Scottsdale Squeeze: a romantic light-hearted murder mystery (Laura Black Mysteries Book 2) (24 page)

“There is an old warehouse on Mary Street, south of Curry Road. The warehouse has large pictures of vegetables painted on the side of it. Do you know the one I mean?”

I looked over at Gina and she was nodding her head up and down and giving me a thumbs-up.

“Yes, I know the warehouse.”

“Good, be at this warehouse at ten o’clock and enter through the red door next to the loading docks. You will give me the paper and I will give you your friend. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“If I even see a police car drive by the warehouse, I will kill your friend, and then I will kill you. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

The phone disconnected.

~~~~

The drive to the warehouse district only took about fifteen minutes but it was a world apart from the rest of the city.

Although Scottsdale primarily consists of beautiful housing and exclusive shopping, there is also a part of the city reserved for heavy industry. This is the warehouse and manufacturing district south of Curry Road.

With Scottsdale Road bordering on the west and the Salt River bordering to the south and east, the warehouse district is a tangled jumble of cinder block buildings and chain linked fences topped with rusty barbed wire. It’s as if Scottsdale decided to put all of its crappy buildings in one secluded spot so no one would ever have to look at them.

I drove down Curry road then turned south on Mary Street. About halfway down the street I saw the warehouse. There were warehouses on either side of it and none of them looked like they had been used for some time.

I drove to the warehouse parking lot and saw the large pictures of a tomato, a stalk of celery, and an ear of corn painted on the side of an otherwise white wall. Unfortunately, the paint was so chipped and faded it gave a dead feeling to the building.

I parked my car in one of the twenty empty spaces next to the building. As instructed, I walked around to the loading dock. There was a faded red door next to the loading bays. I gave it a push and found it was unlocked.

I went in the door and was met by two goons. One goon was big and one was small. They both had dark hair and black moustaches. I saw the smaller one was the jerk who’d thrown a hatchet at me and tried to shoot me when they kidnapped Jackie. I saw his left eye was bloodshot and his face was still discolored from the wasp spray I’d used on him.

Seeing him like that made me smile, a little bit. He saw the smile and went into a rage, screaming at me in Spanish. I had readied myself and would have been glad to get into a fight with him. My adrenalin was pumping and I felt like I could have taken on both goons at once.

Unfortunately, the bigger goon got between us and started yelling back at the smaller one. After a few moments, he had the smaller goon calmed down to the point they could lead me back to where Carlos was. The smaller one led the way, with the bigger one trailing behind.

The loading dock had six bays where trucks could back up to the building and load or unload their cargo. From the outside of the building, I had seen none of the bays were being used and from the inside it looked like the building had been shut down for some time.

The shipping area was completely empty with only a couple of broken down forklifts and a rack of old machines of some type. As I looked around, I saw there was nothing on the shelves in the warehouse but a few dusty boxes.

The goons led me around to the office of the shipping department. It had large dirty glass windows looking out over the entire loading dock. The office had the same unused look as the rest of the building.

One of Carlo’s men came out of the office. He patted me down and went through my bag, looking for weapons or recording devices. Since I hadn’t brought anything in, he found I was clean.

The shipping office had a dozen guys in it. Most of them were smoking cigarettes. A couple of them were on their cell phones and the others were standing in groups talking. Carlos was standing next to an old wooden desk that apparently had been used by the warehouse shipping and receiving clerk. He was talking in Spanish to another man and I couldn’t help but notice they were both using a lot of hand gestures.

As Carlos saw me come in, he pointed to a chair. I went to the chair and sat. After finishing with the man, he turned his attention to me.

“You are Laura Black?” he asked.

“I’m Laura Black,” I said. “I think you have something for me.”

Carlos made a signal to one of his man. The man walked across the office to the door of an inner storage room. He unlocked it and went in. With the door open, I could see that the room mostly contained bare meal shelves, with only a few old boxes of copier paper and office supplies. A minute later he reappeared with Jackie, her hands were cuffed behind her back.

She looked better than I had expected. True, her shirt was stained and her hair was a tangled mess. She had large dark circles under her eyes and I could tell she hadn’t slept a lot. But her eyes still had the fire and determination I was used to seeing. She looked like she was still more pissed-off than scared. I took it as a good sign. I knew if we got out of this in one piece, she would end up being OK.

“Now then,” Carlos said, “I think you have something for me.”

I removed the blue folder from the otherwise empty bag hanging over my shoulder. I opened the folder, took out the single document, and held it out to Carlos. He grabbed the document from my hand, almost ripping it. He sat back down at the desk and bent over the document, closely examining it. He read the document a couple of times then examined the signatures and the notary stamps under a large magnifying glass.

Even though I knew the document was genuine, my heart was furiously beating in my chest. I reached behind Jackie’s back and held her cuffed hand. From the way she was gripping it, I knew she was as frightened as I was.

What would happen if Carlos thought the document was a fake? Would he let us go out and try again? Or would he simply shoot us and go to some sort of backup plan-B?

After five long minutes of watching Carlos search for a flaw in the document, he sat up, apparently satisfied. He made a gesture to two of his men and we were both lifted up by our arms and were quick-marched into the same storage room where Jackie had been held.

“Hey,” I shouted. “We did our part, let us go.”

One of the goons pulled out a pair of handcuffs and they tried to put them on me. I put up a good fight but they eventually forced my hands behind my back and cuffed them. As one of the goons was about to slam the door in my face, I yelled out to Carlos.

“Hey, I did everything you asked. I brought you the damn document. Now let us go.”

“I think not,” Carlos said, as he walked up to the entrance of the storage room. “I think if I let you go now, you will only cause me further trouble. When this whole affair is over, I will let you both go. If you want to live, you will shut up and do as you are told. Of course, if you have deceived me, or I find you are working with the police, I will personally kill you both.”

The goon closed the storage room door and locked it from the outside.

Damn.

The light in the room was dim but still enough to see by. I spent two or three minutes looking around the storage room, looking for a way out. Unfortunately, there were no windows and only the one door, which was now locked from the outside. There was a clear space against the wall in the back of the room and this is where Jackie and I sat.

“We may be here for a little while,” I said. “Talk to me. It’s been four days since you were kidnapped. Where have you been? What did they do to you?”

“It’s only been four days? I’ve sort of lost track of time, but it seems a lot longer than that. Well, after they shoved me into the van, they drove me to a house. I don’t know what part of the city it was in, but it was a fairly long drive and it wasn’t in the best neighborhood. They made me go inside and they locked me in a bedroom. It had an adjoining bathroom, so that part was OK. But there were thick burglar bars on the windows and I couldn’t get out. They left me there for a couple of days. I didn’t see anyone but a woman who brought me food. I tried talking to her in both English and in Spanish, but she wouldn’t talk back to me.”

“I can’t imagine what that was like,” I said.

“It totally sucked. But then, it must have been on Sunday, Carlos showed up. That was even worse. First, a man came into my room and handcuffed me. He then took me into the kitchen. Carlos was sitting at the table and he was holding a long knife. At first, he didn’t threaten me with it. He sort of played with it. They sat me in a chair next to him and he started asking questions. While he was talking to me, he kept waving the knife around.”

“What did he ask?”

“He kept wanting to know about a document I had in my bedroom. I told him I didn’t have anything in my bedroom other than the deed to the house and my tax forms. He said he knew I was lying and he would cut me unless I told him what he wanted to know. It was terrifying. I had no idea what he was talking about. He kept getting mad and when he started yelling he would hold the knife close to me, like he was about to slash at my face.”

“What happened then?”

“After he asked me the same question about the document three times and I gave him the same answer three times, he just exploded. He started screaming in Spanish and he ended up breaking everything breakable in the kitchen. He picked up anything he could find and smashed it on the floor or threw it against a wall.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No, for some reason he never hit me or cut me. After he got done breaking everything he could break, he calmed down and started from the beginning. He said I had signed some papers to transfer a property to Spencer-Wade Land Development and he needed the paper back. I told him I knew all about those papers and he could have them. I couldn’t help but to think to myself this would have gone a lot quicker if he had told me what he wanted in the first place.”

“You knew about the transfer documents?”

“Well, sure. When I moved out, I went into Roger’s safe and took my file. It had my birth certificate, the kid’s birth certificates, my will, and my passport. I knew it also had a bunch of other papers, but at the time, I was just trying to pack everything so I could move out. I didn’t have a lot of time and I didn’t want to sit at the desk and try to sort everything out. Honestly, I didn’t even look at what was in the file until Roger started bugging me about it a few months after I moved out.”

“Then you looked in it?”

“Actually, I took the file to my lawyer and had him look at it. He said many of the documents were quite valuable. Apparently, Roger had moved several properties from his business into my name. I knew he often used my name as a placeholder for things he wanted to keep separate from his company and from Howard. One of the papers I had already signed transferred a property back to his company. I assumed at some point Roger would want the papers back or have me sign some new ones to transfer the properties back over to Spencer-Wade Development. I would have been glad to do it but he never asked. Since I was having him send everything to my lawyer first, it might have spooked him. But really, since I was now on my own, I just wanted to know what I was signing, so I could keep everything straight in my mind.”

“You had the papers in a safety deposit box. Terry said he talked to you about it and he didn’t think you had one. What happened?”

“Well, I wouldn’t tell Terry Lennox any of my secrets, but no, I didn’t have one before about a month ago. Terry mentioned he had one for his stocks and bonds. I started thinking if the papers in the file were as valuable as my lawyer said they were, I probably shouldn’t keep them in the house. I asked Pam about it and she said she had a safety deposit box at her bank and I should get one too. I went down to her bank and put the file in a box.”

“What happened with Carlos?”

“Well, once I knew what he was looking for, I told him the papers were in a safety deposit box at the bank. Carlos then started yelling and screaming at me again. He was so angry I thought for sure he’d start hitting me or even cutting me. He wanted to know how to get into the box. I told him the key to the box was in my kitchen. At first he was OK with that, but he got pissed again when I told him I would need to be the one who went down to the bank to get it, since they verify both the signature and the picture. He said I wasn’t going anywhere and I needed to think of another way for him to get the papers.

I was terrified and I thought he was going to kill me. I didn’t know what to say, so I started talking about you. How you were smart, and clever, and you could probably figure out how to get the papers. For some reason he liked the idea you would help him get the papers back and he calmed down.”

“What did you tell him about me?”

“That you were the one who had found me in Mexico. I’m sorry I drug you back into this, but I was so frightened, I wasn’t sure what else to do.”

“No, it’s OK. I understand, really. We’ve been trying to get you back ever since they kidnapped you. In a way, having Carlos call me has made it easier.”

Jackie looked at me, locked with her in a dimly lit room with my hands cuffed behind my back. She gave me a look that said, oh really?

“I’ve talked to Howard about all of this,” I said. “The reason Roger didn’t ask for the paper back or never sent over new paperwork for you to sign was he thought you wouldn’t do it.”