Tony Calibretti stopped trying after six text messages and one profanity-laced voicemail. Dan Brawley tried eight times before giving up.
Of course, I didn't know this because my hands were cuffed behind my back and my captors had emptied my pockets somewhere between the parking lot of Pogano's storage facility and...wherever I was.
After several calls and text messages of his own, Det. Clifton Allah joined the exclusive club of People-Angry-at-Blake-For-Not-Answering.
Even after selling a piece of his soul to beg a drug kingpin for help, he still wasn't completely convinced that his favorite reporter wasn't just laying low or in hot, hyper-focused Holmsian pursuit of a lead.
"Boy got me out here catching ticks in the bushes," he muttered to, perhaps, the ticks, and maybe the two curious alley cats —likely home to the ticks— who perched atop a crate a couple of feet away, alternately watching him and licking their paws.
Allah had received a couriered envelope containing a single slip of paper twenty-four hours prior. The note had simply instructed him to find as comfortable a spot as possible to hide on a residential street and watch a home at very specific time of day. It was also clear in its instruction that he not park on the street because residents, who had recently launched a neighborhood watch, might see him.
And so, assuming that his dearest and sometimes most enraging reporter friend sent the note, Allah complied.
Fortunately, the frustrated investigator didn't have to wait terribly long before he saw why he had been summoned.
Richard Fontaine pulled into the driveway, stepped out of a late model midnight blue Jaguar sedan, strode purposefully to the front door, and knocked. Ten seconds later, the door opened, showing a sliver of light but not even a glimpse of the person who'd answered, and Fontaine was gone.
"That's it," Allah snorted incredulously. "I'm sitting in the dirt in the dark, and all I get for it is an asshole walking into a house. This might be poker night!"
YOU ARE READING
Bad Break: A Novel
Mystery / ThrillerBlake Wilson is accustomed to plucking nerves. He's young. He's Black. He rarely bites his tongue. And he's a dogged newspaper reporter who lives by the mantra of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. But when he catches a brutal...
