Saffron’s Menagerie

Phil Stevenson

Description

Saffron, Apples and Caviar Inc.’ provide assassination services to those that want revenge.
Adorable 29 year old Saffron Justice and her eccentric partner Reg Charles, are brilliant Scientists and Biologists who discover the ‘Mother Key’ elixir whilst at M.I.T. Boston.
After successful revenge death contracts, a private detective is closing in on them. Also two New York detectives, Matt Scott and Barbara Custer become involved in solving these bizarre murders.
Saffron and Reg want to close up their operation.
But one more assignment is asked of them.
Could this be their undoing?
Saffron has a glass menagerie in her front room, but a hidden Menagerie in her basement.
Det. Custer is suspicious when a friend is killed in a car crash. As she brings all the clues together, she too is fooled by Saffron’s Menagerie.
The ending is not at all what you might expect.

Sujets

• Policier & Thriller
• Policier
• Fiction
• Crime
• Thrillers

Informations

• Publié par: Tablo Pty Ltd
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781925819786
• Langue: English

Extrait

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental
For
Nancye
&
Iris
 
 
---ooOoo---
CHAPTER ONE
Since women do most delight in revenge, it may seem but feminine manhood to be vindictive. Sir Thomas Browne
 
MANHATTAN
1.
     A bright red Porsche coupe turns into Bank Street from Greenwich Ave, and slowly drives down the dark grey cobble stone street. It stops outside a line of Greek Revival townhouses. It is a warm, cloudless summer’s day in Greenwich Village, downtown Manhattan. The curbside trees are providing a glorious contrast of green and shade against the red brick buildings. A few pigeons from the local park are cooing in a nearby tree. There are people going about their way this mid-afternoon. A few couples chat to each other and a nanny, with headphones in her ears pushes a stroller with a dozing baby wrapped in a light cotton shawl.
The Porsche comes to a stop outside Number 462. A young man, in his twenties, gets out of the passenger’s side and runs up the stone front stairs to the entrance pediment that adorns the old heavy oak front door. A button is pressed, passwords exchanged and the door is unlatched.
A few minutes later the visitor walks back down the front stairs, clutching a brown paper folder, gets into the Porsche that drives away.
It is Friday, which entices a number of cars into the street with occupants that also make their way to the same townhouse door. They also stay only minutes and then disappear back into the great metropolis.
Ten minutes after the Porsche, a green Chevy Camaro that contains a sole driver goes through the same procedure as before.
Inside the Bank Street townhouse an overweight man, fiftyish, known as Lucky, a name he coined himself, counted dollar bills on his dining room table and stacked them in matching denomination piles. A large covered plastic storage tub was nearby. It contained the items that he peddles each and every Friday afternoon to only a dozen or so well-heeled young Manhattan or Brooklyn types and some older, which sought his wares.
The man has bottle lens glasses on his round fat face that has a receding hairline, with squinty eyes that make him look like an old-fashioned bank clerk. Today, so far, he has netted $6,000. An average sum, however he is happy. If all goes well that figure might go to $10,000.
He looks out from his dining room window down into Bank Street to see a small delivery van arrive. It is his afternoon grocery delivery, as the driver, while whistling, opens the back of the van to retrieve a cardboard box brimming with fruit, vegetables and other assorted goodies. He is a young-looking man, with reddish thick clumped hair adorned by a cap bearing the same logo as on the side of the truck. Large circular sunglasses surround his eyes. He wears baggy jeans and a sloppy sweater that hangs loosely down past his waist. The driver scoots up the front stairs and rings his buzzer.
Lucky covers his cash with a cloth, checks again his visitor via the above door camera and walks to open the door.
“We’re on time today,” the delivery driver says with a smile.
To which Lucky just nods. He wants him gone as soon as possible. He had complained about the late delivery after 3 pm last Friday. The busiest delivery day and also his busiest day. He doesn’t want grocery deliveries interrupting his lucrative Fridays. And certainly, did not want any indicators that might ward off his clients.
“Shall I take it to the kitchen?” the driver asks.
Lucky didn’t recognize the delivery guy as the regular, and didn’t care either.
“No, I’ll take it from here,” was his reply.
Lucky signs the delivery docket, sends the delivery truck on its way, and is soon in the kitchen filling the fridge with the perishables and stacking other items on the kitchen bench. A twin pack of frozen strawberries is thrown into the freezer compartment.
The door buzzes again and he instantly looks to the security monitor to see who it is. Passwords are exchanged and another deal is done.
2.
Lucky didn’t go out at night. He didn’t like it, especially weekends. He would prefer his casual strolls through Washington State Park during the afternoons, which usually finished with an early evening meal at The Spotted Pig or at Buvette’s, a popular, quaint bistro offering a French small-plates menu at breakfast, lunch & dinner.
Lucky is a loner. Rotund, short, unattractive, sweaty and unpleasant to look at. His crooked stained teeth need some orthodontic care. He is a relation to a ‘speak-easy’ type major New York dealer named Carlos, who provides his inventory at a most reasonable cost. Lucky helped out his cousin big-time some years back regarding an incident, when Lucky perjured himself, by giving Carlos an alibi after Carlos was charged with a break and enter. Carlos then returned the favor by selling Lucky modest amounts of cocaine and cannabis at well below ‘market price’.
Lucky spends all his funds, or most of it, on rare coins, which he gloats over in his third story secured collection room. In fact, he spends most of his time in his collection room, which also secures his prohibited substances. Lucky drinks Pepsi and munches on potato crisps as he dotes on his prized collections of rare Spanish coins. He has a gold doubloon and two silver ‘pieces-of-eight’, minted in the 16thcentury. He loves to look at them and thinks of Blackbeard the Pirate’s look on his face, when opening a chest full of them, with a ribald parrot screeching in the background, ‘pieces of eight, pieces of eight.’
It is now Saturday afternoon, and he decides to dine at Buvette’s and then go home to make his favorite dessert, a strawberry and cream concoction in a big glass bowl that he loves spooning into.
He’s ‘watching’ a rare Italian coin for sale on eBay, and the auction is ending that night. He plans to buy it. The sale ends at 8:35 pm.
He hails a cab to quicken the return of the few blocks to his townhouse and arrives home at 5:45 pm. Just enough time to settle and watch the news at six o’clock.
He walks to his kitchen, opens the freezer door and pulls out the frozen strawberries. It is the twin pack, each single serve separated by a perforation in the plastic pouches. He notices a small rip in one pack, thinks nothing of it, and decides it is the one to eat first. Using his teeth, he opens the pack wider and empties the contents into a very large long glass. He goes back to the fridge and retrieves a tub of thickened cream and spoons it into the glass. The strawberries will take about thirty minutes to defrost, and in anticipation, as usual, he pours himself a large Canadian Club whisky on the rocks. Then settles in front of the television and waits for the news.
He has been fascinated about the Hillary Clinton loss in the recent election and her shock reaction to it, but he doesn’t really care at all. He didn’t vote. After thirty minutes of commercials, more commercials with some news, he has finished his drink and now looks forward to his dessert.
As he enters his kitchen he didn’t notice a small movement in the glass. It may have been from the strawberries moving as they melted in with the cream. It moved again. And then, a third time, as if it was agitated.
As he sat back with the television, he amused himself on the amount of wealth he had accumulated in such a few years. He now almost owned his townhouse and had a magnificent private collection of coins from all over the world. The coins are also an investment, as they will appreciate over time. He knows that he must move on to another location soon, as his visitations on Friday afternoons were not going unnoticed. One local, who queried him in the street during casual conversation, referred to his visitors. His reply always is that he provides a resume, curriculum vitae service for job seekers who want a professional presentation when applying for jobs. Lucky always says that it paid the bills.
He had his favorite long spoon that dived deep into the stemmed glass. By now the strawberries were ready and the cream had melted though the batch revealing artistic strawberry red veins on the inside of the flute.
The spoon went deep into the glass and for a moment it seemed different to Lucky, as he felt something larger in the glass. He brought the glass up to his face to see, when from the creamed red miasma an orange insect jumps out at him and claws onto his left cheek. As if by nature, within a millisecond the insect’s engorged tail sting strikes Lucky’s left eye, into the corner near his nose. Lucky recoils, and by reaction slaps the insect on his cheek as hard as he possibly can. No casual hand flick away! The insect, now mortally damaged, arches its tail and strikes again, driving its sting into Lucky’s right cheek. Lucky gives the creature one almighty strike, feels its external skeleton crack, which causes it to fall into his lap, dead.
He looks down in shock and despair. It is a large reddish brown scorpion. Immediately he is overcome with excruciating pain in his eye, cheek and now his entire face. He slumps forward letting his dessert crash to the floor. He tries to stand up, but falls back into the chair and then rolls onto the floor in agony. Within minutes Lucky’s pulmonary system is failing. The system of blood vessels that forms a closed circuit between the heart and the lungs was under attack from the arachnid’s powerful poisonous venom. After a while, pink frothy sputum starts to dribble from his mouth. An hour later Lucky is dead.
 
 
SAN FRANCISCO
 
1.
 
Saffron Justice is reading her notebook in a comfortable leather seat next to a port window on the Gulfstream G600 private jet. She planned to be in Frisco for about three days if all went to plan. She wears a dark grey Prada f