Read Online Gone at Zero Hundred 00:00 by Cr Hiatt - Free Book Online

comfortable telling the person the truth. I had no
idea who she was.
    “Oh no,” the girl cried, “I don’t know when I’ll get another
chance to call.” She spoke with a slight accent.
    “Who are you?” I said.
    “My name is Tamara Marquez,” she stammered. “Anna was going
to help me.”
    Tamara Marquez? That was the name listed on the file folder I
found. “Maybe I can help you. I’m working on some of her cases.”
    She was quiet for a moment, as if she was debating what to
do. “Did your mom get my package?” She finally asked me after a few seconds.
    “Package? What package?”
    “We need help,” she continued, “and we’re running out of
time.”
    “Okay. I’ll do what I can.” I had no idea what she was
talking about, but I could tell by the catch in her voice, that she was scared,
and what did she mean by, we?
    “Do you know where Danny’s Coffee Shop is?”
    “Yes.” It’s not too far from The Devil’s Door, the place I
just staked out.
    “Can you meet me there?”
    “Um, I guess so,” I said. “But, why don’t you just come here,
to the office?”
    “No, no, no…I need you to meet me in the alley, behind the
coffee shop where no one can see. I’ll be there tonight at midnight. Can you be
there?”
    “At midnight…?”  This was crazy. I started to pace
around the room. She wasn’t making sense.
    “Please, I don’t know who I can trust, and we are running out
of time. Will you please be there?”
    “Yeah sure, I’ll be there.”
    “Oh God, they’re coming. I have to go.” Then the line went
dead, and all I heard was the dial tone.
     Now that I was wide awake, I was in a state of
confusion. I wanted to talk to her some more, but she was no longer there. I
punched in star-six-nine to return the call. It said unknown number.
    She was gone .
    Frustrated, I sat down on the edge of the sofa. What could I
do at three-thirty in the morning? Who was coming that would make her rush off
the phone?
    I went in search of my backpack and the laptop; then sat back
down on the sofa. I looked through the notes in the file, and searched my mom’s
private files on the computer. The file said she was a live-in housekeeper for
Howard Grant, a wealthy attorney who dabbled in politics. He has a
twenty-five-year-old son, Aaron, who still lived at the home, which was on
Vanderbilt Drive, a wealthy neighborhood in Sutter Beach. A maid and butler
also lived at the home, but they were not related to Tamara. The file indicated
that Tamara came to live with the Grants when she was young, but had issues
later on, and eventually moved somewhere else. The file didn’t say what those
issues were. And there was no current home address listed for Tamara. On a
yellow post-it note my mom scribbled two things: The Humidor and The Blue Sky,
but the note didn’t say what they were. There wasn’t anything in the file to
give me a clue why she hired my mom, or why she would be so afraid that she needed
to meet in a back alley at midnight.

FIFTEEN
     
     
     
     
    THE FOLLOWING morning, I drove
over to Sutter Beach Park to meet up with Cody. He wasn’t there when I arrived,
so I started to stretch and work out my joints before he laid into me. Three mornings
a week we met to do some kickboxing. He has been training in the sport for a
couple years, only because he needed somebody to choreograph scenes in his
films, and he didn’t want to pay someone else to do it. I started about six
months ago. After my mom died, I asked him to crank up the training. I needed
something to help me deal with the anger. Cody took the challenge a little too
seriously. He loved making me sweat. But, it was free, so how could I complain?
    “Hey, good lookin’,” Cody said
when he snuck up on me while I was down on all fours doing a yoga stretch. He
referred to all the gals as good lookin’. Not cute, pretty, or even hot, like
every other eighteen-year-old guy said, just, good lookin’. He probably had a
copyright on the