Liquid Smoke

by Jeff Shelby

  Private eye Noah Braddock has finally found peace in his once tumultuous relationship with Detective Liz Santangelo and has called a tentative truce with his alcoholic mother, Carolina. So when lawyer Darcy Gill demands that he look into a hopeless death row case, he’s more interested in catching some waves before San Diego’s rare winter weather takes hold. Then Darcy plays her trump card: the man scheduled to die—convicted of killing two men in cold blood—is the father Noah never knew

  LIQUID SMOKE

  Jeff Shelby

  The Last Day of February

  I wondered how it had come to this.

  No. That wasn’t right.

  I knew exactly how it had come to this.

  Lightning shattered the sky and raked the black surface of the ocean.

  The rain spilling out from above hit my face and body like a shower as I stood on my patio, soaking me and the duffel bag slung over my shoulder.

  The water stung the cut above my eye and grew the bloody stain on my shirt.

  I knew that I wouldn’t ever stand on this patio again, stare at this view again, live in this home again.

  Thunder rolled off the Pacific like it was coming through a megaphone, rattling the windows and doors of all the homes on the boardwalk. The rain picked up velocity, splashing into the puddles on the ground.

  I wiped the water from my eyes and took another look, making sure that all of it—my home, the view, this world I had created for myself—would never leave my memory.

  I knew that it wouldn’t. And I knew that the memories of the last month wouldn’t leave me either.

  Things like that don’t leave you. They inhabit you. Forever.

  I turned to the glass door and squinted through the reflected bands of rain. My gun lay on the kitchen table. Two surfboards stood in the corner. Most everything I owned was still inside. I didn’t know what would happen to those things. And I didn’t care.

  The lightning cracked again behind me. A starter’s pistol, telling me it was time to go.

  I stepped off the patio and headed for the car, leaving the remains of my life behind.

  WEEK ONE

  ONE

  “You have an admirer,” Liz Santangelo said.

  She and I were on my patio under a San Diego sun that was threatening to disappear into a February storm. I was getting ready to hit the water, and Liz was about to head to work.

  Without turning to look, I knew who she meant. A woman in her late twenties, small, attractive. She’d bicycled past on the boardwalk when Liz and I had first stepped outside. Now she was on the beach, off to our right, pretending to read a book. She was trying to be unobtrusive. I wasn’t the world’s greatest PI but I knew when someone was keeping an eye on me.

  I tied a knot in the drawstring to my board shorts. “I don’t have a shirt on. Probably hard for her not to stare.”

  “She must be too far away to see your faults,” Liz replied.

  “Bah.” I pulled the red rash guard over my head, stretched it over my chest and moved my gaze to the woman. “Just intimidated by my looks.”

  The woman turned away when our eyes met. She closed her book, picked up her towel, and headed up the beach to the north.

  “Yes, clearly she’s infatuated,” Liz said.

  The woman stepped off the sand, crossed the boardwalk, and disappeared down one of the many alleys that led to Mission Boulevard. I didn’t have an office and people regularly showed up on the beach, as it was the best place to find me. Usually they came and talked to me instead of disappearing into an alley, though.

  “A long time ago, you staring at her ass like that would’ve bothered me,” Liz said, tugging on my hand.

  I laughed and turned back to her. “Not what I was looking at.”

  Liz and I had finally uncomplicated our complicated relationship. After years of ebb and flow, we were riding the same current. I was a private investigator; she was a homicide detective. We butted heads professionally, and that had screwed up the personal side of things. But after working a case that made me reevaluate what was important, I had gone looking for some normalcy and good in my life.

  I’d found both in Liz.

  She glanced up at the sky. “You really going to go surf in the rain?”

  “Not raining yet,” I said.

  “Yet.”

  February was arguably the worst month of the year in San Diego for weather. It could get downright cold and wet, making the city feel very un-Southern California-like. Watching the thick gray blanket unroll above us on the first day of the month, I thought we might be in for the local version of a monsoon.

  I grabbed my board and started keying in the tri-fins. “I can get in a little time before the stinking rain blows it all up.”

  “Rain is fine,” she said, smiling.

  “Rain sucks,” I said.

  She shook her head, but the smile remained.

  Things were easy between us. No tension, nothing riding below the surface, no distrust. We’d seen each other at our worst and decided that wasn’t so bad. Our lives were better with the other in it. I was happier than I’d ever been, and it was our relationship that was driving that.

  “Oh, look,” Liz said. “She’s baaack.”

  I got the last fin in place and looked down the boardwalk. The woman had returned, this time with a longboard tucked under her arm. She had replaced her T-shirt with a rash guard. She glanced our way and let her eyes sweep past us, like she was just taking a look up the beach. She walked toward the edge of the water.

  “Maybe she wants lessons,” Liz suggested, her tone somewhere between amused and annoyed.

  I stood. “My day is made.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Jealousy. It always makes my day.”

  Liz rolled her eyes. “I’m not jealous.”

  “Said the really jealous woman.”

  She tried to hold in a laugh but failed. “Whatever. I’m leaving.”

  I leaned over and kissed her. I started to pull away, but she caught my arm and held me there for a moment longer before letting me go.

  “Tell her I have a gun and I’m more than happy to use it,” she said.

  I watched Liz head around the side of the house before turning back to the water. The woman was strapping the leash onto her ankle, surveying the ocean in front of her. Maybe we had overestimated her interest in me, our suspicious natures getting the better of us.

  Time to go find out.

  TWO

  I staked out a spot near the jetty, where the nice right break that sometimes appeared had failed to materialize. The imposing clouds to the west had yet to kick up the larger than normal swells that winter storms brought.

  The woman was wearing a bright yellow rash guard and a pair of black bikini bottoms. She had her blond hair pulled back. The board was a little oversized for her, but she handled it okay, paddling into a couple of the small ripples she mistook for waves.

  She pretended like she was watching the horizon, waiting for the water to rise up in more respectable swells, but I caught her looking in my direction twice before she finally turned parallel to the shore and paddled over.

  “Not so good, huh?” she asked, as she glided up next to me. “I was hoping there’d be a little more going on out here.”

  “Not in the middle of the day,” I said. “Usually just like this.”

  “Really?” She wrinkled her nose. Her tone was overly friendly. “I was told South Mission was a pretty good spot.”

  “It can be. Just gotta catch it at the right time.”

  She nodded like that made sense to her.

  “How long are we gonna make the stupid small talk?” I asked.

  Her gray eyes shifted away from me, and she pushed a few wet strands of hair off her fo
rehead. “What?”

  “You practically camped out on my patio for the last hour,” I said. “I saw you walking the beach before you even got in the water.” I nodded at her board. “You rented that at Hamel’s. And you just told me you’ve never been out here before.”

  Thin lines formed above her eyes as she thought about objecting. Then she shrugged. “Got me.” She held out a hand. “I’m Darcy Gill.”

  I didn’t shake her hand. “What do you want, Darcy Gill?”

  “Nice to meet you, too, Noah Braddock.” Her eyes flickered, and the polite friendliness she had brought over with her disappeared as she retracted her hand. “Everyone on the beach said you’d be pissed off if I bothered you on the water.”

  “They were right.”

  “But I wasn’t sure you’d speak to me if I just showed up at your door,” she said. “So I’m sorry for ambushing you like this.”

  “Sorry enough to just paddle away?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Not that sorry.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” Darcy said.

  “Congratulations.”

  “You’re a private investigator, correct?”

  “Yep. But I’m not for hire.”

  “Why not?”

  I dipped my hands into the water and then ran them along my arms, goose bumps forming on my skin. I thought about throwing out all my reasons, but she hadn’t done anything to earn that knowledge. “Because I’m surfing at the moment.”

  She stared hard at me for a moment, the intensity of her eyes matching the looming clouds above us. Then she made a face like she didn’t care. “That’s fine.”

  “Now will you swim away?”

  “In a minute,” Darcy said. “If you’ll answer one question for me.”

  “One question and you’ll leave me alone?”

  “One question.”

  I didn’t believe her, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. “Alright.”

  “How do you feel about the death penalty?” she asked.

  I looked at her like she’d grown a dorsal fin. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  I squinted into the blue-gray sky to the west. “That’s your one question?”

  “Yeah.”

  I laughed, then shrugged. “Okay. I’m in favor of it. Goodbye, Darcy Gill.”

  “Why are you in favor of it?” she asked.

  “No, no. That’s two questions.”

  “Come on,” she said. “You already told me you aren’t for hire. Just answer me.”

  I resented her interrupting my quiet afternoon, but I wasn’t ready to get off the water yet. And drowning her would have been too obvious.

  “Fine,” I said. “I support the death penalty because I believe that there are some people who simply don’t belong on the planet. They aren’t here to do anything other than damage the world.”

  “I agree that some people aren’t fit for this world,” she said, “but it doesn’t mean killing a person is correct.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But that’s the way the world works, and that’s my opinion.”

  “I have a client on death row,” she said. “His execution date is in a month.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, watching the water spill off the jetty. “But I’m gonna assume that your client may have done something that justified his current position.”

  “He did,” she said. “He killed two other men.”

  “There you go.”

  “The problem for me, Mr. Braddock, is that my client won’t talk to me,” she said. “He’s willing to accept the punishment. But I’m not.”

  “Isn’t that his choice?” I said.

  “Maybe,” she answered. “But I don’t believe in the death penalty, and it’s my job to see if I can change his sentence.”

  I sat there, the last of the sun beating down on my shoulders, knowing there was more to this conversation.

  “You said you didn’t care that I wasn’t for hire,” I said.

  “I lied,” she said, smiling, exposing a slight gap between her two front teeth.

  “Then you’ve wasted your time,” I said as I lay down on the board.

  “I think I can change your mind,” she said.

  I started paddling in. “Then you’re wrong.”

  I heard her thrashing in the water behind me, her small arms working furiously to catch up to me. I stroked hard until my fingers grazed the sand below the water.

  “You haven’t asked me about my client,” she said, catching me sooner than I’d anticipated.

  “Sharp observation, Darcy.” I stopped paddling, slid off the board, and stood next to it, maybe twenty yards from the sand, the water just below my knees. “I’m not interested.”

  She pushed off her board, fell awkwardly into the water, then bounced up to her feet. She shoved her rental angrily toward the shore and put her hands on her hips. “Ask me who my client is.”

  I put a finger to my chin like I was thinking, then pulled it away. “No.”

  “I’m not going away until you ask,” she said.

  She had the feel of someone who would back that statement up, nipping at my heels as I tried to kick her away.

  “Christ,” I said, reaching down to my ankle and unstrapping the leash. “If I ask, will you go the fuck away?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Even when I tell you that I’m still not interested? You’ll go away and no more of this shit?”

  “I promise,” she said.

  “I heard that once already.”

  “This time I mean it,” she said. “If you want me to go away, I’ll go away.”

  There was something in her demeanor that suddenly made me realize I didn’t want to ask the question. She seemed supremely confident.

  But I was stuck.

  “Who is your client?” I asked.

  “My client is Russell Simington,” she said.

  The name meant absolutely nothing to me. “So?”

  Darcy Gill folded her arms across her chest, casting a long, thin shadow across the shallow water. “Russell Simington is your father.”

  THREE

  I walked out of the ocean, the board tucked under my arm and Darcy Gill chasing behind me.

  “Did you hear me?” she asked, coming up to my side.

  “I heard you.”

  “Your father is on death row.” “I don’t have a father,” I said.

  “Spare me the Movie of the Week drama,” she said, keeping pace. “I know you don’t have a relationship with him. But he is still your father.”

  I trudged up the sand, stepped across the pavement of the boardwalk, and set my board down behind the small retaining wall that bordered my patio.

  I turned to Darcy. “I didn’t even know his name until you just said it. I don’t know that this guy is my father.”

  “Your mother is Carolina, correct?” she said, dropping her rental board against the wall.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He told me where to find you,” she said. “He told me who your mother is. I checked you out. He got your birth date correct. He is your father, whether you want to believe me or not. And he is scheduled to die.”

  The temperature was in the high sixties, but I fought off a shiver.

  I sat down on the wall. “He knew where to find me?”

  Darcy nodded. “He knew your address by memory. And your mother’s.” She paused. “And you would have no way of knowing this, but you look a hell of a lot like him.”

  Something lurched in my gut. I’d never known a thing about my father. Knowing my mother had nearly done me in. She’d never brought him up, and I’d never asked. There were veiled references on occasion, but nothing strong enough to start a conversation. I’d done fine without a father and, over the years, that independence had only grown stronger and quashed any fleeting curiosity I might have had in learning anything about him.

  “Who did he kill?” I a
sked, trying to get my thoughts in order.

  “Two Mexican nationals,” she said, sitting down next to me. “Five years ago. He shot them point blank in the back of the head, hands tied behind their backs.”

  “Sounds like a guy I really want to meet.”

  “Look, I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “You can find out the facts pretty easily, so there’s no point in it. He’s a hard man. He’s comfortable in jail. He’d been in before this conviction.”

  I didn’t know how to feel about that. On one hand, it didn’t matter. I’d never met him, never spoken to him, and never touched him. The only influence he’d had on my life was my having to give an embarrassing answer when people asked where my father was.

  On the other hand, if he was truly my father, the blood of a lifelong criminal was pulsing in my heart.

  “He was convicted with special circumstances that allowed for the death penalty,” Darcy continued. “He’s never participated in his appeals, and he’s waived the opportunity for several of them even to be heard. That’s why he’s come up so fast. He’s been on the row for eighteen months. Generally, the average is thirteen years before we get to this point.”

  “Why hasn’t he appealed?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just picked up this case last month. I work for a firm that only handles appellate cases. We grab cases like your father’s.”

  “Don’t call him that,” I said sharply. “And I know what appellate firms do.”

  “Then you know we’re his last chance,” she said. “The attorneys who handled his earlier appeals told me that he just wasn’t interested in spending time in court anymore. He’s barely spoken to me.”

  I stared at the gray sky draping the ocean like a big canopy. “Why would you think I’d give a shit about helping him?”

  “I don’t. But you’re basically my last option to get him to talk.”

  “Talk about what?”

  She shuffled her feet on the concrete walk. “He killed those two men. There’s no doubt about that, and he confessed to it. But when he was first arrested, he indicated that he was working for someone. He’s denied it ever since. But if I can show that he was under orders, it might buy him a little sympathy and get the sentence commuted to life.”