Whiskey For Breakfast Read online

  I didn’t recognize him, but I had a sinking feeling I was about to meet my new neighbor. He was probably an inch shorter than me and had a face soft with baby fat. His eyes were very round in his pudgy face and I couldn’t tell if he had eyelids because he didn’t blink. At all.

  Black hair stood in wild tufts around his head and a pencil thin mustache I was pretty sure he’d drawn on sat just above his lip. He wore khakis that were at least a size too big and a Star Trek T-shirt that was a size too small. His binoculars hung around his neck.

  I stood as still as possible, wondering what I should do, and praying he’d get tired of waiting and go back to his own house. He kept staring at me through the peephole, never blinking, and when my fingers cramped I realized I was squeezing my gun too tight.

  “I can hear you breathing,” he finally said through the door.

  I let out a sigh as I unlocked the deadbolt and undid the chain, but I didn’t bother to hide my weapon.

  He looked me up and down with those wide, unblinking eyes, and I was suddenly very aware that the only thing I had on was a pair of spandex bike shorts and a sports bra. I could mostly be pretty attractive when I gave half an effort—my hair was dark and shiny and never frizzed in the humidity, and my eyes were a nice chocolate brown. My skin was good and my features put together an attractive package.

  But after a morning workout, my face was probably flushed red and blotchy and patches of sweat darkened my clothes. My hair was up in a crooked ponytail, I had on no makeup, and I probably smelled like a locker room. Chances were pretty good he probably didn’t come over to attack me.

  “You’re Addison Holmes,” he said, and I was slightly taken aback by the fact that he not only had been spying on me but also knew my name. “Agent Savage speaks highly of you, but I had to see that you would fit in for myself. We don’t just take anyone off the street, you know.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Neighborhood watch.” It was then I noticed he had a folded T-shirt in his hand and a dayglow orange vest and he shoved them both at me. “I’ve been watching you since you moved in, and I could tell this morning that you have a good eye for what’s happening in the neighborhood. We try to keep crime to a minimum here. I’m Leonard Winkle, but everyone calls me Spock. I’m the president of the NAD Squad. It’s your turn to host Saturday since you’re the newest member. We’ll be here at 9am sharp. Wear your shirt. Mrs. Rodriguez likes cranberry muffins.”

  With that he turned on his heel and headed back across the small expanse of lawn that separated our houses.

  “What the fuck?”

  I closed the door and locked it up tight. I put my gun back in my purse and tossed the ugly vest on the counter before holding the shirt up in front of me so I could see what it said. NAD was spelled in giant block letters in the same dayglow orange as the vest across the front of the shirt. And underneath it was the word SQUAD in much smaller letters.

  “NAD Squad,” I murmured. I turned the shirt around so I could read the back. “Neighbors Against Delinquency. Of course that’s what it means.”

  I tossed the shirt on the counter and poured another cup of coffee, deciding to take it into the shower with me. Running wasn’t going to happen this morning. In fact, I was contemplating just crawling back under the covers and starting the whole day over again. Unfortunately, Kate was expecting me at the agency for a meeting.

  She’d called me the night before driving back from the airport and reception had been spotty, but I’d caught the words sperm and billionaire, so it was enough information to have me sufficiently intrigued. Though a part of me was wondering if Kate was trying to set me up on a blind date.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Since my move to Savannah, I’d somehow managed to add ten extra minutes to my commute. Instead of taking the highway all the way around the outskirts of downtown Savannah like I had when I was living in Whiskey Bayou, I now had to maneuver my way through the congestion of historical Savannah, where drivers felt the need to sightsee from the middle of the road instead of going straight to their destination, and the one-way streets made it impossible to get anywhere without a lot of creative cursing and a half tank of gas.

  The McClean Detective Agency was just across the street from Telfair Square in a two-story brick corner building. Riotous green ivy covered the walls and black shutters framed the windows to give it the same charming appearance that all of the businesses had around the area. The front door was black as well and a gold plated plaque with tasteful lettering was the only advertisement as to what went on within.

  Six months ago I’d been driving a sweet little cherry red Z that had been worth every penny of the price I couldn’t afford. Unfortunately, when hard times had come it had been the first thing to go. I’d found a Volvo that had seen better days at a salvage yard for five hundred dollars. Sure, it had some exterior paint issues, but I kept telling myself that I wasn’t so shallow that appearances made a difference to me one way or the other.

  The interior smelled like Mexican food farts and mountain pines because of the little scented tree I had hanging from the rearview mirror, and there was a hole in the floor of the passenger side big enough to drop a toddler through. But for the most part, the car got me where I was going, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  I floored the gas pedal so I could pass a car that was trying to figure out how to parallel park, but as soon as the pedal touched the floor the car shuddered hard enough to snap my teeth together and a high-pitched wheeze came from somewhere under the hood. I barely caught my purse before it bounced off the passenger seat and fell through the hole in the floorboard.

  “Come on, come on. Don’t do this to me now.”

  The car was making enough noise that people had stopped to stare—probably to see if it was going to blow up with me inside—and all of a sudden the car shot forward and the awful noises stopped only to be replaced by a growling engine and the sound of my wheels whooshing against the pavement.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Horns blared as I sped through a red light and I dodged pedestrians and other cars with wild-eyed panic as the car seemed to take on a mind of its own.

  “Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”

  My heart stopped in my chest and my bowels turned to liquid as I weighed my options. It turns out I didn’t really have any options other than crashing in a fiery heap of metal and rust and that wasn’t really something I was looking forward to. Though if I died today I’d no longer have to be a member of the NAD Squad, so there was an upside to everything, it seemed.

  I took a hard right onto York Street on two wheels, my foot pressing the brake over and over again with no success. The smell of rubber made my eyes water. Or it could have been the black smoke rising from the hole in the floorboard. Whatever it was, I was in big trouble.

  Kate’s building came into view and I gave one last ditch attempt to stop the car, pressing the pedal all the way to the ground, my ass coming up from the seat and my grip on the steering wheel so hard I was afraid it might pop right off. All I could do was close my eyes and pray.

  The car stopped so suddenly I screamed into the silence, and when I found the courage to open my eyes I found I was about an inch away from the bumper of a black Mercedes. God and I’d had a pretty tenuous relationship over the last couple of years—ever since the whole wedding fiasco. But occasionally He came through for me and saved me from sudden disaster, and I figured I probably needed to start paying Him back a bit by going to church so my prayer points weren’t all used up in the event of a real emergency.

  The good news was I was mostly close enough to the curb to be considered parked, so I pulled the keys out of the ignition and grabbed my purse, looking around to make sure no one had witnessed my grand entrance. Unfortunately, it was peak hours for professionals going to work and joggers making use of the park across the street, so I ducked out of the car as fast as possible and ran through the front door of the agency to the sound of catc
alls and slow applause.

  I slammed the door at my back and stood in the lobby of the McClean Detective Agency, reveling in just being alive. That had been too close to call, and already I was mentally rearranging my checking account and wondering what I could sell so I could get another car, but there was nothing in my checking account to rearrange. I had rent due in another week, and I didn’t even have enough to cover the whole amount.

  The only thing I had left of value to sell was internal organs and thick brown hair that came just past my shoulder blades. I figured if shearing hair to the scalp and selling it for cash was good enough for Jo March, then it was probably good enough for me. I wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about getting rid of the internal organs yet.

  Lucy Kim stared at me from behind the ornate cherry wood reception desk with soulless black eyes and an impassive face. She was so still I wondered if she was real or one of those blowup dolls that were sold in naughty novelty stores. I was ninety-eight percent sure that Lucy was one of those day-walker vampires, but I hadn’t been able to prove it yet.

  The front lobby of the McClean Detective Agency was tasteful Southern elegance. The furniture was leather and placed in front of a massive fireplace that never got used because this was the South. Rugs were scattered across the floor and expensive paintings hung on the walls. It was made to look like a home instead of an office from the front to make people more comfortable.

  “Hey there,” I said, just to fill the uncomfortable silence.

  Lucy was a mystery. She was several inches shorter than my own five-foot-eight, and her skin was golden and flawless. Straight black hair rained down her back to her waist and shone like silk, and I was thinking her locks would probably sell for a hell of a lot more than mine. She wore black from head to toe, as she always did, and five inch heels that would be good for stabbing someone in the eye in an emergency. Her nails were long and blood red to match her lips.

  I had no idea how old she was or anything remotely personal about her other than she’d worked for Kate since the agency opened a decade ago. She never took a sick day or a personal day and I’d never seen her eating in the break room or from the snack trays that were brought out for clients. Like I said, vampire.

  Lucy held out a couple of file folders to me without saying anything, and when I took them from her she immediately went back to whatever she’d been doing on the computer.

  “I’m a little early for the meeting,” I said. “Is Kate already in her office?”

  I’d been on a personal quest lately to get Lucy to speak to me in the hopes that I’d be able ferret out some personal information about her. It just wasn’t natural for a woman to live in the South this long and not want to talk about herself, her family, and her ancestors from a hundred years past.

  Lucy jerked her thumb towards Kate’s office, never looking away from her computer screen. I rolled my eyes and sighed and headed down the long expanse of hallway where all of the agents in Kate’s employ had their offices.

  Kate’s door was closed, which meant she was probably in the middle of something important. Our meeting wasn’t for another twenty minutes so I had time to look over the two new files Lucy had handed me.

  I’d been using Carl Jansen’s office while he’d been on medical leave for a herniated disk, but Carl was back and I’d been ousted to a refurbished janitor’s closet. The gray metal desk filled up almost the whole space and the computer was probably a dozen years old, but it still did the same invasive searches on people’s lives that the newer models did—only a lot slower. I mostly used my personal laptop at home.

  The walls were oyster gray and new industrial carpet with maroon flecks had been laid for my benefit, only the smell of the glue was so strong my eyes started watering if I stayed inside for more than ten minutes at a time. I’d put a few personal touches around to make myself feel more at home—candles, family photographs, and a dartboard that hung on the back of the door—but in my experience there was never much point in polishing a turd.

  The most important thing on my desk was the Keurig coffeemaker, and I dropped in a pod and pushed the button as I opened the first file. I raised my brows at the note Kate had stuck to the first page. It was a request for an assist from the Savannah PD. Requests came through the agency a couple of times a week, but they never came to me, or at least hardly ever. I’d assisted the FBI and the local police in a call girl murder case not too long ago, but I’d ended up mostly naked and with a broken heart by the time the case was solved, so I’d been steering clear of the boys in blue lately.

  The department kept Kate’s agency on retainer because it was easier to hire her agents out by the hour rather than pay overtime for a cop’s salary, and a lot of cops worked for Kate in their off time just to make extra money. Budget cuts had hit the city hard over the last couple of years.

  “Johhny Sakko,” I read aloud, my brow furrowing as I tried to remember where I’d heard the name before.

  It looked like Johnny owned a couple of parking garages right in the middle of the city. He also owned several restaurants, including a place called Mambo that was all the rage right now. I remembered where I’d seen the name now. There’d been a write-up about it in the papers and he’d been featured on the national news.

  According to the police, the valet service at Mambo used one of Johnny’s parking garages close by, and while people sat and had what was surely an overpriced dinner with mediocre food, Johnny’s employees were suspected of using the cars to make drug drops all over the city. They had a tendency to use the flashier cars for their dirty work. Different cars on different nights and different times, and the police were running in circles. They knew Johnny Sakko was guilty. They only had trouble proving it.

  My job was pretty cut and dried. I had a reservation for two for Saturday night at nine o’clock and the use of a brand new Porsche that had been loaned from the dealer. All I had to do was slip the camera inside the car and go in and enjoy a free meal. Easy enough. Except I had no date to bring with me, and I’d be caught dead before eating in a restaurant alone.

  I’d seen women eating by themselves from time to time, usually looking forlorn and trying not to make eye contact with the other diners so they wouldn’t see the pity in their gazes. I’d heard women ate by themselves all the time in the north. But in the South eating alone was like proclaiming to the world that no one wanted you.

  I made a couple of notes in the Johnny Sakko file and opened up the second file.

  “Good grief.”

  I didn’t have anything against old people, but there was nothing I hated more than spending time in a nursing home, even an upscale assisted living center like the one in the file. It was filled with nothing but randy geriatrics who thought it was okay to pat you on the ass because they were over the age of seventy-five.

  I knew this to be fact because my Uncle Milton spent the last twenty years of his life in Sunnydale Assisted Living, where he met the last two of his four wives and finally keeled over from a heart attack during the throes of passion. Uncle Milton had been a firm believer in male enhancement and erectile dysfunction medication. Not that it had done him a lot of good in the end. They’d had a hell of a time getting Milton’s coffin closed, and I shudder to think how scarred the poor intern was who was relegated to massaging out the rigor.

  I was looking for a woman named Virginia Peterson, according to Kate’s notes. Apparently Virginia had decided she didn’t like how her children hovered over her, and she was paranoid they were going to take all of her stuff and stick her in a nursing home. According to Virginia’s doctors and her children she had the early stages of dementia, but she also suffered from delusions and extreme paranoia.

  So Virginia bought fake IDs on the Internet and cashed out her entire life savings, and she slipped out of her home in the middle of the night.

  “Damn,” I muttered. For someone close to eighty years old she was pretty spry.

  I snorted my coffee when I read Kate’s handw
riting at the bottom of the page. Apparently she thought I should take notes on how to sneak around without being seen or heard from Virginia Peterson. It would serve Kate right if I took her up on it.

  Virginia took her new identity and all her money and rented an apartment at the Summer’s Eve Retirement and Assisted Living Home.

  “That’s an unfortunate choice of names.” The images in my head of what went on at Summer’s Eve was enough to make me want to run screaming.

  The case was simple enough. Virginia’s children were frantic with worry and Kate had tracked her down this far. All I needed to do was go in and give a visual affirmation that it really was Virginia and then I could leave and let the family take over.

  I made a call to Summer’s Eve and made an appointment to tour the facilities later in the evening, with the small lie that I had an ailing grandmother. With that done, I stuffed the files in my bag and looked at the time. My eyes had started to water a few minutes before so I knew I’d already spent too long in the space that was called my office. I grabbed my coffee cup and my purse and closed the door behind me, breathing in the fresh air from the hallway.

  My keen sense of smell noticed something that hadn’t been there on my first walk down the hallway.

  “Chocolate.” I stopped and inhaled again. The smell was coming from beneath Kate’s door and I didn’t even stop to think as I knocked on the door. I had the knob turned and was halfway in before I heard her say “Come in.”

  “I wondered how long it would take you to sniff them out,” Kate McClean said from behind her desk. I looked at the chocolate scones on the sofa table next to the Keurig and my mouth started to water a little. “You’re losing your touch.”

  “The carpet glue threw me off. I think it’s done permanent damage. All my nose hairs are singed.”