Leighton Jones Mysteries Box Set

by N. M. Brown

  The Rooster was a dive bar, but in a good way, with feisty staff, honest food, and hardworking regulars, who were welcoming to the lonely young officer. More than that, it was a connection to his lost past – when he had first met Heather, and the world had still been good.

  On the rare occasions in recent years when Leighton had stopped in at the Rooster, he found that it was unchanged. It was as if it had remained locked in time, unchanged through the years – he sat at the bar and felt he had somehow travelled back in time. He would sip at his beer, enjoying the seductive feeling he could step out of the door into the past and drive home to his previous house on Maple Street where Heather would be bathing their baby daughter.

  In such moments, it was all Leighton could do to stop himself from sobbing into his beer glass. For this reason, the Rooster was more than some random venue; it was a conduit to his lost past, and the only place he would like to raise a glass to the end of his career.

  Unfortunately, Chief Gretsch liked to stage-manage all the Oceanside Police station social events – even to the point of arranging uplifting background music – and the Rooster didn’t fit with his idea of a good time. He liked to choose a clean venue he could book solely for the event. That way, there would be little risk of his carefully rehearsed speech being interrupted by catcalls from any cynical retired cops or members of the public.

  Leighton pushed all thoughts of the party from his mind as he decided to leave the station. He chose to exit via reception. Normally detectives would use the staff exit at the rear of the building, but because he was using both hands to carry the carton, Leighton opted for the public area which had automatic doors.

  As he walked towards the front desk, he spotted a girl leaning onto the counter. She was in her twenties and making what looked like an emotional plea to Janine, the reception officer.

  ‘I’m telling you, I know,’ she said, speaking through the hole in the Plexiglas.

  ‘Well, it’s probably just anxiety,’ Janine said, ‘but I’ll take your details and we can register your friend as a missing person.’

  As he passed by the desk on his way to the automatic doors, Leighton offered the desk officer a quick smile and raised an eyebrow knowingly.

  It was a warm afternoon and a slight haze from the ocean hung in the air. Leighton liked it like that – finding something clean and optimistic in the quality of the light. Somewhere overhead, a helicopter was droning out over the sparkling Pacific.

  Stepping around to the side of the building, Leighton opened his car and deposited his box of memories on the passenger seat. He walked around the rear of the vehicle and climbed into the driver’s side. Sliding the key into the ignition, he did not turn on the engine. For a moment, he simply held on to the steering wheel and stared into the past, as if in some way, given the right conditions, he could put the car in gear and drive towards it. Despite the light and heat of the day, Leighton’s internal vision was consumed by a dark stretch of wet highway and the bitter stench of burning rubber.

  The memory of the sirens in his memory merged with the wail of a cruiser leaving the station behind him. Leighton blinked the vision away, turned on the engine, and rolled smoothly out of the station car park.

  It was then, as he turned into Mission Avenue and was about to accelerate, that Leighton noticed the girl he had seen earlier at the reception desk. She was sitting on a park bench across from the station, staring at her feet, but her hunched posture told the nearly-retired detective that she felt utterly defeated.

  Leighton checked his mirror, pulled his car alongside the kerbside, and got out.

  As he walked across the lawn towards the girl, the driver of a BMW, who was irritated at the location of Leighton’s car, honked his horn and began shouting abuse at him. Without turning around, Leighton withdrew his badge and held it backward. The BMW driver fell silent and drove off, revving his engine as he went.

  ‘Can I help you, miss?’ Leighton asked from a comfortable distance.

  ‘What?’ She blinked and wiped her eyes in embarrassment.

  ‘My name is Leighton Jones, I’m a detective.’ He turned the badge around so she could see it, and moved a tentative step closer to her. ‘I overheard you speaking to my colleague at reception.’

  ‘For all the good that did,’ the girl sniffed and rubbed at one eye, smudging her eyeliner into a bruise.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Leighton persisted.

  ‘The stupid woman at the desk didn’t believe me.’

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down, miss?’

  He took a seat next to the girl but was careful to maintain a non-threatening distance from her. He could see by her folded arms she was already reluctant to trust him.

  ‘Were you reporting a crime back there at the desk?’

  ‘Trying to.’ The girl wiped again at her smudged eye make-up and looked wearily at the detective’s face.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the girl shrugged. ‘I was supposed to meet my friend yesterday and she didn’t show up.’ She leaned forward slightly and held her face in her hands. ‘Have you ever had a feeling something just wasn’t right?’

  ‘Many times – comes with the job. So, this friend didn’t show up.’

  ‘I know how it sounds,’ she sighed, looking at the ground. ‘I’m not a total idiot, but something’s not right.’

  ‘Look, miss, it is miss, isn’t it?’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘Well, miss, people go missing all the time. Most of them just have a change of plan and forget to tell anyone. On occasion, they forget by accident; mostly, it’s a choice. Some are runaways, some are lost, but they almost always show up again.'

  ‘This is different.’

  ‘Okay,’ Leighton spoke slowly. ‘Tell me what happened.’ He mentally produced a notepad. It was a visual technique he had used for years. All too often, witnesses would clam up when an investigating officer started writing down details. So he created a strategy to get around this. Instead of a physical pad, he would imagine a black leather notepad, and open it to a clean white page and record the details in his mind as he spoke to the witness. Then, in the privacy of his car, he would commit the information to paper.

  ‘I arranged to meet my friend off the bus yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Yesterday?’ Leighton relaxed. In his head, he closed his notepad. There was nothing to worry about in this type of case. ‘Who is your friend?’ he asked.

  ‘Laurie… Laurie Taylor. She’s a college friend from Barstow – well, from near to Barstow.’

  Leighton suppressed a flicker of emotion. Most of the older officers associated the town of Barstow with one of their colleagues, who had raped and murdered a young woman there back in the 1980s. He had been sentenced to ninety years but died in jail. The association was just a trace memory – nothing more.

  ‘And where were you meant to meet this friend?’

  ‘At the bus station, but she didn’t show up,’ the woman breathed in shakily, trying to contain her tears. ‘And I know that’s nothing major, but it’s the other stuff that’s wrong.’

  ‘What other stuff?’ Leighton produced a neat handkerchief and gave it to the girl.

  ‘She told me she had booked a ticket on some new bus company. She was pleased because it was a cheap ticket.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘She sent a text message to my cell phone.’

  ‘Could she have changed her mind?’

  ‘Maybe, I guess.’ The young woman’s voice took on a doubtful tone.

  ‘Well, have you tried calling her?’

  ‘I did at the bus station. Her phone rang a couple of times, then cut out.’

  ‘Okay. What’s your name?’

  ‘Victoria Reiner – Vicki.’

  ‘Well, if I’m honest, Vicki, it all sounds pretty normal to me. You might find that in a couple of days she gets in touch.’

  ‘When I got home, I checked the bus company’s website, but it doesn’t exist.’

/>   ‘Maybe your friend made it up. Perhaps she was a bit strapped for cash and invented the company.’

  ‘But I saw the bus come into the terminal. The doors opened, but she never got off.’

  ‘Could you have been mistaken? I mean, there are hundreds of buses coming through there every hour, and I know from experience a worried mind can get confused.’

  ‘You think I’m being stupid, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’ Leighton smiled. ‘You’re just being a good friend.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m starting to doubt myself too.’

  ‘Miss, I’m going to give you a card with my number on it.’ Leighton reached into his jacket pocket and handed the girl a white card with neat text printed on both sides.

  ‘That’s my office number at the top, and my cell phone number is on the back. If your friend gets in touch in a couple of days’ time – as she most probably will – well, then you can just go ahead and toss that card in the trash, but if you still don’t hear anything, give me a call.’

  ‘Thank you for this,’ Vicki said, as she clasped her hands between her knees. ‘I know I could be wrong.’

  ‘Well,’ Leighton said as he stood up and brushed at nothing on his trouser legs, ‘if you’re not, we can get this passed on to the Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit and they can get the ball rolling. Okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks, I am.’

  ‘Okay, good day to you miss,’ Leighton said with a genuine smile, and turned and walked away.

  As he got back into his Ford, Leighton felt a sense of purpose he had not known for many years. It seemed somehow timely that one of his final duties as a working police officer would be to help reassure a worried member of the public. He smiled sympathetically at the petty worries of youth and recalled a quote from Mark Twain about how most of the troubles he had known in his life had never happened.

  Pulling back out into the boulevard, the detective imagined that, over the next few days, the young woman would finally be reunited with her friend, and perhaps the two of them would laugh over a couple of clinking Mojitos. Maybe the young woman would even speak fondly of the friendly old police officer who had rightly assured her everything would turn out fine. If that turned out to be the case, then maybe Leighton could finally be the type of person he had always failed to be. He could almost be a good guy. Driving home on that warm afternoon, Leighton pushed a cassette into tape player on the dashboard – it had cost him two hundred dollars to have the CD system removed. The sweet sound of Son House playing “Delta Blues” filled the car. Leighton began to drum his hands rhythmically on the wheel. As he sunk into the sanctuary of the music, he was blissfully unaware that his cosy vision of the future could not be further from the truth.

  Chapter Six

  Anthony Morrelli could not believe his luck. Most weekends he would head to the bar for its 11.00am opening time, blow his wages far too quickly and end up getting sent home in a cab before early evening. Tonight, however, he had paced himself and lasted the entire day. Having arrived at Scotty’s in the late afternoon, he had been fed, got drunk, and spent his cab money, and yet felt a vague sense of accomplishment. With no cash or options, and with the warped wisdom of drunkenness, he decided to stagger unsteadily home along the dark, dusty road leading to town.

  Scotty’s Bar was a hacienda-style place four miles out of Laughlin, Nevada. It was off the beaten track, but to Anthony - and a few other regular patrons- it was worth the journey. The beer was cheap, the waitresses were hot, the burritos were big enough to keep you full for a day and a half, but best of all, no asshole tourists ever came out here. Tourists – or fuckheads, as he affectionately liked to call them – were the bane of Anthony’s life. His day job down in Laughlin involved renting jet skis and motor boats to idiots who wanted to piss about on the river. Most of them couldn’t fit into a life vest or, in some cases, a boat.

  “Don’t you have anything bigger?” they would whine day after mind-numbing day. He had even gone as far as buying in a few extra-large personal fucking flotation devices, which resolved part of the problem, but the boats were still designed for reasonably fit people, so he often ended up having to assist as they squeezed their fat asses in and out of the vessels.

  It was a hot night and as he wandered along the desolate roadside, Anthony’s feet kicked up the dust. In the sky above him, the stars were clear and an occasional plane would blink a trail towards Vegas. One previous evening, after a day of drinking, he had been walking unsteadily back down to Laughlin when a neat black triangle had blocked out the stars overhead as it silently crossed the sky. Anthony had stood with his neck craned watching it, feeling like he was in some Spielberg movie. He imagined for a moment a blinding light would fasten onto his body and spirit him off to another world. But then, as the angular shape moved away from him, he saw the orange glow of the stealth plane’s two afterburners.

  He had made the long journey back to town on one other previous occasion, and that time he had been accompanied by a guy called Trey Evans. Trey was a small guy and a big drinker. Anthony reckoned he was probably somewhere in his late forties, but it was hard to be sure. He usually sat at the end of the bar, dressed head-to-toe in faded denim, and would often be the last customer there when it closed. Usually, he would be driven back to town by Marianne – one of the more compassionate barmaids. There was nothing romantic about the arrangement – everyone knew Marianne lived in Bullhead City with another woman in a civil partnership. However, one occasion where Trey’s hands started to pay her unwanted attention, and another where he vomited on her passenger seat, was enough to end Marianne’s generosity. After that, he was required to book a cab or take the long walk.

  On the April night Anthony had walked back with Trey the weather had been colder, and they had walked briskly to stay ahead of the frost settling on the desert around them. The fact both men had someone to talk to about baseball, the price of gas, and asshole tourists, made the journey pass quickly.

  As they reached town at about 3.00am, the men were bonded in drunken accomplishment. They shook hands and agreed they would repeat their journey the following weekend.

  But that journey never happened. Anthony had been laid up in bed after eating some bad prawns, and the furthest he journeyed all weekend was from his bed to the bathroom. The next time he was in Scottie’s, he looked for Trey at the end of the bar, but his space was occupied by a group of three women sharing glass jugs of cocktails.

  When he asked Marianne if she had seen the small man, she rubbed her temple and said he’d been in the previous weekend and made his own way home alone.

  Anthony hadn’t seen him in the bar in the following months either, and so he figured the journey out of town was perhaps not worth it without the promise of a free ride home.

  Shambling through the dark night, Anthony began singing various rock songs to cheer himself up. At one point, his tuneless murmur was interrupted by the startling sound of a snake’s rattle coming from the road up ahead. Anthony stopped dead, and spread the fingers on both his hands. He looked like a man who had wandered blindly into a field of landmines. Anthony may have been drunk, but he still knew a bite from a rattler out here, in the middle of nowhere, would mean serious trouble. The creature fell momentarily silent, masking its location. Breathing carefully, Anthony leaned forward and peered into the gloom. He could see the vague change in tone from the roadside to the sandy scrub, but nothing more than that.

  From somewhere in the darkness he heard the rattle, like a crazed maraca. The chilling sound came from somewhere just in front of him, possibly within striking distance. Anthony let out an involuntary yelp and leaped backward. His survival instinct overpowered his rational mind and he ran to the side of the road, then hurried a few metres ahead.

  For several minutes, Anthony had walked quickly, imagining if he slowed down, the rattler would somehow catch up with him to take deadly revenge on him for stepping i
nto its hunting ground.

  After half an hour of moving at a decreasing pace, Anthony decided that walking to town had probably not been such a great idea after all. He was ravenous; his feet were hot and sore, with the first sting of a blister on his heel starting to cut through his drunkenness. He looked over his shoulder in the hope of seeing a car to flag down, but there was nothing except the indistinct grey ribbon of road stretching away from him.

  Eventually, a glow on the horizon swelled to reveal an approaching car. A smile crept across Anthony’s face, and he began to wave his arms wildly in the direction of the approaching vehicle. In his mind, he was already anticipating getting back home to his trailer and microwaving some frozen pizza. Not only did the car not slow down, it accelerated and drifted to the opposite side of the road to Anthony.

  ‘Bastard!’ he shouted as the tail lights faded into the distance.

  He wandered on for several more minutes before the urge to urinate sent him to the edge of the road. He unzipped and sighed as his urine hissed on the arid sand. He shook and zipped up, then began his solitary wander along the deserted road once more. By the time the bus appeared on the horizon, Anthony’s attention was lost in a haze of fatigue. He was simply counting his steps in groups of ten. Eventually, the growling engine sound was too loud to ignore.

  At first, Anthony thought the low groan was emanating from a 747 rising out of Vegas, but he turned around to see bright lights on the horizon. His next thought was it could be a truck delivering cargo or fuel through the night, but as he peered into the darkness, Anthony Morrelli smiled. It was a bus.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said. He began to wave his arm back and forth.

  As the bus approached, Anthony held his arm up to his eyes, shielding them from the fierce lights. The bus jolted to a stop beside him and shuddered from the vibration of the engine. The doors expelled a loud hiss and then slammed open.

  Without waiting for an invite, Anthony leapt aboard and climbed the two steps to face the driver.