Old guns, p.1
Old Guns, page 1
Old Guns
Alan Lee
Sparkle Press
Old Guns
Book Thirteen
of
The Mackenzie August
Mystery Series
by Alan Lee
All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 Alan Janney
First Edition
Printed in USA
Cover by T Hodges
Formatting by Vellum
Sparkle Press
Created with Vellum
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
1
I was sitting in my office and being really great at it when Edgar walked in like he owned the place.
Which he might. He owned a handful of buildings downtown, where I worked. Edgar also trafficked in illegal firearms, the valuable kind coveted by collectors, not the cheap kind coveted by gangsters. We weren’t pals but we went back, and there existed some mutual respect. He was dressed well in a dark suit with hints of purple embellishment, and he wore tortoiseshell sunglasses indoors, and his buzzed hair had zigzag lines above the ears.
“August,” he said.
“You’re too old to have lightning bolts carved into your head.”
“They aren’t lightning bolts, fool. They’re tribal symbols.”
“What do they mean?”
He grinned. “Something badass, I hope. You have a minute?”
“I do.”
“Are you still a private investigator?”
“Only until the Washington Nationals call me for second base,” I said.
“You’re a private investigator today? I mean, that’s your job?”
“It is.”
“It don’t look that hard,” he said.
“I make it appear easy.”
“How do you detect shit from this office?”
“If you must know, Edgar, I’m working two cases. Both of them for an attorney at the behest of an insurance company, who asked me to document individuals claiming mobility issues. I filmed one early this morning, walking his dog, which he says he can’t do. The next event occurs when the second individual gets off work in two hours, and I’ll spring into action with my trusty camera,” I said.
“Is this hourly work? I mean, you get paid by the hour?”
“Some, yes. Some are flat fee. I am a boutique hitman and can cater to your financial means.”
“Hitman,” he said.
“So to speak.”
He didn’t look happy about it. He took off his sunglasses and with them he gestured to my bookshelves and my client chairs and the windows like he wanted to comment on each, but he didn’t. “So what are you doing right now? Looks like you’re just sitting there. I would be bored as hell.”
“I am composing a sonnet.”
“No you’re not.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
“That’s like a love poem, right?”
I cleared my throat.
“So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
“That’s solid, August,” he said. “Real solid. You write it? What it’s it mean?”
“It’s not mine. It’s the ending to a sonnet written by Shakespeare, hinting he’s keeping his love immortal by putting her in poetry. I can’t remember the rest.”
“Where’s yours? Where’s the paper?” he said.
“I’m composing it in my mind.”
“No, you’re not,” he said.
“I am, in fact.” I was wearing my denim jacket. With denim jeans. I know—outrageous. My doting wife threatened legal action if I wore this denim combo again, but that was until she saw a photograph of Ryan Gosling wearing the same thing and she relented. Ronnie still didn’t like it, but apparently Gosling opened a lot of doors for the common man, and today I hoped it made me look like a poet who wrote sonnets.
“How’s it go?” he said.
“Sorry, Edgar, I’m still in an early bashful stage of composure. In case there’s any confusion, the sonnet is not about you.”
“You can just sit there,” he said, “and write love poems in your brain?”
“I have an intoxicating muse.”
“Damn you talk so weird. I always forget that, when you’re not around.”
“I don’t have in-laws, but if I did, I imagine this is the type of visit they would pay me. Intrusive and judgmental,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s on me. Could say I’m vetting you, because I worry. About my son Elijah.”
“I didn’t know you had one.”
“He’s grown,” said Edgar.
“Really.”
“I don’t look old enough. But Black don’t crack and I started early. Older kids were doing it, and I had weird stuff going on inside my chest, so I tried a few things.”
“Still,” I said.
“Started hella early. Like G.I. Joe early.”
“Fecund in elementary school?” I said.
Although a gangster, he was somewhat of a gentleman gangster. He didn’t travel with a walk-around guy. He didn’t hurt people that I knew of. He didn’t extort or blackmail or bully. Maybe broker of illegal exotics suited him more accurately than gangster. “Not quite. Listen. My boy, Elijah, he’s got a problem. He wants to join the family enterprises, but I ain’t about it. His mom, though. She got it in her head a stupid idea, that he should get his private investigator license, because she needs PIs now and then.”
“I assume you and his mother aren’t married.” I pointed at my client’s chair.
He sat and he smoothed both pant legs. “That’s right. We share custody of our grown-ass kid. We get along. She’s in town, a CPA. Smarter than me. Smarter than Elijah. He’s not sharp enough to be an accountant and I don’t want him in my world. But his mom got him a PI license and sent him out and he got busted.”
“Busted how?”
“Trespassing.”
“Thou shall not trespass. That’s on the first page of the manual,” I said.
“I told you. He’s not smart, and I think he didn’t do the training. But I pulled some strings and got the charges dismissed. Now, they won’t give him back his license unless he does training. With you.”
“Oh,” I said. “But I don’t want to do that.”
“Why not?”
“I’m busy.”
“No you’re not,” he said.
“I am so busy.”
“You’re sitting around writing love songs.”
“That’s what I’m busy with, you dummy.”
“August. They said it’s got to be you, because a lot of these places just sign off on it, on all 60 hours, but you won’t. They say you don’t lie, so it’s got to be you.”
“There truly is no reward for virtue,” I said.
“What?”
I stood and went for the coffee maker in the corner. Half the pot remained and I held out a mug for Edgar but he shook his head. Cream and sugar for me, because Manny wasn’t watching.
I came back to my desk, fortified. “What about Sullivan? Or Virginia Court Services? Or Liz Ferguson, she’s great. He could shadow her.”
“Gotta be you.”
“Why?”
“Police officer named Farmer said so.”
“Val Farmer. Why the hell is the Deputy Chief involved with your son’s private license?”
“Told you. Had to pull some strings. Keep shit off the record.”
“What does Elijah’s mother need him to do?” I said.
“She’s auditing a company going bankrupt. Something about fraud and solar panels. She asked Elijah to stalk the employees.”
“In the business, we use the term surveil.”
“Yeah that’s it, give me a vocab lesson, that’s why I came here,” he said.
“Will you also use his services?”
“Maybe. Probably. Not if it’ll get him killed, though, and it might.”
“Because you’d have him surveil your competitors.”
“Could be,” he said.
“People with violent criminal histor ies.”
“Could be,” he said.
“Do you really want your kid pissing off your violent competitors?”
He threw up his hands and dropped his head backward and slouched in the chair. “No. I want his ass to be a plumber. But it’s his mom doing this, and what am I gonna do, hire another spy instead of him? I’d never hear the end.”
“You’re not a very scary gangster at the moment. More like a henpecked gangster.”
“August, let him tag along. He needs sixty hours.”
“You know,” I said, “In other states, getting your license takes months, or years. What would you do then?”
“Ship his ass off to the Air Force. I’ll pay your hourly rate, August.”
“It’s high,” I said.
From his jacket pocket, he withdrew a money clip, stuffed with bills. I loved those. It’d look so great on my shelf next to the potpourri—today’s scent was Greed And Hedonism. He said, “Cheaper than college. Come on, August. We’re allies, right? We do shit for each other? It could be dangerous, so let him learn from the best.”
“What’s wrong with plumbing?” I said.
“Boy don’t like getting his hands dirty.”
“What I do isn’t easy, Edgar. My hands get dirty. He could be a welder. Somedays I wish I was a welder.”
“I’ll pay you double. Meet with him. Take over the solar panel fraud case he was working on. Double. That’s a lot of money.”
“It’s not about the money,” I said.
“What’s it about?”
“I don’t bring trainees to work.”
Edgar stood and walked to my office window and looked at the Orvis across the street. Though he kept his voice level, passion stirred beneath the deep waters. “If you don’t, my boy won’t learn. He’ll go to someone else, if the police let him. He’s going to get hurt. My boy. My boy’s gonna get hurt.”
On my desk was perched a photograph of Kix. My boy. What Edgar hadn’t said, because he was something of a gentleman gangster, was that I owed him. And I knew I owed him.
“August. Father to father,” he said.
“Edgar. Dammit.”
“I will owe you big. Good to have guys like me owe you favors.”
“Can you get me a bazooka?”
“Like a rocket launcher, bazooka? I can get you any type of bazooka from any damn war you can name,” he said. “This mean you’ll train him?”
“I’ll meet with him. That’s all I promise.”
He grinned and pumped a fist. His nails were manicured. “Yes, August. Hell yes.”
“I already have buyer’s remorse,” I said.
“Here.” He slapped the cash on my desk. Freed from the clip, the stack could breathe and it expanded. Oh baby. “That’s yours. Don’t think about it. I’m leaving. I’m going. Don’t think about it, don’t reconsider, I’ll have him call you.”
“Call? Gross. Text please.”
“Listen, one more thing, August. Man to man. You’re too big to wear denim on denim. Look like a big-ass blue jean couch.”
Crud. Ronnie was right.
“Bazooka, Edgar. Get me a bazooka.”
He laughed like he didn’t know if I was serious.
I didn’t either.
2
That evening I created salad bowls for the family. A layer of brown rice on the bottom, topped with a layer of chopped romaine, then quadrants of black beans, sweet potatoes, avocado, and broccoli sprouts.
The black beans had been soaked overnight to reduce the oligosaccharides, obviously. Only maniacs with anosmia wouldn’t.
The sprouts were grown here at Chez August. A superfood, according to Ronnie, one of the rare foods eaten while it was still alive, guaranteed to promote immortality.
No one dying here of heart disease before the age of ninety-nine, not on my watch.
Timothy August was aerating two bottles of California Pinot Noir. “I don’t care what the snobs say about Oregon. I like fruit in my wine,” he said and I didn’t know what that meant.
Early summer had turned the world a green so brilliant it vibrated the eyes if you weren’t careful. Shading our windows were pine, maple, and magnolia trees, so the warm breeze whispering through the screens was scented with plant life, and my son Kix was rolling a tennis ball for our tolerant boxer to chase across the living room. I sipped the wine and marveled at this diorama of happiness in which I found myself.
Veronica Summers came home to change. Her days revolved around prepping for a jury trial beginning next week. The son of a local construction magnate had drunkenly fought two police officers, and much depended on the interpretation of screwy footage from body cams, and whether or not Ronnie could back the RCPD down with lesser charges due to their excessive force; the young man had a cracked skull and ribs—deserved, in my opinion. She ran upstairs in heels and a skirt and retuned in yoga pants and sneakers, intelligent and winsome in any outfit. She wore diamond stud earrings and a small diamond pendant on a dainty gold chain—barely-there jewelry for when she meant business.
“Those shoes were killing me.”
“Being gorgeous is exhausting,” I said.
“No, vanity is exhausting. But you’re worth it.”
“I do not require vanity,” I said. “Staying for dinner?”
“I’ll get something on the way back to the office.” She closed her eyes and ran her fingers through her blondish hair, and I detected coiled stress. Trials were taxing, like one of the majors in golf or tennis—this week mattered and everyone watched.
“Eat with us. It’ll make your evening chores more tolerable,” I said.
“I shouldn’t. I received the jury list and now I must research them to death.”
“Stay for dinner. I insist.”
“Oh you insist?”
“And I’m bigger than you,” I said.
She smiled and my heaven grew brighter. “Is than an order?”
“You betcha.”
“Then, Mackenzie, I will stay. For you.”
I poured her a water with lemon slices because she didn’t drink wine when returning to work. She sat at the bar and watched me squeeze limes over the salad and I told her about my conversation with Edgar, her favorite of the local kingpins.
Sheriff Stackhouse returned home and kissed Timothy August on the mouth and Ronnie on the cheek and she squeezed Kix until he shouted about prisoner abuse. She held him like she needed reassurance, and then she poured herself an extra large glass of red wine, and I detected more coiled stress.
As I set the table, our final roommate appeared. Deputy US Marshal Manny Martinez. Tall and lean and hard and tattooed. Dark haired, dark eyed, his dark temper held in abeyance by patriotism and discipline. Often his partner Noelle Beck would join us for dinner, but not recently—Noelle’s fiancé Rocky Rickard had been unfaithful and unwittingly fathered a child with a prostitute named Lemonade, and now Rocky was raising the newborn; Noelle broke off the engagement but remained attached to the man, infuriating Manny, who’d long proclaimed Noelle could do better. They weren’t romantic, but the fabric of their bond was made of more than friendship. She was welcome but likely wary from a long day on the job working in the shadow of Manny’s displeasure.
I blessed the food and we all said, “Amen.”
Kix noted, Didn’t count. The sheriff’s eyes were open.
We poured salad dressing and we ate. Manny took two bites, finished his beer, and went for another.
“Bring that weird glass aerator of Pinot, babe,” said Stackhouse.
He did. It was weird.
Timothy noted, “You’re on edge, Sheriff.”
“Very much so.” Stackhouse set her fork down and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “But telling you about it will alter the course of our dinner.”
That’s okay, said Kix. There’s no meat in this ridiculous meal. I don’t care what you say, beans are not a meat.
Timothy gestured at the table. “We’re all ears. Please.”
“If you insist.”
“We do,” I said.
“I was approached today by a group of politicians,” said Stackhouse. “They asked me to run for mayor.”
“Wow,” said Ronnie. “Of Roanoke, I assume?”
“Yes.”
“Very wow. You’d be great at it,” said Timothy. “You’ve been asked this before, though, right?”
“I’m asked every election about local positions. Four years ago, these jackasses asked about my interest but I rebuffed them. Today, their case was stronger.”
