Little GTO

By Rick Russell

Winemaker Kat Carlson recruits her family and friends to find and take down a child pornographer/kidnapper hidden out in Baja California. Body guard Ken Holder proposes to Kat and takes over as Annandale's police chief as the Carlsons and friends unwind a tangled mystery to get to the pornographers lair in the hinterlands of Mexico. Kat takes over a narrator in this latest Carlson mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sangraal Inc.
• Release date: Sep 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452392479

Rick Russell

I'm a book seller who has been at it all his adult life. Along the way I have been a book, magazine, ezine and newspaper editor and writer. I have purposely avoided the publishing establishment, because I have known many of them, and their incompetence and ignorance of literature as an art form is frightening. I write because it is a part of understanding what I have made my profession and i have done it for forty years now.

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Little GTO

by

Richard Russell

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Sangraal Books

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Little GTO

Copyright © 2009 by Sangraal, Inc.

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Little GTO, you're really lookin' fine 


Three deuces and a four-speed and a 389

- John Wilkin – Ronnie and the Daytonas Little GTO

Chapter One

I’m a winemaker. Actually who I am takes some more explaining. I’m different things to different people and even to me sometimes. Inside, I think that there are only two people who really understand me. My Daddy, who isn’t really my father, and my Aunt Jo, who isn’t really my aunt. You see it all really began for me when I ran to my Uncle Larry, who isn’t really my uncle. I have too many aunts and uncles, and along with that a passel of cousins. Oh, this isn’t working out well at all.

I know who my mother was, she was a prostitute who didn’t know who my father was. That was back in Stockton, a long time ago. She kept me around, I kept her house and ran away to San Francisco. I was twelve, then thirteen and I followed my mother’s profession. You can imagine my clientele. Well, one of them was a State Senator, got easier to imagine didn’t it?

Well my Uncle Larry made like a client and actually just talked to me. Well, what I said got my pimp arrested, or maybe what I might have said or something. In any case my pimp’s girlfriend, a real bitch who probably wasn’t really his girlfriend because she liked girls, and, dammit, I’m getting muddled again.

In any case I ran to Uncle Larry. He was an editor, the big cheese on the west coast for a major magazine. There I met Aunt Jo first. She cleaned me up, took me home, and held me through my nightmares. I first felt safe in Aunt Jo’s arms, first time in my whole life. Even now, twenty years later, I imagine that; Aunt Jo holding me, and the monsters just evaporate. Does that make sense?

Well, it was like I got adopted before I did. The way my grandfather, who isn’t really my grandfather, explained it is that I became a source. It was like a whole major corporation was taking responsibility for me. I was hustled through a couple courts and all of a sudden I had a ton of family. But there was one that looked at me like he knew me, he wouldn’t say anything, he avoided me.  Finally I got mad. Wasn’t I a person, didn’t I have rights or something? So I demanded he acknowledge me. I wasn’t nothing after all.

It was like he looked at me and just said he was afraid of me. That he didn’t ever want me to think he was like my clients, that he would hurt me. He wanted me to trust him. And I did and he hugged me and danced me all over that office. That’s my daddy.

OK. Like it’s romantic and all that shit. You fuck and you fuck. Plug in, plug out. My Daddy never touched me in those places. He loves me, because I’m me. He taught me to surf, to dive, to think, and most of all, to love.

So I’m leaving out Mommy, Tori. Tori’s like a mother three times in three different ways. Legally, she adopted her brother, Teddy, when their parents were killed in an accident. Teddy is my big brother, and my partner in my part of the vineyards here. He’s married to Donna. Then Tori adopted me, my middle name Raselli is her maiden name. And finally she had my baby brother, Ray.

Now on top of that, there are the Ericsons, Aunt Jo’s family. Hal and Jesse take care of the vineyards for Grandpa Eric, my Daddy’s father, and Teddy and me. Granpa Eric runs the winery and I’m the winemaker.

Daddy is the Managing Editor of Confidential News and World Report.  When I was growing up. Well, in high school and college anyway. Daddy and Mommy took me all over the world on stories for the magazine over the summer. You see Harold Reilly, who I call Granpa, along with Granpa Eric, was the owner and publisher of the magazine. He isn’t publisher anymore; Aunt Gwen is now. She is Harold’s adopted daughter. Her adopted daughter Deena is my best friend, her husband, Uncle George, just retired from the New York Police Department a few months ago. Oh, and Deena works for Uncle Larry as a reporter covering the agribusiness sector so she lives here most of the time.

Mommy works with the magazine as a contributing editor. For most of the time, when I was growing up, she was my Daddy’s researcher. Actually she still does most of the research, it’s just that she also writes pieces and side bars.

Uncle Larry is the editor and publisher of The West Coast Business Report, the magazine is owned by Granpa Harold, my Dad and Uncle Larry. Aunt Jo is the West Coast editor of Confidential and they have an office for both magazines in San Francisco. Tricia is their daughter and she is just starting college with my brother Ray at UCLA. Don is their son and he’s still in high school.

Teddy and Donna run Other Worlds. They design what are called Role Playing Games for computers. Teddy writes the programs and Donna does the artwork. Kerry and Kelly are their twin daughters who are in junior high school and Nicky, named after my Daddy, is their son, he’s in the sixth grade. They live in Los Altos Hills.

You’d really think I’d be better at this. Mommy, Daddy, Uncle Larry and Aunt Jo, not to mention Aunt Gwen and Granpa Harold have all won, or shared, a Pulitzer Prize. And here I’m getting all tangled up just trying to explain who I am.

Of course I need to tell you about Princess, you see that’s me too. When I was first with everyone, they taught me to surf, and to dive. Donna said that we were beach people and wine people, and if I was the little sister, I had to learn. So, one day on Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz, I hung ten for the first time. Ok, if you’re not a surfer it isn’t a big deal. In any case a surfer made me a necklace of pop-top tabs, put it around my neck and called me the Princess of Steamer Lane.

So a couple months later Aunt Jo and I entered a surfing contest in Huntington. I actually won the kid’s part. Well the organizer had been there the day I hung ten at Steamer’s and put Princess Carlson on my trophy. My picture is still on the wall at a diner in Huntington as Princess Carlson, and since Huntington is a surfers Mecca, on the beach for like twenty years, I’m Princess. And Daddy always calls me Princess.

Here I’ve gotten this far and realized you don’t even know my name. I’m Katherine Raselli Carlson, well you did know my middle name. Everyone calls me Kat, except my Daddy when he is being serious, then he makes of point of calling me Katherine, so I’ll know it’s serious, and half the time, when he’s not, he calls me Princess.

And all right, I’m thirty-three years old and I still say Mommy and Daddy. Well if you spent the first thirteen years of your life without a Mommy and Daddy, you’d still say it too, every chance you got.

Now, I expect you’ve got all sorts of ideas about why I’m not married. It isn’t that hard really. Given my, well, background, you’d probably expect me to be either promiscuous or very, very choosy. I went the choosy route. Plus I’ve got an Electra complex that well let’s just say I’ve never met a man who can hold a candle to my Daddy. There is one who comes close though.

It was tough when I was a teenager. I was sort of mature, I mean I’d lived on my own, taken care of myself, and the boys my age were still, well, boys. When I was twenty-two, I was living with my parents in Brooklyn Heights. I’d just gotten my degree in Viniculture from Chico State and Mommy wanted me to try my hand at reviewing for Confidential. As you can probably tell by this, I wasn’t a superstar. Well the magazine was doing a story on some mafia figures and one took a shot at Granpa Harold, so we all got bodyguards for about a month. I got Ken Holder. He was an old friend of Daddy’s and Daddy started him in the business. He was one of the highest paid bodyguards in the world, and he guarded me for free because he owed Daddy. He had actually guarded me a couple times before for short periods, and I think I sort of fell for him the summer I was 17.

Ken is still one of my best friends. We just couldn’t get past the age thing. Ken was thirty-five. Ken is like Daddy. He’s kind of quiet and he doesn’t move much. Everything he does is sort of economical and sure. It makes him a fantastic lover, as well as other things.

Ken was a high school drop-out who was a soldier when my Daddy was in Vietnam. After my Daddy hooked him up with Nick Harris’ detective agency, he went back to school and the year before he started guarding me he got a degree from Cal State in Philosophy. He said he was lucky really. If he had gone to school earlier he’d have studied something that was more practical, not something he liked.

Okay, dammit, we’re lovers and neither one of us fools around. I go down to L. A. a lot and he comes up here a lot. Seeing as my Daddy is only one of the world’s best investigative reporters and my Mommy is his researcher, I can pretty much guarantee that they know too. They don’t say anything. The one who does is my Aunt Gwen who always makes the point, sometimes pointedly, that Uncle George is eight years older than she is. Of course I’m sure Aunt Jo knows too. Face it, I was adopted by a group of the world’s best journalists and there is nothing that gets by them.

So, when I was twenty-three, the winemaker they hired here, oh here is Annandale, it’s a little town in the Napa wine country, in it’s own valley actually between Napa and the Lakes. Well anyway, the winemaker had a heart attack, just before the harvest, which is the worst time to lose a winemaker. So I filled in. I’ve been filling in ever since. Well I wasn’t exactly the best reviewer in New York City.

About the only other thing about me that is important is that I have a psychological problem (or two or ten.) I mentioned the Electra thing, didn’t I? Well, it seems I have an adopted child syndrome. Half the psychologists in the world have told me so, so I guess I’ve got custody of it. I rebelled at twelve, and didn’t like it. So when I got adopted I became, well, like this model child. I was first in my class all the way through an exclusive girl’s school. Well, except for junior year when Deena beat me out by half a percentage point. But then after Uncle George came along, Deena had the same syndrome. Somehow, like in our heads because we’re exhausted cases of wine trying to figure it out, we think we won’t be loved if we don’t excel, and obey and, well generally just be model children. We know that we’ll be loved. We don’t have to excel. But we do, just like we have to. Deena says she knows her Daddy would kill anyone who hurt her. It’s certain. Yet we don’t rebel, either of us.

In any case, that’s me. Kat.

Another thing that might be important is that Joe Colson, who is another big vineyard owner here, the Michaelson brothers, Ed who runs the John Deere dealership and Jack who got roped into being police chief because Ed was running the dealership, Aaron Costello who was slowly taking over the Shell station and garage from his Dad, my Daddy and Ken all served together in Vietnam, though Daddy was a correspondent, not a soldier.

This is important because all of them had been bow hunting together the weekend before Jack Michaelson called on Monday morning, and said he needed help because a body had washed up in the reservoir. Daddy was staying in his room and Ken had to sneak back to his because he was in bed with me. He was staying in the guest room with Ed Michaelson, who shouldn’t have been there at all because he lived a mile away, but had to find some way to explain why he was there at all. Well, Deena and Ed are kind of an item, and I think my Daddy had it all figured out and didn’t need a program.

Deena had a problem like mine, even though Ed was a year closer to her age. Most of the year, except for the harvest. Deena was the only black person in Annandale. Not that the town is prejudiced or anything, it isn’t. The problem was strictly with Deena and Ed. But then I supposed the same thing could be said of Ken and me.

Chapter Two

You have to understand that a body in the reservoir is a major trauma in Annandale. In the mid-seventies, exactly the mid-seventies, nineteen seventy-five, Ivan Gunnerson, who is down in history as the Wine Country Ripper dumped a bunch of little girls in the reservoir after he cut them up with a straight razor. My Daddy found him out, along with the State Senator who was behind it all, who was my client and how I got my family. Anyway, a body in the reservoir was a pretty big deal in Annandale.

Now let me explain a bit. Jack Michaelson didn’t have a clue as to how to be a policeman, much less a police chief. He had one patrol car, one patrolman and a red light that plugged into his cigarette lighter when he needed it to. And when this happened he didn’t even have the patrolman because the last one quit to go to work in Sonoma because they paid more than minimum wage there. Cal Ames retired, after forty years as chief in nineteen eighty-six, and Annandale went through a series of professional law enforcement officials. All of who wanted to actually enforce the law. Well, Annandale didn’t really need a police force for that. Basically Annandale needed a police chief to keep the teenagers from running amok, make sure that all the drunks got safely home, and write the occasional ticket to some out-of-towner who probably didn’t deserve one.

At harvest time, when the migrants came to town and doubled the population, the CHP gave us a contingent of five officers and the police chief was in the way until the town council (and I was on it at the time) decided that the police chief should take his vacation during the harvest.

Three years ago, I figured out a way that the whole thing could work. I applied to the state for a bunch of grants and revenue sharing for public safety. Then I got a law enforcement internship program from the police union. The way it all worked out, the town got the maintenance on the jailhouse, a patrol car, a patrolman/intern and a hundred and ten thousand dollars a year. Which made the police chief in Annandale a public official who was actually paid five thousand dollars more a year than the police chief of Los Angeles. The problem was that no one from the town actually wanted the job.

Jack Michaelson was adrift at the time. He had just come back home again for the fourth time in the last twenty years. Jack’s a mechanic. And he’d spent his adult life, with his wife Karen and his two kids, bankrupting gas stations on the California coast. Basically, he’d come home, work for the Costellos and his family, save his money, buy a gas station and bankrupt it. Then he’d start over again. At the time the lady showed up in the town reservoir, he’d been the police chief five and a half years, made exactly three arrests for drunk and disorderly, written a bunch of tickets to out-of-towners and put a down payment on a car repair business with three bays in Napa. All of which left Annandale in a mess, unless, of course, Jack could solve the mystery in the week and a half before he moved to Napa. This was why he called.

You see I’d been pushing Ken to take the job. OK, for him it would be a cut in his income. He got twenty-five hundred a day when he worked. He was the best and actually in a bigger demand than he could handle. If you want to see him, check out the photos