Sloane Monroe 5.5-Flirting with Danger

by Cheryl Bradshaw

  Another pause.

  “Okay, okay,” Johnny said. “Empty suit, I get it. I’ll leave. Lay low for a while.”

  Johnny shuffled out of the room. I waited. Not long enough to get caught by the next man or men due to show up, just enough to give me a fighting chance at getting out of there.

  I’d pushed the cabinet door open a few inches, heard a female’s voice. “Sloane, you here?”

  Maddie’s curious tone vibrated down the hallway. Before I could respond, she said, “Who are you? Hey! What the—get your hands off me!”

  I thrust the cabinet door open, rushed forward, Rachel’s gun leading the way. “Get your hands off her. Now!”

  Maddie and Johnny had their hands wrapped around each other’s throats. From my vantage point, it was hard to tell who was winning. Johnny glanced back just enough to see the missing gun had been found. His chubby fingers released Maddie’s neck. I tossed Rachel’s phone to her. “Go back to our room. Call the cops.”

  “Oh, no. I’m not leaving you here,” Maddie said. “Not with this guy.”

  “I’ll be fine, Maddie. Go.”

  She leaned back against the wall in her typical defiant manner and made the call from where she stood.

  Johnny sized me up. I returned in kind. He was dressed in black slacks, what looked like a double XL polo shirt, a gold chain necklace, and loafers, the kind with the ridiculous-looking tassels on top. With his school-boy haircut and soft eyes, he looked more like a giant teddy bear than a hardened criminal.

  “Was it you?” Johnny asked. “Did you kill my brother? Do you know Rachel? You the one she’s workin’ for? The two of yas in coots?”

  Seriously. How stupid was this guy?

  “You mean cahoots?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, what you said.”

  “You first,” I replied. “Who are you? Who sent you here? And why is Rachel dead?”

  As I spoke, Johnny started taking small steps backward.

  “Stop moving,” I said. “Answer my questions.”

  He ignored my request, twisted the knob on the balcony door, his eyes still locked on me. He stepped outside. “You don’t get it. I’m already dead. You. Me. We all are. There’s no running. No escaping from him.”

  “You’re alive now. Let’s talk about this. Maybe I can help you.”

  Johnny shook his head. “No one can help me. Not you, not the cops. No one.”

  He reached back, curled his fingers around the black iron bars lining the balcony, turned, and dove head first over the side.

  I didn’t look.

  There was no need.

  We were fourteen stories up.

  I knew what had happened.

  CHAPTER 4

  “I’ll never second guess you again.” Maddie’s long, loose blond curls flapped in the wind as she stood at the edge of the balcony, her tall, athletic frame staring down at the splattered wreckage below. She was unfazed. As the head ME in Salt Lake City, Utah, Maddie’s cool demeanor didn’t surprise me.

  “Whatever I’ve managed to get us involved in, I get the feeling we shouldn’t be here. Someone else is coming, and it isn’t the police.”

  “You know this has an organized crime vibe, right?” she asked, her fingers curled into air quotes. “Maybe you should call—”

  I crossed my arms in front of me. “I’m not calling him.”

  “Why not? We’re in New York. Giovanni lives in New York. He has connections, especially these connections. If you’re in trouble, he can help. You know he’ll help you.”

  For all I knew, Rachel’s death was his doing, his order. I yanked on her arm. “Maddie, we have to get back to our room. Now.”

  I scanned the hallway as we stepped out, detected two video cameras. Smile, you’re every move is being recorded.

  “We did our duty,” Maddie said. “We called it in. Let’s go—leave the hotel. This has nothing to do with us.”

  Two days earlier I’d been trying to decide whether I wanted to fly to New York City with Maddie or not. She’d been asked to teach a class at a conference for the state’s coroners association. I thought the trip would be peaceful, serene, granting me the opportunity of putting my profession as a private investigator on hiatus. I should have stayed home.

  “We can’t leave. I detected two surveillance videos in the hall. And there’s probably more. The cops will see us entering Rachel’s room and then exiting several minutes later. We can’t hide from this.”

  “What are we going to do then?” she asked.

  “Give a statement and change hotels. You’ll teach your seminar as planned. Then we’ll go home. I have a feeling we’ve just walked into something big, much bigger than either of us realizes.”

  CHAPTER 5

  It didn’t take long for the hotel to become inundated by the NYPD. Maddie and I were grilled, forced to recall the events as they happened, second by tedious second. As far as stories went, they seemed to believe mine. And why wouldn’t they? Everything I said checked out. And everything I hadn’t said remained tucked inside the vault for later. The cops seemed legit. Maybe they were, or maybe they were dirty, on someone’s payroll, which meant telling the whole truth could have exposed me to far more danger than keeping my mouth shut did.

  Until I had a better grasp on what went down and why, I played the naïve card, kept certain details to myself, details like the last words Rachel uttered before she died. I wanted to check things out on my own, discover why it was so important to her to spout off a series of random letters and numbers I assumed I’d find on a license plate in the hotel’s parking garage.

  I offered the cops a few morsels to keep them satisfied. I turned over the gun I found on Rachel’s lap along with her cell phone, and I admitted I’d overheard Johnny say someone else was called in to clean up the mess. They asked me if I knew who “someone else” was. I didn’t. I only knew an hour had passed, and the man of mystery and his cohorts hadn’t showed. With cops raiding the place like a sudden infestation of curious termites, it wasn’t hard to see why the mysterious one had remained in the shadows—watching, waiting.

  I told the cops Johnny had called himself an “empty suit,” a term I wasn’t familiar with. They clued me in. In short, it referred to a person who didn’t have much to offer.

  While Maddie and I waited to be released, I overheard one of the cops say Rachel’s suite was registered to a woman named Eleanora Fagan. The cops took this as a solid lead, no questions asked. Some historians they were. I had to admit, it pleased me to be the one to clue them in for a change. Eleanora Fagan was the real name of song legend Billie Holliday. An alias. Was the name Rachel an alias too?

  Questions impregnated my mind. Who was Rachel, and what was the real reason she was at the hotel tonight? The skimpy outfit she wore indicated she’d come expecting a late-night tryst. This could have meant she was a call girl. Except for a call girl, she seemed all wrong. Her nails were manicured and clean, her hair perfectly styled. Her shoes were new, the kind you’d find on the most elite of society. There was nothing cheap or trashy about her.

  An hour later, our personal information was taken, and we were free to go. The question was—where? We checked out of the hotel and headed outside, waited what seemed like an eternity for the valet to pull our rental car around. We agreed to stay the next night at the hotel hosting Maddie’s conference. Once her class was over, we’d fly home.

  A section of concrete sidewalk several feet from where we stood was still cordoned off. Johnny’s body had been removed, but the bloody stains remained, still intact, on display under a shimmering street lamp in full view of the public. The whole thing didn’t sit well with me. My gut said to walk away, like Maddie suggested earlier. This wasn’t my case, wasn’t my problem. Whether it was or wasn’t, Rachel’s murder was premeditated. Carmine had been sent there to kill her.

  I wanted to know why.

  I placed a hand on Maddie’s arm, considered what I was about to say, and how I wanted to say it. It
didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be well received no matter what I said. “I need to check on something before we go.”

  She placed a hand on her hip, frowned. “Oh, come on. I know what you’re doing.”

  “It’s no big deal. I’ll be right back, okay?”

  “I’ve seen that look too many times, Sloane. I thought we were letting the cops figure things out. This isn’t our fight.”

  “I want to take a look at the parking garage. It will only take a few minutes.”

  Both hands were planted on her hips now. “The car will be here any second. What do you want me to do? I can’t sit here.” She pointed to a sign indicating the lane was for through traffic only. No waiting allowed. Period.

  “Drive out of here and pull over somewhere,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere. Wait for my call. I’ll have you pick me up.”

  “Sloane, think about it. This guy, the one Johnny said was coming, he could be out there, anywhere.”

  How would leaving lessen the risk? If we were being watched, we’d be followed to the next hotel. I didn’t want to spend the next day looking over my shoulder, wondering if every guy on the street, every man in every café was eyeballing me in a way I deemed suspicious.

  “I need to do this,” I repeated. “Five minutes, okay?”

  I sprinted in the opposite direction, entered the parking garage, and walked from one car to the next, trying to match the numbers with what Rachel said to me. It was the middle of the week, which meant the garage wasn’t filled to capacity. A few minutes and several license plates later, I emerged from the garage empty-handed.

  I picked the phone out of my pocket, prepared to call Maddie, then stopped when I spotted a large, metal sign protruding from a patch of dirt in front of the hotel next door. The sign indicated the hotel was closed for renovations, with an expected reopening date two months from now. There was a picture of what the new, upgraded rooms were expected to look like. The sign was radiant and had a catchy tagline, but my eyes wandered once I noticed a second vacant parking garage beneath the closed hotel. It was too alluring to resist, so I didn’t.

  Only two cars were visible when I descended the steps of the garage. I walked to the first. It wasn’t a match. The second car was parked at the opposite end. It was silver, a two-seater convertible with BMW and Z4 emblems displayed on the back. I checked the plate. 334XY7.

  We had ourselves a winner.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Maddie, I’m in an underground parking garage next to the hotel. I found the car. The combination of numbers and letters on the plate match what she said to me just before she died.”

  I pressed the unlock button on the key fob, heard the distinct click, opened the car door.

  “It’ll take me a minute to get to you,” Maddie said. “I thought I’d drive around the block a couple times until you called, but there was no right turn on the first two streets I passed, and there must be a billion traffic lights in this city.”

  “No rush. I’ll see you when you get here.”

  I shoved the phone back inside my pocket and crawled inside the car. It was as pristine inside as it was out. There was no litter of any kind, not even a gum wrapper. I felt beneath the seats. Nothing. Checked the center console. Nothing. The trunk. The visor. Why was telling me about the car so important? What was she hoping to achieve?

  I popped open the glove box. Inside was a single item, a black leather case I assumed was the car’s user manual. I undid the snap, opened it. At first glance, it was just as I suspected, nothing but pages of mundane photos and descriptions explaining anything and everything relating to the car. I thumbed through it and discovered something else—a hidden compartment in the shape of a three-inch square, cut into the center of the last half of the book. Inside the hidden compartment was a woman’s ring. I also found a napkin with the words Essence Night Club scribbled in pen. There was one other item—a photo copy of a plane ticket. Skyway Airlines Flight 12 departing the following evening at midnight from John F. Kennedy International Airport. Destination: Rome’s Fiumicino airport. There was a name written at the top: Dashner. I shoved the copy of the ticket and the napkin inside my pocket.

  A sound reverberated behind me.

  Panting.

  Breathing.

  Slow.

  Heavy.

  My head whipped around as a thick, black bag was thrust over my head, masking my face. I wriggled around, kicking at the hands of my unknown assailant. My boot connected, slamming into the man’s fingers. He reeled back, shouted expletives, threatened to “cut me.”

  In the process of defending my life, my leg caught on something sharp, split open, the sting pricking my skin like the tip of a tattoo needle. The wetness of the blood dripped from my skin, tainting an otherwise impeccably kept car.

  “Don’t touch her,” a male voice said. “He says we have to deliver her unharmed, and that’s what we’re gunna do.”

  Shit. There were two of them.

  “A bit of roughing up will do her some good,” the injured man said. “Teach her a lesson. She needs it.”

  “Walk it off, Cesare. That’s an order. I’ll tie her hands. She won’t cause no trouble.”

  “You won’t get the chance,” I spat.

  I jerked my legs backward, prepared to strike again.

  “Look, lady. I want to respect the boss’s wishes. I really do. But if you don’t cooperate, you’ll force my hand. Now step out of the car.”

  “Screw you!”

  I did my best to fling my body onto the passenger seat. I hoped somehow I could get myself out of my current predicament, tear the fabric from my head, make a run for it. Big mistake. The calmer of the two men had anticipated my move, slapped a hardened piece of plastic around one of my wrists. I reeled my other hand in front of my body, pressing it onto my chest.

  He had one wrist.

  He wasn’t getting them both.

  I couldn’t allow them to take me.

  I knew what would happen if they did.

  My freed arm was gripped tight, yanked back. The strength of my attacker far exceeded my own. As a woman, I was thin, my frame tiny, rather than muscular, which was why I’d spent the last few years learning jujitsu, a skill that, at the moment, wasn’t paying off.

  We struggled together in a tug of war for control of my other wrist.

  I lost.

  “You have nowhere to go,” he huffed. “Your hands are tied, and you can’t see. Get out of the car, or I’ll force you out.”

  I listened, heard what sounded like a gun being cocked, ready to fire.

  “You had a friend with you,” the man continued. “What was it you called her? Maddie, wasn’t it?”

  Was he a cop? Were they both cops? Had he been one of the officers in the room when we were being interrogated?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’m alone.”

  “Feeling a bit of amnesia, are we? I tell you what. Let’s make a deal. You get out of the car and get into mine—quietly, without tryin’ to resist—and when your precious friend comes around the corner, I won’t be forced to put a bullet in her.”

  I’d been in worse situations than this before, but never at the expense of someone I loved when I still had the chance to save them. He could have been lying. Could have been telling the truth. Either way, time wasn’t on my side. Maddie would arrive at any moment. If there was even the slightest chance he meant what he said, I had to save her.

  “Come with me,” he prompted. “You have nothing to fear. Trust me.”

  He was wrong.

  I didn’t have “nothing to fear.”

  I had everything.

  CHAPTER 7

  It’s funny how one sense takes over when the other is incapacitated. I read once that when one sense is lost, another becomes heightened. I’d been seat-belted in to the back seat of what seemed like a four-door sedan. It was too low to the ground to be a truck, and not spacious enough to be
a van—I could tell by the distance of the men’s voices in the seat in front of me. The black bag remained over my head, as did the zip-ties behind my back. In an effort to stop me from kicking again, I’d been zip-tied at the ankles as well. As far as I knew, Maddie was still alive. For whatever reason, I was the one they wanted.

  It was daylight now. Almost. Every once in a while, tiny flickers of light filtered through the mask, sporadic, like the sun was being intermittently blocked by something. Possibly trees or buildings.

  We were no longer in the city. The car hadn’t stopped at a traffic light for several miles. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was being driven into the woods where I’d be executed, buried in a shallow grave because I’d turned up at the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I’d envisioned my death before. Thought about the ways I’d most likely meet my end. Of the various scenarios, this one hadn’t even made the top ten. I felt weak and helpless, incapable of defending myself. I wasn’t about to give up though. Not yet.

  Most women in my predicament would be too unnerved to remain calm and focused at a time like this. Not me. My normal life provided all the anxiety I needed. I’d lost an innumerable amount of sleepless nights over victims I’d searched for over the years. All of them were eventually found, though some were still lost forever, their souls gone to live in a world beyond this one. Wherever that was.

  Sitting in the back seat of someone else’s car, being tied up, blindfolded—it almost seemed surreal—like my body was floating somewhere between this world and the next. Teetering on the edge. One foot remaining in this life, the other stepping into the great beyond.

  Since the first right turn was made after exiting the parking garage, I estimated we’d driven for about thirty minutes. I’d counted every turn, clocked every bump on the road, ingested every smell. The car had a lingering aroma of cigar smoke and the smallest hint of glass cleaner, an unsavory, nauseating combination.