Lucky Bones Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Michael Wiley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Michael Wiley

  A Sam Kelson mystery

  TROUBLE IN MIND *

  The Detective Daniel Turner mysteries

  BLUE AVENUE *

  SECOND SKIN *

  BLACK HAMMOCK *

  A Franky Dast mystery

  MONUMENT ROAD *

  The Joe Kozmarski series

  LAST STRIPTEASE

  THE BAD KITTY LOUNGE

  A BAD NIGHT’S SLEEP

  * available from Severn House

  LUCKY BONES

  Michael Wiley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2020

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2021 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2020 by Michael Wiley.

  The right of Michael Wiley to be identified

  as the author of this work has been asserted

  in accordance with the Copyright, Designs &

  Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8982-9 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-711-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0432-5 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For those who put their foot in it

  ONE

  Sam Kelson met Genevieve Bower at Big Pie Pizza on North Avenue. She had pale skin and bleach-blond hair and, for the meeting, wore a little blue sweater and red leggings. She ordered a Coke and a side of garlic knots and said, ‘My boyfriend’s stealing my Jimmy Choos.’

  ‘Your whos?’ Kelson’s left eye twitched until he caressed his forehead.

  ‘Jimmy Choos. Designer sneakers, pumps, sandals, wedges. A hundred pairs. Mine are fakes. He’s stealing them.’

  ‘Counterfeit shoes?’

  ‘You’d never know. He also took two Rolexes.’

  ‘Fake too?’

  ‘Do I look like I’d buy real?’

  He stared at her pale skin, her red leggings, her little blue sweater. ‘You look like an old-time stripper named Carol Doda. I saw a TV show. They called her the Topless Tiger.’

  She gave him a long gaze. ‘Marty said you’ve got a problem keeping your mouth shut. Something about getting knocked in the head.’ She’d gotten his name from Marty LeCoeur, a one-armed man Kelson knew through his friend DeMarcus Rodman.

  ‘He’s right,’ Kelson said.

  ‘I want the shoes back,’ she said.

  ‘So you’re a crook and you want me to steal your counterfeits from another crook?’

  ‘I’m a businesswoman.’

  ‘You know, I used to be a cop.’

  ‘Yeah, Marty said. You got fired.’

  ‘No, I got shot.’ He touched a scar over his left eyebrow to show where. ‘On duty. Now I say things I shouldn’t. Do things. The doctors call it disinhibition. Frontal lobe damage. I’m better now, mostly. I’m a good guy. I love everyone. The state lets me carry a gun. I pay my bills. My eleven-year-old daughter stays with me on nights when her mom doesn’t have her. For Christ’s sake, I’ve got two kittens. I’m dependable. But the department retired me on disability.’

  The waitress brought the Coke and garlic knots, a Sprite for Kelson.

  Genevieve Bower tore off half a knot and nibbled at it.

  Kelson said, ‘Point is, I think you want someone else for this job. I try to work on the right side of the law, and if I cross over I can’t help talking about it. The disinhibition. That’s bad for people like you.’

  Chewing, she said, ‘Marty says if you see a chick you like, you tell her. Strangers, friends, it doesn’t matter. You can’t help yourself.’

  ‘It’s happened. But less lately.’

  She swallowed.

  He watched her swallow.

  Something about her lips and the way her food disappeared inside her, all snug in her little sweater, switched a switch in his head, and his synapses seemed to spark like loose wires. ‘I should know better,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’ She sipped from her Coke. Swallowed.

  ‘What’s his name?’ he said.

  ‘Whose? My boyfriend’s?’

  ‘Unless someone else has been stealing your fakes.’

  She curled her upper lip. ‘Jeremy Oliver. He’s a DJ. Eighties music. If you want to shake your bootie to Journey blasting “Don’t Stop Believin’” or Joan Jett beltin
g “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll”, Jeremy’s your guy.’

  ‘Huh.’ At the mention of Joan Jett, an impulse tickled Kelson. ‘How long were you together?’

  ‘Nine days. We met four weeks ago at a party at my cousin’s. A whirlwind, you know? And then the wind died.’

  ‘Nine days counts as a boyfriend?’

  ‘It’s five days longer than Marty.’

  ‘You have a picture of him?’

  She tapped her phone and showed Kelson a shot of an olive-skinned man with a shaved head. He was giving the camera a wicked smile full of gleaming white teeth. He looked in his early thirties.

  ‘Handsome guy. Text that to me, OK? Any idea where I can find him?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ she said. ‘He posts his club and party dates on his website, but I went to the last three and he was a no-show. Once he had a stand-in. The other times there were just a bunch of angry partiers and an empty DJ booth.’ She wrote the website details and Jeremy Oliver’s phone number and home address on a paper napkin and gave it to Kelson. ‘No one’s seen him in two weeks.’

  Kelson read the napkin. ‘JollyOllie.com?’

  ‘I know, but the things he could do with his tongue.’

  ‘Please don’t tell me.’ Kelson folded the napkin and slipped it into a pocket. ‘How much are the shoes and watches worth?’

  ‘The watches, maybe a hundred bucks. The shoes about sixty thousand.’

  ‘For sneakers?’

  ‘Designer sneakers. They start around five hundred a pair and go up. I want them back. If you get them, I have another job for you.’

  ‘I’ll ask around.’

  As she wrote a check for a week’s work, Kelson found himself humming Joan Jett’s ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.’ She raised an eyebrow at him and said, ‘Brain candy?’

  He said, ‘The first night I had sex with my ex, it was playing.’

  ‘I’d rather not know,’ she said.

  ‘We went back to my apartment, turned on the radio, and Nancy did a striptease. I always hated the song, but now it gets me.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I mean, really gets me.’

  Genevieve Bower got up. ‘Let me know when you find Jeremy.’

  ‘What about the rest of your garlic knots?’

  ‘You eat them,’ she said. ‘Delicate tummy.’

  When she reached to shake his hand, her sweater stretched tight over her all of her, and he said, ‘Sorry about the Carol Doda thing.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you’re human. You don’t need to apologize for that.’

  ‘I like you,’ he said.

  ‘You only need to be sorry if you use your screwed-upness to hurt someone.’

  ‘Screwed-upness?’

  ‘Yeah, you seem to have a bad case of it.’

  ‘Really, I just got shot in the head.’

  She left then, and he sat at the table alone, dipping dough into marinara, listening to the conversations of other diners and talking out loud to himself about how crazy he was to let a woman’s sexy swallowing of a garlic knot persuade him to take a job that sounded as if it would only aggravate him and, if he succeeded, force him to convey counterfeit goods.

  The waitress refilled his Sprite and he complimented her on her hair and her neck and, because he couldn’t help himself, her knees. After that, the manager kept an eye on him.

  All would have been well if the conversation at the other tables hadn’t experienced one of those lulls just as the ceiling speakers started playing a new song – Joan Jett’s ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Kelson said out loud.

  Oh, yes, his brain answered.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ he said.

  Do it till you’re satisfied, his brain said.

  Do it all night long.

  Do the hoochie coochie.

  Do the Watusi.

  Kelson stood up at his table. His eye twitched. His arms twitched. His legs twitched. He fumbled with the zipper on his pants. He said, ‘No, no, no.’ His brain said Yes, yes, yes. He stripped off his pants and danced with his chair. Two months had passed since he’d done something like this, and his head buzzed with the pleasure of a long-denied joy.

  ‘Freedom,’ he said to the waitress.

  As ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll’ pumped from the ceiling speakers, he climbed on to his table and sang along. Then the table legs blew out, and he landed butt-naked in the deep-dish pie of a lady in a nearby booth.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘your pepperoni just poked me in the ass.’

  The police arrived and shot him with a Taser. He shook on the floor to the bass beat until they jolted him a third time.

  TWO

  As the police booked him at the Harrison Street Station, Kelson chattered about being an ex-cop, about the undercover work he did on the narcotics squad, about his friends, acquaintances, and enemies still on the force, and about his kittens. Then he asked to talk to his old commander from the narcotics division, Darrin Malinowski. When the officers ignored that, he asked to talk to Dan Peters or Venus Johnson, homicide cops he knew from the biggest case he’d worked since going private. ‘You wrecked a pizza,’ said one of the cops. ‘You ruined a lady’s appetite. That don’t count as homicide. Maybe sex crimes wants to talk to you. Maybe Miss Manners.’

  ‘Call Sheila Prentiss at the Rehabilitation Institute. Dr P. She’s my therapist – she’ll explain my deal to you.’

  ‘Not much to explain,’ the cop said. ‘Indecent exposure. Disorderly conduct. The lady whose pizza you sat on, she’s threatening to sue Big Pie – and you.’

  ‘My lawyer,’ Kelson said. ‘His name’s Ed Davies. I want him here now.’

  ‘For a guy that can’t keep his pants up, you got a lot of needs,’ the cop said.

  Malinowski, Peters, and Johnson never came, and the police put Kelson in a cell where a guard checked on him every fifteen minutes.

  ‘Suicide watch?’ Kelson asked on the guard’s fifth visit.

  ‘Making sure you don’t hurt yourself,’ the guard said. ‘If I was anything like you, I know I’d want to.’

  ‘Not me,’ Kelson said. ‘I like life. Even when a punk shot off a piece of my left frontal lobe, I refused to die.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ the guard said.

  ‘If anything, I’m too lively – from others’ perspectives.’

  ‘I see.’

  In the evening, Kelson felt the start of one of the headaches he got since the shooting. When he asked the guard for a Percocet, the guard said, ‘You know how many screwballs ask me screwball questions every day?’

  So, with pain twisting into his skull, Kelson lay on his skinny mattress, gazing at the jail-cell ceiling. ‘Has it come to this?’ he asked. The ceiling said nothing. ‘Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer,’ he said.

  At ten, the guard came by and said, ‘Nighty-night, screwball,’ and a minute later the jail-block lights went out.

  When Kelson slept, his first dream started well. He was in his apartment with his daughter Sue Ellen and the kittens she’d named Payday and Painter’s Lane. Sue Ellen was teaching them to play dead – so Kelson clapped, and they leaped from their splayed backs and zipped in circles around the apartment. Sue Ellen burst into that laugh of hers that always sounded to Kelson like wonderful bells. But then Kelson turned his back – maybe he only blinked – and Sue Ellen transformed into the seventeen-year-old street dealer named Bicho who shot him in the head before he returned fire, killing the boy … or maybe Kelson shot first – that detail was lost to frontal lobe damage and the morgue – and the things Bicho was doing to the kittens no one should ever do to the living or the dead.

  Kelson jerked awake, sweating, tears in his eyes. He said, ‘What I would—’ but then his misfiring synapses left him wordless. In the dark, he did the deep breathing exercises Dr P taught him, and after a while his heart stopped pounding wildly. He closed his eyes, but that only woke him more, so he went back to the breathing exercises. />
  The next day, Kelson sat in lockup until after two p.m., when Ed Davies bailed him out. When the police released him, Davies was waiting outside the jail with a box of Kelson’s belongings. As Kelson threaded his belt through his pant loops, Davies said, ‘I appreciate your business, but I’d be happy to miss you for a while.’

  ‘Think you can get the charges dropped?’

  ‘I’ll talk to the lady – tell her about your heroic background, offer her a pizza gift card. She’ll look as silly as you do if the news catches the story.’

  ‘She wants to sue.’

  ‘Sue a disabled ex-cop who took one in the line of duty? A man who still fights the good fight? A man who’s come back against the odds?’

  ‘A man who sat on her pizza.’

  ‘Let her try.’

  Kelson took a taxi back to Big Pie to pick up his car, a burnt-orange Dodge Challenger he’d bought with his disability settlement. It was the twenty-second of May and, like most Chicago days at the end of spring, chilly and gray.

  Sitting in the back of the taxi, he checked the messages on his phone. He had one from his daughter Sue Ellen, three from Genevieve Bower, and one from DeMarcus Rodman.

  Sue Ellen had called the previous evening from his apartment. She’d waited for two hours for him to take her to their weekly dinner at Taquería Uptown, and now she was bored … and now she was hungry … and now she was calling her mom – and, she said, ‘Mom’s going to be mad at you. Sorry.’