Private Investigations Page 12

  She’d told the driver to let her know when they were getting close. He spoke. She requested he drop them off at the corner opposite the towing yard then gave him a nice tip for his efforts.

  She got out of the car and held the door open. “Are you coming?” she asked. Joe didn’t seem to be aware the cab had stopped.

  He grimaced then climbed out to stand next to her, smoothing his already smooth shirt. The cab drove off, and they both watched it, wrapped up in their own thoughts.

  Ripley took his arm and began walking toward the holding lot. There. The sedan holding the three goons sat parked at the curb on the opposite side of the street. Ripley crossed, heading straight for the garage next to the towing lot that probably held the office.

  “Where are we going?” Joe asked, blinking at her.

  “To get your car back.”

  “Fine. It’s your ass.”

  He seemed to consider the body part in question as she walked slightly in front of him. She tugged him so he walked even with her. “I don’t have a thing to worry about.” I hope.

  With barely a glance at the dark blue sedan, she and Joe entered through the door of the garage, the interior dim and cluttered and looking pretty much like every other garage she’d been in. The only difference was that normally her heart didn’t threaten to pound a hole through her chest, and she usually didn’t have three goons following her.

  Joe stepped up to a caged office where a guy smoking a cigar sat reading the sports section of the newspaper. She supposed he needed protection. Most people didn’t take kindly to having their cars towed.

  Joe took his license from his wallet, put it in front of the guy and launched into his spiel, while Ripley stood to the side, slipping her hand into her purse. Her fingers met with the cold, unyielding metal of her gun as she watched the door. She quickly snatched her hand out. Who was she kidding? She couldn’t shoot a rabid dog if it were charging her. Well, okay, maybe she could. But she wasn’t in a hurry to find out. She only hoped these guys weren’t foaming at the mouth.

  Joe’s voice rose, and Ripley blinked to find him arguing with the attendant who stared at him indifferently and shifted the cigar in his mouth with his tongue. She realized the cage was also necessary to enable the occupant to get away with highway robbery.

  Joe finally counted out bills one by one and flicked them at the attendant. Ripley calculated the amount, adding it to the running tab she already owed Joe. The sum was starting to eat into a good chunk of her savings, but the guy hadn’t breathed one word to her about all he’d given up for her so far. Besides, she owed him more than money.

  The door to the outside finally opened, and Ripley wasn’t ready for it. She jumped and turned toward it, only to see a woman she didn’t recognize step to the cage. Another towing victim? She’d venture a yes. Ripley stepped closer to the door and opened it a crack to peek at the sedan. Still there. Men still inside. She frowned and let the door close again.

  “Over there,” the smirking attendant said, pointing to another door to the side that probably led to the towing yard. “Just give me a minute to call the dogs in.”

  Joe said something to him Ripley wasn’t sure she wanted to hear, then led the way to the door the attendant had motioned to.

  “Hey!” the woman who had come in called after the attendant. “I’ve got appointments.”

  “Yeah, well, now you gotta wait,” he shouted.

  Ripley didn’t have to wonder why he’d taken the job. Obviously he enjoyed it.

  Joe leaned in closer to her. “Where are our friends?”

  “Still outside.”

  He grimaced.

  Her thoughts exactly.

  “So what’s the plan now?”

  She tapped her finger against her lips, considering the situation. She pulled her bag closer to her side, reassured by the weight of it. “Pull the car out on the street and wait for me.”

  She began to walk away, only to be towed back by the collar of her blouse. “Uh-uh. Not an option.”

  She wriggled free from his grasp. “That’s not for you to say.”

  “So long as I’m with you, it is.”

  Ripley scanned Joe’s handsome, irritated face, finding the frustration from dealing with the attendant gone and the seriousness back. Then it dawned on her what may be behind the change. “You’re worried about me, aren’t you?” she asked wonderingly.

  She’d never had anyone outside her parents worry about her before. And it felt pretty good. Not that she had given her parents much to worry about. Up until now she’d always done things exactly the way they wanted her to. She figured she must have saved up her bad-girl points and was cashing them all in on this one case.

  “No, I’m worried about me,” Joe said, though she could see it wasn’t true. If he was truly worried about only himself, he would have dumped her a long time ago.

  “Uh-huh.” She glanced toward where someone rapped on the other side of the door. Joe opened it to stare at the attendant. “In a minute.” He closed the door again.

  Ripley smiled at him. “You know, he may decide to keep the car if you keep doing things like that.”

  “Let him.” He narrowed his gaze. “What are you going to do?”

  She shrugged and glanced at the woman drumming her orange acrylic nails against the counter in front of the cage. “I’m going to walk up to the car and ask them what they want with me.”

  She thought of Nicole Bennett confronting her and Joe the night before and felt a stab of envy. What she wouldn’t give for guts like those. Then again, there was a big difference between a green P.I. with a guy along for the ride and the three goombahs sitting outside.

  Joe grasped her hand and tugged her toward the door. “We’ll confront them together. Right after I get my car out of this godforsaken lot.”

  She stumbled through the door after him, a protest on her lips. A protest that died right there when Johnny the attendant pressed a button and the gates opened to reveal the three men in question standing there with their arms crossed over their chests.

  RIPLEY SAT in the back seat of the plain blue sedan, one of the goons sitting next to her while another sat in the front seat watching her through the rearview mirror. She bit her tongue to keep from asking them what they ate. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be healthy. It wasn’t normal for guys to be this big.

  She peered out the window to where the third guy was talking to Joe near the front of the car.

  She sighed and sat back. “Are you guys really FBI?” she asked, staring at first one then the other.

  The one in the front seat reached inside his jacket, then flipped open a wallet over the seat, all without turning. She eyed his identification, wondering if he’d ordered it from the same catalog she’d gotten her P.I. badge from.

  He flipped the wallet closed and put it away.

  “I’ve never seen agents that look like you.” Of course, she’d never really seen an FBI agent up close and this personal before, period, but they didn’t have to know that.

  Neither of them said anything.

  Ripley sighed again and rolled her eyes. Apparently the only one capable of speech was talking to Joe, leaving her here with Harpo and his clone on steroids. All they needed were handheld horns to blow to indicate yes or no, and they could take their act out on the road.

  “You look more like Mob to me,” she said, then nearly bit her tongue in two. Neither man moved, but she felt the driver’s stare intensify on her via the mirror, something she could only sense because all three of them wore mirrored sunglasses. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Then again, if you were Mob, I don’t think you’d be flashing FBI IDs around, would you?” she thought aloud. “You wouldn’t have to. The mere suggestion of Mob affiliation would be enough, wouldn’t it?”

  Someone rapped on her window, and she jumped. She looked up to see goon number three motioning for the door to open. The automatic locks sounded, and he pulled the door open.

  “You’re f
ree to go, ma’am.”

  She squinted at him. A Mob guy wouldn’t call her ma’am, would he? “Are you sure?”

  Did she really just ask that? When someone like him said that you were free to go, you went.

  A smile tilted the sides of his mouth then vanished. “Not unless you don’t want to.”

  She couldn’t have scrambled from the car faster had she been pushed.

  Ripley stood in the middle of the street, gaping as the guy rounded the rear of the car and got into the front seat alongside Tweedledum. Then the sedan drove away from the curb and down the street, turning at the next corner.

  Joe came to stand next to her. “Come on, let’s go get lunch.”

  JOE SAT across from Ripley in a rib joint on the edge of Beale Street and grinned at her sudden loss of appetite. He’d had to order for her, because she hadn’t said a word since he’d stuffed her stiff body into his car and driven the short way to the infamous street.

  They sat in the corner of a bar decorated with old posters of blues legends, donated musical instruments and autographs written directly on the wall. The three-piece band set up near the door played without a singer.

  Ripley finally blinked out of her shock-induced coma. “You’re telling me he let you go because he’s from Minneapolis and remembered you from your college basketball days?”

  Joe leaned his forearms on the table. “Yep.” Seldom was he reminded of the time he’d spent with the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers. But if he could haven chosen a moment, this would definitely have been one of them.

  She rolled her eyes and flopped back in her chair.

  “Well, that, and I told him everything I knew about you and the case you’re working on.” He straightened his napkin.

  Her eyes widened.

  “And here I thought you’d be happy to find out that you’re not in any trouble.”

  “I already knew that. Sort of. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  He stared at her. “You wouldn’t happen to know a Christine Bowman, would you?”

  She blinked at him. “Christine Bowman is Clarise Bennett.”

  He cocked a brow.

  “I found that out this morning when I called to check whose name the contact number Clarise had given me belonged to.” She chugged down the water in the glass in front of her, her gaze constantly darting through the window. “So it’s Nicole that they want, isn’t it?” She looked squarely at him, her chocolate brown eyes wide and wondering. “What did she do?”

  “As far as they’re concerned, nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “It’s not her they’re after. It’s Christine Bowman.”

  “The woman who hired me?”

  He nodded.

  “Did they say what they want her for?”

  He chuckled and leaned back so the waitress could take his plate. She reached to take Ripley’s, as well, but she slapped her hand down on the edge and said she wasn’t done, when in truth she had yet to touch it. Joe guessed that her appetite had made a comeback. “It wasn’t exactly a give-and-take kind of conversation, Ripley. I did most of the giving, and Agent Miller did most of the taking.”

  “So they want Christine…” She broke off a rib from the small rack in front of her and rolled an end into a bowl of barbecue sauce. Her gaze suddenly flew to his face. “You didn’t tell them about the box, did you?”

  He motioned for her to lean forward, and he slowly cleaned a drop of sauce from the side of her mouth with his napkin. He groaned when her tongue dipped out to finish the job.

  “No, I didn’t tell them about the box,” he said, sitting solidly back and out of touching distance.

  She seemed to notice his body language, and the tiniest of smiles played around her lush mouth.

  He took a business card from his back pocket and held it out to her. “I did, however, promise that we’d contact them if we get any information on either Christine or Nicole.”

  “Why Nicole?”

  “I’m guessing because she might lead them to Christine.”

  He sat back and watched her dig into her ribs with a vengeance, obviously determined to make up for lost time. He shifted uncomfortably when she made soft, sexy sounds in the back of her throat, the same kind of sounds she made during sex.

  “These are the best ribs I’ve ever had,” she murmured before launching another attack on the plate in front of her.

  Judging from her slender frame, he’d guess they were some of the few ribs she’d ever had.

  “So that’s it then?” she asked, finishing in no time flat. Joe glanced around, wondering if they posted a record anywhere. “We don’t have to worry about them anymore?”

  “We don’t need to be jumping from any more balconies, if that’s what you mean.” He leaned forward and rubbed the back of his neck. “In fact, we can go to the old hotel…you know, if we want.”

  She stared at him as the waitress removed her plate. “That’s good, right? All your stuff’s there.”

  “Yeah,” he said. What he didn’t say was that returning to the old hotel also meant separate rooms and that there would no longer be a need for them to pretend to be a couple for the purposes of evading the three goons they now knew were with the FBI.

  She looked as disappointed as he felt while she cleaned her hands with the wet towelette next to her napkin. The prospect of her thinking with sadness about them parting pleased him.

  She balled up the towelette and tossed it toward the ashtray. “Well, that was a little anticlimactic, wasn’t it? The FBI, I mean. Here I thought I’d done something even I didn’t know about.”

  Joe grimaced. He should have known she was thinking about the case.

  She stared at him. “But why would they come into my room with their guns drawn?”

  He shrugged. “They said they weren’t entirely certain of your connection to Christine and thought it was a pretty good bet that she might be rooming with you.”

  “Oh.”

  He couldn’t believe it. She was disappointed the FBI hadn’t been after her. Go figure.

  She scooted her chair back and got up. He quickly followed.

  “Where to now?”

  “Back to our old hotel, I guess. And to try to figure out what, exactly, is in that box that both Christine and the FBI are interested in.”

  10

  RIPLEY SAT cross-legged on the bed in her original hotel room, the contents of the mysterious box spilled across the sheets in front of her. Hours of fingering the fake jewels, examining the clasps and the larger gems, holding them up to the lamplight and jingling them left her no closer to the truth than she’d been before.

  She sighed and leaned back on her elbows, her gaze automatically drifting to the empty pillow beside her, then the wall her room shared with Joe’s room.

  When they’d returned to the hotel, she’d automatically assumed he would come to her room with her. But he hadn’t. Instead he’d said something about contacting his home office and trying to work some sort of damage control and left her in her room, alone.

  She straightened the watch on her wrist. That had been several hours ago. And he hadn’t tried to contact her since.

  She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to think. Since the threat of the FBI wasn’t hovering over them, and since Joe had already gotten her between the sheets, there was no longer a reason for them to be stuck together. She made a face, hating to describe their time together in that way. But it was accurate, wasn’t it? She thought of his long, hard body and the many, many hours they had spent stuck together. Her stomach tightened with desire despite the dull sensation of feeling used that spread through her.

  She dragged the free pillow over her head and groaned loudly, mostly because she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it had just been about the sex, no matter how phenomenal that had been. Joe had gone out on a limb for her in more ways than one. And people didn’t do that for a roll in the hay.

  But if he hadn’t been with her merely
for the sex, where was he?

  She threw the pillow aside and sat up, pushing her hair from her eyes. She really shouldn’t be thinking about that now. She should be trying to figure out what was in this box and why so many people were after it.

  She picked up the box and fingered the semiprecious jewels dotting the side and lid. A soft knock on the door, and her intentions to solve the mystery flew straight out the balcony door.

  She pulled the door open to find Joe standing there looking good enough to eat. “Hi,” he said.

  Gone were the jeans and casual shirt and back were the starched shirt, tie and dress slacks. She yanked on the tie, pulling him into the room. The door whooshed shut behind him.

  He chuckled. “So you missed me, huh?”

  She had. Bad.

  “Here,” he said, holding out a box to her. This one was a cardboard box similar to the ones that had littered the back seat of his car. “These are for you.”

  “You shouldn’t have.” She popped open the lid and stared at the athletic shoes inside. She fished one out and held it up. “Are we going somewhere?”

  “I thought we might go for a walk.”

  “A walk.” She considered him long and hard, then her eyes widened in awareness. “Are you asking me for a date, Joe Pruitt?”

  His immediate grimace spoke volumes.

  “You are, aren’t you?” she asked.

  He cleared his throat, getting that ill-at-ease look again. He glanced at his watch. “I just got back from the company I’m trying to contract with and figured it was feeding time.”

  He glanced at the rumpled bed behind her, and Ripley waited for him to try to get her into it. Instead, he looked at her and asked, “Any luck with the box?”

  She frowned and glanced at her shorts and shirt. There was no discernable difference that she could detect. But he had yet to make one suggestive remark or look at her breasts.

  Not good.

  “Okay. We’ll go for a walk,” she said carefully. “Just let me get dressed first.”