Chapter Six

Blu drove into North Charleston, parked in front of Phineous’ run down shop, and knew that something wasn’t right.

Phineous was a creature of habit. He could always be found either at his apartment getting stoned or at his office working. He had his groceries and food delivered, cut his own hair, and never went on vacation.

The closed sign on the front door said quite a bit. Blu had never seen it there, even after hours. Phineous was always diligent in locking his doors, but any signage was lacking. He didn’t need to advertise.

Blu got out of his SUV and checked the door to the office—locked. He turned around and looked up and down the sidewalk. The area was desolate, a detail someone like Phineous probably enjoyed. Blu peered through the dirty window into the shop. The place was never clean, but Blu saw broken equipment on the floor, as if it had fallen.

He turned around, a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right.

And then it hit him. What bothered him about the situation—Crome.

His partner would have gone in, scared Phineous to death, got whatever the analyst had, and then told him to get out of town or he’d kill him.

In his current frame of mind, Crome wouldn’t care about burning bridges. This trait probably contributed to why Maureen was taken.

Blu walked back to his Nissan, got in and turned the air on. It had been a blessing that some idiots shot up his old truck, forcing him to get a newer one—one with working AC.

With cool air blowing, Blu called Crome. Of course it went to voicemail.

  

Crome checked his phone and saw it was “BLUE” calling. His partner’s previous client had given him the phone and saddled him with a number that spelled out the color.

He let the call go to voicemail. There was no sense dealing with that reality just yet—the one that would tell him he needed to get himself under control. The one that had good intentions and only wanted to help. Well, by God, he didn’t want any help. Not since Phineous had told him what he needed to know.

In fact, Blu was probably at Phin’s shop right now, looking at the mess and realizing Crome had hijacked the lead. That put Crome thirty minutes ahead of him. Actually, a lot more than that because Blu would have to track down Phineous which would take a few hours, even for somebody as good as his partner. Not that he stashed him someplace inconspicuous. It was more like hiding him in plain sight.

Crome took a hit off his vape pen, exhaled, hot-boxed another drag right on top of the first, and then put it in his pocket. The double shot from the nicotine-laced vape juice coursed through his veins and cleared his head.

His target was directly ahead of him. Phineous had told him what he’d found in the picture, or rather in the reflection from Maureen’s iris. Jesus, the camera imaging was good these days. The photo analyst had been able to zoom in something like five times and print out an image.

The photograph he’d been sent of Maureen with the gun to her head was really a reflection off a mirror. And it was cropped to show only her head and the hand holding the gun. But Phineous got a larger image from the reflection.

The picture showed the torso of the man who stood over Maureen and held the gun to her head with one hand and a smartphone with the other. His face was not in that image either, but more of the room was. Including things like a towel and a box of tissues. They told Crome the room was the bathroom. Another, smaller detail was also in the photo—the complimentary toiletries given at every hotel. Items like shampoo and conditioner and soap. Items that sometimes had the manufacturer’s name printed on the packaging. Or, as in this case, the name of the hotel.

That was all Crome needed. It wasn’t the top hotel in the city, but it was up there. The Palmetto Inn had a Meeting Street address and provided a short walk to the Market, one of Charleston’s famous attractions.

Even in his own head, that sounded like some travel agent BS, but he gave himself a break. Caffeine and nicotine ingested at levels large enough to drop cattle did have a few side effects.

  

Blu had to track down Phineous, and fast. He had a hunch, a real bad one, that Crome had gotten to the poor guy first and scared him. While Blu agreed with the sense of urgency, he also believed in being pragmatic. He hoped he could smooth things over with Phineous when he found him.

He called Gladys. Gladys was a DMV contact who helped him pro bono after he got her out of an abusive marriage. She verified Phineous’ last known address which was not too far from his shop, and he made his way there.

“There” turned out to be an old but decent apartment complex Blu had visited previously for other photo jobs. The brick buildings were still coated with green mildew, and pine trees and worn-out cars were scattered throughout the lot.

Blu parked, got out of his vehicle, and knocked on the second-floor door.

There was no answer.

He called out, “Phineous?”

Again there was no answer.

“Come on Phineous. It’s Blu.”

Still no answer.

The other detail Gladys had confirmed was the type of vehicle Phineous drove—a ten-year-old Prius.

There were no Priuses in the lot.

Aside from the office and here, where else could he look?

Blu pulled his iPhone out and made another call.

Tess Ray answered on the second ring with, “You find Crome?”

“No.” Apparently she had more faith in him than he’d put in himself.

“Okay, what do you need?”

He said, “I think Crome scared Phineous enough that the poor guy left town. We need to track him down.”

“Yessir,” she said, but not convincingly.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I think my partner just burned an important bridge and I need to fix it and find Crome before he does something else this stupid.”

“He’s only trying to find Maureen.”

“I understand that, but he’s trying to do it alone and I’m not going to let him.”

“Seems you don’t have a choice at the moment.”

“Sure I do,” he said. “Find me Phineous.”

After a moment of silence, she said, “I will do what I can, but we need to talk about your bedside manner.”

“This is my friend,” he said, realizing he’d been testy with Tess just now. “I’m sorry. Any help you can give would be appreciated.”

“Was that so difficult?” she asked.

  

Crome scoped out the hotel lobby trying to get a read on the place: white tile-floors, gray marble wainscoting and reception desk, high ceilings with brass chandeliers, and pretty people behind the counters.

Normally, he wasn’t so conspicuous. But at this moment he stood out as only a rough, tattooed biker in a sea of casually-dressed tourists could in an upscale hotel lobby.

He took a seat on one of the couches just off to the right and pulled out his phone and tried to become another clueless scroller while he formulated a plan.

What he needed was to figure out which room Maureen was in if she was even still here. Phineous hadn’t been able to decipher much more out of the picture but the name of the hotel on the toiletries. Crome needed a friendly face he could drag into this mess.

None of the pretty people serving the guests had friendly faces. They all had pleasant but professional faces without blemishes. And they’d call the police.

Then he remembered that Blu had befriended a Latina woman who cleaned rooms in one of the other hotels. She’d helped him out by searching a room for him after the guests had checked out and found a tube of lipstick they’d later linked to a victim by the fingerprints still on it. Since then, she’d been brought into the Blu Carraway Investigations fold as a contractor and Crome had made sure to introduce himself to her.

Realizing that since he couldn’t identify the kidnapper but the kidnapper could identify him, Crome got up and left. He found Juanita’s number in his phone as he walked out and gave her a call.

“Buenos días, señorita,” he said.

“Hola, Mr. Crome.”

Just like Gladys and her access to the limitless DMV database, Juanita Moralles, the hotel housekeeper, could provide a unique service.

In Spanish he said, “Do you know anyone who works at The Palmetto Inn?”

After a pause, in Spanish, she replied, “I think so. Let me make a call. What do you need?”

“I’ve got a picture that I think was taken in one of the rooms there but I want to see if they can narrow my search a bit.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Give me a few hours.”

He didn’t really have a few hours, but wasn’t about to push the housekeeper like he did Phineous. He could rebuild that bridge by hooking the poor sap up with loose women. If he pushed Juanita the wrong way, she’d clam up and make sure neither he nor Blu could get any information out of her or any of her friends in the Latin community—a really bad idea.

He walked to a local restaurant, sat at a table, and ordered lunch. America was great for a lot of reasons—one of them being that no one really knew how much money anyone else had. Guys driving Bentleys couldn’t afford to fill up their gas tanks. The little old lady in the rusted-out Chevy had ten million in gold. And a biker with worn jeans and a scruffy leather vest like himself could be sitting on several hundred thousand dollars in the Caymans that no one else, including the U.S. government, knew about.

He drank black coffee at a local watering hole and thought about Maureen and how scared she must be. It was how he kept his edge. He couldn’t afford to let himself relax until she was safe and her kidnapper was dead.

Juanita called Crome within the hour. She did have a friend who worked there. And she started her shift at five.