to explain Perry’s alarm.

  “At the end of the row of file cabinets,” she said from his shoulder. “There’s a door. Into a closet.”

  And that was when his own panic set in. He inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled, the short choppy breaths frosting in cloudbursts of white.

  He reminded himself of where he was—New Orleans; of who he was with—Perry Brazille; of the reason he was here—Dayton Eckhardt—before he walked to the corner. He saw the spray-painted message first.

  There will be no ransom demand. We have what we want.

  And then he saw the chair, the ropes hanging from the legs and the arms. Yellow nylon, a water-skier’s ropes. Ropes used to bind cargo, to secure it on the deck of a ship.

  To secure a man below in the hold, leaving him in the dark for days. For weeks. Until he lost count. Until he barely remembered his name.

  “I’m guessing that’s his finger?”

  At Perry’s question, Jack startled. The flashlight beam danced around the small room as he forced his breathing pattern to return to normal, forced his muscles to relax, hoping doing so would calm the near deadly beat of his heart.

  What had she asked him? “Finger?”

  “On the floor,” she said, and he looked down to where she pointed.

  Yeah. It was a finger. He ground his jaw until he felt a joint pop, then he stepped into the small room, checking behind the door, shining his light into the corners.

  It took only seconds to see what he needed to see. He stepped back out. “Did you touch anything in here?”

  “I pushed the door open.” She held up both hands. “But I’m wearing gloves.”

  He nodded, guided her back to the staircase with one hand on her arm. Once at the top of the stairs, he pocketed his flashlight, dug for Book’s card and pulled his cell from his waistband holster.

  “It’s Jack. You need to get a crime scene unit to the warehouse as soon as you can.”

  JACK SAT on the running board of his SUV, the door open, the engine running, the heater blowing at full blast. He had his arms crossed, his hands tucked in his armpits, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled almost to his mouth.

  Perry had bummed a Styrofoam cup from one of the officers on the scene, and then bummed coffee from the thermos of another. She held it beneath his nose and waited.

  It didn’t take long for him to look up and push back the hood. He took the cup from her gloved hand with a muttered “Thanks,” as he wrapped all ten of his fingers around it.

  “You’re welcome. And you look like shit.” She hadn’t planned to blurt it out like that, but he did. If possible, he looked as if he’d aged ten years in the last ten minutes.

  He sipped, grimaced. “Thanks for that, too.”

  “Seriously, Jack. It’s more than a lack of sleep.” She’d hazard a guess that it was more than this case. “You look like a ghost. Or at least like you’ve seen one.”

  “Nah. Just a finger,” he said, and sipped again.

  Jack Montgomery, Private Eye, reduced to a shell of his former self by a severed finger? She wasn’t buying it.

  But before she could say anything else, he asked, “They found the ring, right? Behind the door?”

  She leaned against the vehicle’s closed back passenger door. “Believe it or not, yes.”

  “They bagged the ropes? And took scrapings from the spray paint?”

  “And confiscated the chair.”

  “Did they spray it with luminol or fluorescein?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and turned, leaning her shoulder against the frame and staring down at the top of his head.

  “Okay. Whatever.”

  “You know, Jack. I’m a shop clerk. They’re not exactly giving me a blow-by-blow. I heard about the ring, the rope and the chair while I was hunting down coffee. If you want to know more, you’re going to have to put those investigative skills of yours to work.”

  He studied the coffee in his cup for so long that she wondered if he’d been listening, or if he’d returned to wherever the scene upstairs had taken him. He’d said little about what they’d discovered. She’d expected so much more.

  She’d expected him to be ecstatic, to be juiced on adrenaline to the point where he wasn’t even feeling the cold. Instead, he sat hunched over, alone, as if he weren’t the victor but the victim.

  The same victim Della had witnessed suffering when she’d done nothing more that morning in her kitchen than reach over and touch his arm.

  “Jack? Are you okay?”

  “I need to talk to Della. I need to know exactly what she saw. If it makes any sense in context.”

  “If she saw chickens, you mean.”

  He tossed back the rest of the coffee, threw the cup over his shoulder into the SUV’s back floorboard, and got to his feet. “Did Book say anything about how she was feeling?”

  “No, but I can tell you she’ll be sleeping until the headache subsides,” Perry said, glancing up at the sound of footsteps approaching.

  Book reached them and stopped, gripping the top of Jack’s open door, his expression grim. “Well, it’s an official case now. Which means, we’ll take it from here. I need you to come with me to operations. Fill me in on what happened and what else you know.”

  Jack grumbled under his breath, but said, “Sure. Just let me drop Perry off with Della first.”

  “I need to get statements from both of you,” Book argued, one hand moving to his waist. “Kachina said she�
��d check in on Della until one of us gets back.”

  “How was she when you left?” Perry asked.

  “Sleeping. She went out fast.”

  “Good. We’ll go and get this done while she’s asleep,” Perry said, circling the front of the vehicle on her way to the passenger side.

  “Right behind you,” Book said to Jack before jogging back to the taped-off scene, and his own car parked just outside.

  “Are you going to tell him what you know?” she asked, once Jack was settled behind the wheel.

  “I don’t have any reason not to. But anything he gets from me, he could get from the Austin police.”

  He shifted into drive and headed out. She waited until they’d turned and left the warehouse behind before asking, “What are you going to do now?”

  “Once we’re done at the station, talk to Della, find out what she can tell me about what she saw. Assuming what she sees is even real.”

  Perry knew he wasn’t going to like it, but tossed out the challenge anyway. “There’s one way to find out, you know.”

  He cast her a wary glance. “What’s that?”

  “Test her gift for yourself.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “Have her do a reading.”

  11

  AFTER PERRY CHECKED in on Della, Jack gave in to the insistence of both women that he schedule the reading for midnight. Della was confident she’d be feeling better by then, and Perry didn’t want to wait because, well, he wasn’t sure why except that she was intent on proving a point.

  He wasn’t thrilled with the idea. Neither was he thrilled to admit that Perry did have a point, but there really wasn’t any way around it.

  If Della could pick up enough vibes in his aura, or fluctuations in the cosmos, or woo-woo type echo things to see the truth of his past, then maybe he could get this case rolling again. And maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t feel like such a putz for partnering up with a psychic.

  Because that’s exactly what he felt like. A putz.

  His investigator’s nose had brought him to New Orleans to look into Eckhardt’s roots, and his instinct for survival had led him to Café Eros.

  His belief that he’d spotted a scam had taken him to Sugar Blues, his certainty that all trails went somewhere to the Times-Picayune.

  Refusing to believe in coincidences had sent him to Eckton Computing’s warehouse, which had turned out to be the end of his line.

  He’d been able to run the investigation on his own as long as the official case was still in Texas. But now that it had crossed state lines, he had nothing left to go on but instinct.

  Instinct, and a psychic. And if that didn’t define a putz, he didn’t know what did.

  Leaving Perry at Sugar Blues once they’d finished giving Detective Franklin their statements, Jack put in another call to update Cindy Eckhardt, then spent the rest of the day tracking down friends of Bob and Dawn Taylor, as well as Eckton employees who had worked with Taylor.

  What Jack found out was that the co-workers weren’t surprised Taylor hadn’t found work after the Eckton layoffs. His reputation as a hard-assed, hardheaded, hard-drinking bastard had made the industry rounds.

  What had bowled them over was his suicide. No one thought a man that mean had it in him to take himself out. Nor did Jack get the sense that any of them mourned the man’s passing.

  If Taylor were still alive, several had said they could see him scheming to get back at Eckhardt, but since he wasn’t around to sever fingers they really couldn’t help.

  The couple’s personal friends Jack had managed to catch up with repeated what he’d already learned. Everyone was sorry for Dawn. The men were anxious to do anything they could to her, uh, for her. The women knew that, and felt she would do better if they all gave her time to grieve. Twelve months’ worth of time.

  Right. With friends like that…

  By the time Jack returned to Sugar Blues, it was close to ten. He had no idea if the women had eaten, so he brought a bag of burgers and fries for three just in case.

  He parked in the alley behind the shop and knocked when he reached the new back door. He saw Perry through the window over the sink, and seconds later she pushed the curtain aside to see who was there.

  She was smiling when she opened the door. “You ought to give me your cell phone number. I just realized that I don’t have a way to get in touch with you.”

  “You thought I’d skip town before you got the results of my reading?” he asked, setting the food on the table and thinking that he kinda liked the idea of being nagged if Perry was the one doing the nagging. She was sweet. She was cute. He could get used to having her around.

  “Of course not,” she said as she closed the door. “Whatever happens tonight is between you and Della.” And then she sighed. “Mmm. Onions and mustard and grease. It smells wonderful.”

  He gestured toward the seat next to his. “Pull up a chair. I brought plenty.”

  “Ooh, thanks.” She beat him to tearing open the bag. “Della’s still sleeping, and Kachina had appointments until eight. I just finished closing up and I’m starving.”

  He unfolded the waxed paper around his burger and dumped out his fries, then reached for a squeeze packet of ketchup. “I’m surprised you have enough business to work the hours you do. And that it’s enough for the two of you to live on.”

  “Three,” she said, dragging a fry through his ketchup and shoving it into her mouth.

  “Three?” he echoed, because there was something about a woman with an appetite that made him forget his worries.

  “Kachina makes three.”

  “Hmm. I’m not sure I can afford your services.”

  She sputtered. “For you, cher? No charge.”

  His cares went the way of his worries with the Cajun flavor she added to her offer. This was the first time all day he’d been able to relax, and damn if it didn’t feel great. “Thanks. I think.”

  “What, you need client testimonials?”

  “To prove I’m getting my money’s worth?” He took a bite of his burger, sat back and chewed.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of proving that you’re not wasting your time.” She picked up another fry, attacked his ketchup again.

  He frowned. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Only because it’s too late to bother any more of the Big Easy’s fine citizens. And,” she added, wrapping both hands around her hamburger bun, “because Book warned you to keep your nose out of his business.”

  Yeah, it was his business all right. “He wouldn’t have half of what he does if I hadn’t given it to him.”

  “And that just grates, doesn’t it?” she asked, a tad too smugly.

  He reached over while her hands were full and filched a half dozen of her fries. “Only because Detective Franklin’s working with some sort of chip on his shoulder.”

  “Oh, what? And you’re not?”

  “Not really,” he said, and chomped down.

  “Jack Montgomery.” She turned in her chair to face him. “Do I need to get you a mirror?”

  Chewing, he glanced over, surprised by her incredulous tone.

  He had baggage; who didn’t? But to call it a chip? Did he really heave his past around as if it might fall and crush anyone he allowed to get close?

  He shrugged. “Maybe I am. It’s not such a big deal.”

  “If you say so,” she said, and went back to eating. “Though you might want to make sure it doesn’t get so heavy that you end up getting hurt.”

  He wondered what she knew about hurt. Then he remembered the death of her parents and wanted to kick his own insensitive ass.

  Still, insensitive or not, he was curious. And so he asked, “Is that what happened to you? You carried a chip for too long?”

  She gave a sharp, unladylike snort. “You mean why did I decide to sleep with you after six years of sleeping with no one?”

  Well, there was that. He had to admit he was curious. “Sure. We
can start there.”

  “Okay, fine.” She reached for a napkin, wiped her mouth and hands, then got up to get two sodas from the fridge. “Because of that chemistry thing. And because I like you. A lot. A whole lot,” she added softly, as if speaking to herself. “I like your honesty. Your integrity. You’re sexy as hell. Then there’s the fact that you’re good around the house.”

  “Next, you’ll be saying I’ve got a super personality,” he said, though he couldn’t help but get a nice buzz from her comments.

  She handed him his can and popped the top on hers before she sat back down. “I’ve spent most of my life in the company of women. And all of my formative years when I learned the differences a Y chromosome can make.”

  Him? He liked the differences, and started to say so.

  But she quickly cut him off, waving one hand, her other wrapped around her soda. “And I don’t just mean the differences in the equipment. I mean the differences in what using the equipment means.”

  Oh. That. “So, that was the reason for your trip into the closet this morning?”

  “No. I was just waiting for you to make coffee.”

  “Right.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yes. I was angry.”

  “With me?”

  “With both of us.”

  “The crack about conserving water—”

  “Wasn’t any worse than mine about rings.” She breathed deeply, then took a drink. “I was frustrated. And, yes. I was hurt. I wasn’t sure what to expect from you the morning after. And I didn’t understand the one-night-stand vibes you gave off.”

  He was an ass. Seriously. An ass in over his head with this particular gypsy woman. To be honest, she’d scared him shitless. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “But you did. We spent an amazing night and an amazing morning, and the first thing you say to me is that it was only sex.” She sighed, shrugged, sipped. “And maybe it was for you. But I let my emotions get in the way, and ended up with a big ‘what the hell am I doing?’ moment.”

  “Because you leapt without looking.”

  “Exactly. And I don’t leap. Not anymore.”