Synopsis

Someone stole $4.2 million from Big Jim McGuire’s closet. He believes it was his
stepdaughter, Cici, and her female lover, Shane. Jimbo hires Dan Trix and Lester to find them.

Cici has disappeared.

When results are not immediate, Big Jim hires a broker to locate a hitman to find them.
Trix and Lester follow Cici and Shane to Paris, then on to Hamburg. What started as a
sniff-and-find job quickly becomes an urgent effort to save lives.

It’s not until they arrive in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, after pursuing a lead in Mexico City, that Trix and Lester feel they are close. But the closer they get, the higher the pile of dead bodies.

While searching for a stepdaughter, her lover and a very large bag of cash, Trix and
Lester must take care that their bodies are not added to the pile.

Chapter 1.

“Those who were seen dancing were thought to be crazy by those who could not hear the music.”

Frederick Nietzsche

Cici McGuire was a woman of privilege.

But she had never known the warmth of love. When you finally feel the warmth of a sun, any sun, you don’t care what planet you’re on.

It was a modern-traditional story of a child born of parents who thought that young love and sex were sufficient to sustain a marriage. It wasn’t. They divorced.

The mother, Danni, remarried while Cici was still in grade school. In that part of Massachusetts most everyone had a diminutive nickname that ended in “i” or“y” or “o”. Jimbo McGuire−Jimmy when he was a kid−didn’t have a lot of education but he did have the will to succeed. He was street-smart and shrewd.

His version of success was financial. Jimbo’s – sometimes Big Jim – business was selling cigarettes and booze in New Hampshire, just over the state line from Massachusetts. New Hampshire is a state with one of the lowest sales taxes on booze in the U.S. Cigarette excise taxes are half that of Massachusetts. For people who smoke and drink and live any place north of Boston, all roads lead to New Hampshire.

The family lived in Massachusetts, which is where Cici went to a college in the state system. A nice place for a nice girl to meet nice people and earn grades sufficient to justify the expense.

What Cici did not meet was a beau. There were dates and flings but nothing of substance and nothing lasting. Maybe Freud could determine why that was but Jimbo and Danni sure couldn’t.

Then came work life. Cici found a job in a law firm as a paralegal. She was not your vanilla brand of paralegal. Cici carried Gucci bags, wore Yves St. Laurent, dabbed on Tom Ford, and had all of her disposable income for play.

Jimbo revealed his love tangibly. When Danni bought a new handbag, Jimbo bought one for Cici. When Danni got a Ferragamo scarf, Cici added one to her collection. Danni fell in love with a Boston terrier. Cici got the sister. The parents bought a duplex and a car, both in Cici’s name. No college debt, no mortgage, no car loan. That’s a lot of play money for a young college graduate.

Her play money wasn’t even required for vacations. Every year Danni flew to Paris to view the new spring collections. Maybe to buy a trinket or two. She flew her partially full Louis Vuitton steamer trunk to Paris in advance of her arrival. It was waiting for her in a suite at the George V. After all, a girl can’t shop on Rue Saint Honoré wearing off-the-rack from Chico’s. Furthermore, a girl really doesn’t want to shop alone. Enter Cici.

During that ten-day stretch every year, Jimbo and his buddies flew to Las Vegas. They were comped from the minute they left the airport till the minute they returned. As long as they stayed inside the hotel, it was compliments of the house. There was an abundance of entertainment to be had in the hotel. And they had it all.

For that type of treatment, you had to push a lot of tokens through a machine, put a lot of chips on red, sit in private rooms with only two other players at the table. Jimbo well satisfied the hotel’s requirements.

Cici was a regular visitor to Jimbo and Danni’s winter home in Florida. The parents would fly down on a private jet. It was a bit expensive, but really, airports are such a nuisance. And the germs.

Cici and Danni’s dogs were about the size of a Gucci tote. When the family came to Florida, the dogs came to Florida. For the couple weeks a couple times a year, the ladies could be seen walking their dogs together. It seemed real familial, sweet you might say.

The people they socialized with in Florida were guys they met at the bar at the Ritz. They were on a first-name basis with the waiters at the Longboat Key Club. Jimbo liked that place. He liked a place where people knew him by name, knew where he liked his chaise lounge, knew he drank DP like most guys drank Bud Light. That’s Dom Perignon, not Dr. Pepper.

A couple times Jimbo lined up Cici with waiters. Not professional waiters but guys earning a buck while they finished their degree at a local college; guys working on a business plan for a new meta-integrated tracking system for pharmacies, guys who had the second round of interviews and were just waiting to hear.

But there was no Velcro, no chemistry. Jimbo was happy he tried. Danni thought Cici should have worn a different outfit. Cici was happy when the guys said goodnight.

Cici was an attractive young lady; slim, with long dark hair, dark eyes, flawless complexion, pleasant personality. There should have been a long line of hound dogs sniffing around her

But sometimes you pass through life’s park in a section where there are no hound dogs. You wonder if it’s maybe you, if it’s an attitude, if it’s a scent. After a while, it’s easy to worry.

Even if we didn’t observe enviable parental role models, somewhere along the line, most of us saw what it could be. We saw that life was better with two; that one and one makes much more than two. Some have the character to sequester the hope that they will float into still waters and gentle breezes. They realize they are in white water and had better deal with it.

Others get distracted. They break paddles on rocks. They yearn for a love that will transform their yearning into pleasure, into satisfaction.

Cici yearned.

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