The Holler Thief: A Private Eye Mystery

by Jim Heskett

  Phil opened his long arms wide, practically daring Harry to hit him. And Harry wanted to do it. Two voices competed in his head: one demanding he exact satisfaction from this man who had besmirched the good name of his friend. The other voice told Harry to keep it inside, to stay quiet, not to make waves. The second voice wanted Harry to defer to the mean man standing before him, because that would be the quickest way out of the argument.

  But he realized he didn’t want to listen to the second voice. Harry was tired of losing, but even more, he was tired of expecting to lose. He was tired of not dictating the conversation and letting others make decisions.

  “I’ve had enough,” Harry said, and Phil hesitated for a second, smiling curiously at the resolve on Harry’s face.

  He shifted closer to the edge of the stairs, which caused Phil to frown. He probably hadn’t expected that.

  “You’re trespassing,” Harry said. “Get off my property.”

  Harry’s burst of confidence had not slain the dragon. Instead, Phil advanced three more steps. This put him two steps below Harry, but due to their height disparity, they stood eye to eye.

  “Make me,” Phil said. No fear on his face, no second-guessing. Harry didn’t understand how he could be so cocksure all the time. But now they stood as vertical equals, leering, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for the right escalation to move this into physical territory.

  But Harry did nothing.

  If that was the moment to punch Phil, then he missed it. He watched the moment sail by, smelling Phil’s onion breath and feeling the intensity of his gaze. His muscles bristled with anticipation, but he couldn’t give his body the order to act.

  “That’s what I thought,” Phil said.

  “Leave us alone,” Harry said. “Just go away.”

  “I don’t think so. In fact, I’m about to rain down hellfire on all y’all. First, Neva is going to lose her job. That much is guaranteed. Then, if I can find a way to press charges on her, I’ll do that. Or, if not, there’re still ways to make people’s lives difficult.” Phil smirked with one corner of his mouth. “I taught you all about that, didn’t I?”

  “You taught me by showing me what not to do.”

  Phil cackled. “It doesn’t matter what you think is going to happen, little man. You’re done, and Neva is done. There isn’t really anything you can do about it, either, so why don’t you just admit defeat and make this less painful for everyone involved.”

  “No.”

  Phil tossed a pitying look at Harry, then his eyebrow raised. Harry didn’t understand what was happening to him, but a rage unlike anything he’d ever experienced swirled up from his toes. A version of the instinctual drive he’d experienced last night recurred. The same motivation that had driven him to bum rush the goon in the kitchen now swelled between Harry’s ears. A white-hot feeling of redness filled his brain like red wine in a glass.

  He started vibrating in place. Without consciously doing so, he lowered himself a few inches, tensing his legs, poised to move.

  “I… said… no.”

  Phil actually took a step back as he stared at Harry’s fists and tensed muscles. “What are you doing?”

  And then it happened. Later, Harry would barely remember any of it, so fueled with adrenaline in the moment that he was acting solely on impulse.

  Harry shoved Phil. Both hands, as hard as he could. He followed through, extending his hands and knocking Phil back. The much larger man stumbled down to the bottom step, but did not collapse.

  Harry jumped down to the bottom step. Anger coursed through him, making his unblinking eyes feel dry and his jaw tightly press closed. He was dimly aware that his breaths had turned into hoarse grunts.

  He shoved Phil again, and the gangly PI backed up toward his car. “Stop it, Harry.”

  But Harry didn’t stop. He didn’t know if he could have done so by choice.

  “You leave me and my friends alone!” Harry shoved him again, harder. Phil tumbled back, bumping into his car. “There is room enough in this town for both of us. If you don’t like it, then maybe I’ll go to the Arkansas Board of Private Investigators and tell them about some of the things I saw working in Fayetteville. I could tell them about how you embezzled thousands from the agency.”

  Phil paused, eyes narrowed, hands up. “You can talk all you want. You don’t have any proof.”

  “Think I don’t?”

  Harry kept his gaze firm and even, or, as well as he could with adrenaline making him feel like a snarling badger. He could see the uncertainty on Phil’s face. And, at that moment, it didn’t matter if Harry actually had legit evidence or not. Phil appeared to believe it.

  “Harry,” Phil said, now softening his tone, “come on. Let’s be reasonable.”

  “Get off my sidewalk!”

  The last one actually made Phil flinch. Without a word, he retreated back to his driver’s side as he fumbled with his keys. Eyes on Harry, he grimaced as he unlocked his car. Phil pointed a gangly finger at Harry. “This conversation isn’t over.”

  Harry stood there, shoulders heaving, panting, arms out at his sides as Phil drove away in momentary defeat. Once he left, Harry raised his fists into the air and howled at the blue sky above. He expelled his lungs until he was gasping for breath, and he heaved in a lungful and then howled again.

  When he looked down and his head stopped buzzing, he saw an old woman sitting in her garden, staring cockeyed at him. He tossed her a wave. Then, he went back inside to retrieve his briefcase, but not to quit the case.

  Harry intended to solve it.

  38

  Serena Rojas gripped the steering wheel and leaned forward. She squinted, which was something she did often, but pretended she did not do. She pretended she wasn’t doing it because she was a year overdue for her eye exam, and she had the feeling her vision had slipped. Glasses never looked right on her face, and she hated the thought of jabbing contacts into her eyes every morning.

  But that would soon be her life, whether she liked it or not.

  The sun had set, but she wanted to wait for darkness. She was staring at a rather unusual police station, but everything in Eureka Springs was a little different. This looked more like a house in the woods than a city building. They were away from downtown, which Serena liked. Also, surrounded by trees, another plus.

  Serena knew a couple of things for sure. One, that Ginnifer Applewhite’s mobile phone was in a temporary evidence locker somewhere inside that building. Also, now that there had been multiple homicides, the Arkansas State Police or FBI would get involved, which meant that evidence would likely soon be transferred to a more secure location. Certainly by tomorrow, this town would be crawling with uniformed cops and big egos wearing skinny ties.

  If Serena wanted to atone for her mistakes, she needed that phone. They needed it for the case. Obviously, Harry had no idea she was here. He would never willingly approve of something like this.

  “But that’s why he hired you,” she said to the dashboard. She was the Doberman Pincher left behind to guard the house. She was the poison on the blade, meant to get the job done by any means possible. None of this made her feel less about herself; she enjoyed having a simple purpose. She preferred simple goals with well-defined success and failure states.

  This evening, her goal was one of her own making, and her brain told her that success didn’t mean the end of the case, but it would keep their options alive. Failure at her current task meant an end to the road. Or maybe even graver consequences.

  Serena pulled her black skullcap low and slid on her black gloves, then she left the car. Her black clothing didn’t perfectly match the greeny brown of the surrounding forest, but it was close enough. She had a clear view of the surveillance cameras, and she made a slow and careful circle of the building, noting any blind spots. She didn’t find any. They had enough cameras outside that Serena would find no hidden path to the building.

  “Damn it,” she said as she hunkered behind a t
ree. In most invasion scenarios, there always remained the nuclear option: shoot her way in or out. But she couldn’t do that here. These were innocent civilians… first responders, even. Serena had done bad things to a lot of bad people, but she had never taken an innocent life and had never hurt a cop. She never would.

  So, this infiltration had to be perfect. A single mistake could bring the whole thing down and end with her behind bars. Now that she no longer worked for the government, she had no more get-out-of-jail-free cards. Everything she did had permanent consequences.

  Still, there had to be a way. She checked her pockets for a laser pointer, because sometimes they could trick cameras. But it only worked on occasion, and she didn’t even have one with her.

  Back in the car, she had a tranquilizer gun, and it was a relatively quiet weapon. She could possibly use it to knock one of those cameras off its axis and create a blind spot, but that would be a tiny target to hit from this distance with a sighted pistol, let alone a less precise weapon like a tranq gun. Also, someone might notice a surveillance feed suddenly showing a different part of the forest behind the police station.

  Many options for failure. Few for success.

  Out of nowhere, Serena heard the sound of a phone ringing. Faint and chirpy like a desk landline, it came from inside the building. By the second ring, she was sure of the source.

  A series of revelations occurred to her. Given the size of the town, the size of this building, and the time of day, there had to be only two or three people inside the station. Which meant there likely was not a dedicated person watching the surveillance monitors. Why would they need that? It’s not as if this building on Passion Play Road suffered a significant number of invasions and assaults. Serena was probably their first.

  The phone rang a third time, and she had to make a snap judgment. Either someone in there was turning away from the monitors to answer that phone, or she was dead wrong. But she had no more time to debate it.

  This seemed her best play, so she ran. Leaves and mucky underbrush kicked up as she powered her legs as fast as humanly possible. She closed the distance to the building in one second. Leaves and twigs rustled and her feet tramped through small puddles, but she left only silence in her wake.

  She pushed herself up against the building, with a security camera hanging quietly above her. The phone stopped ringing. If this back door opened right now, what would she do? Probably kick that unlucky person in the stomach, slam the door shut, and then haul ass into the woods.

  But the door didn’t open. She waited ten seconds, then thirty, then thirty more. Maybe they hadn’t seen her. Even a department this small would mobilize in seconds at any sign of a threat.

  Serena decided they weren’t coming. Also, she had to hurry, assuming one person inside was distracted by a phone call. Even if there was only one other occupant, that still left her in danger.

  She whipped out her lock picking tools and shoved them into the lock. That, at least, made her job easier than a keycard system. She would need Harry for something like that. But manual locks, she could do.

  Serena maneuvered the picks around for a few seconds until she’d found all the tumblers, then stepped back. The door drifted open a fraction, and she felt cool air leaking out of the cracked door.

  Serena dropped to her knees and plugged a device into her phone. It was a thin, flexible tube with a camera on the end, like a short colonoscopy probe. She inserted the camera end into the open door and tapped on her phone to access the view. She studied a wall-eyed feed of a brightly lit hallway, with no one in it. No interior security cameras.

  She stowed her phone and slipped inside the building, then closed the door behind her. This long hall terminated in a T-junction ahead. She could hear two distinct voices in that direction and assumed the main lobby was to the left ahead. Three doors on her right, two on her left. Bathroom, Maintenance, and a door marked with the name of the chief.

  On the left were two doors: Records, and Storage. Records sounded like the room she wanted, but it was at the far end of the hall, close to the T-junction.

  Serena began inching down the hall, but sudden movement at her right made her freeze. The bathroom door was opening. Coupled with the two voices around the bend in the hall, that meant at least three people were here.

  No time. She jumped left and pushed open the door marked Storage. She closed the door behind her as quickly as quietly as possible, then held her breath.

  And waited. She heard the clacking of dress shoes in the hall. Pulse thumping in her neck. Three people in the building were too many. One or two she could avoid indefinitely, but three? That made her getting out of here unseen almost impossible.

  The footsteps continued on down the hall.

  Finally exhaling, she turned on her phone’s flashlight and waved it over the room. Shelves stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, loose nightsticks, body armor. But no windows and no doors other than the one she’d come from.

  She pressed her ear to the door. It hadn’t sounded like enough footfalls to take whoever to the end of the hall. But she needed to be in the Records room next door, not here.

  She heard another footstep. Someone was still in the hall. She killed the light and closed her eyes, trying to amplify her other senses.

  Another footstep, this one sounding closer. Then a long pause.

  Serena drew her P320. She had no plans to shoot anyone, but she could pistol-whip someone pretty good with this small gun. And even though she didn’t want to do that, it might be her only reasonable defense against getting caught and going to jail.

  Still no footsteps. No sound of the outside door opening. Had they seen her?

  Serena gripped her pistol, finger on the slide rail. A drop of sweat glided down the curve of her back.

  Then the footsteps continued, moving in the other direction.

  She finally let out her breath and then turned her flashlight back on. For a few seconds, she hunted frantically around the room, taking in years of junk piled up on every available shelf. The beam then landed on a box on a desk on the north end of the room.

  Serena squinted at it. The box was labeled on the side in hastily written Sharpie: Unfiled Evidence.

  She crossed the room and opened the lid to see a series of clear evidence bags stacked inside. Holding the light in one hand, she dug around until she found one with a series of objects, including a black phone in a glittery pink case.

  The bag read Applewhite, G.

  “Got you,” Serena said, then she shoved the bag in her pocket.

  She pushed her ear against the door for a few more seconds and heard nothing. With a heave, she pulled the door back and leaned out in the hall to check. No one. She pivoted right and then absconded by the back door, running as fast as she could toward her car.

  39

  Despite the boost in resolve after standing up to Phil Dugan, Harry had made little progress. He’d spent the afternoon revisiting documents and statements from his interviews. By dinnertime, his eyes were so bleary from staring at screens that he could barely keep them open.

  He had spoken with the police about Rourke Mannafort and his possible connection to the vaping illnesses around town. Harry hadn’t wanted to liaise with the police at all, if he could help it. But now, with two dead bodies in and near Eureka Springs in the same week, this called for desperate measures.

  And he finally connected two important pieces of the puzzle. He’d made a real-world link between Rourke and Advanced Vaporizer Products, the company Harry had found earlier. The link was paper-thin, however. Rourke Mannafort helmed the board of a company that managed several smaller companies, and AVP was on that list. While there was no evidence of any direct connection, it seemed close. He felt on the verge of breaking it wide open, but he needed… something.

  An interesting thing happened when Harry mentioned this to local police earlier today. The cops quickly changed the subject. When Harry tried to steer the conversation back toward Rourke, Harry f
ound himself transferred to the chief of police, who advised him to back off using grave and cryptic language. He told Harry that Rourke Mannafort was a valued member of the rural northwest Arkansas community. The man gave to local and state charities and had never been named as anything less than a model citizen, although one of the richest in the county. If this were D&D, Rourke Mannafort would be the local noble with the biggest house in town, and all the Eureka Springs serfs would pay tithes to the man once per tenday.

  Harry’s first instinct was that they were all on the take and in Rourke’s pocket, but as the propaganda continued to spill, he saw a different picture forming. They were terrified of the man with the sprawling house on the hill. Harry suspected the terror derived from the possible threat of removal of funding. Big donors had big sway, and if he curtailed his donations, some of those cops would likely lose their jobs.

  And maybe they also were in his pocket, but that was secondary to the trepidation they expressed any time the subject turned in that direction.

  Harry sat in his office, staring at a printed picture of Rourke, tacked to a cork board. The private investigator pointed at it. “You’re the vape king, but how do I prove it? Did you kill Lukas? Did you have him killed? What could that simple man have possibly known or done to put a death mark on him?”

  Harry felt like he didn’t need to ask those questions regarding Ginny Applewhite. Until last night, she’d been the primary suspect in Lukas’ murder. But now, that probably wasn’t true.

  “Can’t ask her now,” he muttered. Instead, Ginny was a foot soldier in their drug game, the final step in the production chain: street-level selling. She was the one actually standing on the street corner, waiting for the inevitable fun-seekers to ask about buying fun things from her. Foot soldiers died all the time, usually after routine arrests. If the boss or one of their captains didn’t trust you to keep your mouth shut around the cops, you became an instant liability.

  Harry thought of his son, and one day in particular. More than ten years ago, when Harry had been in his mid-thirties and his son six or seven years old. Harry had taken them to visit Washington DC one weekend morning for a father-son trip. Harry wanted to introduce his kid to the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, because he figured the real-life versions would have more impact than pictures or video. But the main thing his son took from that day had been a lesson of violence. They had stumbled upon a crime in progress on a street corner, wherein one man had been attacking another for sleeping with his wife. The obscenities they were screaming at each other made their individual positions clear in the argument.