Carrie 7
Chapter 7
If Avano was nervous as Jace as Carrie walked into the room, he hid it well. He sat there behind his carved oak desk with his fingertips together in a very judicial manner. Jace glanced around the room. Except for the incense burning in the sensor on the table in the corner. And a set of crystals arranged in the corners of the room it looked like and ordinary office. There were three large windows behind Avano, and oddly enough the center one looked cleaner than the other two.
"I have been told that you wish to discuss Dove," he said.
"She's a friend of ours," said Jace, "We're trying to find her." Said Jace
"Alas she has departed for parts unknown even to me," he said, "I believe she had a crisis of faith."
Avano looked pain and even shed a tear for effect.
"If only she had stayed," he sighed, "I could have counseled her."
Jace and Carrie both fought the urge to roll their eyes.
"Did she give you any clue as to where her crisis of faith might take her?" asked Carrie. Jace was impressed. She was already sounding like an investigator.
"I regret no," he said, "an I have not been able to contact her on the Astral plane either."
"When was the last time you saw her?" asked Jace
"I recall it being the day before she disappeared." He replied in a tone that made Jace and Carrie suspect that they weren't going to get anything else out of him.
"Well thank you for your time, sir." Said Carrie.
"You're welcome fair one," he said, eyeing her up and down, "Please feel free to come back here anytime."
Carrie's face remained polite as Jace offered his arm to her. She took his arm with a firmer grip than she meant to. When Jace told her she was pretty, it made her feel warm and fuzzy inside. This guy made her skin crawl.
Jace shook hands with Avano and immediately he saw the telepathic flash of a window shattering in the dark as a shadowy form went through it. As quickly as it appeared the image was gone.
Jace and Carrie turned and walked out of the office and headed down the hall. They exchanged a look that told Jace that Carrie had seen the telepathic flash too.
"Well we know one thing," she said, "Avano is not a grieving spiritual advisor, he's a liar."
"Oh yeah," said Jace, as they stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor, "He definitely knew more than he was telling."
"So, what do we do now?" asked Carrie as they climbed into the car.
"We need to come back here later when no one else is here and have another look at that office," said Jace, "Something about it is off and right now I can't quite put my finger on it."
As they drove back toward home, neither one of them knew that as soon as they had left Avano's office he had made a phone call.
When they got back to the penthouse they changed out of there disguises and ordered Chinese. Jace sat down on the sofa put his feet up on the coffee table and began to rack his brain trying to figure out what if was about Avano's office that was bugging him. Carrie elected to take a shower.
A few minutes later, just as the shower shut off, there was a knock at the door. Jace looked at his watch.
"Hmm," he said, "that was fast." He stood up and walk toward the door. He was his hand was half way to the doorknob. When Carrie emerged from the Bathroom.
"Jace," she hissed, "Don't open that door, it's not the delivery boy!" No sooner had these words left her mouth that Jace heard the pump action of a shotgun through the door. He dove out of the way just as a shotgun blast blew the doorknob off the door. Carrie hit the deck at the same time.
Four Masked men came crashing through the door. Two were armed with shotguns and two were armed with semi-automatic pistols. Carrie and Jace jump to their feet. The two with the shotguns leveled them at Carrie. Carrie's eyes dilated, and the shotguns jumped violently out of the man's hands and swung around 180 degrees and blew the two would be attackers away. Jace raised his hands and the pistols flew out of the hands of the other two, and then they were blown backwards against the wall
This and having witnessed what happened to their friends drained the fight out of them. They scrambled to their feet, turned, and tried to run, but they didn't get more than a few steps before they had the sensation of being grabbed around the throat and lifted off the ground. The grip that had them swung them around in mid-air and brought them face to face with Jace and Carrie standing there with their hands raised in Darth Vader force grip style.
"Now," said Jace, as the shotguns hovered in front of there faces, "if you two don't want to end up splattered all over the wall like your friends, you'd better tell us who hired you."
"What are you people?!" Cried one of the men clearly terrified.
"Who we are and what we are doesn't matter," growled Carrie, the shotguns chambered shells "What matters is what we're going to do to you if you don't talk!"
"I d-don't know_" he started
"Shut up, Eddie!" snapped the other guy.
"I will not shut up," the first guy retorted, "Listen, Jake, you may want a shotgun facial, but I don't!"
"We don't know who hired us," he continued, "We get our instructions from a post office box, so we never no who hires us for the jobs!"
Carrie turned to Jace,
"What do you think?" she asked
"I believe them," said Jace, "Avano strikes me as the type who is too smart to get his own hands dirty unless it's absolutely necessary."
With a flick of their wrists, Jace and Carrie bounced the two men off the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Then they dropped the unconscious men to the floor.
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Detective Steve Jackson stood with Jace and Carrie as the Forensics guys made their way outside. The coroner's van pulled away with the two dead bodies in it. And he turned to Jace. Jace and Carrie were standing there with chopsticks in their hands eating from cartons of Chinese noodles.
"Well," he said, "First of all thanks, those four assassins are a team of hitmen for hire known as the Gulf Shore Boys. We've been trying to nail them for years. Whatever you did to those two worked because Little Eddie was singing like Pavarotti's canary. Those to are going away for a long time."
"And second?" asked Jace,
"Second, you'll need to come down to the station in the morning and sign a statement, but that's just a formality as far as I know you two are in the clear, self-defense pure and simple."
"Great," said Carrie
"Oh, and one other thing," said Jace, "keep those two on ice until you hear from us if at all possible. If as we suspect Avano had something to do with Sue Snell's disappearance, and hired those guys to kill us for snooping, he's going to get really jumpy and spooked when he finds out they failed."
"Right," said Carrie, "And at the moment he's the only lead we have to what happened to Sue."
"I'll do what I can." Said Steve.
After he had gone Carrie turned to Jace.
"What do we do now?"
"First," said Jace, "We're going to finish our supper, then get a couple hours sleep."
"And then," replied Carrie
"And then we're going to pay a little nocturnal visit to Avano's office."
TBC…..Please Read and Review
