Clean Slate (Jim Knighthorse Book 4)

by J. R. Rain

  “Somebody got killed today.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said, as I exited the desert, my van bouncing over deeply rutted roads. “And such a peaceful town, too.”

  “Interestingly, it was at the very same kiosk where we were sitting today.”

  “The one with the fancy name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, that is interesting.”

  “The dead guy is, I’m fairly certain, one of those same yahoos we’d seen giving the girl a hard time.”

  “You mean he actually came back?”

  “Apparently so. The girl there, Mandy Simms, claims they came back for more than just coffee.”

  “Well, no surprise there, Detective. They did look like a lot of trouble. You said so yourself.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, she claims they were going to rape her, or damn-near try. One of the guys got out of the car, and said as much.”

  “I assume he wasn’t successful in this endeavor.”

  “You assume correctly, Knighthorse. Next thing she hears is another set of footsteps, followed by the same guy asking something to the effect of, “Who the hell are you?” and that gets followed by the sound of bones crunching. That’s how she describes it. The next thing she knows, a gunshot is fired, which is followed by the sound of more bone crunching. I figure the ‘more bone crunching’ part was when the guy in the car got his head bashed in.”

  “My guess would be with the butt of a sawed-off shotgun, maybe even his own shotgun, maybe even with the same shotgun he was going to use on the guy who saved the day.”

  “Saved the day?”

  “I was a Superman fan growing up.”

  “Well, the girl isn’t much help. Officers found her curled in the fetal position in the back of the store, crying.”

  “But she’s okay?”

  “As okay as a young girl could be who was about to raped by a couple of animals.”

  By this time, I had found my way to a paved road. With the bouncing and jolting behind me, I got a good look at my split and broken knuckles. Both my hands were torn up pretty bad. Like the old joke goes, “You should have seen the other guy.”

  The detective continued, “The way I see it, the girl was lucky. Those two guys, it turns out, were up from Phoenix, which is why I didn’t recognize them. My instincts told me they were trouble, too, but I got another call, and...”

  “And what?” I asked.

  “I saw you lag behind, Knighthorse. I knew the girl was in good hands.”

  “Or maybe I left and I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe,” said Falcon. “The thing is: we don’t know what happened to the second guy.”

  “That’s certainly a curious thing,” I said.

  “Just answer this one question, Knighthorse, and I’ll promise you that you will never hear about this again.”

  “A fair trade.”

  “Is he alive?”

  I was gripping the steering wheel with both hands, as more blood oozed from my damaged hands, hands that had gone to work on the would-be rapist.

  “If he’s lucky,” I said.

  “What happened to him?”

  “We might have had a talk in the desert,” I said. “The talk didn’t go so well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He might have failed to see the error of his ways.”

  “Is he still out in the desert?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think, maybe, we’ll leave him there.”

  “My thoughts, too,” I said, but by then, Detective Falcon had disconnected the line.

  I thought of all of this as I now drained my tenth beer, and reached for an eleventh...

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  “Are you leaving today?” asked Cindy.

  “Yes,” I said. I was in my hotel suite. It was early. I was hung-over and my whole body hurt. Beating the unholy shit out of someone takes a lot out of you.

  “I wish I was with you.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I wish your job wasn’t so dangerous.”

  “It’s mostly not.”

  “But it can be,” said Cindy. “It has the potential for being dangerous. Very dangerous.”

  “It does,” I said. “But mostly, it’s not.”

  “I know you can take care of yourself, Jim. You have done it countless times before. You not only take of yourself, but you take care of me, of others. But there are a lot of bad men out there.”

  “Which is why I have one of the good ones with you now,” I said. “How’s Spinoza working out?”

  “He mostly keeps to himself.”

  That didn’t surprise me. Spinoza was as tortured a soul as I’d ever seen. But a damn fine detective and about as tough as they come.

  She went on, “I forget he’s here sometimes. Mostly, he reads in the living room. Sometimes, I spot him by the window, staring out. Mostly, he sits across from the front door, eyes half closed, with Junior curled up at his feet.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “Jim, I’m fine. I don’t need him.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But I’m dealing with someone unpredictable and dangerous.”

  She didn’t like it. I told her I loved her, and she seemed to like that. She told me she loved me, too, and I really liked that. We hung up and I sat back on the bed.

  Not too long ago, she’d had enough of my job and left me. We had spent a few weeks apart, and I had hated every second of it. Apparently, she had, too. We came together again, although not much had changed. I was still a private dick, taking on jobs that sometimes had the potential to be dangerous, and she still worried. These days, I didn’t worry about her leaving me. She had tried it and didn’t like it much. She also knew I was who I was: a detective through and through. She accepted that, although she didn’t have to like it. And I respected that.

  I looked at my hands, which were still raw and red with wounds that were now scabbing. Had she known what I had done in the desert yesterday, she might have re-thought her decision to stay with me.

  She doesn’t have to know, I thought, just like I don’t need to know the ins-and-outs of her job.

  A weak argument, I know. But I also knew that I would tell her what happened.

  Someday.

  As I lay on my bed, with the maid’s vacuum running across the hall, I recalled again the guy I’d left out in the desert. I recalled his bloodied face, his shattered nose and cheekbones. He was still out there, I knew. Probably dead. Someone would find him some day. Or not. More than likely, the vultures would get to him. It was, after all, the desert.

  Yes, Cindy would have a hard time with what I had done. That I had potentially saved a girl’s life would be forgotten in the shuffle. That I had left a man to die in the desert would be predominant in her thoughts. Perhaps it should be more predominant in my thoughts, but it wasn’t.

  The man, after all, admitted to raping many women. He had admitted this in the desert, defiant, laughing at me, even as I beat the unholy shit out of him. They had raped many, many women. He and his friend. It was what they did. Cruised up and down the highways, raping women, torturing women. And, if the guy could be believed, in a few cases, even killing some of the women.

  No, I didn’t regret what I had done. I would, in fact, do it all over again.

  And again.

  My hands throbbed. I had beat him to within an inch of his life. That it had felt good beating him concerned me. My father had been a sniper in the military. He had been, in effect, a government assassin. My father was also dead inside. A classic sociopath. My greatest fear, of course, was that I was more like my father than my mother. I didn’t think a particular psychosis could be inherited, but it still worried me. I didn’t want to be like him, except...

  Except it had felt so damn good beating the shit out of that scumbag.

  Lord help me.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  I was on the road again.

 
; Probably a good thing. Detective Falcon and I had gotten along well, but I knew he needed me out of town. The guy getting killed in the drive-thru had shaken the town, and he didn’t need a stranger hanging around, raising eyebrows.

  As they say, my work there was done.

  Although I didn’t have a lot of hard evidence, I had seen enough and heard enough to feel comfortable that I was now heading down the right path. And that path was the road to San Antonio. That there was, in fact, something to this mystery. That there was a very good chance that Freddie Calgary was, in fact, still alive.

  I had two days of traveling ahead of me. A lot of time to think about what I had done back there in town. A lot of time to think about the lives I had taken. I didn’t make it a habit to kill people. No, that was my father’s job. In fact, my father had done the dirty work for me last time, too, dispatching my mother’s killer with a skill honed in the military: a single shot to the forehead from long range.

  I had watched my mother’s killer die in front of me, just as the bastard had killed his own father right before my eyes. And that had been just to make a point.

  As I drove, heat rose from the highway ahead, wavering, smoldering. Those two guys were scum. They were brutal, hateful, destructive men. I was brutal, too. But not hateful. No, those two pieces of shit had directed their hate and perversion at an innocent girl, a girl who had done no harm to them. A girl who had, more than likely, rebuffed their lascivious advances.

  And so, they had come back to teach her a lesson, to have their way with her, and probably to kill her, too. And if not kill her, they had no problem ruining her life and destroying her innocence.

  Motherfuckers.

  Before me, the road was mostly flat, mixed with some gently rolling hills and distant, sand-colored rocky edifices. Not quite as awe-inspiring as the Sedona rock formations, but no less impressive.

  There, perhaps a mile ahead, I saw a lone figure walking. He was hunched slightly, and seemed to favor his right leg. His mostly-white hair blew in the hot desert wind. There was no car broken down anywhere. The man walking had no reason to be there. Except, of course, to see me.

  As I drew closer, Jack held out a hand and raised a thumb.

  I almost laughed.

  Almost.

  If Jack was, in fact, God, then I was about to confess a very big sin: I had killed two of his own.

  A very small part of me didn’t want to talk to him, dreaded talking to him. A very big part of me wanted to forget what happened back there in Sedona. But Jack had never judged me before, and I didn’t expect him to do so now.

  I slowed and pulled the van over to the side of the road. Hot wind blasted through the open window as I leaned across the street.

  “Need a lift, Jack?”

  He lowered his hand and stopped walking and looked at me with a warm smile on his sun-beaten face.

  “No,” he said, “But I think you do.”

  Chapter Forty

  We drove in silence.

  Jack smelled of sweat and dirt and road dust, all with a chaser of overripe body odor. Jack, in fact, smelled like a man who’d been walking the road for many hours, which he might very well have been doing.

  “I used to wonder if you were really God,” I said, finally.

  “And now?”

  “Now, I wonder if you’re real.”

  He glanced at me sideways, his face sunburned, hair windblown. Crow’s feet clawed the corners of his eyes. “Yes, you struggle with that.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” I asked. “If you were me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I would.”

  He rested both of his hands in his lap, his dirty fingers interlaced. I noticed one of his nails was badly damaged, split nearly halfway down. His fingertips were dry and cracked.

  His answer intrigued me, and as I drove onward, putting many miles between me and Sedona and two dead men—although one might have survived, but I doubted it—I thought of my many discussions with Jack, about the one lesson he wanted me to learn above all else: That we are all from God. All from him.

  “I killed two men,” I said.

  Jack didn’t respond or move. I continued driving, both hands on the wheel. I was suddenly missing Junior, a creature who would never judge, and only loved, no matter what.

  “I killed them with my fists and the stock of a gun.”

  Jack continued saying nothing. I continued driving. Had the events from the day before really happened? Jesus, had I really killed two men? The wounds on my hands suggested I had.

  I said, “One man, I know I killed. The other, I suspect I killed. I doubt he got out of the desert alive. Not in the condition he was in.”

  “He didn’t,” said Jack.

  “So, he’s dead, too?”

  Jack didn’t look at me, but he nodded.

  “Jesus,” I whispered.

  We were silent some more, as the cacti swept past us, as one rock formation merged into the next.

  “I’m sorry,” I said finally.

  “For what, Jim?”

  I blinked. “For killing those two men.”

  “The men you killed were ready to die, Jim. They were prepared to die.”

  I shook my head. “No, they were ready to kill again. At the very least, they were ready to hurt a young girl, as they had done time and time again.”

  “Let me fill you in on something, Jim: you had an agreement with them.”

  “An agreement?”

  “Yes, and a very interesting one at that.”

  Heat waves continued shimmering off the road. In the far distance, the waves coalesced into shimmering pools of liquid air. A mirage, and it really did look like water. I reached for my own water bottle next to me, took a swig. Offered some to Jack, who shook his head and thanked me anyway. Interestingly, the stink that had surrounded him seemed to have disappeared. Either that, or I had gotten used to it.

  No, I thought, it’s gone.

  Finally, he said, “You knew those two men, Jim. In another place, and another time. An agreement between the three of you was reached before this incarnation.”

  I waited, gripping the wheel tightly. I’m not sure I was understanding what I was hearing, or even liking it, but I gave Jack the benefit of the doubt. After all, he just might be God.

  Or something damn close to it, I thought.

  Jack let me process this—or try to process it—before continuing. Finally, he said, “Your agreement was simple, Jim. The three of you would meet in this place, at this time.”

  “Here in Sedona, across from the Red Rock Coffee Plantation?”

  “A rather lofty name for such a small place,” said Jack, smiling. “Don’t you think?”

  “Jack...”

  “Yes, Jim, at that place.”

  I nodded, now certain none of this was real. “Go on.”

  “First, you must understand, Jim, that all of you alive today were given a glimpse into a potential future.”

  “A glimpse when?”

  “Before incarnation.”

  “Do you know how crazy that sounds?”

  “There’s far crazier than that, Jim.”

  “Fine, go on.”

  “A future potential was shown, one in which Hal and Lawrence—the two men you killed yesterday—chose an uplifting path. Or, rather, a path in which those two men made choices that benefited mankind, in their small way.”

  “They hardly benefited mankind,” I said.

  “No, Jim. You see, another path was revealed, one in which these two men had chosen a darker road, a destructive road, one in which they hurt many.”

  I nodded. “Yes, they hurt many.”

  “And they have hurt many before, too,” said Jack. “In other lifetimes. It is a pattern of theirs, one that they were determined to break.”

  “But they didn’t break it,” I said.

  “No,” said Jack.

  I drove steadily, watching the mirage shimmer and dance along the far horizon. “So, that’s where I came
in?” I asked.

  “Yes, Jim.”

  “I agreed to remove them if they continued their destructive ways?”

  “You did, Jim.”

  “I don’t feel bad for killing them,” I said.

  “That concerns me, Jim,” said Jack.

  “It concerns me, too,” I said.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Ah, San Antonio.

  It was late and I was in my hotel room at the Hilton, which overlooked the famous River Walk, although I couldn’t see much except for a faintly glowing thread of silver that might have been moving water.

  It had been a hard two days’ drive, and I’d had a lot to process. Maybe too much. Which is why I was currently standing under a hot shower, my head bowed, my mind empty.

  Try as I might, and no matter how much hot water was wasted, I couldn’t scrub the memory of the sound of Lawrence’s skull shattering. It had sounded like a china plate smashing.

  I listened to it break over and over again, and in between it breaking, I relived my time with Hal in the desert, too. He had been a pig, and proud of it.

  Yes, I thought, he had wanted to die. He had veritably goaded me into doing it.

  He didn’t have to goad me very hard.

  It only took one punch, and then the switch was turned off in my mind. That one punch was followed by many more.

  Many, many more.

  Chapter Forty-two

  I was up early.

  No surprise there. I had spent the night dreaming of two dead men. Two dead men who had been watching me from the shadows of this very hotel room. To say that I was relieved, upon awakening, to find myself alone, was an understatement. I might be a big, bad man, but I could have used Cindy next to me at about that moment. Hell, even Junior would have been comforting, stinky paws and all.

  Now, with the restless night behind me, I headed down for my morning jog. Ever the friendly hotel guest, I smiled at the receptionist working the front desk. She smiled back and I shot her a wink. She grinned and I was out the door. I would argue that the wink had not been flirting. I would argue that it was just me connecting with fellow human beings on Planet Earth. I would argue that I had done a lot of bad things in the past few days, and making someone’s day with a wink was doing something good. If Cindy had been here, I would, of course, lose that argument.