27. “Bad Reputation”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“BAD REPUTATION”
(JOAN JETT)
T he next morning, while Javi and I were repeatedly bumping into each other in my tiny kitchen while he handled coffee and I made our smoothies (my famous Creamsicle one! Javi’s second favorite), I decided I liked his kitchen better.
It was a whole lot bigger. Plenty of room for Javi’s big, tall body along with mine to move around and do our thing without getting in each other’s way.
I was going to the fridge to put away the almond milk and yogurt, he was coming from the fridge with the creamer, when we slammed into each other, front to front.
Fortunately, this didn’t cause us to be covered in milk and yogurt.
I made a shift to round him but was foiled in this effort when Javi’s arm curved around me, and he hauled me closer.
This almost caused us to be covered in milk and yogurt, but luckily, my reflexes were quick.
I tipped my head back to look at him to see him grinning down at me.
“I can handle all the pink if I get to brush up against you every day makin’ coffee,” he murmured.
Oo.
I liked his way of looking at my tiny kitchen a whole lot better.
I gave him a smile.
He kissed it off my face.
Then he let me go and sorted our coffees.
I put the stuff away in the fridge.
And for the first time, shuffling around it with Javi, I fell in love with my tiny kitchen.
* * *
It happened in the early afternoon.
What we knew at this juncture was, both Brody and Arthur were trying to pull images they could use off the videos in order to attempt facial recognition.
I didn’t know all the ins and outs of it, but Javi explained they needed a relatively high resolution, full-face image.
They then were going to start with narrowing the search area to Phoenix and its surroundings.
After that, the software would run through all sorts of images on the Internet, particularly social media, to see if it could find matches.
This could, we’d been warned, take days.
Or even weeks.
Maybe even months.
No way around it, we had a long wait, and with no other leads, we were hunkered down to find one or start receiving the names of the women we could contact to let them know Trev was out of the picture and the videos were gone.
Or, if we lucked out, find the one who could hire people to handle Trev (and alas fail) in an attempt to make her nightmare go away.
Javi still swung by to take me to work that day, because the NI&S bodyguard assignments were still in effect.
I loved riding with him, but my guess was, it would begin to be a drag to cut out of what he was doing just to take me to work.
Not to mention, we all figured, with the amount of time that had passed since anything happened, the danger was over, so he probably didn’t have to.
However, when it finally happened, we knew it wasn’t.
You see, Willow came in early to bake, so she left early.
And she was leaving.
She was in the staff room, grabbing her stuff from her locker.
Gabe was in the coffee cubby, getting a coffee from Tex.
I was in the kitchen, dumping some spent plates in a busser tub.
That was when I heard Willow scream.
I looked up and saw two besuited men had her and they were struggling with her on a trajectory toward the back door.
“ Gabe! Tex! Willow! ” I shrieked, dropping the plates with a clatter and racing to the staff room.
Once I got there, I saw they had her out the door.
Therefore, I raced out the door.
One of them was stuffing her terrifyingly lax body in the back of a Mercedes. The other one was getting into the driver’s seat.
So of course, in what was becoming my signature move, I ran and jumped on the back of the one shoving Willow in the Mercedes.
I jerked him away from the door, and the driver shouted, “Just tase her ass!”
Within maybe a second, I was flipped to my back on the asphalt.
My breath gushed out of me, and I had exactly a nanosecond to hope the short, flirty skirt of my girlie dress covered my cute panties along with doing a quick scan of my body because I landed hard, before my entire frame sizzled vastly unpleasantly…
I didn’t really know what happened after that because I was out .
* * *
“Can you explain why I have two women in my garage instead of one?” a man asked.
He was about my dad’s age, but still very attractive in a millionaire daddy kind of way. He was also a man I semi-kinda recognized but couldn’t put my finger on it seeing as I’d been abducted, I was zip-tied, achy from landing on my back on the asphalt and sitting in a millionaire daddy’s garage.
Last, he was speaking to the two goons who kidnapped me and Willow.
Yes, I would confirm yet again, we were in a garage.
Yes, the garage was very nice, at least three-car, and it was the cleanest garage I’d ever seen.
No, this didn’t make me want to be there.
Yes, the dude who tased me shoved me in the back of the Mercedes with Willow.
Yes, sometime after they took off with us but before we got ourselves together from being tased, they zip-tied our wrists behind our backs and our ankles together.
No, I didn’t remember much of anything from the start of our abduction, except I heard a couple of gunshots (these being from our car, shots I expected were aimed at Gabe and/or Tex).
No, I didn’t know if those bullets connected with anybody.
Yes, I was totally freaked out about that.
Yes, in a weird way, I was glad Willow wasn’t alone with whatever was going on here.
No, it still totally sucked we’d both been kidnapped.
“She jumped on my back. Aaron told me to tase her,” Goon One said.
Goon Two (or Driver Goon) smacked him upside the head and bit, “Don’t say my name, you moron.”
Goon One didn’t like getting smacked in the head and reared on Goon Two.
Goon Two dodged and kept biting. “I told you to tase her, not shove her in the car.”
Mastermind, or the guy I didn’t know but semi-kinda recognized, sighed loudly and snapped, “Stop it.”
The Two Goons glowered at each other, and this lasted a good long while.
“Stop it!” Mastermind clipped.
The Two Goons kept glowering, just not at each other.
Mastermind looked to me. “I’m sorry they involved you.”
Did he expect me to shrug and say, “Hey, that’s okay”?
I did not.
I glared at him.
“I think you might understand why I’ve gone to these extreme measures,” he said.
“Uh, we don’t even know who you are,” I replied.
He seemed surprised by that. He then seemed annoyed by that. He then seemed to ponder his options regarding that.
And then he came to a decision.
“This is how this is going to go,” he began.
I glanced at Willow.
I didn’t know what I expected to see. Her cowering or crying, maybe. Her looking as terrified as I felt, possibly.
Her looking pissed enough to tear someone’s head off?
No.
“I apologize it’s gotten to this point, but rest assured, I’ll make it worth your while,” Mastermind went on.
“Make what worth our while?” Willow asked, or more like, whipped out at him like a lash.
Dang.
She was so totally an Angel, and more the Raye-Angel variety, and not the Harlow-Angel variety, like I thought.
“This”—he swung a hand out in front of him to indicate us sitting zip-tied on chairs in his garage—“unfortunate turn of events.”
“We’re listening,” I said.
Mastermind nodded. “Trevor Clampitt met my daughter on the Stung dating app about four months ago.”
Well…
There you go.
“When she shared with me what was happening, at first, I tried to handle it in a civilized manner. That, I assure you,” he said.
And we were looking at whoever put together Sun Dial LLC.
Onward from that, considering he was a millionaire daddy, this explained why he could bury that shell company so deep Arthur couldn’t find out who was behind it.
“I’m afraid Mr. Clampitt felt he’d discovered his whale and made acting civilized extremely difficult,” Mastermind continued.
No doubt.
Stupid Trev.
“I sent some associates to try to reason with him,” Mastermind carried on. “Lamentably, this had an unforeseen conclusion.”
“In other words, Trev was thinking ten grand a month wasn’t enough, he should get a raise, and he communicated this to you,” I deduced, and kept right on deducing.
“You weren’t feeling that and sent some henchmen to put an end to his shakedown.
They got into a physical fight that somehow ended with Trev face down in a pool of his own blood.
But somewhere along the line, Trev dumped his laptop and phone so they not only left a dead body, they left empty-handed. ”
Mastermind appeared surprised at how much I knew, but he powered through it.
“The final result of that meeting was an accident,” Mastermind asserted. “That was absolutely not what I intended. And we did get his phone. Alas, we didn’t get his laptop.”
So, there was the intel on the location of Trev’s phone.
I suddenly had a theory about that laptop.
That being, the Hottie Squad weren’t only keeping Kev to keep him safe, they were keeping him because they felt he hadn’t told them everything.
And he hadn’t.
Like, when he found out his best bud was very dead, he’d gone to where his best bud had shared he hid the golden goose of his laptop, something that needed to be kept very secure because it was paying Trev’s bills and putting him in a nice Mazda.
Kev, for some braindead reason (or perhaps he thought he’d pick up where Trev’s blackmailing ended), decided that the laptop needed to be taken out of the equation (or put in the hands of someone who could profit from it, namely his), instead of handing it over to the police so maybe they could use it to help them find Trev’s killer.