Gumshoe Rock

by Rob Leininger

  I didn’t grieve. When someone tries to burn you alive and threatens to rape and kill your woman, “Good riddance” is not an unreasonable response.

  * * *

  Three days after that, Ma informed Mike Volker and Marta that Clary Investigations had rounded up seventy-six thousand dollars in cash and three cashier’s checks totaling twenty-four thousand dollars. But she was going to hang onto all of it until FBI agents weren’t running around like roaches in a tenement. So far, they’d uncovered no motive for Soranden’s murder. I had Russ under control, so that business about the Jetta was out of it. I told a couple of FBI guys that Dooley and Ramon had admitted to killing Soranden, cutting off his head and using ants to clean out his skull, but they hadn’t said why they’d done all that.

  And why had they kidnapped me and Lucy?

  I shrugged. How would I know? They didn’t tell us why. Who knows how guys like that think? They dropped Soranden’s skull in my car. I’m famous. Start with that. Bring in a Quantico psychologist.

  They had no idea how Kimmi was involved. A Jetta is hard to explain so I didn’t try. Seriously, who would believe it except Volkswagen salesmen, and even that’s a stretch. A Jetta? The feds were calling it a thrill killing, but that would change in a heartbeat if they got a whiff of Soranden’s blackmail schemes. They were still digging, so that could still come out.

  Kimmi was an obvious link to Volker, but Volker wasn’t an obvious link to Soranden or to his murder so we were looking good there. Kimmi was simply a puzzle. A girl that age had the FBI flummoxed. They found no motive for her to be involved in kidnapping and murder other than her ill-considered association with Ramon and Dooley, and we—Clary Investigations, that is—didn’t tell Mike or Marta that an “old piece-of-shit Honda” had set Kimmi off, or that she’d even been set off, so they came across as clueless and desolate, which, of course, they were, and that was much better than the truth.

  The FBI concentrated on Ramon and Dooley because they both had police records, histories of violence. Ramon had been in the hospital twice recently for injuries sustained in Wildcat so they had that, but no idea who had put him there. I wouldn’t be going back anytime soon even though they had Pete’s Wicked Ale and the music was starting to grow on me. The FBI went through Dooley’s place, Truckee River Apartments, and found Robin in room 304 who didn’t know anything, and they spoke to Mira, a more or less homeless girl who “circulated” in the building. They also found that Volker had been audited that year by Soranden’s gang, but the IRS had audited over four hundred others in Northern Nevada and Mike’s audit had come up clean. A bit of coincidence, but not compelling. Even so, this was not a good time for him to suddenly come up with a hundred thousand dollars, so Ma said she’d hang onto the money for a while.

  She told him she’d picked out three banks. He would have to be patient. She was going to wait until at least December or January before he and Lara Rose Donndin opened joint accounts in those banks for a hundred dollars. At that time, she would start giving him endorsed checks and cash, not enough to get the IRS involved. To stash the money safely would take a while. If there was the slightest hint that the FBI was nosing around Kimmi, still looking for a motive other than a dumb kid running around with killers, Volker would have to wait—as long as it took. Ma didn’t tell him she was going to get FBI updates from Willie Munson regarding Soranden’s murder, but that was the plan. If you had someone in your pocket, you used it, and the more you used it, the deeper they went in.

  Volker might eventually get his money back and get away with everything he’d done. But Internal Revenue was a “service” like Schwarzenegger was a terminator, so … maybe not.

  Time would tell.

  * * *

  Both Munson and Warley in the Green Room? The place might never be the same.

  Okay, Traci Ellis helped. A lot. And O’Roarke, if the truth be known, but I would never tell him that.

  “Whatcha drinkin’, Mort?” Warley asked.

  Before I could answer, Lucy said, “His name is Mr. Angel and he’s drinking sarsaparilla, what’s it to ya?”

  “Thanks, hon,” I said.

  “De nada.”

  “I believe we have a bit of business to transact,” said Slick Willie Munson. “Perhaps we should adjourn to a table. That is, after I order up a drink.” He gave Traci an appreciative look that lingered topside. “Might I have a glass of sherry, miss?”

  “Might you? Does that mean I can say no?”

  O’Roarke sidled over. “Traci, sweetheart. That is not how we speak to our paying customers.”

  She love-tapped the side of his face and blew him a kiss. “Okey-dokey, ducky.”

  “Wow,” Lucy stage whispered.

  Man, what had happened in the ten or twelve days since I’d been in the place? Personal interactions had gone sideways.

  O’Roarke gave me a cast-iron squint. “Don’t say it.”

  “Say what? Nothing comes to mind except she’s your niece and you’re forty-six, she’s twenty-five, so that ‘ducky’ comment and the air kiss will require some thought. But don’t worry, I’ll get back to you on that.”

  “She’s my niece’s roommate, not my niece. I told you that to make sure your hands stay off her since by all accounts that’s what your hands tend to do around beautiful women.”

  “Hey!” Lucy said. “That hands business ended two minutes after he met me and I said I’d marry him.”

  “Huh?” O’Roarke grunted. “You two’re married?”

  “Workin’ on it,” Lucy said. “Paperwork’s all done. All he needs to do now is ask and we’ll be hitched in under two hours.”

  I looked at Traci. “What happened to ‘Uncle Pat’?”

  She shrugged as she gave Munson his sherry. “He told me to say that. The big silly.” She gave O’Roarke a quick kiss.

  “Wow,” Lucy said again.

  “Okay, how ’bout you, hon?” Traci said to Warley, which might’ve been the first time in his life he’d been called “hon” by anyone, including senile grandmothers and great-aunts.

  “How about me what?” Warley asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “What’re you drinking?”

  “Oh, I’ll take a … a screwdriver. Uh, virgin.”

  She stared at him, then looked over at O’Roarke. “Can’t I? Ple-e-e-ease.”

  “Okay,” he said, “go for it,” and Traci doubled over behind the bar and whooped with laughter, came up with tears in her eyes and hiccups. “Ohmigod. A virgin screwdriver.” She sloshed orange juice into a glass and slid it across the bar. “I sure hope you’ve got a designated driver, Sport, ’cause I made it a double.”

  “A double? Hey, thanks.”

  Never say the IRS doesn’t have its sophisticates.

  Lucy tried to control her snickers, didn’t get them all, then the five of us crowded around a table for four, out of earshot of the bar.

  “You brought company, Ma,” I said. “Good job.”

  “Had to. I was about out the door when these two showed up.”

  “Groovy,” Lucy said. She looked at Munson. “Where are your bodyguards, Renner and Bledsoe? Haven’t seen them for ages. We really miss those guys.”

  He smiled. “Outside. They don’t need to hear this. Or you,” he said to Warley. “But since you’re already involved, let’s get you involved even further.”

  “Not sure I like that,” Warley said, at which point I upped my estimate of his Stanford-Binet by five points.

  Munson gave him the hairy eyeball. “You’re head of the IRS in Northern Nevada. Do you want to remain in that capacity or go work a drive-thru at Burger King?”

  “Well, yeah. No.”

  “Then keep this under your hat and maybe you can keep your pension.” Munson turned to Ma. “I’m not certain this was worth it, but a deal’s a deal and you beat the pants off the FBI and we haven’t lost any more agents since that one in Toledo.” He handed her a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.

 
She looked at it, smiled, then fanned herself with it. “Now I can pay that damn phone bill.”

  “You could’ve given her that before coming over here and putting a wrench into the feng shui in this place,” I said. Which might have been uncharitable and slightly unpolitic, but Munson and Warley still weren’t on my Christmas list.

  “I needed a break from D.C.,” Munson said. “And I haven’t heard how you found those two who killed Soranden. I want the ‘rest of the story,’ as Paul Harvey would say—if he were still with us. Newspapers never get it right. Television is worse.”

  He turned to Warley. “You didn’t hear any of what you’re about to hear. If I find out you did, your pension will bottom out like the Titanic, but I want you in this up to your eyeballs, so stick around.” He looked at me. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  Munson didn’t believe what he saw on TV? I might have underestimated him. Our country’s alphabet media is staffed by fiction writers. Stalin would’ve been jealous, but Cronkite was undoubtedly spinning in his grave. So I told Munson and Warley how it went down, which took a while with pauses and real-time editing to keep Volker, Jettas, blackmail, and bank robberies out of it. It took long enough that we went through a few more drinks and even Warley ended up glassy-eyed when I told Traci to hit his OJ with vodka. So, of course, he ended up deeper in our pockets, which might be useful in the future.

  Finally, I turned to Ma. “Do I get a bonus for the burns, and for removing two-thirds of Dooley’s head?”

  “I gave you a bonus for that already,” Lucy said before Ma could answer. “Six days ago.”

  “Oh, right. You got a bit rambunctious. Took me two days to recover from that.”

  “From what?” Warley asked.

  Ma and Lucy rolled their eyes. Lot of that going on around good old Warley.

  “Don’t tell him,” I said to Lucy. “He would be forced to kill himself.”

  “Yeah? What’s the downside?”

  Everyone laughed except Warley because he was born without a soul. Or a sense of humor, though he does chuckle when elderly widows owe back taxes with interest and penalties.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  OCTOBER THIRTIETH, TWO weeks after I’d broken out of the burning cabin, stopped Ramon and Dooley with that rock off the cliff and saved Lucy, she and I went back up Dog Valley Road and turned left onto Three Butte Trail. Not wanting to damage anything of value, we took my Toyota.

  “How will we find it?” Lucy asked. “Everything looks so different in the daytime.”

  “It won’t be far from that cliff.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “And I think it weighs more than you.”

  “Groovy.”

  We went around a switchback and came back north, still gaining elevation. Half a mile later, Lucy pointed ahead.

  “Is that the cliff?”

  “I’m pretty sure there was only one.”

  I stopped the car in the middle of the trail just south of the cliff and we got out. All was quiet, not like the insane activity of that mid-October night. Three Butte Trail was four miles to the ashy remains of an old cabin. Or we could take a fork in the trail and go another few miles on the forest service road until it dead-ended.

  “You didn’t see what happened to it?” Lucy asked.

  “Nope. I was distracted. I only saw what it did. But the car would’ve given it a pretty good hit, knocked it in this direction. It wasn’t there that night, so it probably rolled off the road.”

  We climbed down a three-foot embankment then hunted around in low, wild shrubbery beneath tall pines. Farther to the south, the trail of broken undergrowth made by the Charger was still visible. The Charger itself had been removed. And, of course, Dooley.

  “Is this it?” Lucy asked, crouching by a granite rock that was about half boulder.

  “Hell, no. No way I could lift that.”

  “Yeah? Then what’s this on it?”

  I got down beside her. Bits of glass were embedded in the granite. And a dark stain.

  “Glass,” I said. “And blood.”

  “This is it, then.”

  “Sonofabitch. I lifted that?”

  “Must have. Now do it again. That’s what we came for.”

  I got my hands under it, couldn’t get it off the ground. Lucy tried to help, but it was too heavy, too awkward.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  * * *

  “Now what” consisted of leaving the rock where it was, no choice, driving back to Reno, considering several options, then ringing the bell at Rufus Booth’s house, the dojo entrance.

  “Not here for a workout, are you?” he said when he saw me. “Those ribs’ll take another week or two to heal right.”

  “I need some help, if you’ve got time. Out past Verdi, up in the hills.”

  He lifted an eyebrow when I told him what we needed.

  “Let’s go. This I gotta see.”

  So the three of us went back, and between Rufus and me, we got that big son of a bitch in the back of the Toyota, got it back to my house in Reno, and weighed it.

  Lucy read the scale. “Ohmigod. It went all the way around and a bit. Like three hundred and twenty pounds.” She looked up at me. “And you lifted it with a cracked rib.”

  Then she burst into tears.

  * * *

  It took both Rufus and me some major grunting to get that beautiful boulder on top of the gun safe where it sits to this day, still embedded with glass, still stained, still beautiful.

  Our Gumshoe Rock.

  The End, except …

  PS:

  Lucy and I were married on the sixth of November. I asked, she screamed, and as she’d planned, we were hitched within two hours. Got ’er done at Golden Bells Wedding Chapel on Fourth Street. Ma was matron of honor, and Day, Officer Day of all people, the Behemoth, who had saved my life earlier that year, was best man because he was at the police station and Russ couldn’t be located on such short notice and Lucy wasn’t about to wait and go past that two-hour deadline she’d promised me a dozen times in the past four months. Her parents understood but suggested that a second ceremony with a bit of the traditional hoopla would be in order after we returned from the honeymoon, which was a thirty-six-day cruise that began in Hawaii and went to Tahiti, Pago Pago, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and ended with four days in Hong Kong.

  Her parents paid for it.

  No one tried to kill us.

  Best damn month of my life.