MICHAEL LISTER'S FIRST THREE SERIES NOVELS: POWER IN THE BLOOD, THE BIG GOODBYE, THUNDER BEACH

by Michael Lister

  Time seemed to stop as I projected onto him all her lies and betrayal. Instantly, standing there all togged to the bricks and high-hating, he embodied all I hated about her faithlessness and my weakness.

  Before I realized what I was doing, I had knocked him down, pinned him to the ground with my body, and was punching him repeatedly in the face with the bottom of my left fist.

  Friend and father figure that he was, Ray pulled me off him, and when I tried to get through him to continue my assault, he committed a little assault of his own—on me.

  Chapter 2

  “I hope he’ll be all right,” Ruth Ann said.

  “She’ll do far worse to him,” I said.

  We were sitting at the bar in Nick’s.

  “Gee, mister, who gave you such a high opinion of women?” she asked, smiling before she took the next sip of her drink.

  The playful question was rhetorical, so I didn’t answer. She knew damn well.

  Nick’s was a small, dark bar that served hard, cheap liquor and lots of it. It had a Wurlitzer jukebox with fluorescent lighting, a small dance floor, and a couple of pool tables in a room in the back.

  Ruth Ann Johnson, a Salvation Army nurse, and I often met here for drinks and conversation late at night when the place was filled with our kind of people. I was nursing a tall-neck bottle of Schlitz, staring into the large mirror on the wall behind the bar. She sat beside me sipping on a martini. In the mirror, I could see a few couples dancing in front of the jukebox, the colorful lights of its pipes and grille panels flashing on their faces. Beyond them in the back room, a handful of men in uniform from Tyndall Field and the naval section base were drinking and shooting pool like they meant it.

  “I’m worried about you,” she said.

  “Because I hit a guy?”

  “Hit? You pummeled him, soldier, and you know it.”

  I didn’t say anything. I had asked her not to call me that, but the more I asked, the more she said it. She knew better, but it was an assumption nearly every stranger made. I hadn’t been wounded in combat. I never got to serve. I got tangled up with the serious-intentioned end of a shotgun while I was still with the Panama City Police Department and any hopes I had of serving went the way of my right arm.

  Unlike me, Ruth Ann had served in the war, helping wounded soldiers in the South Pacific before getting wounded herself. I think it was our wounds that made us such good drinking buddies, though we never really talked about my missing arm or her missing leg. I found mine a source of embarrassment, but I wasn’t sure why she avoided the subject of her heroism.

  “You think he’ll press charges?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Probably not if it means explaining to his wife why he was at a swanky hotel with another doll.”

  “How you know he’s married?”

  “It’s my business,” I said with a smile.

  I glanced at the bullet hole in the mirror behind the bar, the web-like veins spreading out from it, and recalled a recent case of marital unhappiness involving Angel Adams and her hood husband, Mickey.

  “I thought trouble was your business?”

  I laughed.

  Though I’d never seen her get all dolled up, not even once, Ruth Ann was still the kind of girl guys called doll. She had thick blonde hair worn above her shoulders and flipped out on the ends and big blue eyes that looked interested even when they weren’t. She was small and looked like somebody’s cute kid sister.

  “Hey doll face.”

  I turned to see a sailor leaning against the bar on the other side of Ruth Ann.

  “What’ll you have?”

  “Some more quiet conversation with my friend here,” she said, jerking her head back toward me, her blonde hair swishing about as she did.

  “You with lefty?” he asked, leaning around her to glare at my missing right.

  Before she could answer, I spoke up.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I was right-handed before it got blown off, but I’ll arm wrestle you for her.”

  “Sure, soldier, I’ll take your girl,” he said.

  I turned around and took a few steps so I could put my left arm on the bar and move away from our drinks some. He strutted around, placed his hat on the stool next to him and his elbow on the bar.

  “Don’t go nowhere doll,” he said to Ruth Ann. “This’ll only take a second.”

  The moment he finished speaking, as he was still looking at her, I reached up and grabbed the back of his head and slammed his face down into the bar. His nose and forehead smacked the marble bar top but good and it knocked him out cold. He fell to the floor face up and didn’t move.

  I moved back down beside Ruth Ann and took a long pull on my bottle of Schlitz, eyeing the other sailors in the mirror. I didn’t think this guy was with them, and I must’ve been right because they continued their game without more than a passing interest in their fallen comrade.

  “You not worried about being so . . . What’s the word I’m looking for? . . . eager . . . to make with the mauling?”

  “I didn’t maul him,” I said.

  “I was talking about the guy earlier today,” she said. “Jeez you’re dropping guys all over town.”

  I started to say something, but she cut me off. “You should talk to someone.”

  “I do.”

  “A professional.”

  “She is.”

  She turned and looked at me, her big blue eyes wide. “Really?”

  “That so surprising?”

  “Jimmy Riley talking to a shrink?” she said. “Well, heck yeah.”

  “The force sent me to her when I got shot. When I left the force I just kept going.”

  “Just keep the surprises coming, soldier, I don’t mind,” she said. “But have you considered maybe it ain’t workin’ so good?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t kill either of ’em.”

  Chapter 3

  “Lauren Lewis is here to see you,” July said.

  My quickening pulse began to pound inside my constricting throat.

  I had just returned from the small library around the block with a bag of books when July had eased into my office and closed the door behind her. She waited in front of my desk, as she always did, while I finished the sentence I was reading, and when I looked up, I caught her casting an eyeball over the novels and philosophy and psychology texts with only a mild interest.

  “Really?”

  Suddenly, the hairline at the top of my forehead was moist, my mouth dry.

  “She asked for you, but I could take her in to see Ray.”

  “Show her in,” I said.

  “But—”

  “Show her in.”

  Dropping the book on the scarred wooden desk with the others, I jumped up and looked out my second-story window, across downtown Panama City. The traffic on Harrison was light, the sidewalks mostly empty. The unseen morning sun behind me cast a warm glow on the sleepy streets, but I found no peace or strength in any of it, so I sat back down.

  July didn’t usher Lauren in so much as stand aside and allow her to enter, and I couldn’t help but think that the way she stood, leaning against my door and arching her back to accentuate her nearly flawless figure, was the female equivalent of a man flexing for another man.

  When Lauren had walked in, she glanced around, noting—I could tell because I knew how she thought—that in the year that had passed, the old walls had remained bare.

  Unlike the first time July had shown Lauren into my office, she didn’t take her coat, offer her coffee, or close the door.

  I resisted the urge to stand, and I forced myself to look right into her dark eyes as if for the first time.

  Swallowing hard to ensure my voice wouldn’t break, I attempted a casual, “Lauren.”

  “Are you following me?” she asked.

  For a moment I couldn’t speak, guilt gripping my vocal cords.

  “What?” I asked, my voice filled with a surprise as brittle as my attemp
t at casualness had been.

  I tried to laugh it off as inane or absurd, but images of a desperate man hiding in the shadows undermined my attempt. Nearly a year had passed, and I didn’t recognize that man any longer, but I still hated his helplessness, loathed his lack of self-control. His existence had been a brief and solitary one. Lauren never knew of it. As far as I knew, only my counselor did.

  “I remember one time you said if you ever wanted to follow me I’d never know it, but . . .”

  “I’m not following you,” I said as if I never had, my voice filled with the wounded pride of an innocent man.

  She collapsed back in her chair and the familiar scent of Paris perfume drifted across my desk.

  Beneath her dark brown hair, combed smooth across the top and hanging in soft curls above her shoulders, her flawless skin seemed nearly too perfect, the almond eyes beneath the razor sharp eyebrows nearly too dark, too deep, too . . . Nearly, but not too.

  From my inside right coat pocket, the only inside pocket I was able to use, I pulled out a pack of Pall Malls, shook out two, put them in my mouth, and returned the pack to my pocket. I then fished in my left outside pocket for a lighter. This all took a while and she waited patiently. Once I had them both lit, I took one out and held it out to her. She stood and accepted my offering, placing what had just been in my mouth between her Revlon-red lips. She then took a long drag from the cigarette, held it a moment, and lifted her head to blow it out slowly.

  “How are you doing with . . . ,” she asked, nodding toward where my right arm should be.

  I had been injured the day she left me—as a result of her leaving me, but she didn’t know that—and we hadn’t really spoken since then. I was still on the force, but moonlighting for Ray when I took her case. I was wounded in the line of duty, called a hero, awarded citations, but if I hadn’t been working with Ray, if I hadn’t taken her case, if I had never met her, it would have never happened.

  “I manage,” I said. “Ladies like a wounded war hero. They think some Jap bastard blew it off. I straighten them out . . . eventually.”

  I wondered if she could tell I was lying. I hadn’t been with a woman since her, couldn’t if I wanted to. Could she tell? Was she still able to see through me?

  “I was so sorry to hear it had happened,” she said. “But I was very proud of you, too. You were so brave. That woman and her child owe you their lives.”

  The truth was, I hadn’t been brave so much as numb. If I hadn’t been, I would have waited for backup. I didn’t care if I died. In fact, I wanted to. I wasn’t brave. I was suicidal—and it cost me far more than my right arm, but she’d never know that.

  When she sat down again, we were quiet a moment longer.

  Her silhouette style black dress emphasized her trim waist and narrow hips and grew broad above her breasts. The war had made stockings mostly a thing of the past, but her dress showed plenty of pale leg beneath black silk stockings, the backs of which had seams running down them. The rest of the girls had to go bare-legged and draw seams down the back of their legs with black eyeliner to give the illusion of stockings, but not Mrs. Harry Lewis. She wore them to help conceal the burn scars on her legs, but her exemption from even the smallest wartime sacrifice made me angry.

  Her two-tone, thick high heels brought together the black of her dress, its white collar and highlights, and the white of her gauntlet gloves and clutch bag.

  “Someone’s following me,” she said, her voice ragged and weary. “I thought it might be you.”

  “It’s not—”

  “Of course it’s not,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “—so you can mark my name off the list,” I continued, “and move on to whoever came after me . . . or before—depending on how you’re working your way through us.”

  Only the slightest twinge of pain showed on the fine features of her delicate, but tense face. There was nothing I could say that would shock her. She had long since grown to expect my cruelty.

  Resolutely, she stood. “Sorry to . . . I mean . . . I shouldn’t’ve come here.”

  “Someone’s tailing you?”

  She paused to consider me, her eyes searching mine.

  “Yeah,” she said, slowly drifting back into her seat, “I think so.”

  “How long’s it been going on?”

  “A while,” she said. “I don’t know—a month at least. At first I thought it was my imagination. Then, for a while, I just dropped out of sight so he couldn’t follow me. But now . . . now I can’t and it’s happening again.”

  “Obviously you haven’t gotten a good look at him or you wouldn’t’ve thought it was me,” I said. “What—”

  “I haven’t seen him at all.”

  “What’s he done?”

  “Whatta you mean?”

  “To let you know he’s there,” I said. “He hasn’t done anything? Not to your car, your cat, your—”

  “You know I don’t have a cat,” she said.

  “I don’t know what you have now,” I said. “Or who. I assume you still have a husband.”

  “Yes,” she said, gathering her purse again.

  “So he hasn’t done anything to you or your property?” I asked.

  We aren’t each other’s property, I suddenly remembered her saying near the end. No one ever owns another person. No one ever can.

  I hadn’t remembered that until now. What else had I forgotten? What other shards of memory were buried so deep they could be felt but not recalled and would come unbidden, triggered by a word, a smell, a taste?

  “No,” she said.

  I thought about that.

  She looked around some more—perhaps searching for clues to my condition or any evidence that she had ever been a part of my life—and while she did, I stole glances at her. She still wore her long dark hair down over the right side of her face to conceal the burns, very little makeup, and too many clothes.

  Her eyes drifted across the various stacks of books scattered around the floor, over the dusty boxing gloves to the stack of files atop the old metal filing cabinet, past the framed pictures on the floor leaning against the wall, beyond the chess board still awaiting my next move as it was the last time she was here, and came to rest on the records full of sad songs stacked on my Motorola Spinet.

  What does all this tell you about the condition you left me in? What are you thinking? Feeling? Do you feel anything for me? Did you ever?

  “Creeps usually do something to let you know they’re there,” I said. “It’s their idea of a swell time. If this guy hasn’t done anything . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We fell silent again and I could hear July talking on her phone out in the hallway. From her serious tone and cryptic conversation I knew it was Ray.

  Gracefully, Lauren crossed her long, shapely legs and straightened out her skirt. Her movements were as smooth and elegant as the silk stockings gripping her gams. As usual, they were dark, but you could still make out the burns down her right leg if you knew where to look.

  Her eyes grew wide when she saw the bullet hole in the wall above my filing cabinet. “Is that a—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Are you sure someone’s following you?”

  She shrugged. “It’s more a feeling than anything else, but yeah, I’m sure.”

  “It’s probably either an ex-lover, your husband, or a PI hired by one of them. Or both,” I said. “So—”

  “My only ex-lover is a PI.”

  I may have been her only ex-lover who was a private detective. I was not her only ex-lover. She’d tried to make it sound like the latter instead of the former.

  “—you’re probably not in any danger, but I’ll find out who’s doing it and—”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t come here to hire you. I just wanted to—”

  She stopped abruptly as the phone on my desk began to ring.

  “Sorry,” I said as I snatched up th
e receiver.

  “Don’t agree to take her case or do anything for her before you talk to me,” Ray whispered.

  “What?”

  “I’ll explain when she leaves. I have relevant information.”

  When I hung up she said, “I’ll let you go. I know you’re busy.”

  Though the stack of books on my desk belied my busyness, I didn’t contradict her.

  “Okay,” I said, “but don’t worry about whoever’s following you, I’ll take care of him.”

  “No,” she said, standing to leave. “I’m not going to hire someone to follow me because I think someone’s following me. I just—”

  “You’re not hiring me,” I said, my voice angry and hurt.

  “You’re right I’m not,” she said, walking over to the door, “so don’t follow me.”

  “Don’t worry after me, sister, I won’t be there,” I said, as if I really wouldn’t.

  After Lauren left, I sat there for a moment, stunned, and thought back to the first time she had come into my office and disarmed me with her disconcerting honesty, unconventional beauty, and her complete lack of pretense and illusion.

  My desire for her had been instant and incomprehensible.

  “Of the infidelity cases you investigate how many of the people turn out to be cheating?” she had asked.

  “Nearly all.”

  “Really?”

  “Most people don’t come to us the first time they have suspicions.”

  “So what percentage?”

  I shrugged.

  “How many? I want to know.”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “A few years,” I said.

  It was evening. I had been moonlighting with Ray for a while, but not a few years. I was sick of swimming in the cesspool of city politics and corruption and was getting ready to leave the force. My plan had been to start working for Ray full-time when I came back from the war.

  “So, of the cases you’ve worked, how many were guilty of cheating?”

  “All of them,” I said.

  Her eyes widened. She then exhaled heavily and fell back into her chair, the expression on her face a curious one, as if I had just shared a strange good news.