Knockdown: A Home Repair Is Homicide Mystery Read Free Page A

ask me how it happened, okay? It happened the wayit always happens. You lose, you chase your losses, next thing you’re on their shoot list.”
    Only Baumann didn’t say
shoot
. “I’ve got a family. You saw the kid; he’s a good boy.”
    Right, she’d seen the kid because she’d been intended to see him, maybe feel a little sorrier for Garner. She did, too.
    Just not fifty grand’s worth. She was about to say so when a small head peeped around the doorframe. “Dad?”
    Garner frowned. “I told you, siddown out there, okay? Wait for me, I’ll only be a—”
    The boy didn’t move. His big, not-quite-innocent eyes took in the room with its clinical lack of decoration, the metal cabinets and the shelves stuffed with file folders.
    He didn’t smile. He looked … sly. “Steven, maybe you could just sit down in the chair out there until your father and I are finished here,” she said gently.
    His eyes didn’t change, their expression calm and knowing. It gave her a chill, suddenly, realizing that the boy understood what his father was doing.
    That he was begging for his life. But he’d come to the wrong place, because the only thing she knew for sure about Garner was that if she did lend him money, he would never return it.
    Heck, he hadn’t paid the mob back, and they were willing and able to kill him on account of it. So what chance would she have?
    The boy went back to the outer office. She got up and closed the door. “What have you got?”
    “What?” Garner looked confused. “I … What do you mean, what have I—”
    “House? Car? Anything? A coin collection? Has your wife got any good jewelry?”
    He was shaking his head. “There’s the house, but it belongs to my wife. It was her parents’ place, and anyway, what would you want with—”
    She sat across from him again. “You’re not getting it, what I’m saying to you. I don’t want it. But they might.”
    Despair filled his face. “Just … you mean …”
    He glanced at the door, beyond which his son waited. Right now the kid had a roof over his head, a place to go at night.
    And tomorrow maybe he wouldn’t. But his dad would be alive. “Steven, I’m suggesting you offer them something. It’s harsh, I know. But it’s the best I can do for you right now.”
    Or ever
, she didn’t add, but he understood. When he got up from the chair he moved like an old man.
    She got up, too. “A house is a big thing, Steven. If you’re lucky, maybe they’ll take it.”
    “Yeah,” he said bitterly. “If I’m lucky.”
    She didn’t offer to put in a word for him. It wouldn’t have done any good. He knew that, as well. He opened the door to the outer office, then turned.
    “Listen, I was thinking I might take the kid out for lunch, maybe to a ball game. You know? But …”
    He spread his hands helplessly.
    He was tapped out, of course; his last twenty to the guard downstairs, probably. Without a word she opened her desk’s top drawer and drew out five hundred-dollar bills.
    She crossed the room and handed them to him. In the outer room, the little boy sat in a chair with his ankles crossed and his hands clasped in his lap, waiting. Watching.
    “Thanks,” Steven Garner said, stuffing the bills into the inside pocket of his cotton jacket. “C’mon, kid.”
    They turned to go. She followed them to the door, hoping Garner wouldn’t decide to just take a flyer out the propped-open window at the end of the corridor.
    He didn’t. As they moved away down the hall, the little boy glanced back over his shoulder before they disappeared into the elevator. Those eyes …
    Jake shivered, not liking the expression in them and glad when the elevator closed. And that was the last she ever expected to see of them:
    Steven Garner Sr., his boy, and her five hundred bucks.
    But she was only two-thirds right.

CHAPTER
1

    H ER NAME WAS JACOBIA TIPTREE—JAKE, TO HER FRIENDS —and on that bright day in July twelve years after the Manhattan meeting,