Franky Is Lucky

CHAPTER 5

THE LEECH GOES LOOKING

I sat there for a brief moment just thinking. I had to make a plan. First thing is first I turned over the ignition to Amy’s car and shut the drivers side door. I needed to hide the car just in case. I drove it to the back by my garage parking it in one of the empty stalls. I grabbed the note and Amy’s keys and got out of the car. I shut the garage door and headed to the front of the house. I walked over to the broken window and finished hammering in the bottom nails, securing the plywood to the window frame. I picked up the unused supplies and headed back around the house to the back door. I stopped by the shed and put everything back and then I entered the house. I went through checking to make sure no one was there. I locked all the doors, shut all the curtains and disengaged the alarm. Then I headed to the sun room. There the body laid. I approached with caution. Which was probably stupid but I had heard and seen too much in the past twenty four hours to not be careful. I reached into the corpses pockets.

Inside his jacket pocket there was a dry cleaning claim ticket and a set of keys. There was an empty gun holster strapped to his belt. He had a cell phone in his pocket and in his back pocket there was a wallet. Jackpot! Turned out someone had been smart and removed all forms of identification, there was a lot of cash and a few receipts. I looked through the cell phone it yielded little information. There were no text messages no recent calls and no saved contacts. Who has a phone with no information on it? Someone who doesn’t want to be identified that’s who? I put the guy personal effects on the wicker table in the sun room. I had to find a place to put the body. For one he was going to start to smell and two if someone decided to stop by it would be a disaster. Oh come have some lemonade, oh don’t mind the dead guy he’s harmless. Yea that would go over really well.

I went through the sun room to the kitchen and out the back door. I headed into the shed. I was searching for a tarp and I found it. I grabbed the wheelbarrow as well and headed to the garage first. I was really glad that I had decided on a secluded house with a lot of land. Though I had originally bought the property to keep people at a distance it was proving to be a good location if I ever decided to become a serial killer. Strange thoughts Franks. Focus.

I draped the tarp over the bed of my Dad’s old pickup truck. I had kept it after he died and hardly ever used it but I was thankful that I had decided not to sell it after all. Once the bed was covered I took the wheelbarrow and brought it to the back door of the house. I went inside grabbed the ends of the throw and slid the body to the door. It took all my strength to hoist the body into the wheel barrow and some considerable upper body endurance to wheel the cargo over to the garage. I lowered the tailgate of the truck and pulled the dead guy into the tarped bed. I then proceeded to wrap the tarp around him. I realized rather quickly that my wrapping made it very obvious that it was a body but I remembered I had another tarp and ran back to the shed. I grabbed the extra tarp and some bungee cords from the shed and headed back to the garage. I draped the tarp over the bed of the truck as a crude canopy and used the bungee cords to secure it. I then headed back inside. I grabbed the mop again and cleaned up all the blood in the house. When I was done I looked down I realized that I had ruined my shirt. Man, I really liked that shirt.

Back to Earth Franky, you have a dead guy in the back of your truck and your friend is kidnapped. You need to be thinking.

I went to the sun room where I had placed the guys personal effects and I scooped them up. I grabbed the ransom letter and I headed to the study. This was all I had so I needed to figure out what to do with it. I placed everything on my desk and sat in my office chair. I glanced at the items one by one as my computer whirred to life. I pulled up the internet.

I typed the phone number on the note into a reverse lookup database. There were no results. It must be a disposable cell phone I had seen that in movies a million times, must have been based in fact at some point. So that was a dead end.

I searched the dead guys wallet again to see if there was anything I missed. Nope just cash.

I opened the cell phone in the phone information for the cell number. I plugged that number into reverse lookup and again nothing. No dice. Think Franky. Think. There has to be something.

I realized that I would have to call the number on the note. I reached for the phone and began to dial. Midway through I glanced down at the desktop and saw the dry cleaning claim tag. Wait!

I hung the phone up and picked up the tag off the desk. It was a normal dry cleaning tag. There were three red numbers on the bottom 517 and the dry cleaners name and number were printed at the top. Louie’s 24 Hour Dry Cleaning. I picked up the phone again and dialed the number on the tag. It rang three times before a woman answered.

“Thanks for calling Louie’s twenty four hour dry cleaning. This is Vanessa how can I help you?” I thought rather quickly, because I pulled this one out of thin air.

“Yes ma’am this is going to sound silly but my husband seems to have left a dry cleaning ticket on our refrigerator but I don’t know if it’s an old one or not. If I give you the number can you tell me if I need to come by to claim anything? I can’t reach him on his cell phone.” I was using an older sophisticated voice for this one. Man I was getting good at lying in a very short period of time.

“Sure ma’am I can do that what is the number?”

“517” I said.

“Give me one moment while I go look.”

“No problem” Hopefully she hurries.

It took a few minutes then I heard her pick up the phone. Fingers Crossed. However, I already knew there would be something there, I am lucky after all. I grabbed a pen and paper quickly so I could jot down any information she gave me.

“Yes ma’am for Peter Green of 415 West Alta Street?” She replied. Score!

“Yes ma’am that’s the one. Do we have anything?”

“Yes Mr. Green left a suit here yesterday. It is ready for pick up.”

“Okay ma’am well thank you I will swing by later to get it.” No I wouldn’t

“You’re welcome Mrs. Green it will be here waiting for you. Bye.”

I hung up the phone. It was probably rude of me but I didn’t care at the moment. I had what I needed, a name and address. I frantically typed into google and got nothing. So I googled the address. I guess I am going to have to make a house call.

I picked up the ransom note, the guys keys and the plucked the directions from the printer. I looked down at the note. I contemplated calling. I wish someone would have taught me some life skills, like what to do in a hostage situation, or how to thwart kidnappers. I trudged to the door and went to grab my satchel when I realized I was still covered in blood. Crap.

I ran back to my room and changed my clothes. I decided to go for a conservative look in order to seem older. After all I was supposed to be Peter Green’s wife not his kid. I put on some black slacks and slip on brown shoes. I threw a blouse over my frame and grabbed my leather jacket. I peered in the full length mirror in my room. Geesh not me at all. But I wasn’t supposed to be me. I grabbed a pair of dark shades and a hat. I shoved everything in my satchel, picked up my car keys and headed out the door locking it behind me. I walked out to the garage and opened the door. I saw my dad’s tarped truck, parked next to it was my red motorcycle and next to that was Amy’s car and my sedan. I chose the sedan. I unlocked the doors and climbed in. I pulled out of the garage and turned around in the driveway. I headed out onto the street and turned left like the directions told me too.

It took me about fifteen minutes to pull up to Peter Green’s house. I saw that it was a small brick rambler style house with a long drive way. I pulled in and parked in front of the garage. I let myself into the backyard through the gate right next to the carport. I saw that he had a deck with French doors leading into the house. Amazingly blindly brilliant luck. Then again I really wasn’t surprised.

I walked up the steps of the deck to the French doors. I reached inside my bag for the keys I had gotten out of Perished Peter’s pocket and I found a house key on the key ring and tried it in the door. It worked. I turned the knob and let myself into the house praying that there wasn’t a real Mrs. Green. I walked into what looked like a den area. There were two black couches in a room painted in eggshell white. A large plasma TV mounted on the wall and a black lamp on a black table next to the black couch. On the black coffee table there were magazines fanned out in a too perfect fashion and a remote sitting next to them. All the things in the room were boxy and the whole look was very assassin chic.

I gently walked through the den to the hallway on the other side of the doorway. The hallway was short and painted as white as the previous room. I decided my best shot was to either head to the office or bedroom. I assumed the bedroom was upstairs and that the office was across the hall from the den. So I headed to the office first. I tried the doorknob and it was locked. I looked through the keys again and found a small silver key. I tried it in the door and the knob turned. I entered the room. This room was just as white as the previous rooms but it was considerably messy. On the black desk there was a computer with two monitors, scattered papers hid the keyboard and mouse. Next to the desk was a filling cabinet with locks on it and next to the was a bookshelf with volumes of hand bond materials. This room had a strange feeling to it. I realized I was in the mouth of the beast. I walked over the desk and looked for business cards or any type of material to find out who this guy worked for. Looking in the drawer of his desk I found what I was looking for. Yes.

Inside there was a bunch of what looked like work material. All of it was stamped with a company logo. The embossed letters read AGH. I wiggled the guys mouse on the desk and his computer came to life. I pulled up the internet browser and typed AGH in the search bar. It pulled up one company in the area, Aster Grant and Hughes Genetic Research. Wait, wait, wait dead guy works for a research company? Maybe this was a dead end. So I turned to the file cabinet. I used another small key on the key ring and wrenched the drawer open. Inside were files with names on them each had a number next to all the names. I glanced at the names and then I saw something disturbing, my name was amongst the folders. I pulled the file and sat down at the desk.

I opened the sheath, the first page had a picture of me in the right hand corner of the page, I noticed that it was my school photo from when I was sixteen. On the sheet I could see my personal information.

Name: Felicite Onni 0069143
Alias: Franky Onni
Date of Birth: 16 April 1989
Biological Parents: Felix Onni 0021543 (Father)
Gwenneth Maddox 0084215 (Mother)

I skimmed down it was all there, everything from my social security number to my hair and eye color. I turned the page and I saw a bold heading that read “Character Briefing” below it read a few short paragraphs. I skimmed over the information a few sentences stood out as I did.
“Onni has not surfaced in the public for five years. However she does maintain a virtual identity and has contact with people through the use of chat rooms.”
“Onni is greatly empathetic and intelligent. Her resourcefulness is immeasurable.”
“Onni seems to lack the capacity for control, she is labeled as a level five unknown threat.”

What? What was this? It seemed that they had a whole dossier on me and my life. I flipped through the rest of the pages. They had everything from a psychological profile to my known associates. There were reference numbers and coding all over the pages. But my time was up.

I heard the front door of the house being unlocked and opened. And then I heard a female voice say “Oh hey Mrs. Johnson, how are you?”

And I heard the door shut again. I had a few precious moments to get the hell our of here. I grabbed the file and shoved it in my bag. Closed the file cabinet and leaned out the door of the office to look down the hallway. I locked the door behind me and went across the hall to the den. At that moment I heard the woman come in. I shut the door to the den behind me slowly but she heard me anyway.

“Dad, you home from work already? Who’s car is that outside?“ I heard her coming. I froze but then I realized how stupid of an idea that was. I opened the French doors and bolted outside to the fence. And wrenched the gate open and slammed it behind me. I grabbed my car door and flung it open and threw myself inside closing the door behind me. I started the ignition and backed out of the driveway like a bat out of hell. I made sure I faced away from the house so that I wouldn’t pass by it and gunned the accelerator.

That was close. After I got over the shock of how close it was I realized that the girl was Peter Green’s daughter and I felt the guilt poor over me. For so long it had been okay that he was dead and lying wrapped in a tarp in the bed of my pickup truck. For a minute there I was fine with the notion that he was just a blood thirsty assassin with no moral backbone and no history. But now I knew he had a daughter. He had someone depending on him. You didn’t kill him. His buddies killed him. He would have lived had they not. I tried to convince myself that none of this was my fault but I knew that it was. I knew that all of it was my fault. I knew that I was the only one in my life that was left unscathed.

I drove all the way back to my house. I had accomplished something after all and I had to do more research so that I could get further and maybe have a chance at setting things right. I drove down the street to my house and saw a black SUV parked on the street and a large plumbing van parked on the other side of the street. I decided to drive past them in an attempt to see if they were suspicious. They definitely were. The SUV had to men sitting in the front seat both looked like they were wearing black suits and dark sunglasses. Very suspicious. I realized these people were probably a very crude surveillance team sent to wait for me to come home.

I guess this means plan B.

But what was plan B?