by Dale Mayer
Johan’s Joy
Heroes for Hire, Book 21
Dale Mayer
Table of Contents
Title Page
About This Book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
About Galen’s Gemma
Author’s Note
Complimentary Download
About the Author
Copyright Page
About This Book
After helping out Vince, Johan hadn’t planned on staying at Levi and Ice’s compound for long. However, Johan realizes how much plans can change when Galen comes over from Africa to join Johan, and the two are sent into town on a job that’s close and up-front personal to another member of Legendary Security.
Joyce, otherwise called Joy, sought a career position but accepted something out of her normal skill set in order to pay the rent. But when her inventory lists show missing drugs, she knows something ugly is going on. With no one at the company willing to listen, she turns to her old friend Kai for advice.
Johan wasn’t the answer Joy was looking for, but, when she finds out the previous employee to hold her position is in the morgue, she’s damn happy to have him.
Her job might be safe … but her life? Well, that’s on the line …
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Chapter 1
Johan Kotton walked through the compound’s huge kitchen area, snagged a cinnamon bun, and poured himself a cup of coffee, then wandered into the adjoining room, where a large group sat around the dining room table, talking. As he took the last seat, Kai looked over at him, grinned, and said, “You’ll get fat here if you keep eating like that.”
Johan nodded sagely. “You could be right,” he said, “but I’ll worry about it later. These are too damn good to miss out on.”
“Those are Bailey’s cinnamon buns,” Kai said. “They’re to die for.”
He munched his way through it, thoroughly enjoying the different tastes of everything over here. He had traveled for years in his work, decades even, but he had spent the last five years with Bullard over in Africa, until Johan had been sent off the Galápagos Islands to help rescue a science team. He’d come back, along with Galen Alrick, to Ice and Levi’s compound in the outskirts of Houston for a week or two. He was hoping to do a mission or two here and see just how different it was.
He was originally from the US, but his parents had been missionaries and had traveled all over the world. He’d gone to school in England and in Michigan. School hadn’t really stuck, and he’d gone on to working in various trades in Germany and then in Switzerland. It was hard, as he looked back through his vagabond lifestyle, to place any area as home.
As he pondered the cinnamon bun in this strange path his world had taken, he heard Kai say, “I know, but it’s Joy, and she’s not one much for raising the alarm.”
“You know Joy. We don’t,” Harrison said. “And she might not be one to raise alarms, but that doesn’t mean she’s not making this a bigger deal than it is.”
Kai shrugged, sank back in her chair and said, “I think you’re wrong.”
“What did I miss out on?” Johan asked, as he took another bite of his cinnamon bun.
Kai turned toward him. “A friend of mine, Joy—well, it’s actually Joyce, but we’ve always called her Joy,” Kai said. “She’s working at the corporate office for a medical research center and says a mess of drugs are missing from her inventory.”
“Drugs are always missing,” Johan said. “I swear it goes along with every medical center I’ve ever seen.”
“I agree,” she said, “but, in this case, it’s knockout drugs.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are those a hot commodity on the black market here?”
“Yes,” Harrison said. “Unfortunately. And, in this case, the drug is ketamine, which is what they use to knock out horses.”
“Or men,” Johan said quietly. “We’ve had serial killers using that same drug before.”
“I never thought about a serial killer,” Kai said, her eyes round as she stared at him. “And I definitely won’t mention it to Joy.”
He chuckled. “No need to really put the panic into her. Besides, if it’s just one or two bottles, is that something everybody’s worried about, or is it a much bigger issue?”
“She’s new there,” Kai said. “She was hired by Westgroup as the inventory clerk, working in their corporate offices, which includes their oversight of a large research center. The two buildings are near each other on the same block, I believe. They don’t do any animal testing, but they’re doing a lot of work on various animals, so they knock them out to do surgeries.”
“Sounds like animal testing to me,” Johan said, as the last bite of the cinnamon bun went into his mouth.
“I hope not,” Kai said darkly. “It would make Joy very unhappy.”
“What’s the difference between animal testing and experimental surgery?” he asked curiously.
“Motivation, I think,” Harrison said, with a laugh.
“Either way,” Kai said, “the corporate office is near the medical research facility which is run alongside a large vet clinic, and, per Joy’s inventory records, a lot of ketamine went missing.”
“Nobody should stock a lot of ketamine,” Johan said. “It’s a very strong drug, and you don’t need very much of it. So, unless they’re dealing with a huge population of bovine, horses, or, say, elephants,” he said with a snort, “I can’t see anybody having a large stock of it.”
“True enough, but they did get a large amount in, and now it’s gone.”
Johan stared at her, his fingers tapping away on his knees. His mind raced as he thought about all the uses for ketamine. “If it was a serial killer, he won’t need a lot of ketamine anyway.”
“But, like you said, it’s worth money on the black market,” Kai said. And then she turned to Harrison and frowned. “Wait. You said that.”
“That was me,” Harrison said with a nod. “But it doesn’t matter. Drugs that go missing are an issue. Have they contacted the cops?”
“No. See? That’s a funny thing. Joy said that she brought it up with her boss, and he just laughed at her, said she must have miscounted, so she should go back and do it again.”
“Did she?” Johan asked, interested in the way the system worked over here. Africa was a whole lot more lax in some ways because you could be staring down the barrel of a rifle pretty damn fast. So Africa had less of a certain type of crime because the on-the-spot punishment would be so much more severe. But Johan had done many jobs in Europe, and even in the US too, and he knew that things were on a much different scale here.
“She did, indeed, and, when she went back to him, he said it must have been an inventory error.”
“Did she go to their accountant over it?”
Kai looked at Harrison and nodded. “The accountant wasn’t happy and commented that the stuff was expensive but didn’t confirm whether he had entered an invoice for a case of ketamine or not.”
“Sounds like she’s trying to do the right thing and to track it down, but
nobody else seems to care.”
“I think that’s a problem for a lot of large companies,” she said. “Because somebody else will end up taking the blame, if it did go missing.”
“And is that our problem, or is this just a thought exercise that we’re all talking about?” Johan asked.
“I dumped it in Ice’s lap,” Kai confessed. “So I’m not sure what she’ll do with it. Considering the type of drugs we’re talking about, I imagine she’ll bring in the cops.”
The steady clip-clip sound of footsteps coming down the hallway said they were about to find out. As Ice walked in, her hair in a long braid down her back, wearing a simple white flowing shirt over jeans and sandals, she looked as cool, calm, and collected as ever.
Johan had heard that she was pregnant, but she wasn’t showing much, if at all, if that was the case.
Ice had on reading glasses and pulled them down her nose so she could see over them. “I spoke to Joy,” she said. “She’s really worried, but her section boss is apparently brushing it off.”
“Yes, that’s what she told me,” Kai said.
Ice nodded. “However, I went several rungs higher on the ladder to somebody I know on the board.”
“Of course you know somebody on the board,” Kai said in a drawling voice. “Is there anybody here in Houston that you don’t know?”
Ice flashed her bright grin. “It helps to know a lot of people, not only the local ones,” she said. “I just had a private conversation with him, and he’s not impressed. He said, whether it was a clerical error or a theft, it’s not a drug they want to have floating around, particularly as the lot numbers would lead back to his company’s research lab.”
“Never thought of that,” Kai said. “That gives more weight to getting this solved.”
“Well, it should have been resolved right off the bat,” Johan said.
Ice looked at him with interest. “You wanted to do a job, right?”
He nodded immediately.
“Good,” she said. “Then you and Galen can go.”
At that, a silence hung around the place. Johan looked around and said, “And why is everybody all of a sudden staring at me that way?”
“You’re not one of our regular guys, don’t know the lay of the land here,” Harrison said easily. He looked at Ice and said, “Don’t you want one of us to go too?”
“You mean, besides Galen, who is also one of Bullard’s men?”
Harrison gave a one-armed shrug. “Yeah. Like which streets to avoid and who to call at the police department. And which restaurants to avoid.” He chuckled at his own joke.
She pondered it and said, “Well, I do have a job in the same area. I could send two of you over there, and, if these guys needed help, you could step up to aid them, and vice versa.”
Harrison frowned but said, “I’m game. It’s in Houston, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “And so is the other job.”
“We don’t get many jobs close together like that,” he said. “What’s the second job?”
“A large art theft,” she said.
He stared at her in shock.
She shrugged. “What can I say? Apparently we’re broadening our horizons.”
“Please tell me it’s something exotic, like involving an international jewel thief or something like that,” he joked. “Sounds mundane to think of a local museum getting broken into.”
“African sculptures,” she said.
“So then we should do the Westgroup job and their stolen drugs,” Harrison said, “and Galen and Johan should do the African sculpture job.”
“Like I know anything about African sculptures,” Johan joked.
Just then Galen walked into the area. He lifted a hand, walked over, and gave Ice a gentle hug, then tossed his bag on the floor, and dropped into a squatting position beside Johan. He grinned at his old friend. “Sounds like she’s got a job for us.”
“Oh, yeah. She’s just trying to keep us together and away from her pretty boys,” he said. “Everybody knows they can’t handle the heat.”
Galen burst into laughter. “Well, if they can’t,” he said, “I’m not sure anybody can.” He stood and stretched. “Glad I’m here, though, man, that’s a long set of flights to get here.”
“It is, indeed,” Ice said, staring at him. “We just got word that our men arrived there too.”
“Yeah, Bullard’s gnashing his teeth already,” he said. “They’ve taken over some interesting security stuff. I wouldn’t mind hearing what they’re up to.”
“Well, you can learn while you’re here,” she said. “In the meantime, Bullard wanted you to get some North American experience.”
“So it’s interesting that you’re putting the two of us together,” Galen said.
“Well, only because a job is right next door with a museum that had another kind of a theft. African art statues.”
Galen rolled his eyes. “Art’s not really my thing,” he said, “unless shooting them up and leaving a room devastated is an art form.”
“We have more than enough of that art form ourselves,” she said in a mocking tone. “So, you two go to the ketamine theft, and I’ll assign the art theft to another two guys.”
“You know what? If the museum had only hired us in the first place as security,” Harrison said, “they wouldn’t have had an issue.”
“Unfortunately,” Ice said, “they are just now realizing that.”
“So how major is this art theft?” Harrison asked.
“Well, it’ll definitely be an issue between the two countries. The display was on loan from Nairobi,” she said, “and they’re very unhappy to know that four pieces have gone missing.”
“Right,” Harrison said, standing up and reaching over to shake Galen’s hand in greeting. “So, me and who else?”
“Good question,” she said, looking at her sheet. “I’ve got nine jobs in progress right now.”
Harrison looked around. “I thought the place was pretty damn empty.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got Tyson here. So maybe you and Tyson.”
Harrison crossed his arms over his chest and nodded. “Pretty boy Tyson. He’ll do just fine in a museum, but me, not so much.”
“You’ll do fine too,” she said cheerfully, “because that’s the job.”
*
Joyce Baxter, or Joy as she preferred to be called, stopped in her tracks, sighed deeply, and faced the mammoth building before her. It may look like one building, but it seemed to be two buildings sharing one common wall, in her mind. She worked in the corporate section, basically the front of the building on all the aboveground floors, even on some of the basement levels, like where her office was.
In the corporate world, the peons were given the windowless offices, reserving the window-filled penthouse offices for the CEOs, the owners, the board members. Those in-between positions got the offices on the in-between floors.
Regardless, she could enter the main entrance without setting off alarms. Supposedly the back of the building housed a portion of the research department and had its own entrance at the rear as well.
Even the elevators were segregated. One set in the front of the building was strictly designated for the office workers, with the other set for the researchers not even visible or reachable from any floor on the front side of the building.
Joy shook her head. She knew, per employee records, some 240 people were employed by the company. Yet Joy saw only a handful of those, all dressed in suits, in her section. Most of the employees seemed to work for the lab itself, which was in a separate building on the same block. Yet still a research department was in her building, but she had never seen evidence of it in her weeks of working here. She envisioned the researchers all wearing white lab coats, but what did she really know about this place? Maybe those researchers were more the evidence-gathering types, searching the web, wearing jeans and T-shirts. That would place the lab-coat guys at the actual lab itself down the road. Possib
ly.
She sighed again and walked into the building on one more Monday morning, already feeling the cramping tension going up her spine to the back of her neck. She’d been so happy to get this job, but now all she could think about was the fact that everybody was hiding something, and she hated it. She was very much a straightforward, up-front, easy-to-get-along-with kind of gal, but don’t screw her around either. Now she felt like something was not quite right with her job, and nobody would talk to her about it.
How was she supposed to do her job if that was the case? It was frustrating, and she wasn’t sure what the answer was. If there even was an answer. Half of her realized that this was all a big mess, and, having moved to town three months ago, she should have another job in her pocket already; yet it had taken her six weeks to find this one. Her sigh came out as a moan this time.
Using her security code to enter her floor, she walked in and headed to her back office in the dungeon level, grateful to find it empty. She normally shared it with two other women, who should arrive shortly. Joy dropped her sweater over the back of her chair, slipped her purse in her bottom drawer, sat down, and logged on to her computer. Except that, as soon as she brought up her screen, the log-in screen wasn’t there, suggesting she was still logged in. As if she hadn’t logged out on Friday.
She sank back in her chair, staring at the computer screen in horror. It was possible she hadn’t logged out, but it certainly wasn’t her normal procedure. Because that was against the security policy of the company. And the last thing she wanted to do was get fired, and, right now, this screen was not what she wanted to see.
She wasn’t terribly techie oriented, but she figured there had to be a way to see if anybody had been on her computer over the weekend. But, when she tried to bring up documents, it seemed like only her own documents surfaced, just as she had last seen them. She brought up a web browser, but a lot of the pages were blocked normally anyway. She checked the browser history, but nothing seemed to be any different. Feeling relieved, but, at the same time, a little worried, she checked her email, but nothing terribly important was coming in either.