Dirty Deeds

by AJ Nuest

  “Or incredibly sexy. Which I already knew.” He shook off her hand and tugged the card from the envelope, and Eden enjoyed the way his pupils dilated as he read the naughty little message she’d penned to her supposed lover. All the ways she planned to use those chocolates during their next session of wild love-making.

  He snapped his gaze to hers. “Can I keep this?”

  Tossing her head back in a full-throated laugh, she pressed her palm along the buttons of her silk blouse. God, she loved her work. “No, I’m afraid not.” She smiled, plucking the card and envelope from his hand and hiding them inside her purse. “And I believe, with that, I’ve officially overstayed my welcome. It’s been lovely meeting you, Will.” She stood, sliding her coat off the bar. “I wish you the best of luck at your show.”

  “But, wait. No, don’t go.” He raked his thick hair off his brow. “God, can I at least get your number?”

  She smirked, collecting the rest of her belongings and tucking the box of cherries under her arm. “Tell you what. How about a standing date? Next Monday, about this same time, I’ll do my best to come back. You meet me here and we’ll see how it goes.”

  He grinned. “I’ll be watching the door.”

  “Until next time, then.” She turned and stepped from the bar, hesitated and spun back to face him. “And take these.” Sliding the box from under her arm, she offered him the chocolates. “By way of my congratulations. They’re more yours now than his, anyway. Share them with your friends during tonight’s show. Each time you eat one, think of me.” Curling her lips in a devilish smile, she winked. “And my note.”

  He accepted the gift, brows bouncing like they shared a special secret. “Lady, you got yourself a deal.”

  She nodded and strode for the exit, a soft laugh tickling her belly as she swung her coat onto her shoulders. Poor Will. No one would be enjoying his boyish charms tonight. No, tonight, he’d explode onto the art scene in a way his benefactors would never forget.

  Pushing through the door and onto the sidewalk, she chuckled again and then fastened her coat. Some days, the scam almost came off too easy, but at least now she could phone Anna and let her know the job was done.

  Eden turned up the collar of her coat against the cutting wind and walked north. Customer satisfaction counted for everything in her line of work. A happy clientele equaled a steady income. Customers referred their friends to Dirty Deeds time and again.

  The hair along the back of her neck prickled, and Eden slowed, darting a frown over her shoulder. Chicago’s usual mid-day foot traffic crowded the street—shoppers, sight-seeing families, business men and women staring at their iPads or talking into their cells.

  Another quick survey of the street and, just to be safe, she stopped at the corner and waited on the light, using the opportunity to check the storefronts behind her. Nothing. Maybe she was just being paranoid. Still…

  The signal flashed in her favor and she crossed to the opposite sidewalk, turned and strode back the way she’d come. The hair lifted on her arms. Her palms grew damp. A third glance over her shoulder, and her heart thumped. Someone—mid-height, black fedora, tan trench coat—stepped off the sidewalk and into the shadowed alcove of a department store doorway. The movement was so fast, she’d almost missed it.

  Shit. Without missing a beat, Eden tugged her cell from her pocket and speed-dialed the office. The strike of her heels drilled into her head as she waited for the call to ring through. A shiver of apprehension dislodged her shoulders, but she kept her steps measured and even.

  Running would only get her chased, and she couldn’t afford to draw anyone’s attention. Anonymity was more than important, it was vital. Not only for her, but for every client she had filed away at the office.

  “Password,” Mocha answered.

  “I picked up a tail. I’m on the corner of State and Monroe, heading south.” Eden resisted the urge to peek over her shoulder. “I need to disappear.”

  The furious click of Mocha’s nails over the keyboard echoed through the line. “Turn east at the next block. Two blocks over to Lakeshore Drive and then go half a block north. Happy Sunshine Cleaners on your left.”

  She ended the call, burying her chin in the collar of her coat as she rounded the corner and continued east. Anger simmered in her belly, warming her from the inside out. Who the hell could be following her? None of her customers would be dumb enough to tip off someone regarding her identity. They all knew what she was capable of and, besides, there was a level of trust involved. Not to mention, most of them were so relieved to have found her, she couldn’t imagine them ever betraying her in such a way.

  Filling her lungs, she pulled open the door to the drycleaners and locked eyes with the young man behind the counter. Right. His name was Chanming. His parents had called on her services after he’d become the target of an internet bullying campaign—a backlash that had resulted from his classmates when he’d confessed to being gay. Mr. and Mrs. Hàn had wanted the cruelty and uncompromising pictures stopped, immediately and without raising any more attention, but they’d been unable to afford her fee.

  Didn’t matter. Eden plucked a business card from her purse, strode to the counter and slid it across the top. The situation had been easy to rectify. Internet bullies never could handle the same abuse they dished out. She’d taken care of the problem and, in return, the Hàns had agreed to keep a disguise on hand, just in case she ever ran into this exact situation.

  Chanming nodded and left his line of waiting customers, approached the end of the counter and lifted the hinged section. Happy Sunshine Cleaners was only one of several locations around the city that had struck the same deal with her. And good thing too, because having a list of people she could rely on was worth its weight in gold.

  She passed through as he grabbed a black duffle bag from under the counter and led her to a small changing room behind the dry cleaning conveyor.

  “Back door?” She accepted the bag and dropped it to the floor with a heavy thump.

  He smiled, pointing toward the exit on the north wall. “Leave whatever you need to inside the room and I’ll have it cleaned and ready for next time.”

  She nodded. Then paused. That… The genuine affection shining in Chanming’s eyes was exactly why she did what she did. Every so often, her help gave people a new lease on life. “Thank you, Chanming.”

  “No, thank you.” He closed the door and she smirked, bending down to tug open the zipper.

  Inside waited a set of battered, black high tops, several ratty t-shirts and a pair of holey jeans. Perfect. No one would recognize her dressed as Jett. Kicking off her shoes, Eden transformed herself into an androgynous punker in her late teens, finalizing the disguise with a set of brown contact lenses, a short dark wig and a backward-facing baseball cap. Leaving Pearl’s clothes in Chanming’s able hands, she shrugged into the jean jacket, shoved the skateboard under her arm and headed out the back door.

  Whoever was stalking her better have their shit locked and loaded. She took a running start, dropped the skateboard and pushed off down the alley for the street. They’d messed with the wrong woman. In a few, short days, their world was about to come crashing down around their shoulders.

  * * * *

  Kelly pressed the side of his arm against the glass door of the tech department and entered the alien bubble of Molly’s inner sanctum. He slowed to give his eyes a second to adjust to the darkened interior, lifted his cardboard tray of steaming coffees and carefully sidestepped a blinking tower of networked mainframes. Skirting a stack of gutted hard drives, he shook his head.

  How the scrappy little hacker kept track of anything in this tangled maze was a mystery to him. Almost as much as why the captain allowed Molly to keep the place such a god-awful mess.

  Then again, it wasn’t like Molly had attended the academy. She hadn’t inherited the cop gene or ever toed the heavy-handed brand of justice doled out by Kelly’s dad. She’d come to the squ
ad straight off the streets—a plea bargain deal she’d worked with the DA after being busted for hacking into the police database. In doing so, the misdemeanor she’d hoped to erase off her record had became a felony, and she’d been staring at five to ten in lockup plus a fine upwards of a hundred large.

  Lucky for her, Captain Meredith D’Avella had never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth. She’d approached the DA with the suggestion of bringing Molly on board, under the terms the charges be dropped if she followed the conditions of her parole and agreed to work for the department.

  All around, it’d been a good call, and chances were the captain’s leniency where Molly was concerned was directly tied to her unblemished record. Since the day she’d come to the precinct, not a single case she’d worked on remained unsolved.

  That kind of persistence and dedication were hard to come by, and were two of the few traits she and Kelly shared.

  He rounded a rolling cart stacked with discarded keyboards and spindles of rewritable CDs, and entered the main hub of Molly’s operations. Archer glanced up from where he’d propped his ass against the table in the center of the room and Kelly stopped dead in his tracks.

  Son of a bitch. The dark scowl creasing Archer’s forehead was a sure sign their progress on tracing the business card was circling the toilet. Not good, considering failure wasn’t an option. For any of them.

  “One of those for me?” Archer unlocked his arms, nodding toward the tray in Kelly’s hand.

  “If your stomach can handle the swill the captain calls coffee.” Kelly worked one of the cups from the tray and offered it to Archer. God knew, he probably needed it. Hell, after the all-nighter they’d just pulled, they both did.

  The second Kelly had finished relaying details of Ruby’s murder, he and Archer had decided to roll the streets. See if they could drum up a few leads about what she’d gotten involved in.

  Most of the prostitutes they’d approached had recognized Archer as one of the good guys. Word had spread how he’d helped Ruby out when she’d needed a friend. Not that this seemed to help their recollection any.

  Their tight-lipped responses weren’t surprising, even though Kelly and Archer both agreed hitting them up had been worth a shot. Loyalty among friends only went so far on the streets. The first rule had been and always would be to look out for number one.

  Kelly turned toward the young woman manning the helm and offered her the second cup. “Molly?”

  She jerked away from the screen as if she hadn’t even realized he’d entered the room. Her thick blond hair was gathered in a lopsided pile on top of her head, secured with several pencils and what looked like the rubber band grocery stores used to bundle asparagus.

  “Oh. It’s you.” She eased back in her chair and lifted a stern eyebrow, sizing him up from the top of his head to the soles of his black, steel-toed boots. “You spill that coffee in my room, Riordan, and you and I are gonna have words. Comprende?”

  O-o-kay. Whatever he’d done to piss her off, the irritation in her eyes looked sharp enough to slice and dice his balls and serve them back to him with a garnish of smack upside the head.

  He gripped the paper cup a little tighter. Hell, maybe he and Archer weren’t the only ones who’d been up all night chasing ghosts. “Consider it a peace offering. Two creams, two sugars, right?”

  She sniffed and accepted the coffee. “Don’t you be flashing those baby blues at me, coming in here with that dark smolder after dumping this hot mess in my lap.”

  Kelly glanced at Archer and he rolled his eyes. “Just bring him up to speed, Molls.”

  “Fine.” She sighed and set the coffee aside. “Let’s start with the obvious. My original search for Dirty Deeds came back a big, fat zero. There’s no listing anywhere. No business entity report, no licensing and no taxes filed on either the state or federal level. As far as the US Government is concerned, the business doesn’t exist.”

  A click of her mouse, and a 3D image of the card spun a slow circle on her computer screen. “The paper is one hundred-pound linen stock, available at any business card provider around the globe. Printing is embossed gold foil, again available anywhere, by anyone, sold around the world.”

  Propping her elbow next to her keyboard, she dropped her cheek into her hand. “Short of calling every business card provider on this blue planet, there’s no way to trace where the card came from or who purchased it.”

  Yeah, right. Like that was gonna stop her. Kelly cocked a brow. “And the phone number?”

  “Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” She tossed her head and he jimmied back a step as one of the pencils clattered to the floor. “The first trace I ran came back as Georgio’s Pizzeria on South Lake Shore Drive.” Her fingers danced along the keyboard, and he squinted as the listing for the pizza parlor popped up on the monitor. “I know the place. After all, a girl’s gotta eat. So I put out a second trace, and it came back listing the number as Luke’s Oil and Tire Service on Melrose.”

  She tapped the mouse and another window opened, the red sign painted along the top of the garage declaring the business as Luke’s Gas ‘N’ Go. “A third trace, and the computer coughs out the general information line at The Shedd Aquarium. Fourth trace, and I’m given Trudy’s Hair Salon in northwest Indiana.”

  Kelly dug his thumb and index finger into his eye sockets and scrubbed at his fried eyeballs. “Yeah, okay, I see the problem. Can we cut to the chase?”

  “The problem, Detective, is there’s a bug written into the line which consistently bounces my trace off any wireless router in the tri-state area.” A final hard tap and Molly sat back from the keyboard. “It’s brilliant. An unending algorithm that leads straight down a rabbit hole. Hell, I’m sure those businesses don’t even have a clue their lines are being hacked.”

  “Bad news is, all this ping-ponging around also makes it impossible to triangulate Dirty Deeds’s location.” Archer crunched his empty cup and tossed it toward the garbage can. It hit the rim and tumbled to the floor. “Whoever wrote the program knew what they were doing. It was designed for one purpose and one purpose only.”

  “To make the line one hundred-percent untraceable.” Molly lifted her cup and blew into the tiny hole in the lid before sipping.

  What the hell? Kelly glanced between Molly and Archer, the memory of that long lapse followed by the series of weird clicks when he’d called the number skipping through his head. Christ, the only people who were tech savvy enough to pull that off were… “You think it’s the Feds?”

  One of Archer’s blond brows rose toward his cowlicked hairline. “If so, we’re treading on dangerous ground, my friend, but I can’t imagine the FBI would be interested in a small-time informant like Ruby.”

  Point taken. Kelly dropped his focus to his cup, tapping his index finger against the side. As a general rule, the government didn’t like anyone messing with their shit, but if Molly could confirm who was behind the scam without tipping anyone off… He lifted his head. “What about decrypting it? Is there any way we can debug the line without setting off all sorts of alarms?”

  “Way ahead of you.” She sat forward and opened a window filled with unending lines of computer code. “I’m writing a program now to see if I can trace the line back to the source. It’s gonna take me a while, though. A few more hours to finish, at least, and then maybe another twenty-four to see if the program works.”

  “Which pretty much leaves us at a standstill until then.” A wide yawn cracked Archer’s jaw, and he stretched his arms over his head. “I’m headin’ home to get some rack. Call me if anything hits.”

  Kelly nodded as Archer strode for the door. “Right behind you, but I need Molly to check one last thing.” They might have hit a temporary snag with Dirty Deeds’s location, but Kelly wasn’t about to let that unravel the one other lead he’d gotten in the case.

  Leaning forward, he braced his forearm on the back of Molly’s chair. “Let
’s see if you can dig me up anything interesting on Howard Weaver.”

  Chapter 3

  “Hmmm… Howard Weaver.” Molly wheeled down the row of networked computers stationed along the curve of her desk and Kelly stood, rubbing at the stiffness in his neck.

  His dragging ass aside, he couldn’t wait to find out what Weaver was hiding. Enough that the wondering would’ve kept him wide awake.

  A few well-aimed clicks, and Molly located Howard Weaver’s public records. “Caucasian male, fifty-six years old, married Clarice Mayer in 1982.” Her finger curled over the mouse, shuffling the information up the screen. “He began working for Image-Tech industries in ʼ98 and became their chief financial officer ten years ago. Cushy financial package came with the position, shares in the software end of the company, use of the timeshare in Barbados…

  “Wait.” She leaned forward on her elbow and Kelly strode up behind her as she pointed at the monitor. “Here’s something off-kilter with the whole Weaver success story.”

  Yep. He’d assumed as much. One thing Kelly could always count on, no one skated by with a clean record. Not even him.

  “Three years ago, Howard Weaver filed charges against the chief executive officer of Image-Tech for skimming funds off their employee pension account.” Spinning to the side, she pushed toward the next computer and Kelly followed, sipping the weak brown water in his cup as she pulled up the judicial records from the suit. “Okay, here we go. Looks like the case was settled out of court. Apparently, Image-Tech wanted to keep the whole thing on the down-low in order to reduce company-wide panic. The CEO resigned, but there’s no indication of whether or not he coughed up the missing cash.”

  Kelly frowned, scratching at the bristle along his jaw. Something about that whole story wasn’t gelling. If Howard Weaver was enough of a stand up guy to go to bat for his employees, why wouldn’t he just admit as much from the get-go? And what, if anything, did his suit against Image-Tech’s CEO have to do with Dirty Deeds?