Dangerous Friends (A Carlos McCrary novel Book 4) Read online

  Dangerous Friends

  A Carlos McCrary Novel

  By Dallas Gorham

  Dangerous Friends is a work of fiction. Copyright 2015, 2016 by Seven Oaks Publishing LLC, all rights reserved.

  Excerpt from I’m No Hero Copyright 2014 by Seven Oaks Publishing LLC, all rights reserved. Excerpt from Six Murders Too Many Copyright 2014 by Seven Oaks Publishing LLC, all rights reserved. Excerpt from Double Fake, Double Murder Copyright 2014, 2015 by Seven Oaks Publishing LLC, all rights reserved. Excerpt from Quarterback Trap Copyright 2015 by Seven Oaks Publishing LLC, all rights reserved. Excerpt from Don’t Blink Twice, copyright 2016 by Seven Oaks Publishing LLC, all rights reserved. This excerpt has been set for this edition and may not reflect the final content of the edition when released.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents in all of the above works are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental. No part of any of these stories may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9915851-9-9

  16051801

  Cover art by Michael By Design www.MichaelByDesign.com

  Dangerous Friends

  A Carlos McCrary Novel

  By Dallas Gorham

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  Hello from Dallas Gorham

  Also by Dallas Gorham

  I’m No Hero

  Double Fake, Double Murder

  Quarterback Trap

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 1

  The burner phone rang five times before James Ponder fumbled it out of his pocket to answer.

  “What took you so long?” the familiar raspy voice asked. “You think this is a hobby or something, Lamp Post?”

  “No, no, no, Mr… I mean, Redwood.” Ponder caught himself in time—only code names over the phone. Or at least over that phone. “No,” he finished lamely. He knew that Redwood would reject any explanation and he couldn’t tell him the truth. “Sorry.”

  “Are you high again?”

  “No, no. I haven’t had a hit all day.” Ponder inhaled, held his breath, and admired the beauty of the swirling smoke that rose from the hand-rolled cigarette.

  “Hmph. You must to be clear-headed,” Redwood said. “There are millions of dollars at stake here. As well as the future of our planet. The package is on the way. It’s due to arrive tonight. We can’t change the schedule now. I’ve already made the arrangements from my end. Don’t fail me again, Lamp Post.”

  Ponder released the smoke from his lungs. “What time do we make the delivery?” He coughed.

  “I’m waiting to hear from my other source. I’ll call Kinetic with the time. But you do have the present ready, right?”

  “It’s ready. We’re just waiting for the, uh, package to arrive. I have good news. You know how I complained that we need more dedicated volunteers. I may have another recruit for the, uh, the real work we do.” He took another hit. Man, this is good shit.

  “Listen, Lamp Post. I told you, three people are enough. The more people involved, the trickier the security gets.”

  “This girl is different, Redwood. She’s smart, she’s dedicated to the cause, and she comes from a rich family.” And she’s been screwing my brains out since that party last Halloween. “I’ve worked her around for five months, bringing her along. She’s a perfect addition. I think it’s time we brought her in on the operation.”

  “No. We planned this too long to bring in an unknown quantity. She’d be a wild card. Leave her out of this. Watch her reaction to the operation. Then you’ll know if she’s as dedicated as you think.”

  “Well, uh, there’s a little complication…”

  Redwood remained silent. Ponder hated that about him. When the boss wanted an explanation, he didn’t ask the question like a normal person. No, he waited and let Ponder stew.

  “She already knows about the operation. Look, I swear she’ll be all right with it. She’s a true believer, man. Besides, I told her it would be a peaceful protest.” Ponder didn’t tell Redwood that he had bragged about the up-coming operation while he snorted cocaine with the girl. Then when she asked for details, he’d invented some harebrained explanation.

  “What kind of protest did you tell her it was?”

  “I told her we would drape a banner across the front of the package with our message on it.”

  Redwood sighed. “It can’t be helped. That train has left the station.” He laughed at his little pun. “You realize that you have placed the whole project at risk—again.”

  “Yes, sir, but it will be all right, I swear.”

  “And you realize that if you’re wrong about her, there will be serious repercussions. For both of you.”

  “She’s okay. I’m certain of it. She’s coming over here later to wait for Kat—Kinetic’s call.”

  “Remember, Lamp Post. Clear-headed. If I find you’ve gotten high again, I shall be… disappointed. I don’t want anyone injured or killed this time; it causes too much backlash. You remember how much I hate to be disappointed, don’t you?” The line went dead.

  Ponder’s stomach knotted. He rubbed the stump of his left little finger. A few years earlier Ponder had accidentally killed a night watchman during an assignment. Redwood had sent two thugs after him. One thug had held his wrist while the other had cut off his little finger with a hack saw. “Just follow orders next time,” the man with the hack saw had told him. “Redwood don’t like it when you improvise.”

  Closing the flip phone, Pon
der giggled and took one last drag on the joint before crushing it in the ashtray. The girl would bring Oxycodone to keep him happy when the marijuana wore off. And later Ka-BOOM! He would see the carnage and feel the adrenaline rush, and Redwood couldn’t blame him for the deaths.

  Chapter 2

  The girl picked up her phone and punched reject. “I feel kinda bad sending Daddy’s calls straight to voicemail like that.”

  Ponder wrapped his arm around her waist and tried to reach her phone. “Why don’t you turn it off? You’re an adult for crissakes. This isn’t the nineteenth century, and your father doesn’t own you. You must assert your own personal identity.” He spoke with the certainty of long practice and much repetition of well-memorized slogans. “You don’t have to be defined by your subservient role to a patriarchal paradigm. You deserve your privacy. We deserve our privacy.” Ponder rubbed her breast with his chin, tickling her nipple with his beard.

  She rolled onto her side to face him, grabbed his hand, and kissed the palm. James had such a… a… facility with words. If only he wasn’t such an adrenaline junky. “I know, James, but… Daddy’s gonna be worried, you know?” She leaned backwards and set the phone on the nightstand. “Besides, Katherine or Steven might call.”

  She wrapped James’s arm around her waist and rolled onto his chest, straddling his body. James was a more persuasive speaker than she was, but she was better at persuading with her body. She wiggled her hips, giggled, and nuzzled his neck under the beard. “That got your attention. I feel that.” She ground her hips against him.

  James wrapped both arms around her waist. “Omigod, that feels good.”

  She nibbled his earlobe. “It could feel even better.” She rolled off and reached for her purse. “You’d better put on a condom. I brought some.”

  James lay there with his eyes closed. “Not this time. What are the odds, just this once?”

  “We discussed this. We won’t bring children into this world yet. Not until we clean up some of the pollution.” She nibbled on his earlobe.

  “I’ll put on a condom, if you turn off your phone. Don’t worry, we have my phone. I don’t get as many calls as you do.”

  “What if Steven calls me instead of you?” She noticed Ponder’s eyes narrow. “What, you’re jealous? That’s so bourgeois.” She hoped she had used the unfamiliar word right. She’d learned it in her poli-sci class the week before. “You know how pissy Steven gets if we don’t answer his calls no matter what we’re doing. Or whom.” She smiled.

  “Forget Steven.”

  “We can’t do that, especially not now.” She stroked his beard. “James, the project will happen any time, maybe tonight. We gotta be ready and available. Are you that easily distracted?” She blew in his ear. “Speaking of being ready and available…” She ran her fingers down his chest. “I’ll bet I can keep your attention, even if the phone does ring.”

  Chapter 3

  When John Babcock carried his coffee into my office, he looked as nervous as a nudist at a church picnic.

  “Sit down, John. You said on the phone that you had a family emergency. What happened?”

  “Mickie’s in trouble, Chuck.”

  “Your daughter Michelle, right? I met her at Hank’s Super Bowl party.”

  “Yeah. She’s a freshman at the University of Atlantic County.”

  “What’s her full name?” I asked.

  “Michelle Teresa Babcock.”

  My heart twanged when John told me her middle name. I’d once dated a woman named Teresa. I wrote it down anyway. “What’s her major?”

  “Environmental studies.”

  I wrote that down too. “How can I help you?”

  John’s chin dropped to his chest. “Mickie’s disappeared. I called Hank, and he told me to call you. Said you helped him out of a tough spot a while back.”

  Good old Hank. He’d sent me several clients in the last year. “Disappeared how?”

  “She doesn’t answer her phone. I emailed and texted her. She doesn’t reply.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Eighteen. She’ll be nineteen this summer.”

  “When’s her birthday?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe none. It’s the way I work as a private investigator. I get lots of facts. When’s her birthday?”

  “Geez, I don’t know. Sometime next summer—June I think. Penny would know.” Penny was Hank’s daughter and John’s wife.

  “Never mind. I’ll get that later. Where does Michelle live?”

  “At home. She commutes to school.”

  “What’s your address?”

  He told me and I wrote it down. “How long has Michelle been out of touch?”

  “Since Saturday morning. I think something bad’s happened to her.”

  “What does Penny think?”

  His lips twisted in a half smile. “Her maternal instincts tell her that Mickie’s okay. Penny thinks maybe she skipped out with a boyfriend. She reminded me that we did that when we were in college.”

  “But you don’t think she’s with a boyfriend,” I said.

  “She doesn’t have a steady boyfriend.”

  “Sometimes parents don’t know their kids as well as they think.” I smiled to soften the comment. “Face it, John. Legally, Michelle is an adult. There are things you and Penny don’t know about her. She has a right to her privacy even if she does live at home.”

  “Mickie may be eighteen, but she’s not really an adult. I remember when I was her age. I didn’t have a lick of sense. Frankly, she’s naïve about the real world.” He lifted his coffee. “Maybe Penny and I’ve been overprotective. Okay, maybe I’ve been overprotective. You’ll understand when you have daughters.” He sipped his coffee.

  “When’s the last time you heard from her?” I asked.

  “Couple of days ago. Last Friday night at dinner Mickie told us she and a few friends from the university were gonna build houses for Habitat for Humanity during spring break. A local motel out in west Port City agreed to house the volunteers so they wouldn’t have a long commute through rush-hour traffic. At least that’s what she said. She packed a bag and left Saturday morning. Nobody’s heard from her since.”

  I looked at my wall clock. “Okay, it’s two-thirty. Why come to me now?”

  “This morning I had some business out near the Everglades. I called Habitat for Humanity and got the address where they’re building this week. I was gonna drop by and surprise Mickie. Take her and her friends to lunch.”

  “Good for you.” I smiled. “A great way for Dad to check up on his little girl.”

  He shrugged and grinned. “When I showed up at the job site, she wasn’t there. She hadn’t been there at all.”

  “So she played hooky today?”

  “Unh-uh. She wasn’t there Saturday or Sunday either,” John said. “She hasn’t ever worked for Habitat for Humanity. She’s not on their volunteer list.”

  Chapter 4

  John met Snoop and me at the door. “Penny would be here if she could. Her school’s spring break is a different week than UAC, so she’s at work.” He raised an eyebrow at Snoop.

  I put a hand on Snoop’s shoulder. “John, this is Ray Snopolski. He’s a retired Port City police detective who works with me from time to time.”

  Snoop shook John’s hand. “Everybody calls me Snoop.”

  “You gonna help Chuck find my daughter?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  John gestured us in. “Her room’s down this way.”

  Michelle’s bedroom was the second door on the right. The heavy perfume scent hit me before I turned on the light. When I did, it looked like her closet had exploded. “John, did burglars ransack her room?”

  He shrugged. “What can I say? Neat, she ain’t.”

  Piled against the front wall to the left of the door were assorted shoes and sandals. Textbooks and notebooks littered the bed; more were stacked in a corner of the room. An HD t
elevision had a string of Chinese paper lanterns hung across the corner of the screen. Bras and a swimsuit were piled into another corner, surrounded by a herd of blouses and pants in various colors. One corkboard displayed photos, a sparkly bow made of translucent red ribbon, posters, two blue first-prize ribbons, and assorted medals on tiny chains. Wildlife pictures in idyllic settings covered another corkboard. A pile of clean clothes was stacked behind the door. I knew they were clean because they were folded. I figured Penny had laundered them. Two thermal glasses, half-filled with amber liquid, sat abandoned on a nightstand next to a one-liter carafe filled with seashells. Two half-burned scented candles filled the rest of the crowded space.

  I turned to John. “We won’t do a thorough search. It takes hours to search a room properly.” And this one could take days, I thought. “If Michelle’s in trouble, I can’t afford to spend the time. We’ll do a quick-and-dirty for clues to where she might be, but it will take time. Why don’t you wait in the living room?”

  When he left, I turned to Snoop. “You have two daughters. Why would any woman need three hair dryers?”

  “Small, medium, and large? Your guess is as good as mine.”

  I smelled the liquid in the thermal glasses. Some sort of cola diluted with melted ice from the last Ice Age. It must have been diet cola; otherwise, there would have been mold growing in the glasses. “My god, how can anyone live like this?”

  “What can I say? She’s a teenager. You should see my girls’ rooms. They’re just as bad. Maybe it’s their hormones.”

  I smiled. “First go through the pockets of every piece of clothing in the closet. Then check the clothing scattered all over the place. After you check a piece, hang it up so we can keep it straight. I’ll start with the bookcase.”

  A four-shelf bookcase was crammed against one wall. The top shelf bent under a stack of Mother Earth News and another of Rolling Stone. The next shelf held a few dozen CDs by groups I’d never heard of and a portable player. Michelle would have transferred the CDs to an iPod or smartphone or whatever teenagers use to listen to music nowadays. The third shelf groaned with the weight of a half-dozen textbooks. Global Sustainable Energy: Past, Present, and Future. I read the book jacket. “Students will explore the global history of energy sources, both renewable and non-renewable. Renewable energy sources will be investigated and environmentally sound solutions to future needs will be analyzed.” It was already giving me a headache when I remembered the tortured prose in my own college textbooks. I flipped the pages. Nothing hidden inside.