BAD TIME TO BE IN IT

by David Burnsworth

  “Because you’d’ve known I wouldn’t have done anything rash.”

  “You mean to tell me,” Crome said, “that when those men took Hope that one time, you and the kid played by the rules?”

  Blu didn’t respond.

  “It ain’t as if I stashed Phineous someplace you couldn’t find. That would have been stupid. Jesus, Blu. You always think the worst.”

  “No,” Blu said. “I want to help my friend.”

  There wasn’t anything Crome could say that would make Blu understand. Hell, he didn’t really understand it himself.

  “What do you suggest we do?” Blu asked.

  Crome took out a piece of paper and set it on the table. “I got the people who stayed on the floor of the hotel where Maureen was held. All of the rooms have changed occupants at least once since I got the picture so I’m assuming she isn’t there anymore.”

  Blu pulled out his own piece of paper and laid it over Crome’s sheet.

  “What’s that?” Crome asked.

  “The list of credit cards used to pay for the rooms.”

  Rule number one, follow the money.

  Blu had been busy.

  Blu’s irritation with his partner went back a long time. He loved the man like a brother, but damn if Crome didn’t always have to do things his own way. And he still hadn’t forgiven Crome for talking him out of taking a six-figure security job—with benefits—because Crome couldn’t be faithful to more than just his motorcycle. Sliding out of the booth, Blu said, “The ladies are working on getting more intel.”

  “Good,” Crome said. “I got something else I need to follow up on.”

  “Really?” Blu asked. “You think I’m going to let you ride off and do your thing after I just found you?”

  “Well,” Crome said with an actual chuckle, “you showed yourself you can find me. I’m sure you can do it again if you really work at it.” He stood.

  This wasn’t happening. Not this way. Blu wasn’t going to let it. He got up in his partner’s face, making him turn his back to the big plate glass window overlooking the parking lot. “You think that’s how this is going to play out?”

  Blu needed thirty seconds. That was five and counting.

  “Get outta my way, partner,” Crome said.

  Ten seconds.

  Blu grabbed his partner’s vest. “No chance.”

  Fifteen seconds.

  Crome pushed Blu backwards.

  Eighteen seconds.

  Blu’s butt hit the table behind him, stopping Crome from pushing any further.

  Twenty seconds.

  He pushed back but Crome held firm.

  Twenty-three seconds.

  With both hands and what felt like all his strength, Crome lifted Blu off the ground.

  Twenty-five seconds.

  It went against all of Blu’s training not to be beating his partner senseless right now.

  Twenty-seven seconds.

  Crome used his momentum and tossed Blu over a table and chairs.

  Thirty seconds.

  Blu landed hard but rebounded in time to see the door swing shut as Crome hiked a leg over his bike’s saddle, fire off the motor, and roar away.

  The thirty seconds was so Harmony’s friend had time to plant a LoJack on Crome’s bike. The guy who planted it did surveillance for the Charleston office of the DEA. Crome would not find the device with a ten second once-over.

  As Crome wound out his Harley, a bad feeling came over him. Not about throwing his partner out of the way. It was that it had all been too easy. Blu was up to something.

  Any other time, a real fight between him and his partner would have ended with two tickets to the emergency room.

  He checked his mirrors. There were a lot of cars behind him. Memorizing their makes and models as best he could see, he’d check again in five minutes to see if any of the same were still behind him.

  With Blu on the hotel gig, he could focus on the other aspect of this that bothered him: Why Maureen?

  She worked in a dive bar for her tax-evader boss and served drinks to dope pushers, thieves, and murderers. This was too sophisticated to be any one of them. Was the case about him or was that also a decoy? Did someone think Maureen was important enough to cause a reaction but minor enough so as not to be considered family?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Wednesday morning

  DAY THREE

  At the office of the Palmetto Pulse, Blu was escorted to the back by Josie. On the walk to Patricia’s office, Blu said, “Your aunt tells me you’re good at research.”

  Josie, young with chin length brown hair, glasses, and a professional but unrevealing pullover blouse and slacks, said, “I am. But I have to say, my aunt forbade me from working for you.”

  “Forbade?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Something about getting shot at.”

  He nodded.

  Before they got to the back office, Josie handed him a slip of paper. “Here’s my email. Fifty an hour in cash if I find what you need.”

  Blu heard someone clear their throat and turned to see Patricia standing in her doorway.

  She said, “I certainly hope you don’t encourage my niece’s delusion of working for you.”

  With a smile, Blu said, “Of course not,” as he pocketed her email. “I’d never ask her to go to Southeast Asia in the middle of a war to cover underground CIA operations.” This was exactly what Patricia had done in 1970 and how she’d met her future husband Reggie Sails. And she had done it at the age of twenty, which was most likely also Josie’s current age.

  “Good,” Patricia said, ignoring Blu’s jab.

  Josie wisely kept her mouth shut, something that had taken Blu a lot longer than twenty years to control.

  Patricia motioned for Blu to enter her office. Josie left them and returned to her desk.

  On his drive over, Blu had received a call from Tess. Patricia had accepted an offer on the business.

  Seated at her antique banker’s desk, she asked, “How’s Crome?”

  Blu sat across from her in one of the two visitor’s chairs. “I like him better when he works with me instead of against.”

  “Your partner strikes me as the independent type.”

  “Ya think?” Blu asked. “We spent way too much time tracking him down.”

  “You don’t trust his judgment, do you?”

  “Not in his current state of mind. Even when the job wasn’t personal, he tended to push the limits. I don’t want him to go off the deep end.”

  Josie carried in a tray holding a carafe and two mugs. “Coffee?”

  She knew Patricia and Blu took theirs black, so no cream or sugar was required.

  After setting the tray on the desk, filling the two cups, and handing them over, Josie left the room and closed the door.

  “What’s your next move?”

  “I would like your niece to do some background on the list you gave me.”

  “I thought I just said I didn’t want her to do any work for you.”

  “You did,” he said. “She’d be working for you.”

  “And I’d want her to do this on my dime why, again?”

  Blu held up his cup as a toast. “It’ll be your last hurrah.”

  Patricia eyed him for a moment. “Good news travels fast.”

  “Think of the sources I have that you know about,” he said still holding his cup up. “You trained them.”

  He, of course, was referring to Darcy Pelton, Harmony, and Tess.

  As if relenting, she met his toast.

  They both drank what tasted to Blu like a good German roast.

  “How are things with Billie?” she asked again.

  The question, Blu assumed, was to let him know that just as he knew things about her, she also had so
urces. Probably the same sources.

  “Not sure,” he said.

  “Give her some time,” she said. “She’s worth waiting for, if you’re ready to settle down again.”

  Blu took another drink. He wasn’t sure what he wanted anymore.

  “Okay,” Patricia said. “I’ll have Josie look into the list.”

  After some more small talk and a promise for a game of horseshoes at his island home after this Maureen situation resolved itself, Blu made his way to the front door.

  Passing the receptionist, Blu gave Josie a wave.

  She held up a manila file. “Here.”

  “What’s this?” he asked as he took the folder.

  “Background on the list.” She gave him a wink.

  “Did you go rogue on this or were you given the task?”

  Ignoring the question, she said, “Have a nice day!”

  Wednesday, lunchtime

  Tess met Blu at the Pirate’s Cove and together they reviewed the work Josie had done.

  Sitting at a table inside to avoid the ocean breeze blowing their papers everywhere, Tess said, “She does good work.”

  He had to agree.

  “So how do you want to divide this?” she asked.

  “Don’t have to.” Blu picked up his Atomic burger and took a bite.

  “What?” she asked. “Am I supposed to read all this on my own?”

  He chewed his food and washed it down with a Coke Zero, Tess’ choice of drink. “If you want to. All I needed to do was scan them until I found what I was looking for.”

  With a smirk, she dipped her head and began reading.

  While she read, he finished his lunch. When the last of the fries were gone, he sat back, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and watched her. It had been a year since she’d interviewed him in front of that burned out bait store off Folly Beach Road. He’d been working a job trying to find a spoiled brat named Jeremy Rhodes. Tess was the more business-minded of the duo that was her and Harmony. There’d been something between her and Blu, but nothing happened because Blu loved Billie.

  Wednesday, mid-day

  Crome drank from a cup of Starbucks and waited to see if his hunch would pan out. The hunch being that Maureen wasn’t a decoy and something was at play that hadn’t revealed itself yet. A long time ago, he learned from Blu that when things stopped making sense, the best course of action was to back up until they did. And what made sense was that Maureen had been taken to get at him. She had no enemies. He and Blu had lots of enemies. Actually, Crome knew his list was a lot longer than his business partner’s. Either this was a local thing which was why it all happened to him, or someone had gone to great lengths to track him here. He ruled out everything other than local. He’d been back in Charleston for more than a year and the only new enemy they’d made—Sinclair Waters, a.k.a. Skull, crime lord of Columbia, South Carolina—was dead. Maybe someone from his organization or a relative was taking revenge. But the more he thought about it, the more Crome felt inclined to strike it from the list. The next man in line took over. He was probably more than happy about how things had turned out.

  No. This had to be something else. This meant it had to be from the past. Not last year. But something older than four years, when he and Blu had been active in the area. Something before Crome’s three-year sabbatical. And something that had left at least one person really pissed off.

  He came up with a list of six previous clients, did some online searches, and crossed one off because he was dead. That left five names and he ranked them in order of how motivated they would be for revenge based on how the situations had played out. This was how he happened to be watching Clete Ramos from a corner table of the downtown Starbucks.

  Even with Crome’s admittedly limited online sleuthing skills (he was more of a leg-breaker type) he’d found Clete’s current place of employment thanks to social media. Number one on the list, Clete lost everything when his wife at the time hired Blu Carraway Investigations to look into an odd charge on their credit card. A charge that Clete had told her was not legit. She’d agreed with him that it wasn’t legit, but something had told the wiser-than-her-thirty-years woman her husband might not be telling the whole truth. Her instincts had been proven more right than she really wanted to deal with. Clete’s sexual preferences had been yanked from the closet they’d been hiding in. And he’d lost his wife, his children, his job, and his relationship to his evangelical family. He’d gone from an up-and-coming executive at an investment firm to his current digs as a manager for a struggling retailer that pushed dollar wares to the general public. And, from what Crome could gather, he was losing a battle with booze.

  Sitting by himself, Clete did a horrible job pretending not to scope out a table of teenage boys. It would have been nauseating to Crome if Clete had any game with them. But the middle-aged guy wasn’t going to play ball any time soon with that group.

  After a less than stellar attempt at an introduction followed quickly by a rude rebuff from the boys, Clete walked out.

  Crome gave him ten paces, then got up and followed, throwing away his empty cup as he exited. His middle-aged and overweight target lumbered ahead toward a decade-old Nissan Sentra parked at a meter. Crome closed the distance just as Clete opened the driver’s door.

  Crome put a hand on the top edge of the door and pinned the man against his car. “Long time, Clete.”

  Clete stared at him wide-eyed at first, probably scared he was going to get robbed. And then his eyelids went back to normal and then his face bunched up as Crome caught a hint of recognition.

  “You…you…” Clete began. “You’re the one who ruined my life.” He tried to force the door open.

  Crome held firm. “You did that all by yourself when you lied to your wife.”

  Using his considerable mass, Clete managed to wedge himself in sideways.

  Crome knew he wouldn’t be able to hold the man forever. He let go of the door and backed away just as Clete attempted to push with all his might.

  With nothing restricting the door from moving, it swung open fast, creaked against its hinges, and bent further than Nissan had designed it to, warping the sheet metal.

  “Just checking in,” Crome said. “Making sure you’re still a jackass.”

  “Screw you, Crome. I’m gonna sue you for harassment.”

  Crome walked away, satisfied of two things. The first was that Clete was not the guy. The second was that Clete had no real case for harassment. That is, unless he wanted the video footage of him picking up male prostitutes handed over to the police.

  Wednesday, mid-day, Pirate’s Cove

  Blu watched Tess look up from the list she’d been reading, the one Patricia had gotten and Josie had deciphered. Her serious look, the one that showed a slight worry line down the center of her forehead, was gone. In its place was a wide opened stare, the one she gave when she was surprised.

  She said, “Does Crome know?”

  “Not yet.”

  What she referred to was what Blu had seen. Someone had used Michael Crome’s credit card to rent the room. The problem with this was that, as far as Blu’s knowledge of his partner went, Crome didn’t have any credit cards. If that were the case, then the man went to some length to get one in Crome’s name. This wasn’t the average kidnapper they were dealing with.

  “So what do we do?” she asked.

  Blu sat back. “Tell Crome, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I’m not sure he’ll take it too well.”

  Tess’ cell phone chimed and she looked at the display. “It’s Harmony.” She answered it and listened. Then to Blu she said, “You were right. Crome had a talk with Clete Ramos. He just left the man. According to Harmony, Crome gave him a good scare and walked away.”

  “He’ll be checking on the second name on the list.”

&n
bsp; So far, Blu had been right. Crome’s jab about not knowing what he’d be working on so Blu could work on something else had cut deep. After that, Blu got focused, came up with the list of names that appeared to be Crome’s current playbook. He did know his partner’s moves, he just didn’t understand Crome’s motive at first.

  She said goodbye to Harmony and hung up.

  “The tracker’s working,” Blu said. At least until Crome found out about it.

  As if reading his mind, she said, “Until he finds it. Then he’s really going to be pissed.”

  “I can handle him being pissed at me a lot better than him being pissed at the rest of the world.”

  The next name on the list for Crome was one Arthur Ryan. This one was another divorce case, but not quite as unorthodox as Clete’s. They’d found Arthur bankrolling two mistresses. His wife didn’t appreciate him sharing more than just her bed with the women. As far as Crome knew, Arthur was still paying his ex-wife. Her lawyer had gotten a very long alimony schedule that only stopped if she remarried. Crome had befriended her and spent more than a few nights over at Arthur’s old mansion over the years. He’d laugh at the thought except Maureen’s suffering wouldn’t allow him any humor.

  Arthur also turned out to be a dead end—his company had recently transferred him and his new family to Thailand. Crome started his bike and roared away.

  On to number three.

  Wednesday, mid-day

  Harmony watched the blip from the tracker on Crome’s motorcycle trace a route on the display of her iPad. This was much easier work than trying to tail someone. She’d been with both Blu and Crome when they’d attempted to do it the old-fashioned way and found it boring. And frustrating. This way she could trail far behind and not risk being spotted or losing Crome.

  She didn’t figure the older biker for a woman beater, but given his current state of mind, anything was possible. Based on that, it was probably for the best if Crome didn’t know what she or Blu and Tess were up to. If he wanted to play this childish game, they’d let him as long as they could keep tabs on him.