Aaron Steinmetz - Sandy Mantle 01 - Sleepy P.I.

  Sleepy P.I.

  by Aaron Steinmetz

  Copyright © 2011 by Aaron Steinmetz. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. While the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

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  www.aaronsteinmetz.com

  Dedicated to Mom

  my first fan

  Step One: Lower External Stimulation

  Step Two: Lower Internal Stimulation

  Step Three: Try Some Natural Ways of Relaxing Your Body for Sleep

  Step Four: Avoid Overeating and Alcoholic Consumption Before Bedtime

  Step Five: Arrange Your Bedroom for Sleep

  Step Six: Determine if You Are Making Common Sleep Mistakes

  Step Seven: Determine What Issues Are Keeping You From Sleeping

  Step Eight: Once You Have Identified the Issues, Deal With Them

  Step Nine: Clear Out Your Worries and Concerns

  Step Ten: Consult a Physician

  When I first came to Point Insertion, I was a child in a teenager’s body. It was about thirty years ago when I was just starting out as a gilded assassin. I guess I don’t need to tell you I was good at what I did. Not many men get to say they started working as a hitman thirty years ago; not many get to say thirty days. It’s an ugly profession. That’s why I got out.

  I first came to Point Insertion thirty years ago, but I didn’t stay long. Work went fast and I was faster, gone before the blood had time to dry, off on my life of violence. Well paid violence, but violence all the same. Two years ago I came back.

  Not much changed in those twenty-eight years I was away. The grocery store with the peeling paint was still there, its paint still peeling, its beer still overpriced, its cashiers a little fatter. The post office next door did get a new coat of paint, though, and new doors. But as I walked along the wooden sidewalk glancing in the windows of the post office and examined all the golden doors holding back little envelopes and packages I could see the interior hadn’t changed much. I made my first kill there, in a corner near the back end of the building. Twenty-eight years before. I saw my reflection in the glass. Damn it goes by fast.

  Point Insertion hadn’t changed much in twenty-eight years but I sure as hell had. Three hundred and forty kills will put wrinkles on your face, let me tell you. That’s over a kill a month, but not by much. I’m really not that dangerous a person. Just prolific. And it’s made me a very wealthy man.

  The last few kills were the hardest. They were the kills that put me over the edge and sent me back to Point Insertion, back to the town where it all started so I could start again. The evergreen trees…that olfactory alpine sprawl towered over the town like nature’s skyscrapers as I strolled down the street the day I returned.

  As I passed the gray brick church at the end of the town’s only paved road – the gray brick church across the street from the entrance to the tunnels beneath Point Insertion – I reached a clearing in the trees and stared out at the ocean a hundred feet below the rocky cliffs. Point Insertion has a beach or two depending on the time of day, but not much in the way of sand. Not that the ocean’s warm enough to swim in, not this far north, but I didn’t mind then and I don’t mind now. At least in this part of the coast, California is east and the ocean is west. There’s actually a spot along the coastline where land is to the north and the ocean is south. I just can’t handle that.

  I sat on a rock overlooking the ocean that day, staring out at the lighthouse, watching the off-shore breeze blow frothy white waves dotting the ocean like stars, and I wondered where I would live in this town. I wondered how I would start a business as a private investigator in a town that didn’t even need a police station. I wondered how I would sleep again without seeing three hundred and forty faces staring at me with lifeless fish-eyes in the dark.

  Oh, but I eventually figured all that nonsense out. Minister Callum Grady from the gray brick church had a home he didn’t need anymore because he’d been living in the church to save money. Not a bad idea, I thought when the secretary slash minister’s wife handed me the deed. I paid cash, the church was safe from demolition for another year or two and that former minister’s home housed Sandy Mantle, private investigator for Point Insertion, a town that needs a private eye like a snake needs sandals. I didn’t need to go there, just like I didn’t need to start a private eye service in a sleepy coastal town near Highway One, the loneliest highway you’ll ever know. I didn’t need any of it. I wanted it. At forty-seven years old I wanted to simply slow down, relax, and never pull a trigger again.

  Silly me.

  Step One: Lower External Stimulation

  Two years after returning to Point Insertion I was working as the town’s only private investigator, I hadn’t killed anyone since showing up and I couldn’t have been happier, lying in bed, stretching my arms over my head, the morning sun slowly heating me from the outside in. I heard the front door lock turn over and the door open. Glancing at my clock, I wondered why Jenna insisted on opening the office so early.

  I rolled over, groaned and pressed my face into the pillow silently begging sleep to take me away for a few moments more, greedily drowsing with such reckless enthusiasm I only succeeded in waking myself up more. I heard her high-heeled shoes clicking across the wooden floors. She was in the lobby, probably rounding her desk to stick her purse in her desk drawer, the one with all the little stuffed animals she didn’t know I knew about.

  Her clicks would become muffled when she’d reach my carpeted office. She’d make a b-line for the bookshelf without hesitation. She was one of few people who knew how to open the bookshelf to get into my room: another is the fellow who helped me build it. Said I was crazy and paranoid to want to hide my bedroom behind a secret bookshelf door. He didn’t know I used to kill people for money. At least, he didn’t know at the time.

  Jenna’s footfalls became muffled and I knew it was over, the blissful, elusive sleep I’d so enjoyed. I heard the handle turn as she pulled forward the book to open the door. I kept my face buried in the pillow, my eyes closed as the door opened and I heard her walk in. “Come on, old man, it’s time to get up,” she said kicking the bed. “You’ve got a job to do.” I groaned in response, loud enough to find its way out of the pillow. “Cut the sass and get your ass out of bed. You’ve got a client waiting for you.”

  I rolled over. Jenna was wearing her hair down. Must have a date planned. She was young. I don’t think she was a teenager anymore, but not by much if she wasn’t. Her face said high school but her breasts said college, not that I paid all that much attention to her chest. Not when she insisted on waking me up at the crack of, well, ten every morning. “Who’s the client?” I asked, lying on my back in bed, one leg raised to disguise the morning delight.

  “Myla Campbell.”

  That got my attention. I stared at Jenna with wide eyes.

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “That Myla Campbell.”

  “Aw, hell,” I said, rolling over, throwing my legs over the edge of the bed.

  “I’ll keep her busy,” Jenna said, making a quick exit, though I doubt she cared much about keeping Mrs. Campbell occupied. She learned about a year ago if she doesn’t want to see a grown man naked, she shouldn’t be in the same room when I get out of bed. I don’t ask her to wake me up every morning, so I can’t be held responsible for what she finds in there.

  I allowed myself five minutes to get ready: sixty seconds for showering, si
xty for drying, a hundred and twenty for dressing and one final minute to step out of my bedroom, through my bookshelf door and situate myself behind my desk praying to fog-almighty she couldn’t smell me. She told me later she could, even across the desk, but being an upper-class, dignified lady she didn’t say anything.

  And wasn’t Myla Campbell dignified. I always wished she had kept her name. Never cared much for her husband’s name, but then I never really cared for her husband. Besides, Myla Rainn is a much better name than Myla Campbell.

  She was in her mid-forties and kept herself in shape – and the enmity of every other two-score woman in town – by jogging down the street every morning while her husband worked on his empire out in the Hamtons. No, not the Hamptons; that’s in New York. We have our own little version out here called Hamton, California that we all call The Hamtons. It’s where the rich people live. Carson Campbell did not live there. He was rich, but he lived with us in Point Insertion. He would have lived there with his wife but he was a descendant of the great Campbells who discovered water, or something. His predecessors may have changed the world, but Carson Campbell sold real estate to rich people. Nobody really cared much about that. Not even the former Myla Rainn.

  She walked into my office looking so unbelievably beautiful, I felt a bit angry by proxy for the other women in town. Jenna held the door open for her as Myla stepped in and sat in the chair before my desk. Turning her head slightly to the side, she said quietly, “Please close the door.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Campbell,” she replied.

  “Thank you, Jenna,” Myla said as Jenna shut the door.

  Normally I would have said something by then. I would have introduced myself, offered a cup of coffee. At the very least I would certainly have shaken her hand but something stopped me. You see, Myla Campbell is not just a beautiful woman, but she’s also one of the nicest women in town. Even the housewives of Point Insertion who were grinding their teeth at the way her buttocks seemed to be made for spandex running shorts had to admit it: whenever Myla Campbell smiled, the town got a little warmer. And she smiled a lot.

  Myla Campbell wasn’t smiling then. I could see the wrinkles on her bright blue blouse, the discrete but noticeable dirt stains on her skirt. She had tried to wash them off, but if you know what you’re looking for, you can see it. I didn’t need to ask her if everything was all right. Trouble was written all over her clothes.

  “I guess I don’t need to tell you I’m in danger, Mr. Mantle,” she said with a faded smile.

  Never did have much of a poker face.

  “Someone is trying to kill me,” Myla said with the placid voice of a woman staring in her grave.

  I nodded, leaned forward on my desk. “Coffee?”

  “Please.”

  I nodded, pushed a button on the phone and asked Jenna to bring in the coffee. I leaned back in my chair staring at the bookshelf slash bedroom door wondering if I was the best person to keep Mrs. Campbell alive. As Jenna placed a cup of coffee on my desk, I rolled my head around feeling the aging joints pop in their usual places. It wasn’t that I wanted to see Mrs. Campbell die; I had a condition to consider.

  I turned back to Myla as she took a sip of coffee and waited until Jenna closed the door behind her. “As I’m sure you know from the billboard, I am a private investigator. Unfortunately, I’m not much of a bodyguard,” I said, lying through my teeth. Yes, sometimes assassins do protection jobs. In my experience, they’re the most deadly.

  “I understand,” Myla said nodding, “but you do have experience with firearms, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding, “but there’s more to protection than knowing how to fire a gun.”

  “But that’s more than I know,” Myla replied, “and four eyes are better than two. I need to know who wants me dead and I need to put a stop to it.”

  I grimaced. “As I’m sure you also know from the billboard,” I continued, “I don’t sleep until your case is closed.”

  With a half-smile Myla nodded. “Yes, it’s a cute slogan…”

  “It’s more than just a slogan, I’m afraid.” Leaning back in my chair, I crossed my arms and said, “I…how do I explain this?” I still don’t know how to describe my condition without making myself seem nuts. “I have a psychological condition that I don’t understand myself. If I start a job, if I take a case, I cannot sleep until the case is closed. I’ve had it for years, since I started working as a private eye.”

  Since I started working as an assassin, really. It started when I left Point Insertion for the first time. I strangled the fellow in the post office, tossed the body over the cliff at high tide and skipped town. When I took my next job across the country – a four-day job taking out some lady for HatcherTech Industries – I didn’t sleep once until the job was done. And every job from then on was the same. Once I was up for twelve days straight. It wasn’t pretty. At around day six I started smelling avocado. All the time, constantly, the smell of avocado, the smell of guacamole, maybe even a touch of cilantro. Thought I’d lost my mind. Figured I lost it in Point Insertion on the cliffs above the ocean as I dumped a body into the water. Part of me came back to Point Insertion with the hope of finding my mind again. No luck. Thankfully the jobs in Point Insertion haven’t been all that complex or time consuming. And, yes, there have been some jobs here in pee-eye. Nothing that would keep this little business running were I not already independently wealthy, but nobody seems to care where my money comes from. I think they’re just glad I’m spending it here.

  “So you’re saying,” Myla Campbell-Should-Be-Rainn said, “if you take my case, you don’t think you’ll sleep until it’s closed.”

  “Yes, I doubt I’ll sleep. I’m always a little optimistic with each new case, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were, well, me.” I took a deep breath. Sleep or no sleep, I liked Myla Campbell. “But don’t worry, it’s my problem. I won’t let anyone kill you.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mantle.”

  “Sandy.”

  “Thank you, Sandy.” She smirked. “Or shall I call you Sandman?”

  Ah, that stung. I tried not to let it show but, well, no poker face.

  “I’m sorry,” Myla said with a worried look. “Should I not call you that?”

  I waved it off as convincingly as possible. “There’s some history with that nickname I’d rather not go into. Just a lot of tish from my past.”

  “Tish?”

  I smiled. “When I was a kid my mother would beat me if I used profanity. So I started saying swear words backwards. It stuck.”

  “Did it work?”

  “As far as I know. I mean, I never called my mother a tchib or anything. Least, not to her face. But the grown-ups pretty well left me alone when ‘tish’ started flying out of my mouth.”

  Myla Campbell nodded, bemused, but slightly amused as well. “Shouldn’t it be something like, tih-hiss.”

  “Oh now that’s just silly.”

  Myla Campbell would have been safer had she stayed by my side, but in the interest of privacy – both hers and mine – and maintaining some semblance of normalcy in the face of potential danger, Mrs. Campbell returned to her estate, a two story manor hidden from the peons of Point Insertion by trees. Lots and lots of trees. She was confident she’d be safe there, even though she hadn’t a clue who was trying to kill her.

  The night before she hadn’t been so confident, running through the woods from a knife-wielding man in black. She hadn’t been so sure of her safety sleeping in her car, her driver missing, the mud drying on her clothes. But somewhere between what she would come to call the second-worst night of her life and that morning she regained enough composure to return home and let me get started. I didn’t know where this would-be killer had come from. Was he a danger from without, or within?

  Still, there were more people outside her manor than in it, and the ones inside, she insisted, were more trustworthy than anyone else, so I let her return home in her over-sized black Mercedes driven
by the other driver. The trustworthy one, evidently. The lucky one, perhaps?

  I was leaning back in my desk chair, staring at the ceiling when Jenna stepped in my office. “Am I allowed to know what’s going on?” she asked.

  I wasn’t looking at her, but I pointed at her still. “Jenna, you cannot tell anyone what this case is about.”

  “Not a soul,” Jenna replied.

  I turned from the ceiling to her as she sat in my chair. I leaned on my elbows against the desk. “I’m serious about this one, Jenna, lives hang in the balance.”

  “Mine, or Mrs. Campbell’s?”

  “If this is as bad I think it might be…” I didn’t need to continue. Jenna’s eyes were wide with youthful disbelief. “I haven’t handled a case like this in a while. But one thing I’ve learned is when a grown woman tells you someone is trying to kill her, you take her seriously.”

  “That explains the mud on her skirt.”

  “It was some guy in black clothes, chased her through the woods last night. She didn’t know who he was.” Should I have let her go home? Would a professional private eye, one who actually knew what he was doing, have let her leave? These were questions I couldn’t answer then and still can’t answer now. Why should an assassin make a good gumshoe? I tried to keep my betraying poker face from telling Jenna over there how kcuffing terrified I was for her. The little line between her eyebrows told me I was failing. “I’ll start with the driver. Myla said the guy disappeared shortly before the man in black showed up, still hasn’t found him yet.”

  “You’re not gonna sleep until this is done, right?”

  I sighed. “Probably not. Maybe I’m doing it to myself, maybe not. All I know is, I shouldn’t get my hopes up.”