Justice Rain (Chris Seely Vigilante Justice Book 11) Read online

  “Do you need to then? Is that why you analyzed it like that?”

  Fortunately McBride was laughing again, but Gee, you keep putting your foot in your mouth for no reason.

  Chris said, “You wonder if they’ve dealt with one before. Wouldn’t you think the sheriff would take over? Or is there one of those? What county are we even in -- is this still Maricopa? I should know that.”

  “No problem,” McBride said, “yes, we’re still Maricopa, another 10,12 miles. Then you’re in Yavapai, or if you’re headed northeast that’d be Gila.”

  “Either way,” Chris said.

  “I hear you,” McBride said. “You can ask Dale, how they typically handle these matters.”

  “Oh. Who’s Dale?”

  “Dale? He’s a cop. Not local Eclipse. Good guy. No chip on his shoulder like you sometimes get.”

  “You mean like . . . a Phoenix one?” This wouldn’t be a good development at all, having one of those residing right here with you at the ostensibly trouble-free Rancho Villas.

  “Dale’s out of Gilbert,” McBride said.

  “Unh. Gilbert’s . . . where the heck is it, relation to Phoenix?”

  “Half hour, maybe a little more. You know where the 60 interchange is?”

  “With 10, you mean?”

  “Past that. Not a bad community. I looked at a unit over that way too, before I settled on here.”

  Chris said, “But separate departments you mean? Gilbert, Phoenix, Mesa, whatever?”

  “Not sure about Mesa. But Gilbert, sure. Technically it might still be part of your metro Phoenix, but they’re set up independent.”

  The technically part wasn’t the greatest, but what could you do. Chris said, “Shifting gears here, where were you before this?”

  “Chicago area. Are you familiar with it?”

  “Only for a guy’s wedding once. In Wilmette. I thought I’d be his best man, but he snubbed me. I went to a White Sox game during the rehearsal.”

  “Why’d he snub you?”

  “I tossed that one around for a while. I never asked him directly . . . One time we were camping out in my back yard? We were probably 12. You get into telling those tall stories, and I told one about my Dad, bragging about him, that my friend Axe didn’t believe. So I did the next best thing, and bad-mouthed his dad about something.”

  “There you go, that happens. But the little grudge from that night may have extended 20 years?”

  “Oh easily. I think it’s still there. When I got married I didn’t even tell the guy.”

  “I see.”

  “Although mine only lasted a couple months. We went Justice of the Peace.”

  “No huge gala then. That would be one positive.”

  “Oh yeah. She’s long-since remarried and happy. Race car mechanic, one of the Nascar tracks in Florida . . . I’m rambling here, sorry about that.”

  “Don’t mention it,” McBride said. “I lost my wife too.”

  Chris wasn’t thinking exactly, the he lost his wife, Katie, down there in Florida, just that it didn’t work.

  McBride continued. “My case, we were solid -- so I thought. No kids, but 14 years in the books. Then I got locked up for a bit, and she lost interest after that.”

  “Whoa. Locked up . . . as in, for real?”

  “White collar, but yes.”

  “Lemme halt you there for a sec -- honestly we just met. You’re opening up pretty good.”

  McBride put his whole head under for a minute . . . and the minute started to drag a bit and Chris was approaching getting concerned when the guy re-surfaced.

  McBride said, “You tend to relax, older you get. No reason to keep a lot of secrets. People don’t always get it, but I guess it’s a case of been there, done that.”

  Chris could identify with this guy, that was for sure. Maybe envy the guy would be more accurate, since of course Chris couldn’t sit in a hot tub the same way and let it fly.

  He said, “Ooh boy, though, the lock-up business. Where was that?”

  “MCC. Not a hell-hole or anything, and it was only 90 days.”

  Chris didn’t want to ask too many dumb questions. He’d vaguely heard of MCC, assumed it was one of those facilities that held you while you awaited trial, and that probably included the convicted short-timers like this McBride too, if he wasn’t making it up.

  “Federal though . . . or no?” Chris said.

  “Oh yeah. They got me good there . . . I say not a hell-hole, I should qualify that a bit. My cell mate spit on me periodically for 2 and half months. I had to sleep with one eye open . . . you know how it is, half these guys are mentally ill, entirely unpredictable . . . Finally the last two weeks they transfer him out, and I have the place to myself.”

  “Dang. Jeez.”

  “I know. Then, they stick me in a halfway house for 18 months. That wasn’t bad, once I got the routine handled. Maybe I grew up, who knows.”

  “Well,” Chris said, “this story’s getting interesting, but I’m getting hot, here.”

  “This’s is a good one,” McBride said. “They keep the temperature up. The other good one, back past the shuffleboard, they got it set-up nicely, surrounded by those ferns, plenty of privacy.”

  “You mean, if you have a date or something?”

  “Sure. You want to relax, after hours. Less liable someone comes plunging in fresh off some workout activity . . . You ever try pickleball, by the way?”

  “The sound is a little hard to take,” Chris said. “I mean I’m used to it now, sort of. My condo is a bit close to the courts, if I could have done it all over.”

  “Ask for a discount then,” McBride said. And Chris was thinking here we go again with the lodging wheeling and dealing in this place, and McBride added, “That was my old life. What got me in trouble.”

  So Chris had to hear this, and you still had plenty of time before you ate and got ready for work, and he used the term loosely . . . so he took a patio chair and a couple minutes later McBride turned off the spa jets and joined him.

  “What fucked me,” McBride said, “was getting greedy. I had a nice operation, flipping properties before everyone and his brother started doing it. Mostly north shore, but all over Chicago if the deal made sense. I even had guys bird-dogging for me. A couple full-sized billboards on I-94, the Edens Expressway.”

  “Saying what,” Chris said. “You mean the We Buy Houses kind of pitch?”

  “Exactly that, with a subtle variation or two. So then I have party -- and I had a nice spread, summer place on Lake Michigan -- and some guy says you should be a guru, like on TV.”

  “Ah.”

  “Unh-huh, you understand . . . so first I’m thinking, yeah right . . . but my ego, it gets the better of me, and I had to admit, I liked the ring of guru . . . so wouldn’t you know I start doing that, the books and CD’s, the whole 9 yards. Funny part, it wasn’t the money -- I wanted to be on TV.”

  “Well,” Chris said, “we’re all human. Why not, if you can work it.”

  “Thing of it was, I sold a couple hundred thousand of them. If you can believe it. Maybe more. House flipping how-to packages . . . The kicker, to sweeten the pot, the last thing I mention -- you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Sure. If you act now, we’ll throw in the set of 8 inch carving knives as well . . . And exclusively for the first 50 callers, our world famous sharpening stone, hand crafted at a secret location off the southern Italian coast.”

  “You’re not too bad,” McBride said, “though you’re over-doing it a bit. My deal-closer was, they got free 5-year email consultations with me, or a member of my staff.”

  “Hmm,” Chris said.

  “Unh-huh.”

  “So what . . . you didn’t always get back to them, when they emailed?”

  “I didn’t get back to them at all. In fact I made a g-mail account special for the product, and I only checked it once, that I can recall.”

  “You’re bad,” Chris said, “I’ll admit. I apol
ogize for laughing, which I shouldn’t be.”

  “Be my guest . . . So there you have it, in a nutshell. The complaints come pouring in, which I didn’t anticipate -- or if I did, I had blinders on. The feds get into it, since of course I’m transacting across state lines.”

  “Oh boy.”

  “Right . . . So the aforementioned MCC stint, then the 18 months in the halfway house -- which was actually a hostel, for travelers -- they filed that under community service. After that I was a free man. That was 6 years ago.”

  “What about restitution? They hit you there too.”

  “Big time. I had to declare bankruptcy. That goes without saying.”

  Chris said, “But you figured out . . . a nest egg . . . where you can live the good life in the Rancho Villas at present -- and pretty much not do shit? Or do you?”

  “Do anything? Yeah, I’m online. Not exactly up to my old tricks -- hopefully it won’t angle that direction again -- but it’s a working wage.”

  Chris couldn’t tell, the sun in his face, if the guy was winking at him tongue in cheek, but his guess was this guy had recovered enough to be earning more than a working wage -- and you wouldn’t put those old tricks past him, either.

  Chris said, “Well thanks for that. I’m not going to say you brightened my day, exactly . . .”

  “But I added some color to it?” McBride said, big smile again.

  “You did. The other guy, meanwhile, Waylon. Pardon me if you have a relationship with him, but I wasn’t picking up the all-time best vibe there.”

  McBride smiling again. “You’re saying Waylon could be a suspect, our current situation?”

  Chris wasn’t saying that and hadn’t considered it, but Jeez, maybe you don’t rule him out. “What I had trouble with,” he said, “the guy tells me he’s a backup quarterback. First of all, doesn’t he resemble more a position player? But secondly, he’s complaining about his aches and pains. How do you acquire those, if you only get in one game?”

  “He got in more. He only started one, I think. But I hear you.”

  “Of course I ran into Kenny Stabler once at the airport,” Chris said. “You know who that is?”

  “Sure, the Snake. The Raiders. Tremendous in the last 2 minutes of a game, if they were trailing.”

  “That guy was huge too,” Chris said. “Not on TV so much, but in person. And that was a football generation ago.”

  “So you’re giving Waylon a pass?”

  “Sure, why not. Until proven otherwise, like they say.”

  “Well,” McBride said, “that’s makes two. Of your evaluations that I agree with.”

  “What’s the other one?” Chris said.

  “The cop you mentioned, who spoke to you. Fat guy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He spoke to me too.” It took Chris a moment, and then he assumed that would be logical, on account of McBride being a likely rare resident here who happened to have a record. Chris was extra-glad now that he was going with Jeff Masters -- no record for Chris Seely, that he was aware of, but Jeez, don’t hand them a look-around.

  Chris said, “Oh yeah? What kind of questions he ask you?”

  “You know, the usual. Any idea what happened? Do I play golf? How do I enjoy living here?”

  “Not much juice there,” Chris said.

  “No,” McBride said. “I don’t like to comment, but if there was a jackpot for not knowing your ass from a hole in the ground, that guy’d probably hit it.”

  Chapter 3

  The golf course rental shift was a bit more low-key today. Not back to normal, quite, but it was a perfect cloudless afternoon and plenty of foursomes came out of the woodwork -- apparently undeterred by having to play the 11th hole.

  That was another thing yesterday. It sure didn’t seem like there’d been much forensics action involved. The poor woman was discovered at daybreak, and by 8 the full course was open for business as normal. You’d think rope off the 11th for a while and make the golfers go around, skip from 10 to 12, but they’d wrapped it up pretty quick.

  Meaning -- Chris assumed, Eclipse PD? That didn’t sound quite right, that it would be handled that simple. Maybe he would, for his own curiosity, have to ask that Dale guy about the protocol around here.

  What lingering discussion there was, among the employees, had most of them in agreement that the Haliday Jay Express, 8 miles down the road toward Phoenix, was known for shady activity -- one guy saying that some of the hookers actually had rooms on the first floor, lived there. Chris wasn’t sure he believed this, but either way, none of the staffers seemed real concerned about the homicide being a threat to any innocent folks in Eclipse.

  Chris agreed, but he did wonder why the guy -- assuming the murderer was an individual -- would choose the Rancho Villas grounds to dump a body, if that’s what happened.

  Then again -- and Gee, unpleasant to think about -- but maybe there weren’t many options, most everything else besides your golf courses consisting of cement and desert.

  Chris couldn’t quite shake an eerie feeling that he was possibly greeting, and renting a cart to, a killer today -- since someone obviously had known about this place -- and you didn’t have to be a resident to play here, you could pay a fee, though it wasn’t cheap.

  Either way, he kept busy, and a woman tripped near the coke machine and Chris had to apply some ice to her forehead, and the lady was a good sport and joked that he had a good bedside manner -- which is what her dad always told her too, that she’d be a good doctor. But her mom was old-fashioned and steered her toward nursing.

  “Which way’d you go?” Chris said.

  “Scuba diving,” the woman said. “I opened a school in New Zealand. Have you ever tried it?”

  “I don’t think so. That’s with the tanks, right? The whole bit.”

  She said that’s correct, and if he’s ever in California, Monterey, they have a wonderful certification program, and it can truly change your life.

  “But despite it all, you ended up here,” Chris said.

  “Allergies,” she said, pointing to the side of her nose, and she thanked him for the ice, and Chris could understand that, there’d been a guy back-to-back with him in Petaluma one time, their yards sharing a fence, and that guy sneezed solid for three weeks every spring, and the volume could have rattled your window panes, and probably did.

  Chris finished his shift and ate light -- a couple of those pho soups you get from Costco that require opening about 5 different packets and adding tiny ingredients, but they were pretty tasty, though again minimal -- but the reason being, he was going to try a little pickleball tonight.

  McBride had suggested it this morning, hey it’s harmless fun, you meet some folks.

  Chris had his own routine by now, and you hated to break it -- he’d typically take a long walk through the neighborhood, cross over Sunscape Road at the end, the cut-through into the Dirca Villages complex, and walk around there for another half hour. That community had a different vibe, cheaper units, more noise, cars revving up, even motorcycles sometimes, and there was a park in the center with some intense half-court basketball going on, and where everyone sat outside until late. The place had some life to it, people’d remind him of other people he once knew, his mind wandered, not the worst thing, and it was kind of a scene over there.

  The Rancho Villas was more controlled and plastic-ie, but Chris always liked to return to it, with a little perspective thrown in.

  But tonight he headed to the pickleball complex, that he could see -- and hear -- off his little back deck, though you had to loop all the way around the aquatic complex to get there.

  He was counting them up, and there were 12 courts, and he hadn’t been paying attention but there seemed to be some postings in the rec center about meetings where they were trying to get more built. What McBride had told him, laughing, was it was a dumb sport, but it was the fastest growing one in the country, so what the heck.

  Chris sized it up, and there was an o
ption . . . you could wait your turn and blend in with whoever needed a doubles partner at the moment, or you could fork over 8 bucks and let the female pro take over, a round-robin she had going on a couple designated courts, which included a little instruction.

  And dang, this gal was kind of striking. Snug outfit, just a tad overweight in all the right places, wavy black hair tied back, and wearing a visor . . . and of course the first comment out of Chris’s mouth is, “Hi, I’m Jeff. Why do you need a visor at night?”

  The woman pro was handling two paddles, like she was comparing the weight or the balance. She looked at Chris and said, “And I’m Karolina, pleased to meet you. The sun’s still around, if you haven’t noticed. After that, the lights get in the way.”

  “Ah, you can’t see the ball as well without it then,” Chris said. “Do you ever watch football on TV?”

  Karolina said sometimes. She had a trace of a European accent, Chris thinking that sort of fits.

  He said, “Macho sport, but then these head coaches are strutting around the sidelines with visors. I don’t know, not the best look.” Speaking of which, Waylon the NFL guy was making his way through the far gate, some players greeting him.

  “Anyhow,” Chris said, “any tips? And Gee, you live here, or what? I’ve never run into you before.”

  “I do,” Karolina said. “They take good care of us.” Whatever that meant. Chris said, “You coach, like tennis too . . . or this keeps you busy.”

  “This,” she said. “Would you like a lesson? I’m at 54 an hour. Check around, in the valley that’s a bargain.”

  Chris was trying to remember, there’d been Jenna Lee, the Asian tennis pro in Golden Gate Park, and yeah, she was probably more.

  Chris said, “But honestly, these people can barely hit the ball. And the ones that can, they don’t need any technique, the thing’s got holes and it slows down and stays in. What are you going to help?”

  “You’re a bit of a wise guy,” Karolina said, and she moved on to organize her round robin pupils, but Chris felt like an idiot after a couple minutes and came up with the fee and gave her a 20 dollar tip and apologized for being a know it all.