Bait & Switch (27 page)

“Like I said, this is Cary.” he improvised into the receiver as Peyton gave him a sleepy smile. “Who’s calling?”

“
This
is Cary,” Cary said. “Are you okay, Mitch?”

“Yes. I mean no.” Mitch sat up in bed and rubbed a hand over his eyes. He’d be perfectly within his rights to blast his brother for talking him into the twin switch and then disappearing — if he hadn’t been in bed with his brother’s girl. “It’s just that you woke me up.”

“You’re kidding. I waited until ten to call so I wouldn’t.”

“Since when do you care if you wake me up?” Mitch asked at the same time something else his brother had said registered. "Is it really ten o’clock?”

“Ten o’clock,” Peyton repeated, sitting bolt upright so that the bedsheets fell away from her lovely breasts. Mitch pressed the mouthpiece of the phone into his cheek, hoping his skin would muffle Peyton’s comments. “I’m supposed to be at work at ten.”

“Of course I didn’t want to wake you. Do you think I don’t appreciate this favor you’re doing me?” Cary said. “You wound me, bro.”

Peyton scrambled out of bed and headed for the bathroom, her bare behind about the loveliest thing Mitch had ever seen. Cary would really be wounded if he knew they’d slept together.

But darn it. Peyton didn’t feel like Cary’s girl. She felt like Mitch’s. He certainly wouldn’t cheat on her with a stripper.

“Don’t pull that wounded act with me,” Mitch said, angry for Peyton’s sake. But he couldn’t very well take his brother to task for two-timing her, not when he could hear Peyton turning on the shower in the bathroom. “You’ve been missing for more than a week, then you call me up out of the blue and pretend to be appreciative. How stupid do you think I am?”

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” Cary said. “I think you’re a damn fine brother.”

Mitch swung his legs over the bed and pulled on a pair of his brother’s sweatpants. Fashioned from a revolutionary lightweight material, the sweatpants were as expensive as everything else in Cary’s home. “What kind of game are you playing now?”

“No game.”

Mitch rose, walked to the window and drew back the blinds. The day was overcast with only thin rays of sunlight breaking through the clouds. “They why are you calling?”

“A man can call his brother to say he’s sorry, can’t he?”

“You never say you’re sorry,” Mitch reminded him.

“Maybe I do now.”

“Where are you and how much money are you trying to get me to send you?”

“I’m in Key West,” Cary said.

 
Typical
, Mitch thought.
He was risking everything while his brother lived it up in the tropics.

“But I don’t want you to send me money,” Cary continued.

 
Atypical
, Mitch thought.

“What do you want then?” Mitch asked.

“To tell you that you were right in the first place. I’ve decided to come back to Charleston and turn myself in.”

“No!” Mitch said. “I was wrong.”

“No, you weren’t. Turning myself in is the right thing to do.”

“Since when are you concerned with doing the right thing?” Mitch heard the shower turn off. He didn’t have much time to talk his brother out of making a major mistake. “Never mind the answer. Just listen to me. You can’t come back right now.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not going to end up in a jail cell if I can help it.”

“Maybe a jail cell is where I belong.”

“You must be getting too much sun down there in Florida. You sound like you fried your brain.”

“I’m serious, Mitch. You’re always telling me I should face up to the consequences of my actions. I’m ready to do that.”

“It’s too risky,” Mitch hissed. He glanced at the bathroom door. He only had moments before Peyton reappeared. “You were right. Flash Gordon’s a bad character but I can’t prove it yet. I need a few more days to find out more about his bookmaking operation.”

“Flash isn’t a bookie,” Cary said.

Time seemed to stop for interminable seconds while Mitch tried to process what his brother had said.

“You told me you were in trouble with him because of your gambling problem,” Mitch said slowly.

The door to the bathroom burst open. Peyton rushed out, pulling up the zipper on the dressy pair of black pants she’d worn the night before.

“That’s right,” Cary said. “I borrowed money from him to pay back my bookie, but I didn’t place bets with him.”

Mitch’s mind whirled. He’d assumed Cooper Barnes and Stu Funderburk, the two men he’d been sent to harass, were gamblers. If they weren’t, why did they owe Gibbs money?

The possibility that Gibbs was making the bulk of his money by loan sharking didn’t ring true. That was small-time stuff. It wouldn’t account for the staggering sum of cash he was laundering through Epidermis. So what was his evil?

“Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?” Mitch asked.

“I thought I had,” Cary answered as Mitch watched Peyton pull a comb through her wet hair and get on her knees to search under the bed for her shoes. “About my coming back—”

“I told you to stay put,” Mitch interrupted. “Now is a bad time.”

Peyton pulled on her shoes and looked at him quizzically. He wanted to demand that Cary listen to him but instead deliberately toned down his voice. “Check back with me tomorrow. Maybe things will be different by then.”

“But—”

“It’s for the best,” Mitch said. “Call me tomorrow, okay?”

There was a long pause. “Okay,” Cary finally said. “But I want you to know I really did mean it when I said I was sorry.”

Cary broke the connection, leaving Mitch staring at the receiver, wondering at his brother’s serious tone. Cary was never serious, one of the hundred reasons Mitch needed to look out for him.

“Who was that?” Peyton moved across the room toward him. Her hair smelled like his shampoo. Check that, like Cary’s shampoo.

“My brother,” he answered.

“I didn’t know you have a brother.” She looped her arms around his neck and smiled up at him. “You’ll have to tell me about him when I have more time.”

“Sure,” Mitch said.

She planted a swift kiss on his lips and drew back in his arms. “I’m already late, but if I don’t stop home to change everybody will know what we were doing last night.”

He smiled despite the fact that his head was crammed with thoughts of Gaston Gibbs and what kind of illegal operation he could be running.

“I left work early last night without getting permission,” Mitch said. “Don’t wait for me to say that missing work to do what we did isn’t worth it.”

She laughed and blew him a kiss. “You’re bad for me, Cary Mitchell.”

She left the room. A few seconds later, Mitch heard the front door shut. He sank to his bed, already feeling a sense of loss. Maybe it was a foreshadowing.

He hadn’t been entirely honest with his brother. He loved Cary too much to see him thrown into jail, but he was afraid the main reason he’d ordered his twin to stay put had more to do with Peyton than Gaston Gibbs.

As long as Peyton didn’t know who he was, Mitch could pretend it wouldn’t matter to her once she found out.

“Fool,” he said, because of course it would matter.

With great difficulty, he thrust thoughts of Peyton from his mind and concentrated on his most pressing problem: G. Gaston Gibbs III.

He realized it would make sense to contact Cooper Barnes and Stu Funderburk to find out exactly why they owed Gibbs money, but it took the better part of the day to accomplish it.

“I ran up my bar tab and couldn’t pay it back,” said Barnes when Mitch finally got him on the restaurant’s phone. “Damn Millie Bellini anyway.”

“What’s Millie got to do with it?”

“Long as we’re going out, she don’t give me no trouble. But the minute we’re through, she starts jawin’ about the bar tab.”

Mitch blinked. Cooper Barnes and Millie Bellini an item? He never would have guessed it, but then again he couldn’t imagine any man with Millie. Although his advice went against his true thoughts on the subject, he said, “You shouldn’t have dumped her.”

“I didn’t dump her, man. She dumped me.” Barnes paused. “Hey, her birthday’s comin’ up. You think you could lend me a couple hundred so I could get her somethin’ nice?”

“You owe me five hundred dollars already,” Mitch pointed out with heat.

“What’s a couple hundred more among friends?” Barnes asked.

Mitch slammed down the phone.

Stu Funderburk, who had neither a telephone nor a job, was more difficult to track down. After Mitch drove to Summerville and found his trailer deserted, one of Funderburk’s neighbors pointed him to a run-down pub on the outskirts of town.

Mitch found Funderburk cradling a glass of Jack Daniels, sitting alone at a bar so dark it was hard to believe the sun was still shining outside. Not only didn’t Mitch see a pair of crutches leaning against the bar, the small man wasn’t wearing his cast.

“Darn it, Funderburk.” Mitch took the empty stool next to him. “I told you to wear the plaster.”

“It itches,” Funderburk said. Even though he’d probably been drinking all afternoon, his eyes were bird-bright. “Not to mention cramps my style.”

“Listen to me.” Mitch brought his face close to the little man’s. He got a whiff of alcohol and perspiration but didn’t back away. “After we talk, you’re going home and putting on that cast or I’m giving you a real reason to wear it.”

“But you said you were a different kind of debt collector,” Funderburk whined. “Now you’re talking stereotype. Sticks and stones. Break some bones. Jesus, where’s your originality?”

“Funderburk?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up.”

“Okay,” the little man said. “But I’m telling you right now, I don’t got no money. So if you’re here for money, we’re gonna have to go outside and rumble. I can take you. I know I can.”

“Funderburk?”

“Yeah?”

“I thought you were going to shut up.”

He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I forgot. So shoot me.” A concerned look descended over his face. “Forget I said that. Don’t shoot me.”

“I’m not going to shoot you,” Mitch said. “I’m not here for money, either. I just want to know why you owe Flash.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Mitch said.

The small man seemed to relax. “I was supposed to do some renovation work for him.”

Mitch let out a surprised sound. “You’re a renovator?”

“An
aspirin’
renovator,” he corrected. “That’s why I didn’t get
’
round to doing the renovating. Some people get touchy
’
bout things like that after they give you a deposit.”

Mitch rubbed at the indentation between his eyebrows. He’d have thought Gibbs was too careful to mix his criminal life with his philanthropic one, but then again Gibbs had never struck him as the charitable type in the first place. “You’re telling me Flash hired you to renovate one of those historic buildings of his?”

“Historic? I heard people call Epidermis a den of iniquity, but I didn’t think it was historic.”

Mitch sighed. “Did he hire you to renovate those buildings in downtown Charleston or not?”

 
“Hell, no. I was supposed to put a roof on his strip joint. Not that he hired me himself. I never seen the guy. I been dealing with this scary lookin’ woman with a beehive on top of her head.”

“Millie Bellini,” Mitch provided.

“Yeah, Bellini. I tell ya. That woman got bees in her beehive.”

An hour later, Mitch pulled his brother’s SUV into a parking place at a strip shopping center on Savannah Highway and cut the engine. He hopped out of the vehicle, walked directly to the office on the end and pulled open the cookie-cutter door.

The outer office had a secretary’s desk but it was deserted so Mitch gave three hard raps to the inner door and jerked it open.

Vincent Carmichael, his fedora and wire-rimmed glasses in place, glanced up from the file on his desk. Wariness replaced his initial curiosity.

“If you’re here for the report I worked up on you, it’s too late,” he said. “I already gave it to Amelia.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” Mitch said, although Carmichael’s comment explained how Peyton had known about Cary’s fling with Debbie Darling.

“Then why are you here?”

“You ever heard of Flash Gordon?” Mitch asked.

Carmichael inclined his head almost imperceptibly. “Whispers, mostly. I know he’s bad news, but I can’t say we’re acquainted.”

“Are you acquainted with G. Gaston Gibbs III?”

“Not socially but I’ve heard Peyton’s mother mention him,” Carmichael said slowly. “Why?”

“Gibbs and Flash Gordon are the same person.”

Carmichael whistled. “I can’t imagine he wants that to get around.”

“Exactly. In fact, he’d go to great lengths to keep that information secret.”

 
The older man’s eyes narrowed. “What’s this got to do with me?”

“Gibbs has got it into his head that you’re investigating him.”

“I was investigating
you
,” Carmichael pointed out.

“He doesn’t know that.” Mitch stepped deeper into the room. “So he sent me here to take care of you.”

Carmichael’s eyes widened. Mitch could see whites all around the pupils. Carmichael’s right hand went to a desk drawer, where he probably kept a gun. “Is that why you’re here?”

“Heck, no.” Mitch sank into the seat across from the desk, then sat forward, his hands on his knees. “I’m here to get you out of trouble.”

“I’m not in trouble.”

“With Gibbs believing you’re investigating him, I’d say you’re in a heap of trouble. The next guy he sends to take care of you might not have any qualms about doing it.”

Carmichael’s Adam’s Apple bobbed when he swallowed, but his hand fell away from the desk drawer. “How are you proposing I get out of this trouble?”

Mitch smiled. “By helping me investigate Gibbs.”

Carmichael was shaking his head before Mitch finished the sentence. “That’s crazy.”

“Not so crazy. If Gibbs didn’t have anything to hide, he wouldn’t be worried about somebody snooping around. Once we know what he’s hiding, we’ll have a weapon we can use against him.”

“Makes sense, but there’s something I don’t understand. Why would you be investigating anything?”