Courage Matters: A Ray Courage Mystery (Ray Courage Private Investigator Series Book 2)

by R. Scott Mackey

  forty-four

  My meeting with Blake Rios wasn’t until nine, but I was up at seven. I showered, put on gray slacks and the blue shirt with the collar stays, packed and loaded the suitcase into my car. I skipped the hotel’s free continental breakfast. I wasn’t hungry and I wondered if I’d ever be hungry again.

  The commute traffic was already heavy into town. After stopping at a 7-11 store on Campus Drive I drove through Sac State, taking the route that passed the football, baseball, softball and soccer fields. Five minutes later I parked, went to the door and knocked.

  “Ray!” Jill was surprised to see me. She was wearing a white terry cloth robe that fell open slightly when she leaned in to kiss me on the cheek.

  “May I come in?”

  She stepped back and I entered. Her hair was mussed and damp. I loved her post-shower look, maybe even my favorite image of her back when we were together. She went to the kitchen, where she had a piece of toast and a container of yogurt waiting for her at the table. A mug of what I knew was tea was next to the food.

  “Help yourself to anything you want,” she said. “There’s bread over there if you want to make some toast. I have eggs and orange juice. You can make some coffee if you like.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Are you okay? You seem a little down, Ray.”

  From a bag I pulled out the bottle of champagne from 7-11. “How about some champagne?”

  “Champagne? At eight in the morning on a week day? What’s the occasion?”

  “I think I solved the case.”

  “You don’t seem very happy about it,” she said. Her tone turned guarded, a noticeable shift from the practiced perky.

  “That’s because I’m not a hundred percent sure yet and because I’m not happy about what the answer might be.”

  She stood about halfway between the sink and the kitchen table where her tea was getting cold. I was a few feet away my butt leaning against the kitchen countertop. I watched her closely for a moment to see if she might say something, but she didn’t.

  “There are wine glasses—I don’t have champagne flutes—in the cabinet above your head,” she said, filling the awkwardness of that silent moment.

  “I remember.” I turned to the cabinet and pulled out two wine glasses. Next I removed the wire and foil from the top of the bottle, and used a nearby dish towel to cover the cork. The pop of the cork was impressive for a cheap bottle of 7-11 champagne. I held the bottle over the sink so some of the overflow would land there and not the floor. I poured two glasses and handed her one.

  “To us,” I said as we clicked glasses. We both took sips of champagne and then I knew it was time.

  “How is that rental unit working out for you?” I asked.

  “Fine. Great. It turned out to be a great investment. Remember how worried I was about it when I first bought it? That was really silly.”

  “Good tenants?”

  “The best. Never a problem. Why?”

  “That’s on Acacia, right?” I asked, ignoring her question. Nine something?”

  “Nine seventy-one. Why do you care so much about my rental all of a sudden?”

  “And you say that Angel is a good tenant?”

  The color drained from her face in an instant. I thought she might drop the wine glass but it remained stuck in her hand as she stood there frozen, looking at me but not really looking at me.

  “Does Hector live there, too, or does he have his own place?”

  “It’s not what it looks like, Ray,” she blurted out. “They weren’t supposed to hurt you. I got mad at them when you told me. I just wanted you off the case. I wanted you to stop. For your own good.”

  “Who is Angel?”

  “Like you said he lives in my rental. He’s a bouncer at a bar. I asked him if he and his brother in law could help me out with, you know, a bluff on you.”

  “So you hired them to send me a message to back off?”

  “Yes, exactly. That’s all. It was for your own good.” Her words came in bursts.

  “You already said that.”

  “They weren’t supposed to touch you. Just talk to you.”

  I actually believed that, I really did. But it was the only good thing that I could believe about her at the moment.

  “What I don’t get is why you came to me to help your father and get in the middle of all this when you were planning to kill Andrew Norris all along.”

  “I didn’t kill Norris. I… I was in the air flying to Idaho.”

  “Your flight wasn’t until ten that night. Norris was killed before eight. You did it Jill. Admit it.”

  “No, I—”

  “Jill.”

  “I… I…” Her chin sunk to her chest. “I didn’t plan to kill him. It just happened.” She stopped herself and put her hand to her mouth, realizing what she had just said.

  “And you probably had Ziebell in your sights from the get go as well.”

  “No,” she said, a whisper. “None of it was supposed to happen.” Her voice was so soft I could barely hear her.

  “It was for the money, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded and looked at me, more of her personality returning to her face. “It’s my inheritance, Ray. My dad, when he dies was going to leave it all to me. I mean maybe some to charities here and there. That’s cool. But a couple of hundred million were coming to me. I deserved that money for being the daughter of one of the meanest, most heartless bastards on earth.”

  “I still don’t get why you hired me when—”

  “I hired you—or had my father hire you—because he really did think that Norris was planning to steal his clients. That got me worried because what Norris would be stealing was my inheritance. If those clients left, more might follow and it would all disappear. I wanted my dad to protect his firm and my inheritance along with it.”

  It started to make sense now. “Then I told you what Norris was actually up to. That he was warning clients that Stroud Investments might be a house of cards.”

  “Yes. Norris had no reason to say that unless it was true, or at least he thought it to be true. He might have said it as a way to get clients to pull the money from dad and give it to him. A guy would lure new clients by slandering his previous employer. I had to stop him before he told more clients. It would destroy the firm.”

  “And your inheritance.”

  “Yes.”

  “But murder? Jill, how could you do that?”

  She didn’t say anything for several moments, her head bowed, eyes fixated on the floor a few feet in front of her. “I went there that evening to get him to back off. When he said he was quitting and going to leave town I was happy. But then he said he was going to tell all his accounts—all 27 of them—that my dad’s firm was basically insolvent and no longer had the client’s original investments let alone their supposed profits.”

  “So you shot him.”

  “It wasn’t like that.” She was looking at me now. “I brought the gun just in case he might freak out and try to hurt me. I didn’t mean to use it. Our conversation… we were shouting at each other. He told me to get the hell out of his house and started toward me. I thought he might hit me or something. I panicked. I stepped away from him and pulled the gun out of my purse. That didn’t stop him and he kept coming toward me… and it just happened. I didn’t want to shoot him.” Something in her demeanor shifted now, like she was relieved that she had told me. The panic she showed earlier abated, replaced by an eerie calmness. I waited to see if she would continue, but she didn’t and appeared to be lost in her thoughts.

  “Then what about Ziebell? Why did you shoot him?”

  She blinked twice before she spoke. “After Norris everything was different. I knew I was in it now. There was no turning back. Norris told me how Ziebell had first come to him and accused my dad of running a Ponzi scheme and how that started pretty much everything. When he told me that Ziebell would go to the SEC if my dad didn’t pay him off I knew I had to do it. My da
d would never pay Ziebell off. He’s too proud, too arrogant to think the SEC would dare to audit his books.”

  “But you thought otherwise.”

  “My dad’s an asshole. So, I did what he should have done and killed the slimy little prick.”

  “Whatever it takes to win,” I said.

  She smiled, a cocksure smile that I had never seen on her face before in our years together. “Bet your ass. It’s why I’m the best softball coach Sac State has ever had. I play to win.”

  “You may hate your dad, but you are two of a kind.”

  “I guess I should take that as a compliment in a twisted way.”

  “Take it any way you want,” I said. “Now I’m charged with murdering the two guys that you killed.”

  “I’m sorry about that Ray. I didn’t mean for it to happen. That’s why I kept telling you to stop. You wouldn’t listen. That’s why I hired Angel and his buddy to threaten you to stop. I didn’t want you to get into the middle of this and get yourself into trouble. Don’t you see?”

  “You just didn’t want me to find out what was going on.”

  “That’s part of it, too. I admit it.”

  I tossed the contents of my almost full glass into the sink and set the glass down. Jill put her glass down on the counter as well and then folded her arms tightly in front of her.

  “How did you figure it out?” she asked.

  “I got a hit on Hector’s license plate and that put him into your rental.” I was getting weary now, the enormity of Jill’s misdeeds and deception too much too quickly. “That helped me put other things together. How the killer seemed to know what my next moves were. Who might have the most to gain if Norris and Ziebell were silenced. Your name kept rising to the top. I was a fool for not considering you before. Like I said when I first got here, though, I didn’t know for sure until now.”

  “I don’t feel so good,” she said. The color hadn’t returned to her face and she looked like she might get sick. “Excuse me a second.” She covered her mouth with the palm of her hand and ran out of the kitchen.

  I heard a door slam and then a couple of minutes later the toilet flushed. When she returned to the kitchen she still wore the white robe. But now she was holding a gun and it was pointed at me.

  “Sorry, Ray.”

  “So this whole getting back together stuff was all a ruse.”

  “No. I really was hoping nobody, especially you, would find out I killed those two and that we would be okay. Everything I said to you was the god’s truth. I didn’t mean for us to get back together but we did. It just happened. I swear.”

  “Doesn’t matter anyway,” I said. I considered how it was my desire to impress Jill that had motivated me to redouble my efforts to find out about Andrew Norris. If not for her, I might have dropped the entire matter.

  “You could let it go, Ray. Pretend you didn’t find out about me. You said yourself that the charges against you won’t stick. Trujillo’s spent so much building a case against you that he’s never even looked in my direction. I got away with it and he’ll never figure it out. Let it go, Ray, and we can be good again. Happy. A couple. Together.”

  I almost wanted to lie to her and tell her I would forget everything, just so that she would put the gun down. But I was so sickened by what she had done and how she had rationalized it that I couldn’t muster a lie.

  “You are pointing a fucking gun at me and you want us to be a couple. Doesn’t that seem a bit ironic to you?”

  “Fuck you, Ray. Sometimes you’re too much of a smart ass.”

  “How are you going to explain killing me to the police?”

  “Maybe I’ll just throw you in the river, or bury you somewhere where you won’t be found. The levy is right behind my house. It would be easy enough to do. The police will think you skipped town.”

  “Once I’m out of the picture they might start looking at other suspects. They’ll look at you, just like I did.”

  “No they won’t,” she said, but there was no conviction in her voice, as if I’d raised a possibility she hadn’t considered.

  “And so what anyway? There’s no money, Jill. Your dad blew it all.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “Even if there is something left. It will probably all go to the investors once the SEC swoops in, which will be any day now. All the killings will be for nothing.”

  “Shut up!” she yelled. She pointed the gun at my chest, her face twisted in rage. I forced myself to look at her, to return the fire in her eyes with that in my own. Then she started to cry and lowered the gun. In that moment I believed that I had convinced her, disarming her capacity to harm another human being, the threat over.

  I was wrong.

  In one violent move, as if her right arm was possessed, she raised the gun and pulled the trigger, the explosion thundering through the kitchen, and Jill fell dead from the single bullet fired into her own temple.

  epilogue

  Mark Scofield and I walked out of the District Attorney’s office two days later, all charges against me dropped. Jill’s confession, caught on the microphone inside my collar, had been enough to convince both Trujillo and the DA of my innocence. It didn’t hurt that the unregistered Ruger Blackhawk revolver that Jill used to kill herself had also killed Andrew Norris and Craig Ziebell.

  I shook Mark’s hand and we parted company on the street. It was bright and sunny, the kind of morning that put a skip in your step and a whistle to your lips. Except that I didn’t feel like skipping and whistling.

  Nick Trujillo must have known about our meeting with the DA. I saw him approaching from up the street so I waited before unlocking my car.

  “Are we good?” he said when he reached me.

  I nodded. He did not offer his hand nor did I offer mine.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t see it coming with Jill Stroud either,” he said. “I should have. Follow the money and all that. But I never considered her. Stupid.”

  I didn’t want to talk about Jill. I would be thinking about her too much as it was, for the rest of my life. “What did you do about Rios?”

  “He’s gone. No one at his office would say for sure but he probably went back to Mexico. There’s no record of him taking a commercial flight but with his father’s money he wouldn’t have a problem crossing the border south.”

  “He just walked away from all that money?”

  “Not really. Unless the feds can find out for sure that it is dirty money being laundered, then whatever he invested with Stroud is still his. That is if there’s any left.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think it’s dirty money and that’s why he got the hell out of here.”

  “No, I mean do you think there’s any money left?”

  “That’s the big question isn’t it? Stroud just got back from Seal Beach. He will tell you that everything’s honky dory, so will Barry Fein, the clueless bastard. But the SEC has opened a formal investigation.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Months. Maybe even years,” Trujillo said.

  I thought about that for a moment, deciding that even if Stroud fell it wouldn’t undo anything. Yeah, he might go to jail. But other than that his rich clients would still be rich, though maybe not as much as before. Jill would still be gone, Zeibell and Norris still dead. And I still would be left wondering whether if I’d kept my nose out of the whole mess none of this would have been so. Maybe Stroud’s ‘moving the money’ around would have worked, placating and enriching his clients. Norris would have moved to Utah. Zeibell would continue slithering around in search of other suckers. And Jill wouldn’t have learned the truth about any of them. If it wasn’t for me. I knew it would take a long time—if ever—for me to decide how I felt about that.

  The End

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  Read the prequel to Courage Matters

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  In this prequel to Courage Matters, Ray Courage begins his private investigation career, displaying the skills, abilities and sense of humor that have made him a fan favorite around the world.

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  Courage Resurrected, Ray Courage’s wife Pam died thirteen years before in a car accident. Or did she? Ray’s world is turned upside down when he receives a series of e-mails from someone claiming to be his dead wife, accusing him of attempting to kill her and vowing revenge. Ray sets out to find the identity of the e-mailer only to discover the circumstances of his wife’s apparent death appear to be all but accidental. Soon Police Detective Carla Thurber comes to suspect Ray of killing his wife, and of a subsequent murder of Pam’s confidant. Meanwhile, a murderous predator who does not want the facts of Pam’s death to surface aims to stop Ray. In the greatest challenge of his life, Ray must outrun the police and elude those who are out to kill him as he seeks the truth about his wife’s death.

  Courage Stolen

  Courage Stolen The Monarch Project could revolutionize the energy industry, eliminating the need for foreign oil, dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, and creating a clean sustainable energy future for generations to come. But all this is at risk when someone steals the project and demands $20 million for its return. Ray acts as the bagman in an effort to secure the project’s return. Events become more complicated when two murders ensue. Working against an Asian street gang, eco-terrorists, greedy corporate executives, and a band of academics who seem incapable of telling the truth, Ray and his sidekick Rubia seek to unravel who’s behind it all.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank cover designer Karen Phillips, who took the time to create a terrific design that reflects the character, story, and setting of my novel. Thank you for helping me create a better experience for my readers.