Mike Faricy - Bombshell

“But still, they should have taken it easy, no need for that rough shit,” Louie said. He was down on his knees behind the marble topped bar, rummaging around in the fridge. “Man, this place is well stocked,” he said standing up, he held a green bottle of some kind of German beer, opened it and poured it into a chilled glass.

“The SWAT guys might have been jerks, but they didn’t know it was all prearranged. Far as they knew I was a baddy, murdered a woman, they bagged my pistols. I don’t like it, but you can’t really blame them. I can, however, blame Elkers.”

“Yeah, and there he was tonight on the news, standing in front of your place taking questions from those reporters when they hauled you out, cuffed, beautiful, man. And then all those reporters while you’re sitting in the back of the squad car with the shit kicked out of you.” Louie waddled back to join me at the dining room table. “It’s like your buddy Aaron said, the news footage can only help us.”

“Now if they can just get the guy who did this. Think Manning will take much flak on this?”

“Manning? What do you care?”

“I sort of like the guy. He can be a pain in the ass, but he’s a straight shooter, honest.”

“No, I don’t think he’ll get much heat,” Louie gulped down a healthy amount of beer. “He’ll get some, but with all the news footage, it’s too high profile. But I’ll tell ya, I wouldn’t want to be Elkers tonight.”

“What do you think will happen?”

“To Elkers?”

I nodded.

“He’s history. It might be the resignation for the good of the department sort of deal or just a quiet retirement six moths down the road, but either way I’d guess he’s gone. Too bad, it’s a tough way to go, but no one to blame but his own ego,” Louie said then gulped more beer.

“I just want them to get the guy who killed Fiona Simmons.”

“Yeah,” Louie said, he was up and making his way behind the bar, again. “We need to talk about what you want by way of damages. This all expense paid visit to the hotel is nice, but you got all the cards my friend with a lot more available.”

“Louie, I got kicked around a little, I’m not wild about it, but in a day or two I should be pretty much back to normal.”

“Yeah, whatever normal is in your case.” He was standing behind the marble topped bar, watching the frost melt off the exterior of the fresh glass as he poured another beer.

“Think about this,” he said. “You’ve got the physical beating, plus the damage to your reputation, reputational damage to your business, physical damage to your home, and then there are all the psychological issues…”

“Psychological issues?”

“Believe me, Dev, you got ‘em,” he said then drained a third of his glass and looked around. “Hey, this joint got an extra bed?”

“Detective Manning,” I said.

“Who’s calling?” I had the feeling the guy on the other end of the phone was doing a half dozen other things while talking to me. I could hear the general hum of conversations in the background.

“Devlin Haskell,” I said, not really sure I should be giving him my name.

“Just a moment, sir.” He had sort of snapped to, or was I just imagining? Didn’t matter, Manning was always good for a ten minute wait before he bothered to pick up the phone.

I’d just finished the order of Eggs Benedict plus the side plate of smoked salmon and caviar that room service had delivered. I poured another cup of coffee and glanced at my watch, nine-fifty in the morning. Louie had left an hour earlier. I had another massage and a spa treatment scheduled for eleven. That left enough time for at least two more of those really tasty blueberry muffins.

“This is Detective Manning.”

I checked my watch, it was still nine-fifty.

“Detective Manning, Dev Haskell, didn’t expect you to pick up so fast.”

“How’s it going?” he asked, actually sounding genuine.

“I’ve got two of the most gorgeous black eyes you’ve ever seen.”

“How you feeling?” he said, quickly moving on from my black eyes.

“I’ll live. Anything turn up yet?”

“You mean like a suspect with a note pinned to his coat that says I’m guilty?”

“Could it be that easy,” I asked.

“No, we’re sort of in the wait-and-see mode over here, shining a little light under the occasional rock.”

Not the answer I was hoping for.

“Anything I can do to help?” I asked.

“Yeah, continue to keep a low profile, rest up, take it easy in that hotel suite. How’s the food?”

We chatted on for a minute or two about my Eggs Benedict and then absolutely nothing important. I had the feeling the guy was really trying, but then another look in the bathroom mirror at my two black eyes, my nose and banged up face made me think he should.

It was during my late morning massage that I got to thinking about what I could do to help catch Fiona’s murderer. The guy obviously was aware of the Hastings Hustlers schedule, the various cities where they were appearing. That narrowed the field down to anyone in the world with Internet access.

I drifted back to the two cops who transported me yesterday. They tried the anti-woman angle, the religious angle, the stalker angle was it one of those? The guy had clearly been stalking Fiona, but why? A perceived slight? Some flake that followed her over here from England? Some sort of Jodie Foster deal?

The only cameras at the hotel where Fiona was murdered were the ones carried by the guests. Late night hotel security consisted of a fifty-something woman with a bourbon buzz at the front desk and the pool maintenance guy. Fiona had been found in her room with her throat slit. The stalker seemed to know what hotels the team was going to be staying in. In fact, in the case of Chicago and St. Paul, he knew the actual room she was in. Twice in St. Paul, now that I thought about it, once to fire bomb her and then, well, the second incident, her murder.

I felt the masseuse kneading my back. He moved cautiously around the ribs on my right side and seemed to know what he was doing. I felt completely relaxed. He had just massaged some sort of hot fragrant oil into my back and was in the process of laying smooth, hot stones along my spine and shoulders. I had to admit, this was the life, things were really going well if you glossed over my beating. I figured I could milk this luxury hotel stay for at least a good week. But there was a dark cloud, if my past history served as any sort of lesson, this was exactly the time when I usually screwed things up.

No one was around when the taxi dropped me off down the block behind my parked car. I could see a white carpenter’s van parked in my driveway, saw horses supporting a number of different boards. Tools were set up across my front lawn and there was a guy hammering around my front door frame. I decided nothing positive could come from poking my nose in, plus I wasn’t supposed to be here, so I climbed in my car and drove off. No point in alerting Manning that I had wandered off the luxury reservation.

I was thinking about the fingers as I drove, they’d been frozen, which made sense, sort of. Did some guy have a bucket of them in a freezer and he grabbed one whenever needed, a little different version of giving someone the finger? That seemed to make a lot more sense than some guy cutting off a fresh finger every time the Hastings Hustlers appeared in a new town. But then why would he leave one of the things in my garage?

I ended up in the library, doing what I should have done a long time ago. I Googled the Hastings Hustlers. From all the searching I did, which was only an hour on the library computer before my time was up, I couldn’t find any mention of fingers sent to anyone on the team. For that matter, I couldn’t find mention of fingers sent to anyone, anywhere, until the Hustlers arrived in the United States.