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“Today’s your lucky day,” Harlan Worth announced as Serena closed his office door behind her.
“Yeah. So I gathered running the gauntlet.” She slumped into the chair in front of his beat-up desk and sipped the sludge disguised as coffee, still half a cup away from being fully humanoid. Where was it written that police station coffee had to be so bad? She vowed she’d never sleep through another alarm again and not have time to make her own coffee at home.
Worth steepled his fingers. “We’ve got a lead on Slick Nick for you.”
Finally. She’d been chasing Nick Malone, a money-laundering suspect, for months. However, she’d wait until she heard the particulars of the lead to decide whether it had validity. “Let’s hear it.” She pulled a small notepad out of her purse. She wrote everything down. More than once she’d reviewed her notes and found some obscure detail or minutia that had proven to be key.
“Got to love your enthusiasm, Riggs.”
Chasing dead ends had taught her not to get too hopeful. “I’ll see if I think it’s something to get excited about.”
“Seems Slick Nick dumped a girlfriend and you know how you women get.” She let the comment pass. If she took exception to every sexist comment uttered in the 151st, she’d be a raving lunatic. Besides, Harlan, despite his bluster, was one of the nicest men she’d ever met. He’d been married to Nancy Worth for over forty years and still worshipped the ground the woman walked on. “She’s selling her stud-muffin down the river.”
Stud-muffin? Harlan was stuck in the eighties. Serena focused on the rest of what he’d said. Depending on just how pissed off they were, ex-girlfriends could provide a wealth of info. Maybe this was something to get excited about.
She knew Nick Malone was a little over six feet with short, dark hair, blue eyes, and a medium build. That had only narrowed it down to over half the men in greater Boston. She needed a photo and a means of positive ID. The guy had been smart enough never to get caught or arrested. No fingerprints, no photo ID, and he went by several aliases. “Please tell me we have a photo.”
“We have a photo.” Harlan pushed it across the desk in her direction. “For what it’s worth.” The photo was out of focus, the man in the picture little more than a blur, with no discernable features, other than dark, short hair.
“Oh.” Yep. As disappointing as every other lead in this case. She drained the cup and bit back a grimace. She was saving every dollar for a down payment on a town house, but she might have to break down and buy a decent cup of coffee at the nearby coffee shop when she overslept. This stuff was either going to kill her or put hair on her chest—both bad options.
Harlan flipped through his notes, which Serena knew was unnecessary. The man possessed an amazing memory. “According to the girlfriend, he’s a top-notch dresser. Likes nice clothes. Said he’s obsessed with them ocean movies.”
Huh? “Beach movies?”
“Nah. Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve. She says he wants to be like that Clooney guy.”
Serena cracked a smile. “There are worse men to want to be like, although I personally think Matt Damon’s the looker in that lot.”
“You seen the movies?”
“Yeah.” The ending in the second one, Ocean’s Twelve, irritated the heck out of her. “So, we’ve got a perp who fancies himself a master criminal.”
“Hey, at least he’s got professional ambition.” Harlan unwrapped a Twinkie. “Breakfast of champions.” He took a bite and swallowed with minimal chewing. Watching Harlan eat reminded her why she was still single. Men could be real pigs. That and you needed to trust them to marry them. “We also know that our boy has a tattoo.”
“That works.” Finally something to really smile about. A perp could alter haircut and color, pop in colored contacts, change the way he dressed, but it was hard to get rid of a tattoo or a scar. “Arm? Neck? Chest? Back?”
“This is good.” Harlan grinned, looking like one of Santa’s elves gone bad with his full, round face, slightly pointed ears and a blob of cream filling at the corner of his mouth. She made a sign and he swiped off the cream. “It’s on his ass.”
Serena rolled her eyes. No wonder the boys had been in rare form this morning. “That’s great. To make a positive ID I’ve got to yank this guy’s pants down?”
Harlan chased the Twinkie with a slurp of coffee sludge. “You could try asking him nicely. According to the girlfriend, he’s quite a looker, but she says he’s a tiny mite when it comes to the johnson—course that could just be the woman-scorned thing.”
Serena laughed. That must be the little something Bennigan had in common with Malone. “That’s just great! This’ll make for some interesting conversation. Excuse me, you look like someone I know. In fact, you remind me of Danny Ocean. But I need to know, do you have a tattoo on your butt and a little penis?”
“Hey, it’ll guarantee a positive ID.” Harlan smirked. “Another little tidbit for when you’re trying to get those pants down to check out the tattoo—your boy likes a good spanking. You might want to dust off your dominatrix outfit.”
Sometimes she just found out more than she wanted or needed to know about people. Being in a job where she was surrounded by the worst of society was often demoralizing. “I didn’t need to know that.”
Harlan wagged a stubby finger at her across the desk. “It might come in handy. You’ve got to work on always having a backup plan, Riggs. She says he’s particularly partial to one of those little riding whips with the split leather on the end.”
“Jesus. Was there anything she didn’t tell you?”
“She was singing like a bird.” Harlan grinned.
“Please, tell me we’ve got an address.” Slick Nick was a shadow man. She hadn’t been able to find out where he lived. An address would be a huge plus. That she would definitely smile about.
“Sorry, Toots. You aren’t that lucky today. She said they always went to her place or a motel and they always took a cab. But, she did say he has an important meeting at that hotel near the airport, The Barrister. He’s going to be there for a three-day meeting from the twenty-fourth until the twenty-sixth. Just think, you can spank him till he talks and he’ll like it.”
Okay, it looked like dominatrix was about to be added to her repertoire. Serena was the department “go to” girl when light undercover was required. She liked it and she excelled at it. She’d handle the dominatrix thing without a problem.
Color her cynical, but this seemed like a surfeit of information where before they’d only had one dead-end after another. “How do you know she’s not setting us up? That’s a lot of information for her to know.”
“Nuh-uh. She’s setting him up, big-time. Apparently he thought she was just a dumb blonde and didn’t really go to any trouble to hide his day planner. So she found it and took a look.”
Serena grinned. “I like the sound of this woman.” Well, except for her poor judgment in dating a crook. Growing up with a petty criminal for a father had left Serena with zero tolerance and had been a major influence on her decision to be a cop. Criminals were criminals—bottom line. And women who had anything to do with lawbreakers were almost as bad as the men themselves.
If Serena’s mother had left her good-for-nothing father, they would’ve still been poor, but at least they could’ve claimed a little dignity. Pretty damn hard to have dignity when your old man was in and out of prison all the time and your mother lied to cover for him.
Serena had bailed when she hit eighteen. A high-school graduate with thirty-two hundred bucks in her pocket, saved from working nights and weekends, she’d tried to get her mother to come with her. Her mother had stayed because, according to Mom, Serena’s dad needed her when he got of jail. Again.
Serena had shaken Cleveland’s dirt from her feet, headed east and, even though she talked regularly with her mom, she’d never gone back. She couldn’t face the squalor and her mom’s resigned hopefulness. She definitely wasn’t interested in her father’s lies that this time he was going straight.
Becoming a cop had been Serena’s way of denouncing everything her father stood for. Plus, her father truly hated cops. Her job might keep her in contact with criminals and all the emotional dysfunction that went with a criminal’s lifestyle, but she was fighting all that instead of living it. “The girlfriend’s more than a blond bimbo. Bad news for Slick Nick. Good news for moi.”
“Don’t you want to know what kind of tattoo he has on his ass?” The elf-gone-bad’s eyes fairly danced with mischief.
Serena blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. She wanted to grow her hair out, but she might not make it through this growing out stage. And PMS just made it worse. She should come with a warning today: Bad Hair Day, PMS Bloating and a License to Carry Concealed. “I’m thinking there is a limited number of men that fit his general description with any kind of tattoo on their butts, but sure, go ahead. I can tell you’re dying to spill it. And doubtless the guys all know already. They were in rare form this morning.” Secrets in the station just didn’t happen.
“Right cheek. It’s a heart with MOM inside it.” Harlan cracked up. “Apparently that’s the side he prefers for his spanking.”
“I TOLD YOU NOT to call me before ten in the morning,” “Slick Nick” Malone said into his cell phone. Couldn’t a guy get a decent night’s sleep?
“Wake up and pay attention, Nicky, because I’m beginning to think you could fuck up a wet dream.”
Nick curled his fist around the phone. One day he’d find out who this cop was and then he’d pop him. For now it was useful having a guy on the inside. But sooner or later, he’d make him, and then the voice on the other end was history.
The cop was always so foulmouthed. His language deeply offended Nick. But Nick thought his cop-in-a-pocket knew that and went out of his way to needle him with it. When he was a kid, Nick’s neighborhood had been a dump—graffiti-covered buildings, foul language not only spouted all around him but spray painted for the world to see. Back them, no matter how many times he’d washed his hands or how clean he’d tried to keep his clothes, he’d always felt the filth of his surroundings. Eventually he’d managed to put the neighborhood behind him and all it represented. He wore nice clothes. Kept his language clean. Stayed in nice places. Ate at nice restaurants.
The woman in the hotel bed next to him, Susie maybe, was still asleep, her mouth gaping open slightly. Phone in hand, Nick slid out of bed, still naked from the night before, and crossed the room, then closed the bedroom door behind him. He stretched out on the suite’s love seat, the brocade upholstery rough against his back and bare butt.
“What are you talking about?”
The voice laughed, an ugly sound so early in the morning. “Your girlfriend or should I say ex-girlfriend, Debi, has been flapping her trap.”
Apprehension grabbed him by the balls and squeezed. He swung his feet to the floor and sat up. “What?”
“She visited the station and filled us in on all kinds of little nifty details like who you’re meeting and where and when.”
Nick stood and stalked over to the window. Fury roiled through him. “She’s dead.”
He hated it when he lost control and said stuff like that. Another reason to kill her. Jesus. He rested his forehead on the chilled glass of the window and closed his eyes.
“Nick, Nick, Nick. Don’t even think about breathing hard in her direction.” The hated voice sighed. “You know, it really annoys me when I have to think for both of us. If she turns up dead or missing or even with a broken fingernail, game’s up, bright boy. My people will figure out the information was leaked and then you and I are out of business and—who knows?—I just might be the one arresting your punk ass.” That laugh grated on Nick’s nerves like nails scraping a chalkboard. “And you’d never know it was me. So, listen up, loser, you don’t touch Debi Majette. Next time you want to dump a girlfriend, make it a body, before she talks to us. Get your shit together.”
Jo-Jo would have his head for this. His uncle Jo-Jo had been the one to offer him the opportunity to move beyond the ’hood, and Jo-Jo could just as easily send him back. Christ. He tamped down his panic. But it was fixable. Definitely fixable. He just needed a few minutes to think this through without the cop hanging on the line.
“We’ll move O’Malley into place,” Nick said, thinking aloud. “I’ll meet my contacts elsewhere and we’ll send O’Malley to The Barrister on those dates. It’s a little sooner than we’d planned, but it should work.”
“You’re sure O’Malley doesn’t suspect anything?”
Nick curled his lip. Even though he’d never met him, he despised Nick O’Malley and all the others like him out there. He’d read about O’Malley’s background in the papers. No graffiti-covered sidewalks in O’Malley’s childhood. No hookers on the corner across from the drug dealers. No, O’Malley was one of those laid-back lucky gimps who always landed on his feet. He led a charmed life. “Doesn’t have a clue. He’s so used to lady luck smiling on him, he never questioned the job offer.”
Once Jo-Jo had found out the cops were hot on Nick’s tail, he’d heard O’Malley’s story in the news and come up with a brilliant idea. Hire O’Malley to work in one of Jo-Jo’s secondary companies. Let him get comfortable, set him up and then let him take the fall as Slick Nick. O’Malley didn’t look like him, but they were close to the same build, nearly the same weight and about the same age. Every tabloid had carried the story that O’Malley had committed a crime, yet never done time. It was a beautiful plan. It’d take the heat off of him and O’Malley could enjoy the creature comforts of the state pen—and get a taste of what if felt like when lady luck spit in your face.
“Except now we all know you have a tattoo on your ass and he doesn’t,” the cop said.
Nick couldn’t think with this jerk hanging on the other end of the line. “I’ll figure something out and take care of it. Thanks for the heads-up,” Nick said. He hated thanking this piece of scum for anything.
“No problem…as long as you pay up. You know the deal.”
Nick watched the snarl of traffic on the street below. The little people rushing to and fro for their nine-to-five jobs. Pathetic slobs.
“Yeah. I know the deal.” Cash deposited into a numbered bank account.
“You know, I’m feeling generous today, so I’ll throw this in as a freebie, won’t even charge you extra for the info. Everyone in the 151st not only knows you have a tattoo on your ass, they also know you get off on a good spanking.”
Nick fisted his hand in the curtain.
The voice on the other end of the line laughed. “And the Debster says you’ve got a little dick. That’s a shame. Size really does matter.”
Giving way to his fury, Nick flipped the phone closed, cutting off the hateful laughter on the other end. He threw it against the wall and dragged in a deep breath.
One day. One day that bitch would pay for that. The same as that nameless, faceless cop.
2
“TWENTY-THREE DAYS DOWN, seven left to go. You’re never going to make it,” AJ said.
“I’m practically home free.” Okay, so maybe he’d underestimated just how prominent a factor women were in his life. But it hadn’t been as hard as Nick had anticipated, despite his buddies going out of their way to make it as difficult as possible. AJ and Matt had sent women his way left and right over the past twenty-three days. Matt had thrown a party, complete with lots of single, available, hot women. Oddly enough, none of them had even seriously tempted Nick. He didn’t expect it to be easy, but seven more days was doable.
“Home free, my ass. You’re gonna break before you manage another week.” AJ laughed. “You look ready to break now.”
“Man’s got a point.” Tim eyed him across a half-eaten Rueben, Dougal’s special of the day. “You look wound pretty tight.”
Nick forked a home fry. “You only think that because AJ’s brainwashed you.”
Matt tipped his stool back on two legs. “No one’s brainwashed me. You should have seen your face when Polly squeezed behind your chair.”
“What did you expect? Polly’s got these big…” Maybe he was in worse shape than he’d thought, he couldn’t say the word breasts without choking. “You know…and she—they brushed against my back.” And he wouldn’t even mention how good she’d smelled and how sweet her breasts had felt against his back. He didn’t doubt that AJ had slipped her—the prettiest waitress with the biggest tatas—a twenty to squeeze behind him.
“He’s sunk,” AJ said.
“A goner,” Tim seconded.
“Your hands are shaking, you poor slob,” Matt added.
“Hey, is that drool coming out of his mouth?” AJ said.
“I don’t know why I waste my time with you,” Nick said. He upended his beer.
“Because we’re your best friends,” Tim pointed out.
“Don’t depress me.”
“You know you love us.” Matt punched his shoulder.
AJ shook his head. “Easy, Matt. I wouldn’t get too close, Nicky might be getting desperate.”
“Damn right I’m desperate if you three are the best I can do for friends,” Nick said. They all knew they were just mouthing off. When he’d lost his mind and embezzled the money and then it had hit the news, he’d found out who his true friends were. Most of the guys he’d known no longer gave him the time of day. But AJ, Matt and Tim had stuck with him through thick and thin.
“C’mon, Nick. You know you’ll miss us next week.”
“Can’t say that I will. I’m looking forward to not being around.” And that was more than the truth. He could use a change of scenery—even if it was only the other side of the city. It’d be better not to be around the familiar. Like when he’d quit smoking a couple of years ago and it’d been a matter of not lighting up when he was used to. A change of scenery would probably curb his wanting a woman around. And if that smacked of habit and addiction, well, these guys didn’t have to know.
“How long are you gonna be gone?” Tim asked, bringing the conversation back to where it had been before Polly had brushed against Nick.
“Three days.” Long past were the days when he worked around money. He’d blown that career when he’d embezzled funds. His prospects had looked dim to dismal until he’d heard about this job through a friend of a cousin’s friend. Amazingly, Mack Enterprises was willing to take a chance on a guy with his history. Nick knew he was damn lucky he’d stumbled into anything better than scrubbing toilets at Fenway Park. Actually, he enjoyed his job as a booking agent for Mack Enterprises. And he was good at what he did. But for the past couple of weeks…it wasn’t anything he could put his finger on…
“So, you’re gonna be in Boston, but you’re staying in a hotel?” Tim frowned. “Man, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’m a company man and that’s where they want me so that’s where I’ll be.”
“Seems like this trip came up pretty sudden,” Matt said.
Nick shrugged. “It was a little last minute, but apparently the guy they were going to send was needed somewhere else. Me? I go where I’m needed.” And he’d keep his eyes and ears open. Crazy as it sounded, the people at Mack were too nice, too trusting considering his recent history. It simply didn’t feel right. But the best thing to do was to keep a low profile and his eyes and ears open. Maybe he was imagining things.
“We thought you were road tripping, so we all went together and got you a little going away present,” AJ said.
They were grinning like a trio of monkeys and Nick knew major grief was about to come his way.
AJ pulled a box wrapped in plain brown paper out from beneath the table.
“It’s a little something for your trip. When you’re sitting in your lonely hotel room,” AJ said. “Go ahead. Open it. It won’t bite.”
The three of them cracked up at that. Oh, boy. Nick tore off the paper. The vacuous grin of a blow-up doll stared up at him from the cardboard box.
“Meet Sheila. She’s got thunder from Down Under. We didn’t want you to get too lonely,” AJ said.
