Nailed Read online

  Nailed

  by

  Joseph Flynn

  Stray Dog Press, Inc.

  Springfield, IL

  2011

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my aunts

  Mary Zydowsky, Pat Flynn and Judy Flynn,

  and my uncle Tom Flynn

  Also by Joseph Flynn

  The Concrete Inquisition

  Digger

  The Next President

  Hot Type

  Farewell Performance

  Gasoline, Texas

  The President’s Henchman

  The Hangman’s Companion

  Round Robin

  Pointy Teeth

  Blood Street Punx

  Coming soon …

  One False Step

  Still Coming

  and

  the third Jim McGill novel

  (Fall, 2011)

  Acknowledgements

  Doug Updike, Senior Wildlife Biologist, retired

  California Department of Fish and Game

  Sheila Stanton

  Tahoe-Douglas Chamber of Commerce

  Copyright

  Nailed

  by

  Joseph Flynn

  Published by Stray Dog Press, Inc.

  Springfield, IL 62704, U.S.A.

  Copyright Stray Dog Press, Inc., 2011

  All rights reserved

  Author website: www.josephflynn.com

  Flynn, Joseph

  Nailed / Joseph Flynn

  128,478 words eBook

  ISBN 978-0-9830312-7-7

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by an means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously; any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  eBook design by Aha! Designs

  Table of Contents

  Nailed

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  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 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 1

  Friday

  The two cops, both ex-LAPD, cruised the California Sierra and talked about crime and race. Crime, in this case, consisted of public drunkenness outside a new bar, a floating poker game run by a professional gambler, and a small but disturbing spike in the number of burglary calls. Race consisted of black and white.

  The early morning sky was a rain-scrubbed blue and the mountain scenery was some of the most magnificent in the United States, but they noticed it only in passing. They were looking for — but not expecting — breaches of the peace. Finding none, their conversation flowed without impediment.

  “Skin color matters,” Deputy Chief Oliver Gosden said from the passenger seat.

  “Yeah,” Chief Ron Ketchum agreed. “Mostly because people won’t let it alone.”

  “Some people can’t let it alone.”

  The chief wasn’t about to get into that. Instead, he asked, “You know the ultimate proof of racial equality? Rednecks come in all colors.”

  “Maybe so. But you know one advantage of being a minority in this country? There are fewer assholes who look like me than look like you.”

  “You saying I look like an asshole?” the chief replied.

  Ron Ketchum had once saved Oliver Gosden’s life at the risk of his own. Gosden had once saved Ketchum’s reputation at the cost of his job.

  The chief was forty-eight years old, six-two, with a lean, hard frame. He had dark brown hair and hazel eyes. He was white. The deputy chief was thirty-seven years old, five-ten, and still had the densely muscular build of the heavyweight collegiate wrestler he’d been at the University of Iowa. He still carried himself like a jock, too. One who could pin the whole world to the mat, if need be. He was black.

  “Nah, not an asshole,” Oliver said. “White devil slave-master, maybe.”

  Ron gave him a look. “The shit I put up with.”

  As the sun climbed over the mountaintops that Friday in the second week of August, the two top law enforcement officers of the town of Goldstrike were on their weekly patrol. Serving and protecting. Keeping their jurisdiction safe. Their aggregate blood pressure was sixty points lower than it ever had been in Los Angeles.

  Goldstrike was perched in an alpine valley six thousand feet up in the mountains the colonial Spaniards had named the Snowy Range. The centerpiece of the affluent resort town was Lake Adeline whose pristine waters ranged in color from sapphire to emerald. The setting for this liquid jewel was a twelve mile long shoreline gilded with a chain of manicured estates, four-star hotels, and immaculately kept public parks and beaches. The outskirts of town climbed high up the sea of majestic evergreens that covered the slopes of the mountains. A half-dozen ski resorts stood as sentinels above the town, their slopes descending through the conifers like the spokes of a wheel.

  Nature had been lavish in bestowing its wonders on Goldstrike, and the real estate prices had been set accordingly. For the most part, those who lived there had either gotten in early or had made their bundles in high-tech, show biz or some other megabucks profession, and then retreated to “Eden on High,” as the town’s founder, Adeline Walsh, had described the area in 1849.

  Ron said, “As important as color is to some people, it’s going to take a back seat real soon to cultural questions.”

  “What do you mean?” Oliver asked.

  “I mean the way the PC types have subverted the idea of assimilation, there’s going to be a whole new set of worries to get people’s attention.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as, who do you think the average white guy would rather see move in next door? A black guy who goes to work in the morning, takes his wife and kids to church on Sunday, and watches the NBA Finals? Or a blue-eyed Caucasian Afghan who’s a former member of the Taliban and wants to shoot up the white guy’s stereo system, not because he’s playing it too loud, but because the new neighbor interprets the Koran as forbidding recorded music?”
r />   The deputy chief snorted. “I think if either of those guys moves into a white neighborhood, ‘For Sale’ signs get posted on every lawn on the block.”

  Ron sighed. “Okay, let’s try it this way. You’re the black guy who goes to work every morning, takes your wife and son to church on Sunday, and, for some reason, follows NCAA wrestling.” Which described Oliver to a T. “Now, another black family moves in next door. Only they practice Santerîa. Worships several gods. Believes in casting spells and conducting animal sacrifices. Right there in the yard next to yours.” Out of the corner of his eye, Ron saw Oliver frown. “And lets say your boy, Danny, comes up to you one Sunday and says, ‘Pop, I don’t feel like singing in the church choir anymore. I want to go over to the neighbor’s place and cut up a goat.’ What do you think is going to matter to you, the new neighbor’s color or his culture?”

  “They’re both important.”

  “Okay. But wouldn’t you rather have another hard-working, church-going college wrestling fan next door even if he were — oh, my God — white?”

  Oliver grimaced, conceding silently that Ron had a point.

  He would have offered a rebuttal, but the chief had just guided their police department Ford Explorer onto the Tightrope, a narrow two lane isthmus of blacktop in a sea of blue sky. To their left was a spectacular view of Lake Adeline. To their right was a staggering vista of mountain wilderness. Neither view was obstructed by a guardrail. For the next quarter mile, only a steady hand kept them on the road. The fall-off on each side was steep enough to launch a hang glider. Which more than a few loons did. Illegally.

  The speed limit on the Tightrope was ten miles per hour. The deputy chief thought it should be cut in half — if people had to use the damn thing at all.

  Ron looked over at Oliver with a grin. “I thought you had something more on your mind.”

  “Keep your eyes on the road!” the deputy chief ordered. Oliver was tough-minded, fearless in most cases, but he was a devout flatlander who’d lived the majority of his life on the mostly level plane of the L.A. Basin. He’d moved to the mountains only because he’d needed the job Ron Ketchum had offered him, and he saw it as the stepping-stone to his own chief’s spot someday.

  Ron gave his deputy chief a mock salute, and did as he was told.

  “I haven’t run off this road yet, Oliver,” he said. “Haven’t asked you to drive it, either. But someday, most likely, you will have to make the trip on your own. Maybe at night. In the rain or snow. Maybe with a big truck in the oncoming lane. What are you going to do then?”

  Ron completed the crossing, and Oliver heaved a sigh of relief as the comforting bulk of a mountainside loomed to his right. Ron grinned again. Oliver gave him a look that had put many a wrestling opponent at an immediate disadvantage.

  The two men might have pulled each other’s ass out of the fire once upon a time, but there were definitely times when each felt stuck with the other.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” the deputy chief said. “I’ll aim straight down the middle of that sucker, turn on my lights and siren, and everybody else better pull the hell over.”

  The chief laughed. “Toss ‘em over the side, huh?”

  “Bet your ass.”

  “Maybe I’ll just keep driving then.” Ron gave it a beat and then picked up the main thread of the conversation. “It’s your in-laws, isn’t it? Didn’t they just leave town?”

  “Yeah, it’s them,” Oliver said glumly. “And, thank God, they’re gone.”

  “Did Warren and Loretta finally do something unfortunate? Tip you for bringing them a drink or something.”

  “You’re a funny man,” the deputy chief said dryly. “You ever retire from police work, you could do stand-up comedy.”

  Neither rank nor race kept either man from speaking freely when they were alone. Protocol was strictly for public situations. You laid your life or your livelihood on the line for the other guy, that was how it went.

  “Come on, Oliver. I know you’re not a cracker. Can it really be that bad having a white mother-in-law and father-in-law? They must have done a pretty terrific job raising Lauren, back there in Iowa, the way you love her.”

  Lauren Fells Gosden was the deputy chief’s beautiful and adored black wife. She’d been abandoned as an infant by her fourteen-year-old birth mother and given a home by Warren and Loretta Fells, shortly before such adoptions had been labeled “cultural genocide” by black social workers.

  “They’re fine people,” the deputy chief said of the Fells, “I know that. And I know what’d happen to me if I ever said one bad word about Lauren’s parents in front of her.” A small shudder passed through Oliver at the thought, and he fell silent. But his jaw muscles kept working. Finally, he said, “They told Daniel last night that skin color doesn’t matter. Warren sat my boy right up on his lap, looked him in the eye, and said skin color just does not matter. What counts is who you are inside.”

  Ron started to speak, but Oliver cut him off. “And don’t go telling me he was only paraphrasing Dr. King.”

  The chief shook his head. “I was just wondering if Danny maybe had asked his grandpa why the two of them are different colors. A six year old might think of something like that.”

  The sharp look Oliver shot Ron told him he’d scored a bull’s-eye. Content that he understood the situation, the chief didn’t push it. Just kept his eyes on the road as the Explorer entered a series of descending S-curves.

  Undaunted by this road feature, the deputy chief continued to speak his mind. “That’s not the only thing,” he said.

  “What else?” Ron asked.

  “Lauren came out with a new button.”

  The deputy chief’s wife, a surgical nurse, liked to express herself in epigrams that she put onto buttons. She’d pin a given button to her blouse or her blue scrubs until she decided the message had been seen and digested by a large enough audience. It was a low-key method of preaching, a part of Lauren’s charm.

  “What’s this one say?” Ron asked.

  “It’s one of her cheerleader series.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It says: 2-4-6-8, I don’t want to hyphenate.”

  “She doesn’t want to be a writer-director?” asked the former L.A. cop.

  The deputy chief ignored the gibe. “She doesn’t want to be called an African-American. The bottom of the button says: Just call me an American.”

  Ron thought about it for a moment and nodded.

  “Ask her if she’s got one for me, will you?”

  Oliver turned to Ron and said, “This is serious shi—”

  The deputy chief suddenly had to throw his hands against the dashboard as Ron braked sharply. A rush of icy fear filled Oliver as he felt sure they were about to skid over a precipice and plunge to their deaths. When he looked up he saw death, all right. Not the prospect of his own, but still horrifying.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ron Ketchum whispered.

  “Got that right,” Oliver agreed.

  There, just ahead of them, adjacent to the last curve in the road, was the body of a nearly naked black man. He was stretched out against the charred trunk of a lightning-struck tree, a big incense cedar. He’d been nailed to it.

  Crucified.

  Chapter 2

  Mary Kay Mallory breathed deeply but easily, one part of her large, luminous mind measuring her footfalls against her heart rate, another part doing quick scans of her muscles, from the toes to scalp, for any sign of cramping. When you ran alone at 6,000 feet elevation, you had to be aware of how oxygen deprivation could affect your body. It wouldn’t do at all to have her quads or calves knot up unexpectedly and leave her writhing in the roadway, just as a group of happy campers from Marin County came barreling around a curve in their Cadillac Escalade.

  No, no, no. She had too much to live for.

  At thirty-five, Mary Kay was the owner and chief designer of HeraSoft, the fastest rising computer game company for girls and young women in the country.
She was worth twenty million dollars already, and could add hundreds of millions more if she decided to take her company public. But she didn’t think she would do an IPO. Not any time soon. The money wasn’t worth the meddling outsiders that came with it.

  If she sold out, she’d probably have to leave Goldstrike and move the company back to San Francisco, or even set up shop in — yuck! — Silicon Valley. Most of the guys in the valley made Bill Gates look like George Clooney. And if a lot of them were rich and getting richer, so what? So was she. San Francisco was still a great town, her hometown in fact, but … she’d been stalked there.

  A guy she’d hired as a sales rep and then declined to date — because you had to be nuts to be anything but polite and professional with a co-worker these days — had refused to take no for an answer. When she’d given him, “You’re fired,” for an answer, he got weird on her. So weird he followed her everywhere, and one night she came home and found him naked in her bed. Pointing a gun at her. He told her she had to have sex with him. Just once. Then they’d get married. But she could have an uncontested divorce once they’d been together long enough to establish his community property rights. Not terribly romantic, the creep admitted, but she would either go along with his plan or he’d kill her.

  Mary Kay had managed to hit the light switch and run screaming from the darkened bedroom, sped on by a hail of gunfire. The guy followed Mary Kay right out of her house. Naked. But by this time his gun was empty, and a responsive neighbor broke the maniac’s right leg with a baseball bat. The larcenous stalker had been sent away for twelve years for trespassing and attempted murder, but he was appealing both convictions on a number of legal technicalities. With the way the so-called justice system worked these days, you never knew what might happen.