Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: An Addison Holmes Mystery (Addison Holmes Mysteries Book 5)

I
was usually
a glass half-full kind of girl. But I was pretty darn sure this was the worst day of my life.

Once, when I was eight, I’d decided to be Gene Kelly in
Singin’ in the Rain
. I’d twirled and stomped through puddles with abandon, singing at the top of my lungs. I swung with gusto around a lamppost, tapping like mad as the rain poured from the sky. Until my galoshes got tangled—which is a polite way of saying I tripped over my own feet. I ended up flat on my back and my head hit a rock, knocking me unconscious.

My name is Addison Holmes, and I’ve hit my fair share of rocks. I’m a private investigator for the McClean Detective Agency, and I’m still new to the business. Meaning I get the job done, but there are a lot of other people at the agency that do the job better than me. For instance, if you were kidnapped and your life was in danger, I’d more than likely find you. But you’d probably be dead.

My stint as Gene Kelly didn’t last long. When I came to, I had the mother of all headaches and my vision was blurry for three days. My skin was cold to the touch and I was shivering uncontrollably. But at least I had all my clothes on, which was more than I could say this time around.

I woke much the same way I had that fateful day when I was eight. The pain in my skull was like nothing I’d ever experienced and my vision was so blurry it took me several minutes to realize I was staring at a beige ceiling and not the gates of heaven, which was good news because I had much higher expectations for heaven.

I rolled my eyes from side to side because it was too painful to move my head, and recognition started to kick in—shower curtain—toilet—sink—dingy towels—tray full of sharp surgical instruments. One of those things didn’t belong.

My gaze froze on the tray, and I felt panic start to take over. My teeth chattered uncontrollably and I couldn’t seem to function—couldn’t get my wits about me. Not having my wits about me wasn’t unusual, but this time it was serious. I was in deep trouble. And my charm and adorable personality weren’t going to get me out of this mess.

I stared into the tub and my lungs constricted. Blood pumped with a roaring whoosh in my ears, and I tried desperately to suck in a breath. I was naked. And buried in an ice bath.

High-pitched wheezes escaped from my lips until I sounded like a balloon having the air slowly leaked from it. This was not good. In fact, this was about as far from good as I’d ever been. If my tear ducts hadn’t been frozen I probably would’ve cried.

I rolled my head to the side and tried to listen—to see if I was alone or if my surgeons were still present. But nothing greeted me but silence and my erratic heartbeat.

The sign on the door was crudely written with black marker, and it said,
Call 9-1-1. Now.
An envelope with my name written on it was taped just beneath the sign.

Bile rose in my throat and little black dots were dancing like dust mites in front of my eyes. It was everything I could do to keep the contents in my stomach down. If I even had a stomach. I had no idea what kind of wounds the ice was covering, but I was almost a hundred percent sure that vomiting wouldn’t be good for them.

I looked at the surgical tray where there was supposed to be a phone, but there was nothing there—only sharp-edged instruments that mocked me. Panic clawed at me again. My ice was going to melt and I was going to bleed out, and I’d die alone in a bathtub in a three-and-a-half star hotel. I’d always imagined I’d die with a bit more glamour. It was kind of a letdown.

I couldn’t die like this. My unwritten biography demanded that I not end my story this way. My only choice was to try to move. To escape the tub and crawl my way out to the hallway where someone might find me before it was too late.

I was going to fall apart at some point, but not yet. I needed to survive. I had things in my life I still wanted to do. Like make out with Chris Hemsworth and get laser hair removal.

I focused on my body and tried to move my limbs, even just a little. I managed to get my knee bent so it stuck up out of the ice bath, and it was then I noticed the plastic bag that surfaced with the movement. It took me a couple of tries to get my fingers to curl and pick up the bag, but once I did I was almost bursting into tears.

Inside the plastic bag was a cellphone, and there was only one person I could think of calling. Someone who would drop everything and come for me because I asked. Someone I didn’t mind seeing me naked. Believe it or not, it was a short list, despite my twenty-four hour stint at a nudist colony not too long ago.

My fingers fumbled at the opening of the plastic bag and I prayed like crazy that I didn’t drop it in the water. Getting out of the tub at this point wasn’t an option. I needed whatever insides I had left to stay put.

Wild animal sounds escaped my mouth as I dialed with shaking hands. It seemed to take forever as the phone rang—and rang—and rang. Then the sweetest voice I’d ever heard answered the phone.

But when I opened my mouth no words came out. Just hot air and desperation. I was well and truly fucked.

T
here are
some days it’s not worth getting out of bed. Today was one of those days.

Sirens blared in the distance, but between tourist traffic and people generally being assholes and not moving to the side of the road for emergency responders, I figured the cops still had a good five minutes before they got here.

A hysterical woman was Skyping with someone from Channel 8 News, reporting that shots had been fired at the Enmark Gas Station off Montgomery Street. Rosemarie and I had pulled up just in time to see the woman put on fresh lipstick and practice a couple of sobs before dialing into the station.

Over the last several years, Savannah’s crime had spiked. Shootings and domestic disturbance calls were always going out over the radio. And this was the third gas station robbery this week. The cops were doing everything they could to keep things under control, but like with most things, when politicians got involved everything went down the shitter. So while the cops worked with their hands halfway tied behind their backs and buried in mountains of red tape, dodging bullets and putting their lives in danger, the rest of us got to watch the city burn. So to speak.

Shots rang out from inside the gas station and everyone hit the deck, myself included.

“Shoot that motherfucker!” Rosemarie screamed, a hysterical tinge to her voice.

We huddled behind the open doors of her bright yellow Beetle. On her best day, Rosemarie didn’t do well in stressful situations. She’d shown up at the detective agency about half an hour ago, her mascara smudged from the night before and her bright red dress turned inside out. Her hair looked like she’d brushed it with a hand mixer, and I was almost a hundred percent sure she wasn’t wearing a bra. Using the deductive reasoning skills I’d acquired over the two months I’d been a private investigator, I was willing to go out on a limb and say today was nowhere near one of her “best days.”

“Ssh,” I hissed. “You don’t want to startle him into killing anyone.”

“He’s killing everyone. Didn’t you just hear him unloading on all those poor people? They’re just trying to get their gas station Danishes and fill up their tanks for a nice weekend away. And now they’re all going to die.” Rosemarie inhaled a deep breath and let out a
hee-hee-hoo
like she was in Lamaze class. Rosemarie was a little excitable.

“He’s not killing everyone. He just fired a bunch of rounds into the ceiling. Kid can’t be more than twenty. Looks scared to death.”

“America’s youth today,” she said, shaking her head. “Be glad you’re not teaching anymore. Everything’s going to hell in a handbasket. I had a kid tell me the other day that Disney invented Pocahontas because they needed a Native American princess, and that she wasn’t a real person like Wikipedia claimed. Took everything I had not to slap him right upside the head. In two years he’s probably going to be holding up a gas station too. And what is that boy wearing? He’s robbing a gas station convenience store in his pajama pants? And plaid pajamas at that. I hate to break it to him, but he looks like the
Brawny
lumberjack instead of a badass.”

“Maybe he thought the wife beater and bandana tied around his head made him look tough enough.”

“You’d think they’d have some kind of online classes for thugs,” she said. “They’ve got online classes for just about everything these days. Some enterprising young man could monetize the site and probably make a fortune off all the gangbangers and lowlifes, teaching them how to commit crime more efficiently.”

“I’m sure the Better Business Bureau would love that,” I said dryly.

“Are you going to shoot him or not? I’m starting to get a cramp and I need a fucking donut.”

“You sure are swearing a lot today. That’s not like you.”

“I’ve been watching marathons of
Mad Men.
It’s a bad influence on my social niceties.”

“I can’t shoot anyone,” I said. “I left my gun in the shower caddy at the office.”

For the last week, I’d been calling the McClean Detective Agency my home. I’d been living with Nick Dempsey for several months before he decided to ask me to marry him and threw a wrench in the works. I’ll admit I panicked. A girl who’s been left at the altar doesn’t think about marriage and weddings without fear rearing its ugly head. I thought I’d been very mature when I told him I needed time to think on it, and that maybe it was best if we gave each other a little space while I did.

In reality, I’d been avoiding Nick like the plague. Our lines of work often put us in each other’s paths, but I had Nick radar. I could practically feel his presence before he ever arrived at a scene. I could also feel his presence because I’d stuck one of the trackers we used at the agency underneath his truck. My phone vibrated every time he was in a ten-mile radius.

It was really hard to give myself the space I needed to make an informed, adult decision. I knew what that man could do in bed, and my hormones weren’t as informed and adult as my brain was.

“We’re all going to die,” Rosemarie said. “Help me, Jesus. Help me!” She threw in a sign of the cross for good measure. Rosemarie was Methodist just like I was, but I figured God might give her extra points for effort.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I mumbled under my breath. Then I reached into the car and grabbed the box of donuts we’d just procured when the call for the robbery had come through on the police scanner. I slid the box toward Rosemarie and she huddled behind the door, her blue eyes wide and round like a Kewpie doll, as she devoured a chocolate glazed.

I still wasn’t sure why Rosemarie had a police scanner in her car. Or where she’d gotten it, for that matter. Rosemarie taught choir at James Madison High School in Whiskey Bayou, but ever since I’d gotten my P.I. license she liked to think of us as the Southern version of Cagney and Lacey, even though she had no special training and had a tendency to overreact in high stress situations. In reality, we were more like a deranged Abbott and Costello.

“I’m just saying,” Rosemarie said, reaching for another donut, “what good is a gun if you’re going to leave it in the shower? I’ve got mine right under the front seat of the car. You can use it if you want to.”

“I’ll pass,” I said. “The police will be here soon.” Not to mention the fact that I was pretty sure Rosemarie didn’t have a concealed carry permit. But that didn’t stop ninety percent of the Georgia population from carrying them anyway. Southerners weren’t fond of things like permits.

“Why do you take your gun in the shower anyway?” she asked.

“I take my gun everywhere,” I said, peeping around the car door to look inside the gas station so I could assess the situation. The more information I could give the cops when they arrived the better. “But I wasn’t expecting you to use the spare key and disarm the agency alarms while I was trying to put my clothes on. And I sure wasn’t expecting you to burst into the bathroom and drag me half-naked down the hall because you were having a crisis. So it got left in the shower caddy.”

“I needed a donut,” she said, pouting a little. “I had a rough night. I thought Robbie might be the one. After Leroy broke my heart I did what I read in Cosmo and had a couple of rebound flings. Then I met Robbie and my world tilted on its axis and all thoughts of Leroy went right out the window. I thought that was a sign that I’d found
the one
. And it was my first attempt at being a cougar.”

“Who’s Robbie?” I asked.

“He’s that bartender we met last week at the nudist colony.”

“Don’t remind me,” I groaned.

A week ago, I’d caught my first and last case that involved going undercover at a nudist colony. The experience had taught me a lot about myself. Mostly that I wasn’t meant to be naked at the beach. There were parts of the body that shouldn’t be exposed to sand and sun. I’d also discovered that I didn’t particularly want to see other people naked either. There was nothing quite like watching the woman across the dinner table as her nipple fell into her soup bowl every time she leaned forward.

“You thought Robbie was the one?” I asked, perplexed. “You hadn’t talked to him five minutes before y’all were going at it behind the tiki bar. How are you supposed to know someone’s
the one
after five minutes? And three and a half of that was foreplay.”

Rosemarie sniffed. “Sometimes souls just connect. It was like that for me and Robbie. But being at a nudist colony really takes away the subtleties of flirtation. I could see everything he was thinking below his waist. It’s hard not to fall for such blatant seduction techniques.”

“I take it Robbie doesn’t share your soulmate sensibilities?”

“Robbie graduated from high school last year and still lives with his parents. They all live full-time at the nudist colony. He’s not sure about working and living out in the real world. He said he likes the freedom of the nudist lifestyle and he’ll miss his mother’s chocolate chip cookies if he moves away from her.”

“Jesus,” I said, eyes wide. “He’s practically an infant. Men don’t know anything about pleasing women at that age.”

Rosemarie frowned and said, “I’ve slept with a lot of men. I’m not sure I’ve ever found one that knew how to please me. I think it’s a myth. Like unicorns. Or that picture that went viral on Facebook about the man with two penises. Anyone could see that second one was Photoshopped.”

“Men that know how to please women exist,” I said glumly.

I knew this because I’d just told one I had to think about an eternity of receiving pleasure. I was an idiot. I looked at Rosemarie and felt indignation rise up within me that none of her partners had been interested in anything but their own pleasure.

“You’re a woman in the prime of your life,” I told her. “What you need is a
real
man. An older man. Someone who knows how to treat you outside the bedroom and rock your world inside it. Maybe a widower or a divorcee.”

“Where do you think I can find one of those?” she asked, intrigued. “Assisted living? Or maybe that retirement village down on Tybee Island? They’re real go getters down there.”

I didn’t really have a solution. Indignation was about as far as I could take this particular problem. “Have you tried one of the online dating sites?”

“Oh, sure. I’ve got profiles on all of them. Everyone lies about who they are and what they look like, and when you finally meet in person you know you’re only meeting for a quick hookup, so no one much cares about the lies anyway.”

“That’s horrible,” I said, my faith in humanity slightly dented. “They always show those people getting married and so happy on the commercials.”

“I think mostly they’re happy they’re getting regular sex and didn’t marry a serial killer. Those computer programs are pretty good at screening out most of the crazies. At least the ones that might kill you.”

“Huh,” I said and turned my attention back to the gas station. No more shots had been fired and the sirens were getting closer. I took a deep breath and peeked around the side of the door so I could look into the gas station one more time.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been mentally preparing myself to see. I was past thirty, so it was understandable that my eyes might not have been as good as they once were. In fact, I was praying that was the case. There had to be a thousand or so ninety-something women who wore fur coats over their velour jogging suits. There was no reason to think that my Aunt Scarlet was inside the gas station with an armed robber. She was supposed to be halfway to Italy on a singles cruise.

I peeped again and sighed. My eyesight was spectacular. And there was no mistaking Aunt Scarlet.

“Hey,” Rosemarie said, coming back to rational behavior as the sugar hit her bloodstream. “That looks just like Scarlet. I thought she was headed out on a single’s cruise.”

“That was the plan,” I said. “Maybe it’s not her.”

It was her. There was no mistaking Aunt Scarlet. In her prime, people said that Scarlet looked just like Ava Gardner. I’d seen pictures, so I knew the rumors to be true. I’m not sure what had happened as the years passed, but Ava Gardner started looking more like Mickey Rooney. She’d shrunk, so she was barely five-feet tall, and she had a shock of white hair she kept permed and teased so it added a couple inches to her height. She kept it shellacked so nothing less than hurricane-force winds could move it out of place. She was wearing a mink, floor-length coat that swallowed her and she looked mad as hell.

Scarlet Holmes was my father’s aunt. She’d grown up in Whiskey Bayou and outlived five husbands, a couple we weren’t so sure had died of natural causes. Most families had a skeleton or two in the closet. Scarlet was one of ours. She liked her men young, her whiskey neat, and her cigarette’s unfiltered.

“Thank you. I feel better now,” Rosemarie said, pushing the half empty box of donuts back toward me. “It’s the stress. It makes me irrational. I’ve got a new game plan now. I won’t even look at a man unless he’s on the sunny side of sixty. Maybe Scarlet knows someone.”

“Maybe you should get some anti-anxiety meds,” I told her.

“I’ve got some, but I don’t like being that relaxed. Two days before Christmas I was stressed because the home spa I’d ordered for my mother showed delayed shipping. And you know how my mother is. I’d never have heard the end of it to show up to Christmas dinner without
everyone’s
gifts. So I schlepped myself to the mall two freaking days before Christmas. Holiday shopping always makes me a little crazy anyway, so I popped a couple of those pills and ended up taking a nap on one of the display couches in JCPenney. Turns out they thought I was dead and called 9-1-1.”

I was only half-listening to Rosemarie. Pretty much nothing she said shocked me anymore. I was more interested in how to get my Aunt Scarlet out of the gas station alive. She was standing face to face with the gunman, but neither of them were speaking. The situation looked tense.

If I hadn’t been so focused on Scarlet and the gunman I would’ve felt my phone vibrate, signaling Nick’s arrival. The second his hand touched my shoulder chills danced along my spine and my nipples went to full alert.