Memorial Day: A Mick Callahan Novel (The Mick Callahan Novels) (10 page)

"Then pull up a chair and die of envy," Loner cried. "It's all the same to me."

I sat down warily. I'm still uncomfortable in bars, particularly in nearly empty bars with someone who's drunk.

"Want to play a little blackjack?" Loner reached for the deck of cards he always carried. "How about you give me a chance to relieve you of some of that money I paid you."

"Nope, I can't stay. I was just looking for somebody."

"Heard you did okay last night," Loner said.

"Somebody lied to you," I said. "I stank."

Loner howled again. "I doubt it. You always were a slick bastard, Mick, fun as hell. That's why I called you. I know talent when I see it."

"I'm grateful for the job," I said. "I don't need you to blow smoke up my ass, too. I've lost my edge."

Loner shrugged. "Hey, it happens to everybody sometime or another. You're a smart man, Mick. You'll be back on track again in no time." Loner finished one beer. He screwed the top off another with his massive fingers. "What's this thing you got cooking over to L.A., a talk show?"

"A big audition. Maybe it will come to something, maybe not. I wish I had the setup you've got."

"Talking to astrologers? Numerologists? Crazy assholes who talk to aliens? Come on, Mick, get real. I may be making some heavy bread, but no one could accuse me of being a serious journalist. Or even a genuine cultural self-help guru like yourself."

Tap called out: "Mister Callahan, you want something to drink?"

"I won't be staying."

"You got to buy something, you start watching that boxing match."

"Okay, Tap."

Loner lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "You hear what happened today over to the park? They found Sandy Palmer in the creek. Somebody really slapped her around. She was dead, lying flat on her back. They say her eyes were wide open and she looked all surprised. Damn." He rubbed his eyes. Loner seemed genuinely upset.

"That's too bad," I said. "What a terrible thing."

Something urgent was crouching right behind his eyeballs. "Just goes to show you," Loner said. "You got to live all you can. A man can be dead before he knows it."

There was artificiality in the way Loner was expressing himself; perhaps it was real sorrow struggling with anger, but something seemed incongruent; the inside and the outside didn't match. I felt like he was acting a bit, and that piqued my interest. Loner McDowell was a big man and could be a very dangerous drunk, so I decided to move slowly. "What did they say happened?"

Loner shook his head. "They don't know. Somebody beat her to death, or maybe she fell down afterwards." He snapped his fingers, loud enough to startle me. "Just like that, such a pretty little thing."

"How well did you know her, Loner?" I pretended to watch the televised fight. "You seem pretty upset."

"Well who wouldn't be upset?" Loner sputtered. "She was a nice kid and now she's stone cold dead. Hell, everybody knows her family."

I eyed him, smiling. "I said how well did
you
know her?"

"You turning fucking
NYPD Blue
here all of a sudden, Callahan?" Loner snorted. "So I knew Sandy. It sucks that something happened to her, that's all."

"Okay."

"Okay what?"

"Nothing, just okay."

"Mick, I think you're trying to get under my skin."

I stood up and extended my hand. "I wouldn't want to do that, big guy. Just curious."

Loner grabbed my hand, squeezed, and forced me back into the chair. He began to arm wrestle with a big, bright grin on his face. I responded, squeezing and pushing back, and for a few moments nothing moved. Sweat beaded on our foreheads; muscles trembled. We were both grinning, macho pretension in full bloom. I was vaguely aware that Tap had stopped cleaning up to watch.

After a long while, Loner gave a little wheezing grunt and shifted in his chair, but that was about all. Finally, when my arm was killing me and my fingers started going numb, I surrendered. The back of my wrist hit the table and sent bottles flying. I shook my hand and bowed. McDowell puffed up with surprised pride.

"You didn't let me do that, did you?" Loner asked.

"You got me fair and square."

Loner finished his beer. "Thanks." He belched. "We should have bet."

I paused at the bar. "Tap, you seen that kid Jerry from the motel?"

Tap nodded. "He was in here a while back, but he left."

"Thanks."

Loner waited until I had almost left the bar and then called out. "Mick?"

"Yeah?"

"You'll be joining me for a drink one of these days. Sooner or later. You can't last forever."

I shrugged. "You could be right," I said, "but not tonight."

The evening air was cool. I strolled past several shuttered buildings, both business and residential. Only a few houses still had lights; stubborn occupants still hoping something would change, perhaps waiting for death to take them. I heard a radio playing country music, then the baritone muttering of a television news anchor. A sudden silence would signal a long stretch of empty homes with storm-broken windows and boarded-up doorways. Many of the vacant lots still had FOR SALE signs, but the signs themselves were ancient now; fading letters on splintered boards, now hung from rusty chain. Most of the streetlights were dark, but there wasn't much left to see anyway.

Yeah, I had wanted to drink some beer. Seeing the intense, vapid expression on Loner McDowell's face; hearing that too-loud voice, the atmosphere of the tiny bar; rising to the challenge of the arm-wrestling. But when the urge came I use a process Hal Solomon called "think through the drink."

I walked and remembered: Going out, heart thudding, to examine the bumper of my car to be certain I hadn't hit anyone in a blackout. Waking up to learn that I'd gotten into an argument with a good friend; in the meaningless brawl that followed, something about a girl, I had broken the friend's nose and chipped one of his front teeth. Then being arrested for propositioning an undercover policewoman. Shame boiled my blood. I recalled losing my home, career, so-called friends, and having calls to former colleagues rebuffed. And then I remembered a beautiful young woman who died all alone on a bloody kitchen floor.

Having a beer didn't seem like such a good idea anymore.

Think through the drink
.

I stopped and looked up at the night sky. People who live in the cities are genuinely amazed to find out how much larger and brighter the stars seem out in the desert. Even I had almost forgotten. I inhaled the comforting scent of the sage and enjoyed the view. Hal was right, I'd never had it so good.

My drinking career lasted twelve years. I got sober after warrants for unpaid traffic tickets resulted in a "sentence" to 20 AA meetings. I sat in that room hating everyone and everything, but it didn't last. I began to identify with what I was hearing. In time, I came to accept that I had a disease.

I approached Hal Solomon for help after hearing him speak at a meeting in Beverly Hills. He agreed to walk me through my steps. Only later did I realize that Hal was a major stockholder in the media company that had just fired me. We both found the irony amusing.

A light breeze sang across the barren desert. It rolled a clenched fist of tumbleweed along the blacktop with a dry, scraping sound. I yawned and turned back toward the Saddleback motel.

In my room, I booted up the computer and found another E-mail from Jerry. After a short loading period, the screen turned green and a drunken leprechaun starting dancing around a pot of gold. It was a flash-animation e-card, expressing friendship and gratitude, "even if I did have to pay you." I saved it.

Next was Hal Solomon's response to my query:

Your question puts me in mind of a quotation from George Bernard Shaw, who wrote: 'The true joy in life is to be used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a selfish, feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.'

My answer is that you are ready.

You should go forth into the world and identify another noble cause to which you can dedicate yourself, i.e. do a mitzvah. Extend yourself at your earliest convenience.

As for myself, I must confess to a growing sense of boredom. I believe it is related directly to being retired and wealthy. Therefore, please inform me if and when my assistance, (intellectual, financial, or otherwise) is required. You may count on me, as always . . .

And remember that you are valued.

Hal.

Sunday Morning, 7:37 AM

"You know what I need you to do, right?"

We were in the motel office. I stood and motioned Jerry into the rickety chair behind the metal desk. My old, reliable IBM ThinkPad chirped happily and played a musical chord. "I use this one if you want to borrow it."

Jerry was amused. "Callahan, I'm the one who tracked your country ass down, remember? Shit, we traded E-mails for weeks. You think I need to use this wimpy little piece of crap?"

"I just thought maybe . . ."

"Do you even know what the term 'hacker' means?"

"Hey, I know you're good with computers," I said defensively. "But I thought you could use mine too, maybe as an extra or something."

"I'll use my own," Jerry said firmly. "Check this out."

He stood up, went to the back room and unlocked two deadbolts. The door swung open and Jerry waved at a gigantic collection of electronic apparatus. "Enter the 21st Century. Your laptop is to this gear what a Model T Ford is to the space station."

For the first time, I looked closely. I assumed his stuff was mostly stereo equipment, but I had seriously underestimated my friend's capabilities. I whistled. "What
is
all this?"

"Took me years," Jerry said, proudly. "Every time I fixed a computer I lifted a part or two and left used stuff in its place. Take this video card. I swiped it from a new Dell. I did the same thing with the memory, hard drives, and most of the peripherals." He touched a tall stack of electronics. "This is a state-of-the-art Pentium IV 1.5 megahertz system with 500 megs of ram running off a 64 megabyte G2 video card. I got me two 50 gigabyte firewire hard drives viewed on a ViewSonic 2l-inch monitor with a .24 dot pitch. Thus, the world is at our fingertips."

"I was afraid you would say that."

"Say what?"

"Whatever it was you said."

Jerry was getting excited. "These hick towns don't have DSL or a cable modem, right? So I have a two-way satellite that gives me 1.5 megs of bandwidth to upload and download. I use proxy servers routed from Puerto Rico, so I can't be traced if I go somewhere I shouldn't
be
going, you know? Since the U.S. basically owns Puerto Rico, I can gain access to all government, state, and local records."

"
All
of them?"

"It's not that hard, Mick. All DotGOV. Websites are networked out of Norfolk, and they give access to their employees. Since the level of information accessed depends on status, status levels are traded like baseball cards by the really good hackers. You just need to know what newsgroups to look on."

I sat down behind the desk. "You're amazing," I said. "How the hell did you learn all of this?"

"They have desktop computers in coffee shops and bookstores all over. You can rent by the hour. I just never had the kind of money it takes to buy stuff for myself until I started fixing people's gear instead of lifting cars. Then I eventually got this cool stash together. Impressed?"

I shook my head in admiration. "Absolutely, and now I'm going to put you to work. A friend of mine named Hal has serious money and good contacts. He will be helping us out from Europe." I gave him the E-mail address.

"Way cool," Jerry said. "You sure you're up for this, then?"

"You paid me the five bucks."

"That I did." Jerry spread his arms wide to indicate his gear was warming up. "And now I'm set to kick some serious ass."

"Okay," I said. "Forget checking for alibis, because damned near everyone in Dry Wells was in that park and her death happened in broad daylight. I think we need to look for people who might have had a motive."

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to find out how Lowell Palmer got rich. Also, give me detailed bios on Glenn Bass, Loner McDowell, Doc Langdon, also Bobby Sewell and his gang. Go into old newspaper articles from the local and state papers, all the public records, law enforcement and so on."

"I know the drill. Where are you going, Palmer's ranch?"

"Bingo. I'm going to grill Will Palmer and maybe see if I can stir up some trouble by acting like I know something." I turned in the doorway. "By the way, where the hell were you last night?"

Jerry looked sheepish. "I had a couple of beers and got lonesome, so I went out looking for Skanky. But I couldn't get her to sneak away with me."

"You're living dangerously."

"Yeah. That Mexican guy saw me, so I really had to haul ass. I came back, locked myself in, finished the beer and fell asleep in the office. Sorry."

"I think we each need to know where the other guy is at all times. And considering Bobby is one of our prime suspects, you'd best avoid Sewell and his gang from now on. Sorry Jerry, but that includes Skanky."

"There's something really weird going on around here, isn't there?"

A dead man with his hands tied behind his back and his fingertips sliced away qualifies as weird, all right
. I shoved the image aside. "I've just got a hunch, a gut feeling," I said, lying like a rug. "When I'm sure of something, you'll be the first to know. I'm taking my cell phone along so I can check in."