Two for Flinching Read Free Page B

to cost extra for the old
records.”
    Sarah came out of the bathroom.
    “Did you wash your hands?”
    Sarah went back into the bathroom.
    “Anything over a hundred dollars, I have to
have a receipt,” I told him. “You gonna sign a receipt?”
    Billy shrugged. “Guess it’ll have to do.”

 
     
     
    Chapter Four
     
     
    Next day, I was in the sock factory, the
princess safely at pre-school and the Colt .45 in the drawer. The
Colt .45 was my gun. Have you ever had something and the
minute you touched it, you knew it was yours ? It was that
way with me and dark Bacardi, the second it was on my lips, I knew
that was my drink. The first kiss I shared with Stella, she
was my girl. The first karate lesson, I knew I had found my sport. I have used many, many, firearms throughout my
life. Rifles, shotguns, assault weapons, machine guns, revolvers
and other automatics. But none of them felt so right in my hand as
the Colt .45. The weight of it, the power it held, the simple
beauty of it. There were other pistols with more firepower, others
with more capacity, sexier pieces others drooled over, but the Colt
.45 was my gun.
    I was on the computer, chasing down a hunch.
Melvin Jenks and his mistress had stayed in the hotel room until
shortly after eleven before going their separate ways. Looking
back, Mrs. Jenks felt her husband had been acting suspicious for
the last month. Working late, business dinners, mysterious trips on
behalf of the bank. Maybe Jenks had fallen in love with his
secretary. Maybe he had fallen under the charms of a younger woman
who had shown an interest in him that he had not known for some
time. Or maybe he had always been a cheating spouse and his wife
had finally caught on. My gut feeling, though, was that this was
something new. His recent promotion to bank president had elevated
him to a position of power and prominence and the papers were full
of powerful men feeling entitled to a fling.
    I started with the free dating websites.
Places like E Harmony and Match.com required a credit card. Credit
cards left trails. I had no doubt that a bank president could
easily find a way to cover his tracks, but I figured he would also
recognize the potential danger.
    I maintained a couple of identities on the
dating sites—both men and women. I logged on as Looking4Mine , a twenty-seven year old blond knockout. She
was a professional making between forty and fifty thousand dollars
a year, recently divorced with no children, hoping to find someone
to share sunsets and a good bottle of wine. I had downloaded her
picture off Facebook, an unsuspicious young lady from Southern
California and built the bio myself. I tweaked her interest to
reflect her search for a “man of experience” and moved her profile
to public.
    I began the troll, looking for plenty of
forty-seven year old men looking for a soul mate, but none that
matched Jenks. I frowned to myself, sure that I was on the right
track. I widened the search to men between the ages of forty and
fifty. It took a while, but I finally found him. J-love . I
checked to make sure he wasn’t online before clicking the profile.
I wasn’t yet ready for a chat. The picture was “available on
request,” a sensible move to keep anyone from recognizing him, but
there was no doubt. J-love was divorced (which I was fairly
certain would surprise Mrs. Jenks) three kids, in the two hundred
thousand and above salary range. He was also forty-three years old.
Maybe he thought forty-five was too old, that that age would remove
him from too many searches. J-love wasn’t looking for a
relationship, only wanted to “get out of the house and have a good
time.” I printed it all out and logged off.
    The honey pot bit always worked best when you
could get the pursued to do the pursuing. I knew that Jenks’s page
would show Looking4Mine had checked him out and I also knew
that nobody wanting to “get out of the house and have a good time”
would be able to resist her beauty. It