Garret's Gambit by Dale Mayer (book club books .TXT) 📗

found a small round door that looked odd to them. It was locked, so they quickly picked the lock and slipped inside. They heard voices above and glanced at each other and smiled when they realized they were underneath the pub.

“Noisy place to be keeping a prisoner though,” Garret whispered.

“No way to know if the prisoner’s actually here or not,” Kano said. “Why would they keep him here? Seems too obvious.”

He nodded at that. “Still, it’s odd.”

“As always,” Kano said, “heads-up.”

Right, they could never trust anything in this world—always too many cases of shit going wrong—but that was the nature of the business. As they moved in through the basement, they did a quick search, but they found no sign of Garret’s brother … or anyone else. Not that Garret had expected it to be that easy, but he couldn’t help but hope to get lucky for once. They searched this whole level and found nothing. They made their way to the stairs, only to find that still another alcove was halfway above.

They quickly slipped into that to check it out. As they did, they heard voices directly above them. “I don’t give a shit what you think you want for keeping this guy. He’s our prisoner, and we’ll hang on to him and look after him until we need him,” he said.

“The guy’s nothing but a pawn,” he said. “Why do I have to look after him?”

That voice was more of a whine than anything, but it was definitely male.

“Because you’re being well paid.”

“You could keep him here,” he said. “Nobody would know.”

“I would know,” the first voice said in a hard tone. “You know how we get the cops in here every once in a while. What if they came in and found the prisoner here?”

“Well, you could just let him free,” he said. “It’s not like he did anything wrong.”

“He’s bait. How hard is that for you to figure out?” he said. “Also, if you keep talking, you’ll just piss me off further, and I’ll decide I don’t want to listen to your voice anymore and will just cut off your tongue.”

Immediately there was silence, perhaps meaning that the other guy firmly believed the threat to be exactly what would happen. Kano and Garret shifted slightly, so they were directly underneath the voices, trying to peer through the floorboards, but they found no way to see who was talking. Garret figured the tongue-cutting guy to be the owner of the bar, the father tied to one of Kingdom’s men.

“We do need to find where the girlfriend disappeared to though.”

“Why? Who even cares about her?”

“We won’t leave any threads hanging, dumbass,” he said. “If this job doesn’t go the way we think it’ll go, then we have to dispose of the evidence. All the evidence, including her.”

At that, the other man gasped. “She’s pregnant. You know that, right? We can’t off a pregnant woman. That’s just wrong.”

“Yeah, so what do you want to do about it?” the first guy said.

There was silence once again. “We could just let her go. She doesn’t know nothing.”

“But we know,” he said. “And if we know, she knows.”

That obviously confused the other man because more silence came.

With Kano and Garret obviously in the right place, yet not knowing where the hell his brother was, they didn’t want to move, in case somebody set something off.

“You need to get the hell out of here and don’t come back. I don’t want to bother with you.”

“I get it,” he said. “I won’t be back. I promise.” And, with that, he dashed out.

Immediately Kano took off, hoping to come around and find this gopher guy. Garret and Kano had been texting madly with Charles to see if he could find out who this guy was, but the chances of that happening weren’t good. Being the only one now under the floorboards, Garret listened intently, hearing the orders that, as he’d expected, were given to another man.

“Go take care of him now, will you? Also, while you’re at it, we’ll have to move the prisoner.”

“Yeah, where do you want to keep him?”

“Well, I’d say here, but I don’t want to bring it so close to home. What other location do we have?”

“We could move him to Maggie’s place?”

“Yes, let’s do that. She won’t be happy, but I don’t care. Take him to Maggie’s place.”

“Well, if we take care of this whiny guy, is there any reason we can’t just leave our prisoner where he is?”

“Unless the cops come and look into it. And they go to his place to investigate for sure.”

There was more silence, as the men mulled things over.

“Sounds like Maggie’s place is it,” the one guy said.

“You know that she’s got a big mouth though,” the other one warned. “But she’s got that big apartment over her garage. It’s got a separate entrance. What if we don’t even tell her?”

The two men thought about that, tossed up a few arguments for and against it, and then one guy said, “I’ll do it, and we can always pay her off, if we need to.”

“Yeah, true enough. She’ll do anything for money.” And they both sniggered. The second man got up and left. What Garret needed desperately was to find a way to see these guys, to figure out their identities. Also, who the hell was this Maggie? She was about to host his brother as an uninvited guest.

Moving, he tripped a little and accidentally kicked a small rock that he hadn’t seen. Immediately the man above jumped to his feet and called out, “Who’s there?”

Garret ducked down in the darkness.

“Is anybody there?”

“Barnie, come here,” the man called. Immediately another man came running. “Go down to the basement. You know the alcove, directly under here? Check and see who’s down there.” As Barnie went to run away, he said, “Go armed, and make sure nobody comes out of there alive.”

Swearing to himself, Garret slipped back out, headed to the basement, and on to the alleyway. He