Gunshine State

by Andrew Nette

  “And he wants the suite to be renovated.”

  “Dan promised to paint and change the carpets for both of us. Told me it was cheaper than having to find a new tenant.”

  “Apparently Mr. Abercrombie wants some interior walls moved and improvements made to the plumbing and wiring. ‘Substantial improvements’ was how Dan said he put it.”

  “Such as? And stop calling him ‘mister.’ The little swindler doesn’t deserve that much respect.”

  “He wants an open floor plan, where everyone can see everyone else.”

  “He doesn’t have that now. Besides, have you seen him and his staff? They don’t want to be able to see each other. What else?”

  She looked at her note. “More internet jacks.”

  “Only three people work there.”

  Sharon was still reading. “Plumbing for the coffee maker, a refrigerator with an ice maker and filtered water dispenser…”

  “No one in the building has any of that.”

  She shrugged. “That’s what he wants. And he reminded Dan he has two option years left on the lease after this one, so he’s not going anywhere.”

  I flipped through the rest of the slips, slapped the sheaf against my thigh. “The extortion will come any day now. He’s made demands Dan can’t accommodate, but Abercrombie doesn’t want to queer the deal altogether because he can’t afford to stay where he is. It’s only a question of whether he asks Dan for the cash—knowing I’ll make it right—or comes to me directly. I’ll call Dan.” I held up one of the messages. “What’s this from Diane? Is Caroline all right?”

  Sharon stifled her lips. Her eyes gave away the smile. “I should be mad at you for not knowing I’d tell you anything about Caroline right away, but this is too good. Diane called to thank you for paying all of the talented and gifted summer program expenses. She said that should have been a fifty-fifty split.”

  “We had a good month.” Any divorced father with a clue knows there are a million little things he misses or can’t help out with. Some are financial—incidental expenses lumped into “child support—but still add up. Diane and I signed our child support agreement when Forte Investigations was me working alone out of whatever vacancy Dan had at the time. She’d watched the business grow and never asked for a penny more. “So long as she doesn’t start expecting it all the time.” I winked and went into my office.

  The seat hadn’t warmed before Andy Burke knocked on the door jamb. “You got a minute?”

  I waved him in, gestured to one of the two visitors’ chairs. Nice chairs now, not the wooden maidens that made potential clients wonder where I kept the rubber hose. All the thrift store shit was gone, replaced by real office furniture from Steelcase. Not their top of the line, but good stuff, as it reminded me every time I had to move something and wondered if Aluminumcase sold a similar item. “What’s up?”

  “I need a favor. I’m supposed to work tonight, but my kid made the all-stars and there’s a tournament game at seven o’clock. I’m here if you need me, but I’d love to catch that game.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “Paul McConnell.”

  “Refresh my memory.” A weird feeling, having more business than I could keep in my head at once.

  “It’s a custody case. Wife got a divorce because the husband drinks. The agreement specifically states he cannot drink—at all—or he loses his unsupervised visitation. I’m supposed to pick up his tail when he leaves for work.”

  I’m the last guy who wants to deny a father access to his kids. Barbara McConnell’s appeal for their safety wore me down. Agreement in place, she heard a story that led her to believe Paul was not only drinking again, but had been driving under the influence with the kids in the car. We made her understand the limits of what we could do and agreed to keep an eye on him from the time he left work until he got home. “I’m free tonight. Go to the game.”

  “Thanks, boss. I owe you one.”

  “We’re even if the kid gets a hit.” Andy gave me the particulars on McConnell and went off to do whatever else he had going on.

  I asked Sharon to let me know when Delbert got in and got out my fingerprint kit to work on Becky’s letters.

  Halfway into buying Cubs tickets online for Caroline and me when Sharon buzzed to tell me Delbert was here. The kid and I were both Sox fans. Drove her yuppie mother crazy. The Pirates coming to town gave me an excuse to go to Wrigley. I told Sharon to send him in after he’d returned any calls and to come in with him. Bought a pair in the nosebleed tier off the first base line.

  Delbert came in carrying a sweating can of Dr. Pepper, Stetson tilted back on his head. Six-three and rangy as a young Clint Eastwood—not as skinny—he’d been scheduled to appear in a Ranger recruiting ad as soon as he got back from a simple fugitive collection. The con’s partners tried to bust him loose. They hurt Delbert bad enough to stop Rangering. He hurt three of them bad enough to stop breathing. Met a nurse in rehab who made Chicago winters more comfortable than Texas summers, and here he was.

  Sharon came in, asked the question with her expression, and closed the door. There weren’t many women I’d discuss these letters with in graphic detail. I hadn’t even read them aloud with Becky Tuttle. I’m no prude, but I see no reason to offend people unnecessarily when there are so many opportunities to do so with cause. Sharon’s job here made her privy to things that would make a biker blush. I needed an unvarnished opinion as to how a woman might reasonably react. Sharon kept no varnish anywhere near the shelf where she stored her opinions, so here she was.

  I gave them copies of the letters, the originals scanned and filed and blackened with fingerprint powder. Focused most of my attention on Sharon. Someone who didn’t know her as well as I did would have missed what little she gave away. One word came to mind: appalled.

  They finished at almost the same time and looked to me for what came next. “It gets worse.” I told them the story of Becky Tuttle and Desiree d’Arnaud and the elaborate measures intended to keep them separate. Without authorization, I had expanded the number of people who knew by forty percent. So it goes. I needed their help. The Rangers had given Delbert their highest clearance. Sharon had kept my middle name to herself for years.

  “I wondered if that might be who we were working for.” Sharon not yet over her distaste. “My friend Elaine reads all her books. Got me to read one last year. I recognized something in the third letter.”

  “What’s the job?” Delbert said.

  “She wants us to put a stop to it.”

  “Doesn’t sound like she wants us to build a court case. The way you put it.”

  “It’s more delicate than that.”

  He nodded. Let things percolate for half a minute. “You got any ideas how to find this degenerate? Can’t get him to stop less we know who he is.”

  “I thought about posting an operative at every drop box in that ZIP Code on Monday mornings until we got a hit. I doubt even the leading author of paranormal urban vampire erotica could afford that. So I dusted them for prints.”

  “Who’s gonna run them for you?”

  “I thought I’d ask Sonny Ng.”

  “Not Jan?” Sharon said. A detective who worked for Sonny with whom I’d had a brief romantic relationship.

  “That might put her on the spot. You know, thinking if she says no it might seem like we’re not as good with each other as we think, but if she says yes she might get blowback from Sonny. I’ll go to him directly. It’s time we cleared the air, anyway. I have Plan B handy if I need it.”

  Click here to learn more about Bad Samaritan by Dana King.

  Back to TOC

  Here is a preview from the third and final book in the Lars and Shaine crime novel trilogy, The Devil at Your Door by Eric Beetner…

  1

  Lars left a note. He’d been planning for weeks, hiding it like a surprise party from Shaine. He’d packed a small bag with clothes for three days. Left behind his razor and his gun. One of the
m he would replace when he got there.

  He’d gotten the address a while ago, when his arm had nearly healed from his time on the East Coast and the bullet he brought home as souvenir. The information was one final favor from an FBI agent he had nearly killed, then spared, and the bullet was from a man he did kill. One in a long list. A list about to get one more name.

  When Lars asked Special Agent Earl Walker Ford for the address, Ford didn’t question it, though Lars suspected he had plenty of questions that wouldn’t be answered about why Lars would want to find his former boss now in witness protection. If Ford thought for a second that Lars was about to jump back into the killing for money business, he never would have given him the address. But he knew it wasn’t about that. Now retired, the former agent would have had to stop Lars from killing again, unless that target was a man Ford thought deserved to die.

  But Lars wasn’t doing it for Ford. He wasn’t even doing it for himself. As betrayed as he felt by Nikki Pagani after he’d been lured back East in the dead of winter, Nikki was the man who gave him everything he had in life. Money, stability, a career. Despite the career being murder-for-hire and the money being soaked in blood, Lars felt a debt to Nikki and knew the old mobster had been more of a father to Lars than his old man ever was.

  But he was doing it for her. For Shaine.

  It was like doing it for his daughter. Nikki was the one who put out the hit on Shaine’s father all those years ago. The one who ruined her childhood, who sent Lars out to the desert to kill a man for vengeance.

  After the last job, Shaine wanted Nikki to pay for his actions more than ever. So this was Lars’s gift to her, even if he never told her about it. Not before and not after.

  He set the note on the counter of their beach bungalow and moved through the darkened house toward the door. His soft-sided carry-on bag made no noise and he’d oiled the hinges on every door in anticipation of this moment. He knew how attuned Shaine was to any disturbance, any sound that could mean danger. He’d trained her in it.

  He taught her how to shoot, how to react, how to defend herself. In exchange she taught him how to live life outside of the criminal world. Now, here, on a remote shore in Hawaii, he was leaving it behind for a long weekend away of murder and revenge.

  But at least he left a note.

  He didn’t think she would worry. He’d kept the note vague enough and he’d only be gone a day or two. Lars had quirks in his routine so it wasn’t completely out of the ordinary, except for leaving the island, but he hadn’t mentioned that. He preferred to be alone—alone with Shaine, that is—and didn’t take many excursions where crowds of people gathered. But a man has his needs and he made the note sound like he was off on one of his rare and getting rarer jaunts to the big island for some time with a lady.

  Better to make it something Shaine wouldn’t ask follow-up questions about or wouldn’t dare go after him for fear of finding him in the middle of his intended purpose. At nearly nineteen, she had been talking more lately about getting out among civilization a little bit herself. If it was for the same carnal reasons, she never said. For that Lars was grateful.

  Lars knew the time to strike out on her own was coming near. This would be his parting gift to her. The last ghost of her past exorcized from the world. Maybe then the wider world would be safe for her. He could open her cage and let her fly free.

  He boarded a plane leaving at one-thirty in the morning. After a short hop to the big island he caught a flight to San Francisco, connecting to Denver and then onto a double prop plane he didn’t even think they made any more for his final leg.

  He had to crouch to walk down the aisle. The plane seated only forty-eight passengers in twelve seating pairs of two by two. He ended up with an empty seat beside him, which made the flight at least tolerable. A lone flight attendant brought drinks midway through and the drone of the propellers had Lars’s ears ringing by the time they landed.

  He unfolded himself from the seat and wanted nothing more than a good stretch. The sun lit the eastern sky with bright yellows as the clouds caught the sunrise. Lars stepped out of the doorway and onto a set of stairs leading down to the tarmac. He’d never seen so much sky. It stretched over them like a dome, his view to the east unsullied by buildings and to the west decorated by far off mountains pushing at the horizon.

  The flight attendant gave him a plastic smile and said, “Welcome to Montana.”

  Lars had gotten used to the dramatic rising greenery of Hawaii. He’d seen the tan-on-tan undulations of the New Mexico desert, the thick New England tree stands as they burst into colors, but nothing prepared him for the vast, lonely flatness of Eastern Montana.

  So this was where they put Nikki out to pasture. Lars knew Nikki wanted Florida. He could picture the sly smile on Special Agent Ford’s face when he handed Nikki the plane ticket to the middle of fucking nowhere, as Nikki would surely see it.

  A city boy all his life, Nikki would fit in around here as well as Martin Luther King at a Klan rally. Lars briefly thought he’d be doing Nikki a favor by killing him. This was not the way Nikki would have imagined living out his final days after a lifetime of wealth and power at the top of the family.

  Lars set down his bag, inhaled deeply and faced the rising sun. He reached high over his head and put his palms together, stretching toward the expansive sky. He held that position for a few moments then bent at the waist and laid his palms flat on the ground. Joints popped the way they didn’t used to when he began practicing yoga. But he’d passed fifty a month ago. A half century. Probably a record for someone in the hitman business. Men like Lars usually died young and died ugly.

  Lars stopped at the single rental car counter inside the terminal. He marked directions on a map the clerk had to print out from his computer and then set out on Highway 212 in search of Nikki.

  But first, some sleep. Christ, he was tired.

  2

  Nikki opened his eyes slowly and took in the sparse, beige room. Shit, still in Montana.

  Each day he held out hope that he’d wake up from a dream bathed in Florida sunshine, but those bastards at the FBI wanted one more fuck you, even though Nikki had handed them a dozen top criminals on a platter.

  He’d anticipated their double-cross though. He had money stashed; a decent amount of it. Not that it did him a hell of a lot of good out here. Goddamn Montana.

  Until six months ago the only men he’d ever seen on horseback were cops riding through Central Park. Might have been the widest expanse of open land he’d ever seen, too. And Indians. Real goddamn Indians all around. A Cheyenne reservation only twenty miles east of him. They didn’t look anything like they did in the movies.

  He groaned as he sat up on the edge of the bed. The west made him feel younger in some ways, older in others. The air was cleaner and he could breathe easier than he had in years. But wind always seemed to be blowing in a constant low hum. It made it hard to stay warm. He kept bundled up in sweaters, even through most of the summer. Nothing said old man like a guy always in a sweater. Now it was fall again and he’d heard stories of the winters out here on the plains. Snow drifts ten feet high. Storms lasting three days.

  Nikki wasn’t sure how much his old bones could take.

  Guess this was the deal, though. Put him out to pasture. Montana, he decided, was the perfect place to do nothing but wait to die.

  And then he’d met Michelle.

  People who live outside the law are drawn to each other. Any like-minded person usually is. Gays in a small, conservative town will find each other. Suburban punks will instinctively know who else likes their kind of music. And criminals can smell it on each other like blood on their hands that won’t wash off.

  She was the best thing about Montana for Nikki. He looked over his shoulder at her sleeping form. Her mouth hung open and her breathing rasped one step away from a full-on snore of which he knew she was fully able. She was a rugged, western woman like he imagined a pioneer lady must have been. Tough a
nd capable, able to care for herself and still take care of a man. Dark hair with only a hint of gray at the roots, and she kept vigilant about those invaders. Her skin wrinkled only where it should, lightly freckled from a life lived outdoors and her figure still enviable for a woman half her age.

  It wasn’t sexual, this thing they fell into. It was mutually beneficial. She showed him genuine affection and he thought maybe someday he’d get her to try to prime the old pump and see if he could still work it, but for now he was too damn tired.

  Nikki pushed off the bed with a grunt and made his way to the kitchen over rough-hewn wood floors. Already the wind outside rattled the windows.

  Michelle felt him get up, but kept her eyes shut. This strange old man who was going to help her get rich.

  She was deep into her forties, once married, now widowed. It was after her husband’s death she got into the drug trade. It had been Tommy’s work, but she never knew about it. When he was found in a ditch on the road between Lame Deer and Cowell Junction—his body on one side of the road and his head on the other—she learned an awful lot about the man she married out of high school.

  Mostly she learned the only reason they had two nickels to rub together was the crank business Tommy ran. His storm window sales office had been barely bringing in enough to make the rent for a decade or more. But with the influx of oil companies and now the shale-fracking going on less than a hundred miles away, Michelle moved Tommy’s modest-sized trucker speed business into being the dealer of choice for a transient flock of roughnecks with nothing better to do after a shift than crank up and try to make the monotony of Montana life speed by a little quicker.

  Then Nikki arrived with his funny accent, his wild tales of vice and crime from back in New York. He offered to help her, be her mentor. So she moved in like it was a dorm and this was her university of crime. She’d learned a lot and business steadily climbed.