Creeping with the Enemy

by Kimberly Reid

  “So your grandmother is expanding the business,” I say, just to mess with MJ for holding out on me with the Eddie story.

  “Would you shut up?” she whispers. More like snarls. “I met him one time when I went over there early one morning to run an errand for Big Mama.”

  “Wait, MJ. You aren’t working for her, are you? Your probation—”

  “Hell no. She wouldn’t allow that. Stop thinking like a cop all the time. I really was running an errand. She sent me to get milk.”

  “Like that morning I ran into you on Center Street? You said you were getting milk then, too. But you didn’t have any milk and you weren’t dressed for the cold morning.”

  MJ looks like she’s been busted. She definitely could never play poker because everything she’s thinking always shows on her face.

  “That’s ’cause I wasn’t picking up milk that morning. I didn’t have a coat on because it wasn’t cold when I went over there the night before.”

  It took me a second to figure out what she was talking about, and when I did, for some reason I turned into a ten-year-old.

  “Oooh, you and Eddie were in there all night. I know what y’all were doing.”

  “Duh, Sherlock. I didn’t plan to stay all night. You caught me trying to get back home before Big Mama got back from her overnight church trip to the Springs.”

  “So where is Eddie now?”

  “He’s still here, but he’s thinking of going back to school. He’s afraid his pops is going to find out how he gave up the store on his first day on the job so it could be used for a fake robbery.”

  “Yeah, not too bright,” I say, thinking MJ really knows how to pick ’em.

  “He didn’t know the guy was going to stage a robbery.”

  That reminds me of what Lana said about the store being empty when the cops arrived and no money being missing.

  “How exactly did he know that’s what happened? There were no security cameras, no witnesses.”

  “Eddie waited in the back parking lot for the part-time lady who helps with the Freebie rush. He met her at the back door and told her she had a paid day off. Eddie left after that, but didn’t stay away the whole hour. He got worried what the guy was up to and crept in the back way, got there just as it was going down.”

  “I had a feeling someone was in the back. I thought I smelled food cooking.”

  “Yeah, that’s another reason Eddie came back. His mom makes the tamales in the morning so all the afternoon clerks have to do is keep them warm. He remembered he’d left some tamales in the warmer and was worried he’d burn the place down.”

  Wow, this guy might actually be worse than her last boyfriend.

  “He was in the back when the cops arrived. He went out front before the cops searched the store. Told them he’d just stepped out back for a minute to take a smoke and there was no way a robbery had gone down in that short amount of time—it must have been a prank call. When he checked the register and nothing was missing, the cops believed him and left.”

  “So the cashier was the guy who made the deal with Eddie to leave the store?”

  “Yeah. It was a thousand dollars, Chanti.”

  “He could have wiped the store out. I’m sure Eddie’s father would agree the contents of the store was worth a lot more than a thousand dollars.”

  “I suppose. Yet another reason Eddie will probably go back to school before his father finds out.”

  “No, I’ll bet he’ll stick around either way,” I say.

  “You think?” MJ says, and smiles for the first time since she walked into Lana’s office.

  From what little I know of Eddie’s intellectual prowess, I don’t think he left school on his own accord, but I don’t mention this to MJ. I’ll let her go on thinking she found a good catch, at least for now. We’ve got to save Bethanie first.

  Chapter 23

  A minute later, Lana comes out of the strategy room toward us.

  “Don’t tell her,” MJ whispers.

  “Not now. But at some point, we’ll need Eddie to ID Cole as the guy who offered him a thousand dollars.”

  “We got a little more information on Cole,” Lana says when she reaches us, “but it only confirms what you learned from your contacts, MJ. He’s a low-level foot soldier in the Family trying hard to move up and get made quickly. The fastest way to do that is to make a kill.”

  Now I feel as sick as MJ looked when we first arrived. “But why Bethanie? Why not her dad?”

  “We still think her dad is the target. Wait here a minute while we get a team together to go bring in her family.”

  “Damn,” MJ says when Lana leaves. “It’s looking bad for your girl, no matter what your mom thinks.”

  “She thinks the same thing we do. She just said that so I won’t freak out.”

  “So we need to figure out why Cole would want your friend instead of her father ’cause we know that’s why they sent him out here. Once we know that, we come up with the plan to find him, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you have a theory, the one you explained back at your house. He’ll use Bethanie as ransom to make her pops turn himself in to the police.”

  “Ransom. That’s it, MJ.”

  “That’s what?”

  “I just came up with another theory. Cole came out here to kill Mr. Larsen, found out he won the Powerball—”

  “Wow. You didn’t say they were that rich. That explains a whole helluva lot, then.”

  “But not everything. Powerball money still won’t keep the Boss out of jail, which is why Cole was sent. Maybe he figured he could get the money and kill Mr. Larsen, so he’s holding Bethanie ransom.”

  “But that won’t help him take over the Family like my contacts told me was the word on the street,” MJ reminds me.

  “True.”

  “Maybe he’s like Donnell. Remember how he was going to rob your boss and use the money to start up his own Down Homes operation in Denver? Could be Cole is doing the same thing—using your friend to make Larsen testify and set him up with bank so he can go back and take over the business. He can buy a lot of friends in the Family with that kind of money.”

  “That’s brilliant, MJ.”

  She’s no Rhodes scholar but when it comes to criminal minds, MJ is Stephen Hawking smart.

  I notice MJ looks a lot less worried about being in the interview chair. Maybe that’s the secret to getting her to see cops aren’t all bad—letting her be on the same team. I’m about to offer her my seat when I see Lana through the window of the strategy room waving us over. Right away, MJ looks nervous again.

  “Relax, MJ, we aren’t the ones in trouble this time,” I tell her.

  When we get into the room, Lana introduces us to the detectives.

  “It’s okay, guys. I told my CO everything. I had to, there was no way around it.”

  “Young ladies, this is quite some detective work you’re doing here. We want you on our team, but first we need to talk about confidentiality.”

  “You can trust Chanti. She’s protected my cover as well as any partner would,” Lana says, which would make me grin like a fool if I wasn’t sick with worry over Bethanie.

  “I don’t doubt it. But I understand you have a history, Miss Cooper.”

  “Ancient history,” MJ says in her tone that warns people to back down or a butt-kicking is about to ensue. Luckily, Lana steps in.

  “I trust MJ equally,” she says, surprising us both. “She helped us with that burglary ring last month and saved Chanti’s life in the process.”

  Her boss accepts Lana’s word on MJ and I but still makes us sign some kind of form saying we have to keep police secrets. It’s second nature for me to keep secrets since I know how important it is to Lana’s safety, and someone would have to torture MJ to make her ever admit to helping the cops. Right now she’s probably just as worried about her street cred as getting Bethanie out of trouble, maybe more. Even though she’s given up the life, not every
thing goes away.

  “Tell me about that phone call you had with Bethanie,” Lana says, checking her watch. “It’s been about an hour, right?”

  I know she’s asking for the time because the clock has begun to tick. If Cole made her get off the phone because he’s worried someone’s onto him, common cop wisdom is that we only have twenty-four hours to find her. That’s the magic hour when things start to go bad for a hostage, even if she doesn’t realize that’s what she is.

  “It sounded like she was at an amusement park when I called her.”

  “This late in October?”

  “I guess she’s not in the state.”

  “Could it have been a video arcade?”

  “A what?” MJ asks.

  “Whatever you kids call them now, like Dave and Buster’s.”

  “No one but little kids and old people go there,” MJ says. “Well, not real old, but like your age.”

  Lana frowns at that statement.

  “It didn’t sound like that. It was more like the sounds of one of those traveling carnivals that set up in parking lots for a couple of weeks in the summer. The kind you wouldn’t let me go to when I was a kid because you thought they weren’t regulated enough.”

  “If she’s in the country, that doesn’t leave much. Florida, maybe Southern California,” Lana says. “It’s getting too cold everywhere else to run an amusement park.”

  “You think they might not even be in the country?” I ask.

  “It’s something we have to consider. But first I’ll check on amusement parks open this time of year. Anything else?”

  “She kept saying she was so happy and excited to tell me why, and how her parents wouldn’t be able to tell her what to do anymore.”

  “Any ideas what was making her so happy?”

  I couldn’t tell Lana that it might be because she and Cole had finally done the deed after she’d been trying to seduce him for a couple of weeks, so I told her I didn’t have any idea because it was true. I’m pretty sure there’s something else going on besides losing her virginity.

  After MJ and I share our newest theories with Lana and the rest of the team, they work on revising their strategy to bring in Mr. Larsen. In the meantime, they tell me to look through some of the surveillance photos to see if I recognize anyone else in them like I did with Cole. They show MJ to an office where she can make a call to her Atlanta Homies to see if they might have any more information. I imagine MJ must be breaking out in hives right about now, having to call her ex-gang members from a police department, even if it’s from her cell phone and they’d never know. Unless they have one of those GPS tracking wall grids like on TV. I’m guessing a low-rent gang called the Down Homes probably doesn’t, but that didn’t keep MJ from looking like she was going to the gallows when she left the strategy room.

  I’m looking through some surveillance photos taken of the Family when I come across some of a wedding. The way the Boss is smiling, I’m guessing it’s his daughter, and that’s confirmed when I see more photos of them together. I know I watch too much TV, but I wonder if he’s happy for his daughter or if her marriage just made him more powerful because her new husband is also part of a crime family. See how my mind wanders, even at a time like this? For all I know her husband could be a schoolteacher or a bank teller. From what I can tell, it doesn’t matter to the new bride what her husband does for a living because she looks so happy, like she doesn’t have a care in the world even though her family is a bunch of criminals.

  Is love what it takes to make you not care about who a guy really is, or if you do know, to still not care? From the little Lana has told me about my father, that’s how I came to be. She hooked up with someone she knew she shouldn’t have. Isn’t that exactly what MJ did when she became her boyfriend’s getaway driver? She even told me that’s why she joined the Down Homes in the first place—because the boy she loved was a member. It’s the very reason—or excuse, Tasha would say—that I never had a boyfriend before Marco. I don’t want to ever be so stupid over a guy that I lose my mind and good sense. What if Bethanie is that stupid crazy about Cole? Worse, what if she knows what he’s about and is going along, like those people with Stockholm Syndrome?

  Something about thinking the Boss’s daughter could be marrying a bank teller, a counter of money, plus Cole’s fascination with having Bethanie teaching him how to gamble, and the sounds I heard in the background during Bethanie’s calls give me an idea. My TV addiction helps me come up with the idea, too.

  “Lana,” I yell too loudly because she and her team are just at the next table over. “I need to see some surveillance tape of one of the casinos.”

  “Okay, wait a minute and I’ll—”

  “Really. I need to see them now.”

  Lana’s boss looks at her like You raised this unruly kid? but Lana knows I’d never talk to her like that unless it was do or die and I was really onto a clue. She ignores her boss and walks over to the TV and puts in a DVD.

  “Is it muted? I need audio.”

  Lana turns up the volume and now I know for sure.

  “That’s the sound I heard. They weren’t at an amusement park when Bethanie called. She was calling from inside a casino. A Las Vegas casino.”

  “How do you know it’s Las Vegas? Could be Black Hawk. He may have gone up there looking for Larsen.”

  “Because that’s how Cole got her to go with him without a fight. That’s why instead of being terrified, she’s acting like being kidnapped by a Mafia dude is just the bestest thing in the world. He told her they’d elope to Vegas and she was crazy enough, or in love enough, to believe him.”

  Chapter 24

  On the drive to the Larsens, I imagine what I’ll say to them but come up with nothing. What do you say when you’re part of the reason someone’s kid has gone missing? I mean, that’s how they’ll see it even if I tell them Bethanie was leaving with Cole without my help and at least this way we’re still in contact with her. That’s why Lana tells me to wait in the car while she and her partner tell the Larsens what’s going on, and then she’ll come out and get me when she thinks it’s okay. Maybe if MJ had come along with us instead of staying back at the department I’d have stayed in the car. But she didn’t and I don’t. The minute I see Lana get inside the house, I follow.

  I’m in luck; they left the door unlocked. I’m just inside the foyer so I can hear everything but they can’t see me. Unfortunately I can’t see them either, so I just have voices to go on to tell who is there.

  “I know why y’all here, and I never thought I’d say it but I’m almost relieved,” Mr. Larsen says.

  “How do you know? Have you made contact?” Lana asks.

  “No, but I gotta feeling it won’t be long and I’d rather it be y’all calling than them.”

  “Mr. Larsen, I think there’s some confusion here.”

  “I’m not confused. Y’all here to take me into protective custody.”

  “We should never have run in the first place,” Mrs. Larsen says.

  “Yeah, right, Lola Mae. That ain’t what you said when we went down there to cash in that ticket,” Mr. Larsen says.

  “You want to let us in on the secret?” Lana asks.

  Mr. Larsen lets out a big sigh, like he’s thinking he might as well just come clean. “The Sunday before the police told us about the deal to testify against DeLong, me and Mama had bought us a Powerball ticket. When that ticket turned out to have the winning numbers on Wednesday, we decided we didn’t need no help from the police. With all that money, we could go into our own protective custody—change our names, get out of town, live on cash. No one can track you if you never have a job and pay everything in cash.”

  “So you thought,” says Mrs. Larsen. “The cops found us, and they ain’t the only ones.”

  “You think DeLong has found you, too?” That’s Detective Falcone, Lana’s partner. I’m guessing DeLong must be the guy they’ve been calling the Boss this whole time.

 
“I think somebody is on our tail and it ain’t the cops. A week ago, I spotted a car out front, one house down, early on a Sunday morning. Folks around here use their garages, and this car had been parked outside all night. The windows were all frosted over.”

  Score one for me. That was Cole watching the house that morning I went to see Bethanie.

  “Then here come another car pull up in front of my house,” Mr. Larsen continues. “A man gets out but soon as he notices the car with the frosted windows, he gets back in his car and takes off. That’s when I run down to see if I can tail him. By the time I get out the garage, the car that had been there all night was gone, too.”

  Take my point away. I didn’t realize that first car I saw leaving Bethanie’s street was part of this story and didn’t pay attention to what it looked like. In my defense, it was really cold that morning and I was just trying to get someplace warm.

  “Did you catch up with them?” Lana asks.

  “Naw, I lost ’em.”

  “That’s probably a good thing. These guys are dangerous,” Falcone says. “How about a plate?”

  “No plate, but I can describe both cars. The one what was here all night was a silver Porsche. The guy he scared off was driving a blue Jag.”

  Bethanie told me the guy waiting for her in her favorite parking spot that day was driving a Jag. Cole scared him off that day, too. At the time, I doubted how preppie Cole could scare off a serious thug but clearly I underestimated him. How could I know he was the right-hand man of a crime family boss? Now I’m wondering why this guy in the Jag keeps showing up, and why Cole has to keep running him off.

  “Then there’s a boy been sniffin’ around my daughter. First I thought he was just some con artist after the money. That’s one place we went wrong. It’s hard when you never had nothing to keep pretending like you still don’t have nothing after you win all that money. Could be we was a little too flashy with our newfound wealth.”

  “Yes, I can imagine.” I bet Lana’s looking around at Mrs. Larsen’s interior design choices right now. “What made you think he might be after something more than money?”