Death Comes Calling

  Contents

  Front Matter

  Part One: Life

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  XVI.

  XVII.

  XVIII.

  XIX.

  XX.

  Interlude: A Conversation with the Biggest Assholes I Know

  Part Two: Death

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  Part Three: Afterlife

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  Epilogue

  The Hazzard Pay Series

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Hazzard Pay Book Three: Death Comes Calling

  Copyright 2018 Charlie Cottrell

  charliecottrell.com

  xeyeti.com

  Front Cover Design: Copyright 2018 rebecacovers

  Book Design: Charlie Cottrell

  eBook Edition

  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 the author at crookedhalo42@gmail.com 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 (they’re less shy after a drink or two)

  For Michelle, who is a far better partner in life than I’ll ever deserve.

  Part One: Life

  I.

  It rained the day I died—a heavy downpour that was almost as oppressive as the heatwave the rain drove out of the city. The night sky was occasionally lit up with brilliant flashes of lightning, and thunder rumbled through the concrete canyons of Old Town.

  The fire in my room at the Sleep Inn smoldered, and rain occasionally dripped in through the blown-out window, hitting the embers with a faint hiss.

  Not that I got to experience any of that. I was, y’know, dead.

  It was, I think we can all agree, a damn tragedy. A life like mine, cut off in its prime? Deprived of the chance to age gracefully, like a fine whiskey. But that’s the sort of predicament you find yourself in sometime when you’re a hard-boiled detective investigating a dangerous case.

  Of course, we all know this can’t be where it ends, right? I mean, how could I be narrating the story of my own death after the fact? Am I spooky ghost from beyond the veil, come to warn you of dire things? Perhaps I’m a shadow of my former self, locked in an unlife between this plane of existence and the next? Or maybe I’m a data memory, trapped in a computer program, facing the existential crisis of being a disembodied mind? No. It’s none of that. But I don’t want to give too much away. Let’s just say that I’m Eddie Hazzard, and this is how I died.

  └●┐└●┐└●┐

  It started with a phone call from a man I never thought I’d hear from again. I definitely never wanted to hear from him again, but fate or chance or whatever higher being you may choose to believe in don’t usually consult you before dropping unnecessary crap in your lap.

  It was only early June, but already summer was beating on Arcadia like it was a tourist in the wrong part of town. I had a window unit air conditioner running full blast behind me, and I was still plastered to the vinyl of my office chair like a decal on a child’s toy. My computer beeped insistently at me, informing me I had an incoming call. I accepted the call, audio-only, and grunted a hello.

  “Eddie,” a voice replied, warm and dry, like a desert wind. The voice sounded older than when I’d heard it last, drained of some of its vitality and energy.

  “John Bodewell,” I said flatly, sitting up. I felt the vinyl pull at the back of my sweat-soaked shirt with a wet and unpleasant shlurp as I moved into an upright position. John Bodewell. My old mentor turned enemy. He’d stabbed me several times over the years, both figuratively and—increasingly and to my great displeasure—literally. To be fair, I did get a bit of revenge when I glassed him in the face and sent him to prison. Speaking of which… “Aren’t you supposed to be rotting away in Pratchett Correctional?” I asked.

  He chuckled, which turned into a dry, hacking cough. “I was. They let me out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m dying,” Bodewell said.

  “Good,” I said, and disconnected the line.

  “Who was that?” Miss Typewell called through the door connecting her office to mine.

  “Some asshole giving me good news for once,” I said. My secretary gave me a slightly bewildered look but didn’t push the issue.

  My computer pinged in my pocket, letting me know I had an email. I pulled up a vid window and checked it out, only to discover it was from Bodewell. I deleted it without even opening the thing. Probably contained a virus anyway.

  I spent the rest of the day attempting to ignore the nagging feeling in the back of my mind that something was amiss. Why the hell would Bodewell reach out to me? Maybe it was some misguided attempt at reconciliation, or an effort to rebuild bridges so he could die with a clear conscience. I contemplated what could be killing him; maybe some sort of brain disease that made him think I wanted to reconnect with him one last time. I didn’t know, and I kept telling myself I didn’t care. After about the sixth or seventh time I told myself that—and the second or third drink—I even started to believe myself.

  My computer beeped at me again in the early afternoon, and a small vid window popped up, indicating I had another phone call. I answered it in a peevish frame of mind. “Hazzard. What the hell do you want?”

  “Don’t take that tone with me, Detective Hazzard,” a manicured voice on the other end of the connection snapped.

  “Ms. Stewart. Apparently today is just full of unpleasant irritants.” The last thing I needed with my mood was a call from the Organization’s Boss. Sure, being short with the single most powerful individual in the entire city of Arcadia was probably a terminally-stupid idea, but it was hot, and I was cranky and a little tipsy already.

  Ms. Stewart sighed wearily, as though she were dealing with a tantrum-prone toddler. “I was just calling as a favor to you, Eddie. Your old mentor, John Bodewell, is out of Pratchett. But judging from your attitude, I’d guess that you already know.”

  “Yeah, bastard called me this morning,” I replied, lighting up a cigarette to take the edge off. It didn’t help. The next step would be downing the special bottle of Ellis Whiskey I kept in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. The stuff was illegal in 45 states, and you had to sign a waiver to drink it in the rest. It was only just this side of jet fuel. Having it in the office counted as some sort of biohazard, actually. The very smell of this whiskey would get you drunk.

  What I’m saying is, if I had a drink of this stuff, it wasn’t just going to take the edge off; it was going to remove the very concept of edges from my world entirely. I figured I’d be right as rain after two, maybe three shots of it. Or dead. Which was honestly preferable to living in a world with John Bodewell walking free in it.

  “So, what are you going to do about him?” Ms. S
tewart asked.

  “‘Do?’” I repeated incredulously. “I’m going to do nothing, Vera. I’m going to do exactly jack shit about John Bodewell. The bastard says he’s dying, so I say ‘good riddance.’ I’m going to sit here, get tremendously drunk, and probably fall asleep at my desk.”

  “I fail to see how that’s any different than your usual Tuesday,” Ms. Stewart said, huffy.

  “It isn’t. That’s the beauty of the plan,” I replied, abruptly ending the call.

  It wasn’t that I particularly hated John Bodewell. Well, actually, that’s not true. I did hate him, with the fiery passion one reserves for those who were family or once close friends but ended up betraying your trust one too many times. Bodewell had treated me like a fool and a patsy. He’d tried to kill me several times, too, which had strained our relationship. I’d put him away in Pratchett Correctional just a few short months ago, and thought the world was a better place with him sitting behind bars.

  And now he was out again, wandering the world like a specter of bad decisions come back to haunt me. It put me in a foul mood, and there’s only two things that will cure that: spreading it around to other people, or getting tremendously, mind-numbingly drunk.

  Playing to type, I went with the second option.

  II.

  I woke the next day with the Platonic ideal of a hangover. My head throbbed. My eyes wouldn’t focus. My limbs refused to acknowledge any instructions I gave them. My brain felt like it’d been run through a meat grinder, reconstituted as a hamburger, eaten, digested, excreted, run through a wood chipper, and fed into a juicer, then left out in the sun for a week to get all scummy.

  The only bright side was I’d forgotten all about John Fucking Bodewell.

  “John Bodewell’s dead,” Miss Typewell said, stalking into my office and flicking a vid window in my direction. Despite the heat, my secretary was still wearing a wool cardigan buttoned all the way up to her throat and seemed none the worse for the weather. Her only deference to the fact that the earth had apparently snuck a few miles closer to the sun overnight, the only indication she gave that it might be a touch on the warm side, was that she’d pulled her blue-tinted hair back into a bun to keep it off her neck.

  “Wh’zz’t?” I managed to murmur. I was slumped in my chair, my ass hanging in mid-air and my feet propped on the corner of my desk. My arms were hung haphazardly over the arms of the chair, my hands dangling down around the same level as my ass. My neck was bent at what would’ve been an unnatural angle for a sober person, but was perfectly normal for someone experiencing drunken limberness. Someday, when I am in charge of the world as I ought to be by rights, drunk yoga will be a thing. Until then, I remained an unsung pioneer.

  “I said, John Bodewell was killed last night,” Miss Typewell repeated, grabbing me underneath my shoulders and heaving me into a basically upright position. She pointed at the vid window while she forced a cup of cold coffee—because it was just too damn hot to drink warm coffee—into my hands. I took a grateful swallow and squinted at the vid window until there was only one of the damn things swimming in the air in front of me.

  “B’d’w’ll?” I mumbled, vowels still a bit of a lost cause at that point.

  “Yeah. Says he was murdered last night just after being released from Pratchett Correctional earlier in the morning.” She sat on the edge of the desk. “Did you know he was out?”

  “Yeah,” I croaked. I downed another gulp of coffee and felt the caffeine banish some of the haze wrapped around my head. “He…called me. Yesterday morning. Said he was dying.”

  “Well, looks like he died a little sooner than he was expecting,” she said.

  I scanned the article, reading and rereading each sentence to make sure I’d actually understood the words. Bodewell had been shot to death in Old Town last night around midnight, just off Purgation Avenue on 85th. Preliminary reports had it that he’d died in a mugging gone wrong, but the newsfeeds always assumed it was something like that in Old Town, even before the police released their report.

  “What the hell?” I mumbled, handing my empty coffee mug back to Miss Typewell. She refilled it and handed it back to me. I took another chug of cold coffee as I continued reading the article on Bodewell’s death. Strangely for a fatal mugging, they’d gone and left his computer and wallet on him. Of course, I doubted the guy had even had any cash on him, what with just getting out of Pratchett that day.

  “Things don’t add up here, Ellen,” I said, sipping more coffee. I was starting to feel at least slightly alert now, and realizing that the elation I thought I’d feel when John Bodewell died was completely absent. Instead, I just felt kind of empty. “It can’t be a coincidence that Bodewell tries to call me the same day he ends up dead on the street. And the ‘muggers’ don’t take anything off him? Not even his computer? No, this isn’t at all what it looks like.”

  “You think this was some sort of cover up?” Miss Typewell asked.

  I nodded. Yeah, the sense of elation was definitely absent. In its place was a cold knot of determination settling in the pit of my stomach like a greasy lunch. “Yeah, I just don’t know who or why yet.”

  “And you want to know?”

  I nodded again as I stood unsteadily, reaching for my hat and jacket. Sure, it may’ve been mercilessly hot outside, but you have to maintain a certain level of professional attire. Without the fedora and trench coat, I was just another sweaty guy in a cheap suit. With the hat and coat, I was a sweaty guy in a cheap suit who also happened to be a private detective.

  “So, where are you off to, then?” Miss Typewell asked as I downed the rest of my coffee in one go and set the cup on my desk.

  “The Fifth Precinct,” I replied. “They’re the ones who handled the body, so they’ll have the most information to help with the case.”

  “This is a case now?” she asked, surprised.

  “Yeah. I don’t want to, but I’m gonna find out who killed Bodewell,” I said grimly.

  “Not that it matters, but why do you care? You hated the guy.”

  “Well, curiosity, for the most part,” I started. “And when I find the killer, I either want to give ‘em a medal or kill ‘em myself.”

  III.

  The Fifth Precinct was down on 82nd Street between Purgation Avenue and Xavier Drive. The 5th was well-known for its narcotics division. They made more drug busts than any other precinct house in Old Town. Admittedly, the 5th Precinct was also in the heart of the Organization’s drug operation, so it wasn’t like it took much effort to arrange a drug bust in that neighborhood. Walking into virtually any building in the area was a good way to start, usually.

  The precinct’s captain was Julie Mullins, a soft-spoken blonde woman who stood about 5’6”. She was friendly, warm, and confident in a way that folks found disarming.

  Of course, around the time she had you socially disarmed, she’d whip out her hand-to-hand combat skills and disarm you literally, too. She was a street cop a few years ahead of me, and she helped show me some of the ropes when I was a rookie, before I got the boot. Even back then, she was winning city-wide martial arts tournaments, both among the police force and the broader general public. I heard she did some statewide stuff for a while, too, but had to stop so she could concentrate on kicking ass in her career.

  We’d kept up some friendly contact over the years; she’d sent a few cases my way here and there, and I’d sent her a few tips on gang activities when I could. We were amiable acquaintances, at this point, if not actually friends.

  “Eddie Hazzard, as I live and breathe,” she said, grinning widely as I walked into the precinct house.

  “It’s a good day when I manage to keep doing those things myself,” I say, returning her genuine smile and sharing a firm handshake. “I hear you guys found John Bodewell’s body early this morning.”

  Her smile melted into a look of genuine sympathy. “Yes, we did. I know you guys used to be close.”

  “Yeah, we were,” I said, skipp
ing over all the stuff that had driven a wedge the size of a small country between us over the years. There was no reason to bring all that up here and now. “Do you suppose I could get in on this case? See the body, check the reports, that sort of stuff?”

  “Sure, Eddie. Let me get you a visitor’s badge and we’ll head on down to the morgue.”

  Precinct House #5’s morgue was virtually identical to the one presided over by Marcus Franklin in Precinct House #4. In the 5th, the coroner was Jeremy Holt, a short, stocky man with curly blond hair and an easy manner about him. He was quick to laugh, quick to crack his own jokes, and quick to befriend someone. He stood an inch or two shorter than Captain Mullins, but had an outsized personality that more than made up for his lack of height.

  “Eddie Hazzard, meet Jeremy Holt. Jeremy, Eddie here is a private detective.” I shook hands with Holt; his grip was firm but not bone-crushing.

  “Your reputation precedes you, Detective Hazzard,” Holt said. He had a warm, throaty voice, with just a hint of a nasally twang.

  “And you’re still letting me in here?” I replied with a bit of a grin. Holt chuckled and moved to a wall covered in metal doors on the far side of the room. He unlatched one and pulled out a gurney; on it lay the mortal remains of John Bodewell.

  His face looked almost relaxed, if a bit bloodless. It was odd how death changed a person’s appearance. Bodewell almost didn’t even look like himself anymore: the skin around his eyes was smoothed, the lines between his nose and mouth were more pronounced, his mouth more downturned than it had ever been in real life. Features I’d seen dozens—hundreds—of times looked alien and just off to me now.

  I started examining the rest of Bodewell’s corpse. His chest had the usual Y-incision from an autopsy, stitched up professionally by Holt. There were three bullet holes in the chest, too: one on the left side, just over the heart, and two lower on the right side. They looked like they’d perforated his lung; he probably hadn’t suffered for long. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.