Sea No Evil Read online

  NEW CASE. NEW CLIENT. SAME HANGOVER.

  It starts out as a simple maritime stalking case, which Banyon flat-out refuses. The would-be client is the god of the sea, see, and Crag Banyon is a strict reformed agnostic: while he believes in the existence of gods, he prefers it if they don't pester him during happy hour.

  Unfortunately, something big is stirring offshore, the coast is being flooded, and despite his best efforts to stay planted on his favorite barstool, Banyon finds himself swept up in a case of Olympian intrigue, dirty deals and fresh fish. Soon he's up to his pretty little neck in trouble, paddling for his life, taking on water, and in the end it's either sink or swim.

  Does it all come out in the wash? Just ask his secretary:

  "CRAG BANYON? THAT JERK'S A BUM, AND THAT'S THE GODS' HONEST TRUTH."!

  Sea No Evil

  A Crag Banyon Mystery

  By

  James Mullaney

  Copyright © 2013 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 © 2013 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]

  For the papergirl,

  Peggy Mailloux

  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 1

  The windows were far too clean and there weren’t any winos sleeping it off on the sidewalk out front, which were strikes one and two, respectively, against the too-tidy bar on the corner of St. Sodom’s Boulevard and Donny Most Drive.

  I don’t trust people with clean windows.

  Everybody who’s honest has something to hide, even if it’s just an overflowing cat box or a pile of unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink. Your eyes might be the windows to your soul, but your windows are the windows to a soiled laundry pile that’s grown so massive you’ve had to carve tunnels through that mound of dirty underwear like one of those roads they hack through Sequoia trunks. Honest people aren’t out with a bucket of suds and a squeegee every other day precisely because they’re capable of embarrassment and are therefore ashamed of what you might see through a spotless picture window. It’s a whole psychological thing. Trust me. It’s my job.

  On the other hand, it’s the dishonest scumbags I’ve met who always put on the biggest show of having nothing to hide. And windows as spotless as the ones on The Seaweed Palace Bar virtually guaranteed the place was run by a tax cheat with a dozen lime-packed hookers wrapped in plastic shower curtains and shoved up in his crawlspace.

  Lucky for me I’d quit the cops ten years ago, so whatever dirty little secrets the spotlessly clean windows were hiding were none of my business. But the lack of drunks snoozing on the grates out front was another matter altogether.

  There was a time when I walked a beat as a rookie cop around that part of town. Back then I couldn’t go ten feet without tripping over a supine sidewalk tippler. The area had gone upscale in the past couple of decades and I assume the first thing to get the heave-ho had been the bums. Call me sentimental, but I prefer a sloppy sidewalk drunk mangling “Danny Boy” while pissing his pants in the gutter to a prissy yuppie belting out show tunes behind the wheel of a Chevy Volt. Hippie hybrid bastards.

  I’d been up late the previous night on a bender of my own, so my gin-soaked nostalgia that afternoon made me hope that the sidewalk winos from way back in the day had merely taken a five minute break to stumble inside for a bowl of free soup and a bottle of cheap muscatel. Or maybe a gang of baristas armed with push brooms from the Starbucks next door to The Seaweed Palace Bar had swept them into the canal. If that was the case there were a lot of unlucky boozed-up bastards bobbing around like stewed corks in the harbor. Everyone with a brain was steering clear of the water these days.

  The ocean had been going crazy as hell the past couple of weeks. It was all over the news. The storms out at sea had shaken up the ocean floor like a snow globe filled with lobster traps and medical waste.

  A storm surge the previous day had dumped a bunch of flapping green sea monsters onto dozens of estates out on ritzy Spoke Island. Between the doe eyes and the cooing sound they made, everyone thought they were cute as all hell. The love-fest lasted only until the fangs came out. At least the feel-good summer movie that might have come from it died the minute one of them ate Steven Spielberg in his driveway. Little bugger swallowed Kate Capshaw too. There’s always a silver lining.

  A deep sea Leviathan had wandered into the harbor and had been lazily pulling apart tugboats and slapping the pieces around with its tentacles since Friday.

  Everybody near the shore was most concerned about some haunted pirate fog that had been floating around nights just after dusk. Some junked ship with a royally pissed-off dead man crew had been choking people up and down the coast, I guess to remind them to properly weatherstrip their windows. Who knows? Goddamned ghosts.

  Lucky for me my two feet were firmly on dry land. I’d only ventured that close to the harbor that particular afternoon because I had a meeting with a client. My name’s Banyon. I’m a P.I. It said so on the faded yellow card I had stashed in one of my pockets somewhere, although I didn’t take it out much because it was the only one I owned. It was like the Constitution. If I’d had the dough, I’d’ve put it under glass in my office.

  Speaking of glasses, closing time had been hours before and if I was going to get through a business meeting I’d need a full one in front of me.

  I tipped back the brim of my fedora and strolled through The Seaweed Palace’s too-clean front door.

  The joint called itself a bar but it smelled like a hayloft and looked like one of those dirt-free plastic rooms where they make computer chips. The tables and chairs were white plastic teardrops which were suffering from the same unhealthy bout of cleanliness that afflicted the windows. The bar was some kind of stainless steel and vinyl chimera, like the ugly accident that came nine months after a DeLorean spent a wild weekend in Cabo with a cheap office couch. The woman behind the bar was as cheerful as I wasn’t, and when she flashed her bright Stepford smile I wished I’d brought my sunglasses so I could stuff them down her throat.

  “Good morning, sir, would you like to see a menu?” she asked, oozing more syrup than Mrs. Butterworth with a bellyful of buckshot.

  Strike one. Bars need menus like airplanes need orchestras.

  “Just give me your biggest glass filled with your brownest liquid and a bowl of your least stale pretzels,” I said.

  “Oh, we don’t have pretzels,” she said with a sympathetic V in her brow that was in direct opposition to the gleaming grin that never left her ruby lips.

  As she spoke, a blender whirred furiously behind the counter. Wicked things are done to perfectly innocent booze in blenders. I didn’t even have a chance to hurl myself on the Black & Decker to save my future hangover before she poured out something into a very tall glass and slid it across the bar.

  It was brown. I had to give her that. So was the cafeteria floor over at Sundown Old Folks Casa on fajita and beans night. Whatever the brown goop was that she’d poured in the glass, it was thicker than oatmeal and stunk like compost.

  I slid the glass back across the bar.

  “My fault for not specifying that I like my booze sans mulch.”

  The stroke-victim smirk finally fled her face. “Booze? You mean like alcohol?” she asked, aghast.

  “Booze, I mean like now.”

  “We don’t serve alcohol here.”

  I left the dame passing judgment on me like I’d heckled the pope during Easter Mass and went back outside. I checked the sign. “The Seaweed Palace Bar.”

  I went back inside.

  “You know, there are laws about truth in advertising, lady,” I advised the dame at the bar. “My liver and I could make a citizen’s arrest.”

  The offended barmaid was spared the full
wrath of my nine hours of revolting sobriety by the annoyingly helpful voice that chose that moment to cut in behind me.

  “This is a health bar, Mr. Banyon.”

  I turned. Another dame, another smile. At least this one didn’t look like hers came from a prescription pad and a trip to the medical marijuana head shop.

  “Kitten, if you don’t know those two words are mutually exclusive you’re not doing either of them right. You Miss Ravioli?”

  “Ravelli, yes,” replied the woman my crackerjack office staff had spoken with on the phone. Chalk another one up for my dingbat secretary, who was probably running her mouth and her hair dryer at the same time she was writing down the client’s name.

  “I have a table out on the deck. Please, Mr. Banyon.”

  She had long blond hair, long tan legs, a short, gray business jacket and an even shorter skirt that hugged her can like a Campbell’s soup label. She gestured, I walked.

  The dame at the bar called out to the back of my departing trench coat. “I can whip you up today’s special. Alfalfa and wheat curd frappe with lentils, and extra vitamin D.”

  “Tell you what,” I called back to her. “I’ll take this meeting first. That’ll give you time to send out for another five of you, because one is nowhere near enough to pin me down and pour the goat’s breakfast down my gullet.”

  Glass doors at the back of the evil joint with the lying name opened onto a wide wooden deck. There were a half-dozen round picnic tables, but no patrons. No big surprise there. The building was built directly on the shore, and waves rolled in and broke against the foundation. The deck extended out over the bay, and as I walked I looked down at the ominous dark water through the slats beneath my feet.

  The table nearest the railing had on it a half-consumed glass of one of those sewage treatment-plant cocktails the dame out front tried to foist on me, plus a copy of the latest Gazette held in place by an unlit citronella candle.

  My prospective client took the seat in front of her paper and glass of swill. I kept my Florsheims firmly planted on the deck.

  “Sitting over water isn’t the safest place to park your pretty little keister these days,” I informed her. “And by yours, I mean mine.”

  “Mr. Banyon you do not know the half of it,” she replied, with a weary sigh of authoritative certainty. But if Miss Ravelli knew so much about how dangerous the water had recently become she didn’t show it as she calmly sucked down a lump of vitamin PDQ-enriched swamp juice and gestured for me to take a seat at the table.

  I was tempted to tell her to take a long walk off a short pier, several of which were visible from where I was standing, but it had been weeks since my last paying client, and I was an ardent fan of pricey beverages that weren’t cow-pat frappes in milkshake glasses.

  I took the chair, but kept one eye patrolling the water for wayward tentacles. All I saw was one lonely fishing boat that had braved the deep and was at that moment chugging through the harbor with its morning haul, as well as one weirdo in a parka standing on the dock waiting for the ship to come in.

  I didn’t have a chance to ask Miss Ravelli what exactly it was she wanted from the thoroughgoing and courteous professionals of Banyon Investigations, before she dropped her newspaper in front of me.

  “They shouldn’t be allowed to print this trash,” the dame complained.

  “Let’s speed this up, because at this moment the deeply concerned rats at the real bar where I should be getting drunk are forming a search party. Is there any trash in particular I’m supposed to be offended by, or is your beef with newspapers in general?”

  She tapped a finger to the headline. OCEAN’S ELEVEN!

  I’d already scanned the first few paragraphs of the article from a paper I’d swiped off a stoop that morning. It was the eleventh day of more of the same complaints from people who’d bought along the waterfront. Great real estate when you’re splashing around with some beach bunnies having a ball in the summer sun; not so swell when your seafront cottage has been reduced to kindling by the latest storm surge.

  “You owned one of those houses? Tough break. On the other hand, hordes of local artists with no talent can’t keep up with collecting all the driftwood. You will be happy to know that your house will live on as scraps of busted-up wood painted with cartoon whales hanging by hunks of rope from the walls of moron tourists with no taste. So you see, God doesn’t close a door without opening a window to jump out of. Hopefully you’re high up enough that you don’t survive the fall.”

  She tugged a dangling knot from her long yellow hair and offered a miserable sigh through perfect lips. “God is exactly why I want to hire you, Mr. Banyon.”

  I didn’t like the way she said it, all knowing and mysterious. I’m a fan of smug like I’m deeply in love with sobriety, and if I want mystery I’ll stick with Ellery Queen.

  The mystery got a whole lot less mysterious the next second.

  I’d kept an eye on the bay. The fishing boat had chugged up to a dock in one piece. It turned out the nut sweating in the parka was standing at a different pier. He had nothing to do with the fishermen. I barely noticed any of them, because at that moment something began to rise from the water’s depths out in the middle of the bay.

  “That’s our cue to go, lady,” I said, jumping up and tugging my trusty piece from its holster under my armpit.

  I tried to get Miss Ravelli to get behind me but the dame just sat there like a bump on a log in a hole in the bottom of the sea. She was watching the water curve up like the tinfoil cap on a pan of Jiffy Pop, and as the waves broke around the rising object that was now heading right for us she clucked her tongue and checked her watch.

  The dizzy broad who still hadn’t gotten up from the picnic table was on her own.

  For some guys there’s a fine line between brave and stupid. For me there was about two city blocks, which was the location of the nearest train platform and which I figured I could cover at a sprint uninterrupted while my would-be client was thrashing around in the jaws of whatever glistening sea monster was about to drop in for lunch at the back of The Seaweed Palace Bar.

  I’d backed up only one step when the first face broke the water.

  Black eyes, long snout. The mouth ran back in a narrow trapdoor slit which was open wide and making happy little screeching noises as soon as it hit the air. It balanced a beach ball on the tip of its nose as it floored it toward the dock at the back of the bar.

  I holstered my gun. Thanks to some do-gooder politicians with a fish fetish, there’s a law in this state against shooting dolphins. I found that out the expensive way a few years back during an aquarium caper that ended with me and a school of killer mackerel handcuffed in the back of a paddy wagon. Don’t ask.

  The dolphin following the bouncing ball was just taking point. It was followed by four more, these ones yoked up in pairs. The reason why the annoying, playful bastards of the sea were harnessed together like carriage horses was clear the instant the item the five of them were dragging finally bobbed to the surface.

  It was a pretty ordinary chariot. Bulky and gold and worthless for pretty much anything other than showing off. The same applied to the pretty boy who held onto the reins with casual disinterest and allowed momentum to right the chariot.

  It skimmed like a son of a bitch across the surface of the water.

  There were more waves in the chariot owner’s Farrah Fawcett hair than there were in the bay. He shook out his barely damp Charlie’s Angels hair like a proud horse with a state fair blue ribbon pinned in its mane. His flowing hair was so yellow and blinding that I could have stuck him in the sky and given the sun the rest of the summer off.

  The team of dolphins pulling the underwater chariot stopped at the deck behind the Seaweed Palace, and their boss stepped off with a confident glide before the coach even came to a complete stop. A short set of stairs extended to a slip behind the bar, and he bounded up two at a time. The deck swayed as he strode over to me, and when his shadow of doom fell over me I felt like an eyewitness on that airfield in New Jersey just before the Hindenburg went up like a birthday cake with gasoline frosting.