1 Motor City Shakedown (16 page)

Noel pitched forward, his legs gone limp. An incoherent groan whispered out of him. Malcolm caught him and held the man’s weight like Noel was a small child. He eased the cop forward, bending him into a fetal ball inside the trunk. Noel’s eyes swam open and one of his hands clawed weakly at the rim of the trunk. Malcolm crashed his fist against the cop’s temple, and Noel fell slack and silent.

Malcolm bent down and plucked the car’s keys from where they had fallen onto the street. His calm, deep-set eyes scanned the trunk, and his hands roamed over the unconscious man’s form like probing spiders. He removed Noel’s service pistol and the second gun. He put both in the gun safe and closed its lid. He took Noel’s cell phone and scanned its contact list until he confirmed that the number listed for ‘A. Phelps’ was the one he had already committed to memory. Then he broke the cell phone into two pieces and dropped them on the ground.

He slipped Noel’s handcuffs from their leather belt-holster and, bending the man’s arms behind him, snapped them onto his wrists. Pausing for a moment to look over the trunk one last time, Malcolm reached in, picked up the gun safe, and shut the trunk with a soft click.

Ten minutes later, Malcolm had stashed the gun safe in the trunk of his own car, driven it three blocks away—far enough that any future search of the scene would not include it –and walked back. He loitered for a moment at the driver’s door of Noel’s car, pretending to fiddle with his cell phone.

Nobody moved on the street. Nobody watched him from a window or a doorway.

His eyes slid up and away, coming to rest on the Fort Shelby Tower. This cop had been staking it out, he knew. And from what he had gleaned while securing Noel in the trunk, this cop and Allen Phelps had planned on killing someone inside that building.

Malcolm filed the information away and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Noel Hammond’s car flared to life with a low rumble. It drifted away from the Fort Shelby Tower and sank into the silent, sleeping depths of the city.

FOURTEEN

Issabella sipped her coffee and kept glancing at the little clock read-out in the bottom-right corner of her computer monitor. Before she had managed to gather up her things and slip out of Darren’s inexplicably luxurious apartment, they had agreed that he would meet her the next morning at ten o’clock to talk about the case.

It was ten fifty-five.

‘So what? Shut up. He’s late. So what? Of course he’s late. He’s the kind of person who’s always late. And you shouldn’t care, anyway. You shouldn’t freak out. Don’t freak out. You’re freaking out. It was sex. Ugh, don’t be that girl. Don’t be high school Issabella. Be cool, metropolitan Issabella. So don’t look at the clock. Cool, metropolitan Issabella shrugs it off and gets to work. Be her.’

But there was no work. As soon as she’d gotten into the office that morning, she had bundled the pile of documents she was supposed to review for other law firms back into their envelopes and stacked them in a corner. Those were going back to their homes with a note explaining she was no longer doing document review.

That was one decision she had made that she was not going back on. She was a lawyer, not some clerk for other lawyers. If she could navigate the atypical and confounding case of Vernon Pullins—and she
could
, she knew that much –then editing the tangled legalese of junior associates was beneath her.

She looked at the clock again.

‘Stop it.’

Tossing her empty coffee cup in the trash bucket next to her desk, Issabella tilted the monitor away so she couldn’t see the little clock any more. She gathered up the manila case folder that contained everything she had on Vernon Pullins.

Leaning back in her chair, she started thumbing through it all again. There were the newspaper articles about the raid on Vernon’s house, notes she’d made about everything she had learned since the beginning, and the pile of documents she’d snagged from the crematorium.

Twenty minutes later, Issabella solved the case.

She had been scrutinizing the jumble of bills, invoices and tax records from the crematorium when it all clicked in to place. Among the tax records was a single sheet of paper listing Vernon’s employees. He had one. Issabella kept scanning, until the employee’s address appeared in front of her.

She sat bolt upright. She knew exactly what to do, in an instant. She knew how to get the cops who had killed her client.

“Johnny Two Leaf!”

Issabella was on her feet, slinging her purse over one shoulder and rushing toward the door.

“Johnny Two Leaf,” she repeated in a gleeful rush. “I win!”

*

Theresa set another glass of golden spirits down in front of Darren and frowned at the slouching, brooding lawyer.

“Let me put it away ‘til they come and get it,” she said.

“Not yet.”

“Go see that lawyer-girl, Fletcher. Get out of here, why don’t you?”

“Just give me a little while.”

“Okay.”

She retreated back to her perch near the door of the bar, sparing him one last worried look. Darren slouched in his booth, his hands encircling the glass she’d brought him. His normally expressive and animated face was a slack, emotionless mask. Shadows clouded his eyes, and he had the look of a man resigned to misery.

In the center of the table, inches from his fingertips, a single lime-green envelope lay like a malignant talisman—inscrutable and ominous, drawing his tired eyes to it, emanating a bleak sort of magnetism that pulled at him, urged him to take it up in his hands and suffer its contents.

Darren took a long swallow from the glass, set it back down, and did not touch the envelope. But his eyes never left it.

This, Theresa knew, was a ritual Darren could not refuse to perform. She glanced over her shoulder at the rows of bottled spirits arranged on the wall. There was a second fifth of Crown Royale nestled there next to the one she had been pouring for Darren all morning. Confident that there was enough to keep Darren oiled through his stand-off with the envelope, she went back to smoking and worrying about her friend.

The door opened, transforming into a rectangle of sunlight, the bell above it jingled, and Issabella walked into the half-light of the bar. Theresa made a furtive gesture with one hand, signaling the young lawyer over to her.

“Good morning, Theresa,” Issabella said, the same good cheer animating her as the last time she’d been in Winkle’s Tavern. “Can I get some more of my coffee, please?”

“He’s having a bad morning,” Theresa said in a half-whisper.

“He has a lot of those, I guess,” Issabella said. “Whatever. I think what I have to tell him will cheer him up.”

Issabella turned and sauntered away. She slid into the booth across from Darren, leaving Theresa to stare after her and let out a long sigh.

The big woman regarded Darren as her brother. And like any older sister, she had hopes and dreams for him. She wanted him to fly and find happiness.

But the envelope sat there on the table between Darren and the young woman Theresa had been convinced might be the perfect person to rescue her friend from the despondent existence he had been punishing himself with. That envelope wasn’t going away. And even if it did, another six months or so would burn away—just enough time for Darren to put the envelope out of his mind-- and another lime green envelope exactly like it would appear in Darren’s mail.

Theresa started brewing coffee, occasionally glancing over to watch the two lawyers.

*

Issabella sipped her coffee and watched as Darren, for the first time since she’d met him, appeared incapable of saying anything interesting. She’d tried to rib him about skipping their morning appointment, and he’d wh
ispered a half-hearted apology.

She
asked him what was in the envelope.

“Maybe I can meet you later, Issabella. I’m sorry. Right now isn’t good. I’m sorry.”

An idea occurred to her, and she graced the seemingly exhausted, preoccupied lawyer with a wide, bright smile.

“I win, by the way,” she said. “The game’s over. Well, it will be after we make a couple phone calls. Which we should talk about. But you aren’t up for that, right?”

“Issabella, you should—“

“New game.”

He paused, his gaze shifting from her to the lime-green square between them, and back. He opened his mouth to deflect her again, but she talked over him.

“New game is called ‘What’s in the weird envelope?’” she said. “If I guess it first, I win and you have to snap out of whatever this is and we get to work and you tell me that yes, indeed, I have won the case of Vernon Pullins and the Evil Detroit Te..tech…ta--“

“TAC Team,” Darren finished.

“Right. Them.”

“Well, as fun as that sounds,” he said. “I already know what’s in the envelope, so the game doesn’t work.”

“You’re right,” she said, snatched the lime-green envelope off the table, and ran a fingernail under its lip in one swift arc. “I’ll just cheat and we can move on, okay?”

She had half-expected Darren to lunge forward and make a grab for the envelope or, barring that, exclaim something to the effect of
“Get your hands off the little green envelope I seem to be obsessed with so much that I can’t manage a real smile or maybe even an apology for blowing you off after we had sex which was the very best sexual experience I’ve ever had you brilliant goddess”
.

Instead, he remained motionless and dour as Issabella fingered the envelope open and fished around for the letter inside. The little wrinkle of consternation appeared between her eyebrows, and she held the open-end of the envelope up, peering inside. There was no letter. But there was
something
inside, and when Issabella recognized what it was she let out a gasp and dropped the envelope back on the table.

“Oh!”

“Yes,” Darren echoed.

“Oh no.”

“Yes.”

Darren gently lifted the envelope in one hand, turned it over, and shook it. His expression was fixed as the thing in the envelope dropped with an unnerving plinking sound.

A single, small tooth lay there on the table.

Issabella stared, and the little tooth grew in her mind’s eye. A rush of conclusions swept into her and she remembered wondering what had transformed Darren Fletcher and driven him into the corner of this dreary bar, far away from the heights of success he’d known before. The tooth filled her vision, and Issabella no longer wondered.

“Shoshanna Green,” she whispered.

Darren offered her a shallow nod.

“We should call the police,” she said.

Darren finished the rest of his drink in one long swallow. He held it in the air and Theresa nodded at him from across the bar.

“Darren, we have to call the police.”

Theresa arrived with a fresh drink. While Darren raised it to his lips, she and Issabella exchanged one of those meaningful glances that don’t really amount to much meaning at all beyond a mutual acknowledgement that they were the only two people in the room who probably had their wits about them. Theresa retreated back to her perch.

Issabella reached across the table and took up the envelope. She produced a pen from her briefcase and used the end of it to nudge the little tooth back into its container.

“I’m calling them.”

“They know,” Darren said. “This is the fifteenth envelope, Issabella. They already have the first fourteen. Theresa called them three hours ago.”

“This is horrible.”

“It is.”

“And every envelope contains…?”

“So far.”

“Darren, you can’t…” she started, but stopped. She didn’t know what to say.

“You must have been Googling me.”

“What?”

“You knew her name is Shoshanna Green.”

Issabella nodded, and was surprised she didn’t feel defensive about it. But then, he hadn’t said it like an accusation, more as a matter-of-fact conclusion. Of course she’d researched him. Did anyone
not
do that anymore? Wasn’t everyone running their family, friends and co-workers through search-engines, hoping to satisfy that rotten little urge to find embarrassing morsels about the people in their lives? The thought was unsettling and she realized that she had managed, all by herself, to make herself feel defensive after all.

“I did,” she said. “I’m sorry. You weren’t explaining yourself, and I…I got curious. I should have just asked you to your face, I know.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said, and a hint of his usual mirth appeared in his eyes. “I Googled you the day we met. Soon as I was home. Not much of an on-line trail for you yet. And no photos of you at all. Which, given the late hour, was a bit of a disappointment.”

She stared at him in confusion. He arched a brow. She made a shocked face and Darren chuckled.

The cloud of dread seemed to have lifted momentarily, and Issabella decided to seize the opportunity. She had a thousand questions about Shoshanna Green and what she was sure was a horrific story explaining the envelope. But she needed Darren focused on the here-and-now, and she instinctively knew that was only going to happen if she could get him up and out of the dreary bar. Away from the envelope and the alcohol, she could steer him back to their case.

So she heaved her briefcase up from the seat beside her and stood.

“I solved the case,” she said. “So, come on.”

“I wasn’t aware there was a mystery to be solved,” he said, and sipped his drink. “We know who killed our client. We know why. What we don’t know is how to prove it in a court of law.”

“
We
don’t,” she said. “
I
do.”

Darren considered her.

“Johnny Two Leaf,” she said.

“Pardon?”

Issabella put her hands palm-down on the edge of the table and leaned down close so they were face-to-face.

“I forgive you for bailing on me. You had a good reason. But now it’s back to today. We’re going to take a drive and I’m going to explain how I solved the case. If you’re nice, I will let you kiss me and offer congratulations.”

Darren leaned in and kissed her. He tasted like 7-Up and alcohol, but she didn’t mind.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“You believe me?”

“Of course.”

He unwound from the booth. The two of them walked out together. Darren paused at Theresa’s perch and slipped the envelope onto the top of the bar in front of her.

“I’m going out for a bit,” he said. “If they need to talk to me can you just tell them to try my cell? I might be out a while.”

“Sure thing.”

“You don’t mind me leaving it?”

“Fletcher, I’m trying to read here,” she snapped and gestured at the newspaper laid out in front of her.

“We’re okay, then?”