The Goat-Ripper Case: Sonoma Knight PI Series

by Peter Prasad

  Sonya spoke up. “This hospital stinks. Why not sleep it off at my crib on the mountain? Tanya wants to chain you to the bed anyway.”

  They all looked at Sonya, surprised at how she encouraged her daughter. Jake thought she hit the nail on the head.

  “I’d like that.” Tanya tugged Jake’s earlobe. He looked at Colonel Hap Hazard. “Plus a helo ride?”

  “Hell no, kid, you lost four quarts. You might pass out. You’re grounded.” Hap took Sonya’s arm and headed for the door.

  Pitt cleared his throat. “There’s more. The Governor says there’s a reward.”

  Jake brightened. “Money helps. So can I get a carry permit? I’m done trying to outrun bullets.”

  “No problem. Pritchard’ll sign for that. He gave me this for you.”

  Pitt handed Jake a blue leather box, five inches square. Jake popped the flip-top lid. Inside on a bed of light blue velvet sat a gold badge with the California seal: the fat bear on all fours, the tree, the red star and the thin red line.

  The badge read: Special Investigator. Governor’s Office. 2013.

  Tanya trailed her finger tips along the edge of the badge. “It’s beautiful.”

  The Colonel leaned over. “Never seen one of those before.”

  Pitt clarified. “Not many out there. It’s a personal appointment, health care and $75,000 a year. Special projects, on-call; you’ll report to me… if you want it.”

  Sonya, Hap and Tanya looked at Jake. “Do it!”

  Jake handed the blue box to Tanya. He sipped Gatorade and chewed his lip. He shrugged. “Happy to help. I’ll take it. When Pritchard gets termed out, I’ll give it back.” The Colonel, Pitt and Jake shared an alpha-male moment.

  Jake nodded toward Pitt. “Please thank the Governor and make my apologies. I had to get his attention. The skull did the trick.”

  “In spades, Sam.” The Colonel said.

  “Yes it did, Ichabod.” Pitt said.

  Jake looked at Tanya and rubbed his fingertips under her chin. “Maybe you’ll tell our kids before bed. We’ll call it the tale of the headless lab-tech of Fransec on the Old Sonoma road.”

  “I look forward to that,” Tanya announced to the room. She tucked a napkin under his chin and opened the canvas bag. “Eat up, cowboy. Hot roast beef, extra gravy, crispy fries.”

  Jake looked at her. “Can you feed me? Small bites?” He slid his left hand along Tanya’s hip to the small of her back, under her blouse, and held it there. She purred.

  ***

  Jake watched two eagles glide on afternoon thermals above Sonoma Mountain as he soaked in Tanya’s hot tub. The stitches in his hip had come out two days earlier. He touched the tender scar. Tanya called it “his dented love handle.”

  Yesterday they’d returned from the Governor’s office, led by a motorcycle patrolman. Sonya enjoyed the trip most of all. The Colonel shared his flask of Sonoma brandy. He was very Scottish about sharing as they rolled through the flat landscape.

  Pitt was there to welcome them. Pritchard wanted photos. Tanya had them in a manila envelope. She wanted to frame them with his citation, next to his Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Jake sipped from a quart of Sonoma organic milk. He liked the wide-mouth glass jar.

  What was he going to do with a reward check for $50,000?

  “A small thank you,” Pritchard had said. “You took a bullet for me.” Jake decided that Governor Pritchard was a good guy with eyes you could believe in.

  Hap had seconded his assessment. “Pritchard’s a man who you take a bullet for. Now he’ll return your phone calls,”

  Compared to the military, Jake liked the upgrade in pay. Not ‘Vette numbers but new-truck numbers. He began drawing up plans for a tricked-out surveillance van, second-hand.

  Pitt said Semper was in the wind, no new leads. Jake mentioned that to Hap.

  “Pitt can keep looking. He won’t find anything. The private plane is gone too. Panama has no record of Semper’s entry. I’m told he crashed over the Pacific in Mexican air space with a Stinger missile up his ass. They can’t find that bag boy Cristobel either. Now, that’s way off the record.” Hap uncorked his flask on that note.

  “And the winery?”

  “Low bid came in from a group of Sonoma millionaires. The state wanted a quick sale. It’ll be back in production by spring. Fransec has a reputation in Germany. Imagine that.”

  “And the adulterated crap?”

  “The Wine Board siphoned off funds from Semper’s accounts to pay for a recall.” Jake sensed the Colonel had handled the recall and sale to benefit the state’s coffers and his millionaires club.

  “What about Timmons, the investigator out of Belesto’s office?”

  “Reassigned to the Mexi-Cali border, driving a paddy wagon for INS. My bet? Timmons blamed Belesto for freezing the investigation. Until yesterday, we may have needed him to testify.”

  “So what happened to Belesto?”

  “He resigned, claimed illness, a day before Pritchard was going to lock him up. Pritchard wanted his balls. Career over. A new guy, that ex-baseball player from Marin, is already in.”

  Hap sipped from his flask and looked out the window.

  Hap continued: “Sad isn’t it. Belesto ran out of friends. He died in a freak accident anchored on the lee side of Angel Island, drinking himself into a self-pity stupor.” Jake knew the place, a popular spot for party boats.

  “Got his foot caught in an anchor chain. Pulled overboard and drowned. Pitt said the autopsy showed no salt water in his lungs. Maybe he stopped breathing before he got tangled in that chain.”

  “Anyone going to investigate?”

  “Don’t bother, son. There’s no money in it. Some things are better left at the bottom of the bay.”

  “Good advice, Hap.”

  “Glad you’re listening, Knight.”

  Jake was pulled from his reverie when Tanya slid a plate of kale chips under his nose, fresh from the oven. Each withered leaf bubbled with a dusting of Sonoma cheese. She handed him a chilled IPA.

  “May I tempt you?”

  She untied the top of her bikini and let it drop to the deck. She slid over the edge of the hot tub and dipped into the water. Jake made room for her, but she preferred to settle into his lap with several sweet kisses.

  Back to Table of Contents

  A FTERWARD

  Six months earlier in Afghanistan.

  “Team leader! Point man down. Sniper four hundred yards on right. Target roof of warehouse.” Sergeant Silva squawked the dreaded message into his wireless headset. Everyone in Jake’s squad heard it through their ear buds.

  Silva looked at Knight. “Haul his ass out of here now, Knight.”

  Bad idea, Silva, Jake thought. Clear the area first. He ran forward anyway. Surge or no surge, no one wanted to see the kid bleed out in the dirt of a no-name village in Wardak province, Afghanistan. Jake had two minutes to get to him, otherwise, bye-bye. Semper-frickin’-fry.

  Jake looked over his shoulder and down the dirt track for backup. Nada.

  All he saw were dust devils and death ripening in the heat by a poppy plantation with the scent of panic and the sound of pain. The squad had taken cover against a mud brick wall. The dust whirled and kept them glued there.

  On his left, stark against the dry hills, he looked at a verdant field of puffy-headed opium poppies, their tall spindly knobs had been slit to drip black goo. Harvest was on and the sniper was determined Jake’s squad would get none of it. They didn’t want it anyway. They weren’t even authorized to burn it.

  The kid screamed. His life pooled out in an arterial gusher. His name was Dayton.

  The steel helmets of Jake’s squad bobbed up and down, peering over the mud wall for a target. They turned into trigger-happy maniacs, laying down fire on the rooftop.

  If the sniper had set up a few feet behind the lip of the roof—the way Jake would have done it—then he’d be scoping his next target now. If the sniper had a family, then he’d have fi
red and fled. If he wanted Allah’s reception with 72 virgins, he’d stand up and fire rockets. Jake prayed that the poppy farmer had dropped off the back of the building and run.

  Where was the medic? The armored personnel carrier? Jake wanted to shelter behind the Humvee and duck walk to Dayton.

  It was parked twenty yards behind him; shell casing spat from its 50-caliber machine gun. The machine gun roar added to the fear factor and supported Jake’s bet that the farmer had fled. That’s what Jake would do.

  The Humvee’s gunner was shredding the rooftop. Drunk on live action, gunfire and cordite, the driver turned tunnel vision and didn’t see Jake waving him forward.

  One-two-three, Jake chanted. One—pack the wound with QuickClot and secure the dressing. Tick-tock. The kid was a goner, otherwise.

  Two—jack him with morphine, magic elixir for the wounded and cousin to the black goo.

  Three—toss him over his shoulder and run like hell. Jake slung his M-16 across his back and scrambled up like a crab as he yanked a sterile bandage from his kit. He was no medic but he came to battle prepared.

  Was it life and death? Jake never knew until it was too late.

  He ducked and ran toward Dayton, sucking dust. He hammered his boots into the hard dirt track for the 20-yard sprint forward. He saw Dayton’s blood mixing with the dust into an expanding pool of crimson mud.

  Jake landed hard next to him. He found a weak pulse at his throat.

  Jake ripped the wrapper off the hemostatic gauze and packed it into the hole in Dayton’s thigh. It was ugly, through and through.

  He saw pieces of bone in the gushing hole. The shards were not a bleached white, more a shade of gray and blue. The sniper’s slug had blown through the bone and clipped the artery.

  Jake’s hands turned red with blood as he worked on the wound. The wound bled through the bandage, winning the battle with the QuickClot. Jake pulled a rubber strap from his kit, whipped it around Dayton’s upper thigh and tugged hard. The tourniquet stopped the fountain.

  Dayton groaned and opened his eyes.

  “Your knee is fine, through and through on your thigh. Let’s get you home with both legs. Don’t try to walk.” Tears tumbled down Dayton’s cheeks.

  “Frick, it hurts.”

  Jake pulled a pre-loaded syringe from his kit and ripped through the plastic cover. He felt for a spot above the tourniquet on the inside of Dayton’s thigh.

  “Here’s mother’s little helper.” Blindly, Jake jacked the needle through Dayton’s bloody pant leg and pushed hard on the plunger.

  “Holy mother.” Dayton’s eyes rolled up. A silly grin broke across his baby face. He floated with the poppies.

  “Here we go.” Jake was talking to himself.

  He looked over his shoulder for the Humvee, 40 yards behind him and blazing away at the rooftop. Jake stood, bent forward at the waist and leaned back, pulling dreamland Dayton across his shoulder.

  He slid his arm behind Dayton’s leg, catching him behind the knee with the crook of his elbow in a one-legged fireman’s carry. Jake pivoted and ran toward the Humvee. Dayton’s extra two hundred pounds didn’t slow him. This was a flat-out adrenalin-fueled hump and he’d done it before.

  Jake could hear the grind of gears as the Humvee rolled forward to meet them, its machine gun gone silent. Finally the driver was focusing on the medical emergency.

  Jake glanced up at the roof of the warehouse where the sniper had been. Bullets bounced off the walls that now sported a bad case of holes and pock marks. If the sniper was there, he’d look like a Swiss cheese. Jake prayed for fondue and ran like hell.

  Dayton moaned and made no sense in Jake’s ear. If Jake could keep the blood flow stopped, Dayton would live to dance another day.

  Otherwise he’d be one more vet with plastic parts, or worse, a white headstone. Getting Dayton to a plasma IV was the only thing on Jake’s mind.

  The sniper had hit Dayton above the knee, avoiding his steel helmet and Kevlar vest. A thigh shot with high-powered ammo has a 50% chance of hitting bone, plus a 20% chance of clipping the artery. Dayton was two for two and dying.

  Jake ran, determined to change the equation. He’d be damned if he’d let PFC Dayton leave his short, sweet legacy splashed in blood on a dirt track in Afghanistan.

  ‘One sniper, one shot,’ Jake repeated to himself as he hustled forward.

  Snipers usually take their shot and move off quickly once their location is known. Jake imagined that he was safe. He heard the thumps and felt the concussive explosions followed by a shower of grit as grenades hit the rooftop. The explosions raised a new cloud of dust to shroud his get-away. No sniper could live through that.

  Eight years earlier, Jake Knight had bragging rights as a broken-field runner on the Cardinal football field, Shake-and-Bake Jake. He jinked and juked as he ran and shifted directions on every count of three. Adrenaline tunneled his vision and slowed the battle cacophony to a crawl. He felt Dayton’s weight sapping the strength in his legs.

  Back home, Jake had hefted sacks of grain heavier than this. He sucked it up, humping forward under Dayton’s dead weight. The Humvee was ten yards away. Ten yards was a first down; he’d get Dayton over the goal line. Hell, he had this.

  The Humvee stopped; Jake never learned why. Inside it was all the emergency medical gear to get Dayton home, able to shake his bootie with both legs attached. He deserved an IV cocktail of plasma, meds, morphine and another dusting of QuickClot.

  Jake never heard the bullet that got him. You know you’re hit only when you, too, roar with pain. The sniper’s next shot hit his steel helmet and knocked him flat, pole-axed. Dayton and Jake ended up as a pile of arms and legs in the middle of the dirt road.

  His ears rang; his vision blurred. He felt his face for blood. Nada.

  It must have been a glancing shot because it never penetrated Jake’s steel helmet. He has the helmet to this day, badly dented and gouged in a finger-long furrow where the bullet hit. Civilians like to rim that furrow with a finger and swear or say a prayer.

  Death came knocking and rang his bell. Jake had juked just in time. Jake crawled out of the blackness, mildly concussed and seeing double. The sniper had cleaned his clock with the glancing head shot. God bless U.S. Army steel.

  The sniper didn’t take time to gloat. He fired two more shots in quick succession. The first passed through Dayton’s neck, a one-way ticket to Valhalla.

  The second shot passed through Jake’s upper thigh and left a gaping one inch hole from daylight to daylight. It missed his arteries and bone, with odds of one in three. It put Jake on the fast track for going home.

  Jake remembered looking to his left for the sniper, despite the concussion and his hammering headache. Some part of his brain registered that the sniper was not where he was supposed to be. Smart snipers never are.

  Jake saw movement above the warehouse. The sniper’s position was not on the rooftop but hidden behind rocks on the crest of a hill behind the warehouse.

  Jake waved his arm toward the rocky mound and yelled into his headset, “Sniper on hill above.” Silva heard him, raised his rifle and fired.

  Jake passed out again but not for long. He never saw the splash of blood as the sniper departed earth in search of his heavenly reward.

  Only in hindsight Jake remembered he crawled forward to the Humvee, dragging his leg out from under Dayton, and spitting out a mouth filled with dirt. Leaning against the Humvee, he tore through his pant leg, wiped his own blood from the pooling wound and staunched it with QuickClot. He self-administered a shot of morphine and he too surrendered to mother’s little helper.

  Later, in the back of a blood-soaked Humvee padded soft with a head full of Morpheus, Sergeant Silva boasted to Jake, “We got the son-of-a-bitch. Knight, that was pure gallantry what you did out there.”

  That’s how Jake Knight earned his Bronze Star and got a promotion to sergeant on his last day at war. Semper-frickin-fry.

  ~The End~

&
nbsp; Back to Table of Contents

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Prasad is pen name for a San Francisco writer for 40-years. Prasad means ‘divine food’ and he intends his stories to be fun, entertaining fiction. With a degree in Journalism from University of Florida ’72, he spent ten years working overseas as an advertising and travel writer in Johannesburg and Tokyo. Stateside, he managed a retreat center for a Buddhist group, launched a dozen high-tech companies and became a green energy expert. He earned an EPA Energy Star in ’04.

  He is a Florida native, a diver, kayaker, trekker and traveler; solar champion, workshop leader and speaker; and proud to be a father, husband, and Boy Scout in recovery. Now he writes crime thrillers full-time. The next two titles in the Sonoma Knight series are Gurl-Posse Kidnap and Gut-Check Green.

  In 2012, Prasad published Campaign ZEN, 500b.c. – 2012, a subjective history of the ballot box and US elections, illustrated and rich in spoken-word Colonial doggerel. He’s a champion of the democratic process and life-time learning. Campaign ZEN is available on Amazon.

  His Expletives Deleted blog is at Goodreads.

  Twitter: PeterPrasadSF@Twitter.com

  Pinterest: PeterPrasad@Pinterest.com

  Email: PeterPrasad.SF@gmail.com

  Facebook Fan Page: JakeKnightNovels

  Prasad enjoys dialog with pro-active readers and emerging writers.

  THANK YOU.

  Many authors spend hours staring into space, editing in their heads, waiting to be invited into dialog with their characters. Sonoma Knight began as a one sentence idea in July of 2012, while I painted an old fence bright red. It evolved into a chapter plot outline by October, 2012. It sat ignored through the holidays.

  I returned to the green hills of Sonoma under the full moon of February to begin the march of 2,500-word days. Huzzah. I came to a proofed and polished conclusion by May 30th. Editing took a month. Then we illustrated. I hope you’ve enjoy reading it.