New Brew

by Mark Lashway

  “We just couldn’t believe you won so easily,” Reuben told him. “We could tell by the pourer and the judges that you had him before the judges even huddled. But in the end, it’s still a victory and you’ve got yourself a big blue and a lot of street cred to go with it.”

  “I suppose,” Kwik replied unenthusiastically. “The one thing that it does show is that when you enter these things, you had to have been on your game the whole time you were making your brew. The competition is just too high to be relaxed. I mean, and you’ve seen it before too, Reuben, one lousy mistake and you’re done. Zilch! Nada! Before the results are even announced, you can already be an also-ran. I can’t take any satisfaction from this, guys. I mean, when you go on the big hunt, you’re expecting to face a very dangerous and foul-tempered Cape Buffalo, with all of the hazards, with all of the anticipation of emerging on top after making that well-placed shot right between his fucking horns. But all I encountered tonight was a pathetic, love-sick old bull. There was no trophy to be had there.” It caused Cam to wonder what it was with these people and their wildlife analogies.

  “But at least you’re the hunter….and not the buffalo!” Reuben pointed out.

  “Gerhard needs to really take a deep, hard look at himself,” Cam decided, gaining nods of approval from many people, “and decide whether or not he can become great again.”

  “I just hope that his family back in Bavaria doesn’t find out about this,” Kwik said. “Otherwise, they might disown him. No more money, no more living the life.” More than one person gulped at the thought of Streicher having to go out and work a real job.

  “And if Gerhard goes down, that leaves Johann….” a man named Cliff Hewlett added.

  “Down and out,” some woman finished the thought. “No more Germans vs. Belgians.”

  “Witter!” came a by-now familiar voice. Cam sighed and turned around to see Ned Inkwell approaching him with a look that indicated that he wanted to talk privately.

  “What’s up?” Cam asked as he moved away a bit from the gathering.

  “I’ve been to Hell and back trying to track you down!” Inkwell growled.

  “I didn’t know that I was at your beck and call,” Cam shot back. “I’ve been movin’ around. The competitions weren’t worth watchin’, so I’ve been roamin’. What do you need?”

  “I’m getting nowhere here!” the investigator complained. “Your guy, that Dale Sassie, didn’t give me shit! He basically blew me off!”

  Cam said nothing at first. That’s a bit odd, he thought. What was the harm in Dale just giving him some basic info? It’s not like it’s a matter of crucial importance or anything….

  “Yeah,” Cam sighed. “The problem with Dale is that he’s one of those hard-core GWIBErs of the kind I told you about. I don’t know if he’d give me anythin’ more.”

  “I’m so goddamned pissed off right now, Cam, that I just can’t think!”

  “Goin’ around like that won’t do you any good at all,” Cam told him. “You’ll need to calm down.” Cam gazed over at Roger Kwik, who was staring at them, and gave him that look. Kwik motioned to one of his circle to pour another one of his blue ribbon helles. It was brought over and handed to Inkwell, who at first looked at it like it was something poisonous.

  “Cam, I told you before….”

  “Shut the fuck up and take it,” Cam muttered. “As I said before, you’ll see that I’m doin’ you a favor.”

  Noticing the entire place staring at him, Inkwell hesitated a moment, saw one last time the hard, uncompromising look on Cam’s face, then raised the cup to his mouth and took a healthy gulp, allowing it to wash around his mouth briefly before swallowing it.

  “OK, it’s done,” Inkwell declared quickly before a strange look came over him. “Whoa….this beer….is, is….”

  “Fantastic?” Reuben offered.

  “Yes! That’s exactly what it is!” Inkwell cried. “Fantastic! This is nothing like what I’ve been used to. My God, it’s so tasty, so clean, so easy to drink!” Unconcerned about décor, he knocked down the rest of the brew in one long gulp. The crowd clapped.

  “That’s what fine lager is supposed to be,” Kwik informed him, smiling, finally gaining some joy from his triumphant creation. “Pour him another.”

  Cam gave a smile of his own. Now that Ned Inkwell had been lured into temptation, there would be much less awkwardness with him.

  “Gee whiz!” Inkwell exclaimed, still pumped up from his discovery. “And if I remember right, you told me that there are dozens….”

  “Dozens of styles?” Cam interrupted. He was already bored by this, but told himself that he had been in Inkwell’s exact position only a year ago, so he must show some patience. “That’s right, Ned. I’ll take you around to try some others durin’ your voyage to new horizons.”

  “Criminy! That sounds great!” Inkwell replied, grinning and then draining the second helles with inappropriate haste. The crowd just shook their heads. “Thanks, Mr….uh….”

  “That’s Roger Kwik,” Cam informed him.

  “Thanks, Mr. Kwik. Your beer is wonderful!”

  “Glad you liked it,” Kwik sighed. “I’m surprised your taste buds actually caught it.”

  “You’ll have to excuse the faux pas,” Cam told Kwik. “He’s not sophisticated like me.” Kwik merely rolled his eyes and waved them goodbye.

  “Ned, before we get goin’,” Cam said as they walked down the main street, “you’d better call your female associate….”

  “And tell her to take off?” Inkwell replied. “Good idea, Cam, damned good idea! I’m glad I came across you. You’re a good egg, even if cracked. Ha ha!” The investigator took out his cell phone and made the call.

  “So, what do I do now?” Inkwell asked after he finished.

  “Brace yourself,” Cam advised. “It’s gonna be a long night.”

  -13-

  It wasn’t quite 7:00 the next morning when Cam thought that he was having a dream that Shauna was sitting on top of him, wearing a very angry look. It took him a full minute to realize that he wasn’t dreaming, although he wished that he was.

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t walk out on you now and divorce you!” she hissed. Struggling to shake the cobwebs from his head, Cam stared at her face and saw a wild look in her eyes. Something was up, and it was pretty bad.

  He didn’t answer at first, instead looking around the tent, despite the fact that she clearly wanted his full attention. Oh no! he cried to himself when he saw Ned Inkwell’s limp figure slumped over in one corner, lying on his stomach on a spare sleeping bag. Cam could see enough of the investigator’s face to see an impressive shiner on Inkwell’s right eye.

  “Do you want to make a ridiculous attempt to explain?” she asked, still glaring at him. He knew that saying the wrong thing would cause her to explode.

  “Mmmm….honey….well, I’m afraid I can’t explain….because I don’t know what the hell happened,” he answered truthfully.

  “Let me give you a quick summary!” she snarled. “A sudden commotion out in the street late last night caused me to investigate, whereupon I saw my husband, Reuben and that jackass lying in the corner over there putting on a performance for a crowd. You three stooges were singing at the tops of your lungs and kicking your legs like the Rockettes!”

  “Honey, I’m sorry….”

  “No, shut up and listen. It gets better, you see. Then I took you in hand after sending Reuben on his way, only to find that we had acquired a stray who followed us home.” She pointed over at Inkwell.

  “Shauna, baby, is it such a big deal if Ned….”

  “Shut up! It gets better yet. While I tried getting you ready for bed, you passed out on your cot. Unfortunately, the pig over there didn’t.”

  “Pig? What gives?”

  “Your friend there took a fancy to me. While he could barely stand, he told me that I was the most beautiful Indian girl he’d ever seen. He wanted me to think of him as a cavalryman so he co
uld show me his saber.”

  “Mmmm, is that where he got his shiner from?”

  “You betcha. A solid left on his eye. He went down and hasn’t been up since.”

  “Oh, honey….”

  “Zip it. I’m going to give you one, and only one, ultimatum, Cam. You’ve already broken your promise to me about staying straight this year. Now you’re going to shape up, because this is your last chance. One more episode and I’m out of here, do you understand? That means I will leave you and not come back. You’ll never get another chance with me. I won’t plead with you anymore. I’ll simply be gone, got it? If partying means more to you than….”

  “It doesn’t,” he interrupted her. “I’ll straighten up.”

  “Now, get rid of that lump taking up space in the corner.”

  “Yeah. As soon as I can get him up I’ll take him out to get showered up, fed some breakfast and send him on his way. That’ll be the last of him.”

  “Make sure to do the same for yourself. You reek of sweat and spilled beer.”

  “Shauna, honey, I’m really sorry. I didn’t think that he was like that.”

  “And I didn’t think that you were that way last year, either. But it seems like GWIBE has claimed another soul. It does better than Satan in that respect.”

  She strode out of the tent, still very angry. Cam rubbed his eyes, wishing that he could sleep a bit, but he didn’t want to risk angering her even more. He looked over at Inkwell again. The investigator’s mouth was wide open, with drool running out of it, a large wet stain now on part of Cam’s spare sleeping bag. You goddamned idiot, he reproached himself. If you’d just done what she wanted, which was simple enough, really, then you wouldn’t be in this mess….

  ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

  Duke Lando rubbed his eyes as he wondered why it was that he always seemed to be saddled with idiots. Finding good help nowadays was virtually impossible, especially in the field of crime. Tom Deville and Clay Sharper were good examples, he felt.

  “So, explain the latest problem to me again,” Lando commanded, sighing.

  “It’s like this,” Deville replied. “We had Phil all pumped up to carry on with his missionary work and get the whole place all riled up again….”

  “But then….”

  “But then this whole thing with the helles competition happened. Phil actually came off as sympathetic to the crowd, Duke. Can you fucking believe that?”

  “He was actually invited to someone’s tent afterward, and he sipped on a beer they gave him,” Sharper added.

  Lando’s eyes grew a little wide despite trying to hide his surprise. “Hmmm, that’s interesting,” he mumbled. “It’s not good, guys. We can’t have that.”

  “We know,” Deville hastily replied. “So what do we do now?”

  “What the fuck do you think we do?!” Lando snapped, trying to keep his voice low enough so that it didn’t draw attention outside. “It means that we have to get Phil back on track. It means that you just have to work harder than you did before! Do I have to explain every little thing to you two nitwits?!”

  “That’s a pretty mean thing to say,” Deville said, going from worried to crestfallen.

  “We have feelings, Duke. That really hurts,” Sharper pouted.

  “Alright, I’m sorry,” Lando apologized. “Guys, this is just another complication to be handled. Just double down on Utah and keep him focused, OK? It’s a simple thing to handle a one-track mind. But there’s something else I need from you guys.”

  “Oh? What’s that?” Deville asked warily.

  “Nothing too hard. I need you to keep tabs on that Maria Sanchez, Utah’s new crony. Any time you come across her, observe everything. I want to know what kind of mood she was in, what she said, how she acted, understand. No detail is unimportant, got it?”

  “OK, we can do that,” Sharper told him. What’s his interest in her?

  “I’m depending on you two. You’re my handpicked confidants. Serve me well and you’ll both be rich men when it’s over. Just the four of us can pull this off.” There. Slap ‘em down, then build ‘em back up by showing new confidence in them. Look at those clowns, they’re already beaming.

  “Well, that’ll be it for now,” Lando concluded, the signal for the two visitors to leave.

  After they had gone, Lando thought over his whole plan with deep thought. He still liked his odds of pulling it off. The minor complications were to be expected. There were still a few other operatives of his here, ones who knew the least of any of the people he was paying, but they had only a peripheral role at the end, so they could be ignored for now.

  ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

  “Phew! I feel like a new man,” Ned Inkwell declared after finishing the last of his breakfast. Cam had led him through the same morning ritual that he had always followed. “You know what, though, Witter? I still feel like I aged five years from last night.”

  “Yep. It’s the same experience I had last year.”

  “Does that mean that after only a few of these GWIBE things that you become a lifeless, dried-up shell?” Inkwell asked, only half-kidding.

  “Possibly,” Cam sighed. “I’m not chancin’ it. That’s why I’m reformin’ this year.”

  “Me too. I’m not happy about the way I lost control last night.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, Ned, since you almost cost me my marriage.” Cam explained last night’s events to the investigator.

  “Oh my God,” Inkwell muttered, red-faced. “The next time I encounter your wife, Cam, I’m going to make a full apology.”

  “That might be very helpful, indeed. On another note, how’s the case goin’?”

  “Which one?”

  “Either one.”

  “The dead monk is still at an impasse. I’m still testing theories on that one. The second one, that Tex Cutter? That’s the one that worries me more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m getting an awful feeling that it wasn’t connected to your GWIBE thing here, that it might have been a random killing. The guy was practically new here, no friends that we’ve been able to turn up, much less enemies. No connections to any of the cliques here. Nobody we’ve talked to, people who know almost everybody, knew anything about him.”

  “It sounds like you actually believe that the monk’s murder was tied in to GWIBE.”

  “It’s definitely possible. It’s part of a few of my theories. Well, enough of that for now. I need some different information from you, Witter.”

  “Oh, and what’s that?”

  “I want to know about what brewing entails. You know, how it’s done. I heard a lot last night about what goes on, but I need to actually see what it is your people do.”

  Cam paused a moment, caught flat-footed by this unexpected request. He knew that he needed to get rid of Inkwell soon and get back to Shauna to make amends, hoping that the investigator’s quest for knowledge was based on purely….Christ, no. How could it be?

  “Let’s walk,” he told Inkwell. “There’s bound to be somebody makin’ up a batch somewhere. I’ll drop you off with them, and then you’re on your own, got it?”

  Cam caught a small break after they had only gone a short way when he noticed that the Stardust Boys were in the middle of preparing to brew. He led Inkwell into their campsite.

  All of the Stardust Boys were busy with some brewing task, although Vince Costa took the time to come over and greet them. Cam noticed that there were several young women around, too. Costa took the time to make introductions all around. Then Cam explained why they were there, asking if Inkwell could hang out and watch.

  “Yeah, he can watch,” Costa said. “In fact, the girls here are gonna do the same thing.”

  “We want to make sure that we learn to do it the right way from the start,” an attractive, petite brunette informed them. “Especially after we learned how dangerous brewing can be. I mean, between the risk if getting a hand caught in a motorized malt mill, carbon monoxide p
oisoning from brewing in enclosed spaces, over-carbonated bottles, and spilling hot w-w….”

  “Wort,” Costa helped her.

  “Wort! Spilling hot wort….”

  “Yeah, baby, when a man brews a batch, he never knows if it might be his last one,” Costa stated with a bit of dramatic flourish. The women in the group listened intently, as did Inkwell. Cam knew enough at this point to understand that there were really just four types of brewers who ran into serious trouble: The very forgetful, the truly clumsy, the negligent and those folks who were just plain unlucky. He stared at Costa, but got a return look that told him to keep his mouth shut.

  “But what about women who brew?” a cute blonde woman asked.

  “I only said man because the great majority of brewers are male,” Costa explained.

  “Have you ever been in danger before while brewing?” the brunette asked.

  “Of course, baby. Danger comes with the brewing territory, you know? One time in the middle of winter I was brewing a batch in a small shed that I’d built just for that purpose. It had a removable section in the roof to prevent carbon monoxide buildup. Anyway, I had to go back in my house for a minute, and when I returned the shack was going up in flames. There was no point in calling the fire department at that point. I figure that something flammable hanging on a wall had been blown off by the wind and had caught the flame on my burner.”

  “Oh my God, Vince! What did you do then?” the brunette gasped.

  “I wasn’t about to lose my batch and my kettle, so I put on the hot mitts I had with me, entered the flames and managed to grab my kettle full of wort and get it out. I also managed to yank out my burner and the propane tank before it went up. I got some burns, but I put some salve on them and was alright. Then, knowing that I had to see it through to the end, I started brewing again within the heat zone of the smoldering wreckage. Not only did I save the batch, but it also turned out to be one of the best Scottish ales you’d ever want to taste, my dear.”

  “Wow! That’s an experience you’ll never forget,” the awestruck brunette said.