Cheap Heat, page 7
“Uh, it was, yeah. What I was asking.”
She leaned forward. “And what do you think of the answer?”
“It’s a good one. Pretty much the one I was hoping to hear.”
“Good.” She leaned forward further, till she was no longer sitting so much as kneeling across from me on the couch. She planted her hands on my shoulders and pushed me back. It took me by surprise and I fell back.
She climbed on top of me. I stopped asking questions.
Chapter 14
I opened the door into Jason’s office, only to walk straight into his outthrust hand, one finger held up in the universal sign for ‘silence.’
Like a cartoon character trying to be quiet, I took exaggerated steps from the door over to the French press. With dramatic care for the noise I made I lifted the press and selected a mug.
“I’m afraid our rates are non-negotiable,” he was saying. His phone buzzed as the other person on the line spoke.
“I respect your position, Mr. Gogarty,” he said. “But I can’t budge on that.”
More buzzing I couldn’t hear. He looked at me, speculatively.
“I think that idea has some potential.” He nodded, holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder, reaching for the pad of paper on his desk, and taking up a pen. He began writing with quick strokes, the pen audibly scratching against the paper. “Yeah. That sounds good. Sure, we’ve got a fax. He can start inquiries as soon as you make that deposit. Yeah, today, absolutely. Dent-Clark looks forward to working on your behalf.” He hung up.
“Well,” he said, “looks like you’ve got another job.”
I poured my coffee. “I’m not a bodyguard.”
“No, but for a gig that could last weeks or months like this one, you can figure out how to fake it.”
“Meaning what?” I added my preferred yellow packets and dollop of dairy, probably half-and-half rather than the whole milk I would’ve preferred.
“Meaning once we get you kitted out, no one’ll be able to tell you aren’t the god damned Secret Service.”
I took a sip of the coffee and tried not to roll my eyes. He always had the good stuff, at least.
“Does this mean I have to…”
“Yes, you’re carrying a company piece while you’re on this job. And we’re getting you a vest.”
“I’ve got a vest. A couple, actually. One fleece, one down…Eddie Bauer. It’s great. Keeps me warm but leaves my arms free to whip hell out of bad guys.”
He eyed me over his glasses.
“Nobody is gonna shoot at me at a wrestling show, man.”
“Better to wear the vest and not need it than…”
I couldn’t see a percentage in arguing. I took a seat.
“You don’t really want this, do you? Do I need to put Brock on it?”
“We already know that getting shot doesn’t bother him,” I said. I regretted the words even before Jason’s face darkened. “I’m sorry,” I said, raising a hand immediately. “I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.”
“Yeah, but you’re my asshole. And besides, we both know this is a bona fide mystery—and you won’t be able to let go of it before you figure it out.”
“Don’t even know what ‘it’ is yet,” I said. “Haven’t seen any of the threats or been filled in.”
“Company owner…that’s Oscar Gogarty, who I was on the phone with…is going to send over everything they’ve got so far.”
“What was the negotiating about?”
“He was looking for ways to lower the rates.”
“And what’d you settle on?”
“Regular hourly rates with enough retainer for two weeks,” Jason said. “But no expenses.”
“No expenses? How the hell do I make any money on the job then?”
He held up that ‘silence’ finger again. “You’re gonna be traveling with the company, staying in hotels with the company, eating with the company…his point was that they’d be floating all your expenses anyway, so there was no need for it.”
“That’s fair, I guess…but what do I do about food? Eat at craft services every night?”
“They’ll give you the same per diem they give employees.”
“What kind of employees? Crew? Creative? Talent?”
“I did not ask. Besides, how much does a jar of peanut butter cost you?”
“Some of the peanut butter I eat? More than you’d expect.” I finished the coffee with my usual gulp, since it hadn’t really been hot to begin with. “I don’t know what to make of this thing at all. Seems like Grant just has a character that pisses some of the crowd off and somebody wrote a dumb letter.”
“And you will be diligent in tracking down said dumb letter writer and exposing their nefarious plot for all the world to see. And as it might take a few weeks, you’ve got the chance to make some real money.”
“My lifestyle is cheap.”
“How’s your girlfriend like the boat?”
A couple of protests surged up. First about the word girlfriend, but that had been pretty thoroughly settled just a couple of nights ago. The other was to ask what that had to do with anything, but then I realized the implication.
“I’m not moving to dry land. Not to any of the dry land I can afford, anyway.”
“You’re nothing if not committed to the aesthetic. Go on out and grab a desk and start a file. I’ll give you whatever they send over.”
* * *
I had the case file open and the various principals and locations cross referenced before I heard anything from Delmarva Wrestling. Jason CC’d me an email that had a PDF. Once I got it open, it looked like a PDF scan made with somebody’s phone of a fairly wrinkled piece of paper.
In irregular but legible cursive, the letter read:
The South is a proud place and Our Heritage will not be subjected to the insults of your company’s U.S. Grant. He had better never perform in Virginia again. Not in Norfolk or Virginia Beach. Not in Richmond or Bristol nor anywhere in between or there will be serious consequences.
It was signed The Knights of the South. There was some kind of mark on the paper next to that name, but the paper had been so wrinkled and the scan so bad I couldn’t really make out what it was.
“Oh, boy,” I muttered. I spent a couple of minutes lamenting the state of history education in the country over the past several decades that had allowed anyone to believe specious bullshit about the south’s ‘heritage’ in regards to the Civil War, and all its symbols.
Frankly, my sympathy was entirely with the guy tearing up the rebel flag.
I did some searching for The Knights of the South. The hits were so many and varied that I decided to try narrowing it via some official lists of hate groups published by various watchdogs. Nothing there. I narrowed my searches and spent the next hour wading through some of the worst web design and dumbest ideas I’d ever seen.
There were plenty of groups that had similar names or similar motifs—lots of Crusader Crosses, or imitation Crusader Crosses. Lots of Celtic crosses with bad spiral knot-work in the circles. But nothing that jumped out at me; no exact match for The Knights of the South associated with any of the locations named in the letter, or even Virginia in general. The letter was not getting me anywhere.
By the time I’d looked into all that, I had several more emails. The first one I opened was a massive wall of text of different fonts. For a moment I was put in mind of the classic movie ransom letter where all the words are cut out of different sources.
Then I realized what I was looking at was a series of comments cut and pasted from various wrestling message boards, press releases, and articles about Delmarva Wrestling and U.S. Grant in particular.
I read a few of them.
So stiff in the ring…
Seems like a real asshole…
His gimmick is gonna get him killed if they ever go to the Deep South…
Going to hurt someone with that finisher…
I stopped about halfway down the first page. I wrote a quick email to Jason.
“I’ll do a lot of things for this job. But I’m not going to spend hours reading the damn comments.”
I paged through the rest of what they sent me. A poor recollection of a threatening call they’d gotten at a show in southern Maryland. No details to work with, just the hourly worker who’d picked up the phone at company HQ recalling someone had said they didn’t want to see Grant performing that character again, and that there’d be trouble if he did.
I made a note on the file: ask for audio. No way of knowing if they had it, but it couldn’t hurt to ask.
That was it. That was all I had to go on. I summarized my findings in an email to my boss and thought about the upcoming week, and my least favorite holiday.
For me, Thanksgiving was beneath Earth Day, Arbor Day, Flag Day, and goddamned Garbage Ape Day if they ever declared one.
The following Saturday, now that was a day I cared about. That was a day I could spend with people I enjoyed seeing. And lately things had been going too well, and I’d been in too good a mood to deal with it.
I made the executive decision to skip it entirely, and I passed the next day ignoring any and call phone calls. Since none were from Gen, Dani, or Jason, I spent the entire day cleaning the boat, making sure it was winterized, and thinking about Saturday.
For my own personal Thanksgiving dinner, I had a third of a bottle of Wigle bourbon and about half a jar of Wild Friends Pumpkin Spice Peanut Butter, which seemed the most seasonally appropriate thing in my cupboard.
Chapter 15
I should have spent Friday morning making a brine of vegetable broth, ginger, salt, brown sugar, pepper, and allspice at Dani’s house. I should’ve been helping Emily roll out baguette loaves.
Instead, I had been called into the office just after nine a.m.
It was a cold day, the promise of winter in it. We didn’t get much of a fall in these parts anymore; typically it stayed warm through October, then it seemed as though all the trees shed their leaves all at once, in the first week of November, and now it was all just a boring prelude to winter.
When I got there I saw Jason’s car in the lot, as well as what I thought was the Lexus driven by Mrs. Jackson’s attorney.
My heart sank into my stomach, where it bubbled menacingly with the bourbon I’d had for Thanksgiving dinner.
Nobody else was in the office, and I thought I heard raised voices in Jason’s office. So I made my way there and shoved right in without waiting for an invite.
“Jack,” Jason said. He was dressed casually, a polo shirt over jeans, which I almost never saw him in. But then, it was the Friday after Thanksgiving. Nobody worked then; not even him.
I nodded. “Ms. Hanes.” The attorney was wearing a loose gray sweater over dark blue jeans that looked expensive, and heeled boots. It was casual-as-dressy.
“Just what do you think you were doing, assaulting my client’s husband. Do you realize how this complicates her case? I’m here to get back every damn dime she paid you.”
“Assaulting your client’s husband?”
“Yes, and he said there’d be witnesses. Said you even tried to steal his car.”
I walked over to the conference table and set down my helmet and gloves.
“Ms. Hanes. If I had truly wanted to steal Donald Jackson’s car, would he have been able to stop me?”
“He says he threatened to call the police.”
I sighed. “Ms. Hanes, where does he say this occurred?”
“At a gas station a few blocks away from the firm.”
“How does he know where the firm is?”
“It’s public knowledge.”
“Right.” Behind her I saw Jason starting to grin. “And did he use my name or describe me?”
“He referred to you as Jack.”
“So your suggestion here is that I was stupid enough to brace Mr. Jackson and give him my name.”
“He says a bystander called you that.”
“Huh. Ms. Hanes, did it occur to you to ask Mrs. Jackson how her soon to be ex-husband knew who had handled the investigation into his infidelity? Not the firm, I mean, but the individual.”
“No, I just got a phone call from his attorney and…”
“Immediately sped over here on Black Damn Friday, America’s favorite holiday, to try and get money back?”
“It’s my job to defend the interests of my client.”
“Your client told her husband who I was. She told him I rode a bike, and what kind, and what I looked like, and where to find me.”
“How do you know that?” She was put off. I don’t think she’d expected me to be anything but surprised.
“Because a few days ago he tried to run me off the road. Then he followed me to the firm and attacked me.”
“Well,” I could see gears clicking behind her lawyer’s eyes. I liked her a little less, though I understood where it came from. Best interests of her client indeed. “That would change things. How did you respond?”
“I defended myself.” I saw her eyes start to widen, and I raised a hand. “Gently,” I said. “I didn’t hurt him. I did take away his keys for a little while, because he was clearly at the end of a three-martini lunch, and I didn’t want to put him back on the road. I told him to walk to the gas station and back for coffee and to cool off. Eventually I gave him his keys back. And your client sent him after me because she wanted him at least humiliated, probably roughed up.”
“Are you willing to appear in court in order to…”
“No,” I said flatly. “Not unless Mr. Jackson tries to press charges.”
“But this could mean…”
“I don’t care,” I said, cutting her off, rudely, which I immediately felt badly about. But I had the initiative and I soldiered on. “Look, my work for Mrs. Jackson is finished. I don’t want to go back on the clock for it, and frankly, I’m out of town for a long time starting Monday. I don’t blame you for looking out for Mrs. Jackson, and that’s all you thought you were doing. But we’ve wasted enough time on this.”
Ms. Hanes reached into the small purse she carried. It had an expensive looking designer’s marque on it, but I could never tell one of those apart from another. She handed me a card.
“You may hear from me,” was all she said before walking out. We both watched her leave, waited to hear the door close.
Looking at the card, seeing her name in black and white, it finally occurred to me to ask.
“Ms. Hanes,” I said, and she paused at the door of Jason’s office. “How’s Liza?”
She lifted an eyebrow as a question. She had pinpoint control of her features; I don’t know if that was a lawyer thing, but I bet it helped.
“Did she never mention me? I found her friend Gabriel after he dropped out of school.”
The eyebrow lift that was a question melted into widened eyes of comprehension. “Of course she did. She never gave me your last name, but…I probably should’ve made the connection on my own.”
I shrugged. “Not like it occurred to me either.”
“My daughter did seem to think well of you, which is unusual for her and…any adult.”
I chuckled. “We all go through that phase, but…she seemed like a good kid. The kind who worried about her friends. If you doubt the account I’ve just given you, maybe ask her if she thinks I’m a liar.”
“I will,” she said, and I was convinced she was going to go do just that as she shut the door and walked out.
“I’ve never known anyone who could impress someone while pissing them off quite like you, Jack,” Jason said, with a little laugh.
“We all have our gifts.” I turned to Jason. “How good can she be if she fell for that bullshit from the Jackson asshole?”
He shrugged. “Took her off guard, I guess. And this is a divorce attorney’s busy season anyway.”
“November?”
“The holidays. Nothing to make you realize you hate your family like being forced to spend time with ‘em.”
“Hell,” I said, feeling a little sick, “I don’t need to spend any time with my family to know that.”
The lighter tone vanished. Jason cleared his throat and said, “Well, the DWF still wants you Monday. Let’s get you kitted out. I’m going of town this weekend.”
He reached into his pocket for keys.
I knew better than to argue the point. If this was a bodyguarding job, I knew I needed to carry something, even if I didn’t much like it.
First, he set down a Taser, yellow and blue in a plastic belt holster. Then a box of 9mm ammo. A small black plastic case, locked. A couple key-ring sized pepper spray dispersal units.
He turned to me. “You want a shoulder rig or a belt?”
“Uh, shoulder I guess. Be able to wear it under a jacket then.”
A leather strap with two loops for shoulders hit his desk. Then, finally, a vest.
“Really? A vest?”
“If people are serious about attacking you’ll be glad you have it.”
“I’ve already got Kevlar in my jacket.”
“It won’t look suspicious at all if you follow him around wearing a motorcycle jacket zipped to the chin all the damn time.”
“Fine, fine.”
He used a smaller key to open the black plastic case. Inside it was a Beretta Storm 9mm.
“We could probably do the subcompact if you really wanna go concealed…”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“You’re gonna wear it now.”
“I’m here on the bike, and I don’t have saddlebags to get any of this home. Plus I don’t have a safer place to leave it between now and Monday.”
