Bøger af Rb Pahl

Allowance for a Teenage Hooker is the first full-length book in the Tracy Cunningham P.I. series. It opens where Back Story (What's a girl like you ...) ends. Tracy Cunningham rents an office in a converted World War Two warehouse in the industrial section of Sausalito. The only thing right about the office is the rent. She is working on a shoestring, and hasn't had a single client. Her cellphone rings. The caller is a male, and says he got her name from Tracy's former escort service, the Eden Connection (EC). Really mad, because she is giving up that life, she slams the phone down, thinking, Sheese. It's not even noon yet! The phone rings again. When she answers, the man shouts to wait a sec, he's not calling to get laid, he can't find her office, and he wants to hire her. She agrees to meet him in a local touristy restaurant. Bradford, the client wants her to locate Stephanie, his runaway daughter, who left home two years ago when she was fifteen. When Tracy asks why he went to the EC, he says that his daughter was undoubtedly a hooker. How else could she earn money? And he also said Nora told him one of her best gals was going on her own as a private detective. Tracy takes the job, and heads for the high school Stephanie attended before she left. Her class would be seniors now. There, she talks to the class counselor and discovers that Stephanie's boyfriend is still in school. He is called into the front office. He denies knowing where Stephanie is, and Tracy gets nowhere with the kid. He leaves the office, and Tracy trots to where she can see the parking lot. Tracy stakes out the parking lot. Her plan is to follow Jerry after school. He might lead her to Stephanie. As he passes by Tracy, she ducks down in her car. As she does, a big school bus pulls alongside and double parks to load students. Once free, she can see which on-ramp Jerry takes. That's the last she sees of him. Discouraged, she decides to go talk to someone at the police department. The only person she knows there was an almost-boyfriend, she heads up to homicide to see Sergeant Greg Phillips. The conversation quickly turns to her past. Recently, Greg learned about Tracy's moon-lighting career. In defense, she tells him that she retired from the life, and is living on her bank account and a greasy hamburger a day. After a horrible day and night drinking, Tracy hits bottom. She takes time to re-organize her new lifestyle. She skips out on a week's rent and moves into a boarding house. She abandons her warehouse office, leaving a few paperbacks for the next guy. Next day, she tracks Jerry to an apartment house. She spots Stephanie in the lobby. When she meets her, Tracy changes allegiances. Too many things are not right. Why does Bradford want Stephanie back now? It's been two years since she walked out. How did she survive the streets? What is the real operation at the apartment house? Tracy and Steph hide out on an anchored tugboat. She contacts an attorney with offices nearby. While the lawyer is finding the local Mafia Consigliere, he asks Tracy to fill out a resume. Several facts come to light. Stephanie is really a mafia princess. Her mother has been missing for almost five years. Her grandmother committed suicide. Her most loved relative was her grandfather, who passed away three years ago. They head for the mountains, hopefully to find Angel Martucchi Bradford, Stephanie's mother. She may have information. They discover her skeleton under the family cabin in Pinecrest CA. They have evidence that she was killed within a month after she left. When Tracy finds out that Bradford shut off the utilities, things began to fall into place. In her new partner's office, before all parties, Tracy tells the group her story of what has happened. Tracy now must mollify Greg, who is P.O.d that she didn't follow his orders, and that she became associated with a law firm as their in-house investigator.

This book is the "auto-biography" of Tracy Cunningham. It is a fictional life story of our protagonist, from childhood to apprentice private investigator. It tells us why she is the kind of person she is. Her thirteenth and fourteenth years were her worst. Her mother passes away from a multi-year bout with lung cancer. Kelly McAllister, her best friend since infancy, dies from a virulent form of Leukemia. And her beloved grandfather is killed in a drug-store shootout. Tracy and her father are like two people living on a desert island. She is a latch-key kid, left to her own devices to get through her teen years. He is trying to make Chief in record time, she is trying to go through the football team in record time. Her errant ways come to a screeching halt one painful day in her junior year. Tracy isn't a perfect woman, far from it. She embraces her inner child, and is naive in a lot of aspects. She carries scars from childhood, has morality issues with sex and drinking and making the right decisions. Yet through all this, she maintains a sense of humor, and a fierce sense of loyalty which is seemingly not reciprocated. There are times when friends and loved ones want her to quit a job, and she won't. Even if the request turns out to be a demand, she won't quit an obligation. This sense of loyalty is also the reason she feels that a promise, an obligation, and/or keeping her word is uppermost. Tracy is a big believer in Occam's Razor, which can be paraphrased as follow the most likely scenario that fits all the facts. This allows her free-thinking imagination to come up with scenarios from left field. In this book, we see her deductive prowess mature with her adult persona. How were four Pre-Colombian Artifacts stolen from "super sensitized pedestals" in a room protected by video monitors and motion detectors wired to two different alarm companies? She works out a plausible way to steal the gold statues within a half-hour of arriving on the scene. She meets her match in the form of a cop who is as tall as she is short. Sergeant Greg Phillips, SFPD and she have an instant chemistry that will evolve into a love and hate relationship that will last for years. Tracy is a sailboat racing nut. She is an expert on sailboats, and any naiveté or inner child remains ashore when she's involved in a race. Her fellow competitors and friends are referred to as "The Enemy". They refer to her as Captain Bligh. She keeps only first place memorabilia, because coming in second just means someone beat you. Being an airhead about money (Her terminology) has led her down a path that ends in a fellow resident making her and offer she can't refuse. Tracy agrees to come to a party in the penthouse apartment of Nora, who owns the very tip-top escort service in San Francisco. For her services that night, Tracy will earn sixty percent of a very high fee. She becomes one of the most sought-after escorts in the city, primarily because she has established herself in the Eden Connection as the brainy girl with all the hostessing skills to go along with her bedroom prowess, which is formidable. Stuff happens, and stuff happened to Tracy. She has been keeping her cash, jewelery and investment gold in a safe in Nora's penthouse. One night, the safe is cracked and all the contents thereof removed. Nora, Tracy and two other escorts' nest eggs are wiped out. Tracy is fired from her daytime job because her supervisor discovers her nighttime occupation by accidently listening to a phone conversation between Tracy and a client. Realizing that it was time to change careers, Tracy works five weeks full time in the Eden Connection, retires from there, and with a few thousand dollars, retires, packs her car and heads across the Golden Gate Bridge to seek her new fortune.