J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (24 page)

October 4, 2010

About the Author

J. Daniel Sawyer is a hat-wearing, obsessive-compulsive autodidact attempting to write his way out of the loony bin.

A self-aggrandizing science fiction and fantasy author who publishes lurid stories and, worse, the occasional popular philosophy article, he is also a very minor authority on Open Source media production (a topic on which he is, unfortunately, published regularly in LinuxJournal).

In addition to his wanton abuse of the printed word, he unscrupulously uses his decade-long experience as an audio and video producer with his painfully florid and gritty writing style to create deeply immersive audio universes. This habit, which he indulges in public, has garnered him seven Parsec nominations and helped him make his first professional fiction and philosophy sales (a trend which, for the good of the world at large, we can only hope abates soon). Meanwhile, his growing, rabid fan-base is currently plotting to imprison him and force him to produce endless new literary abominations for their amusement. We can only hope they succeed.

Join Clarke Lantham in his next adventure, now available at fine ebook retailers everywhere

A Ghostly Christmas Present

Book 2 of

The Clarke Lantham Mysteries

by J. Daniel Sawyer

I

Clang.

It’s a special sound to hear on Christmas Eve morning, more distinctive than any Salvation Army bell. Immediately before you hear it, some gruff guard is liable to bellow out an “all clear,” but I wouldn’t count on it. Like cops, prison guards are two kinds of people: the compassionate ones that want to make the world a better place, and the abused kids that grow up to be bullies. Cops—well, cops in well-run departments—tend to tilt toward the former. Prison guards tend to tilt the other way, and if your hand gets crushed when the gate closes, it’s more entertainment for them.

They sure as hell didn’t know what to do with me. They kept looking at me and saying “you don’t belong here,” even during the strip search.

Of course, in this podunk Twin Peaks wannabe town, the sheriff’s deputy that threw me in here claimed they didn’t have any room left in the holding tank because of too many drunks. I used to be a cop, I’d be fine in lockup, right?

Yeah, right.

Naturally, they stuck me with the big mean-looking dude who would’ve been called “Bubba” in any prison movie. That he introduced himself as “Manny” (and had about a third grade education) gave the enterprise just enough pathetic to keep me fighting back my menacing laughter.

“You an’ me’s cellies now, boy.” On anyone else, that squeaky voice would be a dead indicator that his balls were just starting to drop, except this guy was easily twenty five and, judging by the swastika on his shaved head and the Black Power tattoo on his left shoulder, a confused victim of identity politics. Hearing him schlep up behind me like he expected me to beg his favor wasn’t one of the more companionable roommate experiences I’ve ever had, and I went to school at U.C. Santa Cruz. “You’s gonna be my good boy and I’ll make sure life is real purdy for ya.”

I heard a draw fly buttons pop upen behind me—you have to work to make untying a drawstring audible, this guy knew what he was up to. In jail for fifteen minutes, and I already got an overgrown third grader trying to play doctor with me. Joy to the world, my cellmate wants to come.

I stepped back from the bars until I bumped into him and said, in my best quavery scared-as-hell coward voice, “You promise? Thanks, man.” I reached back till I found his hip, snaked my hand down to his balls, and got a good handful. Then, I gave them a nice squeeze and a slow twist.

“Ooh, that’s right boy, jes…ow! What the…” I clamped down so hard he couldn’t do anything but grab the bunk and try to stay upright so I didn’t take his nuts off if he fell backward.

Another really good twist, and a little more pressure, I turned around to make sure I had his undivided attention. “Oh come on now, Immanuel.” Yeah, I was in that kind of mood. Endless Christmas music in hotel lobbies does that to me. “I’m not your captive.”

He squeezed out a “Huh?” between groans and failed attempts to scream.

“Here’s the deal. We’re gonna be pals. You and me, all the way. But I ain’t your catcher, or I’ll take these,” I gave his jewels another twist, “and make ‘em into a necklace. You got me?”

Staring down a guy four inches taller and a couple hundred pounds heavier than you isn’t exactly a trick you learn in kindergarten, but you learn a few tricks as a beat cop.

He gritted his teeth. Sweat beads coming up on his head now. Face red as Rudolph’s nose. Kept him in too much pain for the adrenaline to do him any good. Good thing too—he could’ve made a smoothie out of me without trying. But after this much pain, and given that there weren’t going to be any scheduled activities for a couple hours yet, I was banking that he’d need to sleep off the testicle torsion before he got his revenge.

And he wasn’t answering my question.

“I said,” I scooted close enough that he tried to retreat. Coach, we have a first down. “Do you got me?”

He still didn’t say anything.

“Look, if you don’t answer me, I might just have to blow you. And I haven’t had breakfast yet today.” I squeezed a little harder. Much harder and I might actually break something. “So, you got me?”

“Yeah, yeah, goddammit, I got ya,” he squeaked.

“Good man.” I let go all at once and gave him a gentle push. He collapsed on the bed with his hands cradling his genitals, and curled into a fetal position with his ass hanging out of his drawers.

Well, there was gonna be a full moon tonight. Might as well start early.

I turned my attention back to the view out the bars and ran over my less-than-dignified Christmas Eve.

Count on the idiot named “Clarke Lantham” to provoke a cop just because the cop was a prick. Count on him to do it in another state where his lawyer wasn’t a member of the bar, and the only person he could call was the brother whom he’d deliberately avoided telling he was in town. And then, count on that same self-professed idiot to do it all when he was trying to get home by rental car to see to a business emergency.

Yeah, there’s some things only the ass-end of a set of prison bars can teach you. Chief among them being: “Don’t try to find a way out of Sea-Tac through the suburbs when a snowstorm closes the airport.”

Granted, it ain’t the kind of fortune-cookie proverb that’s likely to come in handy every day, but if the waitress at the Hilton had been kind enough to scribble it on my receipt this morning, I’d be at least a whole mile south of the airport by now, without having the extra helping of testicles before lunch.

If I’m gonna be honest, though—and, when you’re standing in a prison cell with a four-hundred-pound six-foot-five cellie snoring like a polar bear with flu, there isn’t much sense in creative self-deception—my assistant Rachel pegged my first mistake during our phone meeting yesterday. Her typically genteel appraisal of my situation ran something along the lines of “Jesus Christ, Lantham, only you would go to an insurance convention in Seattle in the middle of inheritance season and not check the weather report. How the hell did you stay in business before you hired me?”

She was gonna crap fresh grapefruits when she heard about my current predicament. Top of my agenda was not letting her find out yet—last thing I needed this morning was guff from my twenty-year-old underpaid gothy employee. Particularly when she was right about it.

Now I just had to wait for my brother-who-wishes-he-wasn’t to show up, and ponder the meaning of Christmas—which was ostensibly coming tomorrow, though the weather seemed to have different ideas.

I can sum up the meaning of Christmas in one word: Crunch.

Otherwise known as “the sound you don’t want to hear when you’re in a car.”

For me, the holiday season is full of little surprises from Santa like that one. December in Oakland is a miserable thing. In bad years we’ll get ten inches of rain, and the thermometer will drop to forty degrees during the day, and sometimes we’ll get some frost overnight. It’s a horror show for traffic—the interstates can get so bad that it might take an hour and a bit to make the fifty miles from Oakland to Los Gatos.

The thing about winter is that, when you live around the Bay, you forget what the thing about winter is. You think about the rain and the minor bump in traffic. You think about what a pain in the ass it is to have to remember gloves if you’re going out after dark and intend to spend any amount of time outside (and really, who goes outside in winter after sunset for any reason other than to get from the car to a club?).

So now that you know what piss-ant conditions I consider “bad weather,” you probably think the reason that the side of my car was mushroomed in from a broadside in the Seattle snow was that I blew through a signal at ten miles an hour on slick ice, right?

Yeah, you’d think that. It hurts when reality doesn’t cooperate with prejudice, isn’t it? I run into that all the time.

Sorry for the surly mood. It’s been a hell of a few days. But rest assured, I keep my cold-weather knives sharp with twice-annual refresher courses at Infineon. Have to. My PI license means I can operate anywhere in California, and you never know when someone’s going to call you up to Dodge Ridge or Tahoe to find their missing cat.

So yeah, I am spoiled rotten, but I also live in California, and I’d have an excuse if I drove like crap in the snow—even though I don’t. The mooks up in Washington, though, who get snow at least once a year, act like they’ve never seen the stuff. White flakes start falling from the sky and they all rush out to the store at sixty miles-an-hour to buy God a fresh bottle of Head and Shoulders.

Of all the sounds that can tickle your ears when you’re in the car, “crunch” is right up there with “boom” for ones you don’t want to hear. But it’s
really
not a sound you want to hear when you’re sitting at a stop-light on a road in suboptimal driving conditions, or when it’s accompanied by the sound of a honking horn and a pair of high-beams embedding themselves in your driver-side window frame three inches from your head. About the only good thing that can come out of a sound like that is the relief when you realize the truck hadn’t been going fast enough to actually push you out of the driver’s seat.

But the local cops don’t see it that way when they get a look at your out-of-state license, which is why they had me leaning against their car while they took my statement, debating whether they should charge me with reckless endangerment.

“You know that it’s against the law to drive so fast that you put other people in danger, don’t you?” Officer Bellman said. He was easily the more senior of the two, in his mid forties and none-too-happy to be out on a day like this. Up here, they called places like Vancouver and Tacoma “cities,” and this guy had the big-fish/small-pond thing going behind the coffee-stained breath that he insisted on sharing with me.

“What part of ‘He lost control and damn near killed me’ doesn’t compute?”

He hitched his belt up, spread his legs a little apart, and swaggered up so he was close enough to kiss me. I resisted making the obvious joke. “I’ve got you on midemeanor endangerment, buster, this ain’t the time to go pissing me off.”

“Look,” I put my hands between my butt and the car so I wouldn’t be tempted to shove him off me, “I don’t
actually
think you’re an idiot. But it’s cold out, and your breath says you’ve only had one pot of coffee today. I’m just saying you need more antifreeze if you’re going to expect your brain to work out in this weather.”

“That’s it. Turn around and spread ‘em.”

I shrugged and did what he said. Yeah, I know it’s dumb to antagonize the cops, but at that point I didn’t give a damn. At that point, I was getting a kick out of the fantasy of suing this joker for false arrest just so I could be the cherry on top of his Sunday the same way he was currently dolloping whipped turds on top of mine.

So, there I was in the klink, waiting for my kid brother Sam—who should have been called Smeagol—to show up and post for me. Then I’d have to stay in over the holiday until the arraignment on Tuesday. Christmas with this branch of the family? Even Dante never thought of that one.

I ground my teeth together. It should have been a nice day of getting slowly sodomized by the gods of Seattle traffic. Rachael had called this morning to tell that there was a problem with Southland, and it was no good going into it on the phone because they wouldn’t settle for dealing with my assistant, no matter what. No, they wouldn’t talk on the phone. Yes, it had to be in person. No, she didn’t have any other details.

Which meant I couldn’t wait for the airport to open back up, so I’d rented a subcompact and tried heading south on my own. A thirteen hour drive in good weather, so I’d probably get home about the time the weather broke and I could fly down in two hours, but at least I wouldn’t be sitting around the bloody Airport Hilton cooling my heels. I’d comforted myself with the knowledge that at least the conference netted me a handful of leads for regular insurance gigs. Steady work is the unicorn of the self-employed, and there ain’t a one of us who’s virginal in any sense.

Sam showed up before Manny could find his way back to the land of the wakeful. Just as well—I didn’t fancy trying to convince him he needed to buy me flowers before we got serious about our enforced cohabitation.

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