She glanced into the ledger. He’d collected one hundred dollars from her account. Inside, her tiny little black heart grew ten sizes larger that day. She sighed. “You’re making it really hard to hate you, you know that?”
He stuffed her belongings back into her purse. “It’s my charm.” He took the check. “Now get off my truck. We have an early day tomorrow. Meet me at the garage at eight.”
She slid off the tailgate and stepped back as he rounded the truck and climbed inside. Some men used big trucks to compensate for something lacking.
Noah was all male and physically lacked nothing.
As he pulled out of the lot without a backward glance, she felt a twinge of alarm mixed with attraction. With their history, and the fact that he was still involved with Lori, bells went off in her head. She should camp out at Brash & Brazen until the ladies returned from their training class, and let them help her.
However, recent whimpering and whining aside, she’d never been a coward and she wasn’t about to start now. The quicker she began gathering clues, the quicker she’d be free of suspicion from the detective. With Willard breathing down her neck, time was not on her side.
Confident that she could be a strong and professional woman, and solve this case with her newly minted investigator without getting personal, she walked back toward the bar with renewed energy.
She’d find the real killer and finally put this attraction to Noah to rest.
Chapter 6
Harper walked into the motel room at midnight and paused when the stuffy heat smacked her in the face. The air conditioner fizzled in and out, trying desperately to cool the space and failing miserably. The windows were nailed shut.
Complaining to the management would go nowhere. The roach motel had bigger problems.
The first minutes of occupancy were a check for bed bugs with a flyswatter and a can of Raid. Thankfully, the room was bug free. The sticky fly paper hanging from one corner of the ceiling took care of anything with wings.
After dropping her purse on the bed, she stripped and jumped into the shower for relief. With the water on its coldest teeth-chattering setting, she hoped that by the time her body temp came back up to normal, she’d be fast asleep.
Added to the unease of living in the dump, her next door neighbors were a couple who argued into the late hours, then had very loud sex. And she was pretty sure the guy on the other side of her was a criminal. She was convinced she seen him on a wanted poster at the police station.
Harper stepped out, dried off, and slid her feet into her slippers. No bare feet on that carpet. She slipped her arms into her robe.
Bang! Bang! Bang! “Got him!” a man yelled.
Harper ran to the window and peered out between the curtains. A big bellied man in a stained white T-shirt exited the room next door. A large dead rat swung by its tail from his thick fingers as he walked to the dumpster and chucked it in.
An unseen woman cheered. “Way to go Harold! That’s two!”
The curtain closed and Harper looked around the floor for furry gray bodies and took no comfort from seeing nothing moving. There would be no sleeping well tonight.
* * * *
When morning crept in with the chirp of birds soon drowned out by the sound of an arriving biker gang, she was out of sorts and headachy. Not only had thoughts of rodents the size of cats invaded her consciousness, but she’d received a string of heavy breathing calls on her cell from a blocked number
After chewing down a pair of aspirin, she got ready for the day and left her home of two days. Living in Ann Arbor while conducting the investigation had felt like a better plan than commuting every day from her closet-sized apartment in Lansing.
After all, the crime had been committed in this city.
What she saw in the parking lot as she swung open the cheap metal door shook off the last vestiges of sleep.
“Noooooo!” She stumbled over to her Mustang, her stomach souring. Sometime during the night someone had turned the shabby but wonderful classic car into a car wreck.
Tears sprang to her eyes. “My baby!”
How in the hell had she not heard someone taking what she suspected was a bat to her precious car? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t spent most of the night awake.
Was it connected to the calls? The case?
Choking back a sob, she collapsed on the curb and pulled her knees to her chest. Rocking back and forth, she tried to figure out if her life could get any worse.
Her first thought was to go back to bed and grieve. But tears wouldn’t help. Instead, she called 9-1-1 and waited for the officer to arrive and make a report.
The officer kindly commiserated about the damage to the classic car, asked her who she might have pissed off, then took a couple of pictures for his report. There wasn’t much else he could do. The motel had no security cameras.
“That wasn’t helpful,” she sniped bitterly when he pulled away. Clearly the destruction of her car was a low priority compared to pot smoking college kids and noise complaints.
When had her love for law enforcement taken a down turn? Oh, right, since her interrogation yesterday.
She called for a tow and looked up car rentals. The tow truck driver arrived first and gave a low whistle when he saw the car.
“Man, what a shame.” He hooked up to the car and loaded it up onto the flatbed. She gave him the address of her aunt’s old house and her credit card number, then texted Marty to expect the car. He lived across the street.
To keep Marty from worrying, she said a tree had fallen on it. The story seemed plausible if he didn’t look too closely at the damage.
The driver drove off as she swallowed past a lump in her throat. How could she afford to get the Mustang fixed?
With her savings account shrinking, and ten minutes of website scrolling for prices, she called Cheap-Rentals-R-Us for a replacement vehicle and waited for a pick-up. Thankfully, she didn’t have to wait long.
A shiny yellow Camaro bounced into the lot not ten minutes later, bearing a sign on the roof from a pizza delivery company offering quick delivery. She dismissed him until the guy rolled down his window and yelled, “Harper Evans?”
At her nod he waved her over with an enthusiastic hand flap. “Hop in! I’m Eldrige from Cheap Rentals.”
Every bone in her body demanded she send him off and to call another company, but she didn’t have the funds to be picky. She climbed into the car.
“Buckle up.” He chuckled. “This car is a rocket ship.”
The smell of red sauce and pepperoni assaulted her senses. At her puzzled expression, the driver, sporting a peach polyester shirt and a mustache of the nineteen seventies porn star vintage, explained. “I pick up for Cheap between pizza deliveries at my other job. I make a killing in tips.”
“I see,” she mumbled politely and slumped down in the seat to snap on her seatbelt.
“I hope you don’t mind but I have to make one quick stop. Mr. Pran gets pissed if his pizza is cold.” He took off like a shot and her head snapped back, while a handful of vertebrae jolted out of whack.
As if she had a choice?
They sped through the streets for two long and terrifying minutes before coming to a hard-braking stop at a small ranch house with a large apple tree out front. The driver leaped out, ran around the car, and retrieved a pizza warming bag from the back seat. He jogged to the front door and completed his transaction with an elderly man in suspenders.
Smiling as he returned, Eldrige climbed in, dropped the empty pizza bag in the back seat, and tucked a pair of one dollar bills into the glove compartment.
“Eight minutes and forty-three seconds. Yeah!” He fist bumped the steering wheel and took off again.
Harper’s head bounced off the headrest. She was convinced that severe whiplash was in her future.
Five minutes lat
er, they screeched into the parking lot of Cheap-Rentals-R-US and she said a small prayer of gratitude for one more day of life.
They’d barely stopped when she tossed a five at him and launched from the seat to safety, resisting the urge to drop to her knees and kiss the blacktop.
The pizza guy took off again, to be replaced by an oily looking character in a brown tweed suit who hurried from a small and uninteresting gray building. He tugged at his thick sideburn and gave her a once over.
“You must be Harper Evans? I’m Benny.”
Dear lord. Neither the driver nor this guy had updated their look in forty years. Were they related?
She nodded and clutched her pitching stomach. She couldn’t run away even if she wanted to. Her legs wouldn’t hold up. She just wanted a car.
“Yes. Can we do this quickly?” she asked, impatient. “I have an appointment.” At this rate, she’d need pizza guy to drive her if she wanted to get to Noah on time.
The guy grinned. His pointed canine teeth were yellow. “We have the car all ready. We’ll just need you to fill out some paperwork.” He lifted the clipboard. “Okay. Do you have a credit card for the down payment?”
The card was almost maxed out but had a few bucks left to charge. “Yes.” She gave him the number. He wrote it down.
“Do you want insurance?”
“My policy should cover the rental.” That was one thing her aunt stressed when she’d bought her first car. Good car insurance in case of “idiot drivers.”
“Then sign here.” He gave her the pen and the clipboard. On it was her name and a checkbox for “yes” for charging her card.
“That’s it?” She signed on the X. “Usually you have to sign away your first born child to rent a car.” She looked at a row of shiny new vehicles parked in front of the office. The blue one had her name on it. She liked blue.
Handing back the board and pen, she lifted a finger toward the blue sedan. A sharp whistle pierced her left eardrum. Startled, she dropped her hand and stumbled back.
“What the heck, dude?” Harper blanched and spun when a second piercing sound, a whine this time, followed by a knock-knock tore up behind her. The sales guy stepped a few paces sideways as a battered old gold Yugo came to a hard brake between them. Harper expelled a terrified squeak as it stalled just an arm’s length from taking her out.
A kid of about sixteen climbed out and tossed Benny the keys. Sales guy spread out a hand toward the car. “Your chariot awaits, milady.”
It took a minute to realize he wasn’t kidding. “I am not driving that.” The back bumper was held on by wire and the entire bottom half of the car was rusty to the point that it was one large pothole away from the entire frame being left somewhere on the highway. “What about all those pretty ones?”
“I’m afraid that’s all we have for you, Ms. Evans.” He managed to look sympathetic, probably from years of shafting the public with bait and switch policies. “With your history, the boss can’t trust you not to flee the state with one of those.”
“What do you mean ‘my history’?”
He pulled out his phone, typed, and walked around the car. Holding up the screen for her viewing enjoyment, Harper saw a headline on a gossip site that read, Cheerleader kills boss in a fit of rage!
“Oh my God.” She snatched the phone out of his hand.
Beneath the caption was an old picture of her in Daytona during spring break two thousand and twelve. Her bikini top was halfway off and she was doing a bad twerk challenge with her friends at a crappy beach bar. That wasn’t her finest moment.
How had they gotten the picture? When had the news gotten out about the murder? Why didn’t she pay attention to the news? Oh, right. She’d been a little distracted of late.
Shaking off the thought, she had more pressing matters. She handed back the phone. “I did not kill Gerald.”
The guy shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. The boss is giving you his son’s car, hoping that you’ll head for Mexico and he can get a big payout. He upped the insurance on it right after you called. Twenty grand if you run.”
Lightning strike me now, Harper silently begged the heavens. Unfortunately, there was only one pitifully small white cloud in an otherwise beautiful blue sky. The chance of a fatal electrical strike was nil.
“That car isn’t worth twenty bucks.”
Benny shrugged. “You know it. I know it….”
“This is BS.” She pulled out her phone. There had to be a hundred car rental places in South East Michigan. She didn’t have to take this from Benny and his boss.
“Before you think about calling anyone else,” he said, smug now. “Every rental company in town will check your history. You’re a celebrity, and not the good kind.” He tugged at the corner of his mustache. “Do you want the car or not?”
She wanted to rip the mustache off his face like a strip of duct tape just to hear him howl. Instead, she scraped the keys out of his outstretched hand. “Give me those.”
After leveling a death-glare at the salesman, she climbed into the beater and cranked the key. The engine whined piteously to life and she ground the stick shift into first gear.
It had been a decade since she drove a stick; the car stalled out three times before she managed to jerk her way out of the lot and onto the street.
From somewhere behind her she heard cheers from onlookers. Of its own volition, her hand went up and she gave the group a one finger wave as she sputtered out of sight.
Chapter 7
“There’s no way in hell I’m riding in that thing,” Noah said as he ran his disbelieving eyes over what was once called a car. It looked like it had been rescued from a car crusher too late. He kicked a half-flat tire and the hubcap fell off, rolled down the garage driveway, and disappeared into a sewer grate.
“Thanks for that,” Harper sniped as she walked toward the grate and bent to look inside the damp darkness.
Without a flashlight and a heck of a lot of motivation to spend all day digging through sludge with a long stick, she wasn’t getting the missing car part back.
She grumbled, “Excellent. Benny will probably charge me two hundred bucks for a replacement.” She stalked back over to Noah.
“The whole car isn’t worth that much.”
“Try to tell that to the thieves at Cheap Rentals.”
“This is a rental? Whatever you paid was too much.” He raked a disapproving eye over the vehicle. “Why are you driving this piece of shit anyway? Don’t you have a car?”
She closed her eyes for a second, then looked up at him. From the look in her blood-shot eyes, she was on the edge of a meltdown. But she wouldn’t express those feelings to him.
“Yes, I have a car.” She told him what happened to her classic car. “Since I’m a murderer, no one will rent to me. It’s this or nothing.”
Fists closed, he wanted to snap the vandal in half. He also wanted to pull her into his arms and tell her everything would be all right.
However, that was a lie. Last night he’d done some initial investigation and discovered the detectives had focused on her as their suspect: something about drunken threats at a bar. With a dozen or so witnesses, she’d all but confessed to wanting Covington dead and had been found with the body.
At this point, there were no other suspects.
“The Mustang is a 1970 Boss 302,” she added, not realizing he’d been woolgathering. “It will cost a fortune to fix and I have a high deductible. I had it towed to my aunt’s house.”
He let out a low whistle. “Those cars can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Did you win the lottery?”
“I wish.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’m Facebook friends with Summer, a former Muskrats cheerleader. She has a cool 50’s convertible. When I drooled over her car, she mentioned knowing someone who had the Mustang in a barn. It’s very rough but it was l
ove at first sight. My grandmother left me a small inheritance and I got a loan for the rest. I cleaned it out, got a friend to get her running for me, and planned to someday make restorations. Now the car is worse off than when I bought it.”
The hitch in her throat was impossible to ignore.
“It sounds great.” He didn’t know what to say to make anything that she’d gone through better. Her life was on a downhill slide.
“So, unless you have an extra car sitting around,” she added, “Harvey is mine for the near future.”
“Harvey?”
They both turned to the car. She exhaled loudly. “I thought if I talk to him nicely and named him, he’d to his best not to die and leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere.”
He was sure no amount of sweet-talk would keep the wreck running. “We’ll take my truck.” At least the Chevy had an engine that could take them to Mars and back.
Her jaw tightened. “No. Harvey is mine. I’m paying for him and I’m driving him.”
Deep down, he suspected that she wanted to give in and let him chauffer her around. Pride kept her from that admission. Harper had been the princess of stubborn as a teen; she’d had eleven years to move up to queen.
Figuring she’d ditch Harvey after she’d had a day of driving the rent-a-wreck around, he turned and leaned against the car. The hatch popped open. She quickly slammed it closed.
“I give,” he said. Some of her tension eased. “Let’s get to the case.” He filled her in on what he’d learned. It wasn’t much. Still, what the police had was circumstantial.
“Me and my big mouth.”
“You certainly didn’t help yourself,” he agreed. “Let’s hope they don’t find your fingerprints on the knife.”
“Not funny.” Her shoulders slumped. “I hate orange jumpsuits. They’ll make me look sickly. I should turn myself in and save the county some cash for the investigation. They’ll find me guilty anyway.”
Noah’s spine tingled. Now he was pissed off. He reached into his pocket for his keys. Without a word, he turned and headed for his truck.
The Sweetheart Mystery Page 4