The Invisible Crown (Hazzard Pay Book 1) Read online

  The Invisible Crown

  Copyright 2016 Charlie Cottrell

  charliecottrell.com

  Front Cover Design: Copyright 2017 rebecacovers

  Book Design: Cindy C Bennett

  All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Exceptions are reviewers who may quote short excerpts for review. Please write to [email protected] for permission.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The characters are products of the author's imagination and are used fictitiously.

  All Rights Reserved USA

  If you have received this book free of charge without the publisher’s permission, it is a pirated copy and is therefore illegal. Please respect the hard work of this author by deleting this copy and purchasing your own copy from any of the approved venues.

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Missing Person

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  Part Two: Knight Errant

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  Part Three: Defender of the Crown

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Ev, who read it first

  and laughed in all the right places.

  Part One: Missing Person

  I.

  The city of Arcadia is a craphole, but it’s my craphole. I’ve walked its streets my entire life, always searching for something: a purpose, a suspect, or a stiff drink. My name’s Eddie Hazzard, and I’m a hard-boiled detective.

  Yeah, laugh it up. It’s a ridiculous job description, but this is a ridiculous town. It’s full of every cliché you can imagine: corrupt city officials, police officers on the take, greedy businessmen, and crime so organized it has an accounting department, a health plan, and retirement benefits. Which is more than I can say for myself.

  The American Dream is supposed to go something like this: pull yourself up by your bootstraps, start your own small business, get the house and the spouse and the 2.5 kids and the dog out in suburbia. If that’s how it’s supposed to work, Arcadia is the counter-proposal—it’s where dreams go to die.

  My dreams are a little closer to reality: don’t get killed on a job. Get enough jobs to continue to pay my creditors and my assistant, and maybe my rent if there’s some money left over after that. Keep myself in plenty of cheap whiskey and cigarettes. Don’t die. Did I say that one twice? It’s kind of important.

  * * *

  I’m not a morning person. It happens much too early in the day for my tastes. And they keep happening, one right after the other, over and over and over every day. You’d think, by now, some reasonable person would have stood up and said, “No more! No longer shall we be subject to the tyranny of mornings! Let the day begin at noon, and no earlier!”

  It doesn’t help that I’m usually very hungover in the morning. My job makes me drink, and drinking makes the world seem like a slightly less-horrible place. Or lets me block out more of the horribleness, which is almost as good.

  This particular morning, I was not only hungover, I was awake and rummaging around in my office in search of the perfect hangover cure. I’m set up in Old Town. As the name suggests, it’s the oldest part of the city, more than a little rundown and decayed. Streets aren’t maintained the way they are in Downtown, the posh section of the city, and the buildings are just this side of being condemned in a lot of cases.

  My office is in one of the better buildings in Old Town, and even so it’s pretty rough. The carpets are pretty worn and threadbare, the windows are grimy and covered in a patina of age and neglect, and the front door squeaks on hinges that are older than my assistant. You could generously call the place a rattrap. A rattrap would probably be a couple of steps up, actually. But it’s my place, it has my name on the frosted glass in the front door, and the rent is almost paid on time.

  The office itself consists of two rooms. The outer anteroom, where my assistant sits behind a desk built sometime before the last World War, contains a couch, a coatrack, and a couple of tattered chairs for potential clients to sit in while they wait for me to sober up enough to talk about their case.

  The inner office is my sanctum, my fortress of solitude, my drunk tank. My battered desk sits under the room’s only window, the Venetian blinds casting thin slivers of shadow across the scarred wooden tabletop regardless of the hour of the day. Usually, in places like this, the ceiling fan turns a lazy circle, barely stirring the air overhead, but my ceiling fan’s motor burned out months ago, and I was too lazy and broke to bother getting it fixed or replaced.

  There’s also another couch tucked into one corner of the room, two chairs even more worse for wear than the ones in the anteroom, a couple of old metal filing cabinets, and a small washroom beside the couch. At the moment, I was digging around in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet. Yes, I know, everything is electronic these days, no one uses paper anymore, etcetera and etcetera. But filing cabinets do have their advantages. The top drawer is labeled Hard Evidence, while the bottom is labeled Hard Stuff. I found a half-empty bottle of whiskey in the bottom drawer, opened it, and took a pull straight from the bottle. The world swam back into focus a bit, or at least started swaying in time with my vision, and I managed to stumble back to my desk chair without falling over.

  When you’re teetering on the edge of complete insolvency, you take whatever jobs you can get. Take the case I’d finished last night, for instance: it had been rougher than it had any right to be. I’d taken it because it was a simple “find some missing documents” sort of thing. On the surface, it should have been the simplest thing in the world: do a little digging, pump a few informants, and call it a day and knock off to have a drink or three.

  I didn’t expect to find a guard bear.

  In my defense, no one uses guard bears in this day and age. Not when modern gen-mods make it possible for a human to take on the ferocious characteristics of a bear without having to actually transplant their brain into the hairy beasts. But Arcadia is full of surprises, and you have to be in top form to keep from getting killed by most of them. The fact that I can usually manage to do it while at least two and a half sheets to the wind is simply a testament to my prowess as a private investigator. Or dumb luck. I’m honestly kind of afraid to find out which it is.

  But I have to take cases like that. Everything about me, from the peeling letters on the frosted glass to the shabby state of my coat, speaks to the need for a consistent cash flow. The cops didn’t like to call me in for consulting work, like most private detectives will do—apparently disgraced ex-cops are not welcome in most precinct houses—and you can only take pictures of cheating spouses so many times before you run out of cheating spouses, even in a town as degenerate as Arcadia. I needed a big, paying job, and quick, or my bill collectors were going to be paying me a less-than-pleasant visit.

  The front door of the office swung open on its noisy hinges, and I heard my assistant—a young woman
with Latin roots, blue-tinted hair pulled back into a bun, and a no-nonsense attitude named Ellen Typewell—speak in brisk, professional tones with the visitor. All I could see through the doorway was a mass of wavy auburn hair piled on top of the head of a woman with curves that could kill a man. I’d heard of women described as having porcelain skin, but never seen someone that would actually describe. This woman did. Her skin was smooth, pale, and flawless. Her moisturizing regimen must have been intense.

  The woman’s outfit screamed “rich” in a suave, cultured sort of scream. Her coat was made of the fur of something small and soft, and her dress did things to the curves of her hips and breasts that should have been illegal. The fact that the dress—which came to mid-calf—was slit up the side almost all the way to her hip did a lot to accentuate her grace and beauty. There was plenty of that pale alabaster skin on display, and I got a good eyeful as she walked—or slinked, really—across the anteroom and into my inner office.

  “Detective Hazzard,” she said. There was just the hint of a question mark at the end of the sentence, as though she weren’t sure if I was actually the detective . . . or maybe she just hoped I wasn’t.

  Admittedly, my appearance was not cause for optimism. Calling my clothes “rumpled” implied there was a time when they’d been smooth and unwrinkled, and I certainly couldn’t remember such a time. My tie was hanging loose and stained with what was either ketchup or blood, I couldn’t be sure. I hadn’t shaved in three days—or was it four now?—and my face felt like sandpaper. My dark skin was oily and shiny, because I probably hadn’t bathed since the last time I’d shaved, either. I tried to smooth my hair back as I replied, “That’s what it says on my business cards.” I gave her my best cocksure grin, though it probably hit closer to creepy uncle than suave private eye. Those business cards were also several years old and rarely used, admittedly, but that didn’t change any of the facts in my statement.

  The woman looked me over with a critical eye, taking in the mostly-empty bottle of whiskey and my general bearing. She seemed to be weighing what she had probably heard about me versus what she was actually seeing with her own eyes. It wasn’t a fair or advantageous comparison for me, that much was certain.

  Miraculously, I must have passed some sort of muster, as she pulled up a vid window—a hard light construct so much easier to use than old-fashioned touchscreens—and started opening documents and images in it. “I have a case for you,” she said, looking down at one of the chairs that sat in front of my desk. Closer examination of the upholstery apparently made her think better of sitting there, though, as she continued to stand after making a face that looked like she might be about to lose her breakfast.

  “What’s the case?” I drawled, fishing a battered pack of cigarettes from my jacket pocket and hunting up my lighter. I found it under the desk, banged my head coming back up for air, and sat there rubbing the growing knot on the back of my skull with one hand while I flicked the lighter to life and lit the cigarette with the other. The client scowled—smoking was illegal in virtually the entire city, but this was my office and I’d smoke if I damn-well pleased—and waved away the smoke that gathered around her face, but made no comment about my rudeness as she turned the vid window my direction.

  “My husband, Wally Stewart, has disappeared,” she said. I flicked some ash from the tip of my cigarette and stared at a picture of a scrawny man, approaching middle age, with thinning dark hair, a sharply-pressed Oxford shirt, and crooked white teeth. He looked to be several inches shorter than the woman standing next to him in the picture, the self-same woman who happened to be standing in my office at that moment. They were an odd couple, that was for sure. How he’d landed someone as devastatingly attractive as this woman was beyond me, but love did weird, stupid things to otherwise rational people all the time. Who was I to judge?

  “So, Mrs. Stewart,” I said, “what makes you think your husband is missing?”

  “Please, call me Vera,” she said, smiling sweetly. “And I haven’t seen him in days. It’s unusual. He’s generally so doting and steadfast, always there when I need him.”

  “Maybe someone caught him in the streets and needed their taxes done?” I suggested. A flash of anger glinted in her eyes for the briefest of moments, so fast I almost missed it, and then she was pouting at me, her full lips almost quivering with pent-up emotion, her husband’s disappearance clearly weighing on her. I shifted into a more genial, conciliatory tone. “Okay, what can you tell me about him, ma’am?”

  “He is a kind, gentle man,” she said. “He works as an accountant for a firm Downtown, Struthers and Miles. He went to work on Monday, and his secretary said he left at the usual time that evening, but he never came home and he hasn’t shown up at the office since then.” She was on the verge of tears.

  “Didn’t you go to the police about it?” I asked.

  “They wouldn’t look for him. They seemed to think my husband might have been involved in something . . . sinister.” She looked around in a conspiratorial fashion, as though she expected some cop to jump out of the closet and shout, “A-ha!” and then arrest her for conspiracy to commit a crime or something.

  “How do you mean?” I asked, stubbing out my cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and lighting up a second cancer stick.

  “He . . . I think he might have gotten involved with some men from . . . the Organization,” she said breathily, tears welling up in her eyes again.

  That sobered me up a bit. The Organization? What was a thin-necked pencil-pusher like this guy doing getting involved with Arcadia’s massive criminal syndicate?

  “Does your husband have any enemies you know about?” I asked.

  Mrs. Stewart shook her head. “None that I know of. He’s just a corporate accountant. He does their internal auditing.”

  “Has he blown any whistles at work lately?”

  “No. He’s a good man, Mr. Hazzard. A kind man.” She reached across the desk and took my hands in hers. “Please, you must help him, Detective Hazzard! I’m sure he’s in danger.” Her bosom heaved in a way that I was sure was illegal in several states.

  I extricated my hands and made a placating gesture. “Sure, Mrs. Stewart, sure. I’ll track him down. Leave your contact information with Miss Typewell, and she’ll explain our fee structure and policies.”

  The look of relief on her face was almost theatrically exaggerated. “Oh, thank you, Detective Hazzard!” she enthused, taking one of my hands again and clutching it tightly. “I cannot begin to thank you enough.” Her bosom heaved again, and my heart skipped at least a couple of beats. Those were breasts that could launch a fleet of Greek ships.

  “We’ll see if you still feel that way when you get the bill,” I muttered as she turned and slunk off back into the anteroom, gave Miss Typewell her information, and headed out the front door. I stepped out into the outer office and parked my ass on the corner of Ellen’s desk.

  “What do you think of our new client?” I asked.

  “Something seems off about that one, Eddie,” she said, a frown on her face.

  I nodded my agreement. “She seems like she’s loaded, though. I’m taking the case.” I crossed to the coat rack, grabbed my trench coat and fedora, and went to the small closet by the front door. Inside, a shoulder holster held my sidearm, a Marks & Saunders Peacekeeper 340, which I’d affectionately nicknamed the popgun. Armed and appropriately clad, I headed for the door. I had a case, and there was no time like the present to get started on it.

  II.

  My first stop was Stewart’s place of work, Struthers & Miles, CPAs. Their offices were Downtown in a glass-and-steel high-rise a few blocks off Eakin Plaza, the center of Arcadia’s financial and cultural life. Eakin Plaza was a massive square with a beautiful water feature in the middle, surrounded by various offices, banks, high-end retail outlets, and the sort of restaurants that book up months in advance. The Struthers & Miles building was located two blocks away on 138th Street, a respectable address for a
respectable firm. The lobby was all polished stone and glass, and the receptionist sat behind a large, curved desk that was almost the size of my office.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she asked as I came through the door. I was still a few dozen paces away from the desk, my steps echoing across the marble floor.

  “Um,” I said, trying to rush my steps so I wouldn’t be talking across the vast empty space. “I’m here to see Wally Stewart.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but he is out on leave at the moment,” the receptionist replied. That struck me as odd. Why did the office give me a different story than the man’s wife had? Was the office not dealing in good faith with Mrs. Stewart? Or was she dealing in bad faith with me? It was something to consider.

  “Could I speak with his personal secretary?” I asked.

  The receptionist typed a few commands into a vid window, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, she’s out on leave as well.” Well, that was very interesting.

  “Okay, then,” I said, tipping my hat to the receptionist. “Thank you for your time.” I walked back out of the building and around the block to the rear of the high-rise. The building’s back door was in an alley, hidden away from the main streets and prying eyes. I dug into my trench coat and pulled out my lockpick kit, a must-have for any private detective. Sure, this was technically breaking and entering, but moral flexibility is one of the defining traits of a private detective. If I followed all the rules, I’d probably still be a police officer.

  With a few minutes of finagling, I tripped all the tumblers in the lock and pulled the door open. Inside, an empty hallway led to a single door, which also turned out to be locked. A few moments with the lockpick solved that problem, and I was in the building proper.

  Accounting firms often reserve the back offices for one of two purposes: file storage, or a place to put the newbies where they can’t cause too much damage to the trial balances. At Struthers & Miles, they went for the former. The room I found myself in was stacked floor to ceiling with rectangular boxes, all labeled in neat block letters with filing codes like Ab-Er, 24-25. For all I knew, the boxes contained nuclear launch codes. Accountants were part of the last bastion of paper trails; they kept hardcopy files of everything, just in case, and they kept them for years. Which was great if you were looking for receipts of what fast food joints some auditor ate at when he was out of town on a job five years ago, but not particularly helpful for my purposes.