Bite Me (Devlin Haskell 3)

by Faricy, Mike

  “You’ll be allowed thirty minutes to commute to and from your office. Other than that you will be in your office or your place of residence. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well, you can see Marcie about your next appointment.”

  “Would it be possible to email my schedules to you, might save us both some…”

  “No. Please make your appointment with Marcie on your way out, good day.”

  There were a number of things I wanted to ask; Why couldn’t I email a schedule? Why was she so fat? Had she ever been laid? If so did the poor guy survive? Instead I settled for, “Thank you.”

  I made my appointment with Marcie. It dawned on me they were probably scamming the county, paid a specified amount for every client appointment. Therefore, everything required an appointment. I decided to shut up and just get out of there as fast as possible. Marcie was only too happy to oblige so she could return to staring blankly at her crossword puzzle.

  I fled Sentinel Monitoring and drove to my office. I looked longingly across the street at The Spot bar for a moment and then climbed the stairs. There was over a week’s worth of mail shoved under the door. A dozen circulars from grocery stores, two past due notices and a post card from Las Vegas written so illegibly I couldn’t determine who had sent it. I dumped most of the pile into the waste basket, taped the post card to the wall, then went to make coffee and discovered I was out.

  I hit speed dial on my cell and walked out the door.

  “The Spot.”

  “Jimmy, Dev, can you get me two coffees, to go?”

  “To go? And where you been the last few days? Christ we’re down about fifteen percent.”

  “Long story, can I come over and get the coffee?”

  “Yeah, how long you gonna be?”

  “I’m crossing the street now,” I said, hung up and pushed open the front door. Jimmy still had the phone in his hand.

  “You weren’t kidding.”

  “I’m a busy guy. You got something I can carry those in, besides the dirty coffee mug you usually serve me?”

  “I’ve never served you a coffee in here in your life.”

  “You got a point.”

  “Here, take this,” he said sliding the pot across the bar. “It’s way past time to make a fresh pot anyway.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “On your tab, I’m guessing.”

  “Is there another way?”

  “Amazingly some of our customers pay cash.”

  “On the tab.”

  “Everything going okay?”

  “I’m about to start on that now.”

  “And you think that coffee is gonna help?”

  Fifteen minutes later I was thinking Jimmy had a point. I grimaced as I felt the acid burn a hole in my stomach. I swirled the coffee a little to see if there was any glaze left on the inside of the ceramic mug, then pushed the thing aside. The coffee had to have been from yesterday, early in the day.

  I drummed my finger on the desk and thought about that lunatic Kiki, Misses Thompson Barkwell and her idiot brother Farrell Early. I wrote their names on a sheet of paper. Then wrote KRAZ off to the side. I wrote Thompson Barkwell below that, then drew a question mark in the middle. A half hour later all I’d done was retrace the question mark a few thousand times.

  Had I been set up or was I once again just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I didn’t accomplish much more then that for the rest of the day, other than I looked longingly out the window at The Spot as the occasional miscreant walked in or stumbled out. The sun shimmered off the asphalt street and the sidewalk looked hot enough to fry an egg on. A little after four I hit on an idea and called Sunnie Einer, my resource for all things computer.

  “Hello,” she answered on the second ring.

  “Hi Sunnie, it’s Dev, long time no talk.”

  There was a long pause, too long.

  “Hello, Sunnie?”

  “Yes, Dev.”

  “How are things?”

  Another too long pause.

  “Sunnie?”

  “Look Dev, you know and I know you couldn’t care less how things are. So get to the point.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. I’m also busy, what do you need?”

  “Well, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind looking something up for me, on the computer? It’s the…”

  “Do you still have that lap top you borrowed from me, for the weekend, I believe it was about six months ago?”

  I did as a matter of fact, it was on top of my file cabinet, I’d set the coffee pot on top of the thing earlier.

  “Yes, I’ve got it right here, meant to bring it back. I guess I’ve been working overtime and it sort of got away from…”

  “Is it on?”

  “Well actually, not exactly, see it…”

  “Not exactly? Is it on or not?”

  “It’s not, I think it might be broken.”

  “Broken? Did you drop it?”

  “No it just stopped working all of a sudden. Honest. I was typing away on the thing and all of a sudden it shut down.”

  “Did you have it plugged in?”

  “Plugged in?”

  “Oh God. So you never recharged the battery?”

  “How do you do that?”

  “You can’t be this… Oh God, look, bring it over here, I’ll give you a basic tutorial. The same one I give to eight year olds, although that might be a little too advanced. You can pick up dinner by the way, and some wine, I’m in the mood for Italian, and make it a nice wine.”

  I had trouble just turning on a computer, I hated the things. The last thing I wanted was a tutorial. Then there was the small matter regarding the condition of my release and my schedule allowing just a half hour commute to and from the office.

  “How about this,” I said, “you come to my place, I’ll have dinner and the computer all ready for you, that way you won’t have to do any dishes or clean up or anything.”

  “You think my home is dirty, is that it? I teach full time, I have my son, Josh, my consulting business. I barely have time to think let alone…”

  “Hey Sunnie, I’ve got a problem I’m trying to deal with. No, your house isn’t dirty, it’s always spotless I never said anything about your place. I’ll have dinner for you, Italian, as requested, with wine, a good wine. But, I need some help, I can’t come to your place, I’ll explain over dinner, if you can make it. If you can’t, no problem, I’ll catch you some other time. Then you can tell me what’s bothering you. You okay?”

  Another long pause.

  “What time?”

  “It’s a little after four now, how’s six-thirty sound?”

  “Fine,” she said and hung up.

  Gee, a computer lesson from a woman pissed off at me, I could hardly wait. I wondered if fat Muriel Puehl had anything going on, I could invite her and make the night a complete disaster. I racked my brain to remember what I’d done to get Sunnie so mad.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  It was about eight-thirty. We were sitting in front of the infamous laptop at the end of my dining room table. Remnants of our twelve minute, conversation-less, egg plant lasagna and garlic bread dinner were scattered at the opposite end of the table. I was drinking decaf, my second, Sunnie was on her third glass of wine. The first two had done nothing to improve her attitude. I was manning the controls on the laptop getting the intro tutorial to her computer 101 class.

  “You’re kidding me. All I had to do was plug the thing in?”

  Sunnie twitched a smile for half a nanosecond, suggesting anything but pleasure.

  “Okay, so I want to look up marriage records, actually a marriage, as in one,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Minnesota, I think.”

  She sighed.

  “Probably Minnesota, yeah, pretty sure, Minnesota.”

  “County?”

  “I’m gue
ssing Ramsey.”

  She stared at me a moment.

  “Okay, do a search, type in…”

  “Search?”

  “Move your cursor up to here.” She pointed with a pen to a box on the screen. “Okay, now type in Minnesota, then Ramsey County, marriage license, do you have a date?”

  “No, that’s actually what I’m looking for.”

  “Do you happen to have the names of the individuals?” She said this in a tone that suggested she was using quite a bit of her self control.

  “Click on this box. Right, now type the names in there.”

  I entered Thompson Barkwell.

  Okay, now click here on search, again. Okay.”

  I looked over at her, she continued to stare at the screen, stone faced.

  “Sunnie, something’s bothering you, even I’m picking up on it and I’m really bad at picking up on signals from women.”

  She ignored me and tapped the screen with her pen. “Thompson Barkwell married to a Katherine Early. That who you’re looking for?”

  I nodded, reading the screen.

  “There’s your date, looks like a little over a year ago. That all you needed?”

  “Yeah, now you want to tell me what’s bugging you?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Thanks for dinner, I’ve got work to do. I’ll expect the lap top back in the near future,” she said, grabbing her purse off the couch and heading for the door.

  “Thanks for your help, Sunnie,” I called. “Nice chatting,” I added after she slammed the door behind her.

  Kiki and Thompson were married thirteen months and eleven days ago. It was a toss up who fled the scene first, my money was on Kiki. Only because Thompson Barkwell struck me as the type of guy who would have put up with a lot, anything as a matter of fact, once he found a woman crazy enough to go out with him twice let alone marry him. ‘Crazy enough’ seemed to sum up Kiki.

  I stared at the search window on the laptop screen. I was home for the night with a table full of dirty dishes, waiting for a computerized phone call from the monitoring service. What to do, what to do? I typed in XXX and clicked search.

  The call from the monitoring service came through about two and a half hours later. Time flies when you’re having fun. A computerized female voice instructed me to; “Please input my personal code, then press pound.” When I did that the voice replied, “Thank you. Goodbye,” and hung up. A second call came through an hour and thirty minutes later and had me do the same thing. It was a good thing I hadn’t gone out, thank God for Internet porn.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The following morning I picked up a can of coffee on the way to the office, half decaf on the way I drove past the offices of KRAZ, just because. If there was anything to see, I missed it. I drove around the block, pulled into the parking lot and parked at the rear of the lot. A couple of beer cans crackled when I flattened them as I backed into the parking spot. After about twenty minutes of not seeing anything and getting nervous about the GPS capabilities in my ankle bracelet I drove to my office.

  I was on my third cup of half decaf coffee and not the least bit smarter. Granted, Kiki was a lunatic, but what was she thinking marrying Thompson Barkwell? Did I really hit her, tie her up? My toxicology report suggested I was drugged. But why? Was I being set up, royally framed? Again, why?

  I plugged in the trusty laptop, turned the thing on and began searching. I was reasonably adept now, seven hours of intense practice going through porn sites, barely scratching the surface, will do that. I began searching Kiki, then Farrell and Thompson and finally KRAZ. I learned a couple of things, the most immediate of which was I was out of aspirin and had a pounding headache.

  In a nutshell, the three were bit players with spotty histories of scams stretching back eight to ten years, the usual real estate and finance deals, a couple of bankruptcies. Farrell had a bar go belly up out in Las Vegas in 2006, the ‘Early Bird Saloon’. In today’s world that was nothing at all out of the ordinary. Well, except maybe for Farrell’s Vegas bar, the Early Bird Saloon, not exactly an original name, but 2006 was still boom year, before everyone got yanked back to financial reality. How could a bar fail in Vegas?

  I went to the Las Vegas Sun website, searched Farrell J. Early, read a handful of articles that suggested maybe more than food and liquor were being dealt at the Early Bird Saloon. To be specific, Ecstasy and Roofies, ironically the same menu as my toxicology report. Things apparently got to the point where even the Vegas authorities were fed up. In the final article, sort of a post mortem round up of the bar’s twenty-two month history, it mentioned that Farrell, along with wife, Katherine ‘Kiki’ Early worked out an agreement where they would not be charged, closed the bar and filed for bankruptcy.

  Farrell had a wife with the same nickname as his sister? Kiki? What were the odds? It seemed the odds were more likely Kiki would have married her brother than there were two women with the same nickname, although it all sounded extreme even for Vegas and even for Kiki. I searched my second set of marriage records in less than twenty-four hours, both relating to Kiki.

  Back in 2005 Farrell J Early married one Katherine ‘Kiki’ Hinz. Katherine was the only daughter of Ottmar “Loopy” Hinz, former president of the Food and Beverage Workers union of Las Vegas. Ottmar Hinz had been unable to attend his daughter’s gala wedding. Unfortunately he had just begun serving an eighteen year sentence at Nevada’s High Desert State Prison, seems old “Loopy” had been convicted of racketeering.

  One could only guess why Ottmar was called “Loopy”. Apples don’t fall far from the tree, like father like daughter and all that. None of which got me any closer to being exonerated, or did it? A further search found nothing of interest. At five I tucked the laptop under my arm and headed home to practice my searching skills, on the way I called my attorney, Louie.

  “Lo.” Louie sort of groaned into the phone.

  “Hi Louie, Dev Haskell, got a moment to talk?”

  “Lo.”

  “Hello, Louie, can you hear me.”

  “No one there, man,” I heard Louie say. His voice faded as he pulled the phone away from his ear. I could hear him mumbling, the background noise of glasses clinking, music, laughter, it all suggested he wasn’t at a church service. Then we were disconnected, meaning Louie hung up. I called back three more times, Louie never answered, his mail box was full so I couldn’t leave a message.

  The monitor call came through at about eight-forty-five, interrupting my internet viewing of ‘Double D and Disorderly’.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I’d been sitting in the KRAZ parking lot for twelve minutes, eating a couple of blueberry muffins and sipping half decaf coffee from my travel mug. I couldn’t taste the difference in the coffee. I was bored, you’d think at a few minutes before nine in the morning someone, somewhere, would pull into the parking lot for work. As far as I could tell, I was the lone source of activity.

  My cell phone rang, as usual I glanced at the numbers, but couldn’t read them.

  “Haskell Investigations,” I prayed it wasn’t the monitoring folks picking up on the fact I was outside KRAZ.

  “Dev?” a groggy voice rasped, then cleared the throat a couple of times.

  “Yeah.”

  “Dev?”

  “Yeah, Louie, that you?”

  “I was working and missed a call from you late last night.”

  “You weren’t working, Louie, and it wasn’t late, it was a little after five. You were…”

  “That’s late.”

  “You were in some bar somewhere, it sounded like you’d been there for quite a while.”

  “I was doing some research.”

  “Yeah, sure you were.”

  “Anyway,” again with the clearing of the throat, I have to admit it actually did make his voice sound better. “I missed your call.”

  No point in arguing.

  “Yeah, thanks for calling back. Look, I’ve been d
oing some research myself and investigating on my own and I’ve come up with some things.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re stupid enough to go anywhere near that Kiki Barkwell chick or her brother, I really don’t need to hear that.”

  “Give me a break, how stupid do you think I am, relax.”

  “Thank God. Okay, investigating what?”

  “I was online…” I went on to tell Louie what I’d learned, especially the Vegas stuff, Kiki married to Farrell. The Early Bird Saloon closing then finishing up with the drug sales, the same concoction my toxicology report indicated had been fed to me. As I spoke I watched a sleek, dark blue BMW pull into the lot and glide into a parking place close to the front door.

  “Look, I’m driving right now man, can you ...”

  Farrell climbed out of the driver’s side of the BMW. He had a white gauze bandage around his index finger and right hand. I could only hope he’d slammed the thing in his fancy car door. A half second later Kiki climbed out the passenger side, looking fabulous and taking a bite out of an apple. He waited for her, gave her an extremely unbrotherly across her rear. She smiled, tossed her shiny brunette hair, then glanced over in my direction, I couldn’t tell if she recognized the DeVille or noticed me. If she did, she didn’t seem to react or say anything to Farrell. Twenty seconds later they’d disappeared inside the building.

  “Dev, you there?”

  “Sorry about that, must have hit a dead spot, you know, no phone service.”

  “Okay, look, I’m driving too, can you call me in about fifteen minutes, let’s go over this shit when I can pay attention, take some notes. Jesus, lady, signal or get off the God damn road. Oh, sorry ‘bout that. Give me a call in fifteen, okay.”

  “Yeah, I’ll call you.”

  I waited until we disconnected before I started the car, sat for a minute, took down the license number on Farrell’s BMW, then drove to my office. I phoned Louie’s cell, phoned again after twenty and then twenty-five minutes. I phoned his office number at the half hour mark and left a message. Louie returned my call about an hour later.

  “Yeah Dev, man its crazy here, took forever just to find some aspirin. Got a pounding headache, God I hope I’m not coming down with the flu or something,” he said, slurping what I hoped was coffee.