J. Rain: Hail Mary

Yesterday, in a small desert town called Apple Valley, ol’ Boonie was finally put to rest amid much fanfare. Jones T. Jones was there. He even shed a tear, which may or may not have been legit. Anyway, I thought he was going to miss his mummy. They had gotten along so well together.

I was still drinking too much, but that was not insurmountable. That was fixable, and someday, when I had put my own mother’s murder to rest, I would put my drinking to rest, too. And then I would ask a certain someone to marry me.

But first things first.

A door to my right opened and a bespectacled young man with no chin poked his head out. He was dressed in a white lab coat. “It’s ready, Mr. Knighthorse.”

“ How did it turn out?”

“ Great, I think. You can thank the marvels of modern technology.”

So, I followed him in. Took a seat next to a flat-screen computer monitor that was turned away from me.

“ Here you go,” he said. And turned the monitor toward me. “Twenty years, just like you asked.”

On the screen before me was the headshot of a white Caucasian male of about forty. I leaned a little closer, aware that my beating heart had increased in tempo, thudding dully in my skull. The man on the screen had not aged well. His face was weathered from too many years in the sun and surf. His blond hair was turning a dirty blond, almost gray. Blue eyes and white teeth.

It’s called age-progression technology, and it’s used to identify runaways and kidnap victims. The man on the screen before me was the eighteen-year-old kid from the pier, the kid who had taken an interest in my mother. Except in the age-progression photograph, he wasn’t a kid anymore. He was a man. An older man who clearly loved to surf and still lived in Huntington Beach. An older man with three adorable kids who loved their grandfather. An older man who was the son of the homicide detective who investigated my mother’s murder.

“ I hope this helps,” said the technician.

I was finding breathing difficult.

“ Are you okay?” asked the technician.

The room was turning slowly. From somewhere very far away, I heard the technician ask again if I was okay.

I felt sick and stumbled out of the small room and found the nearest bathroom and threw up my lunch and breakfast. I flushed the toilet and sat on the seat and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and tried to control my breathing.

I sat like that for a very long time.

I was doing vertical leg crunches behind my desk when someone knocked on my office door.

I was tempted to ignore the knocking and finish the set. After all, looking like me takes a lot of work. But I happen to enjoy eating, not to mention my girlfriend has an expensive Kindle habit which, for some reason, somehow got attached to my credit card. So now every few days, I get email notification from Amazon saying that books like The Help and Tattooed Dragons have been purchased, although mostly it’s a steady stream of Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts novels.

So, I compromised and cranked out ten more crunches, rolled over, and pushed myself up to my feet.

At the door, I verified that the smallish shape behind the pebbled glass wasn’t pointing a weapon at me and opened the door.

The smallish shape turned out to be a woman. Her eyes were red and her nose was a little puffy. She had been crying. I am, after all, an ace detective. Then again, lots of my clients come here crying, or leave here crying. Or both. I haven’t cried since I was ten. I was going on twenty-one crying-free years. A streak I was proud of.

She looked me over. “You’re all sweaty,” she said.

I couldn’t tell if she disapproved or not. And since I didn’t care if she approved or not, I said, “I’m sweaty. I’m also six foot four with shoulders nearly as wide as this doorway. I’m a lot of obvious things.”

She blinked. “Are you Jim Knighthorse?”

“ And that,” I said, “is what I’m most proud of.”

“ You’re also kind of cocky.”

“ Cocky is good in my business.”

She looked me up and down some more, craning her head to do so. “I suppose it is. So, can I come in, or are you just going to keep blocking the doorway with those wide shoulders of yours?”

I grinned and stepped aside. She moved past me and paused just inside my office, taking it in. Doesn’t take long to take in. A bookshelf filled with Clive Cussler and James Rollins novels there, a sink with a Mr. Coffee next to it, a couch for Cindy and I to roll around on, a filing cabinet with my physical case files, four client chairs and my hand-tooled, leather-topped desk. The desk was obnoxiously big and more than one pissed-off client had mentioned something about “penis compensation,” but I dismissed it since the desk had come with the office. Besides, I had big feet.

“ What’s with all those pictures?” she asked. She motioned to the wall of photographs behind my desk.

I shut the door behind me, headed over to my desk and slipped into my new leather chair. The leather made rude noises that we both thought best to ignore.

“ Wait,” she said, stepping forward. “These are pictures of you. All of them.”

“ I’m very photogenic. At least, that’s what Cindy tells me.”

“ Who’s Cindy?”

“ The most beautiful girl in the world.”

“ Are you always like this?” she asked.

“ Like what?”

“ So…confident?”

“ Only when I’m not.”

“ And when are you not?”

“ Almost never.”

She turned away from one of the pictures and looked at me. “Are you for real?”

“ Ask that inside linebacker in the Oregon game.”

“ The inside what?”

“ That picture you’re looking at. The guy with his feet kicked up in the air. He might concur that I’m real enough.”

She did look, shook her head, then came over and sat in one of the four client chairs. I couldn’t think of a time when all four were filled at once, but I’m ever optimistic.

“ Okay, I get it,” she said. She crossed her legs and kicked her foot. A sort of nervous tic. “You were a jock who liked to bash heads and hurt people. But are you a good detective?”

For an answer, I opened one of the desk drawers and extracted a sheet of paper from one of the file folders. I handed it to her.

“ What’s this?”

“ A list of referrals.”

“ And they’ll vouch for you?”

“ Some more enthusiastically than others.”

She folded the paper and put it in her purse. “Thanks. Detective Chad something-or-other recommended I see you. He said you don’t scare easy.”

“ Detective Hansen,” I said. “And not yet.”

“ He also said you could be a handful.”

“ You have no idea.”

“ Is that a sexual reference?”

“ Would a sexual reference offend you?”

“ Of course.”

“ Then, no.”

She sat back in her chair. She was about twenty-five. She was smallish, but tough-looking. Her hair was short and her nails were unpainted. Upon closer inspection, I saw that her nails were worn down by a lot of work. Work doing what, I didn’t know. She sported a bodacious tan, but also tan lines along her thighs and her upper arms. She was tan, but she wasn’t sunbathing. She was working in the sun. And hard.

“ I need help, Mr. Knighthorse. I need someone who doesn’t scare easy and someone who knows what they’re doing. Whether you’re a sexist pig or you think too highly of yourself, I don’t really care. I just need help.”

“ What kind of help?”

“ My boyfriend’s missing.”