A NOVEL
Time
Clock
Hero
Spikes Donovan
Dubois & Maloney/San Juan
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Copyright © 2016 by Spikes Donovan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
Spikes Donovan/DLC Publishing
www.spikesdonovan.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Book Layout © 2016 BookDesignTemplates.com
Time Clock Zero/Spikes Donovan -- 1st ed.
ISBN 978-0-0000000-0-0
Dedicated to JMC
Tough times never last, but tough people do.
―Robert H. schuller
Chapters
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
Chapter 1
Construction noise, heavy and metallic, tore through Williams Grove at exactly four-thirty on a Friday morning. Phoenix Malone felt the grind in his head – ears pinging, skull pounding – as if someone had claw-hammered him into consciousness. He sat up and put his hands over his face.
Who the bed belonged to, he couldn’t remember. But he felt her stirring beneath silky sheets, felt himself being caressed by freshly-shaven, even silkier legs, and he froze. A woman began to moan softly, sleepily and satisfied, and he felt her slip away from him. The sheets she took with her; and he said, “Tracy.” Or perhaps he heard himself say, “Honey,” or something else. And he whispered it again, but to himself, noticing something different in his voice. A tenderness was there, maybe; a calm, loving music of a strange sort, but something out of place and out of time. He might have heard and felt it before, he thought; but what memory there might have been quickly departed, cut off by the whining rip of a circular saw some few houses over, and because he remembered his early-morning meeting with the Chief of Police: six on the nose, to be precise. And he would be reporting on a very important case involving several high-profile missing persons.
Nothing more than a typical Friday morning in March, one of the windiest months in Middle Tennessee, when what was left of Nashville’s oldest trees always shuddered and gave up; and the tiny ones, recently planted, danced with joy in the winds of spring.
Phoenix Malone didn’t want to know how he ended up in June Buckner’s condo, in her bed. Not this time. He should have been at home last night after visiting his wife Tracy at Centennial Health Care, diligently working on the missing persons’ cases after that, and falling asleep in the wee hours of the morning in their own bed. Maybe he didn’t care. But this morning, he was sitting in June’s bed with his lower half in a state of undress while his upper half still wore a dark blue coat, a white shirt, and a red tie. He felt hungover and tired, and the noise of the construction coming through the double pane glass seemed to pierce his brain like splinters of flying wood.
Maybe June had slipped him something at the Big Coyote Club with the help of the bartender, an ex-con who could be counted on to do anything to anyone for a dollar. The bartender, a real hoot, had been arrested a year earlier for dropping Psyke into a woman’s drink, an inhibition-altering drug that left the mind addled, but sent you naked across the barroom floor right into the lap of a total stranger.
Phoenix raised his hand to his head. He could feel a buzzing – nothing like a liquor hangover, he thought – and he slowly turned and looked at June. He noticed she was wearing an unconscious and oblivious smile he hadn’t seen in Nashville in a year. It was a satisfied smile. A smile rarer than red diamonds these days. A smile of contentment with red lipstick all over her face that told a story.
“June Buckner,” he whispered. He shook his head, carefully slid his legs over the side of the bed, and stood up. He turned and looked again. Voluptuous, perfectly trim with a perfect A-Line haircut, June Buckner, wife of rich real estate mogul Ronnie Buckner, nineteen years older than Phoenix, but with the energy of sixteen-year-old.
Reason enough for Phoenix to have run when she walked into the bar.
Unlike all the other times.
He could have her arrested, he thought. Just make the call, submit himself to a blood test, wait for a workup from Dr. Albin Demachi in the police lab, and then call for a squad car. Like that would really work. Nashville PD would treat the whole thing as nothing more than a lover’s quarrel, or a joke – probably the latter. Or they’d brush it off as just another drug-fueled, sexcapade by one of Nashville’s elite lonely who, because she paid the city’s bills in taxes, probably had a right to be served, whether or not the Nashville Police Department had been called.
Moving slowly, Phoenix Malone waddled across the carpet to the walk-in closet. He found an extra set of clothes he’d left there a few weeks earlier, cleaned and folded, sitting tightly bundled on the floor just inside the closet door. Light tan pleated slacks, dark blue Polo, penny loafers – barely dud enough to excite Chief DeAnte’ Cobb at a meeting – but the clothes looked almost new, so they’d have to do. He picked them up and headed to the shower.
The new luxury condo in Williams Grove was indulgent. Having been built in just under two months – and that included the demolition of a perfectly habitable but abandoned mansion that had been built a year earlier – it reeked of flimsiness and cutting-edge brevity, a repudiation of the surety that had come before it, and a non-commitment to the possibilities that lay ahead. Its destructibility seemed almost certain – built to be destroyed like everything else these days. He hated the feel of it partly because it reminded him of himself.
For the last ten years, Phoenix had been married to Tracy – who for the last three months had lain still and quiet in a hospital bed at Centennial Care in an unresponsive state. He’d graduated St. David’s University when he was twenty-five with a degree in criminal justice and, because he’d been everything his professor could never be, he became the recipient of anything and everything the professor had once wished for himself, up to and including becoming an assistant to the detective at NPD whose job Phoenix eventually took.
Throughout his entire life up until college, Phoenix Malone had been a preacher’s son in a half dozen other
cities just as corrupt and disposable as Nashville. He’d always said that, from the church pew, all of those cities had looked alike; but few citizens anywhere would describe themselves or their cities with such harsh words as vile, lewd, or evil. Amoral maybe, unprincipled, or perhaps libertine. Yes, that was the word he’d heard most often – libertine.
And that was just the word Phoenix needed at the moment: libertine. The right word to rub away the sharp edges of the sin he’d knowingly embraced over the last few weeks, though last night, thanks to the drug June had slipped him, he’d finally been innocent of cheating on his devoted wife who was, for all practical purposes, dead. He found one of his inhalers in the pocket of his slacks, an inhaler loaded with street-grade Oblivium. Highly illegal but effective if you needed to not care anymore. He put it his lips, punched the cap, and sucked it into his lungs.
Phoenix found June’s box of razor’s in the bathroom, razors she never used twice. He lathered up with vanilla hand soap and quickly removed the light colored stubble from his face. He nicked the small mole above the left corner of his mouth, reached for a Kleenex, and pressed it tightly against the tiny wound. It would probably bleed all day.
You deserve it. But not really.
He tossed the bloody tissue onto the counter and started the shower, managing by some herculean effort of will to forget his indiscretions of the last few weeks while waiting for the Oblivium to kick in. Phoenix knew he’d end up replaying in his mind the poor choices he’d recently made, and he knew they’d plague him until he numbed out. And he’d always remind himself of how sinful he’d been, even after he’d doped up. Then he’d assuage his guilt by telling himself that somewhere between the commission of the sin and two, maybe three months down the road, God, just like he himself, would probably forget everything and drop the matter entirely.
Phoenix stood frozen, with his mind looking for the neutral slot, praying he’d stop hearing the guilt roaring between his ears. He paused for only a second longer, and then he ran his fingers through his short, dirty blonde hair. When he finished, he heard a thump coming from behind the bathroom wall.
“This is it, June,” Phoenix yelled. “I told you, I don’t want to do this any---”
The sound of the closet door came next, squeaking on its hinges, followed by a slam. Maybe it was June getting up, though it was too early for someone who had no reason to be awake much before seven, especially on a Friday, which was her day to sleep in.
“Did you hear me?” Phoenix said. “And don’t say a word because I don’t care.”
No response. Typical of her, he thought, as he listened to every sound that came from the bedroom – the closet door being opened again, still creaking on hinges that, by now, should have been looked at by building maintenance, the slamming of a drawer, maybe, and something falling over on the night stand, banging on the glass top, perhaps shattering.
Phoenix rolled his eyes. June’s was an anger to be reckoned with – not something easily ignored and hoped would get better or go away. But that no longer seemed to be any concern of his – not now, at any rate – given the fact of what she’d done to him last night.
“This is it!” Phoenix yelled. “We’re over, June! We’ve been over! Okay! I said it!”
Reaching for the immaculately clean, frosted shower door, Phoenix slid it open and turned on the water, not bothering to wait for June’s response. The water ran hot within seconds, and he backed it off just a bit – once, then twice, and then a third time – trying to find the perfect balance between two extremes which he knew could never be found in the real world.
“And I mean it!”
He stepped into the shower. After pulling the glass door shut behind him, he leaned against the white-tiled wall. The hot, steamy water cascaded over his head and down over his trim, fit, but tired body. He closed his exhausted eyes and yawned, feeling a surge of waves rocking him gently. Then he rubbed his face with both of his hands and yawned again.
He heard another thump. The rattle of the doorknob warned him June had stepped into the bathroom. And he remembered no more.
Phoenix leapt to his feet. He heard the crinkling of heavy plastic, plastic that covered the mattress he’d been sitting on. His posture stiffened and his muscles became rigid as he readied himself for what, he did not know. He saw the fading, golden light of late afternoon casting its last dying rays in a slender angle across the light brown carpet and onto the deep brown paneled wall before him. He ran to the single picture window to his left, now bare without its gold curtains, and looked out onto the ground below. No change down there. Same pool, he said to himself, still covered for the season, still buried beneath drifts of dead leaves, still two floors down. Same garden, too early in the season for blooms. Same tennis court.
He turned and looked across the bedroom and felt a hitch in his breath. The canopy bed, with its glazed metallic tippings – that’s what June had called them – was gone. And all of that ghastly espresso-colored furniture – the nightstands, the dressers, the chest, the bench at the foot of the bed – the entire bedroom suite – all of it, including the fresh flowers she had delivered on a daily basis, had vanished.
A sudden coldness hit him, a surge of adrenaline, he thought; and it sent waves tingling through his body from head to toe.
He’s being set up. He knows it, June knows it, others probably know it. But he owns his own mind, at least right now, and he controls it – June Buckner doesn’t – and he’s recovering most of last night’s memories. He’s just arrived at the Big Coyote Club, alone, and he’s ordering a shot of George Dickel. He sees June Buckner, dressed in her black, off-the-shoulder midi – she’d paid six grand for it – with her black leather coat draped over her purse arm. She’s stepping through the door a half minute behind him because she’s obviously been following him like she’s been doing for the last few days. He sees her wipe a tear from her eye, and their eyes meet. But he looks down at the table because he’s not interested.
He’s not following her home tonight. Not this time, not ever again. It’s over, and no amount of pleading is going to change that.
But she comes over to his table and joins him anyway.
Maybe they’d argued – had they? – yes, he’s sure of it. They’d come to verbal blows because people around them stopped their conversations and stared. Then Phoenix got a call notification from his phone – he was glad for the well-timed diversion – and he answered it with a tone of voice he reserved for official business. June knew the voice because she’d heard it before. “Detective Malone here,” or was it “Detective Phoenix Malone?” But whether or not the call was official, he had decided to tell June it was. He finished his drink, apologized to her, and headed out to the car.
Only he couldn’t remember anything after that.
Phoenix walked back towards the picture window, staring at nothing for an overlong moment. He let his mind race through the impossibilities. Better to start there, he thought, because nothing possible ever happened in Nashville.
But Phoenix was not one to be easily rattled, though his five-foot, eleven-inch tall frame, all one hundred seventy-five pounds of it, may have suggested otherwise to some street punk in East Nashville, or to some innocent victim bent on having the best detective unravel his case. He knew without a doubt he’d been targeted for something by someone. If the perp was any good at his game, the next set up, maybe the clincher, wouldn’t be far behind.
His phone rang, and he jumped. He reached into his right pants pocket, grabbed his Samsung Universe, and held his breath.
He didn’t recognize the number, and so he refused the call.
Chapter 2
Phoenix felt and heard his phone go off in his pocket for the second time as he hurried down June’s stairs to the front door. When he reached the front entrance hall, also emptied of its furniture, with the corner of the wall dinged and the molding cracked and hanging by a finishing nail, he stopped and took another breath. He pulled out his phone again, saw
the same number he’d seen earlier, and then he answered it.
“Detective Malone.”
“All right, where have you been?” the person on the other end demanded. “You’re late, late, and late.”
It was Detective Alaia Jenkins, a newly appointed detective at NPD. Alaia had a permanent scowl about her voice, a dark mood turned sound wave that seemed to drain Phoenix’s energy whenever he listened to it. That voice, harsh and distant, seemed to loom over him in a domineering kind of way, so much so that he nearly turned to see if she was standing behind him. A voice that, if it had arms, would have flapped at him in dismissal while smacking him down at the same time.
“Are you my mother?” Phoenix asked.
“Sorry you’re late again on this one – and yes, I might as well be your mother, white boy.”
“Why don’t you start singing to me how you want my job?”
Alaia Jenkins didn’t respond.
“What’ve you got?” Phoenix asked. “I know it’ll be hard for you to be precise in any intelligible way, but that’s why you report to me, and why I report to Cobb.”
Alaia Jenkins had an attitude since the day she arrived at the department. Must have been the new angle in criminology, the “bad girl” thing, or something else they were teaching the kids over at UT. But Chief Cobb loved her, and that’s why Phoenix thought he’d better pretend to love her, too – but, so far, he was failing the gig.
“If you’d answer the phone like you’re supposed to, you’d know what I have, now wouldn’t you?” Alaia shot back.
Phoenix opened the door of June’s condo, stepped outside, and locked the door behind him. He jogged across the small, private parking lot and noticed June’s yellow Corvette, the pride of Nashville, was missing. His Ford Focus sat by itself in her single, guest parking space. “I’m nearly listening, so do your worst.”
Time Clock Hero Page 1
