by Terry Spear
Marek stared at it in disbelief. “What…what are you going to do? Is…is that my gun? It was my money I lost, damn it. And I said we’d leave. Like now.”
“Oh, you will. You can join Kittie.” A shot sounded as Dexter pulled the trigger. Then another. Marek crumpled to the kitchen tile floor. “No one crosses me and lives to tell about it,” Dexter said. “Ever.”
Chapter 17
Natalie sat back against the couch. “That does away with two of them. Now, if Dexter would eliminate Antonio and Jimmy for colluding with Kittie, we’d only have to terminate Dexter and his brother. If Dexter is getting rid of loose ends, Jimmy will most likely be on his hit list so he doesn’t come back for revenge. Unless Marek and his brother are on the outs with each other. Since Jimmy was seeing Kittie, it sounds like they were.”
“Agreed,” Brock said.
“I wonder what this guy’s going to do about the dead bodies,” Natalie said.
“He used Marek’s gun. How much do you want to bet he’s going to try to make it look like Marek shot his girlfriend and then killed himself?” Shawn asked. “Her body wasn’t where Marek could see it. If I were up to no good and wanted to frame someone, that’s what I’d do. Carry her to bed, make her nice and comfortable, cover her as if I adored her, clean up the mess in the other room, then shoot myself.”
Natalie smiled. “Good to know.”
Shawn smiled at her. “At least that’s how I figure Dexter must have done it. I doubt he would have buried her. He has to make it look like a murder-suicide.”
“No suicide note though?” she asked.
“Dexter might have even done that. It would be easy to write because Marek’s girlfriend had been unfaithful to him,” Shawn said. “About the security cameras… You had decoys up around the houses?”
“Yes. The fake security cameras give any intruder a false sense of security. Once they thought they’d sabotaged the real ones, they didn’t look any further for any others.” Natalie took a deep breath and let it out. “Once you’ve had armed trespassers, it makes you wary of it happening again. Though I never expected something like this to happen.”
“I would never have thought it. They looked like the real thing to me,” Brock said.
“Oh, and another thing,” Natalie said. “They were spending Eugenia’s social security checks. I wonder where the older lady has gone.”
Shawn snorted. “Died? And they’re spending her checks? But did she die naturally or otherwise?”
Brock thought Shawn’s explanation sounded reasonable when he finally got ahold of Vaughn. “Hey, have you learned anything about the other men Marek was associating with in Denver, particularly the ones he was meeting at the pub?”
“Yeah, I did what you suggested and offered each of them a hundred-dollar counterfeit bill to tell me all they knew about Marek. Of course, they wanted to know why I was asking, and I told them I was a PI trying to track him down for committing a crime. They’re wolves. I didn’t have to say anything more than that.”
“Did they notice the money wasn’t real?”
Vaughn chuckled. “No. Which was a good thing for them. I was certain they didn’t have anything to do with what he was participating in. I told them Marek was working with another of their friends. Dexter Cartwright. Now that got a reaction. The two men looked at each other. They said if anyone was doing something criminal, Dexter would be the one to put it together. They said Dexter was always talking about coming up with the perfect crime.”
“What about Dexter’s brother?” Brock asked.
“I’m still trying to locate Trenton. He must be using an alias. No luck so far.”
“You didn’t leave the fake bills with the other men, did you?” Brock asked.
Vaughn chuckled. “No. I told them what they were, and the men were shocked and impressed. But not enough to be mixed up in any of it. I took the money from them though.”
“Good.” Brock told him what was going on with them. “We’ve learned Ink Man is actually Jimmy, Marek’s brother. Nothing going on there?”
“Not yet. What about you folks?”
“Three human assassins, all in police custody.”
“Hell, Jillian and I should have been there helping out.”
“We’re still listening in to the drama at Marek’s place, so I’ll let you go. And you still have a mission there. Stay safe.”
“Okay, talk later.” Then they ended the call.
Dexter was talking on a phone at Marek’s place, the listening bug in Kittie’s purse picking up half the conversation. They wished they could hear the other man’s part of the conversation.
“Hey, Jimmy, just calling you to let you know Marek and his girlfriend have been cut out of the business,” Dexter said, pacing around the room.
Brock was surprised Dexter would tell him that.
“Don’t worry about them. If you screw up like they both did, then you’re out of here.” More pacing. “Let me ask you something though. Did either of them ask you if you wanted to go into business with them? And cut me out of the process?” Pause.
“Well, why the hell didn’t you tell me?” Dexter was irate.
“I’m confused,” Natalie said. “Kittie called Antonio, and he was calling her ‘honey.’ So was she really having an affair with both Antonio and Jimmy? I didn’t think she could get away with it without one of the men catching on.”
“A threesome, maybe,” Shawn said.
Dexter cleared his throat, catching their attention. “Kittie wasn’t serious? Sure, she was. Better be glad you said no to her. I’d hate to lose my Ink Man.”
“I can’t believe Jimmy wouldn’t want to kill Dexter for murdering not only his own brother, but also the woman he had been with,” Brock said to Natalie and Shawn as they listened to the conversation via the listening bug. Brock was damn glad he’d slipped it into Kittie’s bag and nobody had been aware of it. It was better than being a fly on the wall.
“What about Antonio?” Dexter asked Jimmy. He paced some more. “Okay, good. Loyalty is rewarded. You’ve got the new money, so I expect it to get done right, no foul-ups, and on time… The problem wolves? Don’t worry about them. Marek wouldn’t have been stupid enough to tell them anything about the rest of us. He told them he was just the middleman and had clandestine meetings with the man in charge but didn’t know who he was. And that he didn’t know anything else about the operation—in other words, about you and Antonio.”
Then the front door squeaked open and slammed shut. Brock, Natalie, and Shawn listened, but they didn’t hear Dexter saying anything anymore, nor did they hear him moving around the house.
“Sounds like Dexter finally left Marek’s house,” Shawn said. “Sure wish we had a bug on him.”
“What about the aunt? If she’s dead, did Marek bury her in the backyard? If she was buried in a cemetery, they’d have to have a death certificate, and Social Security would have been notified and the checks would have stopped,” Natalie said. “The house is in both her and Marek’s names, so he could stay there indefinitely.”
“Unless she’s off on a vacation somewhere, but I doubt it. Not when they’re spending her money,” Shawn said.
“Let me see.” Brock looked her up on one of his databases. “No record of her being deceased.”
“Here’s an idea. What if Marek didn’t use his own money to create the counterfeit money? Maybe he’s using her checks,” Shawn said.
“That would make sense. That’s why Dexter didn’t seem worried about her being around or that she might suddenly show up when he murdered Kittie and Marek. Though she could have been out of town on a trip, and he knew that. But we still have the comment Kittie made about cashing Eugenia’s check.” Brock looked up Marek’s bank accounts. “Marek still has a bank account in Denver and one in Amarillo, joint account with his aunt.”
“As
long as no one knows she’s dead, he could spend her social security checks and any other checks she might get online in the joint account, no questions asked,” Natalie said.
“It happens. Hell, on one case I checked into, the guy was a drug addict and his mom was an alcoholic and they were both hoarders. They lived together, and they’d been so abusive to other family members when they checked on their welfare that no one visited them any longer.”
“I’m surprised the family would hire a PI to check into it,” Natalie said. “Why not just call the police?”
“They’d had their own run-ins with the police. Money is always a good motive too. There was a sizable inheritance that the mom should have had, and truth be told, that’s what the other siblings were more interested in—payment for all the abuse and neglect they’d suffered while in the care of their mom. I found the man lying on the couch in her home, dead. He had died weeks earlier there, a drug overdose. I could smell another body too. I made my way through the narrow aisles they’d left to reach the bathroom and two bedrooms and was heading for the bedroom where I smelled the odor of another decomposing body.
“I opened the door, and she was in bed, dead, just a skeleton and gray hair, covered with the comforter, the whole room filled with boxes of stuff, only a small path from her bed to a dresser, the closet, and the door. She was still wearing a nightgown. There didn’t appear to be any violence, just that she had died in her sleep. Maybe. Unless she’d overdosed on drugs too. But the son had been cashing her disability and social security checks for years when she had been dead all that time.”
“How do you know for certain how long it had been?” Natalie asked.
“Sitting on the bedside table, a diary was open, and the last entry was dated five and a half years earlier.”
“Ewww. Can you imagine living in a place like that? With a dead body? Your own mother?” Natalie shook her head. “Did the other kids get the inheritance?”
Brock smiled.
“What? If she’d been a horrible mother, they could have at least received some money for it,” Natalie said.
“Between paying the utilities and taxes, and the son’s drug habit, no. I asked his siblings if they knew how he managed to keep up with his taxes, utility bills, et cetera. I figured someone would have removed him from the property and disposed of the house. They said the house was paid off, and other bills were on auto-pay out of his mother’s and his bank account and had been for years. But the taxes hadn’t been paid for the last year. He was looking at losing the house if he didn’t pay them. The police would have found his dead mama and him then.”
“Gross,” Natalie said.
“Yeah, but it goes to show you that it’s done—a relative stealing the funds of a dead person, whether they caused their death or it was of natural causes. Too easy to just keep cashing those checks. I can’t imagine living with a dead body in the house for long, but for years?” Brock shook his head.
Natalie was still looking for things on her laptop while Brock was doing his own searches. She suddenly turned her laptop so Brock and Shawn could see it. “Hey, here’s a listing for an Ink Man Tattoo Artist on Facebook. His shop, The Inking Spot, is located in Amarillo, Texas. Maybe he does tattoos as his regular business, and the counterfeiting is on the side.”
“Hell, Natalie, if you weren’t a top-rate gardener, you should join me in the PI business full-time.” Brock gave her a hug.
She beamed.
“His first name wouldn’t happen to be Jimmy, would it?” Shawn asked, moving closer to see the screen.
“No, it doesn’t list it. That would be too easy. Since wolves don’t wear tattoos, he must love to do artwork on humans.” Natalie shrugged. “It could be a way to stay employed while having other…pursuits of a shadier nature.”
“It’s worth checking into. He’s got a phone number and address. Inking done by appointment only.” Brock leaned back on the couch. “We ought to call and ask for Jimmy and see what kind of a reaction we get.”
“He might run if he doesn’t recognize your voice and he thinks you might be one of the wolves who are causing trouble for this group of counterfeiters,” Natalie said.
“Yeah, it would work even better if we looked him up at his place of business. We could smell that he was a wolf and—” Brock said.
“See if his scent was on the money in the bag I took!” Natalie said.
Brock smiled at her. He loved how excited she could get when she was helping them solve the puzzle. He hadn’t thought of it as quickly as she had, but she was right. Ink Man most likely had handled the money.
“Yeah, but the problem with that is he’ll recognize we’re wolves, know we’re not coming for an ink job, and suspect why we’re there,” Shawn said.
“Right. And then he’d alert his ‘master,’ and Dexter would be on our case again. Though I really don’t believe Dexter would hire the hit men and then give up on dealing with us after we turned them over to the police. I’d say he’ll be even more determined to eliminate us,” Brock said. “Though I feel the same way about him, after he tried to kill me while dealing in drugs.”
“I don’t blame you at all. Do you think he paid them in real money?” Natalie asked.
The guys laughed.
“It’s probably more like you get half the money to sign up for the job and the rest when the job is done. Since they’re assassins, I’d say he wouldn’t risk giving them fake money. Good way to have them come back to eliminate him.” Brock thought some more about how they were going to deal with this. “Rather than try to speak to Jimmy personally, we can break into his ink shop when he leaves. Then we can smell his scent and learn if the ink, money, and printer they’re using are in there.”
“But you heard Dexter,” Natalie said. “They’re going to be working on the money. And he wants it done soon. They may be at it all hours of the night until they’re done.”
“That’s true. We need to go,” Brock said, “and try to catch them at it then.”
“All of us?” Shawn asked.
“Yeah, I don’t want to leave the two of you here if Dexter plans another attack at the garden center. Natalie’s right. Jimmy and Antonio could be working on this now at the ink shop, if that’s where they have their operation set up. It might even be at Dexter’s ranch.”
“Then we can confiscate the money, printer, ink, everything if it’s at the ink shop. Good deal,” Shawn said.
“And the men?” Natalie asked. “You don’t want to just…kill them, do you?”
“If it’s us or them, we’ll handle it. If they’ll cooperate, we’ll turn them over to the JAG policing force. They’ll incarcerate them in their special facilities, but if they’re out to kill us, that deal’s off the table. Hell, maybe we can even confiscate the money before they bleach off the ink from the real money, and they can use it to help pay for their incarceration,” Brock said.
“Sounds good to me,” Natalie said.
Thankfully, they had more guns, since the ones they had used on the gunmen had been given to the police for now.
Brock rubbed Natalie’s back as they headed out to his vehicle. “We’ll get this done and get back to more pleasurable business.”
She nodded. “I sure hope so.”
They headed in Brock’s Humvee in the direction of the ink shop, all the way across town in a seedier part of the city filled with bars, pawnshops, tattoo parlors, and triple-X-rated movie theaters. Brock didn’t like having Natalie with them, but he sure as hell wasn’t leaving her behind in case Dexter retaliated while he and Shawn were away.
“Are you okay?” Brock asked her as he drove through the area, looking for the right shop.
“Yeah. I mean, sure, I’m nervous. I’m not into all this kind of work like you are. I don’t have the combat training, and I feel out of my element to an extent. But I’m okay. I can use the gun to defen
d myself.”
“Should one of us go as a wolf?” Shawn asked.
“They won’t be wolves if they’re working on the money. It’s better for us to be armed with guns, rather than with wolf teeth,” Brock said.
“There’s the shop.” Natalie pointed at it. “Looks like they’ve got some muscle.”
Two big, muscular guys were smoking and leaning against the brick wall of the shop. They were talking to each other, casting a glance around at anyone walking on the sidewalks.
“Yep, they’re definitely the muscle. They probably are there to ensure no one bothers the geniuses at work.” Brock was disappointed but not completely surprised the counterfeiters would have some other men working for them.
Shawn snapped a couple shots of the men. “Wolf or human?”
“After Dexter sent the humans, it’s a fifty-fifty toss-up. But those men definitely are protecting the shop, and they’re being obvious about it, not hiding in the shop to wait on the unsuspecting criminal,” Brock said. “I suspect they’d be in the shop if they thought we might come here. They’d be lying in wait for us.”
“Dexter must have truly believed Marek’s lies and doesn’t think he spilled his guts to us,” Natalie said. “He’s not as bright as I thought he was.”
“Looks that way,” Brock said, “which is a good thing for us.”
“Now what?” Shawn asked as Brock drove on by the shop.
“We’ll see if there’s a back alley and another way in.”
Chapter 18
Brock parked the Humvee in the alleyway behind the door to The Inking Spot. There were no windows or security cameras, just a metal door. Brock had lockpicks—most lupus garous did, in case they needed shelter to shift—so he figured he’d get in without any trouble as long as opening the door didn’t trigger an alarm.
“Why don’t you stay in the Humvee with your cell phone ready to call 911 if we don’t come out in a reasonable amount of time. I’ll leave you the keys in case you need to hightail it out of here,” Brock told Natalie.