Next Last Chance Read online

  “Orders.” The man flashed his badge in answer to my glare. He had the shoulders of a linebacker and plainly didn’t care what I thought of anybody’s orders.

  “Okay,” I said. “But let’s not creep out my neighbors. Come in and lean against the inside of the door where everybody won’t see you.”

  My key engaged the lock on the second try. The plainclothes man crowded through the door with me, one hand under his jacket. Nobody waited inside for him to shoot, but since he’d been so gung-ho I left him to find the light switch and deposited my hat and keys on the kitchen counter. Not much daylight spilled in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, which was unusual. The condo was an architecturally stark compilation of hardwood floors, raw concrete columns, and plate glass exterior walls with no regard for sufferers of acrophobia. Ignoring panoramas of city streets and the Cumberland River was as impossible as finding a place to hang a picture, and there was almost always light. Streetlights, sunrises, lightning when storms rolled through, the glare of Nissan Stadium across the water when the Titans played—I rarely needed a lamp on to get around at night. The reason for the current dimness turned out to be low, heavy black clouds that crawled through town three stories up before the streetlights were supposed to wake.

  My loaner friend had the kitchen lights burning. He leaned against a wall and assumed what he must have thought was an inscrutable expression. He just looked bored to me. I thumbed on my phone.

  For all my high-tech family history, I’d never much gone in for electronics. My laptop computer spent most of its existence weighing down magazines on the coffee table. The television looked very nice in a mahogany stand, so I kept it there though the cellophane hadn’t yet come off the remote. But my cell phone had “gee whiz” written all over it.

  Processing power, data storage and battery life were on par with newer computers than mine. The on-board cameras were exceptional. A shock-resistant waterproof housing kept the insides safe, and the phone would only function for manually dialed calls if I wasn’t the one holding it. My contact lists, email, text messages and other data were backed up remotely and encrypted, but the physical device locked itself using technology based on capacitive fingerprinting; essentially it knew me by touch. Even then, I had to have a conscious pulse rate to make the thing go. One of my father’s best engineers at the Cool-Core research facility in Nashville had built the phone for me.

  I’d kept it powered down since yesterday’s deadly goose chase. One telemarketer with exquisitely bad timing can get a person in my line of work killed. Four missed calls announced themselves on the touchscreen, all from the same familiar number. Tomorrow would be a better time to deal with that. I found Rafferty’s number and dialed. When he answered the background noise suggested I’d caught him in a car. Anywhere but that microscopic office.

  “You hired a babysitter?”

  Rafferty’s chuckles sounded identical to his annoyed growls. Without seeing his face I could never tell the difference. “Smally’s a good man. I figured you’d sleep better with someone on the lookout. For that matter, I’ll sleep better.”

  My guardian shifted awkwardly in the entryway, which didn’t have room to spare while he stood there.

  “Smally?”

  “Kid him about it. He thinks it’s hilarious.”

  “Uh-huh. If he tries following me around tomorrow, I’ll ditch his ass.”

  “His job’s to mind the house. If I have you followed it won’t be that obvious.” Rafferty ended the call with that same unidentifiable chuckle/growl.

  Whiteness stuttered across the river to mimic the flicker my phone made when I shut it off again. The clouds decided since they were in town, what the hell, let’s have a storm. A hollow rumble proclaimed their decision and fat drops splashed against the glass. I remembered how badly I needed a shower. Officer Smally commandeered a breakfast bar stool and extracted a drugstore paperback from his hip pocket. I left him to it and stumped to the master bath.

  The borrowed jail t-shirt went into the laundry hamper. Everything else landed in the bathroom trash. My regular clothes had a definite road kill bouquet and I’d rather buy new shirts than discuss the stains with my cleaners. I stayed in the shower a long time.

  Smally had plowed halfway through his paperback when I returned to the kitchen in my pajamas. If he planned to stay awake all night I hoped he’d brought his own reading material. He was the sort who marked his spot by folding page corners over. The last thing I intended to read myself till tomorrow were the words Jack Daniel’s on a bottle label.

  The windows afforded no outside views now, just squirming streaks of driven rain lit from behind by lightning. It occurred to me that Mount Olivet, too, was receiving a much needed cleansing. The famous bones would appreciate that. I downed my whiskey, left the tumbler on top of the television stand and went to bed.

  Morning came and went without my participation. My stomach lost patience around noon, however, and had me up and showered shortly thereafter. I went ahead and shaved while I was at it. I’d have to see my client in Green Hills if I wanted my car back, and I didn’t want to be escorted off the grounds for looking like a transient.

  I surveyed the results with little satisfaction. The face in the mirror still matched my license and carry permit, black hair with salty hints at mortality along the temples, square jaw that would need another application of the razor by suppertime, the same blue eyes I’d started out with thirty-seven years ago. So why did I feel like someone other than the person those laminated cards in my wallet declared me to be? I chalked it up to one bad night in a graveyard and finished dressing.

  My spare holster hid in the back of the closet. The gun that fit the holster lived in a box at the bottom of my sock drawer. Show me a sock drawer that’s never held anything but socks and I’ll show you a house where nobody really lives. My sock drawer surprise was a bobtail Smith & Wesson .45 ACP with a matte black finish, checkered wood grips, tritium sights and two 7-round magazines. The weapon’s twin waited in the glove box of my car in Green Hills. In light of circumstances, traveling unarmed even that far seemed a bad idea. I remembered the plainclothes man in the other room, and carried the gun out there so he could watch me load it.

  Smally had traded the bar stool for my living room sofa. He’d kept himself busy through the night and well into the morning, judging by the stack of dog-eared paperbacks on the coffee table. He slept now, the way a Mack truck sleeps, all in a straight line and ready to go at a moment’s notice. The clack when I rammed one of the .45’s magazines home had him wide awake in an instant. After all my recent practice I was able to keep my voice level while looking into the business end of his service automatic.

  “Imagine how pleased Lieutenant Rafferty would be with that report.”

  Smally mumbled an apology and put his gun away. His close-set eyes followed me while I worked the Smith & Wesson’s action to seat an eighth round in the chamber and stowed the weapon under my left arm. He didn’t look very sleepy.

  My hat waited where I’d left it on the kitchen counter, a faithful hunting dog who’d been rolling in the mud and worse. Sorry, boy, not today. I fetched another from the entry rack. One of the things I love about Nashville is that it’s a hat kind of town.

  “Hanging around long?” I inquired of my uninvited guest.

  Smally consulted his wristwatch. “Couple hours. Jeffers has the next shift.”

  Round-the-clock house sitters. I wasn’t sure whether to be touched by Rafferty’s concern or just worried. He hadn’t explained everything.

  “Don’t make yourself too comfortable,” I warned with a nod toward Smally’s cairn on the coffee table. I’d caught him eyeing the bookshelves beside the television.

  Taxis don’t prowl downtown streets in Nashville to the extent they do in New York City or Chicago. If you want one, use a phone. I dialed from inside the lobby. An April drizzle wasn’t the only peril keeping me from waiting on the curb. The not very nondescript neon green cab hadn
’t come to a complete stop before I was in the back seat feeding the driver directions.

  My intent was an indirect trip—after the drive-through burger joint—to my client’s residence and abandoned car. A rain-colored sedan justified my precaution by taking up position in the taxi’s rearview mirror. It picked us up on the southbound on-ramp off Demonbreun. The car stayed too consistently aloof to be another component of midday traffic. Barely out of the house ten minutes, I’d already made new friends. There was no point in calling Rafferty: the mystery car was plainly a rental. I doubted it had any association with my friend downtown.

  “Sir?”

  I grimaced at the cabbie’s face in the mirror after cursing with my mouth full of French fries. I considered offering him a large tip to lose the second car, but taxi drivers are rarely as savvy as Hollywood makes them out to be. Even if mine was a retired NASCAR champ, anyone could track him down by his car number. A lot of adventurous cabbies probably got the snot kicked out of them that way.

  “They forgot my pickles,” I said.

  Three

  Jonathon Donovan didn’t sing. He couldn’t play a chord on any of the vintage guitars he collected. He looked as out of place under a cowboy hat as Minnie Pearl in a Harlem tattoo parlor. But what Mr. Donovan (popularly known in the industry as “JD”) did very well was make money dance. Record contracts happened quickly and profitably when JD got involved. His rising stars kept rising, and those already at the top owed their longevity to a negotiator who kept them lucrative as long as they had an audience. None among his clientele regretted the percentage JD asked for his services, because he was the only person they dealt with whose ethics they never questioned. JD was, in fact, a completely honest businessman.

  The best of us live in the same imperfect world, however. If JD was beyond reproach, the women in his life were not. His first wife had died twelve years ago proving world-class show jumpers and Scotch to be a lethal mixture. His next marriage fueled endless gossip because his second wife was young and beautiful with a shadowed past. Donovan’s staff constantly discounted rumors of discord and (on her part) infidelity. JD’s only child, a whirlwind named Jetta, had taken an immediate disliking to her stepmother; Sandra and Jetta Donovan’s quarrels were perfect fodder for the tabloids. Their in-fighting climaxed when JD’s mother was thrown down the estate guest house’s grand stair by her manservant. The butler turned up just as dead a day later. Jetta stayed in Nashville as long as the homicide investigation required then vanished, and only Sandra remained. Things had quieted since, but Mrs. Donovan’s past hadn’t forgotten her no matter how hard she tried to forget it.

  She had hired me.

  JD’s signature decorated the retainer check.

  I had the cabbie deposit me in a church parking lot on Franklin Pike a half mile from my destination. The rented sedan was gone. The rain slacked off and I finished my journey on foot.

  Hillbriar, the Donovan estate, occupied fifty acres on the outskirts of Green Hills where property taxes were sky high. The mansion and associated structures stood separated from the road by rolling pastures, double four-rail horse fences with a cobbled footpath between them, and imposing old trees. Spring foliage hid the buildings from passersby, except for the main house’s red tiled roofs and chimneys. Limestone pillars bracketed the front gate, slightly less imposing than the chimneys they mimicked. A nook for a watchman had been built into the right-hand pillar going in. The nook included a fireplace of its own, so in winter months wood smoke might be seen curling from the pillar’s top. More often, there was neither smoke nor a physical guard, and visitors were obliged to announce themselves via a stainless steel intercom.

  The setup was designed for people in cars, not pedestrians. I stooped to press the button. I wondered who watched me over the closed circuit security camera.

  “Tyler Bedlam. I have business with Mrs. Donovan.”

  The stiff intercom voice wondered politely whether I had an appointment.

  “No. But you have my car.”

  “One moment, please.”

  The grille went silent. Tires hissed on the wet asphalt behind me. I straightened, my right hand curled around the .45 under my opposite arm, and stepped back from the stonework. The approaching vehicle was a Rolls-Royce, uninteresting except for being expensive. Its driver slowed as the car passed the Hillbriar gate. My tension scarcely subsided after the Rolls glided out of view. A syrupy aroma of honeysuckle encircled me; I stood knee deep in the stuff.

  A woman’s voice came over the speaker. Sandra Donovan sounded as relaxed as I felt. “Mr. Bedlam, where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you since yesterday.”

  “I’d rather not discuss the matter over the intercom,” I said.

  The wrought iron gates swung smoothly apart in response. They waited till I passed through and eased shut again. That made me feel safer. The gates at Mount Olivet had done a terrific job of keeping trouble out.

  Fine hard-packed gravel with limestone edging curved to my left then arched gently back to the right to climb a hill. Oaks paraded alongside the drive for a hundred yards. After that the trees abruptly stopped. A broad steaming green meadow swept from there up to the mansion. That structure rose in three floors of timber framing, glass and hand-hewn stone, all crowned with steeply pitched red tile. Flanking the mansion were a separate six-car garage and shop on the right, and stables with twin cupolas as tall as church steeples on the left. Those buildings, too, wore red tile roofs, as did the guest house which hid beyond the stables.

  Usually I didn’t mind leaving my father’s millions to gather dust and interest in banks. I hadn’t earned them. Hillbriar inspired second thoughts. No wonder Rafferty thought I was nuts.

  The driveway cut through Hillbriar’s paddock. A chestnut gelding grazed beside another gate framed by stone pillars. He lifted his head, flared his nostrils and regarded me with slightly menacing brown eyes. I gave the old fellow a friendly wave while the gates pried themselves apart. His glossy flanks shimmying at imaginary flies, then he bent back to the grass.

  Beyond those gates the drive split to embrace a pond with manicured stone banks. The water was too clean to spawn mosquitos, and the lush mosses that looked as if they’d grown between the stones naturally probably hadn’t. Life-sized bronze foals frolicked at the pond’s center beneath manmade geysers that soared as high as the main house. The mansion’s front doors opened on the opposite side of the pond, under a timbered canopy large enough to accommodate the tour buses that surely would come decades later, when JD and his kin were gone and legendary. A new Jaguar was parked there now. It looked tiny.

  My red Dodge had no business sitting alongside the Jag in the shade, which was why I’d left it in the grass next to the garage. It waited there now and looked especially low-classed with the hood partly open and the driver’s window busted out.

  Sandra Donovan approached from the garage side of the pond. From any distance you could tell she was an exceptional woman. She wore a flowing black skirt and a blouse of fabric that shifted between gold and bronze as she moved. Her hair had a similar metallic hue and the afternoon sun set it ablaze as it billowed behind her. She carried an envelope.

  A gray stump of a man in khakis worked over the hedge beside the garage. He glanced at us with the vacuous expression people wear when they’re paid enough not to remember everything they see. He took his clippers discreetly out of earshot when Mrs. Donovan and I met beside my car. Her perfume joined the scent of cut greenery. Honeysuckle.

  The Dodge’s window had been smashed with a large stone from the pond’s edge. The rock was still inside the car, nestled amid the ruins of the center console. Tempered glass pebbles sparkled guiltily from drenched upholstery. The glove box hung open.

  “Get me the repair estimates and time lost.” Sandra’s voice was huskier than one might expect, with a faint softening at the edges of words. “I’ll have Jonathon add it to your expenses.”

  I pressed the unlock button on my
key fob to no effect. I circled past Sandra and lifted the hood. Someone had cut the battery cable to silence the alarm. My first thought was of the gardener and his clippers, but even the dumbest groundskeeper knows the difference between battery cables and steady employment.

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Certainly not! In light of circumstances…”

  It made sense that neither of the Donovans wanted a police visit or insurance claims. But why the junky visitor’s car when richer pickings lived in the garage or under the front canopy?

  “There was a gun in the glove box,” I said.

  “Oh.” The word shrank as she uttered it. Either she hadn’t considered me the violent type, or she thought me an idiot for leaving a weapon overnight in the car.

  “A new one costs sixteen hundred, plus tax. I have plenty of ammunition at home, so don’t worry about that. I’ll send a copy of the receipt.”

  “Of course.”

  I hadn’t asked if that was okay. It would have to be.

  “Mr. Bedlam?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I can count on you, can’t I? To see this through?”

  I hauled my gaze from under the Dodge’s hood to address the question. Her eyes were green with gold flecks. Her face was beautiful in its entirety, with well-defined cheekbones, a jawline Michelangelo could never have improved upon, a sensuously curved mouth that must have inspired unchivalrous thoughts in every male who’d ever met her. I entertained a few such thoughts myself. But Sandra Donovan’s eyes were what left a person trying to remember how to breathe long after her departure. Her newspaper photos were a lot less daunting.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I just need to get my car fixed.”

  She pointed at the severed battery cable. “Would it run if this was replaced?”