Thyme to Live: A We Sisters Three Mystery (8 page)

W
e walked
, holding hands in that self-conscious way people do when they don’t yet know how their fingers best fit together, until we found a rundown Chinese restaurant with a blinking open sign, sticky tables, and a bored, surly staff. Even I, consumer of a strip club lunch buffet, knew this wasn’t the kind of restaurant you opted for over a jerky stick, but it was empty, quiet, and got us off the street and away from prying eyes. At this point, I didn’t even know what neighborhood we were in, other than it was someplace I’d never been.

We seated ourselves, squeezing into the booth beside one another. I could almost hear my sisters mocking us for sitting next to each other rather than across the table from one another. Rosemary, in particular, viewed it as a telltale sign of a new romance. Thinking about myself engaged in a romance with Victor got me all flustered and my face warmed up. I could tell I was blushing, which just made me blush more furiously. Victor rested his hand on my thigh under the table. That didn’t help.

A grumpy waiter made his way over to us and didn’t seem remotely surprised by our request for “just jasmine tea,” which confirmed my impression of the food. He strode away without another word and returned almost immediately. He slammed the pot and two small teacups down on the table along with the bill then disappeared without ceremony.

Victor placed a twenty-dollar bill on top of the check while I poured the tea.

“I probably have a five,” I offered, reaching for my wallet.

He shook his head. “A twenty buys us whatever good will that guy has, which is probably not much.”

“Maybe his shoes are too tight.”

Victor laughed. “Maybe. But either way, it doesn’t look like he rakes in the tips at this joint. Let’s hope he’ll be grateful enough to keep his mouth shut if anyone comes looking for us.”

My brain stopped replaying our kiss and focused on his words. “You think Gabriel can track us down here? I thought you said those guys probably tagged the car while we were in your sister’s apartment?” The memory of being shot at supplanted the memory of making out, and my pulse rate ticked up a couple notches for all the wrong reasons.

“That’s my working theory. But until my friend confirms whether he found a tracking device on his Lincoln, we shouldn’t assume that’s how they caught up with us.”

I stared at him. “How else could they have known where we were?”

He shrugged. “Who knows?” He dumped a packet of artificial sweetener into his cup and swirled it around with a somewhat-clean spoon.

I sipped mine, unadulterated. I don’t care for sweet drinks. And even if I did, I wouldn’t use the other spoon to save my life. It was coated with what appeared to be rice and plum sauce that had gone through a dishwasher and gelled onto the utensil.

He flipped open his notebook and picked up Helena’s phone. “Let’s call the Philly number first.”

“Are you sure?” We didn’t know the voice on the other end would be a friend or a foe.

“I think so. Helena called this number and talked for three minutes, so presumably it belongs to someone she wanted to speak with before she vanished. We’ll call from her phone. Hopefully whoever it is will recognize her number and pick up.”

It was a long shot, but I didn’t have a better idea, so I nodded and drank my tea.

He picked up the phone and hit redial on the menu. I held my breath and strained to listen. After a moment, I heard the faint, but distinctive, sound of the three, short “this number has been disconnected” tones followed by the electronic voice recording advising us that the wireless caller we were trying to reach was not available. Victor ended the call and shook his head in disgust.

“Another dead end. Just our luck.”

I sipped my tea. “You don’t think it’s really just bad luck, though, right?”

He tilted his head in my direction. “Meaning?”

“Meaning it would be an awfully big coincidence for someone to disconnect their line between Friday night and today. Unless …”

“Unless what?”

“Unless it was prearranged with Helena. Or unless the person just set up an intercept to block Helena’s number.”

“Can you do that?”

I threw up my hands. “Don’t ask me. Probably. Your friend at the phone company should know. Ask her.”

“I will. But I only want to call her once. Let’s work through as much as we can and make a list of questions and tasks for her.” He scribbled in his little notebook, and I choked back a laugh.

His eyes met mine. “What’s so funny?”

“You just remind me of my sister, that’s all.”

He marked his spot with his pen and closed the notebook. “Which one?”

“Sage. She’s an ... well, she used to be a forensic accountant. She’s a nanny now. But she has that very fastidious, precise accountant attitude. She’d totally save all her questions for one call.”

“It’s not
that
weird,” he insisted defensively.

“It is for a reporter. I thought you guys were sort of scattered, digging out notes from deep within piles of paper, all stained with coffee rings and stuff.”

He rolled his eyes at me. “Stereotype much?”

“Ah, I forgot. You’re a
financial
reporter. Of course you cross your Ts and dot your Is.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It’s not,” I assured him. “It’s just pretty foreign to me. I was raised in a fairly loosey-goosey manner. I think Sage’s detail-oriented nature and love for mathematics and finance was her way of rebelling against our hippie upbringing.”

“What did they do? For work, I mean?”

“They used to own an eco-resort. Now they don’t.”

“Small business owners? I think they might have had more business savvy than you give them credit for.”

Yeah, until they didn’t,
I thought.

I changed the subject. “Let’s Google the number. Start there, at least.”

He kept his eyes locked on mine for a few seconds longer, as if he were willing me to talk about my family. But I just gazed back at him blankly until he blinked then looked away.

“Right,” he mumbled. He rested his sister’s phone on the table and pulled out his own.

He typed in a Google search with his thumbs then swiped past the first several hits, grumbling about the bait-and-switch results that required a credit card to get the full report. I smiled to myself; I shared that pet peeve.

I refilled my cup from the little ceramic teapot, careful not to touch the sticky, plasticized tablecloth. While he drilled down into the results, I drank my tea and fought the urge to search out the world’s largest container of thyme oil.

Thyme oil happens to be a natural sanitizer. There were no alcohol-based gels for the Field family. We made our own. From thyme grown right in on little seaside plot of land. Anyway, my skin was crawling, and I vowed to not to glance at the posted grade by the front door on my way out and to never,
ever
look up the restaurant on the health department’s website. I was sure I didn’t want to know how many violations this joint had racked up.

I peered over Victor’s shoulder at his results. “Mia Kim. She’s the owner of the phone?”

“Apparently.”

“Does her name ring a bell?”

He rubbed his hand across his lips. “No.” He shook his head and repeated the word. “No.”

Before I could tell him that I knew he was lying, the bell above the restaurant’s front door tinkled and I shifted my gaze to the front of the building to see the poor sucker who’d decided to eat here. It wasn’t a lone diner. Two men crowded into the narrow entryway. Something about them made me uneasy. I don’t know if it was their demeanor or their appearance or what. But I tensed as soon as I spotted them.

Then the taller of the two called to a waiter on the far side of the room, who disappeared around the corner without acknowledging him. At the sound of his voice, a shock of recognition ran through me. I scooped up our personal belongings from the table and threw them in my purse. I grabbed Victor’s wrist, wrenched it hard, and pulled him down alongside me as I slid under the table.

“Ow,” he yelped, trying to shake himself free of me.

“Shh, shh.” I covered his mouth with my other hand and jammed my mouth right next to his ear. “They’re here. The guys from the apartment. I don’t think they spotted us.”

His eyes widened with comprehension and fear, and I slowly removed my hand. We crouched there wordlessly in the cramped space and waited. I strained to hear over the impossibly loud thudding of my heart, like the bass line in a song. I could just make out low voices, growing louder, as footsteps neared our table.

I held my breath as two pairs of running shoes stopped beside the table. In my mind, I pictured what they were seeing. Tea for two. Cash to cover the check on the table.

“
Eles se foram.”
A guttural voice, almost a growl.

“Desaparecido,”
came the reply. The disgust needed no translation.

After an interminable minute, the feet moved away, continuing on to the back of the restaurant. I figured they’d check the bathrooms, maybe peek into the kitchen and ask a waiter if he’d seen us, and then leave.

Hang tight, Thyme
, I told myself.
Just a few minutes more.

Beside me, Victor squeezed my hand—a gesture of solidarity, or maybe reassurance. The footsteps returned, passing our table, headed back toward the front. Just a few more steps and they’d be out of the restaurant, away from us. We’d be safe.

That’s when the rat ran across my thigh.

I
held
the napkin to Victor’s hand, applying gentle pressure to stop the bleeding. “I’m really sorry I bit you,” I apologized for the umpteenth time.

It was true. I felt awful. But when he clamped his hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming that blasted rodent turned around and ran right back across my lap going the other direction. There’s no other way to put it—I freaked out. Apparently my teeth came down hard on the soft, fleshy webbing between his thumb and forefinger.

And, man, was Victor ever a
bleeder.
He’d toughed it out under the table until the bad guys had left the building and even waited an extra minute or two after the bell announced their departure.

But once they were definitely clear of the restaurant, he’d jumped up, holding his arm aloft. Blood squirted everywhere. Our waiter raced over to give us the stink-eye but locked in on the Jackson still sitting on the table and offered assistance instead. He’d even procured a reasonably cleanish cloth napkin before he pocketed the bill and glided away.

Victor shook his head. “What are you, part vampire? Your teeth are like razors.”

I opened my mouth to apologize yet again but he waved his hand.

“I’m kidding. Jeez, Thyme. It’s no big deal. Although”—he paused here to lower his voice to a husky near-whisper—“I think I prefer when you put your mouth to ... other uses.”

I caught myself staring at his lips and would have kissed him again right then and there, but the memory of the men in the restaurant was too fresh. This wasn’t the time for canoodling.

“Were those guys speaking Portuguese?”

His face darkened. “Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“They came here expecting to find us. The first guy said, ‘they’re gone.’ The other one said, ‘vanished.’ How did they know we were here? I don’t get it.”

I furrowed my brow and thought. The men had been tracking us since we’d left Helena’s apartment, but how? After the incident in the parking lot, we’d thought maybe they’d put a tracking device on the car while we were in the apartment, but we’d left the car miles away from the restaurant. It made no sense.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s almost like they put a tracker on one of
us.
But they didn’t see me in the closet. When you ran into them in the hallway, did one of them slip something into your pocket or something?”

He shook his head and reached his good, unbitten hand into his pocket and pulled out Helena’s phone. “Nope. And my phone and my wallet are in your bag. You have my notebook, too, right?”

I didn’t answer him. I was focusing on the gleaming rectangle in his hand.

“Thyme?”

“Sorry,” I said slowly, finally pulling my eyes away from his sister’s phone to meet his gaze. “We have to dump Helena’s phone.”

Victor blanched. “Of course. Her phone. They’re tracking us through her phone.” He pushed the device to the other side of the table, as if he couldn’t get far enough away from it.”

“But if they can do that, it means
they
have a source at the wireless company, right?”

“Yep. Or, more likely, Gabriel hooked up with a local police department or some other law enforcement agency. I don’t think he has the juice to pull any strings inside TeleVantage directly. But he could have gotten a brother in blue to help him out, officer to officer, under some pretense.”

We stared at the phone for a long moment.

Then Victor signaled for our waiter, who was loitering just outside the kitchen no doubt waiting for us to leave already. The guy scurried over.

“Thanks for your help,” Victor said as he folded the blood-stained napkin into a neat square. “I’ll dispose of this for you, okay? Just point us toward your trash.”

The man considered for a moment, weighing his options. Even a rat-infested dive probably drew the line at reusing linens that had been exposed to a customer’s bodily fluids—I hoped. After a few seconds, he shrugged. “Sure. Follow me.”

I grabbed my purse and the phone from the booth. We trailed him through the swinging door into the kitchen. A bored line cook looked up from clipping his nails. The dishwasher, wearing earbuds, bopped along to whatever music he was listening to, oblivious to our presence. Our waiter led us through the space to a set of metal doors.

“Dumpster’s out back,” he said pointing to the door.

We pushed open the heavy door and stepped out onto a concrete loading dock. The Dumpster sat just below near the curb. I crouched and jumped down to the ground. Victor followed suit. He opened the rusted Dumpster lid and tossed in the bloodied napkin then gestured toward me.