MICHAEL LISTER'S FIRST THREE SERIES NOVELS: POWER IN THE BLOOD, THE BIG GOODBYE, THUNDER BEACH

by Michael Lister

  “So the fact that I’m here almost guarantees that my husband is cheating.”

  “Do you love your husband?”

  “Very much.”

  “If he is cheating, are you going to leave him?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then don’t do this.”

  “I’ve got to,” she said.

  “Why? Why do you want to know?”

  “I love my husband, Mr. Riley.”

  “So don’t—”

  “Like a father,” she said. “I’m not in love with him—not like a wife. I care about him a great deal. I owe him . . . well, everything. But if I knew he had someone . . .”

  She trailed off, but seemed to need to say more, so I waited.

  “It would be a great comfort to me.”

  Chapter 4

  One of the advantages of tailing someone you know intimately is you can often anticipate where she’s going and get there before she does. When Lauren turned onto Beck in the direction of St. Andrews, I knew she was headed to Mattie’s Tavern to meet her husband for lunch. When she pulled into the parking lot, I was waiting for her.

  Located at the corner of 12th Street and Beck Avenue in St. Andrews, Mattie’s Tavern was famous for its fried chicken, steaks, seafood, and hush puppies, but it wasn’t the food the Lewises came for as much as all the potential voters in such close proximity.

  As she made her way through the parking lot, I ducked behind a big brown Pontiac Streamline Station Wagon. When she went inside, I waited a few moments, then followed, coming up behind her in time to see the hostess ushering her past those waiting in line and escorting her to a table near the window where her husband, Harry, was already eating a salad.

  Backing behind the bar, I became aware of a fluttering sensation in my chest. It took me a moment to realize it was something like happiness—a feeling I had grown unaccustomed to. I was happy just to be back in the shadows of her life again, and as much as I hated myself for that, I hated her even more.

  The sound of Peggy Lee singing "The Way You Look Tonight" was coming from a juke box next to an empty dance floor.

  Since Harry Lewis had announced his bid to be mayor, he and Lauren had taken every opportunity to be seen together in public. Side by side they smiled, shook hands, and spoke briefly but intimately to every one of their thousands of best friends.

  With an unsettling sense of déjà vu, I recalled watching Harry before, the extravagance of his banker’s lifestyle, the leisure of his banker’s schedule, and the way his groveling underlings catered to his every whim—including his mistress, Martha, a bookkeeper twice as old and half as attractive Lauren.

  Martha provided Lauren and I with the justification we needed to nurture our budding attraction—which we did with the wounded intensity of the wronged and the righteous indignation of the innocent, without the slightest sense of irony or hypocrisy.

  With a bittersweet smile, I remembered how I had been so happy to discover her that I sent Martha flowers the day after I first caught she and Harry together.

  What began as revenge, became a profound love and an intoxicating passion. Soon, Harry wasn’t part of our equation any longer, and eventually, what Lauren was doing had nothing to do with him and everything to do with me—or so she had led me to believe at the time.

  Standing there watching them together, I realized I was supposed to be scanning the joint for a lowlife. As I turned, a small waitress was looking up at me through large glasses.

  “Can I help you, mister?” she asked.

  “Where’s the restroom?”

  She pointed toward it, her eyebrows raised, even as her eyes narrowed. I had to walk right past it to get where I was now.

  “Must’ve missed it when I came in.”

  “Must’ve,” she said, then waited ’til I walked away.

  Splashing some water on my face, I avoided the small mirror above the sink. I didn’t need it to know that joining the dark circles and fine lines, the old desperation had returned. I could feel it. The last thing I wanted to do was see it.

  As I looked away, patting my face, Ray walked through the door. At first, he looked surprised to see me, though I knew he had followed me out here, but then I saw what true surprise looked like when Harry Lewis walked in behind him.

  “Well, Ray Parker,” Harry said, grabbing his hand and giving it three good pumps, “how are you pal?”

  How the hell do they know each other?

  “Just fine, Mr. Lewis,” Ray said, though at sixty he was nearly as old as Lewis. “How are you?”

  “Be okay if I could get Howell off my heels,” he said, making his way over to a toilet and unzipping his fly.

  Harry’s gray hair was thinner and more wispy than I remembered, and though his face had become pink and puffy, his eyes were just as blue.

  “How is the race goin’?” Ray asked.

  “Heatin’ up,” Harry said. “Heatin’ up. I hope I can count on your support and . . .” He looked over at me.

  “I’m sorry,” Ray said. “This is my partner, Jimmy Riley. I don’t think you ever met him.”

  Harry studied me for a moment and I felt like the sweaty, twitching guy in a police lineup.

  His round face was spider webbed with broken blood vessels and deepening lines, and I wondered again what Lauren was doing with this sad old man.

  But the truth was, I knew. It wasn’t about money, though she spent a hell of a lot of it. It wasn’t about fidelity. It wasn’t that he was a good husband—he didn’t act like a husband at all, but an indulgent grandfather. It had nothing to do with sex—according to her they hadn’t had it in years. And even back when they, did they never had much. It wasn’t even about love, though I didn’t doubt that they both loved each other as best they could. It was about loyalty, about what she thought she owed him, and maybe what she really did.

  “No. I don’t guess I ever did. Nice to meet you, Jimmy my boy. I’d shake your hand but mine’s shaking my dick at the moment.” Laughing, he turned back around to Ray. “I may have another job for y’all. Come by the bank one day this week or stop by campaign headquarters this weekend.”

  Just then a large man with a thick neck in a suit too small for him entered the tiny room a few minutes after his chest.

  “Everything okay, Mr. Lewis?”

  “Just fine, Walt. Just fine. Ray, Jimmy, this is Cliff Walton. He helps with security. Walt, this is Ray Parker and Jimmy . . .”

  “Riley,” I said.

  “Riley, that’s right. Ray used to work for the Pinkertons. They’ll probably wind up helping us with certain matters before the campaign is over.”

  Walt wasn’t happy to hear this, but only let it show a moment.

  “They’ll come in handy with Howell,” Lewis added.

  Frank Howell was Lewis’s opposition in a closely contested mayoral race. Panama City’s wartime boom with Tyndall Field, the naval section base, and Wainwright Shipyard made it a place of power, and both men hungered for piece of it—or maybe the whole damn pie.

  A few minutes later when we walked out of the bathroom, Lauren was standing there waiting for Harry. I came out first and when she saw me, her eyes grew wide and alarmed, but quickly shrunk back into dark pools that lacked recognition as Harry appeared behind me.

  “Darling, this is Raymond Parker and Jimmy Riley,” Lewis said. “They may be helping with some security during the campaign.”

  She extended her hand to each of us and said, “I’m Lauren. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Haven’t we met somewhere before?” I asked.

  She had extended her right hand, and having to shake it with my left was awkward and unnatural. I gripped it tightly and didn’t let go.

  For just a moment she narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips, but then smiled and said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe you just have one of those faces,” I said.

  Instinctively, she reached up to ensure her hair was still covering her burns.
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br />   Pain and guilt gripped my heart. I hadn’t meant her scars, and I felt sick to know she thought I had.

  “That must be it,” she said, her injured eyes glistening.

  Harry was already chatting up another potential voter and missed most of what was going on between me and his wife.

  “I didn’t mean your—”

  “Forget it,” she said, shaking her head.

  Ray grabbed me by the arm and began ushering me away.

  “It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Lewis,” I said.

  Chapter 5

  “Suppose you tell me how you know Harry Lewis,” I said.

  My voice was hard and flat, anger like static sizzling at its edges. I had never spoken to Ray this way before, but even if it got me canned on the spot, I couldn’t stop.

  “He hired me to follow his wife a while back.”

  “When?”

  It wasn’t so much a question as a demand. I was out of my precinct, and it’d probably cost me plenty, but I didn’t care—never did when Lauren was involved.

  “Eight months ago, a year, maybe. I’m not sure exactly. Not long after you got shot.”

  We were walking along the marina on St. Andrews Bay out behind the restaurant, the whish of the wind off the water, the metallic clanging of riggings, and the shrieks of gulls in our ears.

  “I knew you’d worked for her before,” he continued, “and I always suspected a personal relationship developed, so . . .”

  Though old enough to be my dad—I was twenty-seven and he had to be nearly double that—Ray was the closest thing to a friend I had. His wisdom and insight had not only made me a better person, but saved me from more than a little self-destructive behavior. It’s why I had kept Lauren from him. I hadn’t wanted to be saved from her.

  “So you took a case for our agency without me knowing,” I said.

  The truth was, it was Ray’s agency. I just worked there. But I couldn’t let a little thing like the truth get in the way of my outrage. I was sore as hell and had my cables all crossed up.

  “I thought I was doing you a favor,” he said. “You couldn’t have worked it anyway, but the truth is, fella, you weren’t in any condition to work anything at the time.”

  He was right. I hadn’t been. It wasn’t just my injuries either, my mind had jumped its rails. And the way I was handling all of this now showed how little that part of my condition had improved.

  The rocking waters of the bay made a slapping sound as they struck the hulls of the boats moored in the marina. It was rhythmic, and provided a beat for our conversation.

  “Why’d Harry want her followed?” I asked.

  “Same as all the others. He thought the little woman was stepping out on him.”

  “Was she?”

  “Why so anxious to dive off the dock for this dame, Jimmy? Maybe she’s as swell as you think she is, maybe she ain’t, but she ain’t worth taking the big plunge for. No girl is.”

  I took in some air. It was acrid, thick with warmth and humidity, the sharp smell of fish and brine penetrating my nostrils.

  “Was she?” I asked again.

  “I don’t know. Pulled me off the case before I had a chance to find out for sure. Said he was an old fool to have ever thought such a horrible thing about his little angel, but the next week he declared his intention to run for mayor, so . . . he gave us plenty of lettuce for our . . . ah, discretion, and you, me, and July haven’t missed a meal since.”

  “You never saw her with anyone?”

  “You gotta get clear of this thing my boy. I hate to see you—”

  “Just keep dealing.”

  “The lady’s careful. I didn’t have time to find who was who and what was what before Harry put the kibosh on the whole operation.”

  I thought about it for a moment.

  “What’d she want this morning?” he asked.

  “To know if I’d been following her.”

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “You think Lewis hired someone else?”

  I shrugged. “Could be a jilted lover.”

  “Well, it’s not our concern. You told her you couldn’t take her case, didn’t you?”

  “No case. Just wanted to know if I was following her.”

  “So you two were . . .”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Jesus, Jimmy. Tell me you ain’t gonna let some scarred-up two-bit broad that happened to marry well turn you all silly again.”

  I shook my head.

  “You sure?”

  “Her or any other,” I said. “I’m impervious.”

  He raised his eyebrows and laughed. “All that reading’s got you talking funny, fella.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “She’s not a temptation. She’s nothing.”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” he said, “but I can’t afford to have some love-sick sap selling out my agency.”

  “Won’t happen,” I said.

  “You sure? Sounds to me like she’s still got her hooks in you but deep. Maybe you should take some time . . .”

  My greatest fear was that Ray would let me go, that his charity would run out, he’d begin to see me as too much of a liability and give me the ole heave-ho, call me a casualty of a war I never got to fight in.

  “Ray, I swear it,” I said, sounding desperate. “Everything’s jake. There’s nothing—”

  “I don’t know. You sound a little too—”

  “Listen to me, partner,” I said. “It’s not just that I won’t do anything. I can’t. I’m no use to women, and I got no use for them.”

  He smirked and let out a harsh little laugh. It said he knew better. “Now you’re just bein’ silly. Some time would do you good, soldier.”

  “No, really.”

  “Just looking out for you. Who else’s gonna do it?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to have to tell him, not ever, but nothing else seemed to be working.

  “Ray,” I said. “I meant what I said. I’m impervious to women—especially Lauren Lewis. It’s no good. Trust me.”

  “How can I? Look how you’re already—”

  “Because,” I said, then paused to take a breath, “my arm wasn’t the only thing injured when I got shot up.”

  Chapter 6

  “I saw Lauren Lewis today,” I said.

  Ann Everett nodded slowly, and I could tell she was attempting to keep the concern out of her expression.

  “It’s a small town,” she said. “I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”

  “We move in slightly different circles,” I said.

  She smiled.

  Ann Everett didn’t look like a psychologist—at least not how I pictured them. She reminded me of a co-star in a movie, attractive enough, but forgettable—a character actor, never a leading lady. She had short blonde hair, smallish green eyes, and black rimmed glasses.

  When I had reached her office, a small house on Grace Avenue, I had asked her if we could take a walk, and we were now strolling around the quiet streets of downtown in the soft tea rose glow of evening.

  “How’d you feel when you saw her?”

  “I thought I wouldn’t feel anything . . .”

  “But you did?”

  I nodded.

  I was happy to be outside, away from her small office where we had discussed so many painful and shameful memories.

  When I first came to her, shortly after getting shot, she had asked if she could record our sessions. She was doing a study about the effects of losing a limb on servicemen, and though I had been injured at home as a cop instead of overseas as a soldier, my experience was far more recent than most of the men she got the chance to interview. I had agreed, but always felt uneasy about it, and even after I quit the cops and she stopped making the recordings, I was never able to completely relax in that room.

  “Do you mean . . .” She trailed off, and I saw her eyes move down my body.

  I shook my head.

 
; “Like what then?”

  I thought about it, gauging how much I should reveal, the lies I was telling myself of far greater concern than any I’d tell her.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I know you, Jimmy. I know you’ve thought about it. Don’t get cagey with me.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  The warm evening air was damp with moisture, and we both had a light sheen on our faces. Above us the Dixie Sherman, the only high-rise in the area, towered over all the other buildings, its form growing less defined against the darkening sky.

  “I don’t know. I felt a lot. I didn’t write anything down.”

  “Where’d you see her? What happened?”

  I told her.

  “She hired you to find out who’s following her?”

  “No, I’m doing it as a friend.”

  “When’d you two become friends?” she asked.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t. She asked you as a friend?”

  “No,” I said, “but by making me aware of the situation she knew what I’d do.”

  “So she didn’t ask you, but she wants you to?”

  “You saying she doesn’t?”

  “I’m not saying anything. I’m asking you. What was it she said that made you think she wanted you to follow her?”

  “She told me not to,” I said.

  In the distance, people stumbled out of a joint on the corner in a cloud of smoke, their loud voices and laughter startling in the quiet. From within, the faint, soothing sounds of the Andrews Sisters could be heard like the muffled music of a neighbor’s radio.

  “And that made you think she did?”

  “You’d have to know her,” I said. “She knew what she was doing.”

  “But do you?”

  “She knew when she walked into my office that if she told me someone was following her I’d stop him.”

  “That may be, but I’m not concerned about her knowing what you would do as much as what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”

  I had nothing for that.

  “Is it possible she really did just think you were following her?”