Dead Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 5) Read online

  Dead Easy

  Phillip DePoy

  © Phillip DePoy 2000

  Phillip DePoy has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2000 by Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For

  Heather Heath

  with her new life;

  Frances Kuffel

  with her new attitude;

  Tracy Devine

  with her new office:

  No more three A.M. calls,

  but you know what Lao-tzu says:

  easy come, easy go.

  Table of Contents

  1. Easy Down Payment

  2. Lying After Midnight

  3. Shadows

  4. The Seventh Seal

  5. The Scream

  6. Walking My Baby Back Home

  7. Ratsville

  8. God’s Boiled Water

  9. Meet The Queen

  10. Vacation Bible School

  11. Sailing Shoes

  12. Rash Thinking

  13. Sunset

  14. Attachments

  15. Invisible

  16. Glossy Abelia

  17. Mixer

  18. Déjà Vu

  19. Husband?

  20. Two Good Reasons

  21. Moonlight

  22. Hearts

  23. Broken

  24. Hot Doughnuts Now

  25. Detective Work

  26. Today

  27. I Sleep While The City Burns

  28. Caution

  29. Lion’s Den

  30. Jazz

  31. Twice

  32. River of Night

  33. Itch

  34. Visitors

  35. Threats and Secrets

  36. Penmanship

  37. That Relationship

  38. Expectations

  39. Vortex

  40. Wrong

  41. Dead

  42. Two Tone

  43. Heart

  44. Dreamland

  45. Chaos Theory

  46. Somebody’s Blood

  47. Why

  48. Kamikaze Drug Lords Of The Sunbelt

  49. Sleep

  50. Gnosis/Geleafa

  51. Knowledge

  52. Easy Math

  53. Timing Really Is Everything

  1. Easy Down Payment

  I cut the dirty butcher paper, and a severed hand slapped the sticky floor with a sucking sound. Only a tiny band of gold made it seem remotely human. I was thinking that a shroud ought to be soft and white, not crackling and brown. I was thinking about that ring, too: how the sound of that hand broke the holiness of the night the way death breaks a marriage vow. I just didn’t know why I was thinking that — yet. It was four in the midsummer morning at Easy.

  Dally caught her breath, then sat on a stool.

  I looked up at her. “Is this why you called me?”

  “Did I know what was in there? No.” She blinked once. “Was I worried about it? Yes.”

  “Any idea where this came from?” I searched the package.

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure it’s a package from home.” She sounded like a zombie.

  “I see.” I rubbed my eyes. Why she thought the thing was from home, I didn’t want to ask.

  I had just fallen asleep when I’d gotten her call, only thirty minutes earlier. She’d been in a weird mood for quite a while, and things between us had been uncharacteristically strained. But I only have three rules to live by, and one of them is that whenever Dalliance Oglethorpe calls, I come. Later for the other rules — but they both involve her too.

  Home. Invisible, Georgia. That’s where we grew up — what we got out of. The town was so small it didn’t make the state maps, and you couldn’t even see it from the highway. It’s in south Georgia, which is usually flat, but Invisible is surrounded by little hills and old pines — unless you’re standing in the middle of it, you can’t see it. Hence the name. We’d always tried not to talk too much about it.

  So even though I thought better of asking why she thought the package was from that place, I heard myself say:

  “What makes you think that?”

  She only looked away, confirming that I’d been wrong to ask.

  “Well,” I told her, getting to my feet, trying to change the mood, “it’s not your birthday, so I have to wonder what’s the occasion. It’s got to be something important — must have been a lot of postage.”

  “No postage.” She shook her head. “It came special delivery.”

  “Yeah” — I glanced back down at the package — “I guess it did, at that. You didn’t happen to see who brought it in?”

  “God, no.”

  “You were here all alone?”

  She nodded.

  “But you hadn’t locked up?”

  Another nod.

  “That means to me that somebody was watching, knew just exactly when to slip in, plop this down, and take off. My guess is that you were back in your office checking the totals for the night?”

  She pressed her lips tighter.

  “Why wasn’t the door locked?”

  “Hal was anxious to leave. Had a date. I said I’d lock up. I was just taking the cash box back to the safe. Before I locked the doors. I heard a noise. I thought it was Hal. I yelled out. No answer. I came in. There it was.”

  Unusually short sentences for our Ms. Oglethorpe. She was knocked all the way back, it seemed, by her little gift.

  “Okay.” I took in a deep breath. “Do we open the package the rest of the way?”

  “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She was breathing funny. I thought I should humor her.

  I knelt back down. There was nothing else in the nightmare Christmas package except for an envelope, unaddressed.

  “Care to see what this says?” I sat on the floor.

  She nodded again. She would not, under ordinary circumstances, have been a woman of so few words.

  I ripped open the envelope, pulled the note out, and read it aloud. “Easy payment plan: installment one.”

  2. Lying After Midnight

  “What the hell does that mean?” I didn’t much care for sitting on that sticky barroom floor with a severed hand, so my mood was cranked a little.

  “I don’t know.” But I could tell she was lying.

  Which made that night a red-letter occasion. The last time Dalliance Oglethorpe had lied to me, she’d been eleven years old, and Halloween candy had been involved.

  What’s more, she didn’t even seem to know that I’d realized she was lying. She was too preoccupied.

  I stood. “I’ll start first thing in the morning.”

  “That’s okay, Flap,” she said quickly.

  “Excuse me? It’s okay?”

  “I’ll take care of it, I mean.” Her voice was empty.

  “Hm.” I folded my arms. “And I say ‘hm’ because in the one hundred and seventy-three years that we’ve known each other, this would mark the first time I haven’t helped you out in a situation of this sort, wouldn’t it?”

  She flashed a look in my direction. “Tell me when’s the last time you unwrapped a human hand in this bar, and I’ll buy you a case of that Cantenac-Brown you’re always hollering about.”

  “That’s a safe offer,” I told her.

  “So I guess your similar-situation theory holds no water, then.” Her voice could have chipped ice.

  I stood my ground. “Lying and touchy both inside of two minutes — this is not at all the woman I know.”

  “Lying?” Her voice rose a little.<
br />
  “You know why this little package is here,” I told her calmly. “Don’t tell me you don’t.”

  She looked away. “Flap, could we cut the coolest-detective-in-the-world show just for tonight. I’ve got somebody handling a little problem for me. This is connected. I didn’t ask you about it because it’s no big deal. It’s not worth your time, and there’s no money in it.”

  “Hm.” I shifted my weight. “First place: I’ve got more time than I know what to do with. Second: You know I don’t care about the money. But, third: It’s your world. I just rent. So if you need me out of this, then I’m gone.”

  “It’s nothing, Flap. Really.” Her voice was getting tired, and her eyes still wouldn’t meet mine.

  “All right, kiddo.” I glanced down at the package. “You tell me a chopped-off hand doesn’t signify, then it doesn’t. Want me to do something with that, at least?”

  “Just leave it.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Okay.” If you’d asked me at exactly that moment, I’d have had to tell you I was feeling something very close to jealousy. “Somebody else’ll clean up.”

  She nodded once.

  “So why’d you call me?”

  “Force of habit. Wish I hadn’t.”

  I buttoned my coat. “Same here, as it turns out.”

  I took one quick look around the place, I don’t know why, and then headed out the door without a bit more ado.

  I heard her heavy sigh. But I didn’t turn around.

  3. Shadows

  I only took three or four steps in the parking lot before I saw the other guy in the shadows.

  I could tell he was watching me. I was also fairly certain he had no idea that I knew he was there. I shoved my hands in my pockets and headed up Ponce. Within half a block I ducked between a couple of buildings and checked to make sure no one was following. Then I beat it back to the Easy parking lot. What the hell. I was up, and not likely to go right back to sleep even if I went straight home. And curiosity is actually one of my better attributes.

  The guy was nowhere to be seen. But the front door to Easy was ajar, and I knew that Dally would have locked it tight behind me if something hadn’t stopped her. I didn’t want to panic, but I was pretty certain that shadow boy was in the club.

  I hustled up to the door and peeked in the crack.

  I could hear their voices, and I could see the back of the guy’s head. It was obvious Dally wasn’t in trouble — as obvious as it was that she knew the guy. When he bent over to pick up the Addams Family delivery, I finally caught a good look. I knew him too.

  He was none other than Risky Jakes — a cliché right out of a B movie. Jakes was a common enough thug for hire. Nice guy at the end of the day, as far as I knew. I’d heard of him since the old days, when the Yankee musicians’ union had tried to strong-arm the Atlanta club scene — with scant success. You had a couple of tough guys from Jersey who thought they could push around some redneck bar owner and get results, only to discover the true meaning of whup-ass. Because you have not been stomped at all until you’ve been stomped by a good ol’ boy — drunk, mean, doing it for fun, and somewhere, genetically, still sussing out some kind of revenge for the “War of Northern Aggression” and the utter devastation of “Reconstruction” — the most perversely named historical phenomenon in America. But I digress.

  Jakes encountered that particular club scene once, quickly saw the lay of the land, and got out of the music industry altogether. He stayed in Atlanta, though — fell in love with humid air. That’s the line of reasoning I always remembered from the guy: “I think I must be some kind of a tropical thing, set down in New Jersey by mistake. Thank God I finally made it to Atlanta — it’s much better.”

  As far as I knew, no one had ever explained to him that Georgia — while hot enough in the summer to drive long-haired dogs mad — was not, strictly speaking, a legal part of the tropics.

  His parents had actually given him the name Risky — they’d met at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. The guy hated his name, and most people knew him as Jersey.

  And there he was, bad Kmart cloth shoes, loud Hawaiian shirt, too-tight Sansabelt slacks and all, talking to Ms. Oglethorpe.

  “It’s a hand,” he pointed out to Dally.

  “Damn it, Jersey, I know it’s a hand.” I could barely hear the next sentence: “It’s not his … is it?”

  “His?” He seemed to think that was a pretty good joke. “Naw — unless he’s lost it in the last couple of hours.”

  “You were supposed to keep me apprised.”

  “Of this?”

  “Of the situation. I was supposed to know where he was and what he was up to all the time. I shouldn’t be surprised like this.”

  “Jeez, Ms. Oglethorpe” — he took a quick look back at the package — “I think anybody would be surprised to get a thing like this.”

  “Shut up about the hand.”

  “It’s a pretty hard thing to ignore.”

  “I mean it, Jakes,” she told him tensely. “You should have told me he was around. He did have something to do with this …”

  “Oh, I’d expect he had everything to do wit this, all right.” Jakes’s head gave a little involuntary twitch. It was a habit of his when he was perturbed.

  He claimed it was only a nervous tic he could get rid of anytime he wanted to, but he’d had it as long as I’d known him. Maybe he’d kept it on purpose. I’d seen him pull his pistol immediately after a twitch like the one he’d just exhibited, and that’s the sort of rumor a tough guy likes running around about him: “He’s okay until his head jumps, but when it does, brother, take off. That’s when he starts shooting.”

  He did not, however, pull his gun on Dally. Nor did he stoop to the dead hand.

  “I’m just as messed up as you are,” he continued, “about this thing. I thought he was going back home.”

  Dally’s voice was colder than the chunk that sank the Titanic. “He doesn’t trust anybody else enough to do a thing like this.”

  “Yeah. I can see what you’re saying: He delivered it here in person. Whose hand is it, do you know?”

  “How would I know a thing like that?” Good. She was finally getting irritated with the guy, which was promising, I thought. “I’m just glad it’s not his.”

  “It don’t look familiar?” He was clinical.

  “The hand?”

  “It’s got a ring on it.”

  “I know it’s got a … damn it, Jakes. You’re the next best thing to worthless.”

  “But I’m here,” he said right away, in his defense.

  “Uh-huh.” She wasn’t, apparently, comforted that much by his presence.

  “What I mean to say,” he continued, “is that I am here — I am not Flap Tucker.”

  “You certainly aren’t that.” And the disgust in her voice made me a lot less angry with her than I had been.

  “Who is?” he agreed.

  Which made a guy like me proud: to be so well thought of after four in the morning — under the circumstances.

  “I’m saying this only makes me think,” Jersey needled.

  “Is it at all possible that you could be a bigger idiot? That’s what I’m thinking.” Her voice had grown dangerous. “You steer clear of figuring out anything and you’ll be better off.”

  “I was just wondering,” he kept on, ignoring the warning bells. “And when I’m done, my conclusion will be that Mr. Tucker don’t know about … him.”

  “Mr. Tucker’s been here tonight. He knows all about the hand.”

  “I know that.” His voice was harder too. “I was watching outside. I’m not exactly the sap you take me for. I heard you argue. I saw him leave. I’m not talking about the hand. I’m talking about the guy who brung it to you.”

  “Oh.” That’s all. And considerably less gutsy than any of the previous syllables.

  “Which is a real switch in my little world,” Jersey finished.

  “What is?” Back to the
zombie delivery.

  “I’m surprised to know something that Flap Tucker don’t. I think it’s one of the seven seals of what you call your apocalypse.”

  I wouldn’t have taken Jersey Jakes to be the sort of person who’d be up on his Bible enough to make a jibe of that sort. It still didn’t prepare me for Ms. Oglethorpe’s response.

  “Well,” she said, sitting down on the closest barstool, “it certainly signals the end of something in this world.”

  4. The Seventh Seal

  By two the next afternoon I was up and dressed. There was jasmine something-or-other in the air, and magnolias were opened all the way down Ponce.

  I don’t usually start my day at Easy, but it’s not entirely unknown. The darkness of the place temporarily blinded me when I first opened up the door, but it only took a second or two for my eyes to adjust.

  Hal slapped the bar the way he always did when I came in.

  “Dr. Tucker.”

  “Is the boss in?”

  Hal looked away, cleaning something that was already spotless. “She … she kind of ducked into her office when she saw you come in.”

  “I see.”

  “She just came in, Flap,” he tried to explain. “She’s going through the mail.”

  “I need food, Hal.” I decided to let him off the hook.

  “You need the cassoulet.” He was relieved. “Marcia made it special.”

  Ever since I’d started telling Marcia, in the kitchen at Easy, about my French heritage, she’d every-so-often make up something out of some French cookbook she had. Her idea was that it classed up the joint. My idea was that she needed a vacation. But her cooking was getting better.

  “You tried it?”

  “Me?” Hal responded quickly. “Not on your life. I don’t like to eat at all before nightfall. It’s bad for the digestion.”

  “I see.”

  “But some have had it for lunch. They raved. Marcia!”

  She appeared in the window between the bar and the kitchen.

  “Flap, here, questions your cassoulet.” Hal turned back to me and winked.

  “I work,” she began in a monotone, “I slave — what do I get? Heartache.”