Scott William Carter - [Myron Vale Investigation 01] - Ghost Detective

by Carter

  In two graceful hops, he went from the window to the arm of my chair to my desk. He perched himself on the corner and immediately set to cleaning his paws, as if this was his usual spot and his usual routine. Afraid he might be uncomfortable if I closed the window, I left it open, and the chill winter air tickled the hairs on the back of my neck. I could smell the coming rain. A few blocks over, I heard the crackle of fireworks from some eager early bird.

  “I don’t know anything about taking care of a cat,” I said.

  He paused in his cleaning to look at me.

  “It’s not that I have anything against cats, you understand,” I said. “I’m not pro or con. Billie was allergic, so that kind of closed that door.”

  He blinked a few times.

  “I guess it’d be all right if you stay,” I said. “But I better look up what kind of stuff I need to know. Things you need, that sort of thing.”

  I started to turn to the computer when Patch placed his paw on my cell phone and looked at me.

  “Oh,” I said. “You think I should call Alesha?”

  He cocked his head to the side.

  “I don’t know. Do you really think she’d want to leave a cool party to help me with some furry visitor out of the blue? Sorry, you’re pretty cute, but you are just a cat. She’d probably just be irritated that I’ve been blowing her off so much lately. I’ve pretty much been a jerk.”

  Patch was a picture of perfect feline stoicism, showing neither approval nor disappointment at what I’d said. I realized that I was sitting in my office on New Year’s Eve talking to a cat, that this would be grounds for merciless and lifelong teasing if word ever got back to my old pals at the bureau, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care what anyone else thought except for Alesha. I wanted her help, I realized. I didn’t know what would happen between us, if anything, but I did know that other than my four-legged companion here, Alesha was probably the only other friend I had.

  I reached out and petted Patch on the head, and he rose to meet my palm, launching immediately into a seriously impressive purr. It may have been the loudest cat purr I’d ever heard. In fact, it may have even been loud enough to wake the dead.

  It was five minutes to midnight. An image of Alesha with another man rose up in my mind, glasses of champagne raised, the air twinkling with confetti, both of them leaning in for the first kiss of the New Year.

  I reached for the phone.

  Acknowledgements

  There may be writers who produce books all on their own, without the help of anybody, but I am most assuredly not such a person. I’d like to single out a few people who’ve been instrumental in assisting me in getting Ghost Detective fit for publication.

  First, to my good friend Michael J. Totten, fellow writer in the trenches, intrepid world traveler, and frequent hiking companion: Thanks for the early read, thoughtful suggestions, and unqualified enthusiasm for the book. We’ve both come a long ways from those early college years hanging out in coffee shops, pal.

  To Elissa Englund, my fantastic copyeditor: A big hearty thanks for helping me whip the manuscript into shape. You’re a pro’s pro. Any typos or errors that remain are entirely my own fault.

  Katarina and Calvin … I didn’t realize I was half a person until I became a father. I feel so fortunate to have such beautiful, bright, and good-hearted children. Thank you for believing in me, despite my many failings. I’ll keep striving to be the father you deserve.

  And now, again, and forever, to my first reader and love of my life, Heidi: I didn’t have any success as a writer until I met you. I doubt there’s any coincidence in that. Thanks for everything, hon.

  About the Author

  SCOTT WILLIAM CARTER’s first novel, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, was hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “touching and impressive debut” and won an Oregon Book Award. Since then, he has published a dozen novels and over fifty short stories, his fiction spanning a wide variety of genres and styles. His most recent book for younger readers, Wooden Bones, chronicles the untold story of Pinocchio and was singled out for praise by the Junior Library Guild. He lives in Oregon with his wife and children. Visit him online at www.ScottWilliamCarter.com.

  If you want to get an automatic email when Scott’s next book is released, sign up here. Your email address will never be shared, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

  A special request from the author: Word of mouth is crucial for any author to succeed. If you enjoyed the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other retailer; even if it’s only a line or two, it would make all the difference and would be very much appreciated.

  Books by

  Scott William Carter

  Garrison Gage Mysteries

  The Gray and Guilty Sea

  A Desperate Place for Dying

  The Lovely Wicked Rain

  Myron Vale Investigations

  Ghost Detective

  The Ghost Who Said Goodbye

  Other Novels

  The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys

  President Jock, Vice President Geek

  The Care and Feeding of Rubber Chickens

  Drawing a Dark Way

  A Tale of Two Giants

  Wooden Bones

  Short-Story Collections

  The Dinosaur Diaries

  A Web of Black Widows

  The Man Who Made No Mistakes

  Visit www.scottwilliamcarter.com/books

  for more information.

  Keep reading for a preview

  of the next Myron Vale Novel,

  The Ghost Who Said Goodbye . . .

  The Ghost Who Said Goodbye

  A Myron Vale Investigation

  Scott William Carter

  About The Ghost Who Said Goodbye

  Charles Manson. Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. Known for their cunning and savagery. In the late eighties, another infamous serial killer sent seventeen innocent people to early graves. Then, suddenly, the murders in the panicked city of Portland, Oregon, stopped—and the Goodbye Killer got away.

  Myron Vale remembers it well. Long before a fateful bullet cursed him with the ability to see ghosts, he was the young son of the city’s most esteemed detective. The case changed Hank Vale, haunting him with a single glimpse of the killer’s otherworldly face. He was never the same man again. Or the same father.

  Now a new victim points to the Goodbye Killer’s return. And when the most powerful forces on the other side of the great divide approach Myron desperate for help, he uncovers a terrifying truth. It’s not just the living who should fear for their immortal souls ... even the dead can die.

  THE GHOST WHO SAID GOODBYE. Electronic edition published by Flying Raven Press, April 2015. Copyright © 2014 by Scott William Carter.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For more about Flying Raven Press, please visit our web site at http://www.flyingravenpress.com.

  Before

  I was seven years old when I first held a gun.

  First day of school. First kiss. First time making love. There are a lot of firsts in life, and I have memories of all those things, but none of them are as vivid as the night I snuck into my father’s den—having recently discovered where he hid his desk key—to see if he really kept a revolver in the top drawer. I was doing it because of a kid named Kevin Blaine, a gap-toothed bully who always waited for me behind the big oak after school. I thought if I just held a gun once, if I could just feel its weight in my hand, its power, I could tell Kevin I knew what it was like—and that I could get to it if he ever laid his meaty hands on me again. When you had a gun, nobody could mess with you.

  That’s what I thought at the time. It was
only years later, after everything that happened to me, when I discovered there were evils in the world no bullet could ever stop.

  Awake in my bed, I waited until the grandfather clock in the living room gonged a dozen times before I crept to the door. Barefoot, in pajama bottoms and a thin cotton T-shirt, I felt winter’s bite from all sides. It was cold in the house not just because the city outside was covered in a white blanket, but because Mom, who already preferred the thermostat be set to a balmy sixty-two degrees, turned off the heat completely when she climbed into bed. No reason to waste money on gas when we could all put on sweaters, she’d say. This, coming from a woman who wore sweaters even in the dog days of August. In winter, she often wore layers of them.

  School had been canceled for two days because of the snow, but I knew my luck was running out on that front. Even Portland, Oregon, a city that was lucky to get a dusting every other year, eventually got chains on the buses, meaning there was a good chance I would not only have to face Kevin the next day, but he’d be armed with plenty of snowballs.

  I waited with my ear pressed against the door for a long time to make sure I didn’t hear Johnny Carson. Mom often stayed up to watch him when Dad was working a night beat—or when he was out drinking, which he was doing that night. Which he’d been doing lots of nights lately, truth be told, a fact that Mom was none too happy about, considering how often I found Dad in the morning sleeping off the booze on the sofa.

  With no sound at all coming from Mom’s room, I opened the door and tiptoed to the edge of the hall. From this vantage point, I saw not only the sleek darkness of the back of the couch but also the glow of the streetlights outlining the curtained bay window, giving me just enough light to realize that there were no boots hanging off either end of the couch.

  My heart rabbity-tapping away, I made my way to the den.

  It was not a big house, just a two-bedroom bungalow off I-84 in the Rose City Park area, but it still felt like hours to cross to the other side of the living room. The hardwood floor was so cold my toes curled, and each creak set my heart racing faster. The place still smelled like the lemon chicken we’d had for dinner, and, glancing into the kitchen, I saw that Mom hadn’t put away Dad’s untouched plate.

  I probably would have stood outside the den for an hour, stifling the urge to pee, but the sudden bark of a neighbor’s dog so scared me that I bolted into the room.

  It was even darker in his den. Leaning against the closed door, I tried to will my heart to slow down. The faint dark-chocolate scent of Dad’s favorite cigars hung in the air. I didn’t dare turn on a light, but I also didn’t dare touch a gun in such utter darkness, so I felt my way past the desk to the window, opening the curtains.

  The fluorescent security bulb mounted on the side of the neighbor’s garage filled the den with plenty of light. The dust, catching this pale eerie glow, floated in the air. Icicles hung from the eaves outside like blue daggers. Swallowing away the lump in my throat, I found the book I was looking for, Mastering Golf, on the shelf in the corner, and opened it to the hidden compartment. There I found the key, as well as his passport and what was left of a rabbit foot I knew he’d had with him in Vietnam.

  Dad hated golf. That’s why, a week earlier, I’d taken the book off the shelf in the first place. Baseball and basketball were his sports.

  Placing the book on the old cherrywood desk, I settled into the swivel chair, the thin cushion like cold concrete. I held my breath and slipped the key into the top drawer’s lock. It took a bit of jiggling, but the key turned.

  The drawer opened.

  At first, I saw nothing but what you might expect to find in the top drawer of a man’s desk: a medley of ballpoint pens, rubber bands, and wrinkled maps, a deck of playing cards picturing pinup girls from the fifties, half-empty packs of gum, loose Tic Tacs ... but something wasn’t quite right. The drawer didn’t open far enough. Then I found the levers in the back and, holding them down, slid the drawer open the rest of the way. There, in a compartment all to itself, was a black revolver on a folded white handkerchief, like a corpse in an open coffin laid out for a funeral viewing.

  A Colt Python .357, I found out much later. When Dad went drinking, he never took it with him. I overheard him tell Mom that a cop who took his gun drinking was just asking for something stupid to happen—which was why I knew it would be in the drawer that night. Dad may have liked to drink, but he wasn’t stupid. Everybody said he was the smartest detective on the force.

  It took me a few long, agonizing minutes before I summoned the courage to even touch it—on the walnut handle, lightly. I traced my finger over the chamber and along the barrel, resting it there for a long time as if taking the gun’s pulse. I shivered. Finally, I closed my fingers around the handle and lifted the gun, ever so slowly, out of the drawer. Did I feel its power? I have to say I did. I may not have decided I wanted to be a cop in that moment, but I did decide I wanted to own a gun.

  I was pointing the revolver at the leather chair across from me, pretending to aim it at a bad guy skulking into our house to kill us, when I heard the rattle of our front door.

  An icy dread shot through me. For just a second I thought it might really be a bad guy, and that would have been better, really, because I could almost imagine myself playing the part of the hero—swaggering out there with my gun like John Wayne, stopping the Terrible Burglar of Greater Portland from stealing Mom’s china. Later, of course, in all the congratulatory fervor, nobody would think to ask me why I had been in Dad’s office in the first place.

  But the rattle of the front door was immediately followed by the murmur of voices, and even though I couldn’t make out the words, I would have known my father’s rough baritone anywhere, slurred as it was. And the other voice, slightly higher, slightly more clipped—I knew that one, too. His partner Sal.

  My heart, which had finally slowed down, began to pound. There was still hope. If Dad crashed on the couch, there was a chance I could sneak past him once he was asleep.

  Luck really must not have been on my side that night, because Dad was making some kind of fuss, and Sal was trying to shush him.

  “Hank, quiet,” Sal said, “you’ll wake Eleanor and Myron.”

  “I don’t care!” Dad said. “Listen to me. You should have let me take that guy.”

  “Hank—”

  “Will you listen? One punch ... I could have took him!”

  “Shh! Hank ... Hank, come on, pal. Okay, to your office. Let’s talk about this.”

  “No—”

  “Come on, you want me to listen. I’ll listen. There you go. This way.”

  And that’s when I knew, hearing their shuffling footsteps on the wooden floor, that it was over. I was going to be grounded until I was eighteen years old. The punishment for breaking Dad’s No. 1 rule—to never go into his office without permission—would be severe enough. What would happen when he caught me with his revolver was unimaginable.

  I had only seconds. I put the gun back in the drawer and closed it. I put the key in Mastering Golf and slipped it back on the shelf. The doorknob to the den was turning; I could clearly see that in the silvery light. Where to go? Where to hide? There was only one place—I dived under the desk.

  Just in time. I heard the swish of the door as I slid to my knees. The overhead light flicked on, blindingly bright, and I squinted at the chair I’d been sitting in seconds earlier. Was it still moving? It didn’t look like it.

  “All right,” Sal said, “this chair here. Let’s have you take a load off, partner.”

  “I want to sit—sit at my desk,” Dad protested, filling me with terror. While Sal was doing his best to talk in a whisper, Dad was practically belting out every word. “My desk—”

  “This chair is fine,” Sal said, and I heard the click of the door closing.

  “No—”

  “Sit!”

  I’d never heard Sal talk to Dad this way, like he was a misbehaving child, and I didn’t like it. Yet his stern tone
must have worked, because the leather chair whooshed as Dad slumped into it. I heard footsteps and I tensed, but Sal didn’t go far. The wooden desk creaked above me. A bit of dust rained down, and I pinched my nose, praying I didn’t sneeze.

  Dad mumbled something.

  “What’s that, partner?” Sal said.

  “I said I coulda—coulda taken that punk,” Dad replied.

  Sal didn’t say anything, the silence stretching for an interminable moment. “Be straight with me,” he said finally. “This ain’t about some drunk football fan with an ax to grind, is it?”

  Dad didn’t answer.

  “What’s this really about?” Sal asked. Then, after a pause, he spoke in a whisper I had trouble hearing: “It’s about him, isn’t it?”

  “No,” Dad said.

  “Level with me. I’m your partner.”

  “Fuck you, Sal. I just don’t like people insulting the Seahawks, okay?”

  “Man, I didn’t realize you cared about the Seahawks so much.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “You even watched a whole football game since that Super Bowl party at Ted’s last year?”

  “Fuck you, Sal.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve said that to me. Making you feel better?”

  “Fu ... Whatever. I don’t care. I don’t care about anything. Just go home. It’s nothing. I’ll see you tomorrow. Just got to sleep this off, is all.”

  Sal took a breath and blew the air through his lips. “Fine. Tried my best. Pick you up at a quarter to eight. And I’m not waiting this time, so make sure you’re ready.”

  Again, I was surprised by Sal’s disrespectful tone. I’d always liked Sal—he usually had a pocket full peppermint candies he was more than willing to share—but I couldn’t stand him treating Dad this way. One foot planted on the floor, the back of a shiny black boot, then Dad spoke.