J Rain: The Mummy Case

“So tell me,” said Cindy, snuggling against me, her breath hot on my neck. “Was it Jarred who shot at you in the desert?”

“We’ll never know for sure, but I think it’s a safe bet. A Rawhide maintenance truck was getting serviced not too far from where we had met for lunch. He could have easily swapped vehicles.”

“Why bother swapping vehicles if his intent was killing you?” Cindy asked. “With you dead, there would be no witnesses.”

I shrugged. “In case he didn’t kill me; in case there was a witness.”

“I’ve never had anyone shoot at me,” she said, shuddering under the covers. “I would be terrified.”

“At first, but then survival supercedes fear.”

We were silent some more. Ginger snored contentedly between my ankles. A helluva heating pad.

“Do you think you’ll coach again next year?” Cindy asked.

Our team had played its final game tonight. We finished the season on a high note, winning by a huge margin, the biggest in quite some time. In fact, we had won four of the last five games, which, coincidentally, was when I was hired on as an assistant coach. Coach Swanson had asked me back next year.

“I told him I would think about it,” I said.

“But I thought you really enjoyed it.”

“Oh, I do. But a coach needs to give more of himself. Hell, most coaches commit their lives to their teams.”

“You were busy with the mummy, and with my stalker.”

“Of which, one is still on the loose,” I said.

“What’s his name?”

“Chad Schwendinger,” I said. “No wonder he turned out bad.”

“I’m not worried,” she said. “I have my big strong man to protect me.”

I was quiet, thinking about the stalker, about coaching, about the mummy, about my mommy. And through it all, I mostly thought about having a beer.

“Maybe next year I can take some time off from detecting to coach.”

“You look like a coach. Did I ever tell you that? The kids look up to you. I was watching them tonight. They were hanging onto your every word down there on the sideline.”

“I think everyone should hang onto my every word.”

“I know you do,” said Cindy. “Speaking of your word, are you ever going to ask me to marry you?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“When I’m out of debt.”

She was silent, meditative. She stroked my bicep. “I would also want you to stop drinking before we’re married.”

I nodded, but said nothing. Damn, I wanted a drink. Now.

“Maybe you need help,” she offered.

“Probably.”

“But you don’t want to get it.”

“I like drinking,” I said.

“So you would rather get drunk than marry me?”

“I want both.”

“You can’t have both, Jim. You need to make a decision.”

I turned and faced her, our noses touching. I inhaled deeply. She was staring up at me, the whites of her eyes luminescent. “There is no decision to make. I won’t lose you again. But can we give this a little time?”

She burrowed her face into the crook of my neck and kissed me softly.

“Yes,” she said sleepily. “We can give it a little time.”

Cindy spent the next few minutes flinching spasmodically into sleep. When she was snoring softly, I eased out of bed and padded quietly into the kitchen and opened the fridge door and removed a cold can of the thing that had been obsessively raging through my thoughts for the last hour. And it wasn’t a Diet Coke.

Cindy allowed me to keep a case of beer at her house, as long as I didn’t go through it too quickly.

That, of course, was the challenge.

So I was sitting in the darkness at the kitchen table working on my third Miller Light, contemplating a fourth, when I heard the familiar rumble of the muffler. I parted the curtains and looked down onto the street below as the same older model BMW pulled up along the curb, stopping in the shadows just outside a splash of lamplight.

I sipped from the can, stared down. I forgot about wanting a fourth beer.

The driver killed the engine and the lights. The tinted window rolled down and a man’s pale face appeared. If I wasn’t mistaken, as his jawline caught some of the diluted street light, he was looking up at Cindy’s condo.

I finished the beer and spent the next ten minutes staring down into the small squarish window three floors below, staring so hard that sometimes the window blurred into a hazy black amorphous mass. Luckily, blinking remedied this problem.

I watched it some more, and decided it was time for a chat. I pulled on a light jacket, because even I get cold, and stepped out of the condo and into the cool night air. I worked my way between the rows of condos, through a security gate and out toward the street.

Once there, I saw that the driver had stepped out of the car and was now rummaging through the trunk. The trunk lid blocked his face. Below the corner of the rear fender, and glowing slightly in the diluted street light, I could see a pair of dirty sneakers. Whoever he was withdrew something from his trunk and set it by his feet.

Light reflecting dully off its plastic surface, it looked vaguely like a slightly deflated football, if footballs had handles and spouts.

Gas can.

Pale hands reached up for trunk lid. Shut it softly.

And I found myself looking into the face of a very shocked, very heavy-set middle-aged man with a thick head of receding hair. Sort of the Roger Staubach look. He was wearing a black Members Only jacket and black sweats, as any good stalker should. He couldn’t have looked more startled, eyes bulging and mouth working.

“Run out of gas?” I asked.

The look of astonishment quickly turned into something ugly. He bared his teeth and reached inside his jacket, shouting: “Darwin is the devil.”

But before he could remove his hand, I pushed off the fender and punched him full in the face. His arms windmilled, flinging what appeared to be a gun into the nearby bushes. He collapsed straight to the ground.

“Only in the bedroom,” I said. “A devil only in the bedroom.”

He held his face and moaned and bled. I rolled him over and removed his wallet from his back pocket, hoping against hope I had gotten the right man. And I had. Chad Schwendinger. Hell of a name.

No wonder he turned out bad.

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.