Blind Dates Can Be Murder (4 page)

“An emergency tracheotomy?” Jo ventured. He stared at her as she tried to explain. “Well, we have to do something. He can’t breathe!”

In the distance, she could hear the faint sounds of a siren.

“The ambulance is coming,” the manager said, waving his hands back and forth like an umpire calling a runner safe. “No emergency surgery in Tenderloin Town.”

Jo looked down at Brock, who had almost stopped moving. The waiter finished going through his pockets, netting nothing but a wallet and a ring of car keys.

“His car,” Jo cried, putting down the knife and straw and grabbing the keys. “Maybe he’s got something in his car.”

She left them all there and ran to the parking lot, grateful that his keychain had a remote control. Running out the door, she pressed the alarm button and then followed the piercing sound to a dark blue sedan. She used the keyless remote to turn off the alarm and unlock the car, and then she swung open the passenger door. Crumbled fast-food wrappers and an empty pizza box littered the passenger seat. Gritting her teeth, Jo rustled through it all looking for another inhaler or some other sort of breathing apparatus. Finding nothing on the front seat, the floor, or in the glove compartment, she turned to the back. She could hear the sirens coming closer as she searched.

Jo lifted a wrinkled, open map and then recoiled, heart pounding. Underneath the map on the floor of the backseat was a gun—a large, black gun. Beside the gun was a coil of rope, duct tape, and a knife.

A gun, a rope, duct tape, and a knife?

Jo stood up straight and watched as the ambulance careened into the parking lot and then came to a stop outside the main door of the restaurant. Emergency personnel spilled from the inside, gurney in hand. A few minutes later, they came back out of the restaurant, Brock’s body on the gurney, working hard to resuscitate him.

Frozen, Jo looked down again at the weapons. She swallowed hard, hoping that somehow they hadn’t been intended for her.

2

I
f Lettie hated all she had to go through to get out of town, at least she always loved the moment when she did, finally, drive away. There was something about pulling onto the highway after finishing a job that was so liberating, so exhilarating, it was almost like flying.

And flying was her dream.

Ever since she was a child growing up in the shadow of the Philadelphia airport, Lettie had kept an image in her mind of how it must feel to break free from earth’s gravity and soar up into the sky. Her family had been dirt poor, and a trip on an airplane was about as likely as a rocket ride to the moon. Now that she was grown, she had still never been on an airplane, but she kept that picture in her imagination, that dream of when it would happen for her.

It wouldn’t be much longer now. Over the past three years—ever since her husband, Chuck, went to jail and she started working for Mickey—Lettie had been putting money aside for her escape. Dollar by dollar, that nest egg had built up so that it was almost big enough now to achieve her dream: a little house in a faraway country where she and her sister could live out their lives in peace, and the men who had tried to ruin their lives would never be able to find them again.

Chuck would be up for parole soon, so Lettie knew her window of opportunity was about to close. Once he was out of prison and back in her life, she might never get away.
Now or never
, as her stepfather used to say. That had become her mantra lately, through all the hours of hard work, through all of the lonely nights in filthy hotel rooms, through all the laws she had to break to make a living and keep her boss Mickey happy:
now or never, now or never, now or never
. It got her through crackers and ketchup for dinner. It got her through the guilt of stealing people’s identities and destroying their good credit.

It got her through the sleepless nights when she would remember Chuck’s hands around her throat or his fist connecting with her face.

Blinking, Lettie looked at the odometer and eased her foot off the gas. She didn’t need to get a ticket for speeding—and doing eighty-five in a fifty-five mph zone would most likely make that happen. Slowing down to sixty, she said goodbye to the dry, sandy terrain of the Jersey Shore and set her sights toward Moore City, Pennsylvania.

Home, but not for much longer.

“Don’t worry about the bill,” the manager said. “It’s on the house.”

Jo tucked her wallet back into her purse, still in shock over all that had happened. Now that the ambulance was gone, the restaurant people were giving her the bum’s rush to get her out of there. She didn’t blame them; it couldn’t have been good for business to have a patron keel over during dinner and need an ambulance, even if the cause had been unrelated to the meal.

“Ma’am?”

Jo turned to see the waiter, who was holding out a black billfold.

“Don’t forget your father’s wallet. I hope he makes it.”

She took the wallet and nodded again, not even clarifying.
He’s not my father
, she thought,
he was my date. He was a stranger
.

He has weapons in his car
.

Slowly, Jo left the restaurant and went out to the parking lot. She wasn’t sure what to do now. The man would eventually need his car and car keys. Conscious or not, he also needed his wallet at the hospital, if he had any kind of insurance.

Maybe she would simply lock the wallet in the car and take the insurance card and car keys to the hospital. She would leave them with a note telling him what she’d done and wishing him well. That way, when he got out, he would just need to catch a ride to the restaurant to pick up his car, and she’d never have to deal with him again.

As for finding out why the man had those awful things in his car, she decided to pursue that through the Dates&Mates screening department, which had a lot of explaining to do.

Jo walked toward the vehicle, opening the billfold to look inside. There was a Blue Cross insurance card, but it was in a different name, that of “Frank Malone.” She quickly flipped through the other cards, which were also in the name of Malone. Finally, she pulled out a driver’s license. The photo was that of Brock Dentyne, the man who had been her date, the short bald guy with the big nose. But the name on the license said Frank Malone.

Whatever his name was, Jo knew one thing: This guy was a pathological liar. Not only had he lied about his age and his height, he had lied about his name!

Thump
.

Jo was startled by a strange sound.

Thump. Thump
.

She stepped back, wondering if the guy’s car was about to explode.

Thump. Thump. Thump
.

The sound was coming from the trunk. Did he have a wild animal in there?

Jo looked down at the car key remote, which had a button for opening the trunk. She walked to about ten feet away, pressed the button, and watched the trunk slowly swing open.

Stepping forward, she gasped.

There, lying sideways in the trunk, was a man, blinking, his hands and feet bound with rope and duct tape over his mouth.

Danny forced himself to drive home.

The urge, of course, was to steer straight to the steakhouse where Jo was having her date to get a look at the guy and size up the competition. Instead, using every bit of self-control he could muster, Danny drove to his house on Maple Street. At least he’d had a good game of basketball—once he stopped tearing everybody up on the court. The guys had a standing game on Thursday nights, but this week there had been a conflict, so they moved it to Friday. Danny was glad. At least it had given him something to do while he obsessed over Jo and her date.

And it wasn’t that Danny couldn’t have had plenty of dates of his own. For some reason, girls tended to throw themselves at him on a regular basis. But six months ago, when he realized that he was in love with Jo, he had lost interest in going out with anyone else. He’d pretty much put a hold on his love life ever since.

At home he climbed into the shower. Under the spray he thought about settling in and doing some black-and-white photo printing. Nothing could pass the time better for Danny than a few good hours in his darkroom. By the time he was finished, Jo might even be back and eager to get together and laugh about the date that had turned out to be a total dud.

Or so he hoped.

The phone was ringing when he came out of the bathroom, a towel around his waist. He gave his wet head a good shake and then answered, surprised to hear the voice of police chief Harvey Cooper on the other end.

“Watkins? You free to do a job?”

The local police hired Danny to take pictures at crime scenes from time to time. Given that Mulberry Glen was about as crime free as most small towns go, it was a gig that didn’t come up too often.

“Now?” Danny asked.

“No,” the chief replied dryly. “Next Tuesday, when the crime actually happens. Of course now.”

Danny grabbed a pen to take down the address, but he didn’t need to write it. As soon as the chief said “Tenderloin Town,” Danny froze.

“The steakhouse?” he gasped. “Is Jo Tulip involved? Is she okay?”

“As a matter of fact, she’s the one who phoned it in. Seems we got a strange case of abduction.”

Danny clenched the telephone in his fist, pulse pounding.

“I repeat:
Is she okay?
”

“She’s fine, I think. It was her date who got abducted. By another date. It’s real confusing, but it involves a knife and a gun and some rope and a car trunk. I think it’s safe to say we’ll need some pictures. I’m on my way there now. How soon can you get there?”

“Probably sooner than you,” Danny replied, already slamming down the phone.

He was in the car when he remembered that he ought to grab his camera—not to mention put on some pants.

Lettie dialed Mickey’s number at the club as she drove. He was usually there on Friday nights, shooting the breeze with the girls in the back or bouncing some over-the-top drunk. Lettie wouldn’t need to say much, just tell him that the job was done and she had gotten out of town without incident. As per their usual arrangement, she would bring him the discs tomorrow, and he’d run them into the computer. She was paid a certain amount per legitimate name and credit card number. What he did with the data from that point was his business, though Lettie knew it had something to do with a fake credit card imprinting company in Hong Kong.

“Mickey Paglino,” he said, answering the phone.