Our eyes traded stares, all of us likely realizing that the bomb could have been placed anywhere, even at an obscure bar on lower Greenville called The Jewel.
Business picked up, and I ordered my second drink. I finally took a bit of interest in the game, a Big 12 matchup between Kansas and Oklahoma. With my mind still swirling from witnessing a gruesome act of terror and essentially losing my job, I pondered what type of work I could do, even a job that could pad my pockets and jazz me a bit. I knew I had to start saving for Samantha’s college one day soon.
Referee? They earn six figures if you ever make it in the NFL, or any other professional league. Wouldn’t fit my win-at-all-cost disposition. When push came to shove—even if I was the one shoving—I couldn’t sit around and be an impartial watchdog.
“Maybe you can find a sugar mama to pick up your bills.” Justin appeared again, flapping his towel against the side of the bar.
“Funny.” I raised an eyebrow, keeping my attention on the game. OU was on top, 28-10, in the third quarter.
“You are the ladies man.”
“If that’s the case, then where’s my legion of lovely ladies?” I asked, a hint of pity in my voice.
“Life’s a bitch…then you marry one. Except for you, that is.” Justin laughed out loud, his shoulders shaking so hard I thought he might lose his balance, topple over.
“You’ve been married, what, going on four times now…right, One Nut?”
Justin’s face flipped upside down.
“One Nut, seriously? You’re going to go there?” His face twisted into a painful knot.
Now I was the one laughing so hard I nearly knocked over my drink.
“You worried about future Mrs. Grabowskis finding out you lost a testicle playing football?”
For the first seven years I knew Justin, everyone jokingly called him grab ass…for obvious reasons. Since he never did much in the classroom, but still was known as our own version of white lightning, he played one year at Tyler Junior College. In one game late in his freshman season, he injured a knee in the first quarter. He returned in the second half wearing a brace. Like a cheetah roaming the grassy African wild, Justin with two healthy legs could take your breath away. With one and a half legs, he was nothing more than bait for every other predator on the field. I recall watching the fuzzy tape of the last football play in Justin’s career when I was toiling away on the fourth team down in Austin. He’d caught the kickoff at the goal line, cut right, and hobbled past one slow-footed defender, then made his signature spin move, but his timing was way off. He spun his crotch right into the lunging helmet of a two-hundred fifty-pound bruiser, who crushed Justin’s sac. Everyone who’d ever witnessed the blow or even the recording—at least the men—let out an audible groan.
“I don’t want them questioning my, ahem, manliness.” A sardonic smile crossed his lips, and he leaned in and smacked my hand in that special way again.
“If they don’t question your manliness, they’ll question everything else.”
“I hear you,” he said.
Alisa rolled her eyes. “Boys. Sheesh.” She flapped her wrists and padded off to bus a table.
I gnawed on ice and looked around the joint, still searching for what I might do when I woke up tomorrow. Maybe I’d take some time away, unwind from the work drama, the explosion, and travel down to the coast, traipse through the sand, search for beached turtles, chase after tiny crabs, and enjoy Gulf Coast seafood. If a shapely mermaid pulled me into the sea, all the better, given my latest conviction to halt the yo-yo relationship with Eva.
Damn, her lips were supple.
But something inside of me felt like I couldn’t leave…not with so much undecided. Part of it was the job situation, especially the related personal finances, and the other part was the bomb that killed innocent people. I’d never escape those screams and images.
I chewed the inside of my cheek, pondering how many detectives might have been assigned to the case. The FBI had probably taken lead on the investigation, but I’m sure the force, at least the privileged side of the house, was on twenty-four-hour call to find the nut job who’d referenced Hitler and had the balls to blow up a bus full of people in the bowels of Dallas. Wasn’t my case to solve anymore, despite seeing the tragedy unfold right before my eyes. I took in a breath and for a quick moment, allowed a trickle of what could have been enter my bloodstream—a shattering reality for fifteen families.
A couple of yelps off to my left, guys cheering on the Sooners who’d just scored again, jarred my thoughts back to my current top issue: finding a paying job.
I reached to my right, scooped up a couple of cashews, and popped them in my mouth, reviewing career opportunities I might want to pursue:
♦ Fireman: a similar bond with your colleagues, but I’d have to go back to training and start at the bottom of the…ladder.
♦ Retail: standing on my feet all day, tagging and hanging clothes, being forced to play nice with snobs. I’d rather have a Brazilian wax. Almost.
♦ Security: the first and only image that entered my mind was Mall Cop. My body was the polar opposite of Kevin James. I had mostly lean, respectable muscle mass, and I could still move at a decent clip when I had to. And, I wasn’t a buffoon. I laughed my ass off at the movie, but I’d be damned if anyone ever caught me calling in for backup while two old ladies fought over the same Kate Spade purse.
♦ Referee: already thought that one through, but I took another trip down Envision Lane. I’d have to start off working Pee Wee games, pulling in a paltry ten bucks an hour. As an officer, I’d been called in to break up parent fights countless times at Youth sporting events. One fool actually got so pissed at a basketball referee that he went out to his car and came back with a loaded pistol. It scared the hell out of everyone in the gym, especially a seven-year-old girls’ team standing no more than twenty feet from the lunatic. Once I subdued the asshole, I enjoyed grinding his face into the hardwood while I waited for backup. Thankfully, he was convicted and is taking an extended vacation in Huntsville.
I reached for the bowl of nuts and found it mostly empty. I’d been stuffing them into my empty stomach for the last ten minutes. Only shavings and salt coated the bottom.
A high-pitched voice got my attention. It was Justin. “She’s lost twenty-five thousand dollars, and the asshole has gone off the reservation. Disappeared into thin air,” he said to Alisa.
My ears perked up.
“Who’s this?”
“Jenna, my sister, got swindled by an ‘investment consultant.’” He used air quotes and rolled his bug eyes back so far within his sinewy frame that he appeared zombie-like in the muted lighting. “She’s not destitute, but twenty-five grand is twenty-five grand.”
An idea popped into my head. Ten minutes later, I booked my first appointment in my new career.
8
I’d ignored the puddle of green ooze when I first pulled out of my parking space this morning, but as I sat in front of the heavily treed lot serving as the home for Jenna Grabowski Parsons, the Impala regurgitated for a good five minutes. The putrid-green car with more Texas-sized hail dents than dimples on a golf ball had intended to be my transition car—ten years ago. One month into my junior year at the University of Texas, a double shot of humble pie was shoved down my throat, courtesy of my All-American girlfriend and my All-American head coach, lifelong Orange Bloods. They both dropped me like I was five-time felon. Actually, it was more like a quick one-two punch—Coach Nelson kicked me off the team, then Tiffany, the runner-up in the Miss Texas pageant, dumped me two hours later.
I blinked and tried to ignore a surge of resentment entering the back of my throat. Admittedly, I had committed one felony, although it was later dropped to a third-degree misdemeanor. The incident was nothing more than me taking up for a whiz kid I’d met in a geography course—he just happened to be wearing Urkel-like glasses and weighed about a hundred thirty pounds. The bully, unfortunately, was the Longhorns’
starting left tackle, whose sole mission on the field was to protect a quarterback’s blind side. I played quarterback and had just worked my way up to second team, but I couldn’t turn a blind eye to a senseless, unwarranted beating. In one punch, the South Dallas kid who didn’t take shit from anyone chopped down the steroid-laden man-beast.
After spending the night being booked, charged with a crime, and tossed into a jail cell that smelled like urine, the course of my life changed forever. Gone was my privileged life as an athlete, my sweet BMW 3 Series that Tiffany’s dad had allowed me to drive, the promise he’d made for me to join his oil business in Houston after I graduated—possibly after I’d spent a few years in the NFL—and my scholarship, my only chip to guarantee me a college degree.
As I looked back at the incident, I think that’s when I realized I had this odd streak of protectionism flowing through my bloodstream.
I checked my phone and the time read 7:58 a.m. Still had a couple of moments for the grand finale. Glancing around to see if a morning jogger would spot my hunk of metal and wonder if their neighborhood was being invaded by a bunch of gangbangers, I waited for the final belch. The fifteen-year-old piece of crap didn’t disappoint. At least I avoided the revolting stench that usually accompanied such a symphony.
The damn thing wasn’t just unsafe, it was embarrassing.
I slurped down a gulp of coffee, a Dunkin’ Donuts special—they still believed I was an active cop so it was free of charge—and pinched the inner corners of my eyes. With no more than four hours of sleep under my belt, I wasn’t kicking off my new career at peak physical or mental condition.
Vividly realistic dreams jarred me from an uneasy sleep, a cold, clammy sweat coating my body. A weakened subconscious had turned my mind against me, mental self-mutilation as it were. A cycle of tortuous thoughts played endlessly, and I found myself running around that burning bus for hours, searching for signs of my daughter. It scared the shit out of me, again and again. The bomb that had rocked Dallas, focusing domestic and international press on our city for all the wrong reasons, was haunting me.
While I listened to crickets chirping outside my cracked window—it never completely closed thanks to a tow truck grazing the driver’s side door panel—I took the opportunity to think through my new business of choice, private investigations. Once again, my mind became my worst enemy, wrapping myself around an axle on countless facets of this vocation: what I should charge clients, what type of work I’d accept or not, marketing, keeping the books, cash flow, and so on. And this is before I’d ever spoken to my first client.
I took in a deep breath. This type of anxiety and self-doubt wasn’t something I was accustomed to. It usually took a lot to rattle me. Maybe the incident, followed by KY and his goon squad trying to break me, did rock my foundation. Add to that the gut-wrenching bus explosion that for a few minutes I thought might have taken the life of my little Samantha. Yep, at age thirty-one, I knew my weak spots, which forced me to realize I was as human as the next guy.
I rattled the Impala door shut and part of me pumped to start anew, only relying on my brain, my instincts. The other part of me was scared shitless, feeling the weight of relying on only my brain and instincts. I’d dreamed of being awarded a job as a detective with the DPD. Some of the bums who had scooted by for years in that role…I knew I’d be more effective than those blowhards.
But shit happens, and here I was taking a slightly different approach—from the private sector—to achieve the same goal. Booker T. Adams could finally show the whole fucking world what he was made of.
I let the taste of those words linger, which added more swagger to my step as I approached the front door. I rang the bell of the Lake Highlands home. Dark brick, upper middle class, older home, probably three thousand square feet or so, and a lawn so pristine it looked like a postcard. Never see that in my old neighborhood, Southeast Dallas.
“Booker.” Her southern lilt brought me back in time. I swung my head back around to see Jenna Grabowski Parsons standing there in black spandex shorts, a pink sports bra, and a trendy headband holding back waves of full hair.
She reached her arms toward my shoulders.
“Jenna, it’s great to see you. It’s been a long time.”
We completed our hug, and I tried not to look down her bra. She’d graduated a couple of years after Justin and me, which made her twenty-nine years old. Time had been good to Jenna.
She asked me in and ushered me to an oversized chair in the living room. She sat on the matching sofa only three feet from me.
“Thank you for coming over so quickly.”
“Not a problem. Anything for…family.” I gave her a wink. I guess I was a bit of a charmer, even if I wasn’t trying.
She grabbed a clear thermos of something green and slimy and took a sip, and I noticed her perfect manicure, her soft-looking hands.
Jenna had married her high school sweetheart. From what Justin had reminded me last night, his deceased brother-in-law, Benny Parsons, had carved out a nice living running a set of pawnshops mostly placed in the lower income areas, south and east of Dallas. He smoked too much, drank too much, ate way too much chicken fried steak, and eventually his ticker couldn’t keep the pace. He died last year of a heart attack. Apparently, he had a decent life insurance policy, given Jenna’s so-called Thursday morning uniform.
“This is just my weekly cleanse. Can I get you something?”
“Oh, no thanks.” I held up both hands, ensuring I wouldn’t be force-fed.
“Not this crap. I can’t stand the taste of this. I have coffee, juice, tea, water.”
She got up and turned to the kitchen, light from the window glancing off her face. Her blue eyes sparkled.
Dammit, Booker, get your head in the game.
“I’ll take some water, thanks.” I followed her into the kitchen, trying like hell to keep my eyes off her magnetic ass. It was a state of the art—the kitchen, of course. Stainless steel appliances, stone countertops, colors matching like it was the HGTV dream home.
“What can you tell me about this deal you signed with the financial consultant?”
Jenna opened a drawer and pulled out a manila folder.
“Here’s the so-called contract.” She held a wad of papers, some stapled, others clipped together. Her lips had turned down at the corners. “I was such a fool. What do they say? ‘If it’s too good to be true, it usually is.’”
I nodded. “Jenna, I’m sure this guy was convincing as hell. Do you have his name?”
She handed me his business card, and I thumbed the name: Bradley David. It listed an address on Commerce, a local phone number, and a website: www.bradleydavidinvestments.com.
I lifted the card, but she jumped in before I could ask the question.
“Phone number is dead. The website isn’t registered. I drove by the address a dozen times. At first it was boarded up, now it’s a ladies shoe shop.”
“Did you get any?”
“Excuse me?”
I think she took that the wrong way.
“Shoes, ladies shoes.”
A bit of pink speckled her neck. I think I embarrassed her.
She coughed out a feminine chuckle. “I know what you must be thinking.” Her blue eyes met mine. “Ditzy blonde watches her sugar-daddy husband die, then in a desperate attempt to keep her same lifestyle she naively allows herself to fall prey to a scam artist who wears bowler shoes and has a comb-over.”
“Did he?”
She looked puzzled.
“Have a comb-over?”
Her lips formed a warm smile. “Hardly. He looked more like Harvey Specter. The lawyer in that show Suits.”
My eyes crinkled, and I think she could see my struggle to match her TV prowess.
“I guess I do have extra time these days.” She popped a shapely eyebrow and held out her fingers, ready to count off. “Let’s see, I’ve seen every episode of Boardwalk Empire, Downton Abbey…”
I was transfixe
d on her long fingers.
“Veep, Suits of course, and Breaking Bad.”
“Breaking Bad. I’ve seen a couple of those episodes up at The Jewel when Justin was in one of his marathon TV binges. Crazy how such a sick bastard can become a quasi-hero.”
“Heisenberg.”
I nodded, realizing it was good to establish a relationship with the client, but I needed to veer us back to the reason I was there.
“So, we’ve concluded that Mr. Bradley David didn’t look like Better Call Saul, and I’d assume he didn’t match the bald head and spiked goatee of Heisenberg.”
Jenna smiled and nodded. I think I saw her eyes checking me out.
I can’t go there, not on my first case.
“Seriously, is there anything about his appearance that stands out?”
I knew I had a couple of other angles to take to find this guy, but you always had to capture the basic information and build your way up from there. At least that’s what I’d gleaned by listening to detectives on cases where I was one of the working pawns.
Jenna raised a hand to her chin, then scrunched her lips. I tried not to notice their smooth texture and full shape. And then I did.
“I could stand here and try to describe this guy from Suits. Seriously, they look like twins. Perfect hair, coiffed appearance, fancy clothes, confident but not cocky demeanor. This guy, Bradley David, looked and spoke every bit the part of a legitimate business man, a financial consultant who had a plan for my twenty-five thousand dollars.”
I nodded, chewing the inside of my cheek, a bad habit I’d picked up from my mom, who was off saving the world again, I think down in Guatemala this year.
“I’ll make sure I check out a couple of episodes from Suits.”
“I have Netflix. We can watch one right now.” This time two eyebrows reached for the stars.
I paused, almost taken aback by her attempt to get me to…What did she expect?
I ignored my natural urges and glanced down at the earth-toned tile flooring.
BOOKER Box Set #1 (Books 1-3: A Private Investigator Thriller Series of Crime and Suspense) Page 4