Sneak And Rescue

Silhouette

"Quit hiding from me, you sneaky piece of junk!"

Sam dug through the stacks of receipts and file folders, frantic as a starving squirrel looking for its winter cache of nuts. One heavy binder slid off the chair in front of her and toppled dead center onto the neat piles of checks and bank statements spread out on the carpet. With horror, she watched an hour's worth of sorting flutter into its former chaos. Muttering a curse beneath her breath, she listened more carefully. The muffled chirp of the new cordless phone was coming from behind a tower of IRS pamphlets piled on the love seat next to the chair.

"It used to be so much easier — just start at the jack and pull the phone through the rubble," she muttered.

Crawling on hands and knees to the sofa, she tossed aside manuals with print so fine she couldn't read them with the magnification of the Hubble telescope. "Might've known it was the IRS's fault," she said, seizing the phone, which had been wedged behind a cushion.

Just before the final ring set off her answering machine — if she'd remembered to reactivate it — Sam answered, "Ballanger Retrievals," in her most professional voice. She pushed another stack of manuals onto the floor to create a narrow empty space where she could sit. The small sofa was so full of folders, pamphlets and papers that only the brown leather armrests were visible. Risking an avalanche that might bury her five-four frame if either side toppled, she gingerly leaned back, trying to catch her breath so she would not be huffing like an asthmatic marathon runner.

"Ms. Samantha Ballanger, please," a male voice with a clipped upper-class accent said, as if accustomed to instant acquiescence. She'd heard the type before.

"This is Sam Ballanger." If he expected her to have a private secretary to screen her calls, he was in for an unavoidable disappointment. After growing up poor in a big south Boston blue-collar family, Sam never wasted money on things she could do herself.

"My name is Upton Winchester IV, Ms. Ballanger. I understand you find and return runaways...discreetly."

"Who referred my service to you, Mr. Winchester?" She always wanted to know her clients were legit and not wasting her time. Lots of wacko husbands who used their wives and kids for punching bags wanted her to haul the victims back. No dice. She'd seen too much when she'd worked as a para-medic and then a police officer after moving to Miami.

There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line. "I was referred by Jayson Page Layton. Jay and I golf together," he replied, expecting her to be impressed.

She was. Layton was a Bal Harbor real estate tycoon whose daughter had joined a religious cult and vanished into a commune in the Everglades a couple of years ago. Sam had literally wrestled an alligator while rescuing the poor kid from her nutcase captors, who'd been little more than child molesters and responsible for at least one dead cult member. That was Sergeant Will "Pat" Patowski's take on it. He was her mentor at the Miami-Dade Police Department, where she had spent seven years as a police officer. The Kingdom Come "prophet" and his "deacons" were presently serving ten to life in the state pen at Raiford.

"What seems to be the problem, Mr. Winchester?"

"I'd rather not discuss the matter over the phone, Ms. Ballanger. Please come to my office at the Seascape Building, say —" he paused as if consulting his day-planner " — four this afternoon. Winchester, Grayson & Kent Accounting is on the fifteenth floor."

She paused, as if consulting her own day-planner, which was a scratch pad and ballpoint buried somewhere in the income tax debris smothering her office. "Yeah, that'll work for me. Oh, my retainer's three hundred for consultation. If I take the case, I get three-fifty a day plus expenses," she said, figuring any guy with a Roman numeral in his name could afford a little extra.

"Very well. I'll expect you at four promptly."

She found herself holding a dead phone. "Jerk," she muttered. Obviously used to getting his way. But the address was in the Brickell high-rent district and he hadn't haggled over the price. She scanned the wreckage of the room, looking for the yellow pages, then spotted the volume on her desk next to the empty phone charger. Two feet of books and other papers were piled on top of it.

"Screw it," she said, getting up to dig for it. As she scooted out from between the piles of IRS manuals, they toppled, then slid with a loud series of thumps onto the mess on the floor.

She managed to extract the phone book without disturbing the "ordered chaos" on her desk. Sam thumbed through the accounting section until she reached the Ws, then whistled. A full-page ad, tastefully done in black and white — or black and yellow, more properly — proclaimed Winchester, Grayson & Kent had been in business for over fifty years. Corporate taxes were their specialty.

"Yeah, I did smell money. Must be a family business. Too bad I didn't up my fee even higher. Looks like Winchester could afford a lot more than three and a half bennies a day," she said regretfully.

Her mother, God rest her Irish Catholic soul, used to light candles and pray for Sam to abandon her avaricious ways. Avarice was one of the seven deadly sins, after all. But stretching a beer driver's income to feed six sons who ate as if each meal was going to be their last, Mary Elizabeth Ballanger never had an abundance of time to fret over her daughter's vices. Sam had elevated what she liked to think of as "fiscal prudence" to an art form.

Her ruminations about family back home were interrupted by a loud crash, followed by an oath as the front door slammed. "Dammit, Sam, I thought we agreed you'd call that cleaning service while I was gone," her husband yelled down the hall.

"Welcome home. I missed you, too, darling," she called back, walking down the hall into the living room of their condo.

Matt Granger sat like a disgruntled yoga student, rubbing the toes of his right foot while cursing inventively. "A man needs steel-toed construction boots to walk in this sty."

Returning from a weeklong assignment for the Miami Herald, he'd unlocked the door, juggling his suiter and laptop as he entered the dark room only to trip on one of an assortment of free weights Sam had forgotten to pick up. In a last-ditch save, he'd cradled his computer in both arms and pitched forward. He landed on an empty pizza carton.

"Let me guess. Double cheese and pepperoni, right?" He glowered at the orange stain on the knee of his best tropical wool worsted slacks. "You take these to the dry cleaners," he said, knowing it would provoke her, but not caring at the moment.

"No way. I have some cleaning solution here that will take that out in a jiff."

"Way. You're not touching my Natazzi slacks with some junk you bought in the discount store."

"Well, since they're Italian, they go with pizza," she said, stooping to pick up the carton and toss it in the general direction of an overflowing wastebasket. "You know, we could afford professional dry cleaning if you let me —"

"Let's not go there, Sam," he said, interrupting before she could restart the old argument. Why had he given her the opening? On the subject of money, his wife was as tenacious as a Boston bull terrier with teeth sunk into a letter carrier's leg. "I have a ton of work to do....