Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (popular romance novels TXT) 📗

John had never been upstairs but he suspected that’s where Donovan’s living quarters were. As he followed him up the staircase, he was expecting to find a comfortable apartment funded with his father’s money, but instead it turned out to be much like the rest of the pub––dark and dated.

Jim pulled off his coat and threw it on one of the sofas. He dropped himself into a spot on the nearest couch and let out a loud sigh and an expletive. John hadn’t taken much notice of Jim’s tattoos before, but now they caught his eye and he had time to study them. They covered his forearms like sleeves: intertwined, monochromatic Celtic symbols and female figures—all mystical and unmistakably Irish.

John watched as Jim sat staring blankly at a wall, taking one swig after another from a whiskey bottle that stood next to a half-empty glass of water on a small table in front of him. Reaching under the sofa, he pulled out a battered metal box. Opening it, he took out a syringe, filled it with water from the glass, and squirted an amount onto what John guessed was heroin powder that he had tipped out onto a grubby metal spoon. With a small cigarette lighter that produced a flame like a miniature blowtorch, he heated the underside of the spoon, causing the mixture to boil. Taking the filter out of a cigarette, he moistened it in water before he stuck the tip of the needle into it, and sucked the contents of the spoon through it and into the syringe. After applying a tourniquet of rubber tubing to his arm, he waited for a vein to pop in a heavily tattooed area of his forearm, and injected the contents into it. It was now clear to John where the money—his father’s money—had gone. Rising feelings of anger and disbelief soon gave way to deep, gut-wrenching disgust. He didn’t know this man at all and, more importantly, neither did his father.

Leaving Jim with his mind elsewhere, John started looking at the papers strewn across the couch. He scanned the letterheads. There were all sorts of bills and demands from the types of companies that would be expected to supply a pub with alcohol and custodial services. He singled out a demand from a company called Supreme Security. It didn’t fit because John could not recall seeing any cameras, security-alarm boxes, code-entry keypads, or for that matter, warning signs anywhere in the building. What’s more, the amount seemed very high at $6,000 for a month’s protection. O’Donnell’s Irish Pub was named as being covered by the service, but the invoice was addressed not to Donovan but to a company called Supreme Bars & Clubs. Maybe his father, as an investor in the pub, had advised Jim to set up a limited liability company as an owning entity? But then why would the security company have the same word ‘Supreme’ in its name? It couldn’t be a coincidence—both companies had to have the same owner. He checked the registered address on the invoice. It was Suite 1023, 124 East 53rd. Street, Manhattan.

From what John knew, that was a very good address. Either John’s father and Donovan owned the security company and the pub, or someone else now owned both. He looked at the other bills and found a demand for rent. It was from Supreme Bars & Clubs, showing an amount in the sum of $18,000 due from James Donovan for rent of the pub for the month. The invoice bore the same registered address as before, of 124 East 53rd. Street. John stared at the paper. Had Donovan sold the pub without his father and was now only renting it? Of course, none of Donovan’s half-assed reports stated anything about it. Or was this part of an elaborate tax dodge? Donovan wasn’t smart enough for that, John decided, and if it had been his father’s idea, he surely would have heard about it. His father was keen to teach him everything about real estate so that one day he could take over his business. The thought that he and his father might never be able to see each other again crushed him momentarily. But his need to find out what was going on and perhaps, in the process, find out why he was stabbed, spurred him on.

He rechecked the rent and security demands side-by-side, wishing that somehow his father could help him make sense of it all. Apart from having the same first word in their company names, the invoices issued by Supreme Security and Supreme Bars & Clubs also had in common the same fonts and layout. Then John noticed as he glanced at some smaller print at the foot of the papers, that both companies were stated as being ‘A division of Supreme Holdings.’ That suggested a large company was behind the two Supreme companies. Given his drug addiction, it seemed entirely plausible that Jim had sold the pub to pay debts to dealers and was probably trying to scrape enough money together each month to pay the rent and other demands.

John checked the other bills. They all referenced the Irish Pub but were all made out to Supreme Hospitality, and each one had a small piece of the left corner ripped off. It looked like they had all once been stapled to another document. After two minutes, he found it. It was an invoice with a Supreme Bars & Clubs letterhead and the missing corners from the other bills stapled to it. He read the invoice. It referenced, in a list, all the other invoices John had seen, together with an item described as a ‘Management Fee.’ The value of the fee was fifteen percent of the total of the invoices, and that came to $50,000. That made the management fee a whopping $7,500—just for one month. It didn’t seem right––whoever was behind the Supreme name