The Last Great Case of the
Sunny Hills Detective Agency
by
Richard Alan Dickson
Published by Grey Cat Press
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 © Richard Alan Dickson
Discover other titles by Richard Alan Dickson at Smashwords.com
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* * *
The Last Great Case of the
Sunny Hills Detective Agency
by
Richard Alan Dickson
The Case of the Fire-Starting Bandit
Chapter One: The Scene of the Crime
Steel teeth bit the earth.
The rumbling grind of metal scraping across the hard-packed ground rang out into the night. The garden rake dragged another heavy load of soggy ash, charred bottles, and half-burnt clumps of wheat grass into a pile in the center of a blackened clearing. At the edge of the burnt circle, a crowd of blackberry vines and scrub brush looked on, silent but for the whisper of the rain pattering through their hair.
"What are you doing?"
I worked the wet rake, my calloused hands handling the unwelcome activity without complaint. The rest of my body wasn't nearly as quiet—particularly my feet, which were cold and wet inside a pair of worn loafers. Beneath a slightly rumpled trench coat, my back was starting to get sore from all the stooping, and my neck was nearly numb from the midnight monsoon rolling down the brim of the comfortable brown fedora set high on my forehead—
"What are you doing?"
The cry came from nowhere, the thin voice of a little whiner—
"Jim—"
"I'm telling a story. Now, be quiet and keep raking, or do you want Mom to come out here and yell at us again?"
Yesterday's fire was big news. It had made all the local papers. Two innocent boys were accused and convicted with a single stern glare—all without the benefit of a trial, or even the chance to speak up. The very heavens cried out against the injustice. The city of Sunny Hills would never be sunny again—
"What are you talking about? I'm sweating to death and you're getting a sunburn! It's got to be a million degrees out here. Besides, we don't even have monsoons in Seattle."
"Says who?"
"Says my teacher."
"Oh, yeah? Do you know why she says that? Did you ask her? You didn't, did you? You don't ask enough questions to be a detective. You just smile and nod whenever anyone tells you anything. Just quit your whining, Johnny—"
"Jon."
"Just quit your whining, Johnny. Keep raking and see how it's done. You might learn a thing or two."
"What's to learn? You're making up most of it."
My partner was new, but his arguments were not. He'd used them on nearly every case the Sunny Hills Detective Agency ever worked. I'd have told him to talk to the hand, but at the moment the hand was busy riding the rain-slicked rake through the dirt, cleaning up the mess and searching for clues. But not even the rumbling of the rake was loud enough to cover up his whimpering little whines—
"Real detectives don't talk like that."
"You can do it however you want when it's your turn. Right now, it's my turn. That means we do things my way. Be quiet and rake!"
"Fine!"
There was a grumble in the air, and not just from my partner. Nobody liked losers or whiner-babies, but nobody liked bullies, either—not even the very air. Bullies gave kids wedgies, stole their lunch money, and played with matches. Around here, people talking about bullies were talking about the Twenty -First Street Gang—three of the worst malcontents ever to set foot on the planet.
"Oh, brother!"
"Yes, Johnny, I am. And, now that that's settled—"
"I know, I know. Be quiet."
My arms rose and fell. The rake bit into dirt thick with the smell of burning and soot. It had been a fast fire, moving quickly through the dead grass at the edge of the play field behind the backyard. Fortunately, it hadn't stuck around long enough to do much more than burn the grass and singe the thick tangle of blackberry vines huddled around a thin stand of alders at the edge of the cow pasture beyond the back property line.
The alders had given the client the biggest scare. She'd have come unglued if they burned. She was proud of those narrow trees and the way they rose high into the blue sky with their silvery bark scattering sunlight and their golden leaves rustling and fluttering in the warm summer breeze—
"I thought you said it was midnight and monsooning."
...another whine, high-pitched and annoying.
Despite the late hour, and despite the pouring rain, a determined mosquito buzzed my ear.
I brushed the pesky insect away and went back to work...
"You're a jerk."
"And you're supposed to be being quiet and letting me tell the story."
"Okay, okay. I'm being quiet."
The fire had been quickly doused. That didn't mean the fireman had been happy to be there. He'd been scowling beneath his wide-brimmed helmet, with the very ground shaking at each step as he stomped down the hill in his black boots and dirty yellow coat. It took him longer to drag his heavy red hose through the front yard, down past the garage, across the back lawn, and into the blue cloud that rolled up the slope of the play field than it did to actually put out the fire.
He'd returned a while later with sweat pouring from his temples, soot on his face, and anger in his eyes. He'd had a few choice words for us about playing with matches, but we were innocent... not that it mattered. We'd been blamed for the fire by an adult. To every other adult, we were guilty.
"Why are we doing this, again?" my partner asked.
It was the first intelligent thing he'd asked all night.
Barney wasn't the worst partner I'd ever had, but he was a little young and still a bit too naive for the trade. We shared the same dark hair, parted at the side, and the same strong chin and cheek bones. He was a good three inches shorter, though, and he still had his innocent blue eyes. Mine had long ago turned brown from too many years of watching too many bad things go down on the mean streets of the big city.
Barney's trench coat still carried that fresh-from-the-store smell, too—hardly slept in, at all. Give it another thousand stakeouts and a few hundred more cups of spilled coffee and it would be just fine.
Whether or not Barney would season as well as his trench coat was an entirely different question.
"Hey, knock it off!"
I was working on him, though. It was my job to teach him the ropes. He might object to it along the way, but in the end I was pretty sure that he wouldn't mind. He had a lot of time on his hands; and given enough of it, I was certain that he'd come around.
"You are such a dork."
"Evidence, Barney," I told him, ignoring that whiny little flurry of mosquito wings above my head. "We're looking for matches, or maybe an old matchbook with something written inside. Clues to the perpetrators of the crime."
The fact that my client told us there'd be no lunch until the mess was cleaned up might also have had something to do with why we were here, but a quick sandwich and a bad cup of coffee were nothing compared with the satisfaction of solving a crime.
"We don't need clues," Barney objected. "We know who did it!"
"Of course, we do. But if you want anyone to listen to your story, you need the evidence to back it up."
"But we saw them," he insisted, his own rake rattling and bouncing across the ground, although not nearly as effectively as mine
"But we didn't see them playing with the matches," I reminded him.
"That doesn't mean they didn't do it," Barney grumbled.
He didn't have to go very far to convince me.
After the fire, we'd followed the fireman with the heavy boots back up the hill and found the truth staring us in the face—three truths. They sat in front of the fire trucks on the banana seats of their black Stingray bicycles, leaning back with their arms folded across their chests and looking at us over the chrome glare of their long, sweeping handlebars.
Todd Feldman, Jay Taylor, Brad Sorenson...
The Twenty-First Street Gang.
Their smug little smirks told the entire story.
They didn't have legitimate business on our street.
They didn't have legitimate business on any street.
The only business the Twenty-First Street Gang ever had on any street was monkey business, and our street was a residential neighborhood. It wasn't zoned for any kind of business, much less monkey business.
"That's why we need evidence, Barney," I reminded my wet-behind-the-ears partner. My gaze flicked down to the top of the fedora that bobbed off to my left and just below my field of vision. It was a brown felt hat with a sharp crease running lengthwise through the middle, pinched at both ends. He might have been a few years too young to be a proper detective, but Barney certainly looked the part.
"Evidence won't matter. Nobody'll believe us, anyway," he grumbled, and he could have been right. The families backing the Twenty-First Street Gang were among the most powerful and influential around. The gang always had the nicest toys, the newest clothes, and the shiniest bikes. They were the darlings of the PTA; but if PTA knew what the Twenty-First Street Gang did, there'd be three new rosy-red bottoms in the neighborhood.
I shook my head. It would never come to that.
The Twenty-First Street Gang was too smart.
Besides, having their bottoms paddled would be almost too poetic for the mean streets of the big city to ever allow. The Twenty-First Street Gang had first formed in the third grade under a different banner—the Butt Nuggets. It was supposed to have struck a quaking fear through the hearts of the students for its daring use of that one forbidden word. Instead, it brought a rash of quaking lips and barely concealed smirks.
Bullies didn't like to be laughed at, especially when they were trying to shake down the meek. It didn't take long for the gang to change the name.
After that first banner was burned, the gang went through three or four other names in search of something terrifying and cool. Each was more lame than the last. Each ended with more laughter and another burnt banner...
But nobody was laughing now—not me, Detective Max Gunn; and not my partner, Barney Friday. With so much practice burning banners, arson became the gang's specialty. The brush behind the play field was arson at its finest. It didn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together.
The evidence was here.
We would find it.
We would clear our names and prove that the Twenty-First Street Gang burned down the yard, or my name wasn't Max Gunn, Private Eye.
"But your name isn't Max Gunn, Private Eye. It's Jim Bruce."
"Johnny! I told you to keep raking and be quiet!"
# #
Chapter Two: Hot on the Trail
After a hard day of raking ash, there was nothing quite like relaxing in your room while cruising the internet with your feet up to soothe an aching back, unless perhaps it was relaxing in your room with your feet up while stomping your wet-behind-the-ears partner on the gaming console. Sadly, we were doing neither, since the client had banished us from the house for the duration of our mutual misunderstanding.
It was a powerful incentive for our feet to take us across town.
Negotiating the dark streets and back alleys of the big city was a challenge, especially when one wasn't old enough to drive. Taxis were out. So was the bus. Taxis were too expensive on our slim allowance, and the bus invited too many prying eyes, too many eavesdropping ears, and too many chances of being tailed. But that was okay. We had good shoe leather beneath our feet, and we knew how to put it to good use.
Barney and I snapped up the collars of our trench coats, tipped down our fedoras, shoved our hands in our pockets, and splashed through the puddles of the cold, dark streets to our suspect's favorite haunt. I'd thought about stopping by The Kitchen for a quick bite, but Barney vetoed the plan. He was right. We'd need to catch the Twenty-First Street Gang in the act of committing their next crime if we wanted to clear our names and return to the office. To do that, we'd need the scoop on their next crime, and while The Kitchen was filled with all kinds of scoops, that was one scoop that it simply didn't carry. We'd have to dig it up the old-fashioned way.
We'd have to steal it.
"You're a dork. It's called spying, not stealing. And I already told you, there aren't any puddles here, it's not night, and it certainly ain't raining. And what's with all this "big city" stuff? We live out in the country!
I made a mental note to schedule a doctor's appointment. I had a ringing in my ears that refused to go away. It was like the high whine of a mosquito, but far more annoying—
"You are such a dork."
We slogged through the streets of the big city. The sweet perfume of rotting garbage hung heavily in the air near the mouth of the alley we passed, courtesy of an overflowing dumpster and a dispute between the mayor's office and the local waste management union. The distant blare of a car horn echoed through the dark canyons of the silent skyscrapers, angry and determined to let the entire world know about it. The skies above the streetlights shared that dark mood, with black clouds hanging low over the buildings and choking out any possibility of a peaceful moonlit night.
The city was alive, even at this late hour.
It had a certain presence at night—
"Jim, did you hear that car coming up the road?"
...an angry presence; thick and nasty, but never evil...
"Jim?"
On nights like these, a tiny voice at the back of my mind wondered what it might be like to have a safe desk job at some big company; a job where I could punch out at five o'clock, go home, eat a little dinner, watch a little television, and spend the entire night in a warm bed oblivious to everything that went on outside my own little world. But it was only one tiny voice. The rest of the voices in my head wondered how people with desk jobs could possibly survive without feeling the quiet power of the slumbering city flow through their veins—
"Jim!"
Barney slammed into me from the side.
We flew across the drainage ditch at the side of the road, crashing heavily into an unfortunate huckleberry bush, but missing a tangle of thorny blackberry vines to either side.
A ratty VW microbus whizzed past, horn blaring. Its two-tone paint job told me all I needed to know about the pedigree of the driver. Rust orange and bird-dropping white. A real class act.
"Are you crazy? Pay attention to where you're going, Dork. You can't just pretend no one else is around and walk down the middle of the road!"
"I'm setting the stage—"
"What's wrong with telling it like it is? What's wrong with the facts?"
"What's fun about the facts? How would it sound if I said that we walked over to Todd's house on the shoulder of some dusty old country road in the middle of a hot summer day?"
"How would it sound if I said that I let my brother get splattered by a car because he was daydreaming? Watch where you're going!"
...headlights split the rainy night, along with the squeal of whitewalls sliding hard on the slick pavement. The black town car rounded the corner on two wheels, slamming back down onto all four as it hit the straight stretch and drew a bead on me and my partner.
The wheelman stomped the gas.
The engine roared.
The car leapt forward, thundering out of the darkness behind a pair of blazing headlights that tried their best to freeze us in terror like a pair of deer during hunting season. But Barney was instantly on the move, kicking off the pavement and snagging my collar as he dove past me and into a magical alleyway. We were carried into a realm of bright sunshine, dusty country roads, and more heat than a bad fence faced while trying to unload a brace of fake Rolexes at the local policeman's ball.
"That's telling it like it is?"
The wheelman who knocked us into this bizarre world of bright sunshine and warm smells was likely a member of Todd Feldman's gang—
"More likely some den mother on her way to a hair appointment and too busy on her cell phone to see a pair of kids beneath her wheels."
Todd Feldman was Trouble with a capital "T." He had the round face of a puffer fish, with curly brown hair, freckles, and a gap between his front teeth. He'd started life as little more than a comic relief, a sidekick to be slapped around by the big kids for his baby face and his silly looks. He'd been a joke back then... still was a joke in my book.
Then, his folks took pity on him.
They gave him a black leather jacket for his birthday.
His personality changed overnight.
Todd Feldman must have liked what he saw when he looked in the mirror while wearing that black leather jacket because he never took it off. He was even rumored to sleep in it. The jacket was his ticket to power, a dark talisman that none of his friends had. He'd ridden that talisman from Chief Butt Nugget to the head of a vicious neighborhood gang.
Todd Feldman was a real piece of work. It was known far and wide that he seldom played fair, but this time he goofed. He'd made a very real mistake when he set us up to take the fall for his little prank.
We were hot on his trail; and we didn't always play fair, either.
Before we were through, Todd Feldman would likely be one of the sorriest Butt Nuggets in town.
# #
Chapter Three: A Simple Little Stakeout
Trouble's favorite hideout was a two-story suburban house next to a glittering lake in the country about an hour outside Seattle. It was little different from any other two-story suburban house in the neighborhood, except for the small fact that the contractor had skipped town before finishing the frills—the planter boxes, the trim around the roof, the cedar siding, or even a good coat of paint.
Dirty windows at the corners of both floors stared out across a yard that was set a good fifty yards back from a country road not even wide enough to merit a centerline. The windows on the ground floor were wider than the ones above, and framed an orange door set into the middle of the wall. The rest of the house was brown plywood slabs, befitting the personality of its occupants—brown like last week's used lasagna—
"Eeew!"
But if the house was bare and ugly, the front yard was worse. A narrow dirt drive angled in from the street, leading to a covered carport at the side of the house that currently sheltered one shiny new SUV and three prized Stingray bikes. The drive cut through a dirt desert with clumps of grass growing in the ground like island oases scattered throughout some vast dune sea. There was no lawn to speak of. No landscaping, either. Just the clumps of grass, a few crawling weeds, the dirt, and the dust.
...and the stumps, of course.
A half-dozen stumps littered the eastern half of the yard. Most were scattered evenly throughout the yard, but one pushed up against an eight-foot plank fence that stretched the length of the boundary line between Feldman's house and the one to the east.
The hideout had only one redeeming feature.
It couldn't be seen from the road.
Despite Feldman's line of work, that feature hadn't been a product of his grand design. The neighbor across the street had once gifted the Feldmans with a hedge at the front property line. The thick tangle of shiny green leaves and large pink blossoms hid the Feldman's house from the neighbor's view, but it also smelled something like the soap that den mothers might put in their bathrooms when company came to visit... thick and cloying and not nearly as pleasant as den mothers imagined.
Neither my partner nor I appreciated that smell. Still, the hedge did give both of us an excellent place to spy on the gang without being seen. As the saying went, beggars couldn't be choosers.
And as to my watering eyes and stinging nose, a good PI couldn't always choose the location of his next stakeout. Every profession had its hazards. Sitting in some smelly old flower bush while watching the suspects play in their front yard was one of mine.
Truth be told, I couldn't really complain. Some stakeouts went for days without success. We'd gotten lucky. Within ten minutes, Feldman and his flunkies had come outside and were now huddled around the nearest stump in the front yard.
"What are they doing?" Barney asked, pulling a flowering branch aside for a better view.
"Can't tell," I told him. "Maybe one of them dropped his brain and the others are helping him look for it."
"Can't be," he snorted. "Too small. They'd never find it. They've got to be up to something else."
He had a point, and not just the one beneath his brown fedora.
Trouble crouched in front of the stump, his arms down and fiddling with something on the ground. Jay "The Weasel" Taylor looked over his far shoulder, staring down with an equal curiosity. The Weasel had black hair like me and my partner, but he wore his fuzzy and short, without the side part. He had Barney's green eyes, but shifty and always on the move... always the Weasel—a slippery animal looking to steal a few eggs from the henhouse and then slip away back into the forest.
The third member of the gang was on the near side. Brad "Skyhook" Sorenson. It was nearly impossible to see past Skyhook's gangly frame, all knees and elbows. He was reputed to have red hair, but not many people could see high enough to know for sure, not even the teachers.
Skyhook was fond of short pants and basketball jerseys. It didn't take much of a PI to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up—presuming his life wasn't cut short by his gangland activities first.
"Is that smoke?" Barney demanded.
Barney's eyes were sharper than mine, but soon it didn't take a pair of sharp eyes to see what was going on. Wisps of blue smoke drifted up past Trouble's head.
"It is!" Barney growled, stepping from the hedge in an unthinking moment of anger. "I knew it! He's playing with matches!"
Before I could remind him of the plan, Barney tore out across Trouble's ratty old front yard just as fast as his stubby little legs would carry him. I was behind him in an instant, but twenty yards was too short of a distance for me to overtake a junior partner with fire in his eyes. He finished his sprint almost before mine got started.
"What do you think you're doing, Butt Head?" Barney shouted.
His heart was in the right place. I appreciated the enthusiasm, but three-to-one odds could only lead to a few lumps on his head. Three-to-two odds weren't much better, but the plan had never been for a confrontation. We were supposed to have been staying out of sight and getting the scoop on their next crime.
"What do you mean, 'what am I doing?' This is my house! What are you doing?" Feldman yelled back, standing up and clenching his fists. He wasn't as tall as Skyhook, but he was still a good three inches taller than Barney, somewhere around my height and weight.
"Hey, Todd," I called out, slowing to a walk and trying to act casual. Neighborly. If I could get him talking, we might have a chance to avoid a fight, although from the way the Weasel looked at Barney—like he was some prize chicken egg—that didn't seem too likely. "What's up?"
"What do you mean, 'what's up?' What are you two doing here?" he hollered back. "Get out of my yard, and take this sawed-off little Dork Face with you!"
"Yeah, Dweeb," the Weasel piped up. "Beat it before you get hurt."
Walking up behind my still-angry partner, I placed a light hand on his shoulder and quietly pulled, keeping up a steady pressure until his shoulders gave way and he moved back beside me.
"We saw you from the road," I lied. "We were just interested in what you're doing, that's all. Um... what are you doing, by the way?"
"None of your business, that's what we're doing," he said, waving his fist at me. It was still closed, but I caught the flash of glass—curved and round—peeking out from between his fingers. At his feet, tiny black ants scurried about in the sawdust piled up against the base of the stump, some moving and others burned to a crisp.
The Twenty-First Street Gang had moved from arson to frying ants.
"You gotta be careful with those things," I said, holding the smile on my face and pointing to his clenched fist. "They're dangerous, especially in August when the sun's so hot."
"You think so?" he asked. "Shows what you know. It's just sunlight, Dweeb. There's nothing dangerous about a little light—"
I laughed. "They might disagree," I said, pointing to the ants.
"That's because they're small, like you. Besides, it takes a while to heat 'em up. The light doesn't even bother the bigger ones. They get away before we can burn 'em."
"I wouldn't count on it."
"Shows what you know, Dork Breath."
It was finished before my mind could even accept what he'd done.
With an anguished howl, Trouble dropped his magnifying glass and shoved the scorched heel of his hand up to his mouth. Ignoring the rest of us, he charged off across his yard in search of a water faucet, his bold attempt to prove me wrong by lighting up his own hand a dismal failure.
Feldman's friends choked back the beginnings of their laughter. It was fine to laugh at the misfortunes of others, but not the boss... especially not when the boss was in pain.
Shooting us a pair of dirty looks, Skyhook and the Weasel turned and scampered off after Trouble, who was already flinging the door open and dashing inside his house.
Picking up the magnifying glass from where Feldman had dropped it, I shook my head and looked it over. It was a simple design, perhaps two inches across with a plain metal handle. I tossed it in the shade behind the stump where it wouldn't cause any more trouble.
It took a special kind of stupid to burn yourself with your own magnifying glass. Not a lot of thinking there. It took a special kind of stupid to throw burning matches at grass piles in the dry months of summer. Not a lot of thinking there, either.
If Feldman was capable of the one, he was capable of the other.
We'd find the evidence to convict the gang, but it was going to be harder than I'd first thought. They knew we were onto them now. They'd be more careful. They'd cover their tracks. They might even throw more dirty little tricks our way just to keep us off their trail. This wasn't the time to yell at Barney for breaking cover, though. That time would come later.
I looked over my shoulder to Trouble's hideout. A drape in the lower window twitched. We were being watched, but there was no helping it, now.
I slapped my partner lightly on the shoulder.
"Come on. Let's go get some lunch."
# #
Chapter Four: The New Client
After we finished up at Trouble's hideout, Barney and I stopped by The Kitchen for some quick take-out before heading to the office to mull over the evidence and scarf down some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Outside the trench-coat community, it was widely believed that a good Private Eye was powered by stale donuts and lousy coffee. That was far from the truth. Cops might swear by the frosty confections, but nothing fired up the old brain cells faster than the classic PB&J. Every Private Eye worth his salt knew it. Unfortunately, not even the classic PB&J could fire up enough brain cells to help every case, especially when one of the partners had other things on his tiny little mind.
"Knock it off with the pounding, already!" I snapped.
"What?" Barney asked, his innocent face looking up from a hammer that he held in both hands. "I thought we came out here to work. Aren't we going to pound nails?"
"Wrong kind of work, Barney. We're here to work on the case."
"Oh," he said, looking wistfully at his hammer. Then, scooting across the dirty planks that made up the floor of what others might call a pie-shaped treehouse, he wedged his back into his favorite corner and dropped the hammer next to a small pile of nails, watching as the handle bounced and clattered on the floor.
Once the hammer had settled in place, he snagged the uneaten half of his PB&J from a paper plate on the inverted cardboard box that served as our only piece of furniture and said, "What's there to work on, Jim?"
"Max," I absently corrected, glancing at my own plate and the crumbs that were all that was left of my lunch while wondering if perhaps someone had beaned him with a blackjack when I wasn't looking. Memory lapses were common to the elderly; but he was far from elderly, and in a partner they could be downright dangerous.
"What's there to work on, Max?"
"You forgotten, already? I don't see no TV in here," I reminded him. "I don't see no ice chest, neither—nor any computers, video games, or stereos. You want to stay banished from the house for the rest of the summer, or you want to solve the case and not be grounded no more?"
It wasn't that I was complaining about the office. Far from it, in fact. Our office was the best tree fort in the neighborhood—not large, but comfortable and off the beaten path. A good Private Eye appreciated the value of a comfortable, out-of-the-way tree fort to hole up in every now and then. This one was the best for that, better than any of the others we'd ever built. They'd been little more than wood slats nailed to the branches of a single tree. This was a true fort, with wooden sides, window openings in the middle of the two longer walls, and a flat roof. We'd even cut off one of the branches to make a flagpole. One day, we might even have a flag to hang.
The office had an odd shape, since we'd only found three trees close together, instead of the traditional four. It was also only five feet off the ground, since Dad had taken his ladders to work by the time we were set to break ground, and since five feet was all the higher my partner could lift his end of the boards. Other than those two minor details, though, it was a great place... our 'home away from home.'
But as much as I liked the office, it still lacked the basic electronic necessities of a true home. For those, we needed access to our room.
Barney got to his feet and walked to the window, looking out across the play field to the patch of scorched dirt we'd just raked on the other side. The breeze blowing in from the window rustled his hair while he munched his sandwich. He pushed his dark bangs from his forehead. It was an innocent face, not at all suited for this line of work. The streets were tough and mean. They ate innocence for breakfast. With his trench coat and fedora, he had the outfit to become a Private Eye. He still didn't have the look, though. If the cops ever wanted to find out who'd kicked a puppy, he'd be the last one brought in for questioning.
"I don't know," Barney finally said. "It's kind of nice being outside."
I blinked as he turned and slid down the wall, scooting next to me.
I checked his tiny head, running my fingers through his hair to feel for any bumps or tell-tale signs of matted blood. With that kind of broken thinking, someone had to have beaned him with a blackjack when I wasn't looking.
"Cut it out, Dork!"
"You are such a loser sometimes, Johnny."
"Am not!"
"Are too!"
"Am not!"
"Are too!"
I was just getting into the spirit of the intellectual debate when a dark silhouette fell across the frosted glass of our front door—
"We don't have a front door."
"Will you be quiet and let me tell the story? What is your problem?"
She was tall for a girl, with her full black hair tied off in a ponytail. A handful of freckles rode high on her face, just beneath a pair of green eyes pulled tight in a smile. A matching grin dimpled her cheeks. She wore tennis shoes, jeans, and a numbered jersey.
There were only three reasons a girl might wear jeans on a ninety degree August afternoon: raking up the remnants of a brush fire in a blackberry patch, climbing trees with her friends, and baseball.
"What are you two arguing about this time?" she asked, climbing the ladder nailed to the side of the tree and hopping inside the open doorway.
"He started it, Ellie," my partner lied.
"Started what?" Eleanor James asked. She was a neighbor who shared one of her names with me, a fact that my overly-juvenile partner sometimes found extremely funny—
"Which name would that be? Max, or Gunn?"
...like I always told him, though, the only funny thing in the whole neighborhood was him—funny looking—
"Todd was right. You are a Dork Breath."
Ellie might have been a girl, but she'd never be confused with a dame. She wasn't the type that got herself all dolled up for nobody. No slinky numbers, or long legs, or ankle-breaking high heels for her. Ellie didn't even own a dress, which was just the way my partner and I liked it. The kids we saw as we walked past the high school each morning spent too much time worrying about that kind of nonsense. They missed out on far too many interesting games of tag and kick the can.
It was their loss, not ours.
"I haven't seen you guys in weeks, Jon. Where you been?"
"New toys. New games. You know how it goes."
"With you guys, yeah. Is he playing detective again?"
"Yeah, but it's my turn tomorrow."
"Really? I didn't think he ever let you play the lead detective."
"Mom made him. She says we have to play outside for a while."
"That explains it, I guess."
We were fresh out of fires, and Ellie seldom liked climbing trees. Of all the reasons a girl might wear jeans on such a hot day, my finely-tuned detective skills told me that baseball was the only choice that made sense. Ellie had come to let us have our rematch, but once we told her our story, any thought of playing ball today would be gone like yesterday's wind.
"What story is that?" she asked, her dulcet tones brightening an otherwise gloomy day.
Barney immediately launched into a long-winded recounting of the previous day's activities. He got most of the facts right—he was very good with the facts—but he delivered them deadpan, with absolutely no flair. I had a lot of work to do if I was ever going to get him properly trained.
"How did you manage to miss the fun?" I asked. Between its flashing lights, it's thundering diesel motor, and its siren's howling cry—loud enough to nearly shake out your teeth at twenty yards—a fire truck was hard to miss. Two of them on one dirt road out in the country would be even harder to miss, especially for someone living on the other side of that dirt road.
"Shopping," she said with a breezy air that masked the distaste I suspected she truly felt for such a patently female activity. Her next words confirmed my suspicions. "Mom wanted to catch a few of those early back-to-school sales. She thought it would be a good time to go. I thought it would be a better time to go swimming at the resort." Shrugging, Ellie added, "She won."
I was right. No one in their right mind—boy or girl—willingly spent any time in the middle of August even thinking of going back to school.
"Aren't you going to Hawaii on vacation pretty soon?" my partner asked, drudging up an irrelevant fact from somewhere deep inside his brain.
"At the end of the week," she confirmed. "Why?"
"That's probably it, then. Your mom knew that you wouldn't have a lot of time for shopping after you got back. She probably wanted to get it out of the way before you left."
It was a reasonable assumption, but taking the mother's side in the argument wouldn't earn any endearments from the potential new clients; and everyone was a potential new client—even when they only came over to play baseball.
I made a mental note to explain the basic rules of business to my partner the very first chance I got.
Crossing her feet, Ellie sat on the floor near the door. "I'm glad you brought that up. I forgot to ask if you'd mind doing something for me while I'm gone."
My partner was quick to volunteer.
I made a mental note to push up my timetable for explaining the basic rules of business to my over-eager partner. There were only four:
First, find out about the job.
Second, find out about the payment.
Third, consult with your partner.
Fourth, never even consider accepting an assignment until the other three formalities have been properly observed... especially the bit about consulting with your partner.
Fortunately, the job wasn't anything Barney couldn't handle, himself. It was a simple protection detail. Protection details weren't my favorite, but there were worse things than watching a bunch of chickens sit on a bunch of eggs while neighbors were miles away sitting on beaches in Hawaii.
"Thank you," Ellie said after my partner agreed. "I knew I could count on you two. You're the best. Most of the time, that is. You were wrong about one thing, though," she added with an arched eyebrow.
"Oh?" I asked with an uneasy wariness creeping into my voice.
"Yes. Hearing your story didn't make me forget why I came."
Johnny grinned, and after a moment, so did I.
The Case of the Fire-Starting Bandit could wait.
The rematch was on.
As to the case, well... there was always tomorrow.
# #
The Case of the Garden-Shredding Bandit
Chapter Five: A Rose By Any Other Name
This is the city, Sunny Hills, Washington—
"You've got to be kidding!"
...it's a small town at the edge of a giant city, a town where little girls walk their dogs on the sidewalk in peace, a town where an unlocked car or an open door isn't an automatic invitation to a thief, a town determined to maintain a tradition of values in an increasingly invaluable modern age—
"I said you could have a turn, Johnny, but that isn't detective talk. It's... I don't know what it is!"
"I keep telling you! Call me Jon! And it is, too. This is just like that old cop show Dad watches on TV."
...Sunny Hills is an oasis, a refreshing drink of water amid a dry moral landscape. Like any oasis, it welcomes the weary. But sometimes the weary don't welcome it back. Sometimes they want more from Sunny Hills than one brief, refreshing drink of water.
And that's when I go to work.
I live here.
I carry a badge.
"And the word you're looking for isn't, 'invaluable.' Don't try to use big words, Johnny. You don't know what they mean."
It was 6:02 A.M. on Tuesday, August Fifth. We were working the early watch out of the bedroom. My partner is Minneagan Bruce. The boss is Captain Mom. My name is Friday, Barney Friday.
"Friday, Barney Friday? That's spy talk, not detective talk!"
It was very early in the morning. My partner was in a sour mood. Most days, he didn't do mornings. He was like a bear that way. At the moment, he looked like one, too. He was tall with a strong chin, brown eyes and a tangle of messy dark hair.
I handed him my comb.
"Very funny."
My eyelashes curled.
I turned my head and gasped for fresh air.
He hadn't brushed his teeth yet this morning, either.
With my eyes still watering, I fished out a breath mint from the pocket of my grey blazer and handed it to him.
"You're a dork," Minneagan told me with a roll of his eyes.
It was an odd response, one that I hadn't expected from such a simple kindness. I didn't take it personally, though. Minneagan was still a rookie, but he had many years of schooling. I briefly conceded the possibility that there might be another definition to the word, dork, than the one I knew. Nodding, I replied with a tight smile.
"Don't mention it," I said.
Shaking his head and muttering to himself, Minneagan tugged at his belt and straightened his slacks. He might not yet have found his morning charm, but he looked sharp. Shined shoes, crisp blue blazer, a freshly-pressed shirt, and a pencil-thin black tie that matched his slacks. I preferred grey to blue, but other than that we could have been brothers. Aside from the tousled hair, Minneagan looked the part. By all outward appearance, he was a model detective—one straight from the book.
"Get the name right, at least. It's Max Gunn, Dork."
While my partner looked the part, he did have a serious flaw, a flaw I'd been working to correct since the day he arrived from the academy as a wet-behind-the-ears rookie. Detective Mini Gun was overly sensitive about his name. Overly sensitive detectives could be easily provoked. Being easily provoked was never a good quality, not in a cop. It was my job to see that he worked his way through his little problem.
At times, I wondered if I'd bitten off more than I could chew.
"As I recall, you were the one who lost his temper yesterday."
We'd just finished suiting up for another long day of protecting the fine citizens of Sunny Hills from the degenerates who saw them as fair game when the Captain's voice rang in from down the hallway and up the stairs. Her shriek was only slightly less impressive than the shrill cry from one of those portable air horns used so often in football games, collision avoidance, and marine navigation.
The Captain was often easily provoked, as well, but she was the boss.
She could do whatever she liked.
We hurried down the hall to the foot of the stairs and listened while she disclothed the nature of the problem that had caused her such disdress. There'd been a crime in the front yard, a crime involving a torn-up garden, a lot of scattered dirt, and some very dead plants. There were no witnesses, but the Captain felt she had a solid lead.
Minneagan and I both had dirt stains on yesterday's suits from the few times we'd been allowed to slide into home plate. The Captain noticed the dirt stains when she'd started the morning wash. She'd jumped to a logical conclusion, even if that logical conclusion was an incorrect one. It was an understandable mistake; but a mistake, just the same.