The Invisible Crown (Hazzard Pay Book 1)

by Charlie Cottrell

  “Whatever you say, Wally,” I replied calmly.

  “Of course, it’s all rather moot, since I’m going to go ahead and kill you now anyway,” he said, pointing the gun at me as he continued to back up.

  “Hey, let’s not make any hasty decisions we might regret,” I said placatingly.

  “Shut up, Detective Hazzard. This is the end for you.” He began to squeeze the trigger as he took another step back.

  A step that took him into the open air above an open vat of mutagen.

  Wally gave a wordless cry as he tumbled backward, and his shot went wide and pinged off some unseen corner of the factory. Vera stumbled backward as well, dragged down by her falling husband, and both of them careened over the edge of the catwalk.

  I am not a man built for last-second heroics. I don’t have rippling muscles or an ass you could bounce quarters off of. My knees are bad, my back aches for several days if I have to lift anything heavy, and my left shoulder hasn’t been the same since some asshole shot me a few years ago.

  All that being said, I dived wildly towards Vera as she dropped off the edge of the catwalk. I hit the metal hard, jarring loose several internal organs and most of my teeth in the process, but I managed to grab Vera’s wrist and halt her fall.

  Wally himself clung to the edge of the catwalk, watching helplessly as I pulled Vera back up to safety. We both sat there, breathing heavy from exertion and the adrenaline rush, before I realized Wally was still there hanging on by his fingertips.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” I began as I grabbed his wrists and started to haul him back up onto the catwalk. For such a scrawny guy, he sure seemed to have a density to him.

  “Eddie,” Vera said from behind me, her voice suddenly and unnaturally calm.

  I spared her the barest of glances. “Um, kinda busy here, Vera,” I bit out through gritted teeth.

  “Move out of the way, Detective Hazzard,” Vera said. There was that rod of steel in her voice again, that righteous certainty that I don’t think I’d ever felt about much of anything.

  “What?” I asked. I turned back to her then, and saw she’d picked up the gun I’d dropped and was pointing it at Wally.

  “Whoa, hold up a second, there,” I said, trying to keep Wally from falling into the vat and his wife from filling him full of lead. “We’ve been through this. He has to stand trial for his crimes. You have to let the criminal justice system do its thing.”

  “No,” she said, her hands and voice steady. “I can’t let that happen. I can’t let him destroy everything I’ve worked so hard to build. I won’t go to jail. And neither will he.”

  I gave Mrs. Stewart a hard look. “Maybe I should just go ahead and turn both of you in,” I said.

  Vera smiled faintly, though it had no hint of joy or humor in it. “I think we both know that won’t happen, Detective Hazzard,” she said quietly.

  Then she shoved me out of the way and stomped on Wally’s fingers. The little accountant shrieked for a split second, fear and pain mingling in his wordless cry as he hung motionless, frozen in a single moment.

  Then time came roaring back, and Wally Stewart plummeted into the vat of mutagen below. There wasn’t really a splash, more a bubbling ploop as he hit. He screamed some more for a few seconds, and then the ooze closed over his head and he was gone.

  “What the hell?” I shouted, rising, confronting Vera. “He deserved a chance to go to trial!”

  “He deserved a quick, horrible death,” Vera replied evenly. She tossed the gun into the vat of mutagen after her dead husband. She walked over to Kimiko and shook the ninja warrior gently until she came around, then helped haul her up and started off down the catwalk. “Your fee will be in the mail. Thank you for all of your assistance.”

  “I could still turn you in, Vera,” I called after her.

  Vera stopped, but she didn’t look back. After a moment, she continued on, leaving my question hanging in the air and me standing on the catwalk, furious and ashamed.

  IV.

  If there’s one thing the case taught me, it’s that you shouldn’t trust gang lords. They will lie and cheat and steal and kill and do whatever they feel like doing. Even the most honorable criminal—and I use the term honorable loosely—is still a criminal, not beholden to the laws of society.

  I knew Vera had felt hurt and betrayed. I knew she was angry with her husband and hadn’t wanted him to reveal her secrets. But she still didn’t deserve to decide who lived and who died, regardless of what she thought.

  I guess what I’m saying is, don’t take on a criminal mastermind as a client if you have any moral qualms about watching someone die a grisly death.

  * * *

  I sat in my office a few days later, staring at the credit chip that had arrived by courier just a few minutes earlier. It was early, and I was belligerently drunk.

  “Have you even looked at what’s on it yet?” Miss Typewell asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want her blood money,” I said.

  “You should still take a look at it, though,” she said. “I mean, just to see what she was offering. So we know what we’re turning down.”

  “It’s tainted, Ellen,” I snapped, turning away from the test with a tortured squeak from my swivel chair. “I might’ve killed a couple of thugs in the fight, but it was in a fight. They had the chance to defend themselves. Wally Stewart was beaten. I was reading the bastard his rights. It shouldn’t have gone down like that.”

  “I know, Eddie,” she said, patting my arm. “We can just toss the thing, if you want.”

  I took a pull from my bottle. It was the fifth one I’d had since I’d left the factory.

  “Eddie, put the bottle down and talk to me,” Ellen pleaded. I glanced at her, rather the worse for wear.

  “Tell you what, Ellen,” I said, turning back around and grabbing the credit chip. I placed it in her hands. “You decide what to do with it. I can’t. Whatever you decide to do, though, I’ll go along with it.”

  Ellen stared at the credit chip in her hand. “It’d be nice to know we’ve got some money in the bank,” she said wistfully.

  “Yeah,” I replied flatly.

  “But . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  Ellen placed the credit chip back on the desk and stood silently for a moment. Then, out of the blue, she grabbed my whiskey bottle and smashed the chip with it. Glass and circuit boards and whiskey went everywhere.

  Ellen sagged a bit. “There,” she said, tossing what remained of the bottle into the trashcan as I picked pieces of glass out of my hair. “Two problems solved in one shot.” I gave my secretary a surly look as she composed herself and returned to her desk, waiting for the next case to come through our door.

  Acknowledgements

  If you’re anything like me, you usually skip over this page in a book. And why wouldn’t you? Unless you are one of the people on this page, this page has no value or meaning for you, beyond whatever random jokey asides I throw in. But, let’s be honest, you’re probably a fan of those, or you wouldn’t have made it this far.

  All that said, I’ve figured out in my short time as an author (God, that doesn’t sound pretentious at all, does it?) that these pages are actually super-important, because without the fine folks listed below, this book wouldn’t have happened! So, suck it up, we’re doin’ this thing.

  First and foremost, Dr. W. Everett Chesnut, one of the smartest and kindest and just generally most wonderful people I know, is responsible for this story. Yup, it’s all his fault. He dragged me into a writing circle he’d started back when I was in graduate school, and that caused me to take a little twenty-page, handwritten detective story I’d come up with while spending a summer waiting tables in Yellowstone National Park back in 2002 and start seriously working on it. What eventually came out of that writing club was Eddie Hazzard and a simple missing person case that got way out of hand. That Eddie wasn’t very much like the Eddie we have now. He was more grizzled, le
ss smarmy, and considerably less charming. But the seed of the character was there.

  Over the past decade or so, the story slowly evolved: the setting moved into the near-future instead of the vague “sometime in the past, maybe?” of the original; I turned it into a six-issue comic that never got drawn, and then into the novella that I self-published for the Kindle back in 2014. That led to several other Hazzard stories getting self-published, but I’d never been fully satisfied with this particular tale, so I went back in November and December of 2015 and rewrote the whole thing again, this time expanding it into the novel you just finished reading.

  The story’s evolution owes a great deal to my beta reader, Jamie Roberts, who was enthusiastic about Hazzard and his stories in a way I hadn’t ever encountered before. Her excitement at getting to read the stories I’d written for myself got me excited about writing and publishing them, and her reactions to characters and plot-twists made me feel like an honest-to-God writer, which is pretty swell.

  My other beta reader, the historical romance author Caroline Lee, has been my biggest cheerleader in the whole publishing thing. She was the one who convinced me to self-publish, and the one who pushed me to find a publisher for Hazzard and company. She, more than anyone else (myself included), believed in Hazzard.

  I also need to thank my wife, Michelle Branco, who has tolerated this harebrained pursuit for the past several years. She’s let me indulge my creative whims, even if it meant I sometimes didn’t get the dishes washed until around midnight. She would probably like it to be known that she makes amazing chili, and you all should be jealous you don’t get to eat it.

  Thanks also to my parents. Mom always said she knew I had a lot of stories to tell, and she even thought the first novella was worth a good four stars on Amazon. Not, y’know, five stars, because she didn’t want folks to think she was being unfairly biased in favor of her own son or anything. And my Dad actually bought the original self-published books (and probably even this one, too!), meaning he’s read at least four books now in his adult life that were not about the New York Yankees or the Beatles.

  Thanks to my editor, Cindy C. Bennett, and to rebecacovers at www.fiverr.com for creating the fantastic cover art.

  I liberally and shamelessly borrowed from the personality and names of several of my friends and family members for various characters in this and other Hazzard stories. It’s not meant as an indictment of those fine folks, and I don’t want them reading too much into anything if I have them killed off in grizzly, gruesome fashion. I promise it’s nothing personal. Special thanks to the real-life Little Blind Girl, whose suggestion of a small, foul-mouthed blind lady led me to creating what is hands-down my favorite supporting character. The real-life LBG curses even more imaginatively, if you can believe it.

  Finally, thanks to you, dear readers. You actually read all the way through the damn acknowledgements page. Who does that? Obviously you do. You are an intelligent and, dare I say it, devastatingly attractive individual with exquisite taste in reading material. Good on you.

  About the Author

  Charlie Cottrell is a history and special education teacher in Northern Virginia by day and a writer of "speculative noir" (near-future, science-fictiony, hard-boiled detective stories) by night. He likes to blend action, mystery, and a healthy dose of humor and sarcasm in his work. He also writes music and draws comics and thinks he vaguely remembers what free time was, but he’s not one hundred percent sure on that. Charlie hates tucking in his shirt, because he is a rebel.

  Connect with Charlie at:

  Website: charliecottrell.com and xeyeti.com

  Facebook: facebook.com/Charlie-Cottrell-844762608906913

  Twitter @XEYeti

  Instagram XEYeti

  Goodreads: goodreads.com/author/show/11488736.Charlie_Cottrell

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