Clawed: A Gin & Tonic Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

front.”
    So what now? The job was a bust, but she’d already paid for the night’s stay. The hotel wasn’t going to give her a refund just because her client turned out to be a no-show. And while she didn’t think the cops would really give her shit about going back to Seattle—they could find her there easily enough, and there was the technological marvel of the phone, if they had anything else they wanted to ask her—wanting her own bed didn’t trump the probable annoyance of having to call the police station and tell them she’d changed her mind, she was going home.
    But sitting in the hotel room with nothing to do except wonder about a dead body she shouldn’t even know about wasn’t going to do her any good. Might as well try to get some positive out of this trip. . . .
    Fortunately, Portland wasn’t without friendlies. She pulled her phone out of her jacket pocket and dialed a number from memory, waiting for the other person to pick up. “Ron, hi, it’s Ginny again. Thanks for the advice on the rental car, it’s as solid as you said. But it looks like my job fell through so I’m free for dinner tonight after all. You still—all right, yeah, that sounds good. Just tell me where.” She listened to Ron yelling to someone else, then giving her an address.
    “McMenamins Kennedy School, seven o’clock. No, s’okay, I can find it. I have been to Portland before, you know.” He said something and she made a face but, in light of her mishaps this afternoon, couldn’t really argue. “I have GPS on my tablet, thank you very much.”
    Seven o’clock. That gave her two hours to kill before she’d have to leave, even allowing time to get lost. “C’mon, Georgie, back inside. Momma needs to fire up the laptop.”
    She’d said she was done with her would-be client, but the fact that the phone had rung in the house that the woman didn’t live in bothered Ginny. And by “bothered” she meant “was starting to piss her off.”
    Once she had Georgie settled down with her dinner, Ginny sat cross-legged on the bed and flipped open her laptop. She’d almost not brought it, thinking the tablet would be enough for a two-day trip, but at the last minute she’d thrown it in the bag, mostly out of habit. She was thankful now: she could run searches on her tablet, but it was easier to work with a full keyboard.
    She flexed her fingers and called up her browser, common sense warring with curiosity. The dead body was a matter for the cops. She wasn’t going to mess with that, not when she’d been the one to find the body—she’d watched enough TV and movies to know how badly that could go. And anyway, she didn’t even have a name to start with—“random dead white guy in Portland” might be enough for professionals, but Ginny knew her limits—even if she didn’t always admit to them.
    “Pull the threads you can see first,” she told herself. “Amanda Adaowsky.”
    Ginny had done a basic search on her would-be client when the woman first approached her, but that had been an “is there something negative about this person I need to know before I accept?” search, not a “does this person even exist?” dig, because who thought to do that?
    Ginny didn’t like wasting time, but she really hated being played for an idiot.
    “Fool me once, shame on you. And I won’t get fooled twice,” she told the screen grimly, entering in the search parameters. “Every new client’s going to get a full scrub-down, from here on in.” Too late for that now, on this job. But if there was an Amanda Adaowsky anywhere in the contiguous forty-eight, the two external states, or Canada, she’d know by dinnertime. After that . . . well, she’d see where that thread led her.
    *    *    *
    Tuesday afternoons at Mary’s were usually quiet, as though gathering strength for the chaos that generally erupted once Trivia Night began. Once a week, people came in from all over the city, filling the bar for two hours