Free Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: An Addison Holmes Mystery (Addison Holmes Mysteries Book 5) by Liliana Hart Page A

Scarlet whispered. “He better watch out or he’ll shoot his pecker right off. Happened to a good friend of mine. Never could pee standing up again. Kept hitting himself right between the eyes.”
    “Why are you whispering?” I asked.
    “It seemed appropriate. Where are we going?”
    “A place called Ugly Mo’s. He’s a car dealer. Kind of.”
    Jayesh hmmphed and drove all the way to the end of the street. It was a dead end. Only one way in and one way out. A couple of metal buildings with peeling paint sat in front of us, and in the parking lot to our right were several rows of cars in various stages of disrepair. It wasn’t looking too promising. I was starting to think Jimmy Royal may have set me up big time.
    “This is the end of the road, lady,” Jayesh said. “Twenty-eight-fifty.”
    “Hey, at the corner back there it was only eighteen dollars,” I said, narrowing my eyes.
    “This street’s an expensive fare.” I handed him thirty bucks and opened the car door.
    “What about my tip?” he asked.
    “I was going to give you thirty back at the corner. You could’ve pocketed it but you decided to be a jerk. Now your boss gets the money.”
    He called me a bitch and put the cab in reverse, speeding back down the road to safety.
    “I have a mind to shoot out his tires,” Scarlet said. “There’s so many laws nowadays. I liked it back when it was an eye for an eye. People these days take offense to every damned thing.”
    “Especially having their tires shot out,” I said. “Come on. My hair isn’t going to last with this weather. Let’s go find Ugly Mo.”
    “I hate to break it to you, but you already look like Troy Polamalu. I’ll take you to my salon. You need someone who can tame that hair. If we get out of here alive we should stop by and see if they can squeeze you in.”
    “I’ve been thinking of making a drastic change.”
    “That’s your hormones talking. You’re not ready to have a baby, so you’re needing to change something about yourself. Sometimes I’d get those hormonal urges to have kids. That’s when I’d come visit your dad and his brothers. They were the best birth control on the market. Horrible children,” she said, shuddering. “And then I’d go buy myself a new pair of shoes or a handbag.”
    I could kind of understand where Scarlet was coming from with the whole kid thing. I knew I wanted to have kids someday. But I’d spent a good portion of my life in a classroom full of semi-adults that were given a license to operate a car, but didn’t know how to balance a checkbook and wrote complete sentences with emojis. It was kind of depressing. And I really liked buying shoes and handbags too.
    “Someone has some real artistic talent,” Scarlet said. “Wonder if they’d do a wall in my bathroom.”
    I was assuming Scarlet was referring to the graffiti that covered a good portion of the metal building. There were a lot of creative curse words and a portrait of a scantily clad woman with breasts that defied gravity. Ugly Mo’s was written in big block letters in lime green.
    “What would you get them to draw on your wall?” I asked curiously.
    “That Jason Momoa fella and me and Tom Hardy on one of those heart-shaped beds. I’ve always been attracted to men that look like they won’t break.”
    “Sometimes I wonder if I’m dead and caught in some kind of horrific purgatory,” I said, wondering why I’d asked the question in the first place.
    “What’s that, dear?”
    “Nothing. I don’t see anyone. Let’s go inside and get out of the rain.”
    The only door in sight was one of those big garage doors like at a mechanic’s shop. There was one fluorescent light hanging from the ceiling, and it smelled like motor oil with a hint of dead animal.
    A piece of metal scraped across concrete from somewhere in the darkness of the building. I froze and immediately felt chills crawl across my skin. I glanced at Scarlet to make sure she was okay, and then did a