[Defeated, Amusing, Gently, Nature, Usurp]

  August agreed to give Faith police protection. Even though he is adamant that Jones was not the shooter. He claimed that he saw Jones Police Academy scores and the kind of shot that I described would be beyond him. A moving car and a target the size of a headrest. No Laura it’s just not possible. Who else have you pissed off this week?

  He also agreed reluctantly to the rest of my demands. So I left Faith with August, his officer providing protection would drive her home. Then watch the house to make sure she remained safe. I went back out and drove back to the bookstore. I was late, it was after eight. I could just picture Anais tapping her foot at the door. Hopefully Lucy would let her in. She had not. Either Lucy had closed early or Anais was late. I decided that Lucy had closed early. But it was neither.

  Lucy had taken a huge video order from The Rabbit hole and then locked the door and started putting the order together. Lucy said she locked up at eight, Anais said she arrived at eight as she was supposed to. When I arrived around eight ten. She was standing there, her foot tapping a mile a minute.

  “This is a new low, even for you, Laura.”

  “I’m sorry, I was at the police station.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I thought Jones tried to kill Faith today. But August has me almost convinced that it would be impossible for him to pull it off, so now I’m not so sure. Come on in, Lucy must have left early. I’ll get Amy and we can go.”

  But I heard noise in the stock room.

  “Anais, there is someone in the stockroom. Get ready to call the police, I’ll check to see who’s in there.”

  I flung open the stockroom door startling Lucy, who gave a little scream. So I almost screamed too, but I just saved myself at the last second.

  “What are you still doing here?”

  “Why are you flinging open doors? I got a huge order from the Rabbit Hole and I wanted to start putting it together. One hundred and three books,” she said proudly.

  “Wow that’s great Lucy, that’s the largest single sale we’ve ever had. Well done. We’ll have to send something extra to the purchaser. What genre does he want?”

  “He ordered books from science fiction, fantasy and mystery.”

  “See what fantasy books he likes and send him a free trilogy of something you think will fit his taste or if we don’t have something suitable in stock, three mysteries or three classic science fiction books. But you don’t have to do this tonight.”

  “It’s okay, I'm just avoiding my dad and I want to get this all set to ship out first thing. I think we should use the delivery service, the customer will get the stuff faster and we don’t have to worry about whether your car is here or not. Did you bring it to the garage?”

  “No, it’s running fine.”

  “I meant for a new back window.”

  “I’m going to try and get a new window from a junk yard.”

  “That’s not a new window, that is a junk window.”

  “No it’s a junk car with a perfectly good window, why buy new when the car is so old, a junkyard window will be fine. But I have to go, we are going undercover tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow Lucy.”

  I ran up and got Amy, I didn’t dare take the time to get my coat. I’d just turn the heater on in the car. It was a quarter to nine when we left. Anais sat in the front, Amy was in the back.

  “What’s this hole in the dash, did some kind of animal get in here? Do you have a hole in your floor boards?”

  “No, it probably came in through where the back window used to be,” Amy said helpfully.

  “What do you mean used to be? Laura, where is the back window?”

  “It’s gone.”

  We were out of town now and my speed had started to pick up. For some reason wind was blowing in the back window, it was also very noisy making a thumping sound. I sped up and the thumping got louder, I congratulated myself on out smarting Anais. She was still talking but I couldn’t hear a word that she was saying. I slowed down when we hit the Saranac town line.

  “Laura could you turn on the heat, it’s kind of cold back here.”

  “Sorry Amy, it’s already on as high as it goes. I have a blanket in the trunk. I’ll get it for you before we leave.”

  “Okay, thanks Laura.”

  “Don’t thank her, she is driving us around in a car without a back window. It’s a safety violation.”

  “It’s safe, what’s the worst that can happen, we get a cold?”

  “No, you get a ticket for an unsafe vehicle.”

  “But what I’m asking is what is unsafe about it. All the other windows aside from the windshield roll down, a convertible doesn’t have a rear window.”

  “A convertible does have a rear window when the top is up.”

  “Well maybe I’ll just have the top removed, turn this old baby into a convertible.”

  “It will be pleasant to drive in the rain and the snow.”

  “If it will make you happy, I’ll call the junk yards tomorrow and get a new window.”

  “You mean a used window.”

  “Yes, a used window for a used car. Why does everything in America have to be new?”

  “Not a hippy rant about new things.”

  “Look, you buy a house. It has x amount of space. Now you feel the need to fill that space. You buy stuff. You change the color of something, now in order to be stylish you have to change all of the other things. Aside from being a waste of money. All that old bad color stuff gets hauled off to the dump. Which makes the pile grow and grow, is that good for anyone? No, of course it's not. It's not a hippy rant, it is a rant for common sense. Some ad convinces you this new item is somehow superior to your old colored item. Or that some French or New York designer should tell you what to wear this year. Only to turn around and tell you next year that what they told you last year was all wrong. Doesn’t that make you an idiot for listening to these people. If your white toaster is bothering you, go to the hardware store and buy some high temperature paint. But pick a color that compliments the other colors in your kitchen. However if you like two colors together, that someone else says don’t match. Don’t worry about, just paint them the colors you like. You are the one that has to look at the stuff on a daily basis.”

  “Like I said hippy rant. If we don’t buy stuff the economy grinds to a halt. People are thrown out of work.”

  “Not meaningful work. Not one person in the world jumps out of bed and says I can’t wait to get to work manufacturing new toasters today. Not only do I get paid, but I’m making the world a better place, one toaster at a time.”

  “Most people don’t get to do meaningful work, Laura.”

  “I know and I think that’s a shame, and something that should be changed. We’re not going to change it by following the same old patterns. We have to try new things. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb after trying just one filament, in fact he didn’t invent the light bulb at all. Humphry Davy invented it, then another guy improved it. Warren de la Rue took Davy’s light and put it in a vacuum tube. Seventy eight years after Davy invented it, Edison made it useful. Same thing with meaningless jobs, we need to improve them. What does the world need? Answer that and you have a meaningful job.”

  We pulled to stop in front of the Saranac Hotel. This was an old and storied hotel that has been in Saranac since the people from New York City needed a summer escape from the traffic, noise and heat. When the rich city vacationers decided grand second homes were needed and thus began the Great Camps Era of the Adirondacks.

  It’s the fanciest hotel in the area by a mile and thus the least likely to have a table of escorts operating openly in their bar. I wanted to test marginalia that Lucy had discovered. If it were true that an escort ring was present in every bar in the town. Start in the least likely place to give credence to the hypothesis.

  We went into the bar and sat down. A waiter materialized from seemingly nowhere and took our order. I was the designated driver and also chilly from riding in a car with no rear window, so I ordered a virgin Irish Coffee. Which is basically coffee with whipped cream.

  The very first thing I noticed as I allowed my eyes to creep around the room, was the table of barely old enough to drink women. They each had a drink in front of them. But none of the women appeared to be actually drinking. The drinks were window dressing on this girls night out. They also looked of an age that would have enjoyed the Waterhole much more than this fancy scene. Personally I would have preferred being in the Brew House in Lake Placid. But I also can’t let my personal bias affect the investigation.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Unlike the Waterhole, no one approached the girls table. But every once in a while one of the girls would get up and disappear for thirty, forty, sixty minutes. Before returning and reclaiming her seat, and drink. Surely the waiter must notice that their presumably first round sat in front of them. There was no way that was good for tips.

  What I hadn’t been able to figure out was how the girls knew that they had a client. At first I suspected the waiter. But he never approached their table. The one time that he did. I could see each of the girls shake their heads no. So I assume that he asked them if they needed anything. None of the girls made a move after the waiter left. So it wasn’t him tipping them off.

  I looked around the bar to check out the rest of the patrons. I was surprised to see the church elder Mattias Vitale seated behind us. I suppose I shouldn’t be. Just because you are a church elder that doesn’t make you a teetotaler. A lot of very well dressed men sat with him. A couple of stumpies came in and sat at the bar. After a little while the waiter brought a new round of drinks for the young ladies. He took away the old untouched cocktails. The girls went back to chatting amongst themselves.

  Finally the two stumpies got up and went over to the table where the girls were seated. The girls seemed friendly enough by their smiles, but the stumpies soon turned back and resumed their place at the bar. The men chugged their beers and left and not one of the girls made a move. I was keeping track of the time the girls were gone. I should have been clocking the men. Some men left and were back fairly quickly but some of the men were gone for up to an hour.

  A man would leave and then maybe ten minutes later one of the women would leave. Maybe the girls were signaled by the man desiring their company. Or maybe, they were clocking the men too. If a man was gone more than five or ten minutes or maybe the girls in a high class bar only ‘escort’ known customers. If a known customer leaves, a girl follows a discreet time later.

  If I were running this. I’d use the known customer rule. It keeps the chance of discovery low. While the exclusivity would most certainly keep the pricing high. That was my best theory. But I had to come up with a plan to verify that the men and the women who left the bar were actually meeting and going somewhere, a room in the hotel, I could only assume.

  “I think I have this figured out and how to verify if I’m right or not. Are you two up for following someone?”

  “Hell yeah,” said Amy.

  “If it’ll help.”

  “Alright, Anais the next time a man leaves the room, thirty seconds later you go out to the lobby and grab a brochure to some local attraction. Look around for the man after dithering around the brochures. Then just come back. Amy I’ll tell you when one of the girls leaves and what she is wearing you go ahead and follow her. But neither of you are to get onto an elevator. Just see what you can see from the public spaces. If either the man or the woman goes to the elevator. Just make note of what floor it stops at unless you see it has multiple passengers.”

  “Got ya, Laura.”

  Anais just nodded in a way of reply. The first man that Anais followed out, either went to make a phone call or use the rest room because he was back quickly. Anais returned with a brochure and we pretended to be interested in it. Then another man left and Anais picked up the brochure and returned it to the concierge. While pretending to study other brochures she saw the man meet one of the girls she recognized from the table. The girl handed him a room key and got onto the elevator alone. The elevator stopped on the third floor. When it returned to the lobby, the man Anais had been following got on and also took the elevator to the third floor.

  Anais came back and reported her findings.

  “Well that’s encouraging, it’s not proof positive but I think the only way to determine that is if multiple couples go to the same room. The next time a woman leaves, I’ll go up the stairs to see if I can figure out what room she is going to. Then we can check when the next woman leaves. I think it would be for the best if we go out into the lobby. From there we can see the elevator. We won’t be popping up and down like a game of whack a mole.”

  We finished our drinks and went out and took a seat in the lobby with a good view of the elevator. It wasn’t long before a woman who’d been seated at the table went into the elevator. I went to the stairwell and walked up to the third floor. A man I’d seen in the bar got off the elevator and went to a room and knocked. That’s why we hadn’t seen a key exchange, he didn’t have one. Knowing each and every person who had been seated in the bar was my eidetic memory in action and was very useful working all of this out.

  But anyone with careful observation skills would have come round to the same conclusions. It might have taken a little bit longer but it was definitely doable. Once I knew the room I wanted to verify it with another observation. I also had the thought that they were limiting themselves by using only one room. But that may be by design. If two or more girls were constantly missing from the table that would be twice as noticeable. With high end clients who’d care more about discretion and were willing and able to pay for it.

  We watched and waited as one more couple danced their way up to the third floor. I was waiting in the third floor hallway to see the man enter the same room. While I was waiting for the man to arrive. I ran through the setup in my head again. It was pretty perfect really the cops could never arrest more than one john and one escort. Because if they arrest an escort, she won’t return to the table. If that happens the other girls know that something has happened. If they can’t reach her by cellphone they’ll assume she was either busted or the john did something to her. Then maybe they’d call the boss or pimp. To deal with the issue.

  I went back to the lobby to meet up with Amy and Anais. I remembered to get Amy, my emergency wool blanket from the trunk. Before I got the car started however.

  Anais asked, “You were so into investigative mode, you never told us what happened to your rear window.”

  “It happened by Haystack,” I equivocated.

  “I didn’t ask where I asked how.”

  I started up the car and started to drive.

  “Why are you avoiding the question, Laura?”

  “I can’t hear you with that thumping sound, I yelled.”

  “I’m not getting out of this car until I learn how it happened.”

  I heard her, but pretended I didn't. She might always forget about it by the time we got back to her house. I brainstormed some idea to distract her and I think I came up with a decent one. Thirty minutes of thumping and possibly exhaust fumes left me with the start of a headache as we reached Anais’s house. As soon as I had to slow down in town the thumping got a little quieter.

  I yelled to Amy, who had ridden in the backseat, wrapped in my wool blanket. “Do you know anyone very well at the sheriff’s office?”

  “Not very well, not like the local police and fire departments who I was in constant contact with. Why?”

  “I was hoping to find out why their office fired Jones. Do the deputies have a bar they congregate in?”

  “Yeah, the Boor’s Head in Elizabethtown.”

  “Would you two like to go there tomorrow night? Maybe some deputy who didn’t like Jones will spill the beans why he got fired.”

  I glided to a stop in front of Anais’s house. She made no move to get out. Quite the opposite. She leaned over and switched the key to off.

  “Now that I have stopped us all from dying of carbon monoxide poisoning, I’m interested to know one: how did you manage to break your rear window and two, what is this crater in your dash board that wasn’t here in your car a day ago.”

  I had run out of options, answer or lie.

  “The back window was shot out after I dropped Faith off at Haystack. The hole in the dash is where I dug the bullet out.”

  Amy piped in from the backseat, “this is turning from a cozy into a film noir, Laura, you have to start wearing that trench coat that Anais bought you.”

  “Why didn’t you mention that someone was trying to kill you?”

  “There not, I think it’s Jones, trying to kill Faith. See she was sitting there in the passenger seat. I pulled into the Haystack trailhead, she hopped out and went hiking, thirty seconds later I was on route eighty six headed back into town when the shot was fired. If you turn around you can see where the bullet went through the headrest into the dash. I think Jones thought Faith was still inside the car sitting in the passenger seat. He may even think she is dead. When I figured all that out. I came back to Haystack to get Faith off the mountain in case he realized that Faith wasn’t in the car. Then I dug out the bullet and gave Faith and the bullet to August.”

  “What’s August got to do with it? Is Haystack even his jurisdiction?”

  “Oh, he didn’t even try to play that jurisdiction crap with me. I told him all about the article I’m writing about the Essex county three stooges of law enforcement, and he’d do just about anything to avoid being named in that piece. He was also tasked with talking to the sheriff, but I doubt he’ll get the reason that the sheriff fired Jones out of him. That’s why I’d like to go to the Boor’s Head and see if we can get one of the deputies to talk.”

  “I’ll drive, I’m never setting foot in this deathtrap again. I should have driven tonight. Your car sits out like a sore thumb. If you're wrong about the shooter targeting Faith, we were all in danger tonight. Until this is all resolved, I’ll drive us around. I have a normal looking car, and whoever is shooting at you may not even know what I drive. When you get and you add your daily note to Obsidian, add another. People I have PO’d lately to no matter how slight, might want to kill me or at the very least, scare the daylights out of me and my friends.”

  “That’s a good idea, Anais. Do you want to leave earlier tomorrow, around four thirty or five?”

  “I’ll be at your store at four thirty.”

  “I’ll be ready, Amy are you going to come?”

  “Sure, I’ll have to make stew or maybe chili so the writers can dish it out for themselves.”

  Then Amy and I drove home, before she went up to her bedroom Amy turned to me and asked. “You are going to be careful aren’t you? Because I don’t know what would happen to this place or me without you.”

  “Amy, I’ve dropped the ball, but I’m setting up a foundation. First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll call Anais and ask her and Bianca to help me as soon as possible. Maybe we can even get a start on it tomorrow. Would you be agreeable to being co-runners of the bookshop with Anais and possibly Lucy for the next eight years?”

  “I’d be honored but what happens in eight years?”

  “The person that I think is best suited to running the store for the next thirty years will be old enough to decide if that is what they’d like to do with their life.”

  “Sounds good to me, goodnight, Laura. Just be careful, it’s not just the bookstore and the collective I’m worried about losing.”

  “I Know Am, I know, goodnight.”

  I went upstairs and pondered for a bit before opening Obsidian and after writing an exciting daily note. I created a new note, titled people who might like to shoot me. Jones, he knows that I’m gunning for him. I as much as told his wife Annette this afternoon. I guess she’d have to go on the list as well. She wants to be a politician, a three time career loser like her husband. Well he has to be the millstone around her neck.

  If I was being cynical I’d say her best case scenario was if Jones died in the line of duty. Worst case for Annette would be Jones getting arrested for ignoring a crime or taking bribes. Was Jones really so stupid as not to notice that an escort service was running right under his nose, or is it possible they are paying him off. Maybe he has always been on the take. It’s really important that I find out what he was fired for in the sheriff’s office.

  Beyond the Jones family, I’ve managed to humiliate the Benoits. Karen certainly had it coming. Lying about Lucy like that. I was telling Kai the truth, I had no plan on releasing that video, before the protest began. Kai came in here fired up, I might have been a little easier on him. Even so, I find it hard to believe that either of them are great shots and I’d say that in liu of todays events the shooting calls for a very good marksmen.