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~1~
The
simple truth is sometimes life just isn’t fair.
A lawyer
friend once told him ‘Steve, life is not
fair, it’s just legal.’
Legal or
not, it wasn’t fair that he was sitting there with an empty glass while the
barmaid was at the other end of the bar letting some young stud chat her up. If
he wasn’t trying to maintain a low profile he would have found a way to get her
attention.
Unfortunately,
that wasn’t an option.
Rule number
one when you’re tailing somebody…don’t draw attention to yourself, especially
when there’s only six people in the bar, counting yourself and the bartender.
The mark
was an overweight, balding guy named Fred Cranston. His wife, Rhonda, was
looking for enough evidence to prevent him from squirming out of alimony in the
divorce.
Cranston sat on the opposite side of the
oval shaped bar. The large-breasted woman on the stool next to him appeared to hang
on his every word, as if he were dictating a cure for cancer, world hunger and
hangovers. From what Steve could see,
she was probably half of Cranston’s age. Another great unfairness…how these
middle-aged, fat, bald loudmouths managed to convince gorgeous, young women to
even look at them, let alone sleep with them.
Cranston,
like most marks, had no idea he was being tailed and even less of an idea that
his wife was preparing to take him to the cleaners.
That was
where Steve Salem, former Boston cop, now a
private investigator in Flagler Beach,
Florida, came in. He made a
comfortable living thanks to people who refused to play by the rules—which
didn’t seem fair either, but it was legal.
Not that he
had any room to talk; his career with the Boston PD had been terminated prematurely
for nearly beating a suspect to death—a flagrant rules infraction, but Steve
didn’t see it that way at the time.
When you
crash through a door and find a twenty six-year-old asshole torturing and sodomizing
a wheelchair bound girl not even eleven years old yet, the rules take a back
seat to justice.
What he did
wasn’t legal, but in his mind it was fair.
The Mayor
of Boston disagreed and because it was an election year, Steve became an
example.
So now he
was a P.I. tailing unfaithful spouses, insurance scammers and people collecting
Worker’s Compensation benefits while they worked another job under the table. It
was good, low-risk money, but the constant exposure to life’s down-side was
exhausting and sometimes demoralizing.
Finally the
barmaid worked her way to him and smiled widely.
“Another,
Steve?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he
said, sliding the empty glass into the trough on her side of the bar, “thanks
Dawn.”
As he
watched her pour Scotch into his glass he couldn’t help but notice the way her
shirt hugged the curves around her generous breasts. Her fiery red hair fell
just short of her tanned shoulders and perfect white-as-snow teeth gave her
smile the brightness of a lighthouse.
When she finished
pouring his drink she set the glass on the bar, withdrew a tenspot from the
stack of bills in front of him and walked to the register. Steve studied her
form until she began walking back, at which time he forced himself to look her
in the eyes.
The job wasn’t completely without its
perks.
Dawn
returned to the young gun at the other end of the bar and Steve picked up his
glass. The scotch, his second, went down smooth and warm. If the mark hung out
here much longer he might have to switch to something non-alcoholic. A D.U.I. would
mean he’d lose his driver’s license, albeit temporarily, his P.I. license and his
permit to carry.
Aside from Cranston, his girlfriend
and the guy talking to Dawn, there was one other patron in the bar—a woman in
her mid-twenties with the looks of a swim-suit model. Steve casually wondered
what such a good-looking woman was doing in a hole like this, alone on a Friday
night.
The door
opened and three kids walked in laughing as they shook off the rain. They
looked like they made the legal drinking age by minutes. The dim lighting in
the bar made it tough to get a good look at them, but Steve thought he
recognized one of them. They walked around the bar and sat next to the swim-suit
model.
Testosterone strikes again, Steve thought.
Steve
alternated his looks between his mark and the three kids. The familiar one was
seated next to the woman and she screened Steve’s view of his face.
The
bartender put a draft beer in front of each kid and they all exchanged discrete
conspiratorial looks, confirming Steve’s suspicion they were under-age. One of
them strolled to the electronic juke box and fed a bill into it. The relative
quiet of the bar was assaulted by an obnoxious rap song, replete with
references to whores, dead cops and drugs.
Cranston
and his companion were getting cozy, nuzzling each other affectionately,
oblivious to the pounding bass of the song. One of the woman’s hands disappeared
beneath the bar. The tell-tale motion of her arm, and the growing look of
ecstasy on Fred’s face, left little to the imagination.
Back at the
other end of the bar, the three kids were getting a little rowdy. Two of them
were standing and having an animated discussion about something. The discussion
escalated into shoving and one of them bumped into the swim suit model.
As they
apologized profusely, the one Steve thought he knew stood and walked quickly to
the men’s room.
Steve took
a glance at Cranston—who was still enjoying the hand-job from his partner—then walked
to the men’s room.
Compared to
the bar, the lighting in the restroom was bright enough to perform
surgery. There was nobody at either
urinal and one of the two stall doors was open. Steve saw the feet of the kid
under the other door, standing.
Steve used
the urinal then moved to the sink and washed his hands. When the kid emerged
from the stall, Steve was drying his hands and checking himself in the mirror.
The kid
walked toward the door but Steve backed away from the sink into his path.
“Aren’t you
gonna wash your hands?” he asked the kid.
“Huh?”
Steve’s looked
at their reflections in the mirror, his hunch was confirmed, he knew the kid.
“I said, ‘aren’t
you going to wash your hands,’ Brad?”
The kid’s
puzzlement increased.
“What? You
know me?”
C’mere,”
Steve said, guiding the kid back to the stall and opening the door.
On the
floor behind the toilet was a woman’s purse.
“Pick it
up,” Steve ordered.
Brad paused
before he complied, handing it to Steve.
“Now let me
have whatever you took from it.”
Brad sighed
and dug into his pocket, handing Steve a few credit cards and a wad of cash.
Steve read the name on one of the credit cards then looked at Brad.
“Her name
is Valerie Casey, if you’re interested.”
Brad
swallowed and blinked.
Steve
stuffed the contents into the purse and slapped it against Brad’s chest.
“Bring it
back,” he said.
“But…”
“Just drop
it on the floor behind her stool. She’ll think it fell when your buddy bumped
into her. Then you and your two friends finish your beers and get the hell out
of here and I won’t have to tell your Uncle Ralph I saw you.”
“You know
my uncle?”
“Yeah, now,
do we have an agreement?”
“Yeah.”
“Atta boy.”
Steve
waited a few beats after Brad left before leaving. He took his seat and watched
as Brad downed his beer then spoke to his friends. After glancing at Steve the
other two finished their beers and they walked out into the rainy Daytona Beach
night. A minute later, Valerie Casey left; Steve watched with an admiring eye
as she walked to the door. When the door closed behind her he turned to check
on Cranston.
“Damn it,” he
said.
Cranston and his mistress were gone.
Steve
picked up his stack of cash from the bar, leaving half of his drink and a five dollar
tip, and walked out.
The rain
was coming down harder than it had been when he arrived and it was full-on dark
now.
He sprinted
to his Jeep, started the engine and did a slow drive around the parking lot
looking for Cranston’s
blue Lincoln Continental. He was relieved, although not surprised to find it in
a back corner of the lot, next to the dumpster—conveniently out of the sight.
Steve drove
past and circled the building again. He found a place to park where he could
inconspicuously observe the car and, if the rain let up, maybe even get some
pictures for Mrs. Cranston.
He reached
into the glove box and took out a digital camera, fitted with an f-2.8 zoom
lens for low-light situations such as this. Unfortunately the lens did little
to penetrate foggy windows.
There was very
little activity in the parking lot, so the sight of approaching headlights from
his right surprised him. The car looked like a Ford Taurus, probably a rental.
It drove by Steve’s Jeep slowly and proceeded around the building, its
headlights hitting Fred Cranston’s Lincoln
on the way.
Salem watched with mild curiosity when
the Taurus stopped just past the Lincoln.
Leaving the
motor running, but turning the headlights off, a figure climbed out of the
Taurus, cloaked in darkness and took a look around the parking lot. Steve began
to get a bad feeling.
Dropping
his camera on the passenger’s seat of the Jeep, he reached inside his jacket for
his .45.
The figure
walked to the Lincoln
and drew a gun.
Steve threw
open the door of the Jeep and slipped on the wet asphalt. Stumbling toward the
front of his car, trying to regain his balance, he heard three shots in quick
succession. The gunman was in his car and gone before Steve could get close.
He walked
through the rain and looked into the back seat of the Lincoln at the bodies of Fred Cranston and
his mistress. Cranston
sat with his back to the passenger’s side rear door. His pants were bunched around
his knees and his shirt was stained bright red from two bullet holes in his
chest. His mistress was on her knees on the driver’s side floor, her head, or
what was left of it, still in Cranston’s
lap. The odors of sex and blood mingled and wafted out into the rainy night.
Steve re-holstered
his .45 and took his cell phone out to call 9-1-1. While he waited for the call
to go through he shook his head at Cranston and his mistress.
“Getting
caught with your pants down is usually a metaphor, Fred,” he said.
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