Devil May Care Read online

  BANYON'S BACK WITH ONE HECK OF A CASE!

  For a savvy private investigator like Crag Banyon, tackling cases that are too hot to handle comes with the territory. But even a plucky P.I. with an occasionally unsavory client roster has his limits. So when a demon shows up at the front door of Banyon Investigations with a pile of cash and a plea for help, Banyon thinks it could be time to cool things down. Unfortunately, temptation strikes at the precise moment the rent is overdue, and the landlord -- not to mention the power and phone companies and Banyon's top fifty favorite liquor stores -- don't take IOUs. Short on cash, he makes a deal with the devil..

  Someone's gone over the wall and escaped from Hell, and the demon prison guards need somebody on the outside to track down their misplaced soul. Simple missing persons case, right? Except nothing's ever simple for Crag Banyon, P.I. When he's not being assaulted, mauled, arrested, framed, betrayed, chased and nearly killed, he's uncovering a conspiracy that extends from this life to the afterlife and all points in between.

  When all Hell breaks loose, what's Banyon's solution? Shove a flask in his pocket and go to a matinee at the Bijou until it all blows over or blows up...whichever comes first.

  What readers are saying about Devil May Care, A Crag Banyon Mystery

  "you will find yourself laughing out loud throughout and waiting for the next installment." --Bill McDaniel

  "had me rolling with laughter, often serious belly laughs." --Prof Saffel

  "well written, well paced and full of wit and humor" -- Destroyer Fan "Sean"

  Devil May Care

  A Crag Banyon Mystery

  By

  James Mullaney

  Copyright © 2012 by James Mullaney

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from James Mullaney.

  Cover art © 2012 Micah Birchfield All Rights Reserved

  Micah's Web Site:gentlemanbeggar.wordpress.com

  Editing and Formatting by Donna Courtois and Dale Barkman

  Email Dale: [email protected]

  To the lunch crowd, Caroline, Stella, Maureen and sometimes Fran (wherever you've gotten lost to).

  Note from Jim:

  If you enjoyed this book, please take a moment to post a positive review at Amazon, and spread the news at your personal web site, Facebook page, etc. I don't know if these simple kindnesses will get you into Heaven, but they might help to keep the author out of the unemployment line. -- Jim Mullaney

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 1

  The wobbling hum was what Triple-A would get if it crossed a flat tire with a crooked roulette wheel. A kind of thump-whir, thump-whir that felt like a trip to Vegas that had taken a very hasty, very ugly turn into the no man’s land of the Nevada desert.

  Thump-whir, thump-whir.

  Desert was right. The mercury had to be flirting with a hundred. But it wasn’t a dry heat. It was the muggy bayou, the sticky Amazon, and crazy Colonel Kurtz’s oppressive jungle all rolled into one nasty, humid swamp. It was the kind of godawful humidity that soaked through your skull and ballooned your brain. Except I didn’t feel any smarter.

  The last smart thing I did was quit the cops. The first dumb thing I did after that was hang out a P.I. shingle. That was ten years ago, and everything else since then had merely been shades of stupid. The most recent dumb thing was getting hammered at O’Hale’s Bar and passing out in some dingy dump where they drove around your room all night on flat tires that sounded like casino night at St. Regent’s Drive-Thru Cathedral.

  Thump-whir, thump-whir.

  I opened just one eye on the noise and let the other one keep sleeping. It was that kind of hangover.

  The sound didn’t come from a lost Shriner’s funny car, but from a crummy old ceiling fan that looked like someone had mugged the propeller off a P-51. It was missing a blade and wobbled as it spun. Thump-whir, thump-whir.

  There was three inches of dust on the blades, and it was a testament to the complete worthlessness of the fan that it couldn’t work up enough speed to dislodge so much as a single speck. I’d’ve called the maid to clean the thing off, but with my open eye I saw that it’d be useless. The maid hadn’t been there in three years, since my last three checks to her bounced. The dingy dump I’d been unlucky enough to pass out in sometime the night before was my own crummy apartment. My name’s Banyon. It said so on the yellowed business card on the coffee table four inches from my bleary eyeball.

  I opened my other eye. It agreed with the first. It was still my place. Damn.

  My eyes felt like they’d been lightly buffed with fine grain sandpaper then stomped on by Clydesdales. My tongue felt dry and flat enough to return a serve from a Chinese ping-pong champion. I was pretty sure all my limbs were still there, but I didn’t feel up to taking inventory. The village smithy was pounding an anvil in my noggin which, added to the nonstop thump-whir, thump-whir above my head, made moving around even a little bit something to carefully consider and ultimately reject. Like marrying a leggy chorus girl or paying the rent.

  It was this last pain in the neck that finally got me up off my stomach.

  The rent was due. It was always due, but I was six months behind this time, with the threat of an eviction hanging over my head like that wobbly thump-whir fan, so its due-ness was twice as pressing as it was when I was my standard three months behind.

  I needed a case. Unfortunately, I found when I sat up that I’d polished off my last case of whiskey some time during the night. The flaps on the box were torn up and my living room carpet was loaded with more empty bottles than a urologist’s Dumpster.

  I could feel my dress shirt sticking to my back. I was like a fat kid who’d just jumped through an open hydrant in his size triple-X T-shirt.

  Thump-whir, thump-whir.

  I needed the other kind of case. The paying kind.

  I heaved myself to my feet and found the bathroom doorknob on the third try. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not always the one in the middle.

  A shower didn’t help, nor did my breakfast of tap water and a half-eaten pastrami sandwich that was the only food in the place other than a half bottle of hot sauce and a tin of deviled ham so old it had rusted to the cupboard.

  As a general rule I avoid drinking water. There’s something distinctly unholy about a clear liquid that has the unmitigated gall to not be vodka. But these days there was another reason to avoid city water.

  The Department of Public Works had
found mermaids in the reservoir again. It happens every couple of years. It’s always some lovesick college kid on spring break who’s hauled one up from Mexico wrapped in damp towels and stashed her out back in the swimming pool. The water sports are more fun than a Busby Berkeley burlesque, right up until spawning season. Next thing you know, he’s telling her he’s got his senior year to worry about and like clockwork he’s dumping a trunkload of pregnant mermaid into the reservoir in the dead of night. The front page of the paper last Friday had a picture of a bunch of DPW workers pulling yards of golden mermaid hair from the filters at the city’s water treatment plant. Sure, they use it to make harp strings, but there’s a warehouse of the stuff stored on the edge of town and half the philharmonic is harps these days. If you’re going to spawn a couple thousand human-mermaid hybrids in my drinking water, have the courtesy to wear a bathing cap.

  The mayor swore on the front page of the Gazette that the water was clean for drinking. Still, I tried not to think of what might be whizzing out my kitchen faucet as I choked down my sandwich. The bread was stale and got caught in my throat and for a blessed moment I thought it was curtains. Unfortunately, the pastrami on rye battled its way past my uncooperative epiglottis and I made it through breakfast still breathing.

  Great. I still had to worry about where I was going to scrape up the rent.

  The one bit of good news these days was that my building had a new paperboy who had not yet been informed by the helpful old busybody next-door that he had as much of a chance of getting paid by me as I had of scrounging up a paying client, and so the morning paper was waiting for me in the basket in the hall.

  I grabbed my trench coat and fedora from the chair next to the door and took the Gazette with me for the walk to work.

  There’d been an accident in the street outside my building. One of those Fairy Godmother, Co. carriages must have drifted into the wrong lane. The carriages are amazing to look at when they’re still in one piece, what with all the gold and silver and the team of huge white horses clomping along out front. Unfortunately, the magical enchantment that has gullible tourists shelling out seventy-five bucks for a three block ride only holds until the carriages get walloped by a speeding Humvee.

  There was smashed pumpkin all over the road. The cops were there, cruiser lights flashing, sweating in their short sleeves as they tiptoed around the team of squashed mice. You never heard language like that coming from the fairy godmother driver. She was hovering two feet off the ground and reading the riot act to the Humvee’s owner. The cops were doing their best to separate them, but when she drew something sparkling from her pinafores, the men in blue yanked their side arms.

  “Freeze, lady, drop the wand!”

  Tempers flare when the mercury boils.

  I hustled around the corner, away from the accident scene. Last thing I needed was to get caught in the crossfire and wind up a toad. I had no hope of a princess kissing the mug I was already stuck with, forget my chances if I was covered in warts and sitting on a lily pad in some algae-clogged pond. Although flies were free and would probably sit better than the stale pastrami sandwich and water chaser that was churning in my gut.

  It was two blocks to my office. I didn’t much like driving, which was obvious since my old Pontiac had been berthed and rotting since Columbus Day in the same two parking spots in front of the downstairs fish market. Luigi Vincetti, owner of For the Halibut Fish Bazaar had been trying to get it towed for months. The local chain supermarkets dumped whatever they couldn’t sell on Vincetti, and their trucks had a hard time steering around the back of his joint with my car taking up two spaces out front. If his clientele got a front-door whiff of his fresh daily mackerel before Vincetti got to it with a can of liquid Pledge, his business would drop faster than a two-bit stoolie in a pair of cement Hush Puppies off the dark end of the nearest pier.

  Vincetti was peering out the window through a pair of cartoon lobster eyes that his stock boy had painted on the glass. That could only mean one thing. Sure enough, the meter maid had left another flapping paper present under my windshield wiper.

  I plucked up the latest ticket, held it high for the old fishmonger to see, crumpled it up and stuffed it into the mouth of the taxidermied shark hanging next to his window.

  Vincetti was screaming something in Italian as I entered the building. Beats me what he was saying. I can barely order pizza in a dago restaurant.

  On the elevator up to my third floor office, I shook out the paper and glanced at the headlines. Washington was a mess. Business as usual there. Locally, there’d been another pit bull attack. That had to make it a dozen in the past week. This time the victim was some woman mulching rose bushes in her backyard. According to the hospital, she was maybe going to lose her leg. The neighbors who owned the dog swore it was the special, magical kind of pit bull that never, ever mauled people and that the woman had provoked the attack somehow, probably by screaming so much while she was being eaten or by keeping her blood in her veins rather than in a jar on the top shelf of her locked medicine chest. The other eleven pit bull owners had made the same excuses after the other attacks, as if they’d all learned their lines by rote on the last day of obedience school. I suppose they had to do something to kill the time while they were waiting for magna cum Fido to crap out his diploma along with his professor’s hand.

  When the elevator doors opened, I was greeted by a stench that had nothing to do with Vincetti’s bin full of fresh, month-old trout, the stink from which the combined efforts of Renuzit and Febreze usually couldn’t kill.

  It was a rotten egg smell that flooded the dingy hallway. It got stronger the closer I got to the office with “Banyon Investigations” painted on the door.

  The potted plant in the corner at the end of the hallway had wilted and died. I was pretty sure it had been three-quarters alive the previous day. Today it looked like a piece of curled black shoelace. Blackened leaves decorated the floor around the pot.

  When I touched my office doorknob, I got a sudden sense of dread deep in my pastrami and rye. It was like a black hole had opened up beneath my feet and suddenly sucked all the joy from the world in a horrible, otherworldly whirlpool from which no happiness would ever escape. So at least there was nothing unusual there.

  My secretary wasn’t at her desk in the outer office.

  Doris was in the first week of a two week vacation. She and that mother of hers were driving cross country to the Grand Canyon. I’d volunteered to go along if Doris thought she’d lose her nerve pushing the old bag in. I nearly got a black eye for my trouble. My sparkling wit is wasted on dames.

  In Doris’ large chair sat a small elf in a tiny little business suit identical to mine, but for the fact that his looked like it hadn’t been wadded up in a fishbowl for the past two months, rung out by hand and stuffed through the mail slot.

  I had taken Mannix on after a North Pole caper a while back. For some reason the elf liked me. So what if he had no taste in friends? He was a good kid just the same.

  “Hey, Mr. Crag,” Mannix said, unable to contain his excitement.

  Elves were never able to contain their excitement, or at least this one wasn’t. I loved playing cards with Mannix. No one telegraphed a good hand better than him. When Mannix was swinging from the lights, I folded; when he was chewing his fingernails, I bet the moon. If I ever scraped enough cash together to pay him all the back salary I owed him, I was sitting on a big enough stack of poker IOU’s from that elf to buy O’Hale’s Bar and move it to a better neighborhood. Like downtown Mogadishu.

  “You’ve got a client,” Mannix said, giddy and grinning from ear to pointed ear. “He’s got money. Inside.”

  He stopped me on my way to my office door.

  “You finished with the paper, Mr. Crag? I want to go through the funnies.”

  “Knock yourself out, kid.”

  I tossed him the Gazette morning edition and Mannix went straight for his funnies, which was what he called the op-eds. He
kept a running tab of local politicians and wiseass columnists, which I think he was passing on to the naughty or nice department back at his old job for a couple of extra bucks a week. You can take the elf out of the North Pole, but you can’t take the Pole out of the elf. He had out a notebook and green pen and was tsk-tsking and shaking his head as I entered my private office.

  I located the source of the rotten egg stench. I wouldn’t tout this as an example of my impressive detective skills, since the smell obviously came from the demon who was sitting on a metal folding chair before my scarred oak desk.

  The sulfur stink rolled off him in waves. You could actually see it distorting the air around his shoulders, making the wall behind him look like the wobbly image of a desert mirage. When he opened his mouth, it smelled like…well, probably like my breath. I’d forgotten to brush after that lousy sandwich.

  “You’re Banyon,” the demon said. His voice was sepulchral and rumbling, like James Earl Jones run over by a garbage truck.

  “That depends. If you’re picking up, I’m the janitor and Banyon’s the guy in the apron in the fish market downstairs. He’s easy to spot. He sounds like Mussolini and he’s probably dunking today’s fresh catch in a bucket of Mr. Clean.”

  The demon grunted. “It is you. About time you stumbled in.”

  “When a demon is my first meeting of the day, it’s past time I stumbled out.”

  My trench coat and hat had been hanging on the rack inside the door for all of two seconds before they were back in my hands. I had taken one step towards the door, certain that somewhere out there was a bottle with my name on it, but the demon held up a leather pouch in his long, gnarled fingers. When he shook it, it jangled.

  “Look, Banyon, you need the dough,” he said, impatiently. “The elf out front made it clear you’re broke. You might as well at least hear me out.”