False Gods

by W. Glenn Duncan Jr.

  Not bad.

  My reaction at the same point had been to put a fist through my office wall.

  I leaned back in my chair and finished my beer. Signaled the barman for another.

  It would take a long time for those left behind, but they would get there.

  Don would use Snowy’s intel to continue his crusade against charlatans and psychopaths and Lucy, Kimberly and the other girls would help each other find their way to lives beyond those of being ruled by false gods.

  The barman slid the fresh beer over.

  Don read on.

  I drank.

  “You did good.”

  “…”

  “Listen to me,” Hilda said, lighting a cigarette and leaning back. “You did good, Rafferty. You know that, right?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “So, what’s wrong?”

  I concentrated on my beer. Tiger was no Samuel Adams, but a perfectly acceptable beer given our surroundings.

  “Rafferty?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You couldn’t save them all.” She leaned forward. “You couldn’t have.”

  “I know.”

  She squinted.

  “It’s not that.”

  “What is it then?” Soft voice. Open. Just for me.

  I sighed. “Something was telling me Ana was behind the whole thing … even before the shit hit the fan.”

  She reached out and touched my arm.

  “And, even though it was trying to tell me that, I didn’t hear it.”

  I sighed again.

  “I know things, Hil. My world revolves around it. I know when I’m being lied to. I know how to catch the bad guys. I know how to fight and shoot and, if necessary, kill. I know how to cope with all that. And it all makes sense.”

  “But?”

  “But … I can’t make sense of the things I knew about this case. Things I shouldn’t have known. And I can’t wrap my head around how things might have been different if I’d just understood what I knew.”

  Hilda smiled. The electric candlelight danced around her jaw and sparkled fire in her eyes. For a moment, I almost pinned down the flecks of colour lurking there, but they spun away from me once more.

  She grabbed my hand in both of hers.

  “I know it’s hard for you to admit you don’t know everything about everything.” I bristled. She squeezed my hand and smiled. “Yes, it is true. And it’s okay. It’s part of why I love you. And no matter what else happened, you did what you needed to do. You found Kimberly and brought her home.”

  “I did.”

  “You did. And in time, you’ll be able to let go of worrying about those dreams.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You sound pretty sure.”

  “Often am.” She grinned.

  “Care to share your secret?”

  “Finish your beer, take me home, and I’ll give you something to occupy your mind.” She grinned again and her stockinged foot slid up my leg. “I guarantee you’ll like it.”

  I thought about that. I was beyond ready to start forgetting about this case and Hil’s suggestion sounded like the perfect first step.

  And besides, our ladies always want the best for us, don’t they?

  * * *

  Started 24 June 2015

  Completed 5 December 2017

  Mittagong, Australia

  Keep reading for an excerpt from the next Rafferty P.I. mystery,

  * * *

  WRIGHT & WRONG

  Wright & Wrong | Chapter 1

  Typical Monday morning.

  In the office, my feet on the desk, and into my second cup of hot black heart-starter. Warm breeze from the street on the back of my neck. Loafing with the newspaper and eyeballing the hell out of a pre-lunch nap.

  Not everyone shared my sunny disposition and positive outlook on the day.

  A tanker, the Exxon Valdez, had run aground a couple days earlier in Alaska, someplace called Prince William Sound, and the aerial photos of the resultant oil spill looked like a depraved Christo installation. Behold, Ladeez and Gentlemen, I give you “Ze Earth … in … Blackface”. Thunderous applause and don’t forget to visit the gift shop on your way out.

  Hundreds of oil-skinned volunteers were already at the scene, doing their best to contain the spreading slick and limit damage to the surrounding wilderness. Only time would tell how successful those efforts would be.

  I was sipping coffee and trying to visualize the paper’s reports of how much oil had made it outside the boat, when I heard the first shot.

  My brain tried to downshift straight from barrels of crude to threat assessment, got caught somewhere in the middle, and lurched into a call and response routine—That was a gunshot | Don’t be stupid, it was a car backfire | No, I’m certain it was a gunshot—before I told the cerebral combatants to shut the hell up and got myself to the open window.

  Looked up and down Jackson street.

  Usual mid-morning traffic. People running late for work jockeying with those go-getters off to the second or third meeting for the day. Lots of cars. No obvious clunkers.

  Strike the car backfire.

  Another shot.

  Two more. Three.

  Now with a clear line of hearing, my brain gave up arguing with itself and started triangulating.

  I could see slantwise through a gap between brick buildings and towards the open space on the other side of Young Street. Behind a tall fence—over beyond the Scottish Rite Cathedral—figures ran, wheeling in unison, like a flock of birds startled into flight.

  Screams, shouts and a chorus of “Oh my God”s pleaded their way to me before another volley of shots cut them off.

  Two teenagers at the right edge of the flock—a boy and girl—fell like puppets with slashed strings. The rest of the bodies kept wheeling to the left and out of sight.

  An overcoated and backwards-baseball-capped figure strode into my view slot. He stood next to the two bodies, cradled his AR-15, and cocked his head. He brought the gun up to his left shoulder and fired at the figures on the ground. They twitched and sprouted crimson haloes.

  Blood angels on the pavement.

  The figure toed both bodies with a booted foot, then looked over his shoulder and jerked his head. A second boy shuffled into view. Bright orange t-shirt and jeans, no overcoat. My brain cut in again—Too hot for an overcoat today—before it caught the look I threw at it and retreated into silence.

  T-Shirt had a black backpack slung over his shoulders, held a shortened shotgun, and pointed it nowhere in particular.

  Overcoat shrugged and his mouth moved. T-Shirt didn’t react. Overcoat’s mouth moved again, wider this time, and he cuffed T-shirt on the side of the head. He pointed at something I couldn’t see and pushed T-Shirt in that direction. T-Shirt shuffled away.

  Overcoat smiled, reached into the duffel bag hanging from his shoulder, extracted a flat black magazine. He ejected the one from the gun, like he was in the middle of his third tour, and slammed the new one home.

  He raised the gun to his shoulder again, braced his feet and squeezed off a series of shots. The reverberations reached me a split second later.

  More screams and shouts.

  Overcoat stopped firing and turned towards me. He lifted his arm and for a second I thought he was going to wave, then another member of the Overcoat Club stepped into view, and they high-fived.

  They said something to each other, grinned, lifted their guns and fired as they stalked out of sight behind a building.

  The boom of a shotgun rolled through the clatter of rifle fire and bounced off buildings and streets. In the background, I could hear sirens cutting through the traffic, too slow.

  Screaming collided with rattling gunfire as I bolted for the door.

  Wright & Wrong | Chapter 2

  “It’s a fucking mess,” Lieutenant Ed Durkee said.

  The cops had done a good job securing the site and keeping the media away from the school perimeter, allowing them only obliq
ue views from the ends of the street to the killing fields in front of us. That wouldn’t be enough.

  I’d have been surprised if there weren’t more than one eager reporter and camera crew knocking on doors in the apartment block on the opposite side of Canton Street, hoping to get an elevated view of the carnage and their network logo plastered coast-to-coast for the next news cycle.

  Ed had been good enough to let me stay inside the police cordon. Probably too busy to throw me out. I repaid the favor by doing my best not to get in the way.

  “What happened, Ed?”

  His answer squeezed between the bars of the steel boundary fence, eight feet high if it was an inch.

  “Looks like a couple of kids decided they were Rambo and the rest of the students were Charlies. Fucked if I know why.”

  Ed’s description was accurate. The asphalt rec-area beyond the fence did look like an urban war movie.

  Police and paramedics jockeyed with each other while, twenty feet to my right, a guy worked an oxy-acetylene torch to cut through the fence uprights. The metal sizzled and spat and the cut ends of the steel bars burned hot and bright.

  Inside the schoolyard, bodies were scattered on the hard, dark bitumen like fallen leaves. The lucky were wrapped in blankets being tended to, and simultaneously questioned by, the uniforms, but there were too many silent, misshapen lumps under white sheets.

  Two in a V-formation where I’d seen Overcoat One.

  Three lined up like piano keys on the steps into the main school building. Which way they’d been facing in their last moment, I couldn’t tell.

  One crumpled at the doorway at the top of the steps. Trying to barricade the door, maybe.

  A few scattered single sheets behind steel-gray outdoor furniture.

  Worst of all—though I had no idea how to judge any of this shit-storm as better or worse—was the collection of sheets in the far corner where the chain-link fences of the baseball diamond and the tennis courts met. I couldn’t, didn’t want to, count them.

  It looked like a hotel’s dirty laundry pile.

  I turned and got my bearings back to my office window. Figured that as I saw Overcoats One and Two stalk out of sight, they had driven the screaming, pleading students into that far corner of this outdoor area, like a turkey shoot.

  And there, huddled together, pressed against each other and the fences meant to keep the bad guys out, they had all died. Like the turkeys do.

  “I heard it happen, Ed. Lots of semi-auto rifle fire, plus a single big-bore shot.”

  “That fits. We’ve found casings all over the place. These kids musta been armed to the teeth.”

  “Two of them were carrying duffel bags with spare ammo. And there was a third. With a sawn-off shotgun.”

  “You saw them?” Ed eyebrows reached for the sky. “When? Where?”

  “After it all went down. But I didn’t get more than a glimpse between buildings.”

  “Hmmm. We’ll get to you. At this rate, Sergeant Ricco’s gonna be taking statements for the next month.”

  I looked over Ed’s shoulder to where Ricco squatted next to a dark-haired cheerleader type. Uncomfortable as the pose looked, Ricco could still have passed for a chorus member of Guys and Dolls in his natty pinstripe suit, wingtips and fedora. The girl streamed tears and whipped her head from side to side as she talked to Ricco. He nodded, looked like he was listening, and scribbled in a black notebook.

  “How many, Ed?”

  Ed mashed his face under both palms and let loose the biggest sigh I’d ever heard.

  “Twenty-two dead. We figure two of those to be the shooters.” He sighed again. “Ten injured. The worst of those missing the lower half of his face from a shotgun blast up close. And a shitload of kids and teachers traumatized to hell and back.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Listen, Rafferty, I gotta talk to the principal and Mayor Strauss wants an update in …” Ed checked a watch under his brown suit sleeve. “Shit, less than thirty minutes. I gotta go.”

  “No problems, Ed. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  Ed flapped an arm at me and weaved his way between the uniforms, between wailing kids and quiet sheets, and trudged up the stairs into the school.

  I packed a pipe, shoved smoke in the direction of my nerves and walked back to the office.

  Why?

  I didn’t expect I’d ever get an answer to that question.

  COMING SOON

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  THE RAFFERTY P.I. SERIES

  RAFFERTY’S RULES

  Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

  15 years ago, Rafferty saved Vivian from a junkie who tried to blow her head off. So when he’s hired by Vivian’s parents to hunt down her kidnappers, it’s personal. Rafferty saved Vivian once. Can he do it again?

  LAST SEEN ALIVE

  Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

  Rafferty’s vacation goes to hell as he works his way through a small Texas town breaking the rules as fast as they can make them, searching for the vicious killer who butchered Cindy Lawson.

  POOR DEAD CRICKET

  Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

  He’s been around the block; this isn’t the first case he’s had involving a dead woman. But this time Cricket Dawes is dead, and no-one cares—except Rafferty. And that’s a bad scenario for everyone else.

  WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME

  Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

  A double caseload means multiple mayhem for Rafferty. A trigger-happy octogenarian collides with a larger-than-life bounty hunter. One will win him an unexpected friend. The other could buy him a bullet.

  CANNON’S MOUTH

  Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

  Rafferty’s mistaken for a hitman. Before he knows it, the mark is dead and he’s left holding the bag. Full of cash. Now the real hitman wants his money and he’s prepared to burn down Rafferty’s world to get it.

  FATAL SISTERS

  (Shamus Award Winner)

  Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

  Finding Sherm isn’t that hard, but telling his naïve wife that he was killed in a mob-connected whorehouse is. And with the witnesses now being murdered one by one, Rafferty must face the truth: sometimes it’s a simple matter of kill or be killed.

  FALSE GODS

  Download here from your favorite ebook retailer.

  Rafferty should wrap up this runaway case easily, but by the time he can find Kimberly in a remote desert compound, they’re trapped in the middle of
a deadly game. Can Rafferty get Kimberly out before all hell breaks loose?

  Acknowledgments

  Heartfelt and undying thanks to:

  Leisa, Ned & the crew at the real Rush Cafe for providing endless cups of coffee, laughs, and my daily writing ‘office’.

  Kylie Mason for her insightful editing & Jessica Bell for a wonderful cover design.

  Beta readers, Stew and Alice, for toiling through rough first drafts and asking for more, and my awesome sister Kelly, for proofreading and tons of encouragement.

  Dad for blazing the trail and creating a character that is so much damn fun to write about. Rafferty fans around the world, especially Paul Bishop, Kevin Burton Smith, Bill Crider and Cliff Fausset, without whom there definitely would not have been more Rafferty.

  Jo Penn, Mark Dawson & Nick Stephenson for sharing their hard-earned lessons and commitment to indie publishing.

  And finally, to plagiarise one of my author idols, Matthew Reilly: “To anyone who knows a writer, never underestimate the power of your encouragement.”