Collared: A Gin & Tonic Mystery Read online

  It was weird how much she liked that, the sense of belonging she hadn’t known she didn’t have, before.

  The martini appeared in front of her, as well as a small dish of Mary’s special hickory-and-honey roasted peanuts that were usually two dollars a bowl. He wasn’t really pissed, then. With Tonica it was sometimes hard to tell.

  She looked up and studied her occasional sparring partner. He was hard to figure out, period. Truth was, Tonica looked as though he would be more comfortable working the door at a nightclub than mixing drinks at an upscale neighborhood bar. Of average height, his shoulders and chest broad and obviously muscled even under his plain green sweater, the white towel slung over one shoulder contrasting with the darkness of his hair, cut in a neat flattop that emphasized the square lines of his face, and the sharp shape of his nose. It wasn’t a handsome face, but it drew attention and, oddly, an immediate sense of familiarity, like you’d known him years ago, and forgotten until now.

  Not her type, but she liked him. No, it was better to say that she respected him. He didn’t deal in bullshit. Most of her working hours, all she got handed was bullshit.

  The next time someone swore to her that they’d sent the papers, or they were certain they had given her all the names to be invited, she was going to . . .

  She was going to smile, and assure them that she would handle it, no matter what. Because that was what they paid her to do.

  Ginny swiveled her stool until she was facing away from the bar, and let her gaze rest on the room as Mary’s started to fill up with the evening crowd, as though by not looking at her phone, it would ring.

  She knew most of the people who were here, tonight. Because the bar was on a side street off the main drag, most people just wandered on by. You had to know about Mary’s to walk all the way down to the end of the street, to the building that still looked like a storefront, with large glass windowpanes and a double-paned door under an arched front. It had been a dry goods store, once upon a time, back before Seattle came and swallowed up the town in its ever-expanding girth. Thankfully, the owner had been more interested in making Mary’s more a nice, peaceful place for locals than a hotspot—except on trivia night, when you got folk coming in from the city proper, to try their luck. Berto, Mary’s self-proclaimed trivia master and emcee, was that good.

  Ginny tried not to miss trivia night—she freely admitted that she was a tad competitive—but the rest of the time she came here to relax after a day of plunking away at her computer. Although she was here less often, now that she had Georgie to keep her company at home.

  Tonight, though, even surrounded by familiar faces, she was too distracted to relax, hyperaware of every movement in the bar, of Miss Penny brushing against her legs as the cat wended her way back across the floor, of the small sounds that filled Mary’s, the clink of glassware and the waterfall sound of conversations that tonight were too loud, too intrusive, rather than becoming the usual white noise that helped her relax.

  Her thoughts wouldn’t settle, that was the problem. Usually she was all about focus, but she’d been waiting for two days for that would-be client to call back and confirm the contract, and there’d only been silence.

  Two days was a long time in her business. It meant they had reconsidered, no longer needed her.

  Ginny took another sip of her drink and scanned the room again, her gaze resting on Tonica while he chatted with a pair of brunettes down at the other end of the bar, measuring them each a glass of white wine.

  Heck with that, she decided firmly. If the client wasn’t interested, then she wasn’t going to play the lovesick teenager and mope around the phone. That wasn’t why she’d founded her own company, to wait for things to happen.

  So. She’d take the rest of the night off, stop worrying, and start fresh in the morning. Maybe she’d call Mac, see if her former co-worker could escape long enough to get together over the weekend. That would be fun. It had been a busy couple of months, between adding a dog’s schedule to her own, and trying to deal with her parents, and . . .

  No. Not thinking about her parents. Breathe in, breathe out. Let the bad thoughts flow away. Her parents would make her crazy if she let them, but only if she let them. Breathe in, breathe out. Think of Georgie asking to play fetch, or bringing her the leash to go for a walk, of the slippery-smooth feel of her tawny fur, and the heavy way she leaned against you when she was feeling content. Good thoughts. Unstressed thoughts.

  It almost worked, when the sound of someone slamming his drink down on the counter next to her shattered her newfound calm, making her turn abruptly.

  “Hey, calm down, guy,” Teddy was saying, having abandoned the brunettes at the first sign of trouble, wiping up the spill without taking his eyes off the customer. “Calm down.”

  “I am calm. Damn it.”

  “Your calm just spilled half of your drink,” Teddy pointed out.

  The guy looked down at his hand, as though only now noticing that the back of his hand was covered in Scotch. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry. I just . . . it’s been a particularly crappy day.” He shook his head, wiping his hand off with his napkin. “Half my staff’s out, and we just had a crisis hit that I don’t have time to handle. Christ, does it always have to come in bundles?”

  “Let me refill your drink,” was all Tonica said, lifting the glass out of the guy’s hand so easily he didn’t even seem to notice it was gone.

  Normally, the rule in Mary’s was that a bartender confession is the same as a priest’s—you leave them alone and you don’t interrupt. But Ginny thought that she knew this guy—he was on one of the trivia teams. Sports specialist, with a real head for numbers and logic problems. Not her type—late fifties, probably, and too lean—but handsome if you liked the sharp-faced ones. She couldn’t remember his name, but they’d traded salutes across the bar a time or three, and in Mary’s, that was the same as a formal introduction. So it wasn’t really eavesdropping, was it?

  Listening to someone else’s problems was always more interesting that being morose about your own, anyway.

  He was leaning across the bar now, spilling his guts to Tonica, just like everyone else who came in here—except her. “Mind you, I run a tight ship. That’s the only way to survive in real estate, these days. It’s just that I don’t know what to do. I mean, Joe’s an adult, he’s not senile, hell, he founded the company, so who am I to say he can’t take a few days off? His health hasn’t been good, I’d be just as happy if he did slow down a bit, let us pick up the slack.”

  Teddy made some kind of encouraging, comforting noise.

  “But this? He’s been gone for two days, says he’s taking some time off and then disappears without an itinerary or a phone number where we can reach him—and without handing over the papers he had been working on. We need to file them on Monday, or this deal goes south like it was the last flight to San Diego!”

  The guy took another sip of his new Scotch, and exhaled. “Hell, maybe it is early-onset senility. And of course, all this happens when we’ve got other things on the table I have to keep an eye on. I swear—I’m too busy to deal with this right now.”

  Ginny’s ears pricked up at that. Her company specialized in doing things for people too busy to do for themselves. Distraction and a night off be damned, this guy was a potential customer on the hoof. But it would be tacky to just jump in . . .

  On the other hand, waiting around for a client to call hadn’t done her much good, either, had it? Ginny chewed on her lower lip, debating with herself.

  “I’m at my wit’s end,” the guy said. “Which I guess is why I’m telling you all this. Sorry.”

  “Comes with the job description: pour drinks, nod head, and listen. You don’t have copies of the papers?” Tonica’s voice was calm, soothing—exactly the kind of voice you’d unload your troubles to. Ginny squelched the unkind—and familiar—thought that he’d spent hours practicing that voice to eke out better tips, and kept eavesdropping.

  “Oh, yeah, but t
hey’re copies, you know? Not original signatures. And yeah, I could use them to stall . . . but the moment anything even smells of trouble, the other folk could use that as an excuse to back out.” He took another long drink from his glass and put it down, this time with a deliberately careful thunk. “Joe and I worked too long and too hard for the deal to fall through. I have to figure out where Joe is, get the papers, and get them filed on time.”

  Ginny had never been in the drama club, but she knew an entrance cue when she heard it. With a mental apology to her mother for the breach of manners she was about to commit, she slid off her stool, and leaned into their space. “Maybe I can help?”

  The look she got from Tonica, his eyebrows rising up into his hairline, was nothing short of “woman, what?” disbelief. It would have amused Ginny if she weren’t so focused on selling herself to the potential client.

  “You?” He was the guy from trivia night, but it was clear from his expression that she hadn’t pinged any recognition lights in his memory. She’d be insulted if she wasn’t already in saleswoman mode.

  “My name’s Ginny. Ginny Mallard. I’m sorry, I heard you talking, and”—her card was ready and in his hand before he knew what hit him. He looked down, an automatic instinct, and read the text out loud.

  “Mallard Professional Concierge Services. We Do What You Can’t.” He flipped it over, looking for something more, but there was just a phone number and website: mallardPCS.net.

  “Services?” His tone was almost but not quite insulting, implying that she might be offering something illicit. Ginny bit back her annoyance, brought up her best smile, and explained.

  “We’re a concierge service. Like a hotel offers, you know: making reservations and smoothing away problems, that sort of thing, but for individual clients.”

  Usually she compared herself to a professional butler-slash-personal assistant, but that didn’t seem appropriate, here.

  “We handle tasks that our clients don’t have the time—or manpower—to handle.” We, in this case, meant Ginny. “Both professional and personal. Research as well. I’m fully bonded and insured. If you—”

  “Oh. Yes.” There was a gleam in his eye that might have been relief, and his hand swirled the remaining Scotch in his glass, making the ice cubes clink against each other. “God, that would be perfect. What’re your rates?”

  Ginny had not expected it to be that easy. Probably a little too late, warning alarms went off, and she automatically doubled her hourly rate.

  “Two fifty per hour. And I can’t say how long it will take.” Never with a first-time client, anyway. “If you can get me the copies of the papers to be filed, I can—”

  “I can handle the office side of things,” he said, cutting her off firmly. “No, I need you to find my uncle. Find him, without a fuss, and get him back here before Monday.”

  Ginny’s alarms upped their urgency and she could feel her brain backpedaling in panic. What had she just agreed to do? “Oh. Oh, but when I said services, I . . . we’re a concierge service, not a detective agency.”

  “You do research for people, right? I’m not asking you to go interrogate anyone, just . . . track him down.” Her would-be client, having grabbed on to her like a lifeline, wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

  Reluctantly, she nodded. Mallard Professional Services did a fair amount of that: genealogical research, real-estate searches, chasing down random bits of information, although most of her jobs involved running errands and organizing trips for people who didn’t have executive secretaries or administrative assistants to do for them.

  “Just research. Backtrack his receipts or something, see where he was, find out where he’s gone, and tell him to get his ass back here.” He laughed then, a deep, practiced chuckle that seemed at odds with his earlier agitation. “I’m not asking you to clunk him over the head and drag him back, just find him, and remind him he’s got obligations, that he needs to come back to work—or at least hand over the damn papers—so we can sort this all out. That’s all.”

  Ginny’s panic settled a little. If she looked at it that way, he was right, it was all within range of her usual jobs. Certainly no harder than scheduling three teenagers’ summer trips across Europe, which she had done for a client last year. But she must have looked hesitant, still. He licked his lips, and nodded, as though finalizing a discussion with himself.

  “I’ll tell you what, manage this by Monday, before the close of business, and I’ll pay time and a half.”

  Ginny almost stopped breathing. One and a half times . . . or twice what her normal rate was. Not that any of her clients were poor, but . . .

  He held out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”

  Ginny considered that hand for a second. If there hadn’t been witnesses, she might have wiggled out somehow, money or no money. He’d agreed to almost 3k a day way too easily. When people were willing to lay down big money, in her experience, that meant there was a problem she hadn’t been told about, that would bite her, eventually.

  But real estate, even now, was a high-stakes game, right? With all the Microsoft money around town, God knows how many millions he might have riding on this deal. So maybe it was worth it to him, to throw money at the problem and get this done quickly.

  She reminded herself of the non-calling client, and the frustration that had been building in her all week, and swallowed down the unease. It was a new challenge, that was all. A different kind of research. A lot of money.

  And Tonica was standing there, elbow propped on the bar, that “whatcha gonna do now, woman?” look on his face, the same expression he wore when he was convinced her team wouldn’t be able to come up with the right answer on trivia night. That look just pushed her off the cliff.

  She took her new client’s hand, giving it a shake she hoped conveyed confidence and competence. “A day’s retainer now, clear, to get me started.” Eight hours at time and a half . . . yes, that was almost three thousand dollars. That would pay for the rest of Georgie’s vet bills and training, and next month’s mortgage payment, too. “If the check bounces . . .” she started to say, giving herself an out.

  “It won’t.” There was a level of confidence—no, arrogance—in his voice that shut down any objections she might have made, plus the pen her new client pulled out to write the check looked like it was solid silver, with a ruby chip set in the handle. If the check bounced, she thought, she could demand the pen, instead.

  “Jacobs Realty,” she read off the check. “And you’re Jacobs?” That name didn’t sound familiar, at all.

  “Walter Jacobs.” He suddenly seemed to realize that they’d gone about this ass-backward, because his laugh this time held a tinge of embarrassment. “DubJay, people call me.”

  That name rang a bell. Clearly, he had no memory of her at all, despite going head-to-head some trivia nights. Another time, that might have annoyed her. Right now, still in saleswoman mode, she merely held the check in her hand, and smiled.

  “We run—my uncle Joe and I—we run a corporate realty firm,” he continued. “Finding and leasing offices for smaller companies, that sort of thing.”

  Ginny worked out of her apartment, but she nodded like she walked in every morning to a rental office with a receptionist and free coffee. Always make the client believe you’re totally on-key with them; that was the first rule.

  He had let go of her hand, but kept looking her directly in the eyes—so directly that she started to feel uneasy all over again. “Walking in here, all I wanted to do was get a drink and bitch a little to Tony, here. Your offer . . . this was just incredible,” he said. “I really had no idea how I was going to handle everything and not lose my mind.”

  “That’s our specialty, keeping your sanity intact.” She smiled brightly, her natural confidence winning through the doubts, even as she folded the check and put it in her jacket pocket.

  Off to the side and nearly forgotten, Tonica rolled his eyes, just enough for Ginny to see. Her smile didn’t fa
lter, but she could feel something twitch in her cheek. He did that just to drive her insane, she knew it.

  She wondered if he’d even noticed that the guy had gotten his name wrong. Probably.

  “Here”—and DubJay, oblivious to the drama being enacted around them, pulled his cell phone out and started typing. “I’m sending you his digital card: all his particulars are on it, that should be enough to start, right? Anything else you need, just call me, and I’ll get it for you.”

  A tinny little ding from the bar behind her indicated the card had arrived.

  “Yeah, um, okay.” Ginny knew that she should have offered to give him client references, done her whole spiel, but there was already a check in her hands and a deadline, and she was feeling a little like she’d just been hit by a truck.

  “I’ll need his Social Security number, his credit cards, his address, that sort of thing.” Hopefully he wouldn’t put up a fuss: she’d had too many clients who’d expected her to work wonders without any personal information at all.

  “I’ll have his secretary be in touch.”

  As easy as that. DubJay tossed back the last of his Scotch, picked up his overcoat where it had been folded across the barstool, and walked out like he had someone waiting for him by the curb.

  “You look like someone just slapped you with a fish.”

  For once, Tonica’s voice was more sympathetic than mocking, but Ginny didn’t trust it. “That’s pretty much how I feel. Like I just had a run-in with a very large, very confident fish that left me with a large check in my pocket.”

  “DubJay’s like that.”

  “Fishy?” She turned back to her seat, and took another sip of her drink. Her hand shook a little with the weight of the glass.

  “Overpowering.” Tonica waited until she let go of the glass, then took it away and mixed her a new one, without asking.