BAD TIME TO BE IN IT

by David Burnsworth

  Up to this point, the only animals he disliked were dogs. One had bit him at an early age and he’d hated them ever since. Now it appeared he’d have to add horses to the list.

  If he couldn’t get into Carraway’s house, then he had to make the P.I. think that this had to do with something else, derail him until it was time to reveal it all to him just before he and Crome died.

  The drive back from Carraway’s house had given him time to think. He’d settled on two options. Both were dangerous and could blow up in his face. But if he succeeded, Carraway would have to go down another rabbit hole.

  Saturday, early afternoon

  Crome memorized the serial number of the forty-four before Powers bagged and took it. Even the detective couldn’t believe the story about Murder the horse. It was definitely one for the books.

  He had someone of his own who could look up the serial number. Ten years ago, on a job, Crome had run into a couple of agents in the F.B.I. and not the garden variety kind. Crome’s job was to stop a husband from violating the restraining order his wife had against him. The man was connected and had foot soldiers who would not mind taking someone like Crome off the board if he got in their way.

  The man, unfortunately for him, was also on the F.B.I. watch list. The agents Crome had run across initially did not like him getting in their way. After a talk with the agents, with Crome giving them his intel on the man’s gambling habit and who his bookie was, something only a few people knew about, they figured Crome knew what he was doing.

  Since their job was only surveillance while Crome’s could best be described as discouragement, they agreed to work together. Crome knew their motive in letting him in was to rattle the target and maybe get him to slip up.

  It worked out well initially. Crome beat up the three henchmen closest to the target and had a discussion with the man that may or may not have included a few broken fingers. But instead of listening to reason as explained to him by Crome, he elected to send more men after him. The agents, having the man’s place wired in, got evidence of him placing the hit on Crome. Conspiracy to commit murder was more than enough to send him away for a long time. Of course, a man like that could not do hard time. So he turned snitch and the agents got the whole ring, five other bosses. Crome’s client got her peace because the feds relocated the man to the other side of the country.

  Those same feds were still working cases. Crome hadn’t contacted them in a while, but the last time he did they’d been helpful. He decided to give them a shot.

  From memory, Crome dialed a number that went to voicemail. He gave his name and phone number and hung up.

  An hour later, his phone buzzed.

  He answered with, “Yo.”

  “Is this Mick Crome?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “What do you want?”

  No pleasantries, but these men were not into that. They were into nailing criminals.

  Crome said, “Can you run the serial number of a forty-four Magnum for me?”

  “What is it?”

  He rattled off the number, again from memory. One thing Crome had was a mind for information retention.

  “Give me a few hours,” the man said.

  “Thanks.”

  The call ended.

  Chapter Forty

  Darcy, Tess, and Patricia arrived at their destination. Tess knew having Patricia in the car put both of her ex-reporters in a difficult position. One woman asking questions was best. Two of them were not as effective, but safer. Three of them were at least one too many.

  And the way it was, none of them felt it was okay to leave someone in the car while two worked a source. Hence the three of them approached the source together in the upstairs bar that served three-hundred-dollar cocktails.

  This source was Tess’ and he was a twenty-something broker for one of the big investment firms. He’d tried to woo her with confidential information which blew up in his face when she took the intel but rejected his proposition.

  Their target, with hair slightly disheveled and a wrinkled collar on his polo, eyed them with red cheeks and a goofy grin. Clearly the drink in front of him had not been his first.

  A waitress came over to the four-top table now filled with the young man and three women. She greeted all three women by name. Such was the clout they held.

  Tess ordered a Coke Zero, Darcy a water, and Patricia a club soda.

  Tess said, “Thanks for meeting with us, John.”

  He picked up his glass, looked at the liquid and ice, and said, “Did I have a choice?”

  “Sure,” Tess said, “you could not talk and maybe cause Harmony to be missing for longer than if you did.”

  With a jerk of his head, he eyed her. “That’s not even fair.”

  Patricia asked, “What did you and Harmony talk about that had her meeting with the mayor?”

  “Am I going to get compensated for losing my job?” he asked.

  “Did you get fired?” Tess asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But meeting the three of you in the open like this, I’m as good as gone.”

  “I know all your bosses,” Patricia said.

  “And they know you,” he said.

  She didn’t let up. “One call and you become untouchable.”

  “You’d do that for me?” he asked, not really sounding like he was buying what she was selling.

  “You give us what you gave Harmony and I promise I’ll do whatever I can to make sure you don’t lose your job.”

  The truth was, and the guy probably knew it, he would still be tainted. They might not fire him right away, but his days would be numbered. Patricia hob-knobbed with the most powerful men in Charleston, but none of them wanted one of her moles working in their camp.

  “I’m sure you will.” It didn’t sound like he believed what he said.

  “So what’ve you got?” Tess asked.

  The man’s brown eyes were hazy, but got a little focused when he said, “The mayor wasn’t just a horny old man, if you know what I mean.”

  “Enlighten us,” Tess said.

  He took another drink from his three-figure highball and set the glass down. “Remember when talk of the cruise ships coming to town started?”

  “I was ten,” Darcy said. “But I remember before he was mayor, Ron Jansen was a proponent.”

  “What’s your point?” Tess asked.

  The man looked at them all, one at a time, with lazy eyes. “Are all three of you going to fire questions at me?”

  Even in his drunken state, Tess realized he was right. “I’ll ask the questions.”

  “Gee, thanks,” he said. “I feel so much better now.”

  What he said almost made Tess smile. She was probably the most difficult of the three. Not because she was mean, but because she always meant business. Harmony had learned to manipulate men. Tess interrogated. In the end, people had told Patricia that after an interview with her, they needed a stiff drink.

  “Again, what’s your point?” Tess asked.

  “My firm handles—handled—the mayor’s personal finances. During the time the decision was made to accept the larger cruise ships into Charleston, he got a significant amount of money.”

  “Illegally?”

  “Now,” the man said, “how would I know that? All I know is we put it into play and made him a hell of a return.”

  “So you’re saying you think he took a bribe?” Tess asked.

  Tess wanted to know why there was even a bribe offered. Charleston the city, if not all of its residents, wanted the revenue the patrons of the tour ships would provide.

  “No,” he said. “I’m telling you to go back to when the cruise ship concept was in its infancy, just before the Cruise Vessel Act of 2000.”

  “The mayor, even before he was mayor, supported the cruise sh
ips,” Tess said.

  Jingling the ice in his glass, John said, “He was the leading advocate in Charleston. And my firm began to handle his personal finances way back then.”

  “How far back?”

  “From 2000.”

  Nodding, Tess said, “So the windfall after the decision was just the final payoff.”

  “Yes,” he said, “and it was huge.”

  Patricia said, “He always did play the long game.”

  Saturday six p.m.

  Blu and Crome sat on chairs on the front porch, slightly unmotivated because the gun serial number was a bust from both sources. They watched the Jeep Grand Cherokee pull to a stop in the gravel drive.

  Before the women could get out, Dink and Doofus were on the scene.

  Tess exited the Jeep with a grocery bag. She handed Patricia and Darcy carrots. Three more horses showed up and each got a carrot. They were getting tamer and bolder. Maybe they were tired of seeing Dink and Doofus get all the snacks and wanted some of their own.

  Blu glanced around to make sure Murder wasn’t close by. Just because he had proven himself a unique watch dog didn’t mean he wouldn’t trample the women. He found the black horse by the water trough. The horse, in Blu’s opinion, knew everything going on. It was as if Murder allowed things to happen on his island.

  Crome, holding a cup of coffee in one hand, waved to the women with the other. He didn’t look well. Blu thought his friend was unraveling even more.

  It had been six days since Maureen had been taken.

  Tess approached the men, nodded at Blu, and stooped down and gave Crome a hug. The strength these women showed was impressive. Crome, a seasoned biker and killer, was about to come apart at the seams and these women, with two of their own in only God knows what kind of condition, were standing tall.

  Blu wondered which one was going to be the spokeswoman.

  Before Blu could ask, the sound that only a barely muffled V-8 engine could make rumbled into the drive. Pelton pulled to a stop next to his wife’s Jeep and got out of his car. He had on a Black Flag t-shirt, which impressed Blu, along with his cargo shorts and sandals. His dog jumped out after him and went to sniffing around.

  Dink and Doofus, undaunted as usual, finished their carrots and trotted up to the mutt.

  They all seemed to get into a sniffing contest, Shelby sniffing at the horses’ hooves and the horses stooping down to sniff the dog.

  Doofus gave the dog a lick on his head, and Shelby gave him a friendly bark in return. The three of them then ran off, the dog keeping up with the horses around the house and into the marsh grass.

  Pelton said, “I hope you have an outside shower.”

  In fact, Blu did. He’d installed it so that he and Billie could shower off after the boat rides they used to take to the barrier islands around the lowcountry coast, before he asked her to marry him and she ran away.

  Darcy said, “Shelby never has problems making friends.”

  “So what’s up?” Pelton asked.

  Darcy asked Blu, “Did you have anything to do with the cruise ship lines coming to Charleston?”

  It was an odd question. A lot of people made a lot of money from it, but not Blu Carraway Investigations.

  “No.”

  “What about a client involved with it?”

  Blu had an epiphany. It all came back to him—the woman shot to death in Battery Park with no leads, the job with Ron Jansen. How could he have been so stupid as to dismiss it?

  He turned to Crome and said, “Remember Grietje?”

  Crome said. “Jesus.”

  Blu said, “We keep coming back to a past client. I only had one that I remember that had dealings with the cruise ships. It was Ron Jansen.”

  Tess said, “We need to go back through your files on that job. Where do you keep them?”

  “The complete set is in storage in West Ashley,” Blu said. “I have some here inside but not that file.”

  Tess said, “We need to see it.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Saturday seven p.m.

  Since getting in the house was a bust, the man decided to target the files in storage. Luckily, there was another unit just down from Carraway’s that was available. And the place was old school, requiring the renters to supply their own padlocks instead of a more modern, keypad activated system. One set of bolt cutters would take care of the lock on Carraway’s unit. The man knew he’d be on film, but if he covered his face, they wouldn’t know who he was.

  The tricky part was the vehicle. The place allowed the renters to pull their cars up to their units to unload or load. He’d need to do this to carry out the plan. But he needed a vehicle that couldn’t be linked to him. Hence, he needed to steal another. The last time, he’d gotten lucky. Instead of leaving their pet dog at home like they should have, the morons left the car running with the air blowing so their beloved pooch wouldn’t suffer from the heat. Prime pickin’s, as his grandmother used to say. Pop the lock, dump the dog, which was a small reward in and of itself, and he was gone.

  This time he trolled the local big box store lot for a vehicle suitable for the task. His requirements were simple: old enough not to have an alarm but nice enough not to be noticeable. Something around twenty years old was perfect, and given that there were a lot of people still suffering from the crash of 2008, there were a lot of older cars on the road. Who could afford a new one when the income wasn’t there?

  And then he found what he was looking for. A Ford Ranger from the early nineties. It was perfect. Faded paint but still decent. He parked on the opposite side of the lot, strolled down the sidewalk in front of all the small businesses also renting space in the shopping plaza, walked into the big store on one side and out the other. The Ranger was still there but he felt he had to work fast. The lock popped quick and he opened the door. It was clean and smelled like air fresheners. He guessed it was a little old lady’s ride.

  The automatic transmission confirmed his guess. Most of these small trucks back then had manuals, from what he remembered. He hot-wired it and the engine kicked over. He slid to the passenger’s side, propped a foot on the wheel, and used all his strength to break the steering interlock. When it popped, he slid back, put it in reverse, and backed out of the spot.

  Saturday, seven p.m.

  Harmony couldn’t see Maureen, but hoped she was close by. The room she’d been locked in had its own bathroom, but there was only one door and it was locked on the outside with a round plate covering where the knob would be inside the room.

  There were also cameras in opposite corners of the room. She’d once tried to cover them but “he” came in soon after, slapped her across the face so hard she saw stars, and uncovered them. After that, she wanted nothing more than to put him out of his misery. It only occurred to her in a vague notion that he hadn’t violated her physically and she was grateful of that. But the threat was there all the time. He could do whatever he wanted to. He was stronger and he had her locked up. She relied on him for food and water. There was a faucet and commode in the bathroom, but he could cut the water to the place at any time.

  The room had no windows. It had no furniture. Nothing but a sleeping bag and pillow on the floor. The bathroom had cheap soap and shampoo, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a washcloth, and towel. He’d taken her purse away and made her change into sweats and a t-shirt. Every day, he’d give her a fresh set. No shoes. No underwear. No makeup.

  He had total control of her. He’d already violated her sense of security. If he ever decided to take the rest of her, there wasn’t much she could do to stop him. She’d already made the decision that if he tried, she’d fight as if she were fighting for her life, which she would be. He would have to knock her unconscious or kill her. That would be the only way.

  What bothered her the most was not knowing how to get in contact with Maureen. If
Harmony managed to get out of the room, she’d know to look for the other woman. Her fear was that Maureen wouldn’t know to do the same. She knew she had to get free first and get to Maureen.

  The man pressed the remote control and watched as the garage door opened automatically. When the opening was big enough, he drove through, parked, and pressed the button to close the door. He didn’t want any nosey neighbors to see what he was doing. In the bed of the truck, he loaded the boxes he’d prepped for this. It looked like he was just dropping off some things in his storage unit.

  He thought about checking on the women, but decided he didn’t have time. He needed to take care of the files and he needed to do that now.

  Harmony heard the garage door open and steeled herself. The man didn’t come to her room every time, but when he did it wasn’t good. Instead, she focused her energy on a plan of escape. The room had no windows and no other doors. The one to the bathroom had been removed. All the vanity doors and drawers had also been removed. Even the mechanism that flushed the toilet had been removed. The man had shown her the way he wanted her to flush it—by filling a small, plastic trash can with water and pouring it down the commode. It would send the waste down the pipes.

  The room had a light fixture that was mounted close to the ceiling and she had no way to reach it. The light switch cover was glued to the wall. In fact, all the electrical outlets had been blocked off and plastic plates had been glued over them. The carpet was really a rug that she could roll up, exposing bare concrete flooring. It was as if he’d spec’d the house to be able to jail people.

  The only thing in the room that might have some use was the wood trim along the bottom edge of the wall. She’d worked on every corner and found one with a slight gap. It was all she had to work with, and since she had plenty of time, it was what she did. To avoid the watchful eyes of the cameras, she would shut the light off. The man had thought of a lot, but he hadn’t thought of everything or he would have chained her to the wall.