Tried & True (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 5)

by Jerusha Jones

  I could think of lots of reasons not to play football—whether the contact or no-contact version—especially since Skip had been an older, and intermittent, college student. He’d paid his own way through school, one quarter at a time. And he’d never been terribly athletic, at least not in my experience. More sedate and brainy, just the way I liked my men.

  I chuckled to myself. As if I’d had a ton of experience. Nope. I’d had the usual spate of silly crushes in high school and college, but after that it was work and more work, building up my résumé until I found the perfect non-profit job. Skip really had been the only man who’d attracted my serious attention, and only after he’d made it clear that he was attracted to me.

  Thirty minutes later, Josh zipped down an exit ramp and navigated several turns on city streets before pulling into a parallel parking space in front of an office building.

  With some rather acrobatic maneuvering and grunting, Josh peeled off the coveralls. He had a full set of business casual clothes—khakis and a button-up shirt, a gadgety watch, and phone clip on his belt—on underneath the coveralls. He looked like every other geeky male IT employee in Silicon Valley. He wadded up the coveralls and shoved them under his seat.

  “He’s working the lunch shift today. I hope he can keep his cool when we walk in.”

  I hopped out of the car with a worried smile on my face. “This won’t get him into even more trouble?”

  “Not if we act fast.” Josh took a moment to retuck his shirt into his pants, trying to fix the rumpliness that had resulted from the struggle to shed his disguise in the car. With the current iteration of his appearance, however, I thought he’d blend in better with the other men in this particular neighborhood if he kept that couldn’t-be-bothered, just-rolled-out-of-bed look. I was tempted to offer to tousle his hair a bit to complete the impression. But he took off at a fast clip around the corner, and I jogged after him.

  Robbie was indeed behind the counter in the small Subway franchise that nestled in the first retail slot next the office building’s main lobby. He had a hairnet on over his curly mop and food-safe gloves on his hands. He did a quick double take when he spotted me in line, but then his face split into a wide grin.

  “What would you like, ma’am?” he asked when my turn came.

  “A turkey club with cheddar and everything except onions and jalapenos.”

  “Toasted?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “’Cause you know who else is gonna be toasted.” He winked at me.

  My eyes widened. “Mission accomplished?” I whispered.

  “Oh yeah.” Robbie raised his hand to give me a fist bump over the plastic shield that protected the sandwich ingredients from customers’ germs. I waved it off at the last second, waggling my finger at his glove.

  Robbie scratched his ear instead, which I was pretty sure defeated the purpose of wearing the gloves, and turned to Josh. “I remember you too, man. Saw you around the office with Skip sometimes. But if you’re with Nora now, I guess you’re okay.”

  “Josh has joined the dark side,” I murmured, “and is dealing with the same repercussions we are.”

  Robbie whistled softly. “Condolences, man.”

  We had to shuffle down the counter, moving with our sandwiches as they were assembled on the other side. But Robbie escaped his station and hovered behind the cashier for a moment as we paid. “Come see me anytime, Nora. It’s been a pleasure.” Then he scooted off to refill the tuna salad tub.

  He was still such a boy, maybe a little lost in the big, bad world of commerce, even though he sure did know his way around the generally accepted accounting principles. Good thing there’d been a counter between us, because I’d wanted to hug him, or throttle him. Either way, it was a relief to see that he seemed healthy and in good spirits.

  I held our wrapped sandwiches on my lap as we sped north again—to Emeryville. We were putting a lot of miles on Josh’s nondescript car. Josh found a park with a terrific view of the Bay Bridge, but it was too cold and breezy to eat at one of the picnic tables. So we huddled in our seats, and I tried to choke down some nourishment. We had less than an hour to burn before our appointment with Tank Ebersole.

  I called Clarice again. No new developments on her end. She sounded even more nervous than I was—there was a tautness to her voice that I’d rarely heard. I was worried she’d been watching some of Ebersole’s interview videos online, but I didn’t bring up the subject.

  “Not a peep from your federal friends,” she said. “If they’ve noticed you’re gone, they haven’t complained to me.”

  “They’re not likely to. But I’m in good hands.” I glanced at Josh who was doing justice to his sandwich, chewing as if his life depended upon it. “Emmie okay?”

  “Quiet this morning before I took her to the bunkhouse for school. I hate how our moods rub off on her. I don’t think we’ll ever have a completely carefree and giddy munchkin on our hands.”

  But I knew Emmie could have a lighthearted side when she was free from worry. I just needed to stop giving her reasons to worry. The weight of the world—on my little girl.

  Josh tapped my knee. It was time.

  “Call you later,” I told Clarice and hung up.

  Now things could get dicey. We’d just passed Josh’s optimistic estimate of a couple hours free of FBI awareness and observation. But no other vehicles had pulled into the park’s parking lot during our late lunch break, so if they were watching us, it was from a distance.

  I could only hope that three p.m. in a tavern would be quiet and conducive to a quickly-obtained mutual understanding.

  CHAPTER 10

  Emeryville still shows evidence of a major culture clash. It’s between Berkeley and Oakland, and the two don’t meet cleanly in the middle. There’s a lot of gentrification and quiet, tree-lined streets full of the well-kept houses owned by university professors and technology company executives. There are also gritty strip malls and the depressing ruins of old warehouses and other industrial relics of the city’s meat packing and railway boom eras which had also been accompanied by gambling halls and bordellos. Rough-and-tumble versus genteel.

  So why wouldn’t it also be the headquarters for an outlaw motorcycle group? I supposed it was like hiding in plain sight for Tank Ebersole.

  Josh’s chosen route through town was definitely more on the seedy side. I gave up counting the number of taverns we passed, most of which already appeared to be open for business. Union halls, tattoo parlors, massage parlors, pawnshops, check-cashing places, convenience stores with bars on the windows and doors, teenaged kids standing in small groups on street corners, cupping their hands around cigarettes and lighting up, blankly watching us drive by. I wasn’t getting terrific vibes.

  There were several good reasons why I’d failed to tell Matt about my appointment with Tank Ebersole. One was to hide my motives and to give myself a shot at free movement. I had a strong suspicion that if the FBI knew about my plans, they would have absolutely forbid me from following through and maybe would have locked me up to guarantee that I didn’t meet with him.

  Another reason was to protect Ebersole. Which seriously went against my better judgment. He was the last man to actually need protection, in my opinion, and I certainly had no sympathy for him. But if he was going to cooperate with my proposal, then I owed him some space in which to operate. And that meant not betraying him to his own followers as well as to the FBI—just yet.

  If anyone in the Mongrels’ ranks got the idea that their president was in cahoots with the feds—or any branch of law enforcement—his life would immediately be at stake. His talking to the wife of a known criminal wouldn’t raise nearly as many eyebrows. And I needed him alive—for the time being—and available to me instead of on the run or in hiding.

  Besides, I was incredibly curious about why Ebersole was afraid of my husband. That by itself would have been reason enough to meet with him, no matter how unsavory the prospect was.

 
Josh pulled the Kia to a stop near the curb in a two-hour parking zone and in front of a vehicle that appeared not to have moved in several years, mainly because it was jacked up on cinder blocks and didn’t have rear wheels. What did remain of the car was pockmarked and rusted, and the windshield glass had a cobwebbed crater on the passenger side. I got the impression the friendly neighborhood parking enforcement officer was nonexistent, or on the take.

  “That’s it.” Josh pointed over his shoulder toward the opposite side of the street.

  A faded marquee over the single, heavy wooden door in an otherwise blank stucco wall said “The Ponderosa” in a font that resembled loops in a lariat rope. The fact that it was a tavern was evident only from the No Minors sign posted on the door.

  “There’s a back exit to an alley,” Josh continued, “but last night the hallway to the exit was jammed with empty cartons and bags of dirty linens. I doubt it’s any clearer today. The bikers usually park around the corner in an area they’ve staked out as their own. We’ll check there before going in, just to know how many we’re dealing with.”

  I nodded. I was going to give myself an open sore, the way I was chewing on my lip.

  Josh pulled the key out of the ignition and handed it to me. “Put that in your shoe. If anything happens to me, there’s a freeway on-ramp straight ahead in about half a mile. Get out of here first, then call for help. You got that?”

  I nodded again.

  Josh unbuttoned his shirt and yanked the hem out of his waistband. He pulled it off, revealing a form-fitting black T-shirt underneath. He shoved the garment under his seat to join the coveralls—yet another layer of the onion. “They’re going to pat us down, so I’m not packing. You shouldn’t be either.” He pitched a brow at me.

  I nodded yet again. Then shook my head. Agreed. No weapon. I hadn’t risked bringing one with me on the plane, anyway.

  We exited the car and quickly jaywalked toward the tavern. The air was still and silent, stuffy even though there was a bitter edge to the temperature, as though all living creatures were in hiding, peeping out at us from hollows in the telephone poles and cracks in the concrete.

  Josh dodged around the corner, and I followed him. One lone bike was backed against the curb, leaning on its kickstand. It could have been one of the Harleys I’d seen in Gus’s shop, but they all looked pretty much the same to me.

  Josh glanced at the license plate number. “Butch,” he whispered. “Whose real name is John Paul Mawbry, by the way. I guess a name like that was a little too tame for an outlaw biker.” A quirky smile played about his lips.

  It occurred to me—too late—that maybe he was trying to lighten my mood, help me relax. Unbidden, Clarice’s foul-language ditty sprang into my mind. I really was not looking forward to seeing Butch again, or his boss.

  “Geronimo,” Josh murmured close to my ear.

  I nodded again and gave him a wobbly smile.

  He hooked a hand under my elbow and ushered me back around to the tavern entrance. But at the door, he did the most ungentlemanly thing and barged in first, leaving me trailing in his wake.

  It took a long minute for my eyes to adjust to the dim, practically nonexistent lighting, and I realized why Josh had kept his sunglasses on until we were inside. I bumped into him, and he steadied me with a hand to my hip.

  “What on earth are you humming?” he muttered.

  “Nothing,” I whispered back. “Gilligan’s Island.” I sucked in a deep breath and clenched my fists, willing myself a hefty length of steel backbone, determined to make Clarice proud of me.

  And then I coughed. The deep breath had been a mistake. Even though the state of California forbid smoking in places of business, the atmospheric particulate density inside the tavern indicated this particular establishment didn’t follow the rules. My sinuses immediately went into overdrive.

  Josh grinned down at me. “Showtime, Mary Ann.” He strode forward along the length of the bar on our right, heading for something back in the shadows.

  I stuck so close to him that I tripped on his heels. A few old men perched on stools as though they’d sprouted from the wood seats and then petrified in the same spots. They exhibited absolutely no interest in us. I guessed they were human fixtures that came with the place, from opening to closing every single day. Because who else drowns themselves in cheap whiskey in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday? For a brief moment, I thought of Loretta and Tarq and wondered if they’d ever frequented dingy bars like this one in order to numb their demons.

  Two men rose from the last booth on the left to greet us. Except the greeting didn’t give me the warm fuzzies. Butch held up a warning finger.

  Josh stopped and held his arms out to the side. He meekly let Butch frisk him. And then, to my surprise, both Butch and the man with him submitted to a frisking from Josh. No weapons were found on any of the men, which seemed mutually satisfying from the way they quickly stepped away from each other to reclaim their personal space.

  But then they were all looking at me. And Ebersole—I’d recognized him immediately from his ranting videos—took a step forward. And hesitated, scratched at a nasty grinning skull tattoo on his neck, coughed the phlegmy hack of a longtime smoker.

  “You know what? Trina, c’mere a minute,” he hollered.

  The female bartender lifted a hinged counter panel and came around to us. She pushed me up against the bar and deftly ran her hands along my limbs, down the center of my back, quick but firm swipes both between and under my breasts, and pats around my ankles. She was chewing gum loudly, with snappy, smacking sounds, and she smelled strongly of the beverages she served. Like a swill bucket.

  My face glowed palely in the mirror behind the bar, and there was a momentary flutter of new fear in my stomach before I recognized myself. My eyes were huge, dilated in the gloom, and the cleft palate scar on my upper lip was even more white than usual. I hate that scar. It’s a dead giveaway of my stress level.

  Trina backed away from me and wiped her hands on the dish towel that was tucked in the wrapped ties of her mini-apron as though I had cooties. “She’s clean.” She hiked up her tank top straps and ducked back behind the bar, flashing us all with plenty of white thigh skin from below the tight spandex shorts she was wearing.

  Neither Butch nor Ebersole were wearing their patched Mongrels’ vests—their colors. Which meant that they weren’t publicly identifying as outlaw bikers and that this meeting was officially unofficial. I recognized the meaning of this omission in their clothing because Gus had given me a few pointers on the subject.

  But the frisking procedures felt like yet another element in a complicated set of rituals surrounding our negotiations—a charade of sorts. I wasn’t sure who it was all supposed to impress.

  Ebersole gestured us into the booth with the air of a generous host. Trina returned with four beer bottles balanced on a cork-lined tray. Little wisps of condensation spiraled from their open tops. She plunked them down in front of us without the niceties of napkins or coasters. She got a resounding smack on her backside from Ebersole for her efforts, but the dull expression on her face never changed.

  Ebersole glugged half his bottle, banged it down on the table, and swiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He was even viler up close. With languid, calculating eyes, like a boa constrictor. And old.

  That part surprised me. I didn’t harbor any illusions about the outlaw biker lifestyle being beneficial for one’s complexion, but Ebersole was especially not aging gracefully. His face looked like the crackled, dried mud at the bottom of a desert creek bed in August. His teeth were yellowed, and I could smell his raunchy alcohol-laced breath from across the table. If I had been a nicer person, I might have offered him a breath mint.

  Josh had taken a couple gulps from his bottle too. He returned it to the table and said, “We don’t have all day.”

  “You know Rocky Navarro?” Ebersole grunted. I thought the question was directed at Josh, but Ebersole was staring straig
ht at me.

  I shook my head.

  “Never heard your husband talk about him?” His eyes narrowed menacingly.

  So it was my interrogation, after all. I shook my head again.

  “He’s the dude who got shanked down in that Mexican jail.”

  I scowled back. Might as well mirror the thug’s tactics. “You mean that traitor who took part in Skip’s kidnapping?” I spat out.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, little lady. Heheh.” Ebersole’s chuckle sounded like a cat choking on a hairball. “I didn’t say nothin’ about motive. Just checkin’. Rocky was one of ours.”

  “Wait.” I pitched forward, on the verge of climbing over the table to wrap my hands around Ebersole’s ugly, bulging neck. “You—you—you were in on that?”

  Ebersole was so large, he didn’t have much room to press back against the wall of the booth, but he tried to make himself flatter, his palms up to ward me off. “Looks like I’d better start at the beginnin’.”

  Under the table, Josh had clamped a hand around my knee in a cautionary gesture, and the pressure he was applying finally hit my pain sensors.

  “Okay.” I sniffed in what I hoped was a derogatory manner. In truth, the postnasal drip instigated by the latent cigarette smoke in the air had reached a crucial—and ticklish—point. “Talk.” It felt good to be the one giving the command.

  “I guess you don’t know, but your old man and I, we go way back. He used a lot of my guys as couriers for his operation—for a while. Nobody was goin’ to mess with a Mongrel carryin’ a day’s take from a gamblin’ parlor or a drug deal. Best armed escort around.”

  “Except when they pilfered,” I interrupted.