Collared: A Gin & Tonic Mystery

by L. A. Kornetsky

  “Two slides and a G and T and three Bass,” Stacy chanted, sliding under the bar and reaching for three mugs. She pulled the taps; he mixed the drinks. Eventually she’d step up and mix drinks, but for now, the routine was soothing to him, reaching for the bottles in their familiar places, the measurements poured without his having to really think about it, shaking and stirring and garnishing with ease.

  It was easy not to think, when you were doing familiar things over and over again. That was half the appeal of bartending for him, the ability to not think.

  Except things were poking at his brain, forcing their way in and distracting him from the rhythm of gin and tonic and lime and ice, until he had to stop and think if he’d put the gin in already.

  Yes. He had. The wedge of lime went into the glass, to sit with the two slides and the beers, and Stacy whisked it away.

  After he’d gotten his briefing on the morning’s fun and games—and given the cop his whereabouts during that time, because the bartender, with his access and his knowledge of what was stored where, was always a suspect until he wasn’t, and that was just the way the game was played—Teddy had called his friend.

  The call hadn’t gone too well.

  “You want me to do what?”

  “Just . . . float the idea past. See if she bites.”

  Megan had been less than thrilled at the idea. “You want me to call my ex-wife, and ask if her office would have any interest in possible safety violations, without giving her any names or details. And keeping your name out of it. So if she bites, she’s gonna bite me?”

  “If it’s not anything they’d be interested in, nobody gets bitten. If it is . . . then give her my name.”

  He should have said, “Give her Ginny’s name.” Ginny was the one who had been hired for this mess. Or better yet, he should just have given Joe Jacobs’s name, since he was the idiot who had gotten into this mess in the first place. But the memory of that old man, torn between what he knew was right and what he owed his family, stopped him cold. In the end, it would get ugly. There was probably no way around it, and Jacobs Senior knew that. But for now, at least, they could keep the names secret.

  Like Mallard said, family made you crazy. And made you do the crazy, too.

  “Just do it, okay?” he’d said. “If it does turn out to be something they can help me with, I’ll owe you.”

  “You still owe me from when we were eleven.” But Megan had, reluctantly, agreed.

  That had been three hours ago. He couldn’t do anything more to help Ginny until Megan called him back. Assuming she even did.

  “My place was broken into.”

  He looked up from the drink he was mixing. “What?”

  He hadn’t even seen Ginny come up to the bar: he was slipping, and slipping badly.

  “My apartment. Broken into. Sometime today. The cops were there, there’s fingerprint dust all over the place, it’s a disaster.”

  Her voice was perfectly modulated, the tones as rounded as she could make them, the very model of a debate-club captain. He didn’t know if she had been, or if she’d even been on debate club; she probably had. But he knew her, better than he’d thought, and even in the ambient noise of the bar bustling around them, he could hear the edge in her voice. She was holding it together, but maybe too tight, and it was going to crack.

  “Where’s Georgie?”

  The question seemed to throw her for a second. “Outside.”

  “Go.”

  She just looked at him, that attractive face utterly clueless, and he sighed in exasperation.

  “Go hug your damn dog, Gin, before you lose it.”

  “I . . .” Her eyes were too wide, her skin too pale, and he realized that she had absolutely no idea how stressed she was. Or, more likely, she knew damn well and would die rather than admit it.

  “Go, before I kick you out,” he growled.

  She slammed her glass down on the counter—it was empty; she’d been using that as a pretext to come talk to him, he guessed, and stormed out. Teddy finished the order he was working on and slid it down the bar, then picked up Ginny’s glass and dumped it into the empties cart below the bar.

  “Stacy. Take over.”

  “What?” She looked at him, her eyes wide not with stress, like Ginny’s, but with excitement and surprise.

  “Ten minutes, starting now. Go.”

  Too soon, and she would probably screw up, but every bartender had to die on the job at least once, and probably more than that. It would be good for her.

  He slid through the crowd, towel still slung over his shoulder, the black apron still wrapped around his waist, and stopped just outside the door, watching Ginny, who was sitting on the city-supplied bench, the damned dog at her feet and Mistress Penny-Drops sitting on her lap, calmly washing one paw.

  “My father is always after me to go back to a ‘real job.’ He thinks I’ll meet someone there, and have a normal life, and work normal hours and . . .”

  “And you’d end up taking a hatchet to someone one morning, out of sheer boredom.”

  That surprised a laugh out of her, and Penny, affronted, leapt off her lap and landed on the ground, staring accusingly at the two of them. Georgie let out a contented sigh, and shifted her head until it rested on Ginny’s shoes.

  “Did they take anything?” he asked her. “In the break-in?” She hadn’t said robbed, he realized now. Ginny was too precise in her words for that not to mean something.

  “Tore the place up. But no. I didn’t . . . if they took anything, it wasn’t obviously valuable. They didn’t even open my jewelry box.” He’d never seen her wear jewelry, except the simple silver ring she always wore, and sometimes a pearl necklace, when she was dressed up. Her ears—or anything else, far as he could tell—weren’t pierced.

  “And the change jar was empty,” she recounted, “which means they got maybe ten bucks, but mostly they were going through my office, and all the places paper might be kept. Like the recycling bin.”

  “Shit. The office was tossed here, too.”

  She didn’t seem as surprised as he’d expected. No, of course not. Everyone knew, by now.

  “You think the two things are connected,” he said.

  “You don’t?”

  He hadn’t had enough time to think about it yet. “But, if it’s related to Joe, why would someone look here?”

  “What about your place?” she interrupted.

  “Mine? I . . .” She was right. The only reason they would have come there was if they’d somehow connected Ginny and DubJay with Mary’s, and that meant they probably knew about him, too.

  “Did the cops call you?”

  “No. But my building doesn’t have an alarm system—there’s no point.” He turned his face up to the sky, as though looking for some kind of answer. “If they did, they did. Not much I can do about it now, and not like I had anything they were looking for.”

  “Do you think they were looking for the papers, the ones Joe took?”

  He sat down on the bench next to her, careful not to step on Georgie, and to hell with Stacy, back inside. She’d manage. “Maybe. If Jacobs Junior had that, he’d be home free, right?”

  “No. Joe could still go to the authorities, or have copies, which would raise questions, anyway . . . I don’t know if copies would count. Would they?”

  “I don’t know.” If Megan’s ex came through . . . nobody had called yet, but there was no reason she would call back on a Saturday night. Real-estate fraud wasn’t enough to get the wheels of justice churning after hours, he supposed.

  “And what if it’s someone else, Teddy? What if there’s someone we don’t even know about yet?”

  “Jesus.”

  Mistress Penny leapt lightly to the back of the bench and walked toward him, reclaiming her usual spot on his shoulder. Her little head rested briefly on top of his own, then she curled across his shoulders like a scarf, her chin next to his.

  “You really need to get a collar for her,
” Ginny said, changing the subject entirely.

  “Yeah.” He could hear the lack of enthusiasm in his voice.

  “You should. I mean, what if she gets hurt? Without a tag, they won’t know who to call.”

  “She’s not my cat.”

  The fact that she was currently draped across him as though all the bones in her body had melted pretty much put the lie to that claim, but Ginny didn’t call him on it.

  “But wouldn’t you worry if she went missing?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said she wasn’t my cat.”

  “Then have her chipped, at least. It’s just twenty dollars to get her registered. Well, thirty dollars if she’s not fixed. Is she?”

  “I have no idea. It’s never been something we talked about.”

  “Tonica.”

  “What? I told you, she’s not my cat.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Typical guy—if he doesn’t put a ring on it, he won’t claim it.”

  “Hey! That’s not it at all. I respect her freedom. Also, do you want to be the one to put her in a cage and take her to the vet?”

  There was silence.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Miss Penny goes uncollared, untagged, unannoyed, and perfectly able to take care of herself. Back to the business at hand, please?”

  “What’s the point? I don’t see what else there is we can do.”

  “Call him, anyway. Joe. Just to be sure everything’s okay.” Thinking about the situation, his gut had gone cold, and his skin was prickling. He’d learned to trust those instincts. “I have to go back inside. Bring Georgie around to the back. I’ll stash her in the storeroom for the rest of the night. You can call there.”

  He expected her to argue. The fact that she didn’t made the coldness intensify.

  As did the fact that Penny, unusually, stayed with him the entire way inside, then leapt to the top of the bar, where she could keep an eye on things.

  Cats had instincts, too.

  Tonica’s tone had made something inside Ginny twist uncomfortably. She didn’t believe in premonitions, or omens, or ESP, but human stupidity and greed? That, she believed in, the same way she believed in gravity: inconvenient but inevitable. So once she’d gotten Georgie comfortably secured in the storeroom with an extra pup-tart and an old blanket to sleep on, she called the hotel, giving Joe’s room number to be connected directly.

  The phone rang once. Twice. A third time, and Ginny was starting to worry, her stomach clenching around the hard knot in her gut, when the receiver on the other end was lifted.

  “Hello? Mr. Jacobs?”

  “Hello?”

  A woman’s voice. Ginny’s brow creased, and her free hand pressed against her stomach, as though to ease the knot. Had they connected her to the wrong room?

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  “This . . . who is this?” Utter confusion filled the other woman’s voice, and the vocal switch from cautious to defensive triggered recognition in Ginny’s brain.

  “Ms. Coridan? Zara? Where is Joe? What’s going on? Why are you there?” A dozen possibilities flooded Ginny’s brain, none of them good, and she could feel her adrenaline ratchet up again.

  “Who is this?” the woman demanded.

  “Ginny Mallard. The one you threatened, remember?”

  “Oh. Right.” Zara didn’t sound reassured, then she got defensive. “I didn’t threaten you, I—”

  “Why are you there? What’s wrong?”

  “What, you mean beyond all the things that are already wrong?” Defensive and bitter. Now she sounded like the woman who had pulled a gun on them.

  “Zara, damn it, why are you there? Did Joe call you?” If so, she was going to wash her hands of him, Ginny swore it. Damn the man, anyway . . .

  “No. I . . . I needed to talk to him. To try and talk some sense into him.”

  “Hopefully, not with a shotgun.” The words slipped out before Ginny could stop them, but she didn’t really regret it.

  “Look, everything’s fine. Don’t worry.”

  “Uh-huh.” No smart-ass comeback to the shotgun crack? Ginny was pretty sure the other woman had been crying, and Zara Coridan didn’t seem like the sort of woman, on first encounter, who was likely to cry easily.

  Ginny turned, unable to pace in the small room, and tried again. “Let me talk to Joe.”

  There was a pause. “No. He doesn’t want to talk to you. Not to anyone. He’s done talking, he says.”

  Ginny frowned, not sure what that meant, and if it was good, or bad. “Look, someone broke into our offices, we think looking for something that would lead them to him. Do you understand? People—violent people—are looking for him.”

  “I have my gun,” she said.

  Oh, great. Ginny closed her eyes, feeling a headache form.

  “One person isn’t going to do it. Can you . . .” Calling the cops would be out. Joe, with his insistence on keeping everything quiet and not getting the family name smeared, would never go for that, although her instincts were clamoring for uniforms with guns right now. “Can you at least tell hotel security that you saw someone lurking in the hallway?”

  A hotel that nice would take unauthorized lurkers seriously. And even though Ginny knew she hadn’t left anything lying around that might lead to Joe—how could she, when she hadn’t even known where he was until after she left her apartment—it couldn’t hurt to take precautions, right? At least until they had someone official working on Joe’s situation.

  “No. No cops, no security. We’re fine. Everything’s fine.”

  Ginny didn’t have Tonica’s bar-honed instincts, but she knew bullshit when she smelled it. “Zara, nothing about this situation is ‘fine.’ Please.” But she knew it was a lost cause; enough years of talking to her parents had taught her when someone wasn’t listening anymore. Zara was scared, which meant that whatever had happened, Joe was scared. And scared men, no matter their age or wealth, did dumb things.

  Add a gun to the equation, and dumb could get deadly. No matter how good a shot Zara might be, she wasn’t good enough. And she’d probably shoot the wrong person, anyway.

  “All right. The door’s locked? Stay put, don’t go anywhere, don’t let him bring anyone else in.” They’d told him not to call anyone, not to talk to anyone or let them in, and he clearly hadn’t listened . . . maybe Zara would be smarter. Ginny was annoyed: they were busting their asses to get him out of trouble, and he couldn’t even follow basic instructions.

  The only response she got was a click. She’d been hung up on.

  “Damn it,” Ginny said, disgust overriding her worry. Georgie, who had curled up on the old blanket and gone to sleep, whuffled as though in response, but that and a twitch of her hind leg were the only reaction.

  Pocketing her phone, Ginny stared at the storeroom wall and came to a decision. Now, she just had to convince Tonica that it was the right one.

  “Wake up.”

  “I’m awake.” Dogs were sloppier than cats, but Penny had to admit, Georgie went from sleep to alert pretty fast, and without too much useless motion.

  “I’ve been listening. Someone . . .” She thought about what she had heard, and edited it, for Georgie’s flopped-over ears. “The ones who went through your den, they were the same ones who came here.” She wished, for a moment, that Georgie was a scent hound, but there had been too many people here too long to pick up any similarity between here and there. “They won’t come back here, but they might go there, to your den.”

  “No they won’t!” Georgie got to her feet in an awkward scramble, legs square under her, chest out as though she had bulldog blood in her. Penny had to scramble back in undignified haste to get out of her way, and her tail lashed once in annoyance.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she snapped. “What are you going to do against humans? Against more than one human, who probably has a gun?” She had heard guns mentioned; she knew what they were, that they were bad, and killed people. She had no interest in seeing any
one get killed.

  “You have to go somewhere else. Somewhere safe. All of you.”

  “All of who?”

  “You and Ginny. And Theodore.”

  “Who?” Georgie, taken down from battle readiness, looked at her with a puzzled expression on her wrinkled face, head cocked at an angle and ears flopping in a way that made Penny want to bat at one, just because it was there.

  “Theodore. Teddy.”

  “Oh. Why didn’t you just say so?” Sometimes, Georgie thought maybe Penny wasn’t as smart as she thought she was. But the shar-pei kept that thought to herself.

  “We need to keep them together, and you have to watch their tails.”

  “How?”

  Penny’s tail lashed, just once. “I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.”

  “What? No.”

  Tonica wasn’t buying it.

  Ginny pushed her main point again. “She’s there at the hotel, with a gun, and not exactly all that tightly wrapped.”

  “I am not charging over there like some kind of half-assed knight errant. We did our job. Call the cops, if you’re that worried.”

  “We can’t,” Ginny said glumly. “Even if that didn’t get us fired—and not paid—calling the cops saying there’s a crazy woman with a gun could get me sued for defamation of character or something, and then good-bye, business.”

  “Well then.” Like that solved everything. “Gin, we did the job we—you—were hired to do. In fact, we’ve done more. Way more than you’re getting paid to do, considering.”

  “But—”

  “Grown man. His own problems. Can only fix the stuff you’re hired to fix. Right?”

  She swirled what was left of her drink thoughtfully. “Right.” She really hated when someone used her own words to prove she was wrong. It wasn’t fair.

  Tonica turned to serve someone else, and Ginny looked around the bar, not wanting to think about the job anymore, not if she couldn’t do something about it. Being a workaholic was easier when it was all facts and dates and broken-down details, not people doing dumb things that she might not be able to fix.