I found this a lot easier the second day, probably because I had a slightly better idea of what to expect, and of where this story is going. I’m still largely writing by the seat of my pants though, there are tons of ideas and hints in this, and I have no diea where they’re all going to lead when it’s all over.
Again, please keep in mind that this was written straight out with no editing, and all I’ve done is dump it from my AlphaSmart to my laptop, so it’s going to be very rough and could contain lots of errors and typos.
Idle Hands (working title) Part 2
We found Detective Gunn where we expected to, standing in the middle of the road barking orders. There were half a dozen cruisers blocking the road, throwing dizzying blue and red flashing light in every direction. I assumed the missing cars - Idle had six patrol vehicles, and I could see that two of these were indeed from Westbrook - had been sent in each direction to divert any traffic there might be at this time of night. Gunn wasn’t a large man, but he was solidly built, and what he lacked in height he more than made up for in balls. You didn’t want to be on the wrong side of Detective Gunn, any idiot could see that, so why is is that’s where I always seemed to find myself?
I stopped a short distance from Gunn, giving the officers scrambling around with equipment they’d only ever used maybe once before a wide berth. Derrick slouched beside me. I’d told him a thousand times that if he kept slouching like that, that in another ten or twenty years he wouldn’t be capable of standing up straight. For his part, he asked if that was why I always seemed to be grimacing. Once I told him it was a side effect of four failed marriages, he laughed, and I did my best not to introduce him to his own posterior.
“Nick Shamus, private detective,” Gunn sneered when he noticed me, “and Derrick Dutch, the boy wonder.”
“Serpico,” Derrick shot back, smug as all get out. Gunn’s eyes flashed for a moment, then he let it drop.
“I hear the incredible slouch here called this in, and I’m guessing that means you told him to Shamus. That how it is?”
“You don’t have to guess Gunn, I would have told you. Best to save that powerful mind of yours for the real mysteries here.”
“So, how’d…”
“She called me,” I interrupted.
“Who did?”
I jerked my head back towards the rapidly illuminating crime scene.
“Cheevers. She called me. Didn’t say what for, just to meet her here. I’m assuming you were going to ask how I ended up finding her here.”
He looked at me long and hard.
“She called you, and asked you to meet her here, in the middle of nowhere, and you came without even asking why?”
“She was a friend, Gunn, she sounded like she was in trouble. It’s the kind of thing friends do for each other.”
“She was a cop, Shamus - a damn fine one - and now she’s dead, laying face down in a shit creek and somehow you, a two bit PI, are the first one on the scene. Now you’re telling me that she was mixed up in something heavy enough to leave her dead, and out of all the people she could have called to back her up she called you? Why should I believe any of that?”
Derrick had been uncharacteristically quite for a few minutes, and sure enough he took this most inappropriate moment to butt in.
“Are you going to charge him with anything or what?”
“Derrick,” I said quietly, but with enough venom to drop a yak, “why don’t you go away and let the grown ups talk?”
“But, you called me and…”
“I said, go away. I’ll meet you back at the office. Now go.”
Derrick looked at me for a moment, his expression morphing from confusion to resolve in the cataclysm of flashing lights. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans and slunk away with the kind of attitude only a teenager, or in this case college student, could inject into such an action.
“That kid’s going to get you into trouble with that mouth of his,” Gunn said after he’d climbed into that damned shiny car of his and taken off.
“Leave him alone. He’s got an attitude problem, but he’s a good investigative assistant. He’ll make a good investigator some day. I seem to remember you having a little trouble with that attitude of your when you first signed on with the department, Gunn.”
“You were barely more than an itch in your father’s balls when I became a cop, Shamus.”
“People talk,” he eyed me suspiciously. “I don’t like people, Gunn, but for some reason they seem to like me, seem to like telling me things without me having to ask. Comes in awful handy in private investigations.”
We stood there a moment in silence. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but his weather worn features seemed to soften a bit.
“I know you were friends, Shamus. You may be next to worthless, like the rest of your sorry profession, but I don’t think you’re a killer. You don’t have the nerve. I do think you’re hiding something, and if I find out you are, I’ll take your badge for interfering with an investigation, do I make myself clear?”
“Sparkling.”
“Good. Now you go talk to Dever, he’s the squirrelly over there who looks like he just shit himself, and you give him your statement. If you leave anything out, or lie about even the most minute detail, I’ll nail your ass to the wall.”
Without another word I turned and headed towards Dever, a portly fellow with shock blond hair.
“Shamus,” Gunn called from behind me. I stopped but didn’t turn back. “Don’t leave town, and don’t get in my way, or I’ll tear your heart out.”
I nodded slightly and continued on. I hoped, for Dever’s sake, that he wasn’t a type two cop as well.
Officer Robby Freddy Dever was nothing short of fawning. Apparently he was a fan of Chandler and Hammett, and never got the memo about fiction vs. reality. I gave him my statement and tried to be friendly, until he asked to see my gun. I didn’t bother reminding him that he was a cop, and had one of his own if he was that interested, and instead mumbled something about having somewhere better to be and left.
As I got back to Bertha, my ‘86 Volvo wagon, I stooped down and sure enough the muffler was nowhere to be seen. I cursed under my breath, knowing that it lay on the side of the road easily within view of these cops, with all the light they were pouring into the area, and that this was going to come back and bite me on the ass. I started up Bertha and she roared, drawing the gaze of several cops. I pulled off the shoulder to go - stopped twenty yards up the road, got out, opened up the back hatch and tossed my muffler in - then headed back to the office.
The clouds were starting to fill in more, cutting off the earth from the heavens. Out here there were no street lights except at large intersections, and the sensation of driving through a tunnel of trees and pitch black was over powering. It wasn’t quite accurate to call this the middle of nowhere, as Derrick and detective Gunn had. This was an area known locally as North Idle, and if anything it was cow country. The scenery shifted from open fields to deep ancient forest with a suddenness that I’m told is surprising if you’re not used to it. I wouldn’t know, I’ve lived here all my life and I didn’t like to travel. I’d spent a few years in Boston before I realized what a miserable, dirty little city it was - and how much I hated my life there, and everything else about it - and I moved back to Maine. Turns out I’m a miserable person no matter where I am, but at least here I can be alone in my misery without much trouble. Besides, cows make surprisingly good conversationalists compared to many I’ve known, as long as you don’t mind carrying the conversation yourself.
So what was Cheevers doing out in the land of pines and cattle in the middle of the night? I’d told Gunn the truth, so far as it concerned him, she had called me and told me to meet her off of route 237, at the end of Geraldine Lane by the old Smith farm, an ancient rotting house and barn and a relatively small field that used to hold horses.
I got there within twenty minutes, it helps that I rarely sleep at night, but she wasn’t there. I waited for a while, and tried calling her cell phone a couple times but she didn’t answer.
That much I’d included in my statement, taken by the far too excited officer Dever, and it was all true.
The next part I included as well, but not as fully as I would like. I knew that Gunn would jump all over me for that when he saw, but it wasn’t an intentional omission. I honestly didn’t know why I did what I did. I’m not sure why, but I decided to drive further down Geraldine Lane.
Thinking back on it, I remembered a feeling of something not being right. It wasn’t something I was consciously aware of the reason for, but it was definitely there. A nagging in the back of my mind. As a private dick I learned long ago to trust my instincts, that there was a whole part of my brain that was working over time, all the time, noticing everything the rest of my mind was missing and plumbing it for information. Usually these fact finding efforts only came to light when I went looking for them - having mulled over a problem for a while I did other things - so when they came to me unbidden, interrupting my conscious thoughts in an effort to be heard, I knew enough to listen. So I headed down Geraldine.
This was one of those roads that connected two places, but which was really nothing in and of itself. After a few miles of intermittent fields it plunged into a woodsy, marshy area before emerging several miles further on route 25 near the town line. It was in this deep woods section that something, a coyote I reasoned later, dashed in front of me and forced me to slam the breaks hard.
In retrospect I should have run the damn thing over. Coyotes are a scourge, especially in areas like this, and are probably the cause for most of the missing pet calls I get every week or so. But, regardless, I stopped hard and watched as it disappeared into the trees.
I think that was when I lost the muffler. I didn’t notice because I was too busy considering the odds of almost running over one of the most elusive and stealthy animals that lived in these parts. They’d been here all along, I occasionally heard them at night and had found traces of their nocturnal activities, but I’d only seen them a scant few times before. It must have been running from something, I figured, but what? A bear? Not likely, there was the occasional black bear spotted around here, but they keep to themselves almost as much as the coyotes do, and as far as I knew they didn’t cross paths often. Nothing else in the Maine woods was likely to make a coyote run scared and stupid like that.
Except for man, that is.
I stopped the car and got out. It was deathly silent once Bertha sputtered to a full stop. I briefly considered the wisdom of venturing into the woods after whatever had scared that coyote so much, but the reality is that the only thing a person has to fear in the Maine woods is the occasional bear - and only then if it’s sick or injured, they’re shy - and far more likely, other people.
I had my piece in hand, and my red pen light - red to save my night vision and to make pinning my location down that much more difficult for anyone who might be watching - trained ahead of myself, as I worked my way down the slope away from the road in the direction the coyote had come from. There was a faint smell on the air, a sweetly textured burned smell, that I knew too well. There had been another person here, and recently. And whoever they were, they’d fired a gun.
And then I had spotted her.
My reverie broke as I approached the end of Geraldine. The cop who was blocking the intersection stopped me and checked my id, radioing back to be sure I’d been checked out before waving me on.
So Yadira Cheevers was dead, and for whatever reason I was the person she’d called shortly before someone shot her down and left her to rot in the woods. AS far as I knew, I was the last person to talk to her, outside of her killer.
Private investigators don’t do murders - we spend most of our time spying on cheating spouses and investigating fraud - but Cheevers had been a friend. I owed it to her to figure this out, for old time’s sake.
When I got to the office, Derrick had a pot of coffee on, he smell of it greeting me as I walked through the door. I was sure it would be tar thick, stale, likely burned, and at this point having not slept in almost thirty eight hours, like a little bit of heaven in a cup. Derrick was leaning back in his chair when I walked in, with his feet up on the desk like I’d told him not to do hundreds of times before. He was reading a battered copy of Good Omens and pointedly ignoring me to boot.
I tossed my coat on the stand next to the door and poured myself a cup of coffee before settling down behind my desk. He made a point of not reacting to my presence in any way. He was pissed off, and he would keep this up for hours if I didn’t do something. We didn’t have time for this, the majority of murders that are solved are solved within hours, and I’d already wasted an hour and a half with the cops.
I swiveled in my seat and selected the largest book I could reach from the floor to ceiling book shelves there, a well worn and probably out of date copy of Black’s Law Dictionary. I turned back around, but he still hadn’t moved, save to turn the pages a few times. I cocked my arm back and heaved the book the fifteen feet to his desk. It he was doing such a good job of ignoring me that he didn’t see it coming, and it hit him square in the shoulder and knocked him off his chair.
He sprung to his feet, massaging his shoulder.
“Damn it Nick, what the hell is wrong with you?”
“Now that I’ve got your attention,” I said, I hoped without betraying how much I’d enjoyed doing that, “I have to know one thing.”
He waited a moment but I didn’t continue.
“What, what’s so important you’ve got to break my damn arm to ask it?”
“How fresh is this coffee?”
He glared, then set his chair upright again and sat down. He retrieved the novel he was reading from the floor, and if I didn’t back down at least a little I was going to lose him again. And this time he’d be on the look out for legal reference text ordinance.
“Look, Derrick, I’m sorry I yelled at you back there, but you were dangerously close to pissing detective Gunn off, and the last thing we need right now is to give the cops a reason to blackball us. Savvy?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, but he did set the novel down. One crisis down.
“You didn’t have to treat me like a child. Not in front of those cops. I’m your assistant, Nick, not your grandson.”
“Noted. But in the future, if you want to be treated like my assistant you need to act like it, and that includes letting me do the talking unless I say otherwise, got it?”
“Fine,” he said, then he brightened. “So, how hard did Gunn drill you after I left, did he run you through a lie detector and everything?”
He was way too excited about that possibility for my tastes. I closed my eyes, hard, and pinched the bridge of my nose. My head was throbbing and I could feel my hand shaking slightly.
“Derrick, please, I’m in no mood for your usual antics. I’m sleep deprived, an old friend just died and I can’t stop thinking that maybe if I’d been there a little sooner I could have saved her, but I’m not allowing myself to feel anything about it right now so I can concentrate on figuring out exactly what happened, and I’m definitely too old for this shit.”
I couldn’t see him with my eyes pressed shut so hard I was seeing colors on the inside of my eyelids, but the tension in the room shifted palpably.
“What can I do?”
“You can start by getting me some aspirin, and by putting some real shoes on. It’s October, sub-genius, well past sandal weather. Just looking at you is making me cold.”
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