by J. R. Rain
I hugged her tightly. “My kind of gal.”
“So what are you going to do with the bonus?”
“Take you to dinner. Buy you pearls and diamonds.”
“Or get caught up on your bills.”
“Or that,” I said. “Or I could always use it to start a new life in the Bahamas. Maybe run a juice bar on the beach.”
“Can I come?”
“Only if I can refer to you as my bikini babe.”
“Deal,” she said, then frowned.
“Something I said?”
“No. It’s this Jones T. Jones character. Just doesn’t seem right that he’s still profiting from Boonie’s murder.”
“I agree,” I said. “Which is why I took the liberty to research Boonie’s kin.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“Judging by that smug grin on your face, I would say that you found them.”
“I did. Or some of them who still happen to live in Barstow. I suggested to them that Boonie should receive a decent burial with his family present. And they agreed. One old lady, a great great granddaughter, actually cried.”
“And what does Jones T. Jones think of this?”
“Oh, he won’t like it at first, but he’ll cave in, and work the funeral into a huge propaganda stunt. Believe me, in the end, Jones will have profited very well from Boonie’s murder.”
“Speaking of which, explain to me again what happened to Boonie’s killer. The news sort of jumbled it.”
“A hundred and twenty years ago, young Johanson Barron gets in a barroom fight with Boonie Adams, stabbing Boonie in the shoulder. A week later Johanson somehow lures Boonie out into the desert, shoots him and leaves him to die. A month later, the Barron family, perhaps aware of this killing, quietly ships Johanson out of Rawhide, where he eventually winds up in Dodge City. Where, I might add, he eventually hangs for a different murder two years later. So justice was served, so to speak.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I happen to be an ace detective,” I said. “That, and I had the help of Rawhide’s newest curator, one Patricia McGovern.”
“Will this somewhat scandalous news hurt Tafford Barron’s chances of running for Congress?”
“One can only hope,” I said. “A good spin doctor can probably get him out of this scrap, but we’ll see.”
“Did you eventually find Jarred’s father?”
“I did.”
“Did you relay the message?”
“It was a dying man’s last request,” I said. “What else could I do?”
“Was it hard for his father to hear?”
“He broke down crying, so I think so.”
“Like pouring salt in the wound,” said Cindy.
“Yes,” I said.
“But you had to do it,” she said.
“Yes.”
Street sounds came from below, especially the sound of a loud muffler. In fact, I heard it pass on several occasions. As it was coming again, I got up out of bed, padded across her hardwood floor, and glanced out her third story window in time to see an older model white BMW chug slowly down the street. Black exhaust spewed from the muffler. I frowned.
“You okay?” Cindy asked.
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said, and came back to bed.
“So tell me,” said Cindy, snuggling against me, her breath hot on my neck. “Was it Jarred who shot at you in the desert?”
“We’ll never know for sure, but I think it’s a safe bet. A Rawhide maintenance truck was getting serviced not too far from where we had met for lunch. He could have easily swapped vehicles.”
“Why bother swapping vehicles if his intent was killing you?” Cindy asked. “With you dead, there would be no witnesses.”
I shrugged. “In case he didn’t kill me; in case there was a witness.”
“I’ve never had anyone shoot at me,” she said, shuddering under the covers. “I would be terrified.”
“At first, but then survival supercedes fear.”
We were silent some more. Ginger snored contentedly between my ankles. A helluva heating pad.
“Do you think you’ll coach again next year?” Cindy asked.
Our team had played its final game tonight. We finished the season on a high note, winning by a huge margin, the biggest in quite some time. In fact, we had won four of the last five games, which, coincidentally, was when I was hired on as an assistant coach. Coach Swanson had asked me back next year.
“I told him I would think about it,” I said.
“But I thought you really enjoyed it.”
“Oh, I do. But a coach needs to give more of himself. Hell, most coaches commit their lives to their teams.”
“You were busy with the mummy, and with my stalker.”
“Of which, one is still on the loose,” I said.
“What’s his name?”
“Chad Schwendinger,” I said. “No wonder he turned out bad.”
“I’m not worried,” she said. “I have my big strong man to protect me.”
I was quiet, thinking about the stalker, about coaching, about the mummy, about my mommy. And through it all, I mostly thought about having a beer.
“Maybe next year I can take some time off from detecting to coach.”
“You look like a coach. Did I ever tell you that? The kids look up to you. I was watching them tonight. They were hanging onto your every word down there on the sideline.”
“I think everyone should hang onto my every word.”
“I know you do,” said Cindy. “Speaking of your word, are you ever going to ask me to marry you?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“When I’m out of debt.”
She was silent, meditative. She stroked my bicep. “I would also want you to stop drinking before we’re married.”
I nodded, but said nothing. Damn, I wanted a drink. Now.
“Maybe you need help,” she offered.
“Probably.”
“But you don’t want to get it.”
“I like drinking,” I said.
“So you would rather get drunk than marry me?”
“I want both.”
“You can’t have both, Jim. You need to make a decision.”
I turned and faced her, our noses touching. I inhaled deeply. She was staring up at me, the whites of her eyes luminescent. “There is no decision to make. I won’t lose you again. But can we give this a little time?”
She burrowed her face into the crook of my neck and kissed me softly.
“Yes,” she said sleepily. “We can give it a little time.”
Chapter Forty-seven
Cindy spent the next few minutes flinching spasmodically into sleep. When she was snoring softly, I eased out of bed and padded quietly into the kitchen and opened the fridge door and removed a cold can of the thing that had been obsessively raging through my thoughts for the last hour. And it wasn’t a Diet Coke.
Cindy allowed me to keep a case of beer at her house, as long as I didn’t go through it too quickly.
That, of course, was the challenge.
So I was sitting in the darkness at the kitchen table working on my third Miller Light, contemplating a fourth, when I heard the familiar rumble of the muffler. I parted the curtains and looked down onto the street below as the same older model BMW pulled up along the curb, stopping in the shadows just outside a splash of lamplight.
I sipped from the can, stared down. I forgot about wanting a fourth beer.
The driver killed the engine and the lights. The tinted window rolled down and a man’s pale face appeared. If I wasn’t mistaken, as his jawline caught some of the diluted street light, he was looking up at Cindy’s condo.
I finished the beer and spent the next ten minutes staring down into the small squarish window three floors below, staring so hard that sometimes the window blurred into a hazy black amorphous mass. Luckily, blinking remed
ied this problem.
I watched it some more, and decided it was time for a chat. I pulled on a light jacket, because even I get cold, and stepped out of the condo and into the cool night air. I worked my way between the rows of condos, through a security gate and out toward the street.
Once there, I saw that the driver had stepped out of the car and was now rummaging through the trunk. The trunk lid blocked his face. Below the corner of the rear fender, and glowing slightly in the diluted street light, I could see a pair of dirty sneakers. Whoever he was withdrew something from his trunk and set it by his feet.
Light reflecting dully off its plastic surface, it looked vaguely like a slightly deflated football, if footballs had handles and spouts.
Gas can.
Pale hands reached up for trunk lid. Shut it softly.
And I found myself looking into the face of a very shocked, very heavy-set middle-aged man with a thick head of receding hair. Sort of the Roger Staubach look. He was wearing a black Members Only jacket and black sweats, as any good stalker should. He couldn’t have looked more startled, eyes bulging and mouth working.
“Run out of gas?” I asked.
The look of astonishment quickly turned into something ugly. He bared his teeth and reached inside his jacket, shouting: “Darwin is the devil.”
But before he could remove his hand, I pushed off the fender and punched him full in the face. His arms windmilled, flinging what appeared to be a gun into the nearby bushes. He collapsed straight to the ground.
“Only in the bedroom,” I said. “A devil only in the bedroom.”
He held his face and moaned and bled. I rolled him over and removed his wallet from his back pocket, hoping against hope I had gotten the right man. And I had. Chad Schwendinger. Hell of a name.
No wonder he turned out bad.
Chapter Forty-eight
Yesterday, in a small desert town called Apple Valley, ol’ Boonie was finally put to rest amid much fanfare. Jones T. Jones was there. He even shed a tear, which may or may not have been legit. Anyway, I thought he was going to miss his mummy. They had gotten along so well together.
I was still drinking too much, but that was not insurmountable. That was fixable, and someday when I had put my own mother’s murder to rest, I would put my drinking to rest, too. And then I would ask a certain someone to marry me.
But first things first.
A door to my right opened and a bespectacled young man with no chin poked his head out. He was dressed in a white lab coat. “It’s ready, Mr. Knighthorse.”
“How did it turn out?”
“Great, I think. You can thank the marvels of modern technology.”
So I followed him in. Took a seat next to a flat-screen computer monitor that was turned away from me.
“Here you go,” he said. And turned the monitor toward me. “Twenty years, just like you asked.”
On the screen before me was the headshot of a white Caucasian male of about forty. I leaned a little closer, aware that my beating heart had increased in tempo, thudding dully in my skull. The man on the screen had not aged well. His face was weathered from too many years in the sun and surf. His blond hair was turning a dirty blond, almost gray. Blue eyes and white teeth.
It’s called age progression technology, and it’s used to identify runaways and kidnap victims. The man on the screen before me was the eighteen-year-old kid from the pier, the kid who had taken an interest in my mother. Except in the age progression photograph, he wasn’t a kid anymore. He was a man. An older man who clearly loved to surf and still lived in Huntington Beach. An older man with three adorable kids who loved their grandfather. An older man who was the son of the homicide detective who investigated my mother’s murder.
“I hope this helps,” said the technician.
I was finding breathing difficult.
“Are you okay?” asked the technician.
The room was turning slowly. From somewhere very far away, I heard the technician ask again if I was okay.
I felt sick and stumbled out of the small room and found the nearest bathroom and threw up my lunch and breakfast. I flushed the toilet and sat on the seat and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and tried to control my breathing.
I sat like that for a very long time.
The End
Available now on Barnes & Noble Nook:
Dark Horse
A Jim Knighthorse Novel
by
J.R. Rain
(read on for a sample)
1.
Charles Brown, the defense attorney, was a small man with a round head. He was wearing a brown and orange zigzagged power tie. I secretly wondered if he went by Charlie as a kid and had a dog named Snoopy and a crush on the little red-headed girl.
We were sitting in my office on a warm spring day. Charlie was here to give me a job if I wanted it, and I wanted it. I hadn’t worked in two weeks and was beginning to like it, which made me nervous.
“I think the kid’s innocent,” he was saying.
“Of course you do, Charlie. You’re a defense attorney. You would find cause to think Jack the Ripper was simply a misunderstood artist before his time.”
He looked at me with what was supposed to be a stern face.
“The name’s Charles,” he said.
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
“Glad that’s cleared up.”
“I heard you could be difficult,” he said. “Is this you being difficult? If so, then I’m disappointed.”
I smiled. “Maybe you have me confused with my father.”
Charlie sat back in my client chair and smiled. His domed head was perfectly buffed and polished, cleanly reflecting the halogen lighting above. His skin appeared wet and viscous, as if his sweat glands were ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.
“Your father has quite a reputation in L.A. I gave his office a call before coming here. Of course, he’s quite busy and could not take on an extra case.”
“So you settled on the next best thing.”
“If you want to call it that,” he said. “I’ve heard that you’ve performed adequately with similar cases, and so I’ve decided to give you a shot, although my expectations are not very high, and I have another P.I. waiting in the wings.”
“How reassuring,” I said.
“Yeah, well, he’s established. You’re not.”
“But can he pick up a blind side blitz?”
Charlie smiled and splayed his stubby fingers flat on my desk and looked around my office, which was adorned with newspaper clippings and photographs of yours truly. Most of the photographs depict me in a Bruin uniform, sporting the number 45. In most I’m carrying the football, and in others I’m blowing open the hole for the tailback. Or at least I like to think I’m blowing open the hole. The newspapers are yellowing now, taped or tacked to the wood paneling. Maybe someday I’ll take them down. But not yet.
“You beat SC a few years back. I can never forgive you for that. Two touchdowns in the fourth quarter alone.”
“Three,” I said. “But who’s counting?”
He rubbed his chin. “Destroyed your leg, if I recall, in the last game of the season. Broken in seven different places.”
“Nine, but who’s counting?”
“Must have been hard to deal with. You were on your way to the pros. Would have made a hell of a fullback.”
That had been hard to deal with, and I didn’t feel like talking about it now to Charlie Brown. “Why do you believe in your client’s innocence?” I asked.
He looked at me. “I see. You don’t want to talk about it. Sorry I brought it up.” He crossed his legs. He didn’t seem sorry at all. He looked smugly down at his shoes, which had polish on the polish. “Because I believe Derrick’s story. I believe he loved his girlfriend and would never kill her.”
“People have been killed for love before. Nothing new.”
On my computer screen before me I had brought up a
n article from the Orange County Register. The article showed a black teen being led away into a police car. He was looking down, his head partially covered by his jacket. He was being led away from a local high school. A very upscale high school, if I recalled. The story was dated three weeks ago, and I recalled reading it back then.
I tapped the computer monitor. “The police say there’s some indication that his girlfriend was seeing someone else, and that jealousy might have been a factor.”
“Yes,” said the attorney. “And we think this someone else framed our client.”
“I take it you want me to find this man.”
“Or person.”
“Ah, equality,” I said.
“We want you to find evidence of our client’s innocence, whether or not you find the true murderer.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“We feel race might be a factor here. He was the only black student in school, and in the neighborhood.”
“I believe the preferred term is African-American.”
“I’m aware of public sentiment in this regards. I don’t need you to lecture me.”
“Just trying to live up to my difficult name.”
“Yeah, well, cool it,” he said. “Now, no one’s talking at the school. My client says he was working out late in the school gym, yet no one saw him, not even the janitors.”
“Then maybe he wasn’t there.”
“He was there,” said Charlie simply, as if his word was enough. “So do you want the job?”
“Sure.”
We discussed a retainer fee and then he wrote me a check. When he left, waddling out of the office, I could almost hear Schroeder playing on his little piano in the background.
2.
“He was found with the murder weapon,” said Detective Hanson. “It was in the backseat of his car. That’s damning evidence.”
“That,” I said, “and he’s black.”
“And he’s black,” said Hanson.
“In an all white school,” I said.