Mystery, 331 pages
Blurb:
Kate
Tucker seeks the people who threaten her and her foster daughter.
Since Kate is a finder of lost,
missing, stolen, or unpaid merchandise, she uses her skills to bring a murderer
to justice. If Kate doesn’t locate the
killer, she and her foster daughter will be his next victims.
Excerpt:
I needed to be
able to prove that this smuggling was happening. If I
and my hunches hadn’t been in such an all-fired rush, maybe I could have
interested the police and the Coast Guard in my theory. Then I’d have been
hiding in the dark with a whole slew of good-looking uniformed men. Some days,
I swear, my brain is on vacation.
I also knew I
wasn't going to dash out there and grab a box and run. Those boxes seemed much
too heavy.
My curiosity was
killing me, though. Since I didn’t feel suicidal, I just let the curiosity hurt
real bad.
Being patient and
hidden were the only tools I had. If I waited long and quietly enough, maybe I
could get a peek at a crate’s contents. Was I ever glad I’d brought the camera!
I had already
loaded it with one roll of fresh film, still cool from the refrigerator. The
other five rolls were chilling my thigh through my jeans pocket.
I loved this old
manual camera. We'd seen a lot. If I had a chance for a picture, it would be a
snap shot. The Canon’s controls were all set. This old heavy rig would take
pictures of whatever I wanted. Good clear ones, too.
All I needed now
was an opportunity.
No one was paying
attention to anything but the task of unloading the boat’s cargo into the
truck. The night was so still I could hear the whine and shriek of the pulley
as it lifted each box out of the boat's hold.
The sound
stopped, followed by curses from the busy bait shack. Both of the musclemen
stopped and listened, then one of them sat his load on the wharf and re-entered
Berth 19. When he called for help, the other lad sat his box on top of the
first box and followed his mouth-breathing buddy.
The door was left
standing open. I could see into their area well enough to watch them cross the
room to the door leading to the boat.
My educated guess
was the winch had jammed with a load halfway up. The water was too shallow and
the area too busy to allow a box of smuggled whatevers to sit on the bottom of
the bay in daylight. Cutting the line was out. For the same reasons, a load
couldn't dangle halfway up the winch's line, either. The line had to be
untangled and the load brought into the bait shack.
By now, I was
positive whatever was in the boxes had to be illegal, immoral, or fattening.
The boxes seemed too heavy to contain cholesterol-loaded goodies, so fattening
was out. The immoral part was easy to disqualify; there was too much of that
available right on the street. No need to import immorality.
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