by Ellle Parker
“As a matter of fact, I’m wearing sunglasses right now.”
“You are not,” I said, but I groaned anyway. I could vividly remember the way he smelled. That scent of hot sunshine and motor oil, slightly sweaty. Like he probably was at that very moment, sitting in the garage in someone else’s car. “Oh shit, Seth, I’m right there.”
“Me too. Go for it, I wanna hear you.”
I let go and stroked myself hard and fast, giving voice to a lot more groaning and swearing than I would have done on my own, playing it up for Seth’s benefit.
Before I could even catch my breath, Seth was swearing, and I could hear him writhing in the car seat. “Fuck, yes. God, Dino, do you have any idea how good you sound when you come?”
“I think I do now,” I said, feeling incredibly relaxed and mellow after all that. “You’re not so bad yourself, kid.”
“My God,” he moaned. “I’m totally wasted. You did me in without even touching me.”
“You’re spreading it a little thick, don’t you think?”
Seth snickered. “Fine, but this seriously was hot as hell.”
“Yeah, I’ll give you that,” I said. “Were you really already playing with yourself when you called me?”
“Yep, I really was.”
“What got you goin’?” I stood up and went to the kitchen to clean myself off.
“The usual stuff,” Seth said, starting to sound like his regular self again. “Thinkin’ about the other night, and what else we could do with that chair. So, you want to get some dinner?”
“I think I’m gonna beg off tonight. I’m beat, and I could use some extra sleep. I’ll just have something here and turn in early.”
“Eh, all right,” he said, sounding a little disappointed, which I have to admit pleased me. “I suppose it wouldn’t kill me to catch up on invoicing. Did you meet Serrano’s supposed brother-in-law?”
I tucked the phone against my shoulder so I could zip up my pants. “I did, and I have some news about that.”
“Yeah?”
“The guy hired me to check out that notebook.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Paid the first day up front and everything. I have his card in my pocket. Listen, I want to swing by there tomorrow and have you take another look at this stuff. You might see something I don’t.”
“Sure, anytime,” he said.
“Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
“G’night, Dino.”
Chapter 14
A good night’s sleep never fails to do wonders for my outlook, even when my outlook was pretty good to begin with. Which it had been. Yeah, life had thrown me a few curveballs lately, but overall, things were pretty damn good.
I cranked up the tunes, took a long, hot shower, and dressed a little better than I normally would for going to hang out with Seth. It’s not that I actually dressed up, so much as I dressed to look good. I put on my watch, pocketed my phone and wallet, and was out the door by nine.
Since I was in a Seth impressing mood, I drove down to the bakery at the corner of John’s Pass and picked up a dozen doughnuts. Sharp clothes may or may not attract his attention, but a box of concentrated sugar sure as hell would.
When I walked into the garage, Seth was bent over the engine of some Chevy, rapping along with the radio about whores in fast cars. He didn’t hear me come in, so I took a minute to admire his ass. I’d seen it that way lots of times, but now I had a whole new appreciation of it. I set the box of doughnuts on a shelf and put my briefcase down so I could sneak up and cop a feel before he realized I was there.
He squeaked and said, “You better watch it, jack. My boyfriend is one tough motherfucker, and he’ll tear you limb from limb if he catches you with your grubby mitts all over my ass.”
“Maybe he’ll think you’re messin’ around on him and tear you limb from limb, did you ever think of that?”
“No way,” he said, still working on the car. “He worships the ground I walk on and would never harm a hair on my head.”
I scoffed. “Yeah, I wouldn’t go bettin’ the farm on that if I were you.”
Seth finally stood up and graced me with that Cheshire smile of his. Then he caught me off guard by throwing his arms around me and kissing me in an especially dirty fashion. I kissed him back, but then struggled to get free.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “The doors are wide open, and you’re gonna get grease all over my clothes.”
He gave me an arch look and said, “Nice to see you too, asshole.”
“Well, come on, you’re dressed for this kind of thing. I’m not.”
“Yeah, fine, I’ll give you that. I’ll pay a little more attention. But you can kiss my ass on the doors being open. I don’t give a flying fuck who sees us.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” I muttered, checking out my slacks and shirt.
“Wait a minute,” Seth said, turning to face me with his hands planted on his hips, clutching a wrench. “You mean you can tell a bar full of thugs I’m your ‘baby’ if we’re not dating, but when we really are, no one should see?”
I laid on every inch of New York sarcasm I had and reached out to stroke his cheek with the back of my fingers. “That bruise of yours is healing up real nice. It oughta’ be gone in a few more days.”
He slapped my hand away. “That happened because we jerked that guy around and made an ass out of him, not because he thought we were gay.”
“You think so? I don’t.”
“It doesn’t matter, because I don’t give a shit anyway.” He challenged me with a look and went back to work under the hood of the Chevy.
I let it drop because the truth was, I hadn’t given it a whole lot of thought. Somehow, I just figured it was going to be business as usual, with the addition of a physical side that went on more or less behind closed doors. I hadn’t considered anything else. I filed away the issue for consideration later.
For a while, I leaned against the corner of the car and watched Seth change out a cracked gas line. Finally, I said, “I brought doughnuts.”
He stood up and took a rag out of his pocket to wipe his hands, not looking at me. “I made coffee,” he said nodding toward the back workbench. I turned to look and saw he’d brought down the new coffee maker and set it up.
“So, you want to take a look at that package we found in the ’Vette?” I asked.
“Yeah, you said you started in on it yesterday?”
Just like that, the ice was melted. Seth sniffed out the doughnut box and tucked in, and I got myself a cup of coffee and perched on the stool at the end of the workbench with my briefcase.
“Hey, could I have one of those before you inhale them all?” I asked, not willing to risk loss of limb by simply reaching for one.
He handed the box over, and I fished the package out of my briefcase. I took an apple fritter and bit into it while Seth turned the package over in his hands, examining it with interest. He went through the same routine I had, pulling off the rubber hands, reading the mailing labels, and dumping out the contents.
He picked up the keys first, tossing them in the air and catching them. “So, somewhere there’s a car that’s not going anywhere,” he said. “And it’s no wonder the dude defaulted on his loan if he was footin’ the bill for a big ticket car like this.”
“Maybe he didn’t bother to pay for this one.”
“No doubt,” Seth said with a nod. “But that’s assuming it’s his. He could have these for whole lot of reasons. Say his girl was cheating on him and he kicked her to the curb. Snagging her car keys on the way out the door would be pretty sweet revenge.”
“You’re a vindictive little shit,” I said, taking a sip of coffee.
Seth flashed an evil grin. “You know, if he stole it, it would be too hot to drive around for a while. So, he could have stashed it to pick up later, and he keeps the keys tucked away safe until it’s time to go back. Personally, I’d rather have the ’Vette, but these Miami
boys like everything cutting edge.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It could also be his mother’s for all we know.”
Seth pulled the key card from the pile and held it up. “Ten to one says this gets us into wherever he’s got the car stashed.”
“That’s got potential. Look at the notebook, see what you think.”
Seth put down the keys and grabbed the notebook, sliding off the band and flipping it open. He thumbed through the pages fast a couple of times, and then again slowly, stopping to look at one that was written on. Finally, he shook his head, looking perfectly bewildered.
“Well…the first one’s a phone number. But I’m guessing you probably already worked that out.”
I swallowed my last bite of fritter. “Goes to a Chinese takeout place in Miami. I didn’t get anything there.”
“Snake and Tango,” Seth read off the last page, laughing. “That’s rich.”
“Yeah. My money says they have a combined IQ of nine. They do sound like the kind of guys who would hang out at a place called The Shark Pond, though.”
“The what?”
“The Shark Pond. It’s a place in South Beach. Serrano had a bunch of matchbooks from there in the glove box. Maybe there’s a connection.”
“Did you check it out?”
“I just thought of it.”
“Well, work some of your cyber hocus-pocus and see what you get.”
“I’ll do that tonight.” I took the notebook out of his hand and turned it to one of the pages of codes. “That leaves these to consider, and that’s gonna take some work. I didn’t get to that part last night.”
I showed him the twelve pages of seemingly random characters, each one looking more or less like this:
14I7
1269227
1FTDR11T5GTA01050
R9-17
132209
Seth looked them over and said, “Well, I guess the dog eared ones are important, since they’re marked.”
“If you’d gone to the trouble of putting something important into code, would you go and stick big red flags on them that said, ‘Get Your Answers Right Here?’”
“I might if I was the kind of guy who had friends named Snake and Tango,” Seth said with a grin. “Maybe they’re decoys and one of the other pages is the real deal.”
I considered that while I flipped back and forth through the coded pages. Seth stood at my shoulder so he could read them at the same time.
“VIN numbers!” he blurted out, smacking me upside the head. “You and I both should have picked that up without even thinking about it.” He looked disgusted.
“Then why am I the only one who got hit?” I asked, smoothing my hair back into place.
“Because I did see it.”
I looked, and sure enough, each page had a set of characters that fit the pattern. “Not only are you pretty, but you’re smart too,” I told him, patting him on the stomach.
“Hot.”
“What?”
“Hot. I’m hot, not pretty,” he said.
I gave him a quick appraisal and said, “Yeah, I guess hot works too.”
“You guess? Clearly, I need to step up efforts to change the way you see me.”
“I liked phase one,” I said. “What do you have in mind for the next step?”
Seth pressed against me and reached down to run a hand over my thigh. “Hey, I know,” he said, breathing on my ear while he spoke. “Let’s go to Miami.”
“What?” I asked, looking at him like he was nuts. “I hate Miami.”
“You’ve got to check out this Shark Pond place anyway, right? Let’s go do it in person, instead of you looking it up on the net. We could hit a couple clubs, get a hotel room… You following me?”
I thought about that for a minute. “Yeah, I could see that. I was figuring I’d probably end up going there for the job anyway, no reason not to get a jump on it.”
“Perfect. And then I can jump you,” he said with a grin.
“What about work?” I asked, glancing at the car he’d been tuning up.
He turned to look. “I’ll have this finished up early afternoon. That’d leave us plenty of time to drive down, get checked in, and still be early for clubbing. I only have two appointments for tomorrow, and I can reschedule those.”
“Okay, that works. I have a couple other jobs I need to work on, and I have a client meeting in St. Pete at one. I could be ready to go after that.”
I finished my coffee, and we agreed to touch base around lunchtime, so we could make plans. Seth pulled me into the office and gave me a goodbye kiss worthy of a porn film. I left weak-kneed, hard as hell, and wondering what he had in mind for the hotel room.
At two-thirty, we put Matilda’s top up to cut the wind, and headed south. Seth eased his seat back and took a short catnap, and I spent the time going over everything I knew about Serrano’s notebook and what I thought it might mean. Not like I really had a clue. It wasn’t the first time I’d headed into a job without much to go on, but I knew eventually we’d get that first break, and everything else would start falling into place. It almost always did.
About an hour into the drive, my cellphone rang and I took it out and answered without looking. “Martini.”
“I’d love one, thanks,” Teresa said in my ear, and I swore silently. This was not the best time to be hearing from her, since the only thing she and I had talked about recently was the Serrano case, and I didn’t want her knowing I was working on it.
“Better not let your husband hear you talking like that, or he’s gonna get jealous and kick my ass.”
“Oh, please,” she scoffed.
I preferred not to know which she thought was laughable, her husband kicking my ass, or the idea she might actually be interested in me.
“So,” she said, “I understand you did a vehicle repossession on Darryl Serrano just a couple nights before he died. You neglected to mention that little detail.”
“I didn’t think it was important. I sure as hell didn’t drown the guy.”
“Well, why don’t you let me be the judge of what’s important, hmm?” Teresa sounded just a little too shrewd, and I could tell her bullshit senses were tingling. That was part of what made her a good cop, she could spot a line of crap a mile away. She also wasn’t any fonder of coincidence than I was.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” I asked, raising my voice. “I must be switching towers or something, you dropped out there for a minute.”
“I said, tell me what you got, and I’ll let you know if means anything.”
“What? You’re breakin’ up pretty bad, I didn’t catch that.”
She raised her voice to match mine. “Dino? Where in the hell are you?”
“I’m really sorry, Teresa, I’m barely getting anything here, you’re all static. I hope you can hear me, I’ll call you later when I’m home.” Then I snapped the phone shut and tossed it onto the dashboard.
Seth was awake and looking at me with a sly expression. “That was cheap,” he said.
“Yeah, I know. I just didn’t want to explain the whole thing to her and make a big deal out of something that might be nothing. She’s too hard to lie to, so I opted for the easy way out.”
“Telling her the line was full of static was a lie, Dino.”
“But I only had to pull that one off for a few minutes.”
“You’re a sneaky son of a bitch.”
“It’s a job requirement.”
Chapter 15
Earlier, while I was waiting for Seth to finish with the Chevy, I’d looked up the address for The Shark Pond. I’d also found a decent looking hotel that was probably within walking distance, and made a reservation for us. Although I was getting more used to the idea of Seth and me together, there were still a few things that threw me for a loop, and getting us a room knowing what would happen there was one of them.
The Shark Pond was wedged into one of the less fashionable corners of South Beach, a fact that made me want to cla
w my eyes out, but had Seth wired with anticipation. As it turned out, he made relatively frequent runs down to this part of Miami and knew his way around pretty well. He was able to help me pick my way through traffic, and find both the club and the hotel. I locked the car, and we went inside to check in. I don’t know if it was in deference to my reaction in the garage that morning, or something else, but Seth hung back until I got on the elevator, and slipped in with me. I didn’t say anything, because I still had no idea where we stood on that issue.
The room was nice. Simple and clean, but stylish, and I liked it. I doubted Seth cared either way, as he tossed his duffel bag on the bed and announced he was going to take a shower. “You want to join me?” he asked, peeling off his shirt.
I had to think about that for a minute, and I admit I was damned tempted. Not only did he look good, but the thought of sharing a hotel room had been on my mind all afternoon. So had the job, though, and I figured it would be wise to put that first. “Business before pleasure,” I said, “or we might never get there at all.”
“And that would be a bad thing?” He slouched against the wall and unbuttoned his jeans slowly, making me start to reconsider.
“Yes,” I told him resolutely, “that would be a bad thing. Get in there.”
He gave me an incredibly adorable pout and disappeared into the bathroom.
It didn’t take us long to get ready, in spite of Seth’s screwing around, which I enjoyed. He’s so easy going about nearly everything in life, and he’s very comfortable to be around. Soon, he looked trendy and hot, and I looked more stylish, but hot.
It was early yet, so we had dinner in the hotel, then set off in the direction of The Shark Pond. The night was balmy and mild, with a light breeze off the ocean. As jobs go, it was a pretty sweet one for the moment, and I was having a good time. I found myself picking up the energy and excitement of the people around us. Seth spent the entire walk gawking at the scenery and pointing out all the hottest T&A like some kind of tour guide.