“Fuck.” I groaned and reached for my phone as glass shattered.
Buck-naked Wendell Baker stomped out the front door. A woman in a rock band T-shirt and nothing else appeared behind him and started screaming. The leather and denim-clad brother got to his feet in time to take a right cross to the jaw.
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“This is Lina Solavita. I’m an investigator for Pritzger Insurance. There’s a naked man assaulting someone on the sidewalk.” I gave the dispatcher the address, and as she repeated it back to me, the woman vaulted over the railing onto Baker’s back and got an arm around his throat. He bucked forward trying to unseat his attacker, which unfortunately afforded me a front row seat to view both of their butts.
“Now there’s a woman assaulting the naked man.”
“I have two units in the area responding,” the dispatcher said. “Is the woman naked too?”
“She’s wearing a Whitesnake T-shirt and nothing else.”
“Huh. Good band.”
The brother got to his feet again and rammed his shoulder into Baker’s gut, driving the man back against the concrete steps. I thought of Nash’s bruised jaw and Knox’s black eye and wondered if all brothers fought like this.
“Does anyone have any weapons?” the dispatcher asked.
“None that I can see. Naked guy definitely didn’t come armed.”
The brothers broke apart and Whitesnake lady slithered off Baker’s back. The brother reached behind his back and produced a large knife.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Now there’s a knife in play.”
Just then, two kids exited the house next door and stood transfixed by the scene before them.
“And now there are two kids watching.”
“Officers are en route. Two minutes out.”
Someone could poke a lot of holes in two minutes.
The brother jumped forward and made the wild slashing motion of an amateur.
Nash’s words rang in my head again. But it was either do nothing or let two idiots murder each other in front of children.
I tossed my phone on the seat, opened the door, and laid on the horn.
When I had their attention, I stood on the running board and shouted, “Cops are on the way.”
Both brothers started toward me.
“Seriously?” I muttered. “Why are criminals so stupid?”
I was laying on the horn again as they crossed the street when I finally heard the sound of distant sirens.
They stopped in the middle of the street, debating whether they had enough time to get to me.
I heard the squeal of tires behind me. A white panel van rolled up behind Knox’s truck and the door slid open.
A man in a ski mask hopped out, grabbed me by the wrist, and dragged me toward the van.
The brothers were running at us now.
“Get in,” Ski Mask said, pulling a gun out of the waistband of his pants. But he didn’t aim it at me. He aimed it in the direction of the advancing brothers.
“Um. Okay.”
THIRTY-ONE
WOULD YOU LIKE ONION RINGS WITH THAT?
Lina
“You guys didn’t grab me just to murder me, right?” I asked the van’s occupants. “Because you probably could have just let those guys back there do your dirty work.”
The driver and the passenger who grabbed me exchanged a look through their ski mask eye holes.
“No one’s gettin’ murdered,” the driver assured me. The sirens were getting louder behind us.
“Might want to hang on,” the passenger suggested. Just then, the driver took a hard left turn that had me hitting the floor.
“Ow.”
“Sorry about that.”
For abductors, they were pretty polite.
“Heard you’ve been trying to get a meet with Grim,” the driver said.
“Is that a problem or are you the welcome wagon?” I asked, rolling into a sitting position and wedging myself against the wall.
The van veered hard to the right as the driver cut across two lanes of traffic to catch an on-ramp.
“We’re clear,” the passenger reported.
They both pulled off their ski masks.
“Wait. Don’t you want to keep those on so I can’t identify you? Or were you lying before when you said you weren’t going to murder me?”
The driver was a woman with thick, natural hair that waved voluminously around her head. “Relax,” she said in the rearview mirror. “Those were for CCTV cameras, not you.”
The passenger, a lean, tattooed guy with a shaved head and a blond beard pulled out his phone and dialed. “Yo. Fifteen minutes out.”
He hung up, put his feet on the dash, and turned on the radio.
Coldplay boomed through the vehicle.
They didn’t take me to a cool, abandoned warehouse or a seedy motorcycle club house. No. My friendly abductors drove me to a Burger King.
The driver pulled into a parking space and they both got out. A second later, the door slid open and the guy gestured for me to get out with a mock bow.
I followed them inside and was struck with an instant craving for onion rings.
We walked past the registers toward the restrooms.
There in the last booth was the one and only Grim. He was tattooed from knuckles to neck. The gray T-shirt he wore looked like it had been vacuum sealed to his torso. His silver hair was slicked back from his face, and he wore sunglasses despite the fact that it was an overcast day and he was indoors. He was picking at a salad with a plastic fork.
He pointed at the seat opposite him with the fork and I sat. With a jerk of his head, my friendly abductors were dismissed.
“What can I do for you, Investigator Solavita?” His voice was one of those sandpapery baritones.
“First of all, you can tell me how you found me.”
His lips curled in amusement. “My guys were just bringing up the tail end of the parade.”
“What parade?”
“We were watching you and the feds watching Hugo’s man. Gotta stay abreast of what goes down in my territory.”
“Where were the feds?”
“Set up in the empty storefront a block down.”
“And they were just going to let the Baker boys knife it out on the street?”
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I don’t waste my time trying to understand why the law does what the law does. I’m more interested in your interest in the matter.”
“I’m looking for something Duncan Hugo stole and probably stashed locally before he skipped town.”
“The Porsche. Sweet ride.”
“You’re well-informed.”
“Pays to know what’s going on in my backyard.”
“I don’t suppose you could tell me where to find that car?” I ventured.
Grim speared a tomato with his fork and ate it. “It never made it to his shop before the bust, and it didn’t show at the warehouse prior to his little abduction spree either. Don’t know where he’s got it.”
I let out an irritated sigh. “Well, thanks for your time. Just so you know for future purposes, this abduction could have been a text or an email.”
He pushed the remains of his salad to the edge of the table. Within seconds, a biker appeared and cleared it. “What’s the fun in that?” Grim asked. “Besides, I’ve got something more important than info on a car.”