Drive-By (A Nebraska Mystery Book 6) Read online

  Also by William J. Reynolds

  The Nebraska Quotient

  Moving Targets

  Money Trouble

  Things Invisible

  The Naked Eye

  Drive-By

  DRIVE-BY

  WILLIAM J. REYNOLDS

  Copyright © 1995 by William J. Reynolds

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by

  Brash Books

  PO Box 8212

  Calabasas, CA 91372

  www.brash-books.com

  This one was always for

  Meredith Abbie Reynolds,

  and all of them are for her mother.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  At two o’clock on the last morning of his life, Darius LeClerc parked the old, battle-scarred Plymouth Duster in the first available spot along the curb, under a dead street light, and hustled the two and a half blocks to the housing project.

  The night was mild by the standards of a Midwestern winter; still, Darius’s breath preceded him in pale clouds as he moved along the broken and littered sidewalk. At least Omaha hadn’t had too much snow that winter, and it hadn’t been all that horribly cold—nothing like the winters back in Detroit. The thought of those winters made Darius hunch his shoulders inside his jacket and cram his fists deeper into the side pockets. Damn but those Detroit winters were cold sons-of-bitches.

  Darius LeClerc was nineteen years old, a slender, almost skinny young Black man, nearly six feet tall. He was dressed in dark colors: black fake-leather bombardier-style jacket, gray acid-washed denims, black Puma high-tops. Under the jacket he wore a black T-shirt and a gray hooded sweatshirt, hood down. As his long limbs propelled him quickly along the sidewalk, Darius pulled his left hand out of its pocket and checked the cheap “sport watch” strapped to his wrist. He had bought it for $14.95 at the Kmart on West Center Road. It was mostly plastic, but it worked well enough, he guessed, though at the moment it would have been nice if it had had a luminous dial. Still, there was just enough light for him to see that he was late.

  He stepped up the pace, half-jogging toward the street light, the working street light at the corner, near the eastern entrance to the project.

  He stopped there, puffing white clouds into the cold night air, scoping out the territory. No signs of life. Was he that late? He moved to check his watch again. It’d be easier to see under the street light.

  He probably never realized that he would be easier to see, too.

  A car engine grumbled awake up the block, back in the direction from which Darius had just come. He turned automatically toward the sound. It was a big car, a Caddie or a Lincoln, maybe, pulling away from the grimy curb across the street, coming down the block, toward the pale illumination at the corner. Its headlights were doused.

  Darius LeClerc’s first thought was that some damn fool was going to get killed. His second thought, when he saw that the car was veering toward his side of the street, when he saw that the windows were rolled down in defiance of the chilly February night, when he saw that gun barrels were resting on the window frames, was that the damn fool was him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It’s easy to get a private investigator’s permit in the State of Nebraska, hard to lose one, and even harder to get one back. How I managed to lose mine is a long story. The fact is, I did lose it—or, more accurately, had it taken from me—back in November, and by mid-February I was hip-deep in the appeal process. As near as I can tell, this process comes down to a series of delays running as close to forever as can be managed. The goal, I think, is to frustrate the appellant so thoroughly that he decides his suit really isn’t worth pressing after all and goes home. Guys like me, who get their backs up at such treatment and decide it’s the other bastard who’ll have to blink first, must be a rarity. That’s the only way I can make sense of having had my latest hearing date moved back four times since the first week in January.

  When I shared this opinion with my lawyer, Mike Kennerly, he smiled tolerantly and told me not to worry. When a lawyer says not to worry, worry is what you should do first. If we didn’t make any headway with the secretary of state, our next stop would be District Court. I had no reason to expect that to be cheap. What I had were serious doubts about whether it would ultimately be worth the effort and expense.

  I was telling all this to Elmo Lammers on the short drive from the Omaha Municipal Airport to my apartment on Decatur Street. Elmo laughed. He has a low, lazy laugh that is well suited to his speaking voice. “You worry too much, Nebraska,” he said. “You always did.”

  “I like to think it’s one of the reasons I’m still around to meet old friends flying into town.”

  “Probably something to that,” Elmo said.

  Late-morning traffic was light this crisp, semi-clear Thursday. I risked turning my attention from the street to Elmo. I couldn’t get used to him with the whiskers, a full but close-cropped beard liberally flecked with white. His brown hair was going white, too, and thinning at the temples. But otherwise he was the same slightly built Black man I had met a hundred thousand years ago in a hot, wet jungle on the other side of the world, courtesy of a mutual relative: our Uncle Sam. Over months of griping about the crappy weather, crappy rations, crappy equipment, and all-around crappy situation Uncle had handed us, we became friends. We hadn’t kept in touch as much as the long-distance companies might like, but it was the sort of friendship that didn’t depend on constant or even frequent contact.

  When Elmo had called me the previous afternoon to say he was flying in to Omaha today, my only question had been what time should I meet him at the airport.

  “Anyhow, what’s so great about being a private detective,” Elmo was saying. “Pay’s lousy, hours stink, and most folks figure that when it comes to ethics you’re right up there with the used-car salesmen.”

  “Yes, but on the plus side, people oc
casionally get pissed off at you and send bullets, knives, and various blunt instruments your direction.”

  “Only if you’re any good at it.” After the army, following stints with a sheriff and a county attorney, Elmo had joined the Chicago office of a medium-sized regional detective agency. He was now what they called a field manager, which, incongruously, meant he spent hardly any time in the field. “What’s going on with your writing career, Nebraska?” he asked, out of the blue. “Couple years ago, I went and put up a new bookshelf in my den, for my autographed collection. Still only got one book on it.”

  My reply was delayed by a small woman in a large Buick who turned from a side-street when she should have waited for me to pass, and then who proceeded to tool along ahead of me at eight miles an hour. She had a bumper sticker pasted on the back end of the car: If You Don’t Like the Way I Drive, Stay Off the Sidewalk! People who put messages like that on their cars are giving you fair warning, which you ought to heed. I made a detour at the next corner to get away from her.

  “My publisher had about given up on me, too,” I finally said. It had been almost two years since my first novel, forever in my heart The Book, had appeared. It did reasonably well for a first effort. Well enough that my publisher spent a few months pestering me for a follow-up before evidently deciding it was futile. “I surprised him with an early Christmas present a couple of months ago. A new manuscript. It’s not the sequel he wanted—he sort of had his heart set on a detective series—but he liked it. He hopes to bring it out this winter. What on earth are you doing?”

  What he was doing was moving his long, almost delicate fingers in the air. “Counting. Your first book was about an inch thick, give or take. My bookshelf is four feet long. Figure a little space on each end for looks … shoot, I’ll have to put up another shelf in about thirty-five years, you keep cranking them out at this rate.”

  “I’d forgotten what a one-man laugh riot you are.”

  “Seriously, Nebraska. I always thought the plan was you’d dump the PI racket, make it as a writer. Maybe this is your big chance, man.”

  Mike Kennerly had said the same thing. So had other friends who had suffered through the long years of my saying I was going to ditch my day job as soon as I felt I could support myself as a writer. The private-eye dodge, I said, was just a fallback. Problem with having a fallback, though, is you’re tempted to fall back. And I had—more than once. When the magazine writing assignments didn’t come fast enough, when the books didn’t get done, and when the wolf was at the door, I would scare up a snoop job. Just to pay the rent, you understand. Strictly temporary.

  After a while, something occurred to me. If PI work was so crummy, why didn’t I just walk away from it? I had quit other jobs, other careers before. Why the reluctance to give up this one? The only reasonable conclusion was that, my protestations notwithstanding, I liked it.

  As soon as I reached that conclusion, the gods reached down from the mesosphere and lifted my license.

  Even your closest friends don’t necessarily want to hear all the gory details of your pothole-riddled journey to self-discovery, so I spared Elmo and merely said, “There’s a difference between giving something away and having it taken from you.”

  “Yeah,” he said after a long moment. “I hear you.”

  Elmo Lammers was Darius LeClerc’s uncle.

  By now we were on Decatur, bumping down the long, rutted hill at the bottom of which was my apartment house, a red-brick building built like a motel and set back from the Northwest Radial Highway, which it faces. I steered my old Impala into a space in the miniature lot on the north side of the building. We got out and went up the open-air stairs. Elmo traveled light: a canvas briefcase, a small soft-sided suitcase, and a zippered garment bag that matched the suitcase. I toted the garment bag while he carried the two cases.

  “Drop ’em anywhere,” I said when we got into the apartment. “You have your pick, this couch or the fold-out bed in the bedroom.” In an effort to reclaim my dining table, which had doubled as my work table, I had gotten rid of my bed several months back and replaced it with a convertible sofa. When folded up, the sofa-bed left enough room for a standard office desk in the bedroom. “They’re both comfortable, the bed just gives you a little extra room.”

  “Couch’s fine,” Elmo said. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  “We had this conversation yesterday. You’re staying here, it’s no trouble, end of discussion. What’s the agenda?”

  “First I need to use your bathroom, then I need to use your phone. I want to let Julie know I got in okay.”

  “Bathroom’s the first door on the left. There’s a phone in the bedroom, on the desk, in case you’d like a little privacy while you talk to your wife. Straight down the hall. Don’t worry about me, I can eavesdrop on the extension out here.”

  While Elmo went to his chores, I went to work in the little kitchen. I ran a handful of Eight O’Clock Bean through the grinder and started the water boiling for coffee. As I watched bubbles begin to form in the bottom of the tempered-glass teapot, I thought about Darius LeClerc.

  I had known him. More accurately, I had met him—twice, to be exact, and talked to him on the phone maybe once more than that, at the request of his uncle, my old friend Elmo Lammers. Darius had come to the Big O about eight months ago, from Detroit, where he had lived with his mother, Elmo’s younger sister, and where, I gathered, there had been “some trouble.” Elmo hadn’t been specific about the “trouble,” and I hadn’t asked. If he had thought I needed to know, he’d have told me. Darius was going to be staying with a paternal aunt and uncle, but Elmo asked me to “touch base” with the kid anyway, let him know there was someone else in town he could turn to if the need arose. It wasn’t the sort of thing that made me leap up and do cartwheels, but I agreed. A friend’s a friend, and like that.

  I gave Darius a week or so to get settled, then called him up. Since I had previously telephoned and introduced myself to his aunt and uncle, Susan and Jack Reedy, and since Elmo had alerted them that I might be getting in touch, no one wondered why this old white guy was calling to invite the kid to lunch. No one except Darius, maybe. He was eighteen at the time, tall and too skinny by half, and he wore his attitude like chain-mail. He made it clear that he was meeting me only because his Uncle Jack insisted, and then underscored his indifference by refusing to make eye contact with me as he slouched on his side of the restaurant booth, answering my questions, if at all, with guttural monosyllabic utterings.

  After ninety minutes of that sort of balderdash, I kicked him free. Or kicked myself free. Who’s to say? I had done my duty to the friend of my youth: I’d made contact with the kid, given him my card, told him not to hesitate to call if he needed anything, et cetera, et cetera. I knew the kid would never call, and that was all right with me. I’d done my bit and that was enough.

  Except it wasn’t enough. I knew Elmo must have been worried about Darius—real worry, genuine worry, as opposed to normal avuncular concern for a nephew’s general welfare—or he’d never have asked me to check on the kid. And my twenty-year-old friendship with Elmo was such that I couldn’t have simply told him I’d bought his nephew lunch and so had fulfilled my obligation. I mean, I could have—Elmo would have asked nothing more of me than that—but I couldn’t have.

  So a couple of weeks later I called Darius to “see how it was going.” Evidently it was going “okay”—that one word being about all the detail he was prepared to part with. From his aunt, Susan Reedy, I learned that Darius was “adjusting,” but that it wasn’t easy. She volunteered no specifics, and I didn’t press. It was none of my business. For that very reason, and because there’s a difference between being interested and being nosy, I waited three months before I called again.

  That time, I got a different Darius LeClerc. He was friendly, even loquacious. Said he was “in treatment”—drug treatment, I assumed, having somehow formed the impression that drugs were part of the
“trouble” back in Detroit—and doing well; said he had found a part-time job that he enjoyed, and was thinking of taking some classes at Metro Community College come autumn; said he’d been meaning to call me and reciprocate for the meal I had bought him when he came to town. A week or two later, we met for lunch. Darius had put on a few much-needed pounds, had abandoned the slovenly too-hip gangsta look he had previously affected, had learned how to look a guy in the eyes. I was, frankly, amazed at the change in him. Amazed and impressed. Despite my original lack of zeal, I was glad I had met young Darius LeClerc.

  And I was sorry, genuinely sorry, when I heard of his death. He had seemed to be a young man on a downward spiral, and then he seemed to have reversed direction. At the risk of sounding sappy, it was downright inspirational. The future, a landscape which once had been bleak and limited, had begun to stretch out before him. But now he would never travel it. A random act of mindless violence had prematurely ended Darius’s journey.

  If it had been a random act.

  If the violence had really been mindless.

  If, if, if.

  The circumstances of Darius LeClerc’s death were not yet clear. There were questions, questions as yet unanswered, questions which Darius’s uncle, Elmo Lammers, had come all the way to Omaha to probe.

  Would my old friend feel better when he found the answers—if he found the answers—or worse?

  That’s the problem with this line of work. One of the problems.

  The water in the teapot rumbled to a violent boil, and I spooned the coffee into the glass beaker of the coffee pot. I had been searching for the properly balanced formula that would reduce my caffeine intake, but not so far that I’d end up on the ceiling if someone handed me a cup of full-strength coffee. This week’s mix was about one-quarter decaffeinated to three-quarters real. I put the coffee beans back in the freezer and pulled out the hamburger patties I had made earlier, a three-to-one hamburger-and-ground-turkey mixture laced with dried onion bits and liberally doused with Worcestershire sauce. There were six of them. I shoved them under the broiler. I split the oversized buns from Benson Bakery and arranged them in the oven; enough heat rises from the broiler to turn the oven compartment into a warmer. I opened a jar of pickles and set it out on the table along with spicy mustard, ketchup, and a bowl of industrial-strength potato chips.