Aaron Steinmetz - Sandy Mantle 01 - Sleepy P.I. Page 2

  “You got the pamphlet I left you, right?”

  I glanced at the tri-folded paper on my desk, picked it up and showed it to her. I unfolded it and read, “‘Ten Steps to a Better Night’s Sleep. Step One: Lower External Stimulation.’ Would’ve thought I’d have done that by moving to Point Insertion.”

  “‘Sleepy P.I.’, you mean.”

  “Yeah, if DJ Smoothie has his way.” I slapped the pamphlet on my desk and tapped it with the palm of my hand saying, “I’m not getting my hopes up. But I’ll try my best to do what this thing says, all right?”

  “That’s all I ask. In the meantime, we’ve got a woman to keep alive,” Jenna said, rising from the chair. “Should I call the cops?”

  I nodded. “Fill Mitchell in on the details. Wanna keep him in the loop.”

  “Think the cops might be involved in this?” Jenna asked.

  I smirked. “Cops aren’t as corruptible as Hollywood and cheap novels would have you believe.” Believe me…I know.

  She interlaced her fingers across her skirt. “Should I cancel my date tonight?”

  I shook my head, waving it off. “Nah. Enjoy your dinner with what’s-his-name.”

  “Kevin.”

  “Whatever. Go out, stuff your faces, give him a through-the-pants hand-job under the table. He’s earned it.”

  “Will do,” Jenna replied with a smile, opening the door to my office, “and I’ll add that to the list when I sue your ass.”

  “And if you’re gonna kcuf him, make sure he wears a helmet. I don’t wanna lose you to maternity leave.”

  From the lobby, through the open door, she hollered, “I’ll ‘kcuf’ whom I want however which way I want. And speaking of cuffs…”

  “They’re in the cabinet by the water cooler.”

  “Thanks, Boss.”

  The ancient home in which I both lived and worked had a garage, a laughable structure claiming to hold two cars the same way a tent claims to hold two men. Thankfully I only had one truck I didn’t use. It was an enormous brown thing with a silver, metallic flatbed which was clearly aftermarket and probably ruined what little mileage the thing got anyway. But I loved it all the same. The locking storage boxes built into the flatbed used to hold my various weapons. Not anymore.

  I unplugged the battery tender, blew the dust off the handle and climbed inside. Driving isn’t a big necessity when everything in town is walking distance and you work out of your home. Or is it live at your work? I felt bad for the old thing, gathering dust in a garage, but at least it hadn’t given me any reason to be angry at it. Like every other time before, the monster roared to life with the first turn of the key. I wasn’t much for driving in Point Insertion, but if I was gonna be dealing with life or death, it was time to resurrect this old friend.

  And maybe one more.

  I leaned against the steering wheel, my chin on my hand and my eyes closed. I’d made it two years without firing a gun. Not even for sport, though the idea had crossed my mind when I saw some of the townsfolk driving through with their gun-racks and orange vests.

  I sighed, shook my head. Reached across the bench seat of my cab. Opened the glove box. There she was, my old friend. I sold my other guns. Couldn’t bear to get rid of this one. I slid her into my front pocket.

  A man trying to quit smoking will often carry a pack of cigarettes with him because, in his mind, he doesn’t have to smoke one. It’s just in his pocket. Nothing forcing him to smoke. It’s all up to him. But, sure as hell, when the chips are down and the stress is up and the world is calling for blood and sweat, that man with the cigarette won’t be the only thing smoking.

  The main strip of Point Insertion lasted about a mile, maybe less. The Campbell Estate was further down, beyond the radio station and its minuscule but adequate tower. I drove by the Lone-Screen Theater, by a small park alongside the police station. A temporary building with a glass front door meant to fill the need until a more permanent structure could be built, the police station was an afterthought with an office, and had been sitting there waiting to be replaced for seventeen years. I drove by it and then left the main strip of town.

  And there I saw the road to the Campbell Estate, a gravel road with fine white rocks pressed firm into the dirt surrounding them. Figure paving the road would have been cheaper than bringing in those rocks, but I guess Carson Campbell didn’t want to appear to have more than his fellow townsfolk who all had dirt roads leading to their houses. Figure the only person Carson Campbell was fooling was Carson Campbell. Figure, at the end of the day, he’s the only person he wanted to fool. I pulled my truck to a stop beside the dirt road, alongside Highway One. Might have taken the truck up the gravel road, except I saw something made me change my mind.

  The bush had been trampled on one side. Not much, but enough to tell me a person had blown through it very quickly. And recently. I climbed out of my truck and approached the bush nonchalantly, but keeping every sense perked for any unexpected movement. My revolver was in her favorite spot in my front pocket, and I felt an unexpected change in my demeanor just feeling her pressed against my thigh. The kill bug had bit my leg and I felt its venom heat my veins like a vaccination. I crept through the bush and followed the path I felt Myla Campbell would have taken the night before.

  Some trampled grass here, some disheveled leaves there: it doesn’t take much to track someone. And Myla wasn’t exactly trying to cover her tracks. A long impression in the ground told me she was in a full sprint at this point.

  She stumbled here, said a twisted root still feeling the sting of her leg yanking it against the ground. I re-buried the poor fellow best I could and it thanked me.

  After a few more minutes of careful searching I saw a broken branch waving me over. It told me Myla had blindly grabbed it in a desperate effort to maintain her balance. Poor girl must have been terrified, the branch said with a slightly southern drawl.

  I glanced around me attempting to estimate how close I was to the Campbell Estate. Couple hundred yards, though the dense foliage made it hard to tell. My feet were already wet to the shins and the morning coastal fog hadn’t quite cleared. Good thing I don’t mind the cold because, clearly, the cold doesn’t mind me.

  I spent another thirty minutes or so retracing Myla Campbell’s tracks. She left very distinctive footprints; high heels always did. It troubled me, though, the further along I went not finding any other tracks. A man in black had chased her along that very path and I saw no trace of him. Part of me hoped her fears were imagined, the presence of the man in black a simple trick of the shadows that scared her into the woods. Strangely, another part of me hoped her every fear was warranted. Oh how conflicted a man can become when he’s bored. He actually misses the violence. After about an hour of tracking, that part of me got its wish.

  It wasn’t much; a small scrap of fabric below a trampled bush. No doubt the owner of the fabric would have taken it with him to hide his tracks, had he been able to find it. I smirked. The very color he chose to hide himself in the dark made it impossible for him to hide his tracks. And the violent side of me smiled even wider. I continued my path through the woods toward the Campbell Estate.

  Her driver’s name was Toby. He was a nice fellow in his late thirties; I’d met him only once before at the theater, waiting outside, patient as a puppy waiting for his master to finish watching the movie. I’d had a hard time believing he could be the one threatening her life, even as I mentally earmarked him as a potential suspect earlier that day. Seeing the careful path the man in black had taken, I was confident he wasn’t the man I was looking for. Seeing Toby’s body beneath a dense layer of ferns, I cleared his name.

  One bullet in the head. Entry and exit wound. Probably from a distance. Not a lot of blood. This man had been killed elsewhere and left here. Myla Campbell’s man in black knew what he was doing. Least, that’s how I would have done it. And I was good at what I did.

  Mitchell was one of three officers in Sleepy P.I. Hmm, DJ Smoothie was
right about one thing: it’s fun to say, Sleepy P.I. Try it some time when you’re alone. I dare say officer Mitchell was the only good cop in Sleepy P.I. His predecessor should have retired years before and was nowhere to be found when Toby was killed. I later learned he’d skipped town for a spa at some mineral springs or something. Said he needed to relax and recharge or some nonsense. The younger one, Kohns – Mitchell’s protégé – should have stuck with paint-balling mailboxes as far as I was concerned. Fortunately for me, Mitchell was in his office when I walked in the station with pictures of Toby’s body.

  I saw Mitchell through the window of his office at his desk typing away with a phone to his ear. He glanced at me, raised a finger to have me wait outside, so I nodded and took a seat in front of the desk used by Kohns, who was probably getting baked in the bathroom. A radio was playing quietly. It had a cassette tape deck built into it and I saw the record button depressed, a cassette slowly rotating inside. How old was Kohns, and he was still taping the radio? I shook my head, leaned back and listened to the current song end, the radio-smooth voice of DJ Smoothie following: “That closes out another hour of Misty KSPI, smooth radio for Sleepy P.I.”

  DJ Smoothie adopted the term ‘Sleepy P.I.’ for Point Insertion about two months before. His efforts to rename the town might have worked had he not tried so hard to drop it into every single broadcast. Went and turned the town nickname into the town joke.

  “I’m DJ Smoothie reminding you to try our new watermelon flavored smoothie at the grocery store, now available.”

  It’s called Gateway Grocery, but nobody called it that, not even the store’s owner, who insisted on being called DJ Smoothie even when he was working the register with his fat employees. The man loved his smoothie machine.

  “We’ll be right back after these messages.”

  The musical punch that followed his voice made me cringe. “Every kcuffing time,” I muttered as Jenna’s voice came out of the desk radio speakers: “Are you sure your spouse is faithful? Do you need to find someone? Is your life in danger!? Call Sandy Mantle, Point Insertion’s most experienced private eye!”

  Never mind I was Point Insertion’s only private eye. I didn’t want her to do this. I think Jenna just wanted to hear her voice on the radio.

  “Remember: he won’t sleep ‘til your case is solved!”

  I let out a gravely groan as I reached across the desk and turned the volume knob to zero. I didn’t want her to do the billboard either; no surprise it featured a twenty-foot high image of Jenna in a bikini on the rocks. What that had to do with private investigating, I had no idea, but it shut her up about marketing ourselves.

  Mitchell finally waved me in, so I stood up and stepped into his office. Poor, young, balding Mitchell interlocked his fingers and said, “Okay, Sandy Mantle, Point Insertion’s most experienced private eye, you know more about this whole Myla Campbell incident than anyone else. Care to fill me in?”

  He was a decent guy. A bit sarcastic at times, but I couldn’t really blame him. I filled him in on the details of the case ending with the discovery of Toby’s body, and I watched his crest fall further and further with each new detail. By the end he was leaning against his desk rubbing his forehead in a way he’d probably be rubbing it the rest of his life muttering, “Why didn’t Myla Campbell come to me? No offense, Mantle, but you’re not the police.”

  I didn’t respond. Never cared for rhetorical questions but I respect their necessity with the weaker folk.

  “For that matter, why didn’t you come to me?”

  “I told Jenna to call you before I left.”

  “She did. She didn’t say anything about a dead driver.”

  “She didn’t know about a dead driver. I didn’t either ‘til about thirty minutes ago.”

  With a groan not dissimilar to my own groans when Jenna forced me out of bed that morning, Mitchell leaned back in his chair. “You didn’t believe her.”

  I shrugged. “I always take threats seriously.” With a resigning tilt of the head, I said, “but, yes, there was a part of me that thought she was running from shadows.”

  Mitchell stood. “Come on. We’ll need to call the Doc out to help us clean this up.”

  “Good luck getting him out of the house,” I replied. “Better off bringing one down from the Hamtons.”

  “Good idea. That’s where the body’s gonna go anyway. Does anyone else know about it?”

  “Only the person who pulled the trigger.”

  Step Two: Lower Internal Stimulation

  Mitchell was pulling his beat-up police car away from the station with me in the passenger’s seat. “Wanna grab some coffee before we head up there?”

  “No thanks,” I replied. “Trying to cut back on the, uh, internal stimulants.”

  Mitchell offered a perfunctory reply as he made no effort to stop for coffee on his own. Partially I was glad because I wanted this to be done and over with as soon as possible, but mostly I was glad because I really, really wanted a cup of coffee. Jenna’s ten-step program said no. And I really wanted to get some sleep.

  Looking back on that first day investigating Toby’s death, I can understand why it took so long to find the killer. Nobody had the right idea. Everybody made mistakes, and I was no exception. I forgot to tell Mitchell about the scrap of fabric I found. I didn’t think much of it at the time; figured it only confirmed Myla’s story about a pursuer in black. Turns out there was more to it after all. Had we given it more work we would have realized sooner the man in black was nowhere near Myla during her escape through the woods.

  Still, my mistake was minor compared to Mitchell’s. And it was such a simple mistake too. I suppose I made the same mistake myself, not thinking to look for the bullet that killed Toby. But up until this point, nobody thought finding the bullet was essential. And when I did finally find it and realize the significance of the thing, well, it was too late to save Mitchell.

  Hope you don’t mind.

  Once the sheriff, doctor and assorted note-takers finished their jobs, they left the scene of the crime, left me behind for my own examination. I was still about a hundred feet from the house and I wanted to make sure I covered Myla Campbell’s entire journey through the woods.

  As I trudged my way back toward the Campbell Estate, I kept my eyes open for any other scraps of clothing or trampled underbrush or dead drivers or footprints. I also kept track of my internal compass to keep myself from getting lost. After ten minutes of slow tracking I found myself breaking through the bushes at the edge of a carefully tended lawn. The Campbell Estate stood before me, two stories high, about a thousand miles long. Every window curtain was closed, every door shut; no one was walking around the estate, no cars parked in front. The whole place was in lock down. Smart girl. If she was really smart there would’ve been snipers on the roof, but you can’t ask for everything. I was just lucky she wasn’t dancing on the lawn with a bulls-eye painted on her chest.

  I approached the enormous wood double doors and rang the doorbell. It didn’t take long for a response, Myla Campbell’s voice, calling through the dead-bolted door: “Who is it?”

  “Sandy Mantle, Mrs. Campbell,” I replied. I saw the peephole briefly darken, then light up again. One front door opened just wide enough for me to enter.

  I stepped inside and saw Myla, who had not long before been dressed in a fine skirt and blouse looking, despite her disheveled appearance, quite beautiful. Her beauty was certainly still present, but her clothing had changed drastically. Her hair still wet, she was dressed in light blue sweat pants and a t-shirt that only barely hid her breasts from the world. Not that I was looking at her breasts. Not for very long, anyway.

  Besides, her eyes were red. “I guess you already know,” I said.

  Myla nodded. “I can’t believe it. Toby was such a nice man.”

  “Mrs. Campbell…”

  “Myla. Please.”

  “Okay, Myla, when was the last time you saw Toby?”

  “Last ni
ght when he was parking the car. He went into the garage and I didn’t see him come out. I thought he went out the back.”

  “And when did the man in black come after you?”

  “After midnight. I’d wonder if he was even real if it weren’t for the bruises.”

  “Oh, he’s real. I found this piece of fabric while I was looking around,” I said, pulling the black shard from my pocket.

  “That was from him,” Myla said.

  “I want you to keep your eyes open for anyone wearing a black shirt with a chunk missing from it.” I slid the fabric back into my pocket. “I doubt he’ll wear it again once he realizes it’s been damaged, but we may get lucky.”

  “I will,” Myla said, crossing her arms.

  “Is there anyone else here? Anyone you trust?”

  “When I told Carson about what happened, he told everyone to go home. He said he’s sending guards to keep me safe.”

  “When are they going to arrive?”

  “Sometime this afternoon.”

  I chewed on my bottom lip. I hate issues like this. My chance of finding the guy was higher at the beginning than any time later, but to leave her alone like this…

  “May I use your phone?” I asked.

  Jenna was on her way over about fifteen minutes later. It was about time I started putting her to work. The girl wasn’t without her uses, after all. She’d been in karate since grade school and could even fire a gun straight without too much hesitation. I wouldn’t put her up against the most finely tuned assassin, but she could certainly hold her own against some no-neck goon who was after Myla.

  Jenna arrived at the Estate in good time and I left her there with instructions to stay by Myla’s side until her guards arrived. I instructed Myla to keep the door shut and not let anyone but the guards in. Not even me. She insisted she’d know the guards when she’d see them so I split, walked back to the road making one more pass through the woods to make sure I missed nothing, walked back to the police station and my truck and I resumed my search for Myla’s would-be killer, optimistic I’d have good luck in the search.