by Sharon Sala
Harley had not aged well. His long, stringy hair was totally gray, and his squat little body had done nothing but get wider and his legs more bowed.
Still, he was the one who’d come into Harley’s world, so judgment was not needed. He lifted his hand in a greeting and smiled.
Harley neither waved back nor changed his expression, and he didn’t stop walking until he was within spitting distance.
“What you be doin’ on my place?” Harley asked.
Bubba had a job to do and wasted no time in lip service. He just pulled out the wad of cash.
“I have a job that needs to be done, and two thousand dollars for the man who’ll do it for me.”
Harley’s eyes narrowed. “What kinda job?”
“I need someone killed.”
Harley swung his rifle, pointing it straight at the other man’s head.
“Why you think I would do such a ting?”
Bubba shrugged. “I just heard that you were a good shot and that you didn’t mind getting your hands dirty.”
Harley scowled. “Murder and mud be two different tings. Prove to me you not wired up by de cops tryin’ to pin someting on me.”
Bubba shivered in spite of his intention to stay calm. “Prove it? How?” he asked.
Harley waved the rifle again.
“Strip where you stand. If dere be no wire, den we talk.”
“Take off my clothes? Hells fire,” he muttered, but started stripping where he stood.
Harley watched with interest but said nothing, and when all of the man’s clothes were on the ground, Harley went through them, checking for bugs.
“Okay…no wires. Now I listen.”
“Can I get dressed?” Bubba asked.
Harley waved the rifle again. “You. Take de clothes and follow. We talk in back.”
Bubba put on his underwear and picked up everything else off the ground and ran to catch up. Harley was already back at the butchering table, slinging fish guts into the trees.
He dressed quickly as he watched Harley cleaning the fish, and then took the money roll out of his pocket again as a reminder of what was at stake.
“So, who do you want to die?” Harley asked.
Bubba was trying to focus on Harley’s words and not what he was doing, but the grossness of the flies, the heat and the bloody table was getting to him.
“A woman in New Orleans. I’ll show you a picture. I’ll give you the address of the house. You kill her, and another thousand dollars like this is yours.”
“Why you want dis woman dead?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Bubba snapped. “Will you do it or not?”
“You cheat me, I gut you like dis fish.”
“Deal,” he said.
“Show me,” Harley said, and then watched the man pull up a picture on his cell phone.
“This is the woman I want dead.”
Harley frowned. “The movie star?”
“Yes, and she’s in New Orleans right now. You’ll have to do it at her house because she’s staying out of sight. There are security cameras everywhere and she has a bodyguard, so make sure you stay in the shadows. Use a hunting scope on your rifle if you have one. If you do it at night, know that there are motion detector lights all over. Look for the rooms with lights, and then make it happen.”
“Give me the address. Give me de money you bring. You come tomorrow morning with rest or I come after you.”
Bubba held out a thousand dollars.
Harley motioned for him to lay it on the table.
His nose curled as he tried to find a spot not covered in blood and guts.
Harley stabbed his fish knife through the bills, pinning them to the table to keep them from blowing away, while the man wrote down an address on a scrap of paper he’d pulled from his pocket, and slipped it between the stack of hundred-dollar bills.
“You go now,” Harley said.
Bubba didn’t have to be told twice, but he had to make himself walk calmly. It wasn’t until he knew he was out of sight that he ran the rest of the way to his car and drove away.
Harley slipped the address and the money into his pants pocket, gathered up the fish and went inside. He hadn’t had breakfast, and it was nearing noon. This bass would fry up just fine.
But while Harley was heating up a skillet, Bubba was getting uneasy. He’d started a fire that he couldn’t put out. Harley Fish was a wild card. Either this could be the denouement he’d been trying for, or it could go to hell in a handbasket. The biggest fear he had was that Harley would fail and get caught. He didn’t trust the man to keep his mouth shut, but he’d already started this ball rolling, and he was a thousand dollars into the deal. He just had to trust that it would play out in his favor. After all the mishaps so far, he was due for a win.
*
Brendan and Sahara’s search of the bookcase wasn’t any more successful than finding that empty hole in the floor. Whatever Leopold had done with the key to the journal, it wasn’t going to be found easily. By the time they’d handled every book in the case, they were covered in dust, especially Sahara.
“That’s all of them,” she said, as she got up from the floor.
There was dust on her shoes, all over the top of her hair and on her clothes because every book Brendan pulled off the shelf above her had shed a little of the dust down onto her.
He grinned. “You look like you’re raising a litter of dust bunnies. There’s not a clean spot on you.”
She laughed. “No thanks to you.”
“Not my fault you were sitting at my feet.”
“Whatever,” she said, brushing uselessly at her shoulders and the seat of her shorts.
He picked a bit of fuzz from the crown of her head and then dropped it on the floor.
She didn’t care about dirt. She wanted answers, but their search wasn’t yielding what they needed. In frustration, she threw up her hands and then shoved them through her hair.
“Where is that key? What did he do with it? What if it’s not even in here? This old mansion is huge. We could look for years and still never find it. I should have known this would be futile.”
Brendan shook his head.
“Just calm down,” he said. “Leopold would keep the journal and the key to it close to each other. Whenever he wanted to go through them, he wouldn’t be running all over this museum of a house trying to gather them up.”
“I guess,” she said.
“Let’s think of this from another angle. What if the key wasn’t written in any kind of book?”
“I can’t think like this. I feel gross,” she said, and pulled up the tail of her shirt to wipe the dust off her face, baring her belly and most of the bra cupping her very shapely breasts.
Brendan grunted beneath his breath and turned his back, but far too late. What the hell was it with her? She was the least modest woman he’d ever known, and it was driving him crazy.
“Okay, I’m thinking now,” she said.
He took a deep breath. “Let me know when you get an idea.”
Sahara began to pace the room from one end to the other, then back again, kicking at chairs, rattling cupboards filled with dusty little figurines and poking behind furniture.
“You could help,” she muttered.
“I wouldn’t know what’s out of place,” he said.
“Well, hell, McQueen. Neither would I. It’s been fifteen years since I set foot in this godforsaken house. And I wasn’t allowed in here.”
“Then tell me what’s familiar. Start with furniture.”
She pivoted, pointing things out one by one.
“The desk. The bookcase. The mantel over the fireplace. The—” Her lips parted as she stared at the fireplace. “It’s brick. It used to be stone.”
“Good work,” he said, and headed for the fireplace again, only this time he began looking from a different perspective.
The brick had been laid in a herringbone pattern, and this time he started at the floor and began wor
king his way up. About halfway up on the right side, he saw a slight gap between the brick and the grout and pushed. A picture hanging above the fireplace swung forward like the page of a book, revealing a wall safe hidden behind it.
“Shoot. Now we don’t have the key or the combination,” Sahara said.
Brendan stood there a minute, thinking, then asked, “What was Katarina’s birthday?”
“Uh…January 2, 1947.”
He turned back to the safe, spun the dial to clear it, then made the first turn to right 1, left 2, then right 4, left 7. The click was loud and distinct as the door opened.
“Bingo,” Brendan said, and thrust his hand inside. “And that’s why they always say to never use obvious dates or names as your password.” He pulled out a small black notebook, opened it and then looked at Sahara and grinned. “This is it! Grab that journal from the desk and let’s go back to our room. You can clean yourself up while I see what I can make of all this.”
Sahara threw her arms in the air and did another little pirouette.
Brendan sighed. She danced when she was happy. That might have just sealed the deal with him. He wanted her and was getting tired of fighting the truth.
“Lead the way,” he said.
He shut and locked the safe, replaced the picture and then closed the door to the little room behind them as they left.
A half hour later Sahara was in the shower and he was sitting at the writing desk with both books open, scanning back and forth from book to key and back again when his phone rang. He glanced down, saw it was his brother Carson and answered.
“Hey, Carson.”
“Brendan, I heard about the attempt on Sahara’s life. Is everything okay?”
“Yes, we’re good. How’s the research going? Do you have anything for me?”
“I hacked Leopold’s bank records as far back as they had them in the system, but not sure it was far enough back to help.”
“Did you see any kind of payoff patterns? Anything suspicious to show he was handing out money on a regular basis?”
“He loaned thirty thousand dollars to a man named Sutton Davidson a number of years ago, but the man paid him back in full.”
“Yes, that was a housekeeper’s son. Sahara said the woman worked here for a while. Sounds like he was helping him start out a business.”
“Got it. Okay, here’s another one. About thirty years ago he made a large onetime payment of twenty-five thousand dollars to a woman named Julia Bennett, then twenty-eight years ago another large onetime payment to a woman named Barbara Lovett, and three more payments like that in subsequent years to other women.”
“Sounds like he was paying off his playmates,” Brendan said.
“Maybe,” Carson said. “I’ll look into the Travis family charitable donations tomorrow. Both kids are sick and so is my honey. I’m on doctor duty until further notice.”
“Oh man, I’m sorry to hear that,” Brendan said. “Hug the babies from Uncle Bren, and tell Shelly I’m sorry she’s sick and to get well soon.”
“Will do. When I have more news, I’ll let you know.”
“Just don’t get yourself in trouble on my account,” Brendan said.
“It’s all good,” Carson said, and disconnected.
Thunder rumbled again, this time a little closer. When Brendan got up and pushed back the curtains to look out, he could see that the wind was rising.
Sahara came out of the bathroom wrapped in a bath towel.
“Keep your back turned, McQueen.”
He continued to look out the window, but his heart rate picked up with the knowledge that she was naked behind him.
“Carson called,” he said.
“Did he find anything?”
“A few things but nothing definitive. The wind is rising. That rain will be here soon.”
“Billie and Lucy should be home by now,” she said, as she hurried into the large closet and pulled the door partly closed.
She quickly stepped into underwear and a clean pair of shorts, then pulled a sports bra over her head and a T-shirt after that and pushed the door aside. “I’m decent. You can turn around.”
He turned.
Her long legs were bare and so were her feet, and even though her hair was up, it was still damp and leaving little wet spots on her shirt where the tendrils were hanging.
“Shiny as a new penny,” he said.
“It feels good to be clean,” she said, and started toward him, then remembered the windows and stopped.
At that moment, the security alarm chimed, indicating that a door had been opened.
“Billie’s back with groceries. We should help,” Brendan said. He folded up the two books he’d been reading and slipped them into his suitcase and shut it.
“Then let’s go,” Sahara said, moving past him to the door with Brendan bringing up the rear.
Twelve
Billie set a sack of groceries on the kitchen counter and was on her way out to get the rest when Sahara and Brendan walked in.
“I’ll grab the rest,” Brendan said. “Where’s Lucy?”
“She got a call. I left her outside in the car for a little privacy.”
Brendan took off out the door to carry in the rest of the groceries and passed Lucy as she was coming into the kitchen carrying the dry cleaning.
“Where should I put this?” Lucy asked.
“Just drape the bags over the back of a kitchen chair,” Billie replied. “I’ll take it all back where it belongs later.”
Lucy did as she was told and then glanced at Sahara.
“Your hair is wet. Is everything okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Sahara said. “Brendan and I were just digging through old stuff and got dirty.”
Billie frowned. “What’s dirty in this house?” she asked.
Sahara laughed. “I told Brendan the dust in Leopold’s office would make you mad.”
“Are you serious? It was that bad?”
“Yes, ma’am. Quite a bit of dust.”
“Strange. I would have thought Leopold would complain. He was always so picky about the housework around here. No matter. I’ll have a word with that cleaning crew, for sure.”
Brendan came back in with the rest of the groceries and set them on the counter.
“It didn’t look like he’d been in his office in a long time,” Sahara told Billie.
Billie’s frown deepened. “What were you looking for?”
Before Sahara could comment, Brendan quickly spoke up.
“Oh, just going through his schedule, stuff like that, trying to figure out if he’d had any meetings scheduled on a planner. I thought it might give us some clues as to who he saw last, if they had any problems…that kind of thing.”
“Oh, that’s smart,” Billie said, then began putting up groceries.
Lucy lost interest in the conversation, and after a quick word to Sahara that she was going up to change, she left the room.
Billie picked up a jug of laundry soap and a package of paper towels and headed for the utility room.
Sahara moved closer to Brendan and then whispered, “Why didn’t you mention what we found?”
“Because right now we don’t know for sure what we found, and the fewer people who know it exists, the better.”
She shrugged. “Okay, but we’re talking about Lucy and my mother. They’re hardly dangerous.”
He didn’t argue the point. “Knowing too much could possibly put them in danger, so I still want it kept between us,” he said.
“Are you going to give the journal to the police?”
“As soon as I figure out what it says. Otherwise, it’s too likely to just lie on some detective’s desk in wait for him to get time to look at it.”
Billie came back in, noticed the two with their heads together and smiled.
At least they’d quit fussing.
She glanced up at the clock. It was already after four. Not a lot of time to get dinner together.
; The wind was rising now, rattling shrubbery around the outside of the house. Something was banging around outdoors. She went to the kitchen door and looked out.
“That darn door to the shed is unlatched and blowing about,” she said, glancing at McQueen. “Have you been in the shed today?”
He was instantly on guard. That would be a good place to hide until dark. He pulled his gun.
“No. You two stay inside, and keep away from doors and windows.”
Now Sahara was nervous all over again. “Is it trouble?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but I’m going to take a look.”
“Be careful,” she said, but he was already out the door.
*
Just in case someone was in the shed, Brendan exited the house, turned left and walked off into the garden out of the line of sight. He took a quick right and came up behind the shed. The droplets of rain were still intermittent, but it was just a matter of time before it really began to pour. There was a window on the back side of the shed. He saw nothing inside, and when he tried the window, it was unlocked.
He jogged back around to the front, and after another quick reconnoiter, he stepped in with his gun drawn and flipped on the lights.
The shelves were lined with gardening equipment and products. There were old muddy footprints on the wooden flooring that had dried long ago, but nothing he could pinpoint as recent. He walked the length of the shed to lock the window, only to realize the lock was broken.
Well, that explained why it was open, which alleviated some of his concerns that someone could have gone out the window as he was coming out of the house. He looked through the window to the grounds beyond and then frowned. The extent of tropical plants and shrubbery afforded many places for a person to hide. The longer he stood there staring into the greenery, the more tense he became until soon the hair was standing up on the back of his neck.
Something was wrong. He could feel it.
He exited the shed, making sure the door latch caught as he closed it, and ran back through the garden and into the house just as it began to pour. The wind was blowing the rain against the windows in hard, splattering sounds, and thrashing through the landscaping. There would be a mess to clean up once the storm had passed.