Off the Clock (2 page)

Quinn slipped out of his car and jogged down to the wall. The gate finished closing just as he got there, but there was enough of a gap between it and the wall it hung on for him to get a partial view of the property.  

The house was a nice, two-story Spanish-style structure that was undoubtedly out of the price range of most people in the country. There was a porch light on next to the door, but the lights inside the house were off.

Quinn heard a car door open, followed by a step as someone got out, then the door slamming shut. A moment later Nick’s shadowy form walked into view, heading for the front door. When he reached it, he stuck a key into the lock, turned it, and went inside.

That was all Quinn was waiting to see. There had been the off chance that Nick was just visiting a friend. And while having a key didn’t necessarily mean he lived there, Quinn felt it was more than pretty damn likely.

He noted the address, then slowly began walking back to his car, thinking.

How much should he get involved here? Or should he even get involved at all? It really depended on what this Nick guy had done, and there was only one way to find that out.

He arrived back at Taste of Siam a little after midnight. The place was packed mostly with Thais now. The music loud, the smiles wide, everyone enjoying themselves. Even Ice, who was still in charge of the karaoke, seemed to be her old self again.

Quinn viewed all of this through the restaurant’s windows from the street, but instead of going in the front door, he headed around the side. As always, the kitchen entrance was open, covered only by a flimsy screen door.

Quinn slipped inside.

The main cooks were an older Thai couple Quinn had exchanged greetings with on occasion. There were also three Hispanic men in the kitchen, doing the prep work and washing the dishes.

The old man was the first to notice Quinn and started saying something to him in Thai.

“I need to talk to Natt,” Quinn said.

The man looked at him for a moment, then recognition dawned on his face. “Ah, Khun Jonathan. You eat?”

“No, thank you,” Quinn said. “I’d just like to talk to Natt.”

The old man looked confused, obviously not fully understanding what Quinn wanted.

Quinn was about to repeat his request when the door to the dining area opened, and Lek came in. She looked surprised to see Quinn.

“Khun Jonathan. You’re back?”

“Lek, could you get Natt for me, please? I just need to talk with her for a moment.”

“Okay. Sure.”

He pointed toward the screen door. “I’ll wait for her outside.”

A minute later, Natt came out.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“Natt, what did that guy do to Ice?”

A worried look passed over her face, but she looked unsure about what to say.

“Listen to me,” Quinn said. “If you tell me, I can help.”

“What can you do?” she asked, clearly wanting help, but unable to believe he could provide it.

“I can make sure he never bothers her again.”

“How?”

“Just trust me. I can.”

“Maybe you make it worse. Maybe he do what he say before and hurt her next time.”

Quinn tensed. “You need to tell me what he said. I will take care of this problem. I promise.”

She looked over at the kitchen entrance, then back at him. “She not want me to tell you.”

“Only because she’s scared.”

“Yes.”

“When I’m done, she’ll never have to be scared of him again.”

She hesitated for a moment. “You sure?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

More silence, then, “Okay.”

•  •  •

Forty-five minutes after Natt finished telling the story, Quinn had climbed over the wall around Nick’s property and was standing in the front yard. He did a quick outside tour of the house, and came to the conclusion that whoever had designed it was an idiot. While it might have been aesthetically pleasing, and Nick had gone to the extra effort of having a security system installed, the building was just waiting to be broken into.

Before Quinn had returned to Beachwood Canyon, he’d made a stop at his house, and picked up a few items he knew would come in handy. Now, kneeling next to the side of the house, he pulled off his backpack and removed a small kit that contained—among other things—wires, a pair of cutters, and a bypass box. The last item was about the same size as a rubber eraser, and designed to melt into an unrecognizable plastic lump two hours after it was activated.

He stuck the items into the pockets of his black windbreaker. Then, with little effort, he used the poor layout of the house to climb onto the roof.

Less than ninety seconds later, he had disabled the phone service, and set up a loop that would make the security firm monitoring the house think that everything was fine. Now, if the alarm did go off, the only thing he’d have to worry about was Nick’s neighbors hearing it. But Quinn wasn’t planning on having it go off.

Back on the ground, he donned his backpack again and headed over to the sliding glass door that led from the house to the backyard. It would be the easiest way in. While he knew there would be an alarm contact along the jamb where the door met the frame, there was nothing monitoring the glass itself.

Using a suction holder in one hand and a glass cutter in the other, Quinn cut a large oval out of the door, set it carefully on the grass, and stepped inside.

There was an alarm panel a few feet to the left of the door. All the indicator lights were glowing green, and displayed on the tiny screen at the top were the words: HOUSE SECURE. He’d deal with the alarm later. His immediate goal was to discover Nick’s location.

He checked all the rooms on the first floor: kitchen, dining room, living room, two bathrooms, and a den. As expected, no one was in any of them. Upstairs he found four bedrooms, and a common bathroom. The asshole was in the master bedroom at the end of the hall, snoring away. Quinn was pleased to see he was alone.

Quinn spotted a cell phone on the nightstand next to the bed. He silently walked over, and put it in his pocket. Carefully, he then pulled out the nightstand drawer. Lying on the bottom was a little plastic box that looked kind of like a thin garage door opener. This was the alarm system panic button. Quinn slipped it in his pocket with the phone.

He thought it was probably a good bet the guy had a weapon stashed away somewhere close. His kind always did. It took Quinn less than a minute to find a Beretta in a box, under the nightstand on the opposite side of the bed. Instead of taking it, Quinn removed the bullets from the magazine and the chamber, made sure there were no other ones in the box, then put the pistol back.

Quietly, he moved back into the hallway, and began a more thorough search of the house. The downstairs den proved to be the jackpot.

Quinn had to admit that when he first saw the guy at the restaurant, and was told by Natt that Nick was a “bad man,” he’d assumed Nick lived in a one-bedroom apartment somewhere, probably in Hollywood, worked as a salesman at an electronics store or someplace similar, and spent his free time trolling the Internet or hassling women like Ice.

The first crack in that theory had been when Nick drove off in the Mercedes. The second had been the house itself. By then, Quinn’s theory had evolved into Nick having a trust fund and living off the money of others. It turned out he was both right and wrong.

Not a trust fund. A wife.

Dr. Carol Meyers. She was apparently some kind of vascular specialist. There were plenty of diplomas and certificates of honor and the like hanging on the den’s walls. There were also pictures. Quinn assumed the woman in each was Dr. Meyers. Nick was in many of them, too, smiling beside her. The others in the shots were probably dignitaries. There was even one or two Quinn recognized.

He sat down at the desk and woke up the computer, pleased to see there was no security screen he’d have to hack. He wasn’t the best computer wiz in the world, but simple civilian password protection? Easy.

He opened the calendar first and noted that Dr. Meyers seemed to be on the road a lot. Before he got too far, he found a pad of paper in a drawer, ripped off the top sheet, and started jotting down pertinent dates, account numbers, the doctor’s cell phone number and email address, and anything else he thought might be of use.

According to the calendar, Nick’s wife was nearing the end of a trip that had kept her away for two weeks. Which meant she’d been gone the night Ice found the doctor’s husband nude and in her small apartment kitchen, cooking her dinner. According to Natt, he didn’t touch Ice that night, telling her they still needed to get to know each other before they could be intimate. That was the word Natt used. She said she and Ice could only guess what it meant at first, and had to ask an American friend to confirm it. Since the night of Nick’s visit, Ice had stayed at Natt’s place, not once going back after she had left. 

Quinn didn’t ask Natt why her friend hadn’t called the police. He knew Ice was in the country on a student visa and was taking language classes down on Wilshire Boulevard. But a student visa meant she wasn’t supposed to be working. She was probably worried that if she called the police, they would find out somehow, kick her out of the country, and do nothing about her stalker.

Whether that would have actually happened didn’t matter. It’s what Ice believed.

Quinn heard footsteps in the upstairs hallway. He reached into his backpack, pulled out a black stocking cap, and pulled it over his head until the built-in mask covered his face. This was his hometown, after all, no sense in taking any chances of being identified. He then continued looking through the computer.

In the Recently Viewed list of the machine’s photo software, he found several files that didn’t seem to link to anything on the hard drive. He leaned back and thought for a second, then gave the room another look. He identified eleven spots that would be decent-to-excellent hiding places. The five best he discounted as ones Nick would have never thought of, then began checking the other six.

He found the small, portable drive in the fourth spot, tucked inside a folding chess set sitting on top of a bookcase. As he inserted the drive into the computer, he could hear the careful steps upstairs retreating to the bedroom. It wouldn’t be long now, he knew.

The drive was password protected. Not a surprise. Fortunately, the software used was the weak, off-the-shelf variety. Something more robust might have been beyond Quinn’s abilities, but this he could hack into in his sleep.

The drive’s directory opened as the steps returned and headed slowly down the stairs. There were two dozen folders, but only one—marked “Old Reports”—contained actual files. Forty-three to be exact. Quinn opened them all together, then the muscles across his cheeks tensed, and his eyes narrowed.

Nick was the only one in the pictures. They appeared to be taken in bedrooms, no two the same. The bed, fully made, was always behind him, and he was always nude. None were taken in Nick and his wife’s house. From the way they were composed, Quinn guessed they were self-timed shots, taken before whoever lived in the home knew Nick was paying them a visit.

So Ice wasn’t his first.

Quinn thought it was a pretty good guess, though, that the others were women who’d balk at calling the police, too. Immigrants or others in compromising positions. He quickly accessed one of his anonymous servers over the Internet and began uploading the files.

He was watching the status bar when Nick rushed through the door, his gun held out in front of him.

“Don’t move!” Nick shouted.

Quinn stared at him a moment, then returned his gaze to the computer. “You going to shoot me?”

“What are you doing in my house?”

“Checking a few things.”

Quinn’s obvious distain seemed to confuse Nick. He hesitated, then said, “Get away from my computer.”

Quinn held up a finger, still looking at the screen. “Hold on.”

“Get away from my computer!”

Quinn held his position. A few more seconds passed, then the computer dinged.

“There. Done,” Quinn said as he smiled and leaned back. “What was it you wanted?”

“What did you just do?”

“Copy some files.”

Nick’s face started to turn red. “What files?”

“A few old reports.”

“I’m calling the po—” He stopped in mid-sentence, the reality of what Quinn just said sinking in. “What old reports?”

“Didn’t you say you were going to call the police?”

“What old reports?”

Quinn stood up.

“Stay where you are!” Nick told him.

Quinn moved around the desk, forcing Nick to back toward the door.

“Stop!” Nick shouted as he wrapped both hands around the gun.

“That’s good,” Quinn told him, not doing what he was told. “Get a steadier shot that way.”

“Don’t think I won’t pull the trigger.”

Quinn kept coming forward until he was just a few feet beyond Nick’s reach, then finally halted. “Then do it.”

Nick looked at him, his eyes wide and scared, his nose flaring with each breath.

“You’re brave enough to break into women’s homes and make yourself comfortable,” Quinn said. “Here, in your own place, pulling the trigger should be a snap.”

Nick’s mouth dropped open. “Wha…wha…what did you say?”

Quinn’s hands shot forward, grabbed the gun, and twisted it out of Nick’s grasp before the guy even knew what was going on. Two steps forward and Quinn was standing nearly chest to chest with Nick, the muzzle of the gun now pressed against Nick’s temple.

“Should we see if I’m willing to take the shot?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Nick said, trembling.

“Good.”

Quinn paused for a moment. He had been thinking a nice, intimidating chat would keep Nick from paying Ice a return visit. The pictures changed everything. These unclothed visits were obviously a pattern, something not easily broken no matter how much Nick might promise never to do it again. Something that, if it hadn’t happened yet, would one day cross into a potentially deadly area.

Quinn pulled the gun away, flipped it around in his hand, then whacked it solidly against the side of Nick’s face.