Hogtied: Mingo McCloud, #7 by AJ Llewellyn

Author:AJ Llewellyn [Llewellyn, AJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Pele Press
Published: 2021-01-25T18:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

“Those aren’t weapons. It looks like a chef’s knife bag.” Oh, boy. Knives are weapons. What am I saying?

“Yeah.” Francois didn’t have footage of Lippy driving Leilani away in Benny’s car, but he did have footage of her abduction, thanks to one of the cameras at the rear of the bakery. We viewed it and I got a lump in my throat as we watched Leilani fighting Lippy. She even punched him in the mouth.

“I hope she gave him another fat lip.” Francois echoed my thoughts.

Debbie was in the car jumping up and down and appeared to be barking. There was no sound, but the picture was clear. Lippy held a large butcher’s knife to Leilani’s throat. She was crying as he dragged her away and out of camera range.

“Any other cameras?” I asked, frightened by my own fertile mind. I tried not to think of her being tortured in some homemade dungeon.

Leilani!

Francois looked more disturbed than I’d ever seen him. “I think we can safely say he’s the one who took her. I doubt somebody else came along and snatched her from him. Now, where the hell are they?” He fiddled with a small tracking device. “Damn it. Benny’s car tracker’s offline. I wonder how the hell that happened.”

He kept working on it, then his cell phone rang. He checked the screen. “I don’t know this number. Can you take it, babe? I gotta get this thing working.”

“Aloha!” a male voice asked as I took the call saying, “North Shore Security.”

“Aloha to you, too.”

“How much da reward for fine one wahine?”

Francois and I hadn’t discussed a reward. But I was willing to pay it.

“What you know about one wahine?” I asked, adopting pidgin to match the caller.

“First, want one reward.”

I recognized the man’s voice now. For a second I’d thought it was Benny, but this guy had a slight lisp and he’d been at the bakery this morning. He was one of the customers who’d offered to tweet about Leilani.

“A thousand dollars,” I said as I realized we now had three hours until our wedding.

Francois stopped tapping buttons on his little scanner. “Who you givin’ a thousand dollars to?”

“Guy from the bakery this morning. Says he has a lead on Leilani.”

“Gimme that!” Francois reached for his cell phone, but I pulled it out of his grasp.

“What you know?” I asked the guy.

“She’s in the house next door.” Suddenly the pidgin-speak was gone and the lisp more pronounced.

“Where you live?”

“You gonna PayPal me a thousand dollars by five o’clock?”

“Sure.” I put him on loudspeaker so Francois could hear him.

The guy went on. “Okays. She in da kitchen. Guy with a big fat lip. He eating. Smells plenny good. Saimin, I tink.”

I didn’t care what Lippy was eating, though, I did miss a bowl of good saimin. “You don’t say?”

“I do say. I can see them from my kitchen. My window’s open. So is his. Only it’s not his kitchen.”

“It’s not?”

“Not his house, either.”

Francois rolled his eyes.

“Whose house is it?” I asked.

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