Southern Cross
Copyright © 2013 by Jen Blood
ISBN:
978-0-9851447-7-7
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer,
who may quote brief passages in review.
This is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover Design by Travis Pennington
www.probookcovers.com
For more information on the Erin Solomon series, visit
www.erinsolomon.com
For Ruth and Mariah
Who taught me to celebrate my
independent spirit, embrace my creative side,
and, above all, never forget
the healing power of a good belly laugh.
Every girl should be blessed
with the gift of such sassy, classy, wonderfully weird aunts.
SOUTHERN CROSS
An Erin Solomon Mystery
By Jen Blood
OF CONTENTS
“Repent,”
a voice whispered in the darkness.
Wyatt
Durham was on his hands and knees. Pebbles from the dusty ground dug into his
palms. He lowered his head like a bull just hit with a cattle prod, trying to
get his wits back. Someone stood beside him, a heavy hand between his shoulder
blades to keep him down. Wyatt tried to speak, but his voice didn’t work.
Nothing
worked.
“Repent,”
the voice said again, lower this time.
There
was dried blood under Wyatt’s fingernails. The smell of something sweet and
cloying in the air, like a jar of wet pennies: more blood.
“The
goat,” he whispered. He’d come for the goat. Mae was home waiting for him. The
kids were gone for the night.
Put the poor thing down and come on home,
darlin’,
she’d said to him before he left.
The
man beside him knelt, his mouth close to Wyatt’s ear. “One more chance, Doc.
The end’s already nigh. Make your peace.”
Wyatt
closed his eyes, his body getting heavier. His elbows buckled. A hand came at
him from behind, pushing him gently to the ground, tender as Mae on those sweet
nights when they lay together. It was all familiar—nearly forgotten but still
there, somewhere at the back of his mind, from days gone by and a life best left
behind.
Repent.
JUSTICE FIRST
DIGGS
|
Every
summer from twelve on up, I abandoned the ocean breezes and cool nights of
coastal Maine for the wet swelter of western Kentucky, where the Durham family provided refuge from my stormy Maine home. When I was fifteen, Wyatt Durham
and I were playing baseball one overcooked July day when I said something he
saw as over the line about his little sister. He didn’t waste his breath
explaining his views on the subject, though. Instead, he belted me in the
stomach with a Louisville Slugger. It brought me to my knees, tears in my eyes,
and for two days afterward every lungful of air burned going down.
That’s
the closest I can come to an analogy for what I felt when Wyatt’s wife Mae
called me twenty-five years later, and told me my oldest friend was dead.
I
landed in Louisville at eight a.m. on a Tuesday in March, after sixteen hours
traveling by boat, bike, bus, and plane to get there. Mae had tracked me down
in the middle of a two-month trek in Costa Rica, where I was doing an in-depth
piece on the surf scene at Guiones. I still wasn’t sure how she’d found me
since I’d left no forwarding address and told no one where I was headed, but I
had a feeling Erin Solomon had something to do with it.
I’ve
known Solomon since I mentored her at a Maine rag called
The Downeast
Daily
Tribune
when she was fifteen. Despite the fact that I was in my
mid-twenties at the time, we struck up a close and possibly ill-advised
friendship. In the seventeen years since, that friendship has morphed into
something far more difficult to define. If anyone could find me, it was
Solomon.
Mae
would neither confirm nor deny; she just asked me to come to Kentucky.
I
came.
There
was no one waiting for me when I landed—I’d already told Mae I’d rent a car, so
she didn’t have something else to worry about while she prepared to bury the
man she’d loved since grade school. Still in board shorts and sandals, I
watched the natives while I waited for baggage claim to regurgitate my duffel.
A
gray-haired man in Dockers and a sweater vest embraced a pretty, fair-skinned
woman a head shorter and maybe a decade younger than him. They kissed, his hand
at the soft slope of her neck as he pulled her closer. It wasn’t like some
teenage tonsil-hockey kiss, with too much tongue and that self-conscious need
the very young have to prove their virility as publicly as possible. It was
more intimate than that; more electrified. The man’s arm settled naturally
around her shoulders when they parted. Their heads were tipped close as they
walked away, hip to hip, and I could hear her laughter and see the light in his
eyes as they left the airport.
I
retrieved my duffel. Despite three marriages, one of them to the very same
little sister I’d taken a baseball bat to the gut for as a teenager, there was
only one person I could imagine greeting me in the airport like that.
Not
for the first time—or even the hundredth—I thought of Solomon. And not for the
first time—or the hundredth—I pushed that thought out of my head.
As I
made for the door, I felt the now-familiar weight of someone’s eyes on my back.
I turned and scanned the crowd. A slow crawl of fear ran up my spine when a
thin man with a receding hairline and angular features caught my eye and then
ducked into the crowd before I could get a clear picture of him. He wore a
black trench coat and carried an expensive leather briefcase. For a full thirty
seconds of blind panic, I watched his progress in the crowd. The latest
incoming flight was broadcast over the PA system; the man paused, listening. He
turned once more, giving me an unobstructed view of his face.
I
didn’t recognize him.
The
slow crawl of fear faded, but it hardly disappeared.
Six
months before, a nameless ghoul threatened me at gunpoint while Solomon sat
tied twenty feet away, both of us helpless to do a damned thing. That moment
changed something fundamental about the way I carried myself. Since then, I’d
spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder.
True,
the traveler with the trench coat and the briefcase wasn’t that nameless ghoul.
That didn’t change what I knew to be true, though: he was out there somewhere.
And he was watching us.
From
baggage claim, I went straight to the rental place to pick up the car I’d
reserved, still trying to re-acclimate to civilization. A spit-shined,
fresh-faced kid of no more than twenty greeted me at the counter. His hair was
cut short. His tie was perfectly centered. I hadn’t bathed in two days, hadn’t
shaved for considerably longer, and it turned out that my forty-year-old bones
didn’t recover from wipeouts nearly as well as they had a decade ago.
My
shiny young friend didn’t look fazed, though.
“I
reserved a rental,” I said. “The name’s Daniel Diggins.” I pulled out my wallet
to retrieve the confirmation code I’d scrawled on a napkin.
The
kid blinked at me, his smile faltering. “Uh—I’m sorry, sir…”
I
frowned and pushed the napkin toward him. “They’ve already charged my card—I’ve
got the confirmation number right there. I don’t care what you give me. It
doesn’t have to be what I reserved.”
“Well,
no, sir—we have cars. But you already picked up yours.”
I
stared at him, eyebrows raised. “Then why am I here?”
“Not
you,” he amended. “But your girlf—” He stopped, sensing that I didn’t know what
the hell he was talking about. “She said you were meeting at the airport,” he
insisted. “Red hair? Little thing… real pretty?” He sighed in relief, pointing
toward the door. “There.”
I
turned around. Erin Solomon herself pushed the door open and crossed the threshold.
Her hair was cropped shorter than I’d seen it since she was in high school, her
fair skin a shade paler than I remembered thanks to the long Maine winter. She
wore boot-cut jeans and a striped jersey, oversized sunglasses pushed back on
her head. All the air left the room.
“Hey,
ace,” she said after a moment. “Need a lift?”
<><><>
“No,”
I said the moment we were outside.
“What
do you mean, ‘no’?” she asked. “I just thought you could use some moral
support.”
“Nope.
I’m fine, thanks.” The rental—
my
rental, a white Ford Focus—was idling
in front of the rental office. Solomon’s second-in-command, Einstein, had his
fuzzy white head out the window, his whole body wagging.
“Look,
I know we haven’t talked in awhile—”
“Six
months, actually,” I said. “We haven’t talked in six months, except for one
panicked phone call in the middle of the night in September, when you’d had a
bad dream and needed to hear my voice. You can’t just show up like this—”
“I
wasn’t trying to piss you off,” she said, more quietly than I’d expected.
“You’re right: I have no right to be here. I was trying to help. If I’d just
lost someone important, you’d be there. You always have been. I was just trying
to do the same.”
I
didn’t say anything. She shrugged, looking awkward and miserable. “I’ll go if
you really don’t want me here.”
I
should have told her to do exactly that—as much for her sake as mine. It wasn’t
like she didn’t deserve it. But the fact was, the idea of returning to my old
Kentucky home and all the Kentucky folk I’d left behind—including an ex-wife
who, last time I checked, hated my guts—in order to bury my childhood friend
was only slightly more appealing than being run down by a freight train. Twice.
And
it really was good to see her.
Solomon
chewed her lip. I was caught suddenly by the memory of luminescent green eyes
and the feel of her body pressed to mine over the course of forty-eight hours
last summer, when we were running for our lives and sleeping in one another’s
arms and the only thing that mattered was survival. And her.
“You’re
a pain in the ass,” I said.
“I
know that. Do you want me to leave?”
I
scratched my neck, digging in hard enough to feel it. Breathed deep. And took a
step toward her. “Come here.”
She
hesitated, a shadow of something damned close to fear flickering in her eyes.
When she reached me, I pushed a lock of hair from her forehead and pulled her
into my arms. She held on tight, her head nestled just below my chin. After a
few seconds, she pulled back, her eyes wet. I smiled.
“Damn,
Solomon… Are you
crying
?”
She
smacked me in the gut, brushing the tears away with the back of her hand as she
tried to regain her composure. “No, smartass—you’re just so ripe it brought
tears to my eyes. Don’t they have showers in Costa Rica?”
It
was cool and clear when we left the airport. The grass was green. The sky was
blue. According to a local with whom I’d flown, it had been a mild winter and
now, in March, spring had taken hold of Kentucky and showed no signs of letting
go. I took the wheel of the rental without the aid of GPS or Rand-McNally and
kept my foot heavy on the accelerator, rediscovering the Bluegrass State like the half-forgotten lyric of a once-favorite song.
Once
we hit I-64, I glanced at Solomon when she wasn’t paying attention, searching
for signs that she’d fallen apart without me. There were none. There was,
however, a thin scar running along the side of her right wrist, another remnant
from our forty-eight hours of hell in August. She caught me looking and covered
the scar with her left hand uncomfortably.
“How’s
the wrist?” I asked.
“Better,”
she said. “More or less. I just had another surgery about a month ago.”
“And
that makes…?”
“Three.”
Three
surgeries. Six months since we’d seen each other last. Another memory flashed
through my mind: Solomon ripping off the splint I’d made and pulling herself
out of our cave prison to safety; shouting down to me as I bled on the ground
below.
I’m not leaving you.
I
sighed. It sounded wearier than it should have, considering I’d just gotten
back from two months of hanging out on the beach. We fell back into silence.
“So,
what did Mae tell you?” she finally asked.
I
frowned. I still hadn’t wrapped my head around the information I’d gotten so
far on that count. “It’s a little bizarre,” I said.
“An understatement
if ever I heard one,” she agreed. “Did she give you details?”
“Wyatt
disappeared on March second—a Saturday night,” I said, reciting the scant facts
I’d been given. “His truck was still at the site of his last appointment, but
there was no sign of him. He was found on the side of the highway late
Wednesday night with an injection mark in his neck and no other sign of
physical trauma, wearing a suit Mae had never seen before. And no shoes.”
“That’s
what I got, too,” she said. “So weird. And someone like Wyatt… I mean, who
didn’t like the guy? He was a country vet. James Herriot in a cowboy hat. Who
murders James Herriot?”
“Apparently,
someone.”
We
fell silent again. I realized after a few minutes that I wasn’t the only one
sneaking sideways glances. I caught her eventually and quirked an eyebrow.
“What?”
I asked.
“You
look good.”
“The
last time you saw me, we’d just spent two days running for our lives with a
madman on our heels. It’s not hard to look good when that’s your yardstick.” I
paused. “You sound surprised.”
“No…
not exactly.” I waited patiently, eyes on the road, while she sorted through
what she wanted to say. “Actually, I wasn’t sure what I’d find when your plane
landed,” she conceded.
Between
the ages of ten and eighteen, Solomon spent most of her free time cleaning up
after her mother—who was a stellar surgeon by day, and the town drunk by night.
Then she followed that up with a nice little stint looking after me in her
twenties, before I got clean four years ago. Old habits die hard.
“Ah,”
I said. “So there’s the real reason you showed up today: still playing
designated driver after all these years.”
“You
quit your day job, dumped your girlfriend, and took off for Costa Rica with a bunch of extras from
The Endless Summer
. Is it really so crazy for
me to think you’d be doing lines off some beach bunny’s backside?”
I
laughed out loud. “Jesus, Solomon. It was a surf trip, not spring break. I was
with a bunch of forty-year-old guys—hell, half of them had their wives and kids
with them. Someday, I’m taking you on one of these trips. Your perception of
the lifestyle is just bizarre.”
She
didn’t say anything to that. Translation: Solomon wasn’t free to think about
surf trips with me anymore.
“How’s
Juarez?” I asked, taking the silence as sufficient segue. Juarez was Jack
Juarez, God’s gift to the FBI. Tall and lean and vaguely Cuban. And nice,
actually. The bastard.