“But officer, I didn’t know she was a…” – he turned to look at Lady Bareback – “a… um… you know…”
“Young man,” the cop said, “you are in a whole world of trouble. Step out of the car.”
T.D.’s face screwed into a mask of anguish. Troy almost felt sorry for the man. He lumbered out of the car.
“Hands behind your back,” the cop said, reaching into his belt and slapping handcuffs on T.D.
“Oh, hell no, he didn’t?” the soldier said. “Those things ain’t even real. He’ll know they’re fake in no time.”
“Nah,” Troy shook his head, “he’s scared out of his mind. He ain’t gonna figure that out.”
The cop jerked T.D. by the shoulder, whirling him around to face him. He pointed toward Lady Bareback, who was looking into the visor mirror and reapplying her lipstick.
“You tellin’ me you didn’t know what line of work she was in, young man?”
“No, sir,” T.D. said and shook his head violently, “she just asked to use my phone. Said she needed a ride. So, I just let her sit in the car for a minute.”
“Yeah,” the cop said, “well tell it to the judge. Stay right here.”
He walked a few feet away from T.D. and pretended to speak into his walkie-talkie.
“Got a ten-one-two out here at the Mariner,” he said in completely believable cop-speak. “Gonna need a wagon.”
T.D.’s face, which was a picture of pain and suffering, got even worse. Huge alligator tears began to fall from the man’s eyes.
“Officer,” he said, “I ain’t never done nothin’ wrong in my life. You gotta believe me. I just came down here with my boss, Eddie. We’s just visiting a friend.”
The cop let a long painful silence hang between them. He opened his mouth to speak just as Eddie Vargo came strolling out of the building. Seeing the police officer and T.D. in cuffs, he stopped suddenly. Troy started to say something to him, but he darted to the left and took off running.
“Dangit,” Troy said and started to chase him.
“No, no,” said the soldier, grabbing him, “best to let him go. He thinks his boy is gettin’ arrested. He’ll get outta dodge quicker than a knife through shit.”
“Through butter,” the construction worker corrected him.
“Whatever,” the soldier said, shrugging.
Troy looked back at T.D. Oddly, the cop was turned away from him and trying desperately not to laugh. Confused, Troy wondered what the heck was happening that was so funny. And then he saw it. T.D.’s pants were soaked. The big guy had peed his pants… literally. Lady Bareback was stepping out of the car and trotting her way down the street.
“Shit,” the cop barked, “she’s getting away!”
He quickly undid the cuffs on T.D.’s wrists.
“You’re lucky this time, punk,” he said as he ran after Lady Bareback, “now get out of here. Don’t come back down to these parts or you’re going away for a long time.”
T.D. nodded vigorously. He ducked into the car and squealed away.
Troy finally laughed out loud and the group behind him clapped and cheered as the police officer and the lady walked back toward them. As they approached the applauding group, Lady Bareback stopped and curtsied.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Bodean,” she said, and winked at him. “Now, come on fellas, I need to get some sleep before your next show tonight. Sugar, why don’t you come out and see just how good these boys are?”
Troy shook his head. “I wish I could, but this murder thing still has me runnin’ around in circles like a chicken with its head cut off.”
Lady Bareback took his head in her hands and kissed him on the forehead. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said, “I thought for sure that video would help you notice something you hadn’t seen before.”
Troy opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it. He’d forgotten all about the video. Maybe he’d run through it again and see if he found anything new. He didn’t think that was likely.
As the flamboyantly dressed group walked away from him, the doors to the Mariner Grove opened and Becky came out with Alain close behind.
“We saw everything from the window,” Becky said. “What happened? Were those the guys? What did they say? Where are they now? Did you find anything out?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa now, darlin’.” Troy held up his hands in a surrendering gesture. “They’re gone for now, but I don’t know if they’ll be back or not. Might’ve run ‘em off with their tails tucked, but once they start thinkin’ ‘bout their paintin’ and their money again, they’ll probly be back.”
He nodded to Alain. “Best you lay low. Can Becky stay with you for a while – at least until this blows over?”
“Sure thing,” Alain said, “but no burpees allowed.”
Becky smacked him playfully on the shoulder.
“Okay, cool,” Troy said and started walking away. “I’ve got some TV to catch up on.”
41
But Now I See…
Troy Bodean slid the DVD copy of the surveillance video taken the night of Tayler’s suicide/murder into the player. While he waited for the menu to load, he walked into the kitchen and jerked open the refrigerator door. Inside was a Styrofoam box of old… really old… Chinese takeout, a crusty bottle of spicy mustard, about a third of an orange, a half empty carton of milk with a date from the middle of last year, a single slice of bologna, and two Coronas.
He slid the piece of meat from its plastic wrap, smelled it to confirm it was still good – bologna being one of two things that would survive a nuclear war, roaches being the other – and stuck it in his mouth. He pulled out the piece of orange and one of the beers.
“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said to no one, laying the orange on the counter and popping the top off the beer.
He sliced the orange into thin wedges and shoved one down into the Corona – he’d always preferred orange to lime in his beer. It reminded him of Mindy, but like the orange, he shoved that memory back down into the dark recesses of his past.
A chime echoed from the TV, letting him know his DVD had loaded and was awaiting his selection. He walked into the living room, plopped down on the couch, pointed the remote at the screen, and clicked the file date-stamped: August 16th, 2017 – the night Tayler committed suicide… or was murdered.
As the DVD whirred and loaded, Troy wondered if maybe all of this was a farce. Did he really even know that Tayler hadn’t actually committed suicide? Sure, the painting had been stolen, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they’d also been involved in his former roommate’s death.
As the video feed of the fateful evening began to play out on the screen, Troy paused, rewound, forwarded, and paused again, examining the whole night for anything… any detail that he thought might shed some light on the events that would happen after Tayler left the club, leading to his demise.
In short, the group of friends – Becky Patton, Alain Montgomery, RayRay Tishomura, and Tayler Evan – all entered the club around 9:15 p.m. This would’ve put them there shortly after the exhibition of Savannah Smiling was opened at Jepson. They were celebrating, and as such, there was a lot of alcohol flowing… except for Becky. She’d been saving herself for the taping of the ninja show after that. So, there was at least one alibi for the people who he knew had been with Tayler on the night he died. Becky had been checked in with the ninja show and hadn’t left all night.
As he watched the video again and again, he devised a new tactic. He began to view the entire sequence of the night watching only one person. He started with Becky. She was a social butterfly. Dressed in a form-fitting black dress, showing off the muscles she’d gotten from a lot of crossfit training, she flitted around the room talking to several different men at the bar… most of whom did not seem interested.
She did finally get the attention of one older man sitting at the far end of the bar. The camera was farther away from the south end and the picture wasn’t the highest definition, but Tr
oy knew the man. He couldn’t place exactly who he was, but he felt sure he’d seen him before. Maybe he’d seen him there on the night that he’d… performed. Becky had her arm around him obscuring most of his face, but it was clear the guy was older… definitely too old for her. But he proceeded to buy her a shot, which she took straight down the bar and handed to Tayler. He chugged it down with several others – the kid was definitely putting away some alcohol. Shortly after that, Becky excused herself… heading out to her competition.
Troy rewound the video and watched Alain throughout the night. He wasn’t sure if anything could’ve been more boring. The kid parked on a stool next to Tayler and didn’t move. He bought a few beers, bought some shots for Tayler, and that was it. He didn’t talk to anyone else, he didn’t dance, he didn’t tip anyone on stage… nothing, nada, zilch. Troy wondered if he’d been embarrassed to be there. He sympathized with the kid.
In the next viewing he focused on watching Samantha. Her night was much the same as Alain’s. She sat on the other side of Tayler. She didn’t drink much, but she did toast a few times and grimace down a few shots. She did also make one trip to the stage with Tayler to tip one of the dancers. She’d more or less been his crutch, as he was starting to get a bit stumbly. Tayler handed her a bunch of crumpled bills and then threw a few more into the air… making it rain on the stage. When they got back to the bar, three more shots had appeared for her, Alain and Tayler. She shook her head no and slid the shot over to the man-of-the-moment. He grinned and took it and it was gone right after the last.
Troy wasn’t sure what they were shooting, but it was a bunch of dark liquid… maybe Jaeger… and plenty to have made anyone pliable, and more than enough to blot out any memory of that night.
As the evening came to a close in this viewing, he watched as Alain put Tayler’s arm over his shoulders and nearly dragged him out the door, with Samantha and RayRay close behind. Huh… RayRay? That was odd. Troy rewound the feed of the bar and skimmed through the video again. No sign of RayRay. He rewound all the way to watch them come in. RayRay, tapping his cane, made his way in with them, then almost immediately excused himself from the group and remained out of sight for the rest of the night… until they carried Tayler out.
Troy clicked the back button and began to search through the feeds from various other locations in the bar. RayRay wasn’t at the stage. He wasn’t out back on the smoker’s porch. He wasn’t downstairs in the super-secret techno dance cave. And then he found him. In the back. In a champagne room.
“RayRay,” Troy muttered with a grin, “you dirty little fella, you.”
He watched the feed as RayRay was led back to the back by a shorter, not-so-attractive dancer. Troy remembered the Peppermint Hippo’s slogan in Vegas – 46 beautiful girls and 1 ugly one. Perhaps RayRay was the performer’s target market. She led him into the small cubicle and closed the curtain. Unfortunately for Troy – but maybe fortunate for the customers – the camera didn’t record what happened in the private room. What happens in the champagne room stays in the champagne room, Troy thought to himself.
He fast-forwarded through the feed until RayRay emerged on the dancer’s arm. She had a bunch of new dollar bills stuffed into the garter on her left leg. It was practically bursting at the seams. And in fact, it did burst. As they walked out of the room, the garter let go and the bills showered down all over the place. Troy could see the girl mouth the words oh shit as she bent down and began clutching up her money.
Naturally, being the gentleman that he was, RayRay knelt down and began to help her pick up the money too.
Huh… that’s odd, Troy thought. He watched in slow motion as the blind Japanese kid deftly picked up and sorted the bills, turning them so they all faced up, and in the same direction. Sorted perfectly.
“Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” Troy said, sipping the last of his Corona.
He jogged to the kitchen and got the last beer. Shoving an orange slice into it, he rewound the tape and watched again as RayRay helped the dancer pick up her money and arrange it neatly into an organized stack of bills.
“RayRay ain’t blind,” Troy said to the TV.
The tape played along and RayRay stood up and began to tap his way out of the picture. That was where the other feed with the group of friends would find him joining them to leave. Troy leaned back and inhaled deeply.
“What the hell does that mean?” he wondered aloud.
The video ran on and then came another shock. The bathroom door, that just happened to be on the opposite side of the hall from the private rooms, opened. The older man, who had been sitting at the end of the bar and bought a shot for Becky, stepped out of the men’s room, and suddenly Troy knew who he was… Bobo Gladmore, the older janitor from the Jepson. He was there… and had been near Tayler the night he’d… died…
The feed ended and the DVD’s screensaver began bouncing up and down the TV. Troy sat motionless, only moving occasionally to take a sip of his beer. He sat that way until it was empty.
“Dangit,” he muttered as he sat down the empty bottle.
42
Puzzled
Troy studied the empty Corona bottle and things began to click into place like a puzzle… A puzzle that you didn’t have the box for so you had no idea what image you were piecing together. His first thought was that he had no idea who he should find first; Bobo? Or RayRay? If only he had some kind of G.P.S. to help him locate… Holy hell, he thought, the G.P.S. in the rental car. He was sure the thugs had turned it back in, and it was only a swift phone call to the rental place to find out that, yes, it was indeed in their garage, ready to be cleaned up and rented again. He also found that they usually wiped the G.P.S. units of recent addresses, but that they hadn’t yet gotten to the Civic.
“Can you do me a favor?” Troy asked the kid on the phone at the desk.
“Uh, sure,” the kid said.
“Can you run and check the G.P.S. and give me the very first address on it in the recently found locations?”
“Um, okay,” he said uncertainly. “Are you a cop or something?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Troy lied, “and I’m in kind of a hurry.”
“You’re not gonna tell anybody about this, right?”
“Nope.”
“Cool,” he said, apparently laying the phone down, “hang on a sec.”
“Roger that,” Troy said.
After a couple of minutes, the kid came back on the line. “Okay, here it is,” he said. “You got a pencil?”
“Better’n that, dude,” Troy answered, “I got a steel trap of a memory.”
“Um, okay.”
“Yeah, just give it to me, kid,” Troy said. “I’ll remember it.”
“Mmkay, it’s 520, Bourne Avenue,” he said.
As Troy heard the address, another piece clicked into place… He knew it well, as he’d been out there many times with a truck to pick up and drop off artwork that had been shipped in or shipped out. It was the Airport Mini Storage.
“Dangit, Bobo,” he said as he hung up the receiver, “whatchu got ya’self into now?”
He got up from the couch and walked into the bedroom. He’d done the same thing so many times, but still, it had been quite a while since he took his gun out of the shoebox on the top shelf of his closet. The Beretta M9 was cold as he checked the slide and tucked it into his waistband. Opening the app on his phone, he ordered a local taxi shuttle out to the airport.
Within five minutes, the car was waiting outside. He debated about telling someone where he was going, but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure why… but something inside, something about protecting Bobo, made him decide to go it alone.
He wasn’t sure what he was going to find at the storage building, but he had an idea. Probably find Samantha – or Samantha’s body – in a box, long gone and decay—
He forced himself to stop that line of thinking. No, rather, he’d find her tied up and rescue her like he’d done a few times before…
Yes, this would turn out just like the others, all well and good. He wondered if he really believed that. As he rode, he wondered what he would do when he confronted Bobo. Shoot him? No. No, he would make Bobo come with him and turn him in to the police. The guy was old and gray… and not that healthy to boot. Yeah, that was how it was gonna go down. He and Bobo would go to the police together and they’d figure out why – and how – this had all happened.
The cab driver pulled into the lot some twenty minutes later and the tires crunched on the gravel a lot louder than Troy would’ve liked. But that was okay; Bobo didn’t know he was coming.
“Dangit, Bobo,” Troy muttered as he paid the driver and crunched down the rows of storage units to the one he knew was leased by the museum. The door was closed, but the lock wasn’t on the loop. Troy pulled his Beretta from his waistband and took a deep breath.
43
Didn’t See That Coming
The thief had opened the lock as quietly as possible and had been exceptionally careful not to make any noise when entering the storage unit. There would be no surprise attack this time. The bitch would be weak from a lack of food and likely the spunk had been beaten out of her since last time.
Sliding into the unit with a crowbar raised high, the thief was on high alert until he was sure the girl was still firmly tied to the chair. She was apparently unconscious or asleep… her head was lolled to one side. He paused in the door for a second to be sure it wasn’t a ruse, and when she remained motionless, the thief entered fully and closed the door behind him.
Throwing the crowbar to the floor, the thief made sure the clatter was loud enough to wake her. Sure enough, she moaned, and her head rose upright.
The Complete Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Collection Page 87