Flight 12: A Sloane Monroe Thriller (Flight 12 Begins Series Book 4) (2 page)

Three minutes earlier

Nightmarish dreams frequently infested my mind, but tonight was different. The faint, yet unmistakable sound of a woman shrieking through the bleak, sleepy darkness seemed all too real. I sat up, flicked on the lamp, peered at my friend Maddie resting in the bed next to mine, her eyes closed, sleeping soundly.

“Did you hear something?” I whispered.

No response.

“Maddie! Can you hear me?”

Still nothing.

A smidgen of white foam protruded from one of her ears, and I remembered—Maddie was a light sleeper—she always traveled with ear-plugs. I scooted off my bed and onto hers, lifted the foam from one of her ears. Tried again.

Maddie slid her eye mask to the side, opened one eye halfway, adjusted to the light. “What? Where? What’s going on?”

“I thought I heard a woman scream just now. Did you hear anything?”

“You sure the woman wasn’t
you
? You do that sometimes, you know.”

“It wasn’t me. It sounded like it came from the room next door. I’m going to check it out.”

Maddie raised a brow. “Did you ever think it might be a couple, enjoying some … ahh … time together, some
alone
time?”

“Trust me—it wasn’t
that
kind of scream.”

Maddie stretched one arm into the air, yawned. “If you say so.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said.  

Her eye slid closed again and she mumbled, “Good luck.”

I slipped into the hallway, sprinted in the direction of the sound. I knocked on the door to the room next to ours. Waited. Nothing. I jiggled the door handle. Locked. Seemed right, considering most hotel room doors locked automatically.

A key card projected from a rectangular slot above the door latch. Odd. Like it had been left there by someone too boozed up to remember to remove it once the door opened. I took the card out, pushed it back in again. A light no bigger than a sliver of rice flashed red, then green. I tried the handle again. Success.

I tiptoed inside, tried not to make myself known on the off chance Maddie was right and I’d interrupted some kind of vigorous mating ritual. At the end of a long hallway, I bobbed my head around the corner. The pale light shining through the oversized window provided a glimpse into what money could buy if you had money to throw away. The penthouse was exquisite, about twice the size of ours, and we’d splurged on eight-hundred square feet.

I saw no one at first. Heard nothing. Maybe it
had
all been a realistic figment of my imagination. Maybe they’d gone to sleep. I considered what might happen if I got caught sneaking around someone else’s room. How would I explain myself? Who would believe me?    

The faintest noise echoed from the far end of the suite. Someone groaning. There wasn’t anything pleasurable or sexual about it. I listened, heard the same harrowing noise a second time, decided there would be no rest until I confirmed whether or not there was any truth to my suspicions.

I passed through the living room to the bedroom, unprepared for what I was about to see. A man was slumped on the floor, his back propped against the side of the bed. His cell phone hung from his limp hand. Blood stained his face, masking me from getting a good look at him. A fairly serious-looking weapon rested on the floor next to him. I pressed two fingers to the side of his neck. No pulse. And he wasn’t breathing. I glanced at his phone, at the name of the person he tried to reach out to before leaving this world and entering the next. If in fact there was a next for this guy. The name on the Caller ID was Johnny. First name only. No last name.

I pushed on what was left of a splintered bathroom door with a finger. A woman was hunched in the corner, one hand pressed to her chest, as if to keep in what blood hadn’t already spilled out. A gun rested on her lap. One of the walls was sprayed red, like a sprinkler set to full blast.

The woman faced forward, her eyes still, frozen.  

She blinked.

She was alive.  

I rushed to her side. “Hang on, I’ll call the police.”

She pressed her eyes closed. Tears trickled out of the corners. “No…police.”

“You need help. You’ve lost a lot of blood. If I don’t call someone right now, you’ll die.”

“No police,” she repeated. “Rocco…he…”

“Who’s Rocco? Why was the man in the bedroom trying to kill you? Why is he dead? I’m a private investigator. Please. Let me help.”

“334XY7.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand. What are you trying to tell me?”

“Key’s on the nightstand. Get out of here. Hurry.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Not…safe.”

As I clutched her phone in my hand, the woman’s head slumped to the side. Her eyes closed again—only this time, they didn’t reopen.

Footsteps. Someone was coming. I sized up the cabinet to my left. I had no choice. For now, it would have to do. I manipulated my body inside, reeled the door back, waited.

“Carmine, you done yet?” a man said. “Boss said fifteen minutes tops. We gotta get the body and get outta here. Carmine?”

Upon discovering Carmine was no longer amongst the living, the man panicked. “Carmine! Wake up! Get up! Come on! Please! This can’t happen. This isn’t happening.”

What part of “bullet to the head and it’s light out” was confusing to this guy?

The man was crying now, feverishly pounding away at something that chirped every time he touched it.

“Boss,” the man said. “We got a problem. Carmine’s dead.” There was a pause, and then, “I don’t know about the girl. Haven’t seen her. Hold on. Lemme check.”

The man entered the bathroom, sighed, said, “Girl’s dead too. What should I do? I dunno what to do.”

A second male voice came through a phone that had obviously been placed on speaker. It was smooth, orchestrated. “How did Carmine die, Johnny?”

“His face is all bloody … and … uhh … Carmine shot her, and I think she shot him.”

He
thinks
? How could it be any more obvious? The guy had an unmistakably large entry wound on his forehead.  

“Johnny, I need you to calm down,” the voice inside the phone said. “I’m sorry about your brother. Unless you want to end up like him, you need to get a hold of yourself. Now. Understand?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“You on a burner phone?”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. 

“Good. I need you to do something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Check Rachel’s body. Find her gun.”

Rachel
. I had a first name.

“I’m staring right at her. It’s not here.”

He was right. It wasn’t there.
I
had it.

“It has to be.” The voice inside the phone was becoming impatient, irritated. “They couldn’t have exchanged fire unless she had a gun. Look harder.”

“I see Carmine’s,” Johnny said.  

“I’m not asking about Carmine’s. You and Carmine failed me tonight. I gave you a simple task. You didn’t complete it. You let me down.”

“I’m sorry, Boss.”

“Stay there. I’m sending someone over to help you out of this mess.”

The call ended. I expected Johnny to look for the gun as instructed. He didn’t. He made another call.

“Lou, Carmine’s dead in Rachel’s hotel room,” he said. “Rachel shot him. Boss said to wait here. He’s sending someone over. Who’s he sending? What does that mean?” Johnny paused, then said, “He wouldn’t do that, Lou. I know he wouldn’t. He’s been good to me. You don’t mean it.”

Another pause.

“Okay, okay,” Johnny said. “Empty suit, I get it. I’ll leave. Lay low for a while.” 

Johnny shuffled out of the room. I waited. Not long enough to get caught by the next man or men due to show up, just enough to give me a fighting chance at getting out of there.

I’d pushed the cabinet door open a few inches, heard a female’s voice. “Sloane, you here?”

Maddie’s curious tone vibrated down the hallway. Before I could respond, she said, “Who are you? Hey! What the—get your hands off me!”

I thrust the cabinet door open, rushed forward, Rachel’s gun leading the way. “Get your hands off her. Now!”

Maddie and Johnny had their hands wrapped around each other’s throats. From my vantage point, it was hard to tell who was winning. Johnny glanced back just enough to see the missing gun had been found. His chubby fingers released Maddie’s neck. I tossed Rachel’s phone to her. “Go back to our room. Call the cops.”

“Oh, no. I’m not leaving you here,” Maddie said. “Not with this guy.”

“I’ll be fine, Maddie. Go.”

She leaned back against the wall in her typical defiant manner and made the call from where she stood.

Johnny sized me up. I returned in kind. He was dressed in black slacks, what looked like a double XL polo shirt, a gold chain necklace, and loafers, the kind with the ridiculous-looking tassels on top. With his school-boy haircut and soft eyes, he looked more like a giant teddy bear than a hardened criminal.

“Was it you?” Johnny asked. “Did you kill my brother? Do you know Rachel? You the one she’s workin’ for? The two of yas in coots?”

Seriously. How stupid was this guy?

“You mean
cahoots
?”   

He nodded. “Yeah, what you said.”

“You first,” I replied. “Who are
you
? Who sent you here? And why is Rachel dead?”

As I spoke, Johnny started taking small steps backward.  

“Stop moving,” I said. “Answer my questions.”

He ignored my request, twisted the knob on the balcony door, his eyes still locked on me. He stepped outside. “You don’t get it. I’m already dead. You. Me. We all are. There’s no running. No escaping from
him
.”

“You’re alive now. Let’s talk about this. Maybe I can help you.”

Johnny shook his head. “No one can help me. Not you, not the cops. No one.”

He reached back, curled his fingers around the black iron bars lining the balcony, turned, and dove head first over the side.

I didn’t look.

There was no need.

We were fourteen stories up.

I knew what had happened.

“I’ll never second guess you again.” Maddie’s long, loose blond curls flapped in the wind as she stood at the edge of the balcony, her tall, athletic frame staring down at the splattered wreckage below. She was unfazed. As the head ME in Salt Lake City, Utah, Maddie’s cool demeanor didn’t surprise me.   

“Whatever I’ve managed to get us involved in, I get the feeling we shouldn’t be here. Someone else is coming, and it isn’t the police.”

“You know this has an organized crime vibe, right?” she asked, her fingers curled into air quotes. “Maybe you should call—”

I crossed my arms in front of me. “I’m
not
calling him.”  

“Why not? We’re in New York. Giovanni lives in New York. He has connections, especially
these
connections. If you’re in trouble, he can help. You know he’ll help you.”

For all I knew, Rachel’s death was his doing, his order. I yanked on her arm. “Maddie, we have to get back to our room. Now.”

I scanned the hallway as we stepped out, detected two video cameras.
Smile, you’re every move is being recorded.

“We did our duty,” Maddie said. “We called it in. Let’s go—leave the hotel. This has nothing to do with us.”

 Two days earlier I’d been trying to decide whether I wanted to fly to New York City with Maddie or not. She’d been asked to teach a class at a conference for the state’s coroners association. I thought the trip would be peaceful, serene, granting me the opportunity of putting my profession as a private investigator on hiatus. I should have stayed home.

“We can’t leave. I detected two surveillance videos in the hall. And there’s probably more. The cops will see us entering Rachel’s room and then exiting several minutes later. We can’t hide from this.”

“What are we going to do then?” she asked.

“Give a statement and change hotels. You’ll teach your seminar as planned. Then we’ll go home. I have a feeling we’ve just walked into something big, much bigger than either of us realizes.”

It didn’t take long for the hotel to become inundated by the NYPD. Maddie and I were grilled, forced to recall the events as they happened, second by tedious second. As far as stories went, they seemed to believe mine. And why wouldn’t they? Everything I said checked out. And everything I
hadn’t
said remained tucked inside the vault for later. The cops seemed legit. Maybe they were, or maybe they were dirty, on someone’s payroll, which meant telling the whole truth could have exposed me to far more danger than keeping my mouth shut did. 

Until I had a better grasp on what went down and why, I played the naïve card, kept certain details to myself, details like the last words Rachel uttered before she died. I wanted to check things out on my own, discover why it was so important to her to spout off a series of random letters and numbers I assumed I’d find on a license plate in the hotel’s parking garage.

I offered the cops a few morsels to keep them satisfied. I turned over the gun I found on Rachel’s lap along with her cell phone, and I admitted I’d overheard Johnny say someone else was called in to clean up the mess. They asked me if I knew who “someone else” was. I didn’t. I only knew an hour had passed, and the man of mystery and his cohorts hadn’t showed. With cops raiding the place like a sudden infestation of curious termites, it wasn’t hard to see why the mysterious one had remained in the shadows—watching, waiting.

I told the cops Johnny had called himself an “empty suit,” a term I wasn’t familiar with. They clued me in. In short, it referred to a person who didn’t have much to offer. 

While Maddie and I waited to be released, I overheard one of the cops say Rachel’s suite was registered to a woman named Eleanora Fagan. The cops took this as a solid lead, no questions asked. Some historians they were. I had to admit, it pleased me to be the one to clue
them
in for a change. Eleanora Fagan was the real name of song legend Billie Holliday. An alias. Was the name Rachel an alias too?

Questions impregnated my mind. Who was Rachel, and what was the real reason she was at the hotel tonight? The skimpy outfit she wore indicated she’d come expecting a late-night tryst. This could have meant she was a call girl. Except for a call girl, she seemed all wrong. Her nails were manicured and clean, her hair perfectly styled. Her shoes were new, the kind you’d find on the most elite of society. There was nothing cheap or trashy about her.  

An hour later, our personal information was taken, and we were free to go. The question was—where? We checked out of the hotel and headed outside, waited what seemed like an eternity for the valet to pull our rental car around. We agreed to stay the next night at the hotel hosting Maddie’s conference. Once her class was over, we’d fly home.  

A section of concrete sidewalk several feet from where we stood was still cordoned off. Johnny’s body had been removed, but the bloody stains remained, still intact, on display under a shimmering street lamp in full view of the public. The whole thing didn’t sit well with me. My gut said to walk away, like Maddie suggested earlier. This wasn’t my case, wasn’t my problem. Whether it was or wasn’t, Rachel’s murder was premeditated. Carmine had been sent there to kill her.

I wanted to know why.

I placed a hand on Maddie’s arm, considered what I was about to say, and how I wanted to say it. It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be well received no matter what I said. “I need to check on something before we go.”

She placed a hand on her hip, frowned. “Oh, come on. I know what you’re doing.”

“It’s no big deal. I’ll be right back, okay?”

“I’ve seen that look too many times, Sloane. I thought we were letting the cops figure things out. This isn’t our fight.”

“I want to take a look at the parking garage. It will only take a few minutes.”

Both hands were planted on her hips now. “The car will be here any second. What do you want me to do? I can’t sit here.” She pointed to a sign indicating the lane was for through traffic only. No waiting allowed. Period.  

“Drive out of here and pull over somewhere,” I said.

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Wait for my call. I’ll have you pick me up.”

“Sloane, think about it. This guy, the one Johnny said was coming, he could be out there, anywhere.”

How would leaving lessen the risk? If we
were
being watched, we’d be followed to the next hotel. I didn’t want to spend the next day looking over my shoulder, wondering if every guy on the street, every man in every café was eyeballing me in a way I deemed suspicious.  

“I need to do this,” I repeated. “Five minutes, okay?”

I sprinted in the opposite direction, entered the parking garage, and walked from one car to the next, trying to match the numbers with what Rachel said to me. It was the middle of the week, which meant the garage wasn’t filled to capacity. A few minutes and several license plates later, I emerged from the garage empty-handed.

I picked the phone out of my pocket, prepared to call Maddie, then stopped when I spotted a large, metal sign protruding from a patch of dirt in front of the hotel next door. The sign indicated the hotel was closed for renovations, with an expected reopening date two months from now. There was a picture of what the new, upgraded rooms were expected to look like. The sign was radiant and had a catchy tagline, but my eyes wandered once I noticed a second vacant parking garage beneath the closed hotel. It was too alluring to resist, so I didn’t.

Only two cars were visible when I descended the steps of the garage. I walked to the first. It wasn’t a match. The second car was parked at the opposite end. It was silver, a two-seater convertible with BMW and Z4 emblems displayed on the back. I checked the plate. 334XY7.

We had ourselves a winner.