by Nora Kane
“Is this business? Or pleasure?”
“Business.”
“Bummer.”
“Sorry, we can do the pleasure part tonight.”
“I'm going to consider that a promise.”
“Okay, it’s a promise.”
“What’s the business?”
“First, Myers and an F.B.I. agent came by wanting me to help them get dirt on Harry Lee.”
“I suppose they told you about his guy Tommy.”
“Some.”
“Then you know more than I do. The O.C. Task Force took it before any of our guys got a chance.”
“They think it’s the same shooter as the guy who shot you and Ames, had the same M.O.”
“I was hoping that guy was already dead.”
“You weren’t the only one. Speaking of that guy, has anybody learned anything else?
Last we talked, he was still kind of a mystery.”
“If they had I would have already told you, but so far, just like everybody else that’s tried to kill you lately, there are more questions than answers. All we’ve figured out was he went by Tito but no Titos we have records of, match his description. That wasn’t the name on his driver’s license, but his I.D. was bogus. As you know, it turns out he’s not immune to bullets either. They found where he was staying by the key he had on him, but there wasn’t anything there to indicate who he was or who he worked for.”
“So, nothing new at all.”
“Nope, not a thing. Trust me, they’re working it hard; at least until Tommy got shot, he was as close as we’ve got to a suspect in the murder of Ames and Burke.”
“Not to mention almost killing you.”
“Yeah, that’s why I wasn’t going to mention it.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to call and bring up a bad memory.”
“That’s okay. You’re going to make it up to me later.”
“I certainly am. One more bit of business, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay.”
“I had a visit from an old client. Miss Dithers. She thinks her husband, or ex-husband, has been murdered. She thinks an associate of our dead scumbag is the killer.”
“You know when we found out the guy dead on the beach was the same guy you saw with Dithers, they grilled him pretty hard.”
“I figured they did, but I never heard what came of it.”
“That’s because there was nothing to hear. Dithers was as hard as an ex-con when it came to being interrogated. He never acknowledged having met the guy. I think if he ended up dead, I would have heard about it. A witness in a cop killing—even one six degrees from the actual crime like Dithers—ending up dead is going to get our attention.”
“What about if he ends up on a missing person report?”
“That too. Did she report him missing?”
“She says no one believed her but said she filed a report.”
“If this happened without word getting to homicide, some heads are going to roll. Give me a minute to check it out?”
“Of course.”
It wasn’t long before Radcliff came back on the line. “They didn’t report it to us.”
“So, Miss Dithers lied to me?”
“Unless she reported it to someone else…but he lived in our jurisdiction. I’m checking the computer to see if a report was filed at another department.”
After about a minute, he said, “No missing person report anywhere and I mean anywhere.
There’s both a national and international database for those kinds of things since missing people of all stripes tend to cross borders.”
“That’s weird. Why would she do that?”
“Perhaps she’s nuts?”
“Highly possible. I caught the end of a phone conversation that suggested someone put her up to hiring me to look into his murder.”
“Except you don’t know that he’s dead.”
“That’s a fair point. Perhaps I should follow up on it.”
“Or let it go.”
“Yeah…except she got me thinking. She seems to think they killed him because of what I saw that night. We’ve always assumed the guy who Mal killed was after me because of Cassie or my previous cartel issues and the Dithers connection was incidental, but what if it was because of Dithers all along?”
“Except they mentioned Cassie. What did she have to do with Dithers?”
“She could have exposed something about that operation.”
“Without knowing it?”
“She did a lot of speculating on her show. Viuda Negra was something she thought she made up until a real assassin who apparently went by Black Widow in Spanish showed up and started shooting people. Maybe she did the same with Dithers? If she did a show on money laundering, maybe someone assumed she knew what she was talking about even if she didn’t.”
“It’s possible. It’s also possible Miss Dithers is just full of shit.”
“Yeah, I’m going to look into that. I might talk to Cassie too.”
“Okay, but remember you're not a cop.”
“It’s hard to forget.”
“I’d better go, Rodriguez is starting to give me the eye.”
“No problem, I’ll see you tonight.”
Margot got on her computer and found Mr. Dithers’ cell phone number. She was surprised when he answered.
“I was under the impression from your ex-wife that you were missing, perhaps dead.”
He laughed. “I am as far as that bitch is concerned. Is that why you’re calling? Or did you have a new way to make my life miserable?”
“No, I just thought I’d check to see if you were alive before I let your ex-wife rope me into looking for your murderer.”
“You’d have been looking a long time since I’m still alive. Why would anyone but my ex-wife want me dead anyway?”
“You were a bag man for a mobster. I hate to break it to you, but guys like you get murdered all the time.”
“Yeah, but thanks to you and my ex-wife, I’m out of that business. It turns out the only guy I could identify is dead, so there’s no point killing me. If they’d wanted to do that, they would have done it before the cops picked me up. Speaking of which, do you mind if I asked you for a favor?”
“You can always ask.”
“Don’t ever mention my name to the cops again.”
“If I have my way, this will be the last time we have anything to do with each other.”
“Good, lose my number, okay?”
“Sure,” Margot told him before he ended the call. Even though she hoped she’d never need to talk to him again, she wasn’t getting rid of his number anytime soon.
She checked and saw Harry still hadn’t got back to her.
Margot decided to call Miss Dithers to find out why she would try to hire Margot to solve a crime that never happened. She didn’t answer. Margot looked up Miss Dithers’ address and decided she might stop by since these kinds of conversations were best done in person.
Chapter 4
It was, of course, possible that Miss Dithers wouldn’t be home, but Margot drove over there anyway.
Margot had never been to Miss Dithers place before. She was fairly certain this was the house she’d shared with her husband until the divorce. Margot had no idea who had got what in the divorce settlement. She parked out front. A quick peek into the garage revealed Miss Dithers’
car wasn’t parked inside. Since she was already there, Margot went up to ring the doorbell just to be sure.
Margot instinctively ducked and drew her gun as a series of sharp banging sounds filled the air. They ended just as soon as they began. Margot looked around and didn’t see anything.
While to her it had sounded like machine-gun fire, it could have been and most likely was fireworks. Miss Dithers lived in the kind of neighborhood where gunfire was unheard of but kids with firecrackers probably weren’t all that uncommon. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with Margot.
No one answered
the door so Margot headed back to her car. She was driving back to the office when she noticed a car that looked a lot like Miss Dithers’ sitting at the intersection.
It was a four-way stop, so Margot waited for Miss Dithers to take her turn. She planned on following her back to her house, but her Mercedes never moved. Margot waved her through the intersection, but the Mercedes stayed where it was.
Margot pulled forward slowly. When she pulled up next to the unmoving vehicle, she noticed the window on the driver’s side was shattered and the door was pockmarked with what looked like bullet holes. A glance at the ground revealed multiple shell casings. It looked like the sound Margot had heard just a few minutes ago hadn’t been firecrackers after all.
There was no sign of Miss Dithers.
Margot stopped in the middle of the road. She drew her Smith and Wesson .40 with the short barrel from her purse and approached the Mercedes.
She hoped against hope that she wouldn’t see Miss Dithers in the car, that she had gotten away. However, once she got closer, she could see Miss Dithers had fallen sideways in her seat, and what was left of her head rested on the passenger seat.
Margot spent some time looking around to make sure the shooter was no longer in the area. It wasn’t the kind of street that got a lot of traffic, but the carnage in the Mercedes sitting in the middle of the road wouldn’t have gone unnoticed very long. Margot hadn’t missed being there for the event by much.
While she wasn’t a hundred percent sure the threat was gone, as far as Margot could tell, she was alone with Miss Dithers’ car and corpse. She got back in her car to call the police. A glance in her rearview mirror showed a white sedan going through the intersection behind her.
She wouldn’t have thought anything of it if Myers hadn’t told her about the witnesses seeing a white sedan when Tommy was killed.
She ducked as it came to a stop. She didn’t see the two submachine guns poke out of the window, but she heard them as she got as low as possible. The back window went first, followed by the front. Margot found herself covered in shattered glass. The seat right above where her head just was had been completely obliterated.
The firing stopped almost as quickly as it began; even with an extended magazine, firing on full auto exhausted the ammunition in a manner of seconds. Margot thought it might be over.
Instead of lifting up her head, she twisted so she could see the rearview mirror. Half of it was gone and what was left was cracked, but in the spider web of reflective glass, she could see the barrage had only stopped because the shooter had run out of bullets. He was out of the car now, the cracked mirror distorting him and his face out of her view. She could see him holding one of his submachine guns against his body with his forearm while he put a new magazine into the gun in his right hand. He put the other gun in his hand and started toward her, looking to either confirm the kill or finish what he started.
Her car was still running. Margot didn’t like the odds of taking on two automatic weapons with her pistol, even if she somehow caught him by surprise. She stayed low and twisted so she could get her foot on the gas pedal without sitting up. As she pressed down on the gas pedal, the machine guns roared again. She drove blind, trying to stay straight since—if her memory was correct—she had a long straight stretch before the road curved. A bullet blew out her back tires, and she couldn’t keep going in a straight line. She plowed into a parked car before she got too far.
The gunfire stopped as the shooter used up two more magazines. Margot looked to the mirror, but it hadn’t survived the second barrage. Whatever the shooter was doing, Margot didn’t feel safe in the car, which had so many bullet holes it looked like a cheese grater.
Margot opened the door to the passenger side and tumbled out. She moved around to the other side of the car she’d just hit and stayed low. The white sedan drove by with the shooter peering into her car. Margot guessed he was out of bullets, at least for the machine guns. Margot was surprised when the sedan sped off.
She came up and aimed her gun, but the short barrel, while good for concealment, was poor for accuracy over any kind of range. She didn’t pull the trigger, concentrating instead on getting the license plate.
All she could get was a partial, but she figured that was better than nothing. She knew how much adrenaline could affect memory so went to grab her phone. As she reached for her purse, she noticed that blood was running down her face. She wiped it away, hoping it was a cut from the glass and not a bullet. The odds were with glass, since people didn’t do much walking around after taking a nine-millimeter slug to the head. When she went to wipe her hand on her jeans, she noticed they were wet. She looked down and saw she was covered in blood. Margot looked at her car and realized why they might have decided to leave without confirming the kill.
There was a lot of her blood on the shattered glass covering her seats.
She felt fine and knew head wounds bleed a lot, so she ignored her physical state and concentrated in plugging the plate numbers into the notes app on her phone. She felt like she was struggling to enter the digits and realized she was feeling lightheaded. At that point, Margot became a little more concerned about the wound somewhere below her waist.
She was looking for a bullet hole when she started feeling dizzy instead of just a little lightheaded. It occurred to her that if she didn’t get off her feet, she was going to fall. Margot sat down on the sidewalk and decided she needed medical attention. The blood covering the screen of her phone added to her difficulty, but she managed to punch in the numbers nine and one before the phone slipped from her hand and bounced off the sidewalk and into the gutter.
She reached for it and fell over onto her side. Margot didn’t try to sit up. The head wound started bleeding again, and this time it was in her eyes. Instead of trying to wipe it away, Margot reached blindly for where she thought the phone had landed.
It was right where she thought so it didn’t take long to pick it up. It seemed heavy; she couldn’t lift it, but she could turn it so she was facing the screen. Margot cleared some of the blood from her face and saw she just needed to press the one. Her fingers, however, weren’t processing the commands from her brain correctly. She blacked out before she could enter the last digit.
Chapter 5
When Margot opened her eyes, she looked for her phone but soon realized she wasn’t lying in the street bleeding to death. Instead, she saw Radcliff standing above her.
“You’re in the hospital,” he told her calmly. “You’re going to be fine.”
“I couldn’t punch in the last number.”
“Yeah, I know. The EMTs found your phone. Lucky for you, someone else who didn’t take a bullet to the hip and thigh made the call for you. Even luckier, that guy knew enough to put pressure on your wounds until the EMTs arrived. Otherwise, we’d be planning your funeral.”
“I could have died?”
“You damn near did.”
“From getting shot in the hip?”
“The bullet to your thigh nicked your femoral artery. A millimeter to the left and all you have is a scar, but another millimeter further to the right, and you would have bled out for sure.”
“So, should I feel lucky?”
“They picked up over a hundred shell casings, and you’re still living.”