A flashlight illuminated the file room. Jax gave his landlord time to ascertain that the place wasn’t on fire or in any imminent danger. When he still didn’t emerge, Jax crept to the doorway. Hayes was crouching over an open file box.
Without warning, Jax stepped into the room and wrapped his arm around the accountant’s throat. He jerked him upright and yanked the flashlight-wielding arm behind his captive’s back.
“Evie, call the cops. We have an intruder.” He knew the damned female was right behind him. He’d have done the same, so he couldn’t complain. Too much.
“Wait a minute! It’s just me, Geoff. I’m only checking the electricity.” The accountant struggled to get free.
There wasn’t much chance of that. Jax had years and muscles on the older man. “Huh.” Pretending he hadn’t recognized him, Jax loosened his hold, capturing his prisoner’s flashlight as he did so. Heavy flashlights made good weapons. He turned it on his landlord and reluctantly released him.
Geoff hastily backed away.
“It’s just an outage,” Jax said accusingly. “And you were in my client files.”
Geoff threw up his hands innocently. “I stubbed my toe, that’s all.”
Evie sauntered in. “Geoff, you know I know when you’re lying. Don’t disappoint me now. I want to believe you’re one of the good guys.”
The accountant looked at her almost pleadingly. “You know I am, Evie. You know I don’t bill my older clients half what I should. I buy ads in all the school yearbooks and newspapers. I was just trying to help a friend.”
Evie crouched beside the open box and sneezed. “Good grief, I hope you’re shredding this stuff, Jax. The rats have already done half the job.”
Jax leaned against the wall, keeping the light on his landlord. “Those files are well past the age of usefulness. I need a truck to haul them to the shredder. What friend, Geoff?”
“A friend, that’s all. He thought maybe you hadn’t looked through everything thoroughly and wanted me to be certain you didn’t have it.”
Jax snorted. “Hank or Swenson? The contract isn’t in there, unless Clancy somehow got his hands on Norton’s storage shed and hid it in forty-year-old files. How likely is that?”
Geoff relaxed and ran his hand through his hair. “Norton occasionally worked for the city back in the day. There was some chance he had it. And I thought it couldn’t hurt to help the family of a man who might be president someday. Just think of the connections we could make—”
“Geoff, Ted Swenson will go to jail before that happens,” Jax said in exasperation. “Grow a backbone. Swenson is asking you to commit a crime. Legal files are confidential, even if they are only moldering rat droppings. Good men don’t dirty their hands forconnections.”
Evie abandoned the file box to take the flashlight from Jax and hand it back to Geoff. “You have no reason to trust Jax. I get that. But trust me when I tell you that should Jax find that contract, he will see it into the proper hands. And I’m thinking you won’t want to be anywhere around when that happens.”
The contract was already in the sheriff’s hands, if he’d only look at it. Jax wasn’t convinced Troy would understand what he was reading. But he appreciated Evie’s confidence.
With the light off his face, Geoff’s expression wasn’t visible. He sounded distinctly nervous when he replied. “Hank won’t be in trouble, will he? He’s just trying to find the contract so the sheriff will release the machines.”
So Ted Swenson and DVM could destroy them and hide all evidence of their tampering, right.
Lights flashed on in the street below, and the air conditioning began to wheeze again.
From the open office door came a distinctive “Yoo-hoo.” Evie’s mother appeared a moment later, as if she’d personally conjured the return of electricity. “Evie, Jax, are you in there? You had a call from a Conan Oswin in California. He claims your cellphone is dead, but it’s urgent that you call him back.”
Twenty-one
Evie checkedthat Loretta was safely tucked in bed, with Psycat sprawled across her toes. She relished the momentary normalcy—before Jax hooked up his phone and returned Oswin’s call and the world descended into chaos again.
She’d just had the most electrifying experience of her life, almost literally. She needed a little bit of normalcy to give her time to process the fact thatshe really could reach out to the recently dead.
Did that mean she should learn to be a mortician? She was fairly certain that would never work.
Conjuring a scary scenario where she dressed a corpse in pink, while its ghost nagged about how much she hated pink and the stepdaughter who’d forced it on her, Evie returned to the kitchen. She fixed a big pot of coffee for the men and a huge mug of hot chocolate for herself. She needed the sugar. Clancy had drained every ounce of energy out of her. Top that off with Jax’s melting kisses and Geoff’s treachery, and her head was already whirling.
If damned Geoff Hayes hadn’t interrupted... She and Jax might have pushed their luck on an ancient Morris chair. Wouldn’t Aunt Val get a kick out of that! Evie dropped that inappropriate thought to follow the men down to the cellar.
Rather than keep the call to Oswin private, Jax put his phone on speaker. “We’re all in this together,” he explained. “I need all of you to think for me. I’ve just had my brains fried.”
Evie snorted. Was he remembering their encounter in the chair or Clancy? Maybe both. She was feeling a little fried too. Good to know Super Macho Man suffered the jimmer-jammers as well.