Kickout Clause (Savannah Martin Mystery)

by Bennett, Jenna

  He gave me a dirty look.

  “Where is he now?” I heard rustling, and assumed she was getting out of bed and putting clothes on.

  “Sitting on the kitchen floor with Rafe pointing a gun at him,” I said.

  “Tell him not to pull the trigger.”

  “She says not to pull the trigger,” I told Rafe.

  “As long as he doesn’t try to move.” Rafe wiggled the gun menacingly. The guy didn’t stir, although I could tell he wanted to. He looked nothing at all like a hardened criminal, and had probably gotten way more than he bargained for when he found himself face to face—or nose to chin—with Rafe.

  “He says he won’t,” I told Grimaldi, “as long as the guy doesn’t try to move.”

  Grimaldi didn’t answer that. “I’m on my way. But I’m on the other side of town, so it’ll take me twenty minutes to get there.”

  “No problem,” I said. “We’ve got this under control.”

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” She hung up.

  I did the same. “She’s on her way.” For our captive’s benefit, I added, “Detective Tamara Grimaldi with the Metro Nashville Police.”

  He turned a shade paler.

  “Just in case you don’t know it,” I added, gesturing to Rafe, “this is Agent Collier with the TBI.”

  It wasn’t possible for the guy to turn any paler than he already was, but he tried. “Shit,” he muttered weakly.

  Rafe and I glanced at each other. Rafe lips curved. After a second I smiled back. It’s hard not to, with all that gorgeousness staring me in the face.

  Then he turned back to the sorry specimen on the floor. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Brian Bradshaw,” the guy said.

  Rafe shot me a look. I shrugged. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but only vaguely, and I couldn’t place it.

  “See? You don’t even remember me.” He scowled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, automatically, and then I added, “Am I supposed to?”

  He huffed. “I wrote the first contract on this house.”

  “You’re the agent?”

  “Yes!” He muttered something I didn’t ask him to repeat.

  “For that sweet little couple with the condo to sell?”

  “That sweet little couple you kicked to the curb when you got a better offer!”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said. “Your clients had a sale of home contingency. The new buyers didn’t. We could have waited around for six months for your clients’ condo to sell.”

  Brian Bradshaw snorted. “Sure.”

  “It’s true. It would be unethical to kick your clients out of the loop just because the other offer was higher.”

  “So it was higher?”

  I hesitated. Tall, Dark & Demanding and his wife had, in fact, offered a few thousand dollars more for the house, probably to convince us to exercise the kickout clause. If they hadn’t attempted to make it worth our while, we might have chosen just to take our chances with the first buyer, in the hope that their condo would sell in a timely manner. But the higher price hadn’t been the main reason we’d exercised the kickout clause. That had been because we’d been afraid that after months of waiting, the original buyers wouldn’t be able to sell their condo and wouldn’t be able to buy the house, and we’d be left with no buyer at all.

  “See?” Brian said. “Now my clients have decided not to sell after all. So I’m not getting a commission on selling their condo. And I’m not getting a commission on your house. And my car payment is due!”

  “You’re driving a Range Rover,” Rafe told him. “Trade it in for a used Honda. Problem solved.”

  Brian Bradshaw stared at him. He looked like he was thinking about saying something, but then he eyed the gun and thought better of it. “You don’t get it,” he said instead.

  “I get it,” I answered. “I’ve been doing real estate for more than six months now, and it’s hard to make a living. And you have to keep up appearances, because if you don’t look successful, people won’t use you to buy or sell their houses. But you can’t go around breaking windows and slashing car tires just because you’re not successful in your career.”

  Brian shrugged, pouting, so obviously he didn’t think there was anything wrong with his approach.

  “I assume you were trying to make the new buyers decide not to buy the house so your clients could get it back?”

  “Yeah,” Brian said. “So?”

  “So breaking and entering is a crime,” Rafe growled. “When people are home and you’re armed, it becomes an automatic felony.”

  “I’m not armed!”

  “What do you call that?” He nodded to a flashlight lying over by the fridge, lighting up the dust bunnies below. It must have rolled there in the tumult.

  “It’s my flashlight. I needed it to see what I was doing.”

  “I could kill you with that,” Rafe informed him. “That makes it a weapon on the police report.”

  “The place was supposed to be empty!”

  “It’s your own fault,” I informed him. “We’re only here because you tore up my apartment and the CSI tech was there.”

  Brian folded his arms across his chest and stuck his bottom lip out.

  We didn’t get anything more out of him after that, and I left Rafe to stand guard while I went upstairs to put on a bra. Going without under the thin shirt made me feel exposed, and I didn’t like the way Brian Bradshaw eyed me. I asked Rafe whether he wanted a shirt and shoes too, but he told me he was fine, that he’d wait. I guess maybe he figured that all those rippling muscles on display would serve as a reminder to Bradshaw not to try anything. And it wasn’t like I was about to complain about the view, was it?

  Tamara Grimaldi pulled up to the steps ten minutes later. She must have broken the land speed record to get here from West Nashville so fast. She told me once she lives in a little midcentury ranch in Charlotte Park, and I assumed she’d been at home and in bed when I called.

  She looked perfectly put together and severe when she stalked down the hallway and into the kitchen. She’d even taken the time to put on one of those dark, masculine pantsuits she favors, with the crisply starched striped shirt underneath.

  I watched her face for any response she might have to seeing so much of Rafe exposed, but beyond a quick blink when she first came face to face with him, she didn’t react. Instead she turned to Brian Bradshaw, who was still pouting on the floor. “Name?”

  He gave it to her.

  “You’re under arrest, Brian. Stand up and put your hands behind your back.” She fished a pair of handcuffs out of her pocket.

  “What?” Brian said, looking from her to me to Rafe and back. “But...”

  “Breaking and entering is a crime. Vandalism is a crime. Tying up police resources on trying to hunt you down is a crime. On your feet. Hands behind your back.”

  Brian scrambled to his feet, still protesting as the handcuffs clicked shut around his skinny wrists. I actually felt a bit bad for him. I know what it’s like to see the bank balance approaching zero and having no idea where your next tank of gas is going to come from.

  Grimaldi glanced at Rafe. “I assume you’ll be pressing charges?”

  He nodded. “Hell, yeah. He broke three of my hundred year old windows and slashed four tires we had to replace. Damn straight I’m pressing charges.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll keep him in a cell for the rest of the night. Come by in the morning and swear out a complaint.”

  “But...” Brian said.

  “You’ll have a chance to go before a judge to set bail tomorrow.”

  “Bail?!” I could see the expense of bailing himself out dancing in front of his eyes.

  “You committed a crime,” Grimaldi said. “People who commit crimes and are arrested, get the chance to post bail. If you don’t have the money for bail, you can contact a bail bonding company. They’ll take something as collateral. Like your house.”

  “I do
n’t have a house. I live in an apartment.”

  “Is that your car outside?”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe they’ll accept that. I’ll give you some phone numbers when we get downtown.” She herded him down the hallway toward the front door without saying anything else to us. There wasn’t much to say, I guess, and I certainly didn’t want her to have to interrupt her lecture on bail bonds to say goodbye. I was enjoying it too much.

  So, obviously, was Rafe, who turned to me with a grin as soon as the door had shut behind them. “Looks like that Range Rover’s gonna do him some good after all.”

  I nodded. “I feel a bit guilty. He’s so young. And so worried about not making a success of real estate.”

  “I don’t care if he’s still in diapers,” Rafe said. “I went to jail when I was younger than he is. And he’s a criminal. Don’t matter if he was just trying to sabotage the house sale. He broke our windows and flattened our tires and destroyed your peace of mind. I want him to pay.”

  Since he put it that way...

  “I guess I do feel a bit better knowing that we won’t have to worry about any more vandalism.” Or about being interrupted again.

  “Damn straight,” Rafe said and scooped me up to carry me back upstairs and to bed.

  The next day was Saturday. I usually do floor duty at the office on Saturday mornings. It was how I met Rafe back in August, and I tend to think of it as sort of a good luck charm or something I have to do or I’ll get jinxed. If I’m not there on Saturday mornings, I worry that I’ll miss out on something good, like a buyer with a million dollars to burn and no agent, calling to see a house.

  This morning, Rafe talked me out of it. We woke up late, after all the excitement in the middle of the night, and then we spent another leisurely hour in bed before dragging ourselves into the shower and off to downtown to file our report.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked him as we walked into Police Plaza. “He’s just a kid trying to make ends meet.”

  He shot me a look. “He’s not a kid. When I was his age, I’d spent a couple years in prison and a couple years undercover.”

  “I just know how he feels. It’s a tough business and hard to get a break.”

  “That don’t mean you start breaking other people’s stuff,” Rafe said.

  “Of course not. You just feel so helpless, when it looks like everyone around you is doing so much better than you are and you’re stuck in this untenable situation...”

  I trailed off when I realized I’d practically described Rafe’s childhood. He knew why I’d stopped, too. His lips curved. “Don’t make excuses for him, darlin’. I had to learn early. It’s time he learns.”

  Maybe so. “I think the people with the current contract on the house will probably bow out, though. Without Brian and his clients, we don’t have anyone who wants to buy the house.”

  “So we hold onto it a bit longer,” Rafe said. “Hell, with the traffic in and out of your apartment, we might be safer living there.”

  We might, at that. I didn’t say anything about it, though, as we turned the corner into Grimaldi’s office.

  She looked pretty perky for someone who’d probably been up since one this morning. She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on when she walked into Mrs. J’s house in the middle of the night. And I imagined that after she took Brian Bradshaw into downtown and booked him into jail and filled out whatever paperwork went with the arrest, there probably hadn’t been enough left of the night for her to go home and get back into bed. But maybe she’d managed a cat nap on a sofa in a back room somewhere, or on the floor of her office, at least.

  “Thanks for coming in.” She gestured to the two chairs across from her desk. “I took the liberty of typing up a statement based on what you said happened. If you’ll look it over and sign, we can get this thing processed.”

  She passed two sheets of paper across the desk to us. Rafe skimmed it and scrawled his signature on the bottom. When I didn’t immediately follow suit, he gave me the evil eye. “We don’t want this little punk getting off easy, darlin’. If we don’t stop him now, he’ll end up like Lamont one of these days, thinking he can get away with murder.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “I had a talk with him. He doesn’t feel remorse for anything he did. He feels justified, because he was only trying to help his clients.”

  “And pad his own pocketbook,” Rafe said.

  “That, too. But the point is, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong. He knows what he did was illegal and unethical, but he doesn’t think it was wrong. He thinks we’re wrong.”

  “Sign the damn thing, Savannah,” Rafe said. “I want this guy behind bars. He came into my house, and broke my windows, and destroyed my property, and threatened my girlfriend. If I could, I woulda shot him. Since I can’t, I want him in jail. So please do it. For me.”

  Since he put it like that. I scribbled my signature on the bottom of the statement and handed the sheet back to Grimaldi.

  “Thank you.” She gathered them together. “You might be called on to testify if this goes to court.”

  “No problem. Do we need to swear out a restraining order, just to make sure he stays away?”

  “You can, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary.” Grimaldi smirked. “You put the fear of God in him. He doesn’t think he did anything wrong, but he’s gonna think twice before he goes anywhere near the two of you again.”

  “Good,” Rafe said. “Because if I find him anywhere near Savannah, I’ll kill the little fucker.”

  OK, then.

  “I’ll be sure to mention that,” Grimaldi said.

  “Any news about the Ortega case?”

  She gave me the beady eye and then relented, probably because Rafe was with me and had a right to know. “The hostage incident involving you and Mr. Lamont took everyone’s attention yesterday afternoon. I have two uniforms contacting some of Mr. Ortega’s former associates today, to see what they can learn. We’re getting closer.”

  “Do you have a suspect?”

  She hesitated again. “When Mr. Ortega was caught for grand theft auto, he informed on some of this associates to shorten his own sentence. One of them was just released from prison two weeks ago. We suspect he may have been involved.”

  “Name?” Rafe said.

  Grimaldi eyed him. “We’ll handle it, Mr. Collier.”

  His voice was as briskly professional as hers. “I know that, Detective. I just wanna know the guy’s name.”

  She sighed. “Frederico Garcia. Know him?”

  “We’ve met,” Rafe said. “Couple years ago now. He was on the fringe of Hector’s organization for a while. D’you know where to find him?”

  “We know where he’s supposed to be. If he’s not there, we’ll try family and known associates. We’ll get him eventually.”

  Rafe nodded. “We’ll leave you to it.”

  She looked surprised, but hid it quickly. “What are you two up to today?”

  “We’re gonna go talk to Savannah’s ex,” Rafe said, before I had time to get a word out. “You got a picture of Garcia I can have? I wanna see if Bradley noticed Garcia hanging around the Shortstop that night.”

  “Why would he have needed to hang around the Shortstop?”

  “A lot of’em do,” Rafe said. “And Manny had a new place to live, away from his old hood. Garcia had to have picked him up somewhere.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll send it to your phone.”

  “Appreciate it.” He got to his feet. I followed. “We’ll let you get to it.”

  “Thank you.” Grimaldi hesitated a second before adding, “You won’t do anything stupid, will you?”

  “Who, me? We’re just gonna go talk to Savannah’s ex. I’ll let you know what he says.”

  Grimaldi nodded, but from the speculative glint in her eyes, I’m not entirely sure she believed him.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  I wasn’t sure I believed him either, so when we wer
e outside the building and on our way around the corner to where the bike was parked, I asked, “Where are we going?”

  Rafe glanced at me. “To talk to Bradley.”

  “You mean you were telling the truth?”

  He smiled. “Don’t sound so surprised, darlin’. It happens.”

  “Of course. It’s just... don’t you want to help the police find Freddy Garcia? I’m sure Grimaldi would let you tag along if you asked.”

  “I ain’t so sure about that,” Rafe answered calmly, “but as it happens, I might know a couple things they don’t. I’ll just give Wendell a call.”

  “Sure, but... don’t you want to go with him?”

  He arched a brow. “You trying to get rid of me, darlin’?”

  “Of course not. I love spending time with you. I just know you feel bad because of what happened to Manny. And I thought you might want to be a part of the team that brings Garcia in.”

  It was his turn to hesitate. “I thought maybe you’d want me to stick close today. After what happened yesterday.”

  “Oh.” He was doing it for me, because he thought I might feel fragile after being abducted at gunpoint and having had my apartment vandalized and then being woken up in the middle of the night by a stranger breaking in. “No. I mean, yes. I would love for you to stick close.” The closer the better. “But I’m not afraid. Walker’s in prison and so is Brian Bradshaw. I’m perfectly safe. If you want to go try to find Freddy Garcia, I understand. I think you should.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded. “It might make you feel better. Or if not that, it will give you some sense of closure. And maybe the feeling that you did something to set things right.”

  I could see the conflict clearly written on his face. On the one hand, he wanted to make sure I was safe and felt safe. On the other, he wanted desperately to be part of taking Manny’s murderer down.

  “Go,” I said. “Please. Do what you have to do. I’ll be fine. I can walk home from here. I’ve done it before.” It was just across the bridge and under the interstate, less than a mile to go to my apartment. And it was broad daylight and I was wearing sensible shoes, so it would be no problem.