BOOKER Box Set #2 (A Private Investigator Thriller Series of Crime and Suspense): Volumes 4-6

by John W. Mefford

  “Can you tell us the last time you saw Natalie Lopes?”

  He smacked the desk, then pointed a finger at us. “I knew it. I told you I recognized the name. Damn, I’m good.”

  And full of shit, but I kept to myself for now. “And?”

  Shifting back in his chair, he returned to his favorite pastime, fingertip popping, his expression unfazed by my question.

  “Natalie. Geez, it’s been a while. What, maybe a month ago, the last time she and the crew rolled through town? Big shoot down on the beach. She could draw quite a crowd.”

  “You haven’t seen Natalie in a month?” Alisa leaned forward, her smile long since gone.

  “Too young to be her mom. Older sister or cousin?” Another smile split his stubbled face.

  “Sister.”

  “We know about your fascination with Natalie,” I said.

  He shifted his eyes between the two of us, a smug smirk washing over his face. “Tell me this isn’t why you traveled across the country.”

  “I’m not here to convince you of anything. Natalie has not been seen or heard from in ten days. We’re talking to everyone who’s been in contact with her recently. Especially those who had…a bit of an infatuation.”

  “You’re not with PPI are you?”

  “You called Natalie twenty-seven—”

  Another smack on his desk. This one sent loose papers flying. “Don’t come into my office and ignore me. That’s disrespectful. Don’t disrespect me. Understood?”

  Instantly, I could feel a ring of fire form around my neck. I grabbed a fistful of my jeans to keep me from lunging across the table to grab a fistful of Luna.

  From my wallet, I pulled out a card and jabbed it in front of his face. “I’m a licensed private investigator. I’m a former cop with the Dallas Police Department. I know people who are in the business of prosecuting smug assholes who prey on young women who don’t know better.”

  He shifted his chair back and forth in quick jukes, while scratching his sandpaper face again.

  “So I called her twenty-seven times. Whatever. That doesn’t mean shit.”

  “It means you’re not worth a shit,” Alisa spouted off, her index finger firing a laser beam of anger right at him.

  “You were pissed that Natalie shunned your advances. You weren’t used to it. So you hired someone to kidnap her.” I paused, shifted my eyes to Alisa then back to Luna. “Or worse.”

  Luna narrowed his eyes. Slowly, the corners of his mouth turned upward until a crooked grin formed. A quick chuckle seemed to escape his gut. It paused, then it resumed, growing louder with each second, until it finally filled up the entire office. He closed his eyes, rocked his head back, his face turning red.

  I glanced at Alisa then back at Luna, for a moment wondering if he’d lost his marbles.

  “Do you know how many—” Luna started but couldn’t finish because of his unstoppable laughter.

  I wanted to reach across the desk and pop his jaw with a right cross. But it wasn’t about my personal satisfaction.

  “Do you know how many floozies come through this city just like your bimbo sister? I’ve been with ten girls just like her since then. She’s nothing more than candy. There’s always another flavor just as sweet.”

  Alisa leaped out of her seat, lunging forward, flailing her arms at Luna. He shoved his chair back just as I took hold of my partner, catching a misfired fingernail on the side of my face.

  “He’s just baiting us, Alisa. He’s not worth it,” I said into her ear, her body rigid with tension, still leaning forward.

  Heat radiated off her skin, and I could see her neck throbbing at a feverish cadence as breath pushed through her lips. Her usually warm, amber eyes were shooting red laser beams at Luna.

  After twenty seconds, Alisa’s body stopped pressing forward and her arms began to bend. I eased her back into her chair, her sights still firing rocket launchers at the asshole on the other side of the desk.

  “Hey,” I said, but her glare stayed on Luna.

  Facing my partner head-on, I grabbed both shoulders. “Alisa, you can’t let yourself fall in a hole right now. I need you. Natalie needs you.”

  Her eyes finally met mine, and instantly I could see the faucets flip on. “I’m sorry, Booker. I just couldn’t take it any longer. I couldn’t.” She wiped smeared makeup from under her eye.

  “Take in a deep breath.” We both inhaled at the same time and then pushed out air.

  “This ain’t no fucking Lamaze class, you know. You’re still in the office of Benjamin Luna.”

  She glanced over my shoulder, but I shifted my neck to get her attention. “Ignore him. He’s just a worthless piece of shit. You’ll be okay.”

  “Thanks, Booker,” she said with a congested tone.

  Turning on a dime, I walked around the desk. Luna lifted from his chair and reached for a drawer. Just as his hand pulled the chrome handle out a couple of inches, my knee slammed it shut.

  “I’m going to call security,” he barked, his chest bowing up against mine.

  “Is your phone in your desk drawer?”

  “Uh…”

  My breath bounced off his forehead. He didn’t budge. “I think you were reaching for something else.” Without changing my sights, my right hand grabbed the drawer handle, pulled it open, and found the butt of a handgun. Raising it in my hand, I saw his eyes glance down.

  “Italian-made Beretta M9.” My forefinger reached for the safety—it wasn’t locked. “What is a chief marketing officer doing with a handgun in his desk?” I stepped on the ends of his shiny leather shoes.

  “Watch where you’re stepping. These shoes cost me a boatload of—”

  Shifting my weight to my toes, I pushed his chest straight back.

  “Ahh!” He tipped over like a blue spruce that had just been chopped down, the top of his back falling into his chair seat. With his sport coat up around his neck, his hands began to slide down the chair arms.

  I took a step away just as his chair scooted back and he dropped to the floor on his elbows with a thud.

  “Shit. I got a bad shoulder,” he said, wincing.

  “What do you know, Benjamin? You and I have something in common.”

  I popped the ammo magazine out of the M9 and stuck it in my pocket.

  “That’s not yours.”

  “I’m just borrowing it.”

  “Borrow, my ass. That’s a theft. I could call the cops on you.”

  I chuckled while placing the M9 in the back of my jeans. “Sounds like a challenge to me. Alisa, do you want to call the Miami Police Department? Benjamin here is eager to bring in law enforcement.”

  Alisa reached for her purse, pulled out her phone, and began tapping the screen.

  “Hold on, hold on,” he said, on his knees, peering over his desk. “I’ll do the MPD a favor and just ask you to leave.”

  “I’m sure they appreciate having community leaders like yourself,” I said. “You never answered my question. Why do you of all people have an unlocked gun in your desk? Don’t tell me you’ve adopted a new employee motivational technique.”

  “Nunya,” he said while glaring at me.

  I felt certain something nefarious was going on, but nothing extraordinary triggered an additional connection to Natalie. “Do you like your job, Benjamin?”

  “What?” he snarled.

  “Do. You. Like. Your. Job…asshole?”

  “Yeah, sure. Whatever. It has its perks.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. We’re going back to Dallas. If we learn that you had anything to do with Natalie’s disappearance, or have any knowledge of what might have happened to her, then I’m going to fly back and personally deliver your gun back to you.”

  He glanced out the window to the ocean then back at me. “I don’t know anything about her disappearance. I just know they don’t teach respect in Texas.”

  “It’s obvious you’ve mastered the art of respect.” I rolled my eyes. “By the way, if we fin
d no more evidence connecting you to Natalie’s disappearance, I’ll mail your gun back to you.”

  “You’ll see. Outside of those twenty-something phone calls, I never talked to her, saw her, had anyone do anything to her. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right.” I walked back around the desk and held out my arm for Alisa.

  “Later, asshole,” Alisa said over her shoulder as we walked out his office door.

  Minutes later, we pushed through the glass door, and the humidity hit me like an eight-foot wave.

  “Ooh.” Alisa plucked a toothy hairclip from her purse and hoisted a handful of hair into a ball at the back of her head. For a moment, her hair appeared to defy gravity, since the hairclip matched her golden locks.

  “What you looking at?” she asked as we tugged open the car doors.

  “Just your funky hair. That’s a lot to deal with.”

  “I’ve had crazy hair as long as I can remember. It only occasionally gets in my way.”

  We meandered through the lot, which was now full of cars, many of which were bright colors with only two doors.

  “Any guess which one belongs to Luna?” I asked, shifting our Camry into drive and cranking the AC.

  “That’s gotta be it.” Alisa popped my shoulder to look out her window.

  It was a yellow sports car with doors that opened from the side. The license plate read PLAYBOY.

  “Hold on,” she said, sifting through her purse. She opened her door and walked to the cheesy car, leaning over the hood.

  What the hell?

  She flipped around and jogged a few steps back to the car. Once inside, she looked out her window and admired her work.

  “Damn, you’re good.” I kept staring at what she’d written on the hood using a black shoe polish pen: Asshole Gigolo.

  She cracked up, then raised her hand and we traded fist bumps.

  “What if we didn’t get the right car?” I asked with a wry smile.

  Curling her lips in, she said, “Whoever owns that car deserves a wake-up call, regardless.”

  “Is there anything you don’t carry in that purse?”

  “All the essentials a woman needs. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  I pulled the Camry up to the edge of the lot facing Dade Boulevard and popped the blinker to turn right.

  Looking at her phone, Alisa said, “Let’s go back this other way. Go left on Dade. It’s quicker back to the airport, and we’ll get a different view of the island.”

  I took a left, and we cruised at about thirty miles per hour, checking out glass office towers and condos all around us, flanked by water inlets. I thought about Maggie, my old sidekick on a case a few months back. The former DEA agent-turned PI was based in this area, from what she’d told us.

  Maggie had arrived in Dallas to find her father at the exact same time I was in the crosshairs of a sniper assassin in North Dallas. We got out of that mess alive, but over the ensuing twenty-four hours, she shed a lot of tears, and we shared almost every emotion two people can feel while hunting down a murderer. It felt like we had a bond, maybe something more, but it was hard to tell. Her heart was put through a meat grinder because of her dad.

  I thought about giving her a call, maybe grabbing a quick bite of lunch before our flight took off for Dallas. I glanced back at Alisa. While her spontaneous gesture to Luna and every asshole like him elicited a needed tension breaker, I didn’t want our visit to Miami to seem like a social visit. Her psyche was delicate, and rightly so.

  Despite a few leads and a few terse conversations, we’d yet to stumble on the one piece of hard evidence that would open the door to what happened to Natalie. Like Alisa, I’d kept my spirits up, thinking, hoping we’d find Natalie alive. I wouldn’t let myself ponder the alternative for more than a few seconds.

  But I also knew I couldn’t ignore evidence that steered the investigation toward the worst-case scenario—Natalie dead. I’d dealt with a lot of arrogant pricks when I worked for the DPD and a few since I traded my badge for a PI license. Luna had some shit going on in his life, the gun told me as much. But a prick like that didn’t seem like he’d waste more than a drunken night on Natalie. While he’d been so infatuated by Natalie that he’d completely ignored the overtures from Des, the producer, I just couldn’t see his ego wasting much more time on her. It didn’t fit the persona.

  “I need a thirty-second pit stop,” I said, turning into an upscale gas station parking lot. I pulled over to the side, parked in the shade.

  “It only takes a guy that long?” Alisa asked.

  I smiled. “You need anything inside?”

  “I’m good.”

  I glanced around the lot and found only one person filling up a white Infiniti sedan. Lifting from the car, I walked down the sidewalk to the back corner of the property, a foul odor pinching my nostrils. Approaching a white fence that encased two dumpsters, I took another quick peek around me, then tossed the Beretta in the left bin and the magazine of ammo in the right bin.

  Back in the car, I pulled out of the lot, heading west on Dade. A towering building on the left reflected the sun’s rays directly into my eyes. I’d forgotten my sunglasses, so I had to use my hand to hide the glare. Just as quickly, two buildings closer to the road gave us a shadow cover, and my shoulders relaxed. My mind went right back to the case.

  “Do you have the PPI client list printout on you?”

  She began riffling through her purse, removing all sorts of shit, including shoe polish, a pack of gum, makeup, some type of hair product called Frizz Free, a fist full of keys, a scarred red wallet that appeared to have fallen into a running garbage disposal. “I know it’s in here somewhere.”

  I bit my tongue, knowing that giving a woman advice on how to organize her life would only turn the spotlight on the imperfections in my own.

  “Wait.” She held up a finger then shuffled through the mess of items she’d tossed on the floor and picked up her wallet. She unsnapped it, then pulled out a wad of paper about an inch thick. I think it had been folded about six times.

  “I didn’t want to lose it.” She winked at me, seemingly waiting for me to react. Instead, I looked outside the car and noticed the buildings we were passing had increased in number of years built but had dropped in size and quality.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  “I keep replaying the conversation with Zahi on our way to the airport in Dallas. When we asked why he was on the PPI client list, he had a good excuse—his company had used PPI talent for some brochures and website images,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “I’m struggling to understand why he wouldn’t have told me that when we had our first interaction at the gala.”

  “I’ll look at it from another perspective. Zahi is running a thriving, global business. He’s always traveling, and there’s no way he can keep up with every detail of the business.”

  “True,” I said. “But Human Resources or Finance doesn’t have anything to do with models or talent. Remember, he claims to have loved Natalie. So, you think he’d connect anything that had to do with her life, PPI included.”

  Alisa rested her hands on her purse and the crumpled paper, her eyes staring straight ahead. Then she picked up the papers and flipped through the pages.

  “What are you checking?” I asked.

  Her finger stopped on a row, then it slid to the right. “Normally, they list the talent and producer associated with a shoot. Not on this row.”

  “So, we can’t pull someone like Des into a room and quiz that person about the shoot,” I said.

  “But why would he lie about it? That’s the part that doesn’t add up,” Alisa said.

  The passageway narrowed to two lanes as we passed Alton Road, the traffic much lighter.

  “Why didn’t he show up on the earlier list? I’m assuming Bree filtered the data incorrectly when she created the first report for Tiara.”

  “You just answered your own que
stion.” Alisa shot a glance at me, arching an eyebrow.

  “Why would Bree filter out any data?” I asked.

  “Maybe the list includes everyone in their virtual rolodex, even people they’d met just once at a party, people who could be future clients. Then Bree would have a need to filter the data,” Alisa said.

  “Damn, you’re good.” I chewed the inside of my cheek, trying to determine if I still believed there was a hole in Zahi’s story.

  “What’s the timing of when Zahi met Natalie to when Zahi’s company used PPI? Not sure what it will tell us, but I need to see that information and let it marinate a bit.”

  “According to this spreadsheet, the PPI talent shoot was the twenty-third of February. When did Zahi say he met Natalie?” Alisa asked.

  “I believe he said about three months ago. Didn’t give me a specific date. Another follow-up for Zahi.” I turned my head to give Alisa the look.

  Wham!

  Out of nowhere, it felt like a tank had slammed into the Camry. The first thing I saw was Alisa’s head smack her window, cracking the glass, as my arms were thrown off the steering wheel. A heart-splitting wail of metal ripping apart, then the car fishtailed. Another slam right into my door, and my neck whiplashed. Looking left, I only saw a black steel grill up to the top of my window, and the next thing I knew the car was being shoved down the road sideways. A sickening smog of burning rubber filled my senses.

  “Booker!” Alisa yelled out.

  I reached over and draped an arm across her, thinking it could somehow keep her safe from the steel monster destroying our car. Just as I took a breath, we got smacked again, this time on the passenger’s side. Swinging my sights around, I saw a mangled metal cage.

  “Fuck!”

  A quick memory: We’d started to cross a bridge just before we got hit. The tank had plowed us into the bridge’s side railing. The metal fence was about six feet above the railing.

  “Dammit!” The front right side lifted for a moment, then crashed back down. Part of the car now hung off the bridge, as the mangled steel cage carved into the windshield, creating another ear-piercing whine.

  The crunching and splitting of steel felt like it originated in my gut.

  The momentum eased for a second, and with it, the horrific sounds paused. I glanced left and saw the black metal grill just before it slammed into my side again. Alisa screamed like I’d never heard before.