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  BANYON INVESTIGATIONS, INC. CASES CRACKED. REASONABLE RATES.

  When a desperate leprechaun needs to locate his lost pot of gold, there's only one P.I. in town dogged and sober enough to take the case. Unfortunately, his first choice is in Bimini dodging an IRS audit, so he calls on Crag Banyon instead.

  That's just the start of a string of increasingly lousy luck that hounds Banyon from one emerald end of his latest crummy job to the other, where it turns out that a trip over the rainbow isn't the fun-and-booze-filled romp that all the brochures claim. Banyon finds that the whole leprechaun world is upside-down, while at the same time our own world is suffering through a mealtime catastrophe that's threatening side dishes from here to Thanksgiving and beyond.

  Toss in a femme fatale more fatale than usual, along with a sexy dame reporter who's so untrustworthy even her curves are crooked, and Banyon finds that he's up to his pretty little eyeballs in more trouble than one plucky, partially plastered P.I can handle. Not without doubling his rates and/or tripling his booze consumption.

  UNLUCKIEST P.I. IN THE GREATER METROPOLITAN YELLOW PAGES.

  Bum Luck

  A Crag Banyon Mystery

  By

  James Mullaney

  Copyright © 2014 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 © 2014 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 every Crag Banyon fan (you know who you are) who has taken the time to spread the word through online reviews, social media discussions, and hollering at strangers on the bus. It helps, folks. It really, truly does. So this one's for you, with thanks.

  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

  It was the kind of headache that felt like Yo-Yo Ma was strumming “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on my medulla oblongata. I was pretty sure a midget soccer team had crawled in one of my ears while I was passed out and spent the ugly hours of the night trying to sissy Euro-kick my eyeballs out of their sockets from the inside out.

  The savage pounding that had started in my head wasn’t content to be contained therein. I figured it must have dribbled from my mouth along with the puddle of hazmat-level drool that darkened my stained pillowcase. The throbbing beat had apparently seeped into the walls like stubborn mildew. At that moment it was causing my framed pictures to bounce up and down on the crooked nails I’d driven into the ratty old wallpaper like the spastic twitches in the extremities of a dying gunshot victim.

  If my own gat had been on my nightstand and not hanging in its holster on the back of a kitchen chair I might have been tempted to join my mortally wounded simile in lead-fueled, convulsive bliss. Instead, I curled my damp pillow around my ears and prayed for a merciful, massive cerebral embolism.

  “Crag Banyon! Are you in there, Banyon?”

  To hell with dancing pink elephants, you know you’re in far deeper trouble than you ever imagined when your raging hangover headache knows your name.

  As I felt myself being dragged involuntarily towards consciousness, I realized that the dame’s voice seemed to be coming from somewhere outside the dense gravitational field that was drawing every bright, sharp and throbbing item within a twenty foot radius directly into the invisible bull’s-eye my bartender had painted on my forehead.

  An old framed photo abruptly slipped its nail and fell off the wall. The dirty glass shattered when the frame struck the dusty floor, and it was only the combined efforts of the shouting voice and the falling picture that got me to finally realize that the pounding to which I was being subjected wasn’t entirely the result of the blurry night I’d spent dog paddling around the bottom of a tumbler in the grubby little pub that was my depressing refuge away from an apartment filled with falling pictures and unwelcome guests.

  “Banyon, you son of a bitch, I know you’re in there,” a new voice, this one a man’s, shouted from the other side of the crummy wallpaper.

  “Then why did you ask?” I called through a mouthful of soggy, muffling goose down. “Superfluous questions are deeply irritating, don’t you agree?”

  I figured that might create a feedback loop in the miniscule brain of my unwanted visitor, and with luck it’d blow out the whole fuse box of his central nervous system and take out his goddamn hands along with it. Instead, he redoubled his efforts pounding on my door and I redoubled mine trying to shove the ends of my pillow so far into my ears that they’d meet in the middle and put me out of my misery.

  “Get up, Banyon! Banyon! The lady wants to talk to you.”

  I heard the female voice I couldn’t identify mutter something, and the goon began pounding even more furiously on my apartment door.

  Chivalry was overrated even before Gloria Steinem strangled it to death with a wet bicycle chain. If mentioning some dame was meant to be incentive to rouse me from the smoggy depths of my decades-long hangover, the moron at my door had a lot to learn about divorced drunken louts and the women who hate them.

  The muttering skirt out in the hall was apparently in part to blame for the high-kicking chorus line that was can-canning its way through my skull. If I could have gotten away with it, I’d’ve put a couple of bullets through the door, heaved both bodies down the old laundry chute and waited for the mayor to present me with a key to the city for performing the public service of thinning the herd of pains-in-the-ass we sensitive humans have to endure on a constant basis.

  Instead, I heaved a foul-smelling sigh and surrendered to the deeply unpleasant realization that I was stuck with life for another goddamn beautiful day.

  I chucked my moist pillow into a corner and hauled myself to a sitting position on the edge of my mattress. The room was spinning and it took my feet three tries to find the floor. It was down there vaguely where I’d left it, but I was pretty sure that at some point while I was passed out some dastard had snuck into my apartment and lowered it two inches and tipped it towards the window.

  “Banyon! I know you’re in there!”


  “And the hoi polloi of this shithole town call me a private investigator,” I groaned at my nightstand, which was somehow doing a fairly good job staying rooted in place despite the fact that all the furniture should have been sliding madly across my diabolically angled bedroom.

  They do call me P.I. They actually call me a lot of other things, too, most of them fairly unkind and pinpoint accurate. I’d been a cop for years, but I’d left the force in a fit of common sense ten years ago. Don’t give me too much credit on that move. That was a decade ago and even I was no longer holding my breath for my genius encore.

  The floor seemed to be settling to something close to level under my socks. The pictures were still bouncing on my wallpaper, keeping time with the Gene Krupa-beat that the jackass was still pounding on my front door. The jerk was as single-minded as a moron with no brain can be. I supposed that was part of the whole point of hiring him.

  My landlord had recently acquired as property manager a palooka with no thumbs who used to work muscle for the local packaged meats syndicate across town. Most consumers look at the happy little labels on supermarket shelves and don’t have a clue what a dog-eat-dog business that is. (It was also allegedly a man-eat-dog, -horse and -hobo business, but Franco-American’s shysters beat that rap in a crooked Mexican court.)

  The rumor going around the building was that my new property manager with the four-fingered wave had lost his two opposable digits to a hungry meat grinder as a lesson to his big boy bosses who wouldn’t play ball with some national canned cuisine goons. There was even a story going around that Chef Boyardee had personally come to town to perform the deed, but the only evidence was one blurry surveillance camera photo of a short greaseball in a handlebar mustache and a puffy white hat covered in blood climbing into the back of a weenie-shaped limo. The crackerjack cops in town weren’t pursuing that particular avenue of inquiry once the army of Boyardee corporate lawyers produced photographic evidence of their client on a beach in Bermuda with Mrs. Butterworth allegedly taken at the time of the unlicensed, impromptu double-digit amputation. Only the principal actors knew for sure what happened that night, and no locals were squealing. But within one week the packaged meats guys had knuckled under to the national Boyardee organization, with the exception of one poor thumbless slob who was a few knuckles shorter than your average gibbon and was therefore no longer any use in the essential hired muscle departments of shooting, knifing and strangling.

  Harry “No-Thumbs” Hooligan had a hard time sealing envelopes, using doorknobs and opening mayonnaise jars these days, but look at him cross-eyed in the hallway and you were part of the wallpaper pattern real quick. Guy was still strong as an ox and no one in his right mind would want to cross him, which was the whole evil point behind my bastard landlord’s putting him on the rent shakedown payroll.

  Still, I figured I was pretty much okay that it was No-Thumbs pounding on my door. I’d been doing swell on my rent lately, thanks to an elf at my office with a head for figures better than Zombie Hugh Heffner’s. No-Thumbs and the dame whose cause he’d taken up were probably there to tell me the building was on fire. If that was the case, I’d just climb back into bed and hope the flames reached my floor before the busybodies in the fire department hosed down my Jim Beam-and-perspiration soaked sheets.

  As I stumbled across the floor, I racked my boozy brain for any other delinquent payments that might be doing the Sword of Damocles act over my pretty little head, but I came up empty. That was cause for celebration in and of itself, which would take the form of the resumption of tending to my waking coma at O’Hale’s Bar as soon as I dealt with the infernal knocking on my door.

  “Banyon!” the voice out in the hallway hollered.

  “I’m going to start charging you a royalty every time you utter my name, you thumbless goddamn, door-pounding, no-neck son-of-a-bitch bastard,” I snapped.

  At least No-Thumbs could hear I was closing in on the front door because finally, blessedly, the furious knocking ceased. Unfortunately, the damage was already done.

  A mirror hanging next to the door picked that moment of abrupt silence to come loose and crash to the floor, shattering into a million pieces. The mirror’s frame caught an umbrella I didn’t even know I had that was leaning against the base of my coat rack. The umbrella nearly gave me a goddamn heart attack when it sprang open and bounced across the floor. One of the umbrella’s pointy end bits snagged a cheap pocket calendar I’d picked up from a local funeral parlor which I’d tossed on a little table across from the door. The calendar flipped up and nearly put out my eye as it arced through the air. It fell on the floor amid the glass, and the umbrella rolled off on its own mini adventure down the hall.

  The whole insane circus act took all of five seconds, but it was enough sudden turmoil to frighten the black bird that had been sleeping on top of my bedroom door.

  The raven had found its way in sometime after I’d left the apartment the previous morning. Beats me how it got inside. It’s not like I leave the windows open even when I’m home. I mistrust fresh air. When I’d stumbled home during the night and discovered the beady-eyed avian bastard doing its impersonation of Peter Cushing as Death on my doorframe, I’d put in a prompt, slurred, post-midnight call to No-Thumbs. The new building manager had offered me three words of advice that were anatomically unfeasible and, I suspected, deeply unhelpful for removing unwanted raven houseguests.

  I’d passed out promptly on schedule and had forgotten the bird was even there. For its part, it had remained quiet through the night. The crashing mirror and bouncing umbrella, however, had woken the feathered pest from its lice-ridden siesta, and it was suddenly flapping its wings and squawking like a maniac while simultaneously excreting the end product of three days’ worth of road kill all over my threadbare carpet.

  Emily Post could write volumes on my famously convivial disposition, and my language is ordinarily so hygienic Christian Barnard could operate in my mouth. When I opened my apartment door that morning I nearly let loose twin barrels of the kind of angry, booze-fueled invective I usually reserve for Girl Scouts and Eskimos.

  No-Thumbs Hooligan loomed, the babe at his elbow scowled.

  I knew her, and not in the initially enjoyable but inevitably costly biblical sense. The dame’s name was Trixie Flax. One more X would have gotten her a spot on a shelf behind the beads at the corner video store, but what a difference one missing antepenultimate letter from the English alphabet can make. Our Miss Flax was cheaper than a handful of penny candy at Woolworth’s, and from the scuttlebutt around the building twice as easy to unwrap. She wore a form-hugging powder blue spandex jogging suit on a form that should only ever be hugged by unlucky jogging costumes or blind lunatic escapees from St. Trigger’s Home for Tetched Cowpokes.

  “It’s about time, Crag Banyon,” Trixie groused, hampered by a mouthful of crooked teeth and a wad of gum the size of a sofa cushion. “I been out here knocking for half-a-hour.” She took one whiff of my breath and turned her nose up in disapproval, which was not as mean a feat as one might imagine given her distinctly porcine proboscis. “Stewed again. I mighta known. It’s just lucky Mr. Hooligan here turned up, or I mighta been out here bustin’ my nails poundin’ on your door all mornin’.”

  The moose beside her had a buzz cut and five o’clock shadow at -- I checked my watch -- goddamn 9:07 a.m. These two morons had no idea how lucky they were that (with the exception of my birthday, Christmas and Zombie Pride Day) I’d stopped wearing my piece to bed after my divorce had been finalized fifteen years before.

  No-Thumbs Hooligan wore the dress slacks to a suit, but no jacket. The pants were hiked halfway up his belly in a vain attempt to cover the thick band of middle-aged fat around his waist. His giant hands were at his sides, and I could see the little butt-hole puckers where his thumbs should have plugged in like Barbie’s legs.

  The two things No-Thumbs hated worse than having no thumbs were 1.) being nicknamed No-Thumbs and 2.) having attention call
ed to his inability to count past eight without removing his shoes.

  I flashed him a toothy smile. “Hey, No-Thumbs, Sloan-Frankenstein Hospital’s half-price brain sale ended yesterday. If you can hitchhike over you might be able to find an upgrade in the Dumpster out back.”

  I stuck my thumb over my shoulder and did my best pantomime of a hippie on the highway. What can I say? I’m the king of the bastards.

  No-Thumbs stepped forward on size-eighteen clodhoppers and buried me in the avalanche of his massive shadow. I was pretty sure I was looking at his north side since it appeared to be covered with a fine coating of moss.

  “I just hope you’re late on your rent, Banyon. Just once,” No-Thumbs sneered.

  “And I hope you don’t get a job judging gladiator matches at the coliseum over on Caligula Drive and Eighteenth Street given the confusion that would inevitably ensue.” I tucked my thumb into my palm and demonstrated the futility of attempting both a thumbs-up and -down while lacking the essential digit. “Utter chaos,” I concluded.

  No-Thumbs momentarily considered driving me into the floor like a croquet hoop before turning in a three hundred and fifty pound huff and marching down the hallway.

  “What about this goddamn raven?” I hollered after him.

  Behind me, the goddamn bird in question squawked like a madman from its crap-smeared perch above my bedroom door.

  “No pets, Banyon!” No-Thumbs yelled back as he shoved open the door to the stairs. “Get it gone or you’re gone.” The stairwell door slammed shut.

  “You just got a way with people, don’t you, Mister Crag Banyon?” announced the dame in the ironic jogging costume.

  “Oh, you’re still here?” I said to Trixie Flax. “You do realize the hilariousness of you wearing a jogging suit, right? After all, the closest it will ever come to jogging was back when a Malayan slave laborer stuffed it in a box and ran it at gunpoint onto a boat to the U.S. And, no, running to the cupboard for Doritos and pie during Lifetime network commercials doesn’t count.”