Homicide Related

Homicide Related: A Ryan Dooley Mystery
EPub edition copyright © August 2011
Copyright © 2009 Norah McClintock

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Published by
Red Deer Press
A Fitzhenry & Whiteside Company
195 Allstate Parkway,
Markham, ON L3R 4T8
www.reddeerpress.com

Edited for the Press by Peter Carver
Cover design by Jacquie Morris and Delta Embree,
Liverpool, Nova Scotia
Text design by Tanya Montini

Acknowledgments
We acknowledge with thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McClintock, Norah
Homicide related / Norah McClintock.

(A Ryan Dooley mystery) ISBN 978-0-88995-431-1
eISBN 978-1-55244-297-5
I. Title. II. Series: McClintock, Norah . Ryan Dooley mystery.

PS8575.C62H64 2009       jC813'.54       C2008-908114-5

United States Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McClintock, Norah.

Homicide related : a Ryan Dooley mystery / Norah McClintock.

Summary: Ryan Dooley continues to struggle against circumstances that would defeat most teenagers. Somehow, though, Dooley is able to work his way through the immense hazards in his life and emerge, not unscathed, but with his integrity intact.

ISBN: 978-0-8899-5431-1 (pbk.)
eISBN: 978-1-55244-297-5

1. Mystery and detective stories. I. Title.

[Fic]   dc22     PZ7.M33Hom 2009

Acknowledgments

To the girls,
more precious than they know.

One

I
t was Monday, another soul-sucking, numbness-inducing day exactly like every other day, except for a single moment that ambushed Dooley like a pop quiz. Dooley didn't like pop quizzes. He didn't like surprises. This particular moment was like a pop quiz in his favorite subject, the kind of quiz where you think, hey, no problem. All you have to do is circle the right answer: A, B, C, or D. You whiz through it so fast and with so much confidence that you're out of there before anyone else, convinced you aced it, until sometime in the space between when you downed your pencil and when you have that class again, it hits you: They were trick questions.

The day started like this:

He got up at seven after going to bed a mere six hours earlier because Kevin, the shit manager—
shift
manager—at the video store where he worked insisted that everyone—
and that includes you, Dooley
—close at least one weeknight every week. Closing meant nudging all the lingering customers out the door as soon as possible after midnight (Dooley still hadn't figured out just how bored or desperate or just plain disorganized a person had to be to show up at a video store at five minutes to twelve in the first place) and then straightening the shelves and mopping the floors while the shift manager—usually, unfortunately, Kevin—counted the cash and prepped the bank deposit, which, in turn, meant not getting out of the store until twelve-thirty at the earliest—most nights it was more like a quarter to one—and that meant not getting home until sometime after one and having to unwind without being able to indulge in any of the fun unwinding activities that he used to enjoy. Big whoop.

After dragging himself out of bed, he went downstairs for breakfast. On a Monday morning, it was usually just Dooley and his uncle in the kitchen, unless Jeannie, his uncle's friend—which is how Dooley's uncle had introduced her to Dooley: friend, not girlfriend—had stayed over. If she had, then either Dooley had the kitchen to himself because his uncle was still upstairs with Jeannie, or he'd find her in the kitchen reading the business section of the newspaper (she owned and managed two ladies' wear stores), her perfume mixing with the smell of coffee, while Dooley's uncle tackled the local news, which consisted almost exclusively of crime stories (he was a retired cop). This morning, it had been just Dooley and his uncle, and his uncle had been in the same crappy mood he'd been in for the past couple of days. Dooley kept waiting for him to explain what he was so pissed off about, but so far he'd kept that to himself while he carped about everything and anything. Like: “When the hell are you going to return those library books? I thought you finished that assignment.”

Which was true. Dooley had finished it. And what a fun exercise it had been—one thousand riveting words about the causes of one of the dullest wars in history, the first
big one.

“I'll get to it,” Dooley said.

“When?” His uncle snapped the word at him. The guy should have been a reporter—his favorite words were who, what, when, where, and why (as in, Why the hell did you [fill in the blank with some dumb-ass thing Dooley had allegedly done]?).

“When I get a chance,” Dooley said.

“I saw the slip. They're due tomorrow.”

“So I'll take them back tomorrow.”

“Why don't you take them back today? You're done with them, aren't you?”

“I said I'd take care of it,” Dooley said.

“You should have taken care of it yesterday. That's when you handed in your assignment, correct?”

Jesus, it was like he was living with a cantankerous, semi-senile old granny instead of a supposedly on-the-ball uncle.

“I was working yesterday,” Dooley said. In fact, he'd done a double shift, taking one from Linelle because she'd asked him and because he owed her—which his uncle knew because he was worse than a probation officer the way he kept tabs on Dooley.

“Always with the excuses,” his uncle muttered.

Dooley looked across the table at him. His uncle was forty-nine years old, retired four years. He was a little shorter than Dooley and had more weight on him, but all of it was one hundred percent muscle. He wasn't a cop anymore. He was a small-businessman, but that didn't mean he'd let himself go. No, he ate right (except on poker night), worked out regularly—weights and cardio—and didn't take shit from anyone, ever. He could be one scary dude. He could also, like now, be a major pain in the ass. Dooley could have explained to his uncle—again—that he wasn't making excuses. He could have said, what's the problem; the books aren't even due yet. He could have told him, even if they were due, the fine is only thirty cents a day, and he could handle that easily; he had a job; that's where he had been for six-and-a-half hours yesterday. He could have said, back the fuck off. But that wouldn't have ended it. On the contrary, it would have been like trying to put out a smoldering fire with a can of kerosene. Besides, this wasn't about a couple of library books. It wasn't even about Dooley. It was about something that, so far, his uncle didn't want to talk about. As Dooley's therapist would have put it, it wasn't Dooley's monkey. So Dooley got up, rinsed his cereal bowl and put it into the dishwasher, and moved on to the next thrill of the day, which was:

School.

He hated school. He always had, even back when it consisted of finger painting and counting. He couldn't figure out what use he would ever have for geometry or trigonometry or even, let's be honest, French. He liked to read—when he was locked up that time, his uncle had brought him a book every time he came to visit, and Dooley had read them all. But he hated the reading they were assigned in school, always stuff they were supposed to learn a lesson from, the teacher always asking what the theme was, like that's what people's lives were about, instead of chance and mischance and good intentions gone all to hell. He only stuck with school because it was a condition they'd put on him when he was released, along with holding down a job, staying away from drugs, alcohol, weapons, and baseball bats, and attending regular counseling—all of which he did, finding, to his surprise, that going to school was the hardest to comply with. The school administration hadn't been exactly delighted when his uncle had enrolled him. Mr. Rektor, the A-to-L vice-principal, did everything he could to encourage Dooley to pack it in. He probably would have liked nothing better than to see Dooley in trouble again. His teachers all knew about his past, even though they probably shouldn't. One of them, a new female teacher who lived in the suburbs, had yet to make eye contact with him; a couple of times when he'd gone up to her desk to turn in an assignment, she had visibly cringed, as if she were afraid he was going to attack her. His history teacher was openly hostile to him. Dooley had lost count of the number of times the guy had been writing on the chalkboard, his back to the class, and someone had acted up, maybe stage-whispered some remark that made everyone laugh, and who did the teacher's eyes go to when he whirled around to locate the troublemaker? Yup. Dooley. The only class he even remotely liked was phys. ed., and that was mostly because he could work off some of what he was feeling. The gym teacher was a tough old guy who looked like he might have been a drill sergeant. He yelled at all the guys, not just Dooley. It was like being back inside.