Frederick Ramsay_Botswana Mystery 01 by Predators Read Free Book Online Page B

about. Farrah made a second, a third, and a fourth call. His expression seemed to grow darker after each. Then he’d left in a hurry. Interesting. The barkeep started to say something and held up a bar tab. Farrah ignored him and kept walking.
    Travis sidled over to the bar and signaled to the barman.
    “Here, let me have that. I’m with his party.” He took the bill, scanned it, and signed. The bartender smiled a thank you and held out Henry’s notebook.
    “Would…” he peered at the signature line on the tab, “Would Mr. Parizzi be kind enough to return this book to that gentleman?”
    “Certainly,” he said and pocketed the pad and its miniature gold pen. And he would return it—eventually—after he’d read it, made a few calls of his own, and weighed the consequences of several new options available to him.

Chapter 10
    Brenda needed to talk to someone. Bobby should have been her first choice but that wasn’t going to work. Even if she could explain what she had in mind, and even if he understood—a stretch at best—the idiot boy would not go along, she was sure about that. It was funny. He watched cage fighting, gloried in the violence offered by his collection of video games, but when it came to the real world and tough choices, he turned into a bunny rabbit. Brenda smiled at the thought. Bunny, that was good. The only thing Bobby did with any skill was…well, like a bunny. Well, at least there was that. A girl needs something and he did help her out there. She’d just have to handle the rest. The question before the house now was, who should she confide in?
    Travis Parizzi rounded the corner. He had a notebook in his hand and was so absorbed in it, he nearly ran her down.
    “Oh, sorry. I nearly knocked you down, Mrs. Griswold.”
    “Hey, could have been worse. You could have knocked me up.”
    Travis slipped the notebook in his pocket and evidently decided to let the remark pass.
    “Yes. Well, sorry.”
    Brenda thought it was a hoot talking off-color to guys like Travis Parizzi. Freaking stuffed shirts. They loved it when you did it at the club or in bed with the lights out, but out in the polite world it, like, made them crazy. There was nothing like dropping the “F bomb” into an otherwise polite conversation to get things rolling. Well, you could take the girl out of the strip club, but you’d never get the strip club out of the girl.
    “We need to talk, Parizzi.”
    “About what?”
    “The stock you screwed Bobby out of. I want to exercise his option to buy it back.”
    “I’m not sure what you mean. What stock, what option?”
    “Don’t bother trying that tap dance on me, hotshot. Bobby sold his stock to you. Spare me the razzle dazzle about you don’t know. He said he had an option to buy it back inside a year. The year ain’t up and I want it.”
    Travis looked at her for a nearly a full minute without speaking, apparently trying to figure out where this could go.
    “You want to buy. As the guy in the movie said, show me the money.”
    “Now? I don’t have it right now, but I have it on tap.”
    “On tap? What, like it’s a keg of beer? Look, Mrs. Griswold, you want to redeem stock that your husband sold me for a considerable amount of money, more, I might add, than it would be worth on the open market, and you want me to surrender it on your say-so? Not going to happen. By the way, I didn’t have to screw it out of him. He was only too happy to sell.”
    “Look, I can get a letter of credit faxed to me tomorrow. When I do, I want you to, like, sign back Bobby’s shares. Got it?”
    “A faxed LOC. You’re kidding, right? Look, you want the stock, you can get it, but with cash. I want cash, and that means you can only redeem it after we get back to Chicago and…” He paused and studied the woman in front of him, “And, after other things.”
    “Other things? What other things?”
    “It’s business. You wouldn’t understand.”
    Brenda had survived as long as she