Frederick Ramsay_Botswana Mystery 01

by Predators

  It required ten rings before his secretary answered. She gibberd something about a Christmas party, giggled, but had nothing to report. When reminded that it was only nine in the morning in Chicago and only the eighth of December, which meant Christmas was still seventeen days away, she hiccupped, made an effort to acquire a serious and sober tone, and agreed it did seem a bit early to celebrate. She’d have a word with the girls.

  “I asked you to pull the IPO file and fax it to me on the plane. You didn’t. I need it. Fax it to me at the hotel.”

  She seemed to struggle with her pronunciation but did manage to ask for the fax number.

  “How the hell would I know? Look in the itinerary on my desk and find it. I want that file ASAP.”

  Henry slapped his phone shut with a curse uttered loudly enough to attract the attention of several guests. He slid off the stool and stormed out of the bar, his beer untouched and his bill unpaid.

  ***

  From his vantage point in a booth to the rear, and unseen by Farrah, Travis Parrizi watched as he pulled out his notebook and scribbled furiously for a minute. He wondered what had become of Henry’s Blackberry. Everyone in the company had been issued one, Henry included. All notes and correspondence that related to Earth Global were to be entered in the devices. Apparently these notes were personal, or they were some other kind of business—business Farrah did not want anyone to know about. Farrah made a second, a third, and a fourth call. His expression seemed to grow darker after each. Then he’d left in a hurry. Interesting. The barkeep started to say something and held up a bar tab. Farrah ignored him and kept walking.

  Travis sidled over to the bar and signaled to the barman.

  “Here, let me have that. I’m with his party.” He took the bill, scanned it, and signed. The bartender smiled a thank you and held out Henry’s notebook.

  “Would…” he peered at the signature line on the tab, “Would Mr. Parizzi be kind enough to return this book to that gentleman?”

  “Certainly,” he said and pocketed the pad and its miniature gold pen. And he would return it—eventually—after he’d read it, made a few calls of his own, and weighed the consequences of several new options available to him.

  CHAPTER 10

  Brenda needed to talk to someone. Bobby should have been her first choice but that wasn’t going to work. Even if she could explain what she had in mind, and even if he understood—a stretch at best—the idiot boy would not go along, she was sure about that. It was funny. He watched cage fighting, gloried in the violence offered by his collection of video games, but when it came to the real world and tough choices, he turned into a bunny rabbit. Brenda smiled at the thought. Bunny, that was good. The only thing Bobby did with any skill was…well, like a bunny. Well, at least there was that. A girl needs something and he did help her out there. She’d just have to handle the rest. The question before the house now was, who should she confide in?

  Travis Parizzi rounded the corner. He had a notebook in his hand and was so absorbed in it, he nearly ran her down.

  “Oh, sorry. I nearly knocked you down, Mrs. Griswold.”

  “Hey, could have been worse. You could have knocked me up.”

  Travis slipped the notebook in his pocket and evidently decided to let the remark pass.

  “Yes. Well, sorry.”

  Brenda thought it was a hoot talking off-color to guys like Travis Parizzi. Freaking stuffed shirts. They loved it when you did it at the club or in bed with the lights out, but out in the polite world it, like, made them crazy. There was nothing like dropping the “F bomb” into an otherwise polite conversation to get things rolling. Well, you could take the girl out of the strip club, but you’d never get the strip club out of the girl.

  “We need to talk, Parizzi.”

  “About what?”

  “The stock you screwed Bobby out of. I want to exercise his option to buy it back.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean. What stock, what option?”

  “Don’t bother trying that tap dance on me, hotshot. Bobby sold his stock to you. Spare me the razzle dazzle about you don’t know. He said he had an option to buy it back inside a year. The year ain’t up and I want it.”

  Travis looked at her for a nearly a full minute without speaking, apparently trying to figure out where this could go.

  “You want to buy. As the guy in the movie said, show me the money.”

  “Now? I don’t have it right now, but I have it on tap.”

  “On tap? What, like it’s a keg of beer? Look, Mrs. Griswold, you want to redeem stock that your husband sold me for a considerable amount of money, more, I might add, than it would be worth on the open market, and you want me to surrender it on your say-so? Not going to happen. By the way, I didn’t have to screw it out of him. He was only too happy to sell.”

  “Look, I can get a letter of credit faxed to me tomorrow. When I do, I want you to, like, sign back Bobby’s shares. Got it?”

  “A faxed LOC. You’re kidding, right? Look, you want the stock, you can get it, but with cash. I want cash, and that means you can only redeem it after we get back to Chicago and…” He paused and studied the woman in front of him, “And, after other things.”

  “Other things? What other things?”

  “It’s business. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Brenda had survived as long as she had and succeeded where others might have failed because she could read people. Her handler back in Chicago at the club before she left to become Mrs. Robert Griswold said she’d missed her calling. She should have been a professional poker player.

  “You’re working a scam, aren’t you?”

  “Scam? What do you mean?”

  “You need that stock. You need it and you need time, and probably some other help, more options, I’ll bet, than you have your hands on right now, to pull off something.”

  “What? Pull what off? What other stock?”

  Brenda realized she’d hit pay dirt. Travis was up to something, and she’d bet her hottest red thong Leo didn’t know anything about it. “If I take the stock out of your hands, the deal goes south. Am I close?” Travis turned to leave. “Maybe I should talk to Leo. What do you think?” For a split second, Travis looked stricken. It was enough. “You want to buy me a drink and talk some business? Or do I have a chat with the boss man?” Brenda raised her eyebrows and smiled.

  “In an hour, in the bar.” He growled, turned on his heel, and stalked away.

  Brenda pumped her arm and whispered “Yes!”

  ***

  Michael seemed stronger that evening. Perhaps the medicine was working, after all. Hope springs like new flowers in the desert after a rain. False or real, hope enabled Sanderson to endure.

  “You are better, then?”

  “I am feeling better, yes. Show me these tires you have achieved.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “For the HiLux, I can dance.” Michael shuffled his feet, lost his balance and staggered, and caught himself on the door jamb.

  “You are not ready, Michael. You must rest.”

  “No, I am fine, you see. I must see these wheels.”

  It took a long time for him to walk outside to the court. He sat on its low wall to catch his breath. Sanderson pointed to the late Lovermore Ndlovu’s stolen property. Michael smiled, a weak smile, but a smile nonetheless. It was the first time he’d done so for months, it seemed.

  “You were lucky. These will fit the truck. See, the number of mounting holes in the wheels is correct and we have the lug nuts.” Sanderson was not sure what lug nuts were, but she beamed. She couldn’t be sure what pleased her more, the acquisition of these wonderful wheels or seeing Michael up, smiling, and maybe a little better.

  Michael stood and wrapped his hands around one of the wheels. He couldn’t lift it. He tried again and then collapsed on the wall, his face distraught.

  “I cannot do this thing, Mma.”

  “I will do it, but you must tell me how.”

/>   Michael instructed her how to mount the wheels on the truck’s axles and tighten the down the nuts.

  “Now we must ask Mr. Naledi for the loaning of a jack. We must lift this machine off of these blocks.”

  “A jack?” Sanderson rummaged in the pile of equipment stacked at the side of the house. “Like this one?” She held up the other prize from her trip to Kazungula—Lovermore’s jack.

  “Yes, like that. Is it another present from the police superintendent? He is a very generous man.”

  “With other people’s property, yes.”

  Several of the young men of the village had gathered to watch and offered to do the removal of the blocks for Mma Michael. It took longer than it might have, had Michael been able to do it alone. There was a great deal of competition among the boys for leadership, and then there were disagreements as to which wheel and which side should be lowered first. In the end the HiLux stood on its own four wheels, dented, rusted in spots and still missing a few parts, but in Sanderson’s eyes the most beautiful machine in the country.

  “We must ask if Mr. Naledi has a fender we can beat into shape for the right front, and then we must paint it,” Michael said. Sanderson shook her head and tried to hide the tears streaming down her face.

  “I would like a red bakkie,” she said.

  “You should paint it that color, then.” Michael slumped forward.

  “Back to bed with you.”

  With the help of two of the boys she managed to get her son back to bed. Michael smiled once more.

  “Tomorrow I will finish the engine and we will charge up the battery again and you shall drive your beautiful machine.” Michael closed his eyes and lay very still—too still. Sanderson’s heart was in her throat. Then she saw him draw a breath. He slept. Death had not yet come. There was still hope.

  CHAPTER 11

  Sekoa reached the shore of the Chobe at dusk. He approached the river’s edge cautiously. Crocodiles lurked beneath its surface and while he had never witnessed one attack a lion, he had seen a nearly grown zebra pulled in. He studied the water’s surface and satisfied there was no danger, crouched and began lapping. His tongue, like that all of the was not particularly adept at drinking and it took him some time to finish. When he was done he rose up from his crouch and tested the air. In the past he’d relied on his eyesight to search out prey and relied less on his sense of smell. A movement to his left brought him to full alert.Felidae,

  One of the members of the pack of hyenas that had dogged him earlier sidled from the bush and stared at him, its tongue lolling. The lion growled and took a step toward the hyena, who scuttled away back in the direction he’d come. The lion watched him leave. He was downwind, and now he caught the scent of the rest of the pack. They were trailing him. Waiting for him to die; perhaps they might even hurry that process along.

  He followed the shoreline, trotting eastward, away from the park and toward a set of vaguely familiar odors. He recognized some of them. He’d caught them before when the large stinking beast with no legs came forward and sat near the pride. It never attacked and they’d become used to it. It made a curious growling noise and when it did so, it emitted a strong smell and made other noises like birds but there were no birds on it like on the buffalo, just dangly things that smelled like what was in his nostrils now—definitely an animal smell. Possibly human, although he could never separate it from the large legless beast. He knew he needed to shake the hyenas off his trail and they, as most of the beasts in the park, always shied away from that beast and its appendages. If he could get close to it or them, perhaps they would leave him to die in peace.

  A giraffe and its mate stood motionless, watching him from afar, ready to employ their hooves if he were to change direction and come at them. Those hooves could be deadly. He never hunted healthy giraffe. Impala and kudu scattered from his path as he trotted along the river bank. He ignored them. He would have liked to pull one down but he knew he had neither the endurance for the chase nor the strength to actually drag it to the ground. His earlier lucky kill had provided enough sustenance to last for a few days. In the old days, when the pride would hunt, he could eat fifteen or sixteen kilos and sleep for a week. But that was no longer the case. He would have to steal a smaller predator’s food or find carrion.

  ***

  Bobby Griswold paced the hotel room. He didn’t know what had become of Brenda and he worried. Not about her safety, but about whom she might have met and what she might be doing. Before they’d married she’d confessed the affairs she’d had. He’d accepted them. After all, he wasn’t exactly a saint, and in her line of work, he couldn’t have expected anything else. Hadn’t he been one of them, at least at first? But he still had jealous moments when he thought of the men in her past, the ones she met at parties, and the ones he imagined her meeting but he wasn’t aware of. He couldn’t trust her alone and out of his sight. More than once this constant surveillance and suspicion had brought him to the edge. What if she had hooked up with some guy?

  He had doubts, not for the first time, about his decision to marry and in fact often wondered how it had happened. He couldn’t remember thinking about it but, well, Brenda had a way of getting what she wanted. He heard the key in the lock and hastily found a chair, sat, and opened the paper.

  “Hi.” Brenda tossed her bag on the bed and strolled to the bathroom. He didn’t like that. Why did she need a bathroom right after she came in the door?

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Around, you know shopping and all. What else have I to do with my time? I mean, I thought we were coming to Africa and see wild animals and things, not mope around a hotel all day. This could be downtown Cleveland, for crying out loud.”

  “You left me an hour ago. So, what did you buy?”

  “I didn’t see anything. The stuff in the gift shop is, like, real tacky. Like I said, this could be Cleveland.”

  “We’re supposed to go to some river where there are the animals and things, the day after tomorrow. Leo is going to send the engineers and most of the others back home and we’re flying out to a resort or something.”

  “Resort? You’re kidding, right? What kind of resort are you going to find in the middle of Africa? Geez, Bobby, use your head. It’s gonna be tents and MREs.”

  “No, no, look at the brochure on the table. It’s where we’re going.”

  Brenda scanned the pages. “You’re sure this is the place? Do they have a spa? I don’t see one in this thing? I could use a massage.”

  “Come over here and I’ll give you a massage.”

  “Can’t do it, Babe, I have to meet somebody.” She slipped out of her jeans and into a short skirt and blouse. The neckline made Bobby frown.

  “You’d be better off if you wore a bra with that blouse. Who’re you meeting?” Bobby’s jealousy antennae were up.

  “Nobody. It’s, like, business. Don’t look at me that way, Bobby. It really is business.”

  “The only business you know is—”

  “Don’t even say it. You are going to have to learn to trust me. It might as well be now. I say it’s business with a capital B, and that’s what it is.”

  Brenda applied lipstick, gave her hair a pat, and left. Bobby waited until he felt certain she’d reached the elevators and rose to follow her. He’d find out soon enough what kind of business she was up to.

  CHAPTER 12

  Leo found Henry Farrah in the lobby turning out his pockets. He watched as his lawyer checked and rechecked them. He inspected the floor close to where he’d been sitting, and then he seemed to have an epiphany, stood upright, and headed for the hotel bar. Leo followed. As Farrah disappeared around the door jamb at the bar entrance, the double set of elevator doors opened. Brenda exited from the first, Travis Parizzi from the second. The corridor to the bar suddenly seemed crowded. Neither saw Leo, who slowed his pace and edged to the wall out of their line of sight. The two followed Henry into the bar. Leo continued his walk and nearly ran into B
obby Griswold who bolted from the stairwell.

  ‘You headed for the bar as well, Robert?”

  “What? No…ah, yes. Maybe. Should I be?”

  “Everyone else is. Henry, your wife, Travis, and I’m thinking I might join them. Then again, perhaps I should let the children plot and scheme for a while before I embarrass them with my presence. What do you think?”

  “Um, I don’t know, sir. Whatever.”

  “Articulate and decisive as always. Are you waiting for me to die, too?”

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind. Walk with me, Robert. We need to have a word.”

  ***

  When Travis and Brenda entered the bar, Farrah and the barman seemed to be having an argument. The barman pointed in their direction and said something to Henry.

  “What’s that old bag of—?”

  “Oh, oh, he wants his notebook back.” Travis waved to Henry.

  “Henry, I’ve been looking all over for you. I have your notebook. Here,” he reached into his pocket and produced the book and its pen. “You left it here earlier. The bartender asked me to return it.”

  Henry squinted at Travis. Finally, he held out his hand and took the book.

  “You forgot to pay your bar tab, too. You owe me sixty pula and fifty thebe, whatever that works out to in dollars.”

  Henry pocketed the book, reached into another pocket and withdrew a one hundred pula note. “Here, keep the change.” He pivoted and rushed out of the room.

  “Thank you, Henry. I’ll have a drink in your honor.” He turned to Brenda. “He bought a scotch and a beer and didn’t drink either one. Left them on the bar.”