by Clare Kauter
Live & Let Bondi
A Baxter & Co. Mystery
Clare Kauter
Copyright © 2017 by Clare Kauter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is dedicated to caffeine.
Contents
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
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
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About the Author
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Losing Your Head
Chapter One
Natalia
My fingerprints joined the masses already smeared across the grimy glass door as I pushed my way into the cafe, a cloud of whiskey fumes and last night’s regrets whirling around me.
Yeah, alright, that sounded a little melodramatic. The aforementioned regrets were pretty much just that I’d drunk the whiskey in the first place. Maybe it hadn’t been the best way to spend a Sunday evening, but after the case I’d been assigned I’d needed a drink. Or five.
I caught a whiff of myself and my stomach flipped, not for the first time that morning. God, I smelled awful. My aroma was so pungent that when a charity worker had walked towards me on the street earlier trying to convince me to give his overlords my money, he got about two metres away and stopped, eyes widening in horror before he turned and ran off. Yes, I know. I should figure out a way to bottle my scent and sell it. Everyone would want some if it had that kind of power.
Or maybe he’d just been scared off by the look I’d given him. I’d been told my glare could melt ice – not that I’d ever tested it. I wondered if the old Laser Eye could really have worked on him even through my sunglasses. Maybe my powers were growing stronger.
Inside the cafe, I tipped down my glasses and scanned the room as my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. Mmm, delicious dim lighting. My hangover liked it in here. Low lights. Less noise. It especially liked the smell of grease that hung in the air, cutting through my own stench and hinting that here be hash browns.
But no. No time for breakfast. That was a risky proposition with my stomach in its current state, and besides, I had work to do. I was meeting someone. Where was he? I hadn’t actually met the guy before, but I’d seen pictures of him. He’d looked friendly enough in 2D, but from what I knew of him I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. Why was he back in town? And why had I been lumped with babysitting duty?
There. Perched in the corner with his back to two walls so he could survey the entire cafe without anything taking him by surprise. He was slouched down in his chair, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think that meant he wasn’t paying attention to every little thing that happened around him. Dark hair, brown eyes, olive skin. Definitely him. Billy Defranco. The latest chapter in my waking nightmare.
Classically handsome, like an old Hollywood movie star, he looked as though he should have been cracking wise in a black and white film from the forties. Or maybe clouded in smoke, solving crime in dramatic lighting with an easy jazz soundtrack like the old noir private dicks. Good for him – he’d fit in with all the other dicks around the office.
I felt like he should be wearing clothes from the costume department of an old mystery film – buttoned shirt with suspenders holding up his trousers, polished shoes poking out from under the table, a dark trench coat draped over the chair next to him. Instead he was wearing jeans, lace-up boots and a tight-fitting sweatshirt. Kind of a let down, although I have to admit all his clothing was impeccably pressed. He had that air of someone who’d spent three hours getting ready so they looked like they hadn’t put any effort in whatsoever.
I slid the sunglasses back up the bridge of my nose. Yes, it was dim in here, but the dimmer the better, according to Garfield. (That was the name I’d given my headache, since I figured he’d be sticking around a while.) I pushed my way through the cafe, closing the space between myself and Defranco. He clocked me approaching, though his face remained impassive.
“Billy.”
“Ortiz?” he guessed.
I nodded. “Natalia. My friends call me Nat.”
“What do I call you?”
“Not Nat.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Wow, we’re already getting along so well.”
I swung myself into the chair next to him so my back faced the wall as well.
“Look, handsome,” I said, getting straight to the point, “let’s not mess each other around. There are some questions I want to ask you.”
“Not big on small talk?”
“I don’t see the point. I don’t much care about being polite.”
“I’d never have guessed.”
“Well, people are full of surprises.”
“Not as often as I’d like,” he said. He sighed. “Let’s get to your interrogation, then.”
Eyeing him over the top of my glasses, I said, “Why are you here?”
“That’s kind of a big question.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m not asking you for an essay on existentialism,” I said. “Why are you here in Sydney? You left over a year ago of your own accord. Why return?”
He raised his eyebrows at me, though he didn’t look surprised. “You pulled my record,” he said. A statement, not a question.
“I did.”
He nodded. “I pulled yours too, and I have some questions of my own.”
“You haven’t answered mine yet.”
The corner of his mouth tipped up in the ghost of a smile. Guess he’d been hoping I wouldn’t notice him dodging the question.
“Turns out Brisbane is even worse than they say.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
He smiled. “Trust me, it is.”
“So you’re telling me you came back for what, the climate?”
He just looked at me for a moment. “You don’t want to work with me.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I don’t like anyone,” I said. “Don’t take it personally.”
He smiled again. “You have a pretty impressive case closure rate,” he said. “According to your file, you’re a model employee.”
“So are you,” I replied. “Which I guess is why I’m so surprised that they think you need a babysitter.”
He shrugged. “Not that surprising. Been a long time since I worked cases. What I fi
nd hard to understand is why a PI as good as you is the one who got lumped with looking after me.”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“They must want someone capable keeping an eye on me.”
I raised my eyebrows at him. “Or on me.”
His brow furrowed ever so slightly as he cocked his head. “And why would they want that?”
“You tell me.”
Billy just studied me for a moment, probably wondering what I was thinking. I was wondering much the same thing about him. He hadn’t explained why he’d moved back to Sydney, or even why he’d left in the first place. He’d been the office’s golden boy before he’d gone, and I couldn’t imagine they were happy to let him transfer out. He was a rising star. What could have happened that made him want to give all that up, switch to the security department and start working in another state? Did he really want to be back in Sydney doing the PI thing again, or had management forced him to return to help their case clearance statistics? And more importantly, was he really here to get back into being a PI, or had someone brought him back for a different reason?
Like, I don’t know, to try and get me fired?
Yeah, OK, I was a little paranoid. If you’d been through what I had in the six months I’d been working at Baxter & Co., you’d be the same way.
A crashing noise a couple of tables down broke me out of my thoughts and I turned away from Billy to see what had happened. The Serious Writer two tables over who was tapping away on his laptop and crafting his masterpiece had knocked over his empty coffee cup and saucer, which had clanged onto the concrete floor. It was no wonder the guy couldn’t control his fine motor skills. This was the second mug of coffee he’d drunk since I’d been here, and it looked like he’d been at it for a few hours. How the hell he was still typing with those jitters, I had no idea. Although to be fair he wasn’t so much typing as occasionally pecking one key, adding a comma. Then deleting it. Then adding it back. Repeat. I wondered if he’d ever finish writing that one sentence. I doubted it. And I’d bet money that if he did it would still be terrible.
“I guess you’re not actually going to tell me what your deal is, huh?” I said, turning my attention back to Billy.
“I don’t have a deal.”
“Everyone has a deal.”
He shrugged. “You going to tell me yours?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“So we’re getting off to a good start.”
“The guys in the office,” I said. “You used to work with them, right?”
He nodded, frowning, probably wondering where this was going. “Yeah.”
“They all hate me. So maybe they stuck you with me as some kind of joke. Haze you on your first day back by pairing you with the office pariah.”
He smiled broadly, all the way to his eyes, the movie star smile that probably warmed hearts and made most people like him instantly. I, however, have no heart, so it didn’t work on me.
“You’re not that bad.”
I raised my eyebrows. “I’ll have to try harder.” Reaching down for my bag, I said, “I guess we should get to work, then, now that the polite introductions are over.” He raised his eyebrows but passed no comment. I took a file out of my bag and slid it sideways to him. “Your second first case.”
He smiled again. I ignored him. Again. The second he opened that file the smile would be smacked off his face anyway. Three, two, one… He flipped it open to the first page.
After a moment of staring at it, he spoke.
“What is this?” he asked in disbelief.
“Welcome to life as my partner,” I said. “I call it the Shitty Cases Division, where we only get the very worst jobs. Lost pets, missing phones, crazy people. The kind of stuff Nancy Drew would have turned down.”
He continued to stare down at the file. “This can’t be real. You’re messing with me, right?”
“What exactly have I said so far to indicate to you that I have a sense of humour?”
He laughed. He thought I was joking.
“A long black?” said a waitress, appearing beside our table with a mug in hand.
“Thank you,” said Billy, shooting her a smile. She giggled at the smile and placed the coffee on the table.
“Careful,” she said. “It’s hot.”
Then she walked away, glancing back at him over her shoulder.
“Right,” I said. “So that’s how you expected me to react when you smiled at me.”
Billy ignored me and took a sip of his coffee. I could have warned him against drinking it, but I decided not to. He immediately let the coffee dribble back out of his mouth into the cup, a look of horror on his face.
“What the hell?” he asked, staring down into the murky brown liquid. “It looks like coffee. It smells like it.”
“But it tastes like tar?”
He looked up at me. “You knew?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I did.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
Shrugging and smiling sweetly, I said, “That’s why I told you to meet me here.”
“What, so you could watch me drink this?” He shook his head. “That’s just sick.”
“I didn’t want anyone from the office to overhear our conversation,” I said. “So I chose the place near the office with the worst coffee, the one cafe I could pretty much guarantee no Baxter & Co. employee would visit. I wanted privacy. Seeing you look so disgusted was just an added bonus.”
“Why would it matter if anyone overheard us?”
I thought for a moment before answering. I decided to go with the truth. Well, part of it. “As I said, the guys in the office hate me. I wanted to talk to you without them around.”
“That didn’t exactly answer my question.”
“I know.” I glanced at his coffee mug. “You going to drink that?”
“Not a chance in hell.”
“Then shall we leave?”
He sighed and then nodded, staring down at the first page of the file I’d handed him.
“I can’t believe I’m actually saying this,” he said, “but let’s go catch ourselves a ghost.”
Chapter Two
Billy
They wanted me to hunt down a ghost.
Yes, seriously.
The guys in charge just kept finding new and interesting ways to humiliate me. And not only had I caught possibly the worst case in company history, but I also had a babysitter who somehow seemed even more annoyed to be paired with me than I was to be stuck with her.
Natalia had light brown skin and dark curly hair pulled up into a messy ponytail. Some curls had broken free of their restraints and framed her face, which was half covered by her huge sunglasses. She wore dark blue jeans and brown ankle boots with a cream coloured jumper and red scarf. When she’d first walked in, she’d looked pretty put together. Then she came a little closer.
She pushed through the cafe, barely glancing at the people she bumped into. She wasn’t so much walking into them intentionally, but she didn’t seem to slow down if someone happened to get in her way. When she reached my table, I wasn’t sure what to make of her. Either she had a really weird taste in perfume or she’d doused herself in – what was that, whiskey? I was pretty sure I was going to be over the legal limit just from inhaling her fumes.
She sat down and immediately began interrogating me. This hadn’t been what I’d expected. I’d figured whoever they paired me with would have been informed of why I’d left Sydney last year. The questions she asked made it seem like she had a very different idea of what had happened than what had actually gone down. Like, she thought I’d had some kind of say in it.
Now that we’d spoken, I was even less certain how to feel about her. Was she serious about everything she’d said? Did she really not know what had happened when I transferred? I’d checked her record too, and she had a pretty high clearance rate, despite her apparent alcoholism. If they thought I needed a babysitter, why had they put me with her? She was a good inves
tigator. Why was she getting stuck with this job?
I’d heard Bruno was in charge of PIs now. Maybe he’d put me with her to try and make a fool of me. Get me a babysitter and hope I quit out of embarrassment. Or maybe she was lying about the whole thing. Maybe she knew exactly what had happened. Bruno could have put her up to this – assigned her to keep an eye on me, waiting for me to put one toe out of line so he would have an excuse to fire me and get rid of me once and for all.
Great. Ten minutes into my first day back and already it felt like they were trying to get rid of me.
Standing, we walked out of the cafe. The sun was bright, but it didn’t do much to offset the cool temperature, especially on a day as windy as this.
“I’ll drive,” I volunteered.
“Of course you will,” said Natalia. “I’m still seeing double from last night.”
Right, so she’d drunk the whiskey the night before. That was a good thing, right? It wasn’t like she’d had it for breakfast, poured over her cereal or something.
“I got my car this morning,” I said, mostly because I wasn’t sure what else to say.
“I figured,” she replied, walking along beside me. For someone who was apparently seeing double, she was doing an admirable job of walking in a straight line. “It’s your first day. That’s what they do. Give you a car and a case. Hope your ride isn’t as shitty as the investigation they dumped on you.”
I laughed. “Not quite. Luckily Bruno’s not in charge of the car allocation so I didn’t get given a minivan.” I swallowed, realising too late I’d just accidentally said something negative about my boss. Shit. I couldn’t do that until I was sure that Natalia wasn’t friends with him. I glanced across at her, waiting to see how she’d respond.