American PI

by Jude Hardin

  “I’ll tell them,” he said. “But I’m still going to transfer the funds. It’ll take a few hours to get that much together, but I should be able to make the midnight deadline with no problem. I don’t care about the money. I just want my son back.”

  “You’re a good dad, Bradley Harbaugh.”

  “Thanks.”

  I told him to call me with any new developments. Otherwise, I would be with Shelby Spelling until the FBI came to Woof-A-Burger to talk to her and possibly take her into custody.

  A few minutes after I hung up with Bradley Harbaugh, my phone vibrated again. It was Laurie this time.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” I said.

  “Where did you go?”

  I gave her the condensed version of everything that was happening.

  “It’ll be out of my hands soon,” I said. “Now that it’s been established that an abduction has taken place, the FBI will head the investigation. Which is a good thing. They have the resources to do it right.”

  “And I’m sure they’ll be interested in everything you’ve learned so far.”

  “I guess that’s true. You know, I feel like calling Detective Barry Fleming and rubbing his nose in it. If the police had gotten involved sooner, Everett might be home by now.”

  “It’s a shame he wouldn’t listen to you,” Laurie said. “But all’s well that ends well, I suppose.”

  “That’s another thing. I’m having serious doubts that this is going to end well, even with the feds on top of it. Once the money is transferred to an offshore account, Shelby and her accomplice won’t have any reason to keep Everett alive. Maybe they’ll play fair, but it isn’t likely. Especially if Everett knows that Shelby is involved.”

  “I hope they find him in time.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Anyway, I’m almost there. So I’ll talk to you later. Okay?”

  “Okay. I have to work at six, but call me on my cell no matter what.”

  I promised I would call her, and then we disconnected.

  I steered into Woof-A-Burger’s parking lot at 3:52. I whipped the Caprice into an open slot, killed the engine and climbed out and trotted inside. It was after lunch and before dinner, so it wasn’t very busy. Ashley was at the register again.

  “I need to speak with the manager,” I said.

  “She left early for the day. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where she went, would you?”

  “No. I’m sorry. Hey, I remember you from the other day. Aren’t you the one who smeared her windshield with—”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I gave her a wink and then turned around and walked back out to the parking lot. I started the car and sat there and stared at the playground, which was vacant at the moment.

  I hadn’t planned on Shelby not being at work. This was not good. Maybe she’d already headed for the airport, but I didn’t think so. She and her accomplice would need to make sure that the funds got transferred before they went anywhere, and they would need strong alibis at least up to the time the bomb exploded.

  Shelby could have gone anywhere, but I figured that her residence would be as good a place as any to start looking. I needed her home address. I could have walked back inside and tried to get it from Ashley or another employee, but I doubted they would be able to help me. Managers and regular workers don’t usually hang out. It’s frowned upon. And managers like Shelby certainly wouldn’t want the people working under her to know where she sleeps at night. They all hated her. By allowing any of them to know where she lived, she would risk waking up with eggs splattered on the front of her house every morning. Or worse. And even if one of the employees inside did know Shelby’s address, most businesses have strict rules about the confidentiality of their employees’ personal information. So I didn’t bother pursuing it from that route.

  I needed a computer. I sat there and tried to think where I might be able to find one in Gainesville on Friday at four o’clock in the afternoon. I supposed the public library would still be open, but I didn’t have any idea where the closest branch was located. I was about to walk back inside and ask when I remembered something.

  The first time I walked into Shelby’s office, she pointed to a no smoking sign with a bunch of other stuff tacked to the wall around it. Receipts and schedules and whatnot, and a postcard from a dentist’s office reminding her about an appointment.

  Would Shelby bother to keep a dentist’s appointment with everything else going on? Maybe she would. It would add to her alibi, for one thing.

  The appointment was for Friday afternoon at four o’clock, but I couldn’t recall the dentist’s name. I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the postcard. There were two stamps on it. I remembered that. On one of the stamps, there was a picture of a Hawaiian shirt with the word ALOHA! written under it. Was the dentist from Hawaii? In my mind, I went through a list of surnames from the islands, ones that I knew from my travels as a musician, but nothing rang a bell. The card’s sender had probably just gone there for vacation or something. Or perhaps the stamp had been sold randomly from the post office or from a machine.

  I did seem to recall that the dentist had a foreign name. Hispanic, maybe.

  I shut the car off, walked inside and asked Ashley if she had a phone book.

  “I think there’s one in the office,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s locked.”

  “Would you mind checking for me? Better yet, there’s a postcard from a dentist’s office tacked to the wall in there. If you could just look at it and then tell me the dentist’s name, I won’t even need the phone book.”

  She hesitated. “I’m really not supposed to go in there.”

  “It’s an emergency,” I said. “I’m sure Shelby wouldn’t mind just this once. Anyway, she’ll never know.”

  I winked at her again.

  “I could lose my job,” she said.

  “Please?”

  She pulled her key out of the register and sauntered to the back of the store, her ponytail swaying behind her. She returned a few seconds later with a copy of the Gainesville Yellow Pages.

  “I didn’t see any postcard,” she said. “Hurry up with the phone book. I need to put it back.”

  I flipped to the Ds. It didn’t take me long to find the name of the business I’d seen on the postcard. Once I saw it, I recognized it right away. It wasn’t just one dentist. It was several working together. A group practice. I pointed to the address and asked Ashley if she knew how to get there, and she kindly gave me directions. I thanked her and slapped the book shut and hurried out of the restaurant.

  The dentists’ office was only a few miles away. I got there at 4:27. I steered into the last available parking place, which just happened to be right next to Shelby Spelling’s Ford Fiesta.

  I called Bradley Harbaugh and told him what was going on.

  “I pretty much have her cornered,” I said. “Give the FBI this address when they call, and give them my cell phone number. I won’t let her out of my sight until I hear from them.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I sure wish they would hurry up and call.”

  “Me too.”

  I hung up and walked inside and took a seat in the waiting area, which was empty except for a young man pressing a handful of cotton gauze against the front part of his mouth. A receptionist sat behind an open sliding glass window, talking to someone on the phone. I figured Shelby would have to walk past me as she left the office.

  I sat there and pretended to look at a Home and Garden magazine from May of last year. The wall dividing the clinical work space from the waiting area wasn’t very well insulated. I could hear the high-pitched squeal of an electric tool of some sort, a drill or an ultrasonic scaling device or something, along with an occasional yawp of pain. It made me feel fortunate that I wasn’t in line for the same treatment. Not today, anyway.

  The lady behind the sliding glass wind
ow told the guy with the gauze that his ride was on the way. He pulled the blood-soaked wad from his toothless front gums long enough to thank her, and then he put it back. He didn’t seem to be in a very good mood, which was understandable.

  The receptionist looked at me and gestured toward the clipboard on the counter in front of her.

  “Did you sign in, sir?” she said.

  “I’m just waiting for someone.”

  After a brief pause, she said, “May I ask the patient’s name?”

  There was a time when you could wander into a clinician’s waiting room and sit there for hours without being noticed, but those days are gone. Everyone’s paranoid now, and with good reason. A guy who walks into a professional practitioner’s place of business without an appointment might really be waiting for a friend to come out, or he might be waiting for the right moment to randomly and senselessly kill everyone in the building. You just never know.

  So I didn’t give the receptionist any grief. The reason she asked was understood. She didn’t know that I had a good excuse for hanging around, and her lack of trust was fully warranted.

  “The patient’s name is Shelby Spelling,” I said. “She’s back there, right?”

  The receptionist reached over and closed the window, neither confirming nor denying Shelby’s presence. A couple of minutes later, a man in blue scrubs opened the door from the exam area and walked into the waiting room. I figured he was one of the dentists. He had a paper apron draped over his chest and a procedure mask over his mouth and nose.

  He pulled down the mask.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to leave, sir,” he said.

  “I need to speak with Shelby,” I said. “Is there a problem with that?”

  “Actually, there is. She says she’s not expecting anyone, and that your presence here makes her nervous. Perhaps you could contact her at another time.”

  I thought about going outside and waiting in my car, but I figured they might not approve of that either.

  I rose from the uncomfortable plastic seat.

  “My name’s Nicholas Colt,” I said. “I’m a private investigator, and I’m working in conjunction with the police and the FBI on a kidnapping case. We have reason to believe that Ms. Spelling might be involved. I just need to talk with her for a few minutes. It’s very important.”

  “May I see your credentials?”

  I showed him my PI license. While he was looking at it, Shelby peeked into the waiting room. There was an echoing boom as the door slammed shut, followed by the sound of sneakers galloping across a tile floor.

  “Is there another way out of here?” I said.

  “Yes. There’s an emergency exit at the end of the hall, but—”

  “Thanks.”

  I made a move toward the door to the back office, but the dentist grabbed my arm before I could get a hand on the knob.

  “You can’t go back there,” he said.

  “You don’t understand, doctor. She’s getting away.”

  I tried to pry his hand off my arm, but his fingers were clamped down like a steel vice.

  “Jennifer, call the police!” he shouted.

  I looked over at the receptionist’s window, saw the woman I presumed to be Jennifer standing there on the other side of the frosted glass. She picked up the phone and started punching in numbers.

  I thought about clocking the dentist in the jaw, and I would have—and probably would have been arrested for assault and battery—if the young man with the gauze hadn’t spoken up when he did.

  “I’ll get her,” he said.

  He bolted past us, opened the door to the back office and took off running.

  Jennifer screamed as he trotted by, and then she looked through the window and told the dentist that the police were on the way.

  The next thing I heard was a series of gunshots.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I reached down and pulled my .38 out of its holster and pointed it at the dentist’s face. It was something I’d always wanted to do, although I wasn’t thinking in those terms at the time.

  “Let me go,” I said.

  He did. Immediately.

  I darted into the hallway and ran to the back of the building, through the emergency exit and into the alley. Shelby was lying on the pavement in a puddle of blood, and the guy who’d chased her was standing there with a gun in his hand.

  “Got her,” he said.

  “Have you lost your mind?” I said. “Why did you shoot this woman?”

  “You said you were with the FBI. You said she was a kidnapper.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “You sure did. I was sitting there. I heard you.”

  All I could do was shake my head. There was no time to explain everything.

  I knelt down beside Shelby.

  “Where does it hurt?” I said.

  “My ass. He shot me in the ass.”

  I turned her onto her side, took my shirt off and pressed it against the wound. She’d lost some blood, but I was relieved to know that her injury probably wasn’t life-threatening.

  “Where’s Everett?” I said.

  “You’re kidding, right? We’ve been through all that. How many days has it been since he disappeared? Three? Four? I hate to say it, but he’s probably dead. If he hasn’t shown up by now—”

  “His dad talked to him earlier. He’s still alive, and you know where he is. Tell me, or I’m going to give you a matching hole on the other side of your butt.”

  “I don’t know anything, Colt. All I know is that you and the guy who shot me are going to jail.”

  She seemed determined to play this thing out to the end. She was a liar and a manipulator and a cunning sociopath, and I should have kept my eyes on her from the beginning. She needed psychiatric help. I knew that, but it was still hard for me to feel sorry for her. Regardless of the reasons, Shelby Spelling was a very dangerous person. She needed to be behind bars.

  She was breathing hard and cringing from the pain, but as far as I could tell she hadn’t shed a single tear. She was mentally insane and physically tough, and through the years I’d learned that those were an especially lethal combination of attributes.

  “You’re not fooling anyone,” I said. “If you don’t know anything, then why did you run away when you saw me?”

  “I thought you were after me about the stuff I did to your camper. And your car. I’m not sorry about any of that, by the way. You never should have messed with me.”

  “You’re going to pay me for the cleanup,” I said. “And my tires. And my laptop.”

  “Sue me,” she said.

  An ambulance followed three police cruisers into the alley. A state trooper and two deputies from the county sheriff’s office climbed out of the cars and pointed guns at us. Using their vehicles for shields, they shouted freeze and all that, and once the shooter and I were facedown on the asphalt and handcuffed, the EMS guys rushed over and tended to Shelby. They patched up the hole in her ass, stuck an IV in her arm, and loaded her into the meat wagon. All in about ten minutes. They blasted the siren and headed for the hospital.

  The guys from the sheriff’s department put me in one car and the shooter in the other. The state trooper gave the other officers a half salute, climbed into his cruiser and left the scene.

  It took a little over an hour to get everything sorted out. When all was said and done, the shooter got arrested and I was set free. Amazingly, I had Detective Barry Fleming to thank for it. He’d been in contact with Bradley Harbaugh, and he knew that the feds were on the case now. As it turned out, I’d been spot-on about Everett being kidnapped, and Fleming had pretty much ignored me since day one. If I’d gone to jail, it would have only added to his embarrassment. So he went to bat for me, and the deputies let me go.

  I apologized to the dentist for pulling a gun on him, and for all the trouble I’d inadvertently brought to his office. He didn’t seem real happy, but he wished me luck in finding the kidnapper.

&n
bsp; After everyone else had left the parking lot, I gave Bradley a call. It was a bad connection, lots of static, but I got the gist of what he was saying.

  “I guess this is it for me,” I said. “I’ve done all I can do. The FBI can interview Shelby at the hospital. I know she was involved, so I’m hoping they can get something out of her.”

  “I talked to an agent named Chet Overton a few minutes ago,” Bradley said. “They have a team on the way to the hospital there in Gainesville, and there’s one coming to my house to set up telephone surveillance in case the kidnapper calls back. Plus, they’re trying to trace the offshore bank account where I’m supposed to deposit the twenty million dollars. So everyone’s working on it, but there’s not a lot of time left. I’m just praying that the kidnappers will keep their word and give us Everett’s location once the money is transferred.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I wish there was something more I could do.”

  “You’ve been a huge help to us, Nicholas, and I appreciate everything you’ve done. Just send me a bill for the time you’ve spent on this. Hopefully, Everett will be sitting here at the table later tonight drinking a can of root beer and eating a bag of corn chips, and he can call you and thank you himself.”

  “What was that?”

  “I said hopefully Everett can call you and thank you himself.”

  “Not that. Something about what he’s going to be eating and drinking.”

  “Oh, that. It’s kind of a joke in our family. Since Everett was about three years old, his favorite food combination has been corn chips and root beer. It’s like he craves it or something. Can’t get enough of it. That’s how I knew it was Everett when I talked to him earlier. I asked him his favorite snack. It was a question that only he would know. Kind of like a secret code.”

  “I can barely hear you,” I said. “You’re breaking up really bad. I’ll call you back in a little while and see how everything’s going.”

  “Okay. Thanks again, Nicholas.”

  I hung up, wondering if I was the smartest detective in the world or the dumbest.