New Brew

by Mark Lashway

  “It’s really great to hear you say that, Phil,” Deville responded in a very solemn tone. “You’re an inspiration to all of us seeking a better future. We’ll be in close touch.”

  “Gosh, with you two guys, Sean Essex and now Maria Sanchez and Duke Lando….”

  “Phil, speaking of Duke Lando, keep your eyes open,” Deville warned. “He strikes me as really shifty. I don’t know if you can count on him in a pinch. He’s just liable to pull a fade.”

  “Yes, I know that Duke can come off that way,” Utah reflected. “However, he put a fair amount of money into this event. Money shows someone’s seriousness about something. He’s not an old-timer like you, Tom, so I understand your concerns, but he’s indicated that he’s 100% behind our cleanup efforts here. After all, he’s looking for a nice, stable market for his products too, see?”

  “Got it,” Deville said. “I guess you’re just a lot smarter at seeing all the angles than I am, Phil.” Sharper nodded like he was impressed.

  As the small gathering seemed to be breaking up, a young black man named Jules Pierce moved a little further away from the spot immediately outside the back of Phil Utah’s tent where he was standing in the darkness, taking in the full conversation. After the near incident at Little Germany with Deville and Sharper, Pierce had discreetly slipped out of the place and followed the two troublemakers here, knowing that his absence wouldn’t be noticed like that of the more vocal Stardust Boys like Vinnie Costa or Richie Hobbs. Quietly putting distance between himself and the Ace Brewing tent, Pierce went to find the other Stardust Boys to report what he’d heard. From there he would go to speak with Dale Sassie.

  ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

  “Are you sure that nobody saw you come here?” Duke Lando asked Maria with a whisper, frowning as she stepped into his tent with a look that told him that she urgently needed to speak with him.

  “Positive,” she mumbled in a low tone. “I took the back way in from the field, staying in the dark. It appears like everybody is out tonight anyway.”

  “So what happened out there? When you called me, you sounded pretty rattled.”

  “I was cool enough at first, but the more I had time to think about it, the more worried I am now, Duke.”

  “What happened?!”

  “It was all innocent, really! He just took me out to teach me some shooting and then we’d have a little fun and I’d let him think he’d converted me over. But then I found out that he’d checked into me and my cover was at risk of being blown. I couldn’t take the chance, Duke, so I finished him right there.”

  “Well, if that’s what you needed to do….Maria, did you leave any….”

  “No, nothing. I wiped everything down that I might’ve touched. That’s all there was. Duke, I’m worried. Maybe….”

  “No! You need to keep your nerve, young lady. Like I said before, it’s a minor distraction, that’s all. Don’t start losing it now.”

  “I really want out of this.”

  “And then what? You, Cheryl Ramirez, have warrants against you for three felonies in California and Nevada. How far do you think you’re going to get without the handsome little sum I’ll be paying you for this job? Huh?”

  “How much longer?” she murmured, defeated.

  “Only a matter of days,” he responded. “All you have to do is play the part I assigned you as Maria Sanchez of Wassacor. You’re officially here to help support Phil Utah’s efforts at this event. In reality, you’re here to gather information for me, keep tabs on those parasites Tom Deville and Clay Sharper, and try to get into that abbot’s confidence .”

  “What happened to the real Maria Sanchez?” she inquired, betraying her concern.

  “Oh, she’s actually on vacation and you’re here, thanks to some pretty delicate maneuvering,” Lando casually explained. If she had known him better, she would have noticed the little arch of his right eyebrow that had always been his trademark when lying.

  “Alright,” she sighed. “As soon as it’s over, I get my money and I’m out of here.”

  “That’s right, Maria. By the way, you did well tonight. I like the way you showed some discretion coming here. It’s nice to know that I have at least one person working for me who has some brains.”

  She left immediately after that. Duke Lando took a few minutes to think it all over. With a grim smile he thought of how things had turned out to be a bit more complicated than he had expected, despite all of the people he had hired for this job and all of the staging that had gone into this. No matter. He’d never been one to be stopped by even major roadblocks. He wouldn’t have been so cocksure about himself, however, if he had known of the bug planted on his cot. Voice activated, it had turned on the second that the woman had come into his tent, recording their whole conversation onto a device located miles away.

  -11-

  “Unnngh….” Cam groaned as he rolled out of bed the next morning. Putting some clothes on and glancing at his watch, he saw that it was 8:19 a.m., a late awakening for him. Shauna was still completely out, as expected, as she always slept in whenever she could. There weren’t any big plans for today anyway, so he decided to let her sleep while he went out for his cast-in-concrete morning routine. Unlike yesterday, when Shauna had been pestering him, he could take his time today.

  As he walked toward the shower place, well out on the fringes of GWIBE as it had been last year, he thought about last night. It had been mellow at Little Germany, even with the Stardust Boys and the Four Horsemen present. Along with the bock beer that he’d had early on, he’d also sampled Gerhard’s helles, weizenbier and märzenbier, as well as Johann’s dunkel and dunkelweizen. Shauna had had her fill well before he had, so she’d left alone to go back to their place for the night. After leaving the Germans, he had fully intended to call it a night but had been coaxed into having a beer at Tom’s and Sharon’s place. Then Sonny had come along and lured him to his place, where over one of Sonny’s kölsch-style beers they had discussed the latest scuttlebutt about Duke Lando, Abbot John and Phil Utah’s crew. As if that wasn’t enough, the Stardust Boys, having finally left Little Germany, had caught him leaving Sonny’s place and talked him into coming to their place to try an India Pale Ale of theirs, which he had to admit had been very good. Shauna would not have approved if she’d known.

  The shower guy welcomed him with a smile. Without a word, the man went about the business of Cam’s shower, knowing his routine well enough by now. Cam felt very satisfied afterward as he dried off and put on some clean clothes. Throwing the dirty clothes into a laundry bag, he said goodbye to the shower guy and headed off to the same breakfast guy from last year. The man already had all of the fixings for breakfast either on or near his grill. The smell from it almost caused Cam to drool, hungry as he was.

  “Cam, I was expecting you,” the breakfast guy greeted him.

  Cam waved and replied, “I hope everythin’ is ready, Jack.” Cam pulled out a $10 for the all-you-can-eat breakfast and got his plate in return. “Load me up. You know what I take.”

  Jack grunted and smiled. Scrambled eggs, sausage, home fries, bacon, he piled them all on and handed the plate to Cam, who sat down on one of the crates that served as seating here and began eating ravenously.

  “Long night last night?” Jack asked, seeing Cam’s haggard look.

  “Yeah, a bit longer than what I’d planned,” Cam replied, “but isn’t that always the way? At least it was nothin’ like hell night last year.”

  “Yep, but there were plenty of others getting wrecked that first night, drinking to the roll. It was just a bit longer this time because of Trub.”

  “Yeah,” Cam sighed, wincing a little at the mention of his friend’s name on the roll.

  “That whole thing was really strange,” Jack said, unaware of the close connection between his customer and the dead GWIBE co-founder. “At least the aftermath, I mean.”

  “Oh? And how’s that?” Cam asked, arching an eyebrow and stopping his eati
ng, unable to stop himself from finding out more about a case that had almost destroyed his career.

  “I just heard some things, Cam, that’s all. Rumors that nobody can confirm or deny. It seems like I never run into anybody who knows anything.”

  “What were some of the rumors?”

  “That they lost Trub’s body in between GWIBE and the hospital.”

  “That part is true,” Cam told him.

  “And that the ambulance crew was pretty well lit by the time they pulled out with the body,” Jack added.

  “That was true, too,” Cam said, remembering what Andy, a uniformed state trooper, had told him about it. Andy said that the idiots didn’t latch down the gurney with Trub’s body on it. Then, hitting that tree in the mountains, the gurney rolled and hit the door, which opened. Bye bye, Trub. By the time the ambulance crew understood that the gurney had fallen out the back, it was way too far gone to catch before it went over the bank and into the river.

  “An ambulance crew getting wasted on a call,” Jack chuckled, shaking his head.

  Like a state police investigator on a murder case getting sucked into the whole scene, Cam thought guiltily, not making the mistake of replying to that one. Some zealots here had corrupted the ambulance people by plying them with great homebrew, eager to impress them just as they had with him. The fallout from that mess had been the two ambulance squad people being booted off the squad. GWIBE had claimed victims right up until the end.

  Cam’s mood turned sullen as the events of the past year came rushing back. The food no longer interested him as he had lost his appetite. You fool, why didn’t you change the subject when you had the chance? Yeah, let’s re-live the events one more time…. He put his mostly empty plastic plate into the garbage and walked away, to Jack’s surprise.

  He returned to the tent briefly and saw that Shauna was still asleep. Good. He felt like wandering around by himself for a while anyway. Despite being married for several months now, he still couldn’t get used to having Shauna with him while he did things. Although he would never tell her in order not to hurt her, he felt like he had a collar on whenever she accompanied him. He enjoyed the companionship but felt like he had to always rein himself in.

  “Witter!” Cam cringed a bit when he recognized the voice. Turning, he saw Ned Inkwell walking intently toward him, not with a smile this time but wearing a very grim expression.

  “Uh oh, I don’t like that look. What’s goin’ on?” Cam muttered.

  “Let’s walk and talk,” Inkwell mumbled, lowering his voice. “More trouble, Cam.”

  “What now?” Cam asked, whispering.

  “There’s been another murder, this one about four and a half miles from here. A man named Travis Cutter, nicknamed ‘Tex’. Did you know him?”

  “No,” Cam replied. “I mean, I knew who he was from an incident the other day. He shot a rattler that got into Utah’s stand. Utah and his girl Maria Sanchez were suitable grateful.”

  “Was he here with anybody?”

  “Christ, Ned, I don’t know! Like I said, I barely knew who the guy was. All I can tell you is that he was really lookin’ to tie into that Maria Sanchez. Flirtin’ like hell.”

  “Isn’t she a lesbian, though?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I hear. Otherwise, Utah would’ve been only half-interested in havin’ her here. So tell me, what happened with him?”

  “A man driving down the road saw a pickup way out in a field with one door open and nobody around. He drove over in his truck and found this Tex character lying near the truck in a bloody mess. It seems like Tex had been doing some late shooting, since there was a small pile of empty shells lying about. He apparently had encountered somebody who knew how to use a blade. He got it up underneath the rib cage from the looks of it. Any ideas?”

  Cam didn’t reply at first, thinking back. Tex Cutter owned a gun, that had been made clear when he had dispatched the snake to that happy den in the sky. He remembered how Tex had tried to use it to impress Maria Sanchez, who had politely slipped away from his offer to teach her some shooting. Poor, lonely Tex had possibly ended up shooting by himself and then someone had killed him. “No, not really. Any clues that indicate anybody went there with him?”

  “No,” Inkwell sighed, running his hands through his hair. “No prints on anything except his. Nothing else. I don’t like where this is heading, Cam.”

  “And where is it headin’?”

  “In the same direction as last year! That can’t happen, do you understand me?”

  “So, how can I help? Or, should I say, how can I help so my wife doesn’t discover what I’m up to and cuts my nuts off as an object lesson?”

  “All I need from you right now is to get some people to talk with me. Jeanne Lamp, the blonde trooper you usually see with me, is around asking people what they know. Your people clam up around me automatically.”

  “Simple enough. Who do you want to talk to?”

  “You were there. I’ll talk to anybody you remember being there, too. But tell me, are you sure you can get them….”

  “Of course. I mean, if you were talkin’ about somebody killin’ Phil Utah, then I couldn’t help you. But this….”

  “That’s not funny, Cam.”

  “I wasn’t tryin’ to be. It’s merely statin’ fact.”

  “So, where are you taking me first?”

  “Speakin’ of Phil Utah, why don’t we start with him? He’s an insufferable doofus, but he usually has some interestin’ inside knowledge. But first, I have to make a stop.”

  “Stop? Where?”

  “To get myself a beer.”

  “Christ, Cam, it’s only a few minutes after 9:30! You’re drinking already?”

  “Investigator Inkwell, have faith in my experience. Believe me, it’s always a good idea to be pretty well sedated before you go talk to Phil Utah. It helps prevent headaches afterward.”

  ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

  Joey Creed very slowly let out a deep breath as he allowed the door knob to return to its normal position with painstaking precision, completing the latching. He looked at his watch, calculating the time it had taken to do his dry run. Thirty-four minutes, more or less. It had been a major improvement in time from his initial foray, but still long enough to reflect the special care that he had taken to avoid detection.

  Swallowing hard, Joey took another good breath to slow his heart rate down so that he could hear something other than the pounding in his chest. He could fell the slickness of sweat on his brow. Listening intently, he heard nothing, no soft footsteps in the corridor. During the latest practice run, he’d had the feeling that someone was watching, so he’d varied his routine and had behaved erratically enough that it would have caught anyone tailing him. He was confident of his skills and was now convinced that he had been unjustifiably, but very wisely, paranoid.

  He did some more figuring. Since he wouldn’t have to make the return trip on his actual raid, the time saved there and applied toward his exit would allow him to be well away from the abbey and most of the way through the fields. During his flight he would call Uncle Duke on the cellphone that he kept meticulously hidden to arrange a quick pickup. Uncle Duke would have his goods and Joey would have paid the debt to his uncle in full.

  After all of that, he would return home and figure out where to go from there. Like many criminals, Joey promised himself that he would turn over a new leaf and go legit. Like most criminals who made such promises, however, he probably wouldn’t.

  ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

  One of the abbey’s residents lay on his back on his simple bed, staring up at the dull white ceiling, deep in thought. He could only spend a few minutes here, then he must return to work, for to do anything differently would invite questions from the superiors.

  His mind was troubled. He had followed Joey Creed again and had been successful in remaining undetected. The young man thought that he was better than he actually was. That was small comfort, though. Joey was
clearly ramping up for the actual job, which would almost certainly be done within the next 24-48 hours. It was close, so close, but he still wasn’t sure how he should handle this one. Manuel’s case had been simple: To have let him go would have meant disaster for the abbey. Thus, Manuel had had to die. But what about this one? Could there be an alternative that didn’t involve murder? He wished that there was. There had been enough killing already. It shouldn’t be the solution to every problem posed by the thuggish, remorseless Duke Lando. How do you stop such a bullheaded goon?

  ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

  “Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you,” Cam lectured Ned Inkwell as they walked away from the Ace Brewing tent.

  “Damnit, Witter, that was a total waste of time!” Inkwell griped. “Phil talked forever, and yet didn’t tell me one useful thing.”

  “Yeah, I thought he’d have better stuff than what he did. Sorry.”

  “So who can we go to next?”

  “There’s a guy named Dale Sassie who has become pretty prominent here at GWIBE. He knows a lot of people. Maybe he knows a little about Tex Cutter and any cronies.”

  “Lead on. Anything I need to know beforehand?”

  “Yeah. Here’s the way it’ll go. I’ll introduce you when we arrive, then you say nothin’ until either I prompt you or someone asks you a question, got it?”

  “What?! Witter, I’m a state police….”

  “Yeah, and you know what? These people don’t care, Ned. How much success have you had talkin’ to ‘em so far?”

  “Point taken. Anything else?”

  “I’ll be offered a beer….”

  “Early in the day to get wasted, isn’t it? Even for this place?”

  “Nope. Anyway, right after that you’ll be offered a beer….”

  “Cam, are you out of your mind?! I’m a state police….”

  “Yeah, and I was in those same shoes last year, facin’ the same problem. An insider showed me the way and I got accepted. He said to me somethin’ like ‘Cam, we’re both big boys, right? Nobody’s gonna rat you out around here’.” Cam left out the part about how the friend who had showed him the way had turned out to be the murderer at last year’s event.