Kill Smartie Breedlove (a mystery) (30 page)

“That’s for me to decide and for you to shut up about. You signed an ironclad confidentiality agreement. Anything leaves this room, you’re in a world of hurt, understand?”

“Whatever, man.” Bean folded the rest of the pizza into his face.

“Listen,” said Shep, “I’ve decided to start my own agency, and I could use someone with your particular skill set.”

“Seriously?” Bean suddenly got three inches taller. “Like a partner? I’d be like an Associate Investigator or something?”

“More like a minion. We can tweak the job title. Toady. Grunt. Grossly underpaid lackey.”

“How gross?”

“Let’s start with whatever you make at Starbucks plus ten percent.”

“I also get free coffee at Starbucks.”

“Coffee’s in there.” Shep jerked his thumb toward the kitchen. “Guess you know how to make it.”

“Plus I get tips.”

“Yeah, well, here’s a tip for you, Napoleon Dynamite: Take the job, grow the hell up and stay out of trouble before somebody beats your punk ass for you.”

“What about… you know.”

“What?” Shep said impatiently.

“
Her
.”

“You were at the hearing, Bean. The judge found probable cause to make that TRO a permanent order of protection. Respect it, or you’ll find yourself in jail. And I’m not your friend in that scenario.”

“But she knows I didn’t do the dog.”

“It’s not about that.”

“Did you tell her my IQ is 144? That’s a genius IQ, man.”

“It’s not about that, either.”

“All I’m asking her to do is have a friggin’ cup of coffee with me.” Bean got up and pulled on his denim jacket. “You have a kid, that kid is entitled—”

“A kid is entitled to a family and a home, and she made sure you had that. Case closed.”

“She left me to rot in suburbia with the Cleavers while she went off to live her rich and famous life. I want to know why. I want to know who my father is. She owes me that much.”

“She doesn’t owe you jack shit. But she wants you to have this,” said Shep, offering a white envelope.

“Yeah, well, tell her I said to cram it. I don’t want her money.”

“Shut up and take it.”

Bean seized the envelope, tore open the end and pulled out a photocopy of the final
Janny’s World
comic. He stared at it, flipped it over, looked at the blank backside.

“What the frick is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re the genius,” said Shep. “Figure it out.”

T
he subject previously identified as Penn Hewitt rolled into Smartie Breedlove’s driveway at 9:42 p.m.. Shep pulled his new Range Rover into the palmy shadows across the street and broke out a pair of night vision binoculars.

Hewitt debarked his vehicle and climbed the porch steps with an armload of chocolate Lab puppy. The front door opened, and there was a minute or so of awkward conversation as Boodle lunged and bayed at the interloper, and Smartie struggled to hold onto Boodle’s collar with her one good wing, and the chocolate Lab yelped and thrashed in Hewitt’s arms.

The door closed.

Hewitt headed back to his truck and wrangled the yowling pup into a kennel crate. Slouching down in the driver’s seat, Shep did his best to be invisible, but Hewitt spied him, strode across the street to the Range Rover and rapped sharply on the window with the back of his hand.

Shep lowered the window an inch. “Evening there, Hewitt.”

“You are an asshole.”

“Yup.”

“Not over, dude.” Hewitt stalked back to his truck and jerked the door open. As he pulled away, he leaned out the window, pointed two fingers at Shep and repeated, “Not over!”

As Shep swung into the driveway, the kitchen door opened, and Boodle emerged, dragging Smartie by a retractable leash. Boodle wasn’t big enough to get his nose above the window ledge, so Shep opened the driver’s door to pet him, good-naturedly allowing the wide swath of buffalo drool on his gray trouser leg.

Smartie leaned on the inside of the open door in her jogging clothes, ready to run, loose corkscrews escaping her ponytail here and there.

“How’s your week?” Shep said.

“Crazy as a granny in the attic. How’s yours?”

“Fine as frog’s hair.”

“Good one,” she nodded.

We’d be friends dependably, lovers if he was lucky.

For now, I was content with the
Gunsmoke
approach: everybody in their own saddle with an occasional dust devil to keep the saloon door swinging.

“They were such good characters,” Smartie mused.

“Who?”

“Marshall Dillon and Miss Kitty.”

Shep knuckled her jawbone and said, “You’re a good character.”

“So are you, Shep.”

“I’d kiss you now, if you still want to see what that’s like.”

Smartie nodded.

He cupped his hand under her chin and brought her mouth over to his. The scent of her hair, the taste of her lip balm, the welcome cross-breeze between their necks, it was all very Houston. Pecan trees and Confederate roses. Palm fronds and chlorine. Distant factories, flowering jasmine, mosquito spray.

Shep regretted having burned the “blink once if you want me to come upstairs” bit. By the time an equally inspired opening line made its way past the pounding in his head, Smartie was jogging down the moonlit boulevard with Boodle ambling at her side.

end

SNEAK PEEK

Something Awful

(a love story)

by bestselling author Joni Rodgers

A crime scene cleaner with a tenuous grasp on reality finds himself involved in a complicated love affair and scrutinized by police as a person of interest in a string of murders. A darkly sensual, wildly imaginative psychological chiller with an emotional edge.

chapter one
accidents waiting to happen

A
t noon, a song sparrow mourned, and at one, the summer tanager tittered. In between, the Audubon Birdwatcher clock carried on, imperceptibly slow and without a sound, on the wall above the backsplash where the late Mr. Aceveda’s shotgun had left a chalky chip in the tile.

Two o’clock belonged to the cranky purple martin. An American goldfinch sent up its nasal
per-chicory
at three. By quarter till the common yellowthroat, the air was full of wings. Flies fogged the windows in the breakfast nook and feasted on the viscous red rivers that irrigated the tile floor and clotted the serpentine strands of Mrs. Aceveda’s salt and pepper hair. In a cycle well known to forensics, their progeny hatched, grew fat, flew off and died happy, one generation after another for five busy, buzzy weeks, each day marked in circles by the fluted gurgle of the meadowlark and the checked call of the blackbird.

Twelve birds.

Twice a day.

Day after day.

Unseasonable heat reduced the potted herbs on the window sill to sticks and bones. Peaches in a wooden bowl sweetened to ripe, ripened to rot, collapsing into themselves like Mrs. Aceveda’s cool cheeks and sagging breasts, relieved of brightness, sugar and life. Maggots came meekly to inherit their loamy earth mother, setting about their task with compulsive stewardship. It was a ministry, really.

Penn Hewitt hated to kill the industrious little buggers.

He counted them as kindred spirits, perhaps the only living things who truly knew why he was compelled to do the things he did. Penn saw a teeming, transformative beauty in their work, but he knew it would be freaky and wrong for him to say anything like that to Madison Mose, the deputy coroner, who crouched beside the stiff, picking skull fragments into a plastic bag.

Standing in his hazmat suit on the welcome mat outside Felice Aceveda’s kitchen door, Penn zoomed his digital camera to a tiny island of stray tissue between the bloodied gun and Mrs. Aceveda’s grapple-hooked fingers. His focus shifted to the cinched strap of Maddie’s respirator, then panned down to the hip pocket of her jumpsuit, the curve of her backside, the jackknifed line of her leg. She looked up, her face unreadable inside her breathing apparatus.

“Hewitt?”

“Hey, Maddie.”

“Did you just take a picture of my butt?”

“Of course not,” said Penn. “Did you want me to?”

She stood and folded her arms. “Long time no see. Last October, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “The Sawzall thing at the crack house.”

“Right, right.” Maddie nodded too. “Where you been keeping yourself?”

“Arizona. I took my mom and dad out. Got them settled,” said Penn.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Sure. I’m good.” Penn ducked his chin uncomfortably. “Pimped my ride.”

“I noticed,” said Maddie.

Out on the curb, Penn’s panel truck was freshly painted caution-tape-yellow, emblazoned with the Hewitt & Son CTS Decon logo and under that, “Houston’s Crime and Trauma Scene Specialists For Over 40 years.” Bursting over the rear wheelwells, toxic green letters shouted, “Yes! We do meth labs!” because Penn’s dad, Kibe Hewitt, wanted folks to know Penn was certified and bonded to do dangerous reclamation work in addition to the standard biohazard, decomp, trauma and gross filth sites, suicides, hoarders, what have you.

“Made sense to get it done while I was gone,” said Penn.

Maddie’s eyes narrowed behind her goggles. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’d like to get moving on this bid. Do you have next of kin?”

“You know I’m not supposed to give it to you until you get clearance.”

“Yeah, but you do a lot of things you’re not supposed to,” he grinned. “One of your best qualities.”

Maddie rolled her eyes and beckoned him into the next room. “She left all the papers on the dining room table. One of those well-considered suicides.”

“So you’re calling it self-inflicted?”

“Easy call,” she shrugged. “No-brainer. Ha!”

She punched his shoulder, and the feel of her fist sparked a fragmented impulse low in Penn’s midsection. Before he could frame it up properly, the Carolina wren screeched the top of the hour—
tea kettle! tea kettle! CHEER!
—throwing him off. He had to focus on the muscles in his hand. Adductor pollicis. Flexor digitorum superficialis. Flexor digitorum profundus.

“There’s a son,” said Maddie. “Kenneth R. Aceveda. When the constable went to track him down for notification, they came up with a warrant out of Galveston County. Drug charges. Apparently, the Widow Aceveda put her house up to get him out on bond, so he’s bye-bye-birdie, and the bail bondsman wins stank house here, for what it’s worth. At the moment, the stiff’s lawyer has power of attorney.”

Maddie scribbled a name and number on a Post-It and stuck it to Penn’s chest.

“You didn’t get that from me.”

“Get what?” Penn grinned. “Do I know you?”

“Not as well as you think you do.” She lifted her respirator briefly and smiled. She had a great smile. “It’s good to see you again, Hewitt.”

While Maddie and her team prepped and palletized the body, Penn got the go-ahead from the attorney, and went about photo-documenting the damages for the insurance claim. The entire kitchen was involved. Mrs. Aceveda’s last moment of free will fanned across the cupboard doors like a cardinal wing. Arterial spray plumed from sink to stovetop, detailing a graceful quarter turn as she spun and fell to the floor, where blood blossomed out of her head and oxidized to a deep red sea pocked with an archipelago of cementish gray matter. Stained grout laid a dark scarlet grid between the white tiles. The ceiling was flecked with crimson stars.

Most costly to repair would be the unseen damage, the result of a vast molecular migration; over the weeks, the stench of decomposition had physically permeated every absorbent surface in the house, haunting every square yard of carpet, every panel of drywall, every mineral fiber ceiling square. The place would have to be stripped to the studs, fumigated, and completely refitted if it was ever to smell like anything other than a tomb. Mrs. Aceveda’s heirs and/or lien-holders would be obligated by law to fully disclose this unfortunate event to potential buyers and provide documentation of remediation measures.

A decomp of this caliber was a license to print money.

Penn closed his eyes and watched the neon green numbers scroll by, horizontally for addition, vertically for multiplication, inverting for subtraction and division. When the equations turned yellow, he opened his eyes and entered the tally into a spreadsheet app on his iPhone. He bid the cleanup for all it was worth, but came in low on the refit. Refit work meant breathing freely for a few weeks, wearing jeans and a tee-shirt instead of the stifling hazmat suit, listening to Radiohead without a respirator, eating lunch in a clean, air-conditioned space that invited the return of the living.

“Hey, Hermione,” Maddie said sharply. “Get your nerdy intern ass over here.”

Hanging back by an open window, the meat wagon driver, Hector Castillo, tightly trudged over to help scoop Mrs. Aceveda’s slight form into the body bag. With only a cheap disposable mask instead of a full respirator, Hector was getting a snootful of decomp. Mucus from his beleaguered nose melded the flimsy mask to his upper lip. Tears leaked down his cheeks.

Before Maddie zipped the bag, she hooked her finger under the shrunken jaw, toggled it up and down and squawked, “Give us a kiss, Hector.”

Hector’s head bobbed forward and back. “The emu,” Kibe Hewitt used to call that.

“You’re okay, dude,” said Penn. “Just talk to your belly, and say you’re okay.”

Hector shook his head, yanked up his mask and vomited on the floor.

“Thirty-nine minutes, forty seconds!” Maddie whooped her long-legged, musical laughter. “Ten bucks, new kid.”

Penn took a deep draw of charcoal-filtered air and pulled off his respirator, placing it over Hector’s face, steering him out the side door and down the steps.

“Easy, dude. You’re okay.”

Sucking noisily at the apparatus, Hector stumbled down the driveway. Penn paused in the breezeway between the house and garage. When he took his first breath of outside air, he caught a distinct whiff. Cat pee and Clorox. He went to the garage window and cupped his hands on the dirty glass, peering into the cluttered dark.