Three Shot Burst
Page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
A Selection of Titles by Phillip DePoy
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Selection of Titles by Phillip DePoy
The Foggy Moscowitz Series
COLD FLORIDA*
THREE SHOT BURST*
The Fever Devilin Series
THE DEVIL’S HEARTH
THE WITCH’S GRAVE
A MINISTER’S GHOST
A WIDOW’S CURSE
THE DRIFTER’S WHEEL
A CORPSE’S NIGHTMARE
DECEMBER’S THORN
* available from Severn House
THREE SHOT BURST
The Foggy Moscowitz series
Phillip DePoy
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This first world edition published 2016
in Great Britain and 2017 in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2017 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD
eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2016 by Phillip DePoy.
The right of Phillip DePoy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8663-7 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-766-1 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-833-9 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described
for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are
fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,
Stirlingshire, Scotland.
ONE
Florida, 1975
David Waters ordered a gin martini, no olives, at Mary’s Shallow Grave, just after six in the evening. He said he needed to calm his nerves. Anyone who knew David would have agreed, he was a very nervous person – if by nervous you actually meant crazy. He saw a kid named Lena in a corner booth, sipping a Coca-Cola. He sauntered over, leaned in, and said something to her. Without a word, Lena stood up and shot him three times in the chest. David was lying next to a mess of broken glass and blood when I came in, and he was just about as dead as he was going to get. No one seemed concerned for him at all. Everyone had gathered around Lena to make sure she was all right. That’s because Lena had no parents, no fixed abode, and she was fourteen years old.
That’s why they called me.
‘Foggy,’ Detective Baxter said when he saw me push through the door. ‘Good.’
‘You rang?’ I mumbled.
He lifted his head in the direction of the kid. She was still sitting in the booth; Mary, the proprietress, was sitting beside her. They weren’t talking.
I sauntered over and Mary stood up.
‘You want anything?’ she asked softly, headed back toward the bar.
‘No, thanks,’ I told her, eyes on Lena.
I sat down across from the kid. She was dressed in a tee shirt that said ‘Ennui’ on it, a loose-fitting pair of ratty jeans, and slick black cowboy boots. I was dressed in a nice mohair suit, a smart black tie, and Florsheims. We doubtless made something of an odd pair in Fry’s Bay, Florida, home of the slowest moving cultural evolution in the Western Hemisphere.
Mary’s Shallow Grave, all dark wood and stained floors, was at least fifty years old and looked a hundred. The size of a very large living room, it had been built in the 1920s when Fry’s Bay was little more than a private deep sea fishing destination for the bloated swells – guys who subsequently lost everything when the stock market crashed. The crash landed hard on Fry’s Bay, and the town had never recovered. By 1974, it was the best example of hopelessness I ever wanted to know.
‘I’m Foggy Moscowitz,’ I began.
‘I know who you are,’ Lena told me calmly. ‘You’re from something called Child Protective Services. They told me you were coming. Apparently they think I’m a child who needs protection. We can skip ahead. I have a tested IQ of 157, and I carry a gun because I have no parents. I’m fourteen years old, and I’ve already graduated high school. If I had any cash at all, I’d be in college already. I’m not bragging. I just want you to know who you’re talking to.’
‘Got it. I’m talking to a brainy Dead End Kid.’
She blinked. ‘A what?’
‘Oh,’ I said, eyes wide, ‘so I guess Miss I-have-a-tested-IQ-of-157 doesn’t know everything. It just so happens that Leo Gorcey was a sort of hero of mine.’
‘Who?’ She leaned forward.
‘Leo Gorcey was the leader of the Dead End Kids,’ I said. ‘They were tough guys in a bunch of old movies. I saw them on Saturday mornings at the local cinema where I grew up.’
‘Tough guys,’ she repeated.
‘The toughest,’ I confirmed. ‘Like you.’
‘Damn straight.’ She leaned back. ‘So what were you doing out at the movies on Shabbat?’
‘You assume because my name is Moscowitz and I have a New York accent that I’m a Jew?’
‘Partly,’ she admitted, ‘but mostly my clue was when you came in and Mary said, “There he is, he’ll take care of you. He’s a Jew but he’s nice.”’
I glanced over at Mary disapprovingly.
‘So you see what I have to put up with around here,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she commiserated. ‘I grew up smart. The last thing you want to be in a small town is smart.’
‘Well.’ I narrowed my eyes. ‘You shot David Waters. That wasn’t especially smart.’
‘No choice.’ She said it cold as ice.
‘You shot him three times.’
‘I pulled once, the gun shot him three times. It’s a Heckler and Koch VP70. Anyway, the cops have it now.’
The VP70 was a 9mm machine pistol with the three shot burst system and a polymer frame. It had just come out recently, in 1970, and she was right: a single pump would have fired three rounds. But it was a strange weapon for a kid to have, especially since it was double action only, which made the trigger pull fairly heavy.
Nevertheless, I decided to play along with her supposition that she was the brightest bulb in the joint, so rather than quiz her about it, I tried a little interpersonal psychology.
‘You know that the VP stands for Volkspistole,’ I said, ‘which is German. It means—’
‘The people’s pistol,’ she interrupted. ‘Like Volkswagen is the people’s car.’
‘Perhaps you can imagine my discomfort with the German industrial system in general,’ I allowed, ‘given that you’ve already surmised my ethnicity.’
‘Would you like me better if I told you that I took it off a Neo-Nazi?’
‘I like you just fine as it is,’ I said, ‘but I probably would like you better if you hadn’t killed a member of the top oil-rich Seminole family in the state. No matter what gun you used.’
‘I said I didn’t have a choice,’ she snapped. ‘He was drunk out of his mind, and I was scared.’
‘You don’t look scared to me,’ I assessed.
She glanced over at the dead body. ‘I’m not now.’
‘Yeah, well – right. Now he’s dead.’
‘He threatened me, and I feared for my life,’ she intoned, like she’d heard it on television.
‘Uh huh,’ I said, elbows on the table, ‘that’s pretty much what Detective Baxter told me when he called. I just wanted to hear about it from you.’
‘Why?’
‘So I could see the look in your eye when you said it,’ I told her.
‘And?’ she asked, her chin jutted my direction in a clear display of defiance.
‘And I found out what I needed to know.’ I stood. ‘Come on.’
She resisted.
‘Come on where?’ She stuck to her seat. ‘What did you find out?’
‘You’re not scared of anything,’ I answered, glancing down at the dead body. ‘Least of all that drunken rich kid. You plugged him because of something he said to you. I just have to find out what that was. Until I do, you’re coming with me.’
‘I’m not coming with you, in fact,’ she insisted, grabbing the edge of the table in front of her.
‘You can’t stay here in the bar,’ I reasoned, ‘and I don’t want Officer Baxter to take you to jail. We have no appropriate juvenile facility here in our little corner of paradise, so you’re coming with me. You can come kicking and screaming, or you can come laughing and singing. But you’re going to come with me.’
She took in a fairly deep breath.
‘Well,’ she told me philosophically, ‘that’s life, that’s fate, that’s the ordained way. Your path is your path no matter what you do.’
‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about,’ I told her, ‘but if it makes it any easier for me to get you to walk a couple of blocks to my place, I’m all for it.’
‘I’m reading the Alan Watts book on Zen,’ she allowed, easing herself out of the booth. ‘This might be a sort of object lesson for me in that regard.’
‘Once again, no idea,’ I assured her. ‘But I’m happy to see at least the illusion of cooperation.’
‘“The illusion of cooperation,”’ she repeated. ‘You know, Foggy. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’
I glanced down at her. ‘Are you quoting Casablanca to me?’
‘I am.’
‘And you’re Bogart?’
‘Yes.’
I smiled. ‘OK. Just so I know where I stand. Claude Raines is pretty great, too, you know.’
‘He was perfect in The Invisible Man.’
‘Agreed.’ I caught Baxter’s eye. ‘Let’s go speak with the local constabulary.’
I headed toward the policeman by the front door; Lena followed.
‘I’m going to take the kid to my place for tonight,’ I said to Baxter. ‘We’ll figure out where to go after that – in the morning, right?’
He shrugged. ‘OK, but you understand what kind of monster storm there’s going to be in the morning when David’s father hears about this.’
‘There’s not a person within a hundred miles of where we’re standing,’ I responded, ‘who doesn’t think David Waters got what was coming to him one way or another.’
Baxter looked over at the dead body. ‘Yeah. But when it’s family – you know.’
‘Rich Seminole family, you mean,’ I grumbled.
‘Yes,’ he insisted, a little too heartily. ‘Rich family.’
‘Isn’t the phrase “rich Seminole” an oxymoron?’ Lena interjected.
‘The Waters family members all have oil, land, and money,’ I explained, ‘as long as this new outfit Exxon doesn’t manage to take it away from them.’
‘My money’s on the corporation,’ Lena mumbled. ‘Those bastards usually get everything, don’t they? In the end?’
I caught Baxter’s eye and said, ‘She’s a tough guy.’
‘I’m a Dead End Kid,’ she corrected.
‘A what?’ Baxter asked.
Lena gave me a smile. ‘You see what I have to put up with around here?’
Then, from out of nowhere, Mary growled, ‘Where you taking that kid, Foggy?’
I turned around to see her standing behind the bar, hair piled on top of her head like a dingy mop. The circles under her eyes, in that light, were darker than her bruised plum eye shadow, and the Kool dangling from her thin lips was more ash than tobacco.
‘It’s OK, Mary,’ I assured her. ‘She’s coming to my place tonight.’
Mary closed her eyes for a second, then she took the smoke out of her mouth and crushed it into an ash tray on the bar.
‘Good,’ she said softly. ‘Because she ain’t about to go to jail.’
‘No,’ I assured her, ‘she’s not.’
‘You a good man, Foggy,’ she told me.
That settled, Lena and I took off. We found ourselves outside just as the December sun was beginning to set over the ocean. There was a preponderance of mauve.
‘Pretty,’ I said, nodding toward nature’s beauty.
‘Yeah,’ Lena mumbled, ‘you know what makes those colors so intense? Air pollution. In thirty or forty years it’ll be so bad that you’ll need scuba gear to take a walk on the street in this town.’
‘I see.’ I looked down at her. ‘But what I want you to know is that even out of something awful in life, you can still get a little beauty, like this sunset.’
‘And what I want you to know,’ she said, eyes narrow, ‘is that life stinks, no matter how you light it up.’
TWO
My place in Fry’s Bay is not so bad. It’s a quiet apartment in a 1940s building. There are only three other apartments. Two are owned by the relatively wealthy, and they call them condos, although they are in no way different from my month-to-month rental. And they’re almost always empty. The fourth place is occupied by the building’s owner, Evelyn. She’s a very nice ninety-year-old dame who bought it when it was new and never let go. The front of the building faces a nice garden, and you can always find Evelyn out there fussing with the flora. The back of the building looks out onto the ocean, and that’s why the old girl never let go: it’s beautiful. Very peaceful. A far cry from my Aunt Shayna’s place in Brooklyn where I mostly lived until I absconded to Florida.
‘Jesus, Foggy,’ Lena said when I opened the front door and she got a load of the view, ‘nice place!’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
She skipped over to the sliding glass doors that opened onto the patio.
‘You can see the ocean.’
‘That I can. You hungry?’
‘You cooking?’
‘Don’t sound so skeptical,’ I told her. ‘I scramble a mean egg.’
‘I could have eggs.’ She co
llapsed onto the sofa. ‘This is my bed?’
‘Right.’ I headed for the kitchenette.
She bounced off the sofa and beat me to it. ‘You’re going to get your nice suit all messed up.’
‘I’m very meticulous in the kitchen,’ I asserted.
‘Shove over,’ she commanded. ‘I’ll make us an omelet.’
‘Oh you will?’
She opened the fridge. ‘You got onions, peppers – what is that? Havarti?’
‘Get out of my refrigerator,’ I told her.
‘You get out of my kitchen,’ she grinned. ‘I’m trying to make an omelet here.’
‘And just what would you know about making an omelet?’ I demanded.
‘Take a seat in the living room,’ she said very compellingly, ‘put your feet up, have a drink, and you’ll find out. And you won’t have to worry about your nice threads.’
‘You’re very bossy,’ I observed.
‘It’s cute coming from a person my age,’ she explained. ‘I figure I have about three more years of that kind of cute before it gets to be annoying.’
‘Then what, wise guy?’
‘Then,’ she said, shoving my arm to hasten my egress, ‘I’ll have to change my tune. Now go! Oh! Speaking of tunes, put on some music.’
I abandoned the kitchenette, took off my coat, put Stardust on the stereo, and sat on the sofa.
‘You’re a menace, you know?’ I told her. ‘You’ve caused a real mess in this town. And now I have to figure it out.’
‘Yeah.’ She smiled but didn’t look up from what she was doing. ‘I took to you right away also. I love this music.’
‘Good.’ I had to smile myself. ‘Glad we got all that settled. So. Are you going to tell me what David Waters said to you tonight, or am I going to have to wait?’
‘Don’t spoil it, Sherlock,’ she complained. ‘Things were going so well. Hey! You have mushrooms. This is going to be a very tasty dish.’