“He always carries a notebook with his hand curled around it. I’ve never seen his left fingernails.” She squinted her eyes at Tim. “Why?”
“If I ever need him. My identities can’t just appear out of nowhere.” He explained, pulling that notebook out of his bag.
Kissy shook her head. “Look, wouldn’t it just be easier to call Avi?”
“Would he do it?” Tim asked.
Kissy looked down and picked at the edge of a stack of rubber mats with the toe of her boot. “He’ll do it if it means he gets to see me.”
“But won’t your goody two shoes boyfriend want us to go through the proper channels?”
She sighed and gave him a look he remembered well from high school. “Don’t you usually ask your clients if they’ve tried that?”
“Yeah,” he admitted, “I do.”
“So let him ask her.” Kissy shrugged. “If she can handle it legally, wouldn’t that be better?”
“Yeah.” Tim said again. He slid the doodle-covered notebook back into his satchel. “Okay, give him a call.”
After all her arguments, Kissy looked surprised. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes.” Tim grinned. “I will pay good money to see Officer Avi Kee pretending to be a killer.”
Eight
A cold wind bit through the heavy overcoat Avi had slung on over his street clothes. He shivered and glanced over his shoulder at the back door. The client was late.
It was dark. He could see the white crests on the water and heard it slapping against the wall beneath him. He could see the distant lights of the dead docks and beyond that the glow of light from the hospital lounge. But he could barely see his hands on the railing. The stars and sliver of a moon were hidden by thick storm clouds. Plus Tim had unscrewed the light bulbs in each of the three tin lamps attached to the back of the Circus Freaks warehouse.
Avi had planned to skulk in a shadow for the meeting but there were no shadows. His long heather gray coat and dark skin made him almost invisible in the dark night despite his height.
A sound made him turn in time to see the back door of the specialty gym gliding shut. Before the light was cut off, he saw a forties woman wearing expensive workout clothes sporting that odd but recently fashionable gray hair color. She held a large purse to her chest like a child’s teddy bear.
Avi had met a few of Tim’s clients before so he didn’t know why he was surprised. He’d expected a woman more along the lines of Vanessa, the client who had hired Tim to kill Avi. A man could be attracted to Vanessa. He could mistake her for a normal, decent human being. But you’d never think of her as meek.
This client was meek. She was scared. It showed in every twitch of her body as she took a few steps away from the safety of the building, searching around before her eyes could have become adjusted to the darkness. This woman was the opposite of a Vanessa. Avi felt sorry for this woman.
He belatedly reached into his pocket and slipped the cigarette between his lips. Tim had told him the light would let Evelyn know he was her contact. Avi turned the flame height to maximum with a flick of his thumb. Then he flipped the lighter and sparked it.
The poor woman whipped her head around at the sudden sound and Avi wondered if she might jackrabbit. He let the flame die. She put a hand over her eyes and squinted in his direction but she didn’t move. Avi sighed. He raised the lighter again and this time, he pulled on the cigarette as he held the flame to its end.
The cancer stick caught and Avi nearly doubled over coughing. It felt just like it had years ago when he’d tried a cigarette with his little brother. The thing tasted like ash but he could understand why some folks would enjoy the buzz that spiked in his brain. When he’d caught his breath, he dropped the lighter into his pocket and wiped his eyes.
“Are you the KC?”
He barely heard Evelyn’s nervous whisper. She’d stopped about five feet away from him, pulling at the collar of her lime green running jacket. Avi considered saying she had the wrong guy. This woman was hiring him to kill a man. She’d come out onto the isolated docks in the black night and approached a mysterious stranger she thought to be a killer and she was nearly paralyzed with fear. Avi was intrigued. He wanted to know why.
So he moved closer and answered in the words Tim had told him to use. “I’m the KC. Do you have a challenge for me?”
Avi looked down to let the brim of the cap hide his eyes a bit, but the woman didn’t seem to want to see his face. She kept her eyes averted as she handed him a thick tan envelope with names written up and down both sides. Her hand shook and she drew it back so quickly that the envelope fell to the ground between them. Evelyn gave a little yelp that sounded like she was going to burst into tears.
“I’ve got it.” Avi bent to pick it up.
He stood, unwinding the string from the closures. A key on a green string fell from the envelope but he caught it in one large hand. He slipped a finger through the green loop as he rifled through the rest of the contents. The envelope held many bundles of cash, a roughly torn photograph of a man’s face with an address written on the back, and three sheets of paper.
He looked at the shivering woman. “Why not go to the police?”
“I did.” She whispered. “They didn’t believe me. When they called him, he bought our son a skateboard before he came to get me.”
Avi waited but she didn’t say anything else. He pulled the double side printed sheets of paper out of the envelope. They were a listing of dates and diagnoses on the letterhead of Dr. James Fuller, orthopedist.
Evelyn squeaked, “Proof.” She glanced up at Avi and quickly looked away. “You said you needed proof.”
Avi held the sheets, but he watched the woman. She stared at his feet and futzed with the strap of her purse. He almost understood why Tim had become a killer. He watched Evelyn and thought of all the other victims he’d seen in his job. She was just a little too familiar. He needed his own proof.
“Can I see your eye?”
Evelyn looked up, mouth agape. He watched her one eye blink several times as she struggled for something to say. After a moment her shoulders dropped. She took in a deep breath and let it out. Then she reached up and after one more pause, swept the hair off her face and held it with a hand over her ear. She kept her face turned sideways and Avi saw a tear fall from the corner of her eye even though he was staring fixedly at the swollen blue bruise beneath a gash held closed by three butterfly bandages and a stripe of super glue.
Nine
Kissy sulked a little as she rode in the smooth leather bucket seat of Avi’s car. It was a nice car. He was a nice guy. She just couldn’t get a memory out of her head. She didn’t remember the pain of the knife on her throat. She didn’t remember being moved from the hospital lounge to the operating room. She didn’t remember anything after the old man threw himself out of the window with her bomb. But she did remember Avi. She remembered him looking at her, looking at her bleeding neck, and then running after that woman.
Tim had stayed. Julia told Kissy that they’d had to pull Tim from her side when they rolled her off to the OR. She almost remembered his gray eyes holding hers until the very last minute. But she definitely remembered Avi leaving her.
She turned the key over in her hands. A small key on a short green ribbon. She ran her thumb over the roughly engraved DS933 on its head. Dock 9, storage unit 33. She was going with Avi to the old semi-retired shipping center to see if Randall Crella’s secret shipping container held any proof of criminal activity that would allow Officer Kee to make an argument for arrest over murder.
“Looks like the containers are pretty widely spaced. I’ll park here and we can circle around to check all the numbers.” Avi pulled the car to a stop beside the double row of static shipping containers. “Are you sure you don’t want my coat?”
“I’m fine. Thanks.” Kissy had left her coat at Circus Freaks. She didn’t want to have to make up an excuse to Julia for why she was leaving.
They slid out of the
car beside a big red container with the number 29 stenciled on the side. After a look at Avi, Kissy jogged to the right. There were two more containers fit into the space before the edge of the large dock.
“Thirty!” She called to Avi who’d strolled over to check the number on the nearest container to the left of twenty-nine.
“Twenty-eight!” He called back.
They met back by the car, beside unit twenty-nine.
“Looks like our unit is just over on the water side row.” He gestured for Kissy to follow him between units 28 and 29. “I wonder where security is? This isn’t a very big dock.”
“Mayor Sutton just assigned the patrol to a private security firm. The Police Commissioner was not thrilled.” Kissy ran one hand along the corrugated sides of the two containers. She had her head down, watching the uneven ground. When Avi stopped short, she ran right into him.
“What?” she asked.
“How do you know that?” Avi asked.
Kissy tilted his head at him. “I bartend at a cop bar.”
“Right.” Avi didn’t turn back around and keep walking through. He stood still and watched Kissy.
She asked again, “What?”
“You’re beautiful.”
Kissy ducked her head. Avi put a hand under her chin and lifted her face. As she looked in his eyes she remembered why she’d been sleeping with him. He was beautiful too, and romantic and compassionate. She smiled and stretched up on her toes to kiss him. His lips were warm and soft and he tasted like mint. He reached down, ran a hand up her arm to cup her neck as he often did and she recoiled.
The image of his face as he chose Vanessa over her flashed in front of her eyes.
“I’m sorry.” She hid her eyes. “My neck still hurts sometimes.”
“There’s nothing else going on?” He asked. “I haven’t seen you much since Halloween.”
Kissy blinked away the tears that had leaped unbidden to her eyes and looked up. “Do you want to talk or save a guy’s life?”
She pushed past him and led the way to the end of the containers. She stepped out of the little alley to find the cement of the dock extended another fifteen feet before it ended, dropping down to the water where ships used to pull up. A wooden walkway had been built up against the cement. The mayor was attempting to transition the dead docks into a recreation area for the city. The walkway would eventually connect all the docks and the old shipyard offices were already being converted into restaurants and shops.
Kissy looked up at the stenciled numbers on the shipping containers that had been turned into storage units in the transition. Thirty-three was one further down from where she came out of the alley. Just beyond it was the edge of dock 9 and someone was using the electrics on the old railing to repair a small skiff. They had set up a lamp with a caged bulb beside the overturned boat. She walked towards the container they were looking for.
Behind her, Avi called out, “We don’t have to talk,” in a tone that implied he had a long list of thoughts on what they could do instead.
Kissy’s body responded to his sexy voice in pleasant way. She smiled at the nice memories that came up. Maybe she was just like the overturned skiff right now. She could be repaired. Maybe they could be repaired. Her anger at him was totally illogical. He’d chased the person who’d nearly killed her. He was a cop. That’s what he was supposed to do. She shut down the voices in her head let her hormones spin her around.
She smiled suggestively at him. “I could use a little warming up.”
“Oh, you think a little sex is gonna fix our problem?” Avi held his coat open invitingly.
She sidled into his arms and let him wrap the coat around her. “I’m not looking for just a little.”
He leaned down again and this time he kept his arms wrapped around her back. She felt herself melting into his kiss, holding her hands flat against his strong, solid chest. The kiss lingered. It could easily have developed into much more if they weren’t cuddling against a cold metal shipping container on a windy dock. Plus kissing her very tall boyfriend was a challenge in high heels and Kissy was wearing her sensible boots. She let the spark die away and laid her head on his pecs.
“We don’t have a problem.” She assured him.
“Oh we’ve got a problem.” Avi observed.
“What’s that?” Kissy asked.
“We only have one key right?”
Kissy leaned back and held up her hand. The key dangled from the green string around her wrist.
Avi nodded. “One key. But the unit has two locks.”
Kissy followed Avi’s eyes down to the container’s closure. Sure enough, there were two padlocks holding the doors closed on DS933.
Ten
Tim parked his bike in the post office lot down the street from city hall. Even though it was a chilly evening, there was a line at the Sweet n’ Salty Ice Cream Shoppe and a small crowd at The Coffeeshop’s open mic night. But both stores were on the other side of the square. To see him, they’d have to squint through the grove of native trees planted in the central common, past all the gas lamp style streetlights around the gazebo and pick him out of the shadows along all the false fronts of Government Row.
He tilted the torn photograph towards the light and took a good long look at Randall Crella. The man was handsome despite his pocked skin. He had a strong jaw line with a white goatee that set off his dark tan. But his eyes were exactly what Tim would expect from a man who beat his family. They were cold, with stiff crinkling as though he were unaccustomed to smiling. Tim looked into the brown eyes and memorized the face.
Than he slipped the picture into his helmet and set them in the seat of his motorcycle. He pulled a red bandana and a thick leather wallet out of the seat and locked it before he headed down the sidewalk.
Evelyn had written the address of City Hall and the words monthly poker game on the back of the photo. Tim wondered where the rest of the picture was. He hoped she hadn’t torn it from a family photo hanging in their house. That would not be good for any investigation following Randall’s mysterious death.
Tim held the wallet under his arm as he shook out the bandanna. A silver ear cuff with dangling chains dropped into his hand. He squeezed the jewelry onto his right ear and wrapped the bandanna around his wrist like a bracelet. Looking around casually for anyone watching, he pulled the bundle of fifty hundreds from his thigh pocket and stuffed it in the wallet. Before he flipped the wallet closed, he slipped a fingernail under the edge of the brown currency band around the cash and ripped it off.
As he passed Local National Bank, he dropped the cash strap into a recycling container and roughly shoved the wallet in his back pocket where it only fit halfway. He attached the wallet chain to a belt loop on the front of his shorts and opened the top button. The shorts slid down to his hips, showing off his new red boxer-briefs. He paused for a second to consider his look and pulled a pair of blue tinted sunglasses from an inside pocket of his riding jacket. Hopping up the steps of City Hall, he snapped the glasses on with his right hand while he ran his left along the bark of the town’s prize sugar maple, featured on the town crest and protected by the historical society. He warmed the sap in his hand for a moment then ran his fingers through his hair, spiking it up into a messy faux-hawk along the centerline of his skull.
He pulled open the huge oak doors and skulked into City Hall. The guard station was abandoned. Not a soul stood in the open lobby with Tim. He waited for the echo of his footsteps to die away and listened for any other sounds. A distant laugh bounced out to reach his ears and he followed it until he heard more voices and the sounds of ice in glasses and heavy chips on a felt covered table.
He took a breath and barged through the door. “G’day mates. Looks like this is the place be.”
All five heads in the room turned to face him. None of them matched the picture in his helmet. They were just settling in around a very nice poker table. The room itself was just large enough for the table and six chairs altho
ugh it could have been roomier without the filled to capacity bookshelves lining each wall.
Tim recognized three of the players. Mayor Rory Sutton with his ridiculously thick hair sat conferring with a thin black woman whose age was as unguessable as the mayor’s. Standing just beyond them the police commissioner Captain David Lee, a Thursday night regular at The Freckled Dog, appeared to be wrapping up a phone call. He spoke quietly and rarely, without taking his eyes off of Tim.
The third familiar figure was a bit of a surprise. Trevor Bagwell, owner of The Coffeeshop, sat fidgeting in the chair closest to the door. He looked around at the others to see if Tim was expected.
The fifth and final figure at the game paused only briefly in shuffling the cards at Tim’s entrance. She continued, still sizing him up in the manner of a carnivore judging the dinner-worthiness of an unfamiliar species. She looked to be cut of the same cloth as the elegant ladies of the Obesity Committee but with less of their boredom. She certainly put off an air of ennui, but hers was manufactured.
Tim thought she might be the first to speak but as she drew in a breath, the mayor stood from his chair. “Welcome. Were we expecting you?”
“Not unless you’re psychic.” Tim pounded Trevor’s shoulder with his fist. “Though you look like you might be. I’m Red. Red Logan.” He shook hands all around as he talked. “Concert promoter. Looking to settle down here. I was told Randall Crella was the man to know for business in this town.”
He took the elegant woman’s hand last. She kept his hand longer than the rest, leaning over the table to give him a decent view of her cleavage.
“I’m Patrice Coldman. You may have been oversold on Randall.”
“Nice to have you in town, Red.” The mayor gestured to Trevor. “This is the man to talk to about performers. Bookers are always coming to his open mic nights to find fresh talent for their venues down in the big city.”
“Thanks for that. I’m gonna want to book local talent mostly.” Tim pounded Trevor on the back and looked back to the mayor. “Now Crella was gonna clue me in on who to suck up to for liquor licensing and zoning.”
Killer on Call 6 Book Bundle (Books 1-6) Page 21