DOUBLE TROUBLE

by ardavenport


-=- -=- -=- Part 1


Laura Martinez glanced down at her Easy-Transit-for-London app once more before slipping her cell phone into her purse as she hurried down the street to the corner. Baker Street. She turned left, going one . . . two . . . three blocks, checking the addresses on both sides of the street as she went. Walking quickly kept her warm, since her coat was much too light and her skirt too short for this kind of weather. The morning was sunny with only a few clouds in the sky, but Britain had funny ideas about what late spring temperatures should be.

It was mixed, inner city commercial-residential buildings, three and four stories high, occasional trees on the sidewalks, two lanes of traffic on Baker Street, glassy office buildings in the distance. Plenty of pedestrians, but not too crowded; everybody would be at work by now. It was a safe neighborhood.

Just next to the ''SPEEDY'S, SANDWICH BAR & CAFE" she spied the address she needed, 221B. Ugh, if she'd known that there was a place to eat right next door she would have passed on the greasy sausage-thing at the hotel that currently weighed down her stomach. Too late now. She went up the step and pressed the buzzer with 'HOLMES/WATSON' next to it.

She did not hear anything from inside. Nothing happened for too long. She tried again, pressing on the button longer and harder this time. There was a noise. The door opened.

A very average man, average height, average weight, average age (mid-30's), average hair (dark blond, cut in an un-distinctive style for a man), average clothes (light gray sweater, dark pants) opened the door.

"Yes - - " His tone started out cross before he stopped; his eyes flicked down and back up at her face. That's what low necklines were for. "May I help you?" he asked in a much more friendly tone.

"I'm sorry, I don't have an appointment, but I really need to see Sherlock Holmes. It's kind of an emergency."

"Oh, yes, of course." He stepped aside letting her in. "You're an American?"

"Um, yes, I just got in the day before yesterday."

"Oh, well, welcome to London." He smiled. She smiled back. Even without her heels, she was pretty sure she was an inch or two taller than him. She glanced around the cave-like foyer.

"Um, should we go in?"

"Oh, yes, of course." He gestured for her to go forward. "It's just upstairs. I'm John Watson." They exchanged a brief, neutral handshake.

"Laura Martinez. Uh, you're the one with the blog?"

"Ah, yes. Yes, I'm the one with the blog."

The dingy foyer led to a dingy hallway with horrible gray wallpaper on one side and horrible textured beige walls on the other.

"Yes, I'm the one with the blog . . . " John Watson muttered behind her.

They climbed a worn stairway, badly in need of paint or carpet or any kind of resurfacing.

"The one with the blog, that's me," she heard muttered softly behind her. Laura wondered if John Watson always talked to himself.

There was a window at the landing, frosted glass with a few minimal green-colored panes, but otherwise everything was dark and narrow and old, very much like her hotel, located in a decent part of town, but less ruinously expensive than the ones nearer the tourist spots.

As they passed the landing she heard music and it took her a few seconds to recognize the tune. It was R.E.M. Played on a violin.

'It's the end of the world as we know it,

It's the end of the world as we know it,

It's the end of the world as we know it,

And I feel fine.'

It was coming from a door, half-open on the second floor. John pushed it open all the way and Laura stepped inside. The music switched to the rapid-fire verse of the song, played by a tall, thin dark-haired man standing at a music stand by one of the front windows of the apartment; he had to be Sherlock Holmes. There wasn't a picture on his web page and she hadn't had time to look for one on the internet on the hotel computer, but that didn't matter. He looked like a Sherlock Holmes. Maybe a little older than her, maybe not, expression intense as he played through the song.

"Ahem." John cleared his throat. "Sherlock. We have a guest." He helped Laura take her coat off and then hung it over the back of a chair.

The music stopped and he turned toward them, bow pointing straight up in the air. Sherlock Holmes was definitely above average. Long and lean, built like a greyhound, dark hair, gray eyes, slim hips. His clothes and haircut weren't anything special, but he at least had the sense to wear dark and solid, neutral colors and his gray shirt went well with his eyes, which did not pause on any one part of her. His brows twitched.

"This is Laura Martinez," John Watson introduced her. "She has a bit of an emergency."

"Yes, I can see it must be to call you all the way to London from South Florida on such short notice. I trust that you've had time to recover from your jet lag?" He put aside the violin and bow. He had a wonderful low voice that went so well with his British accent.

"How did you . . . ?"

He opened his mouth.

""No, wait, please," she stopped him; his website said that he could deduce things just by looking at you, "I don't care how you do that. I just need you to help me to keep my friend, Nancy, from getting her boyfriend killed."

Sherlock's brows rose with interest. He invited her to sit on a brown leather sofa by the wall while he and John took seats opposite her. In two mismatching chairs on either side of a small gas fireplace, a clutter of bookshelves, lamps and pictures on ugly wallpaper behind them. A worn and truly awful pink and red-hued Persian-style rug dominated the floor.

"Nancy is determined to find her boyfriend, Eddie, but he's in some kind of witness protection in this country and if she finds him I'm afraid she's going to lead some of his old pals in crime right to him. I think we were followed from the airport." She glanced down at the coffee table before her. A laptop sitting on what looked like disturbingly accurate anatomy pictures and some sheet music.

"Hmm, really," Sherlock commented with a frown. He sighed like he was deflating. "An American in some sort of witness protection in Britain. London."

John sat forward in his seat. "Well, that sounds serious. Please tell us your story, from the beginning."

Laura grit her teeth. What was Nancy up to now? Had she gotten an address? Would she text if she found one, or just go straight to Eddie on her own? Sherlock was slouching low in his chair now. What was suddenly bothering him? His web site said that he only accepted interesting problems, whatever that meant, and she was quite certain that Nancy's business classified as at least 'interesting'. John Watson gave her an encouraging smile. Maybe if she started from the beginning he'd see that and help.

Laura Martinez and Nancy Russell had been friends all through high school and after graduation went to the same community college, taking classes off and on and switching majors, dragging their feet on the big decision of what they would do with their lives now that they were officially adults. Once they were past the age of twenty-one and they could officially party as adults, they started clubbing together with friends. One of them was Eddie, a boy they knew from high school, but he hadn't been part of their crowd then. He had gotten into some less than legal activities; whether it was stealing cars or drugs or selling stolen goods, Nancy said she never asked him and Laura certainly didn't. But it gave Eddie some noticeable spending money and he was a lot of fun to hang out with and he didn't do anything illegal around them. Nancy started dating him seriously.

Life moved on, as it often did. The pressure to move out of her parents' house drove Laura to finish a double associates' degree in landscaping architecture and accounting and then onto a job at a property management company that Nancy's family partly owned. Nancy took the old-fashioned route to adulthood and got pregnant.

The night-clubbing pretty much ended with Laura's determination to actually be good at her work and not just somebody who got the job through her connections to Nancy, who suffered mightily through morning sickness, lethargy, weird food cravings and not being able to fit into any clothes except the frumpy maternity clothes her mother bought for her.

Laura saw less of Eddie but he looked forward to being a father and even put some real money into a bank account for Nancy to help support their daughter (they decided to name little Bridget after Nancy's grandmother, after the first ultrasound). Both Nancy's mother and grandmother dithered about demanding a wedding. Partly due to the potential danger of Nancy being legally tied to Eddie and his possibly criminal lifestyle (nobody ever asked questions about the money he gave to Nancy). And Grandmother had not been married when she had her first child and Nancy's mother had been married three times.

In the end, Eddie might have married Nancy, if he hadn't been killed in a single car accident a month before Bridget was born. Apparently. He was properly mourned by all his pals, his pregnant girlfriend and his mother who managed to shed a few tears over her only son's casket. She was a very good bartender, but she had never had the most maternal personality.

Nancy delivered a happy eight pound, three ounce baby girl with a full head of hair and looking very much like her father. Nancy gave her, her father's last name, Blakely. Little 'BB' grew and prospered and was just beginning to take solid food when one of Eddie's old pals, Frank Harding, caught Nancy's eye. To her family's great disapproval, Nancy started dating him. Laura did not go out with Nancy when she was with him. Eddie had been funny and you could always imagine that he was kidding about his life of crime. But Frank was more serious about it, had a temper and liked to be the big man in the room.

Then one evening, when Nancy and Laura were out at dinner on a woman's night out, a mysterious woman approached their table. She was tall, tan and leggy with high-lighted hair, perfect make-up, designer clothes and shoes, and very expensive retro jewelry. 'This is from a friend who only has your best interests at heart.' She deposited a cell phone on their table and then glided away. Both of them had been so surprised that the woman had disappeared into the crowd at the busy outdoor restaurant before either of them could get up. But this was only a small surprise compared with the text they found.

The phone and the text on it were from Eddie.

"Eddie? How?" John asked. Sherlock's critical glare at her shifted to him.

Apparently Eddie was not dead. The charred body from the wreck and now residing under Eddie Blakely's headstone had been an indigent provided by the government who had whisked him away to safety in witness protection because he was providing them - - The Sheriff's Department? The state of Florida? The FBI? It wasn't clear. - - with information that would be used against Eddie's former 'crime syndicate'.

It had been an incredible story, but Nancy had clung to it like a lifeline. She dropped Frank - - the texts advised staying away from any of Eddie's former associates because they would eventually be rounded up by the law to face justice whenever they had enough evidence, with Eddie's help. She eagerly awaited her secret daily text (that she did not tell her family about), sometimes getting up at 3 AM when it usually arrived. Eddie was not supposed to be communicating with anyone from his old life, but he could sneak away once a day to send his untraceable messages. And hear back from Nancy about her life with his daughter. Nancy had offered to help, so maybe the government would spirit her and BB away to his protected-witness hideout, especially since a frustrated Frank still came around sometimes. But Eddie's texts had warned her not to. The government would just send her to a different hide-out and they would have no hope of even the minimal communication they shared now.

Sherlock now sat a bit straighter in his squarish vinyl chair, his hands now steepled before him though he still scowled. John encouraged her to continue. The situation changed abruptly two weeks ago.

They were out to dinner, just two friends taking an evening off, when Nancy confided in her that she had found where Eddie was hiding. The government had sent him to Britain, in the London area where his father was from.

"Really?" Sherlock dropped his hands to the arm rests of his chair. "And just how did she find him?"

"He's got a web page."

"A web page?" Sherlock's tone rose in a near falsetto. "He has a web page?" Suddenly he leaped out of his chair and started pacing on the pink patterned carpet. "So, you need my help to find a man in such fear for his life from some supposed American crime syndicate that he has to advertise his presence to the world with his own web page?"

"It's not his web page, it's his father's," Laura said when Sherlock paused for a fraction of a second to take a breath.

"Oh, well, then it's obvious." He waved his hands, suddenly wound up in a manic frenzy. "While it has been marginally, barely amusing for me to listen to your vacuous and highly improbable tale while John here tries valiantly not to stare at your nipples, I really can't help you, because your problem has nothing to do with your friend's dead Eddie, your problem is that you and Nancy are both too stupid, too credulous to realize that this mystery phone and texts could not possibly be from dead Eddie, because while I may not be an American myself, I know perfectly well that the law enforcement authorities there do not hand out new identities to witnesses until after they have actually witnessed something, as in testifying in a court of law, and not when they are supposedly collecting evidence for some future case, and I really can't help you even if John here is willing to give your ridiculous emergency the benefit of his doubt; for me to do so would require me to give you a whole retirement plan of doubt, because I don't care about your tan, your short skirt, your artificially blond hair or your considerable bra size." He turned to his roommate. "And, yes, John, they are real."

"Sherlock!" He jumped up from his chair.

Laura's shock lasted only a few seconds before the anger set in. She grabbed the laptop from the coffee table in front of her while the two men verbally went after each other.

"She came to you for help! You can't just call people stupid and turn them away like that Sherlock!"

"I can't? What do you mean I can't? I just did."

The laptop was different from hers, left behind in Ft. Lauderdale, but the browser was open and the address window was in the usual place.

" . . . you always do this . . . "

"Why do you insist . . . "

She logged onto her ShareBook page and then on to the 'Blakely Family' page.

"Well, what about the phone and the texts and the woman?" John demanded.

She turned the laptop screen back to the two men.

"There!" Her angry near shout made them both jump, better yet, shut up. "There, see?" She pointed down at the screen. "The guy facing the camera in the picnic picture; that's Eddie."

Both of them leaned down for a closer look; Sherlock picked up the laptop. "This is Eddie?"

"That's him. The hair's a little shorter, but that's him. And it's the same last name, Blakely." She put her hands on her hips, throwing her chest out, but it had no effect on Sherlock whatsoever. He threw himself back into his chair, legs folded up onto the cushion, laptop balanced between them.

Laura waited.

He continued to ignore both of them and tapped away on the keyboard.


-=- -=- -=- END Part 1