Case File: Bright Sun (Case Files of Newport Investigations)

by Pat Price

  The character of Jason Kilpatrick was modeled after an ex-Navy Officer I worked with while consulting at an aerospace company. He was one of the smartest men I’ve ever known and truly a great gentleman.

  Acknowledgements:

  Without the involvement of more than a few people, this book would never been finished, let alone published. I wrote this book back in the late 1990s and the only reason it is published now is thanks to the red pencils of several people.

  First on the list is the ever fetching Gayle Swetow-Price for her editing and pushing the author with a sharp pointed object in the middle of his back. Also involved in the editing of this book was Wanda Russell whose favorite phrase is “this doesn’t add anything to story, take it out,” and whose other favorite phrase is “what in the hell are all these numbers supposed to be?”

  Pat Price – May, 2011

  Bonus chapters from

  Last Train

  A Novel By

  Pat Price

  Chapter – 1

  So, there I was talking to Floyd. Floyd is an overweight green iguana who sometimes passes for a pet. More often than not, he has the aloofness of a cat. Floyd is his own person or creature and only enters his enclosure when it suits him or he gets hungry. I have also been known to turn the air-conditioner down to 60 degrees which causes him to slow down when the room gets cold and allows me to pick him up and put him in his cage. Floyd only has one defensive move which causes people who don’t know him to be wary when he puts the “look” on them.

  "Why are you sitting with your legs crossed on the rim of a canyon and staring at the sun?" Floyd asked. A thought crossed my mind that Floyd was looking a lot bigger than he was the last time I saw him. He looked big, real big. He was about the size of a person. But, given my current condition, I wasn’t entirely sure that his size wasn’t normal.

  I was on what I thought was my second day of sitting on the rim of a small canyon overlooking the entrance to a cave that had been sealed about a year ago.

  My partner Jimmy Two Feathers and I had recovered two homemade nuclear weapons from a group of terrorists whose base of operations had been in that very cave. The terrorists were a group of radical Native American Indians.

  The FBI had retained our services to recover a large amount of stolen uranium from a fuel storage facility for power plants. The cave was where we found the stolen uranium inside two homemade nukes and it was also where we found the terrorists. Not withstanding all of that, the cliff I was sitting on and the opposite canyon wall were enough to take your breath away when the sun was setting and rising. The play of shadows and color of the canyon and the surrounding desert was so beautiful. It’s almost as though it defied description and could make one cry. At the present time, all of that was lost on me, as I had retreated inside my mind.

  Jimmy and I own Newport Investigations, a small private detective firm located in Newport Beach, California. Our normal bread and butter type of case is property recovery. Depending on how you look at it, the Gods either smiled or frowned on us to the tune of four million dollars thanks to the Feds, who came to us asking for help. It took us just under six months to identify who stole the fuel and to discover where it had been fashioned into two weapons of mass destruction.

  The group had stolen enough fuel grade uranium to construct two low yield nuclear devices. The scary part was that they were almost ready to move the bombs or weapons as the FBI referred to them. The targets were Washington D.C. and New York City. The bastion of the white man's capitalism.

  The terrorist group was made up of Native American Indians and their sole purpose in life was to deliver a bolt from the blue to the white man. Ignoring the fact that had they succeeded they would have killed more than tens of thousands of minorities than white people. My experience with apocalyptical groups is that they rarely allow reason and logic to cloud their vision of the truth.

  Jimmy had suffered a severe beating at the hands of the leader of the terrorist group resulting in several broken ribs and two punctures to his right lung. Jimmy's only family at the time was his father and sister and me. His father and sister lived on the reservation east of Phoenix. His father is one of the tribal elders and his sister was one of the registered nurses on the reservation.

  The terrorists were members of the tribe who harbored real and imaginary grievances against the whites. Had I grown up in their environment, I am quite sure I would have been right there with them, considering how we white people screwed the Indians in the first place.

  Jimmy actually grew up with the leader of the radical group who was now a fairly high-ranking officer with the Arizona Department of Public Safety. In Arizona, the DPS is the highway patrol and state police rolled into one agency.

  I had become close over the years with Jimmy’s sister Rebecca. She and I became engaged while she stayed with us in Newport Beach for three months helping her brother to recover. The only other relevant fact is that I acquired Floyd a week after we solved the case. But in reality, Floyd acquired me.

  Jimmy was just five days out of surgery and resting at his father's home. He and I were outside reclining on chaise lounges in December facing the afternoon sun. I had fallen asleep and awoke with Rebecca talking to me and asking who my friend was next to me?

  I was in a twilight state and when I followed her eyes I saw Floyd sitting on my chest. So in some respects one might say that he acquired me.

  "What are you trying to do?" Floyd asked me, changing his tact because I had not answered his previous question.

  "I'm trying to have a vision," I said.

  Rebecca and I had been engaged for about a year. She and I burned a lot of air miles on America West traveling back and forth between Phoenix and Newport Beach every week or two. She was dedicated to her work on the reservation even though I offered to hire a nurse to take her place. Jimmy and I had made four million and change, tax free from the government for finding the weapons. In other words we were well heeled.

  On this last trip to Phoenix I decided to see if I could induce a vision in myself by sitting in the sun and not drinking or eating. After a program on the local PBS station about Native American Shamans, it seemed like a good idea the time.

  Hindsight being twenty-twenty, it was one of the more stupid things I had done to myself. The body can tolerate a lack of food for a relatively long period of time. As soon as dehydration sets in, the mind starts going and that light at the end of the tunnel is a freight train, not a vision.

  I quickly lost track of ‘time’. When Floyd appeared and started talking to me I thought I had been on the rim of the canyon for two days. The truth was that I had been out there almost four days.

  "Why?" Floyd asked again

  "I want to try and gain a Native experience and then maybe it will help me understand Rebecca, the Chief and Jimmy," I said.

  Over the past year I had read anything and everything I could about the Native American experience. Compared to the Indians, other minorities in this country have had a cakewalk. The white Europeans, pushed the Indians back until the only place they could be pushed was onto land no one else wanted, that being the reservations. If perchance the land they had been forced onto turned out to have something of value to the white people, we moved them on to the next piece of worthless land. So, being engaged to an American Indian, I was trying to experience something, be it ethnic, cultural, or spiritual, that would give me some insight into how she thought.

  Floyd just wouldn’t give up, “When do you think this vision thing will happen?” he asked.

  "I don't know. I guess I'll know it when it happens," I said. Iguanas can be so damn superior especially the green ones like Floyd.

  About then it felt like someone tipped the world because I floated off of the canyon rim. I knew in my heart at the time that this was what I had been waiting for. The scene around me was moving but I thought I was still sitting with my legs crossed. I was having trouble understanding what was happening.

  When
the scenery around me stabilized I was looking down at the canyon floor from some distance.

  "Cool," I said to myself and the universe around me, although I suspected the universe really didn't care. The floor of the canyon was about a hundred feet down from the rim and I was floating. This was most definitely cool. I was slowly descending to the sandy floor below and someone was looking up at me.

  "Are you alright?" someone yelled

  "I'm fine," I shouted back, "look at me I'm flying."

  I was revolving around as I was descending and the view changed from the canyon wall next to me to the canyon wall across the canyon. I looked down and was suddenly overcome with a feeling of vertigo, which for me was unusual. I decided that looking down was a bad thing to do while one was in the grip of a vision.

  "He's almost there," I heard someone yell.

  I felt my feet touch something, which I assumed was the canyon floor. The first thing that went through my mind was that the vision allowed you me to fly, how else could I have floated from the canyon rim to the canyon floor.

  My legs collapsed under me as my weight came onto my feet. My legs were burning as the feeling came back into them, but at the time, I didn't understand what was happening.

  I finally came to rest on my back and I was looking up at the rim of the canyon and Rebecca came into my field of vision. She knelt down and her face came close to mine. The sun was overhead and she looked the same to me as she had when I awoke with Floyd on my chest. Her head was blocking the sun and the light was so bright that I could not make out her features. Her hair was diffusing the sunlight and looked like a halo around her head. At that moment, Rebecca was the most beautiful and spiritual creature I had ever seen.

  The stillness was suddenly jarred by a smacking sound and my head shook from side to side. My mind normally works fast when pain is involved.

  “You’ve just been hit,” my mind said to me.

  "How can that be?" I said to my other self. "Rebecca would not hit us."

  Right about then, reality came streaming back with a vengeance. I felt like a weight had been dropped on my chest.

  "Are all you white people stupid or just the one I decided to love?" Rebecca was screaming at me. She had hold of the front of my shirt and was shaking me like a rag doll.

  I tried to sit up and just couldn't make the effort. Jimmy came into my field of vision and looked down at me. A smile was on his face.

  "Trying the vision thing?" he said, more as a statement than a question.

  He knelt next to me and poured some water in my mouth and then more over my face.

  "You’re not brown enough to be an Indian, but right now you sure as hell are red enough," he said with a huge grin.

  "Shut up James," I heard Rebecca’s voice yell.

  Jimmy pulled me to my feet then lifted me like a child and carried me over to his sister's pickup truck. Rebecca opened the door and he sat me on the seat and belted me in before I slumped forward. For the next hour or so I leaned forward against the shoulder belt and was fascinated with my reflection in the push button that opened the glove box on the dashboard. Rebecca was silent as she drove us back to the reservation and her Father’s house. There is nothing like being overly dehydrated to allow you to powerfully focus on a push button.

  Chapter – 2

  I spent the first six hours back at Chief Two Feathers' house with an IV plugged into my arm. I had been so dehydrated that I hallucinated off and on for the next day. As I would drift in and out of the dream states, I would see images of Jimmy, Rebecca, Chief Two Feathers and Floyd. Especially of Rebecca when I had been next to her or had accidentally touched her or smelled her hair or the intoxicating odor of her body.

  What was interesting was, the visions I didn’t see. I didn't see any of the people I had shot over the years, not that any of them had not tried to kill me first. I didn’t see any images of my birth family or of any friends I grew up with.

  The dream states finally stopped late the next afternoon when I was sitting outside in one of the chaise lounges, facing the sun. Chief Two Feathers came out and sat down next to me.

  "How are you doing?" he asked, his voice a monotone.

  "Almost back to normal," I said.

  "Tell me," he said, "what did you see?"

  "I saw Floyd, the green Iguana," I said and started crying, suddenly overcome with emotion.

  I fell into thought for a few minutes while the Chief smoked a cigarette. I went on, "I don't know how long I was there before he appeared to me but it must have been near the end." I was suddenly overcome with emotion again and started weeping. I looked away not wanting the Chief to see me cry.

  The Chief continued smoking and waited for me. The thing that has always struck me about the Chief, like Howard, the tribal elder, who ran the reservation gas station outside of Kingman, is that he can say tons by not speaking.

  "I saw Rebecca and realized how stupid I was and that I could have died out there and missed the time we would’ve had together."

  The quiet tears consumed me again and I looked up at the sun as the top of it was dropping behind the mountains to the west.

  Night swept across the valley like a living thing. It had weight as it went racing past us like a curtain being drawn and a short moment later a chill came on the air. Some time later, and I don't know how much later, the stars came out and I was overcome with emotion again. I looked to the side and saw that the chief was no long beside me. The night sky above me was perfectly clear as it can only be in the desert with an uncountable number of stars scattered across the blackness like light peeking through pin holes in a worn velvet blanket.

  I looked up and felt like I was accelerating upward into a moment of perfectly clarity. I felt the rush of air pass me without hearing it. The illusion of speed was unbelievable and the stars changed their appearance to streaks. It was as though I knew everything and no questions were left unanswered. It seemed like I was in a perfect moment forever.

  I stood and looked at the watch on my wrist. It was a little past three in the morning and I knew what I had to do. I walked back into the house and went through the back patio door into the family room. All of the lights were off and I could see the Chief sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette in the dark.

  “You know your path,” he said. It was not a question but a statement.

  "Yes," I said, "I do."

  "What is it?"

  "I am going to marry your daughter and take her with me to California and start a family."

  I saw him nod once. He stubbed the cigarette out and rose. He walked down the hall in the dark and went into his room and closed the door. I sat down on the couch and fell asleep.

  Chapter – 3

  Rebecca and I were married on the Reservation the next day. The only people in attendance were Rebecca, Jimmy, Chief Two Feathers, and one of their spiritual leaders who officiated. Rebecca had been adamant over the past year that she would not leave the reservation. After the ceremony we went back to her father's house and she went into her room and started packing her bags.

  The Chief remained outside smoking and talking to Jimmy while Rebecca was packing. I walked out of the house and over to them. They were standing next to Rebecca’s truck.

  "I'm having some trouble understanding why she is willing to go to California," I said to both of them. "I would have been willing to stay here with her."

  "You are not just one of them anymore," Jimmy said, "You are one of us now. Sitting in the desert waiting for a vision to appear is not a white thing. You will have to be careful now that you don't start loosing your rights and being taken advantage of and start drinking way too much."

  "Do not tease him James," his father said in a sober voice, his eyebrows pulled together as though someone had knitted them into that position.

  The Chief looked at me, "you understand the vision was not seeing the Iguana, but what happened to you afterwards. Think back. You were hallucinating for two days after they found you
. The last evening was the vision. You are in the way of the people now, not the white way. You are the warrior and she is your woman. She will go where you go."

  He turned as Rebecca came out of the house dragging a duffle bag behind her. She looked at her brother.

  "The others are in the house. Would you get them for me?" she asked Jimmy.

  Jimmy didn't say a word; he turned and walked into the house. Rebecca’s father laid his hands on her shoulders and looked at her.

  "You know your way now?" he asked.

  "As an educated woman I never thought I would say this, but yes, I know my way," she replied. Her father pulled her to his chest and hugged her. When he stepped back a few tears were welling up in his eyes. He silently nodded to her and released his hands from her shoulders. She stepped back and turned toward me and I could see tears in her eyes as well.