Clearwater Heat

By Al Rennie

Coop and Joe are the new 'go to' investigators for Bob Morse. They are asked to find any mitigating circumstances in an arson, manslaughter charge against Morse's client. The wierd part is that the accused continues to claim his innocence and expects help from an unexpected source. Meanwhile Mia, has some important staggering news to give Joe. And Rosalie asks Doc for a favor that almost kills her

• Language: English
• Publisher: Al Rennie
• Release date: Jul 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476112558

Al Rennie

I was born and raised in Toronto. I attended Upper Canada College before taking a degree at Queen's University. I have worked as a lifeguard for the Toronto Harbour Police, a youth worker for the Toronto YMCA, and an English teacher in Lakefield. I am married with two great daughters and an extended foster family. My interests include Maple Leaf hockey - this is our year - New England Patriot football and writing.

Book preview

Clearwater Heat

By

Al Rennie

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Al Rennie

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.

Image Credit: Photographer – Lt. Nick Sherrouse

Cover Credit: Rita Toews – probably the most caring,

patient and inventive cover creator ever!

And she’s tough too!!!! She has to be – she live in Winnipeg!

Formatting Credit: L.K. Campbell – as always just great – and thank you

for the Kindle stuff!

Dedication

For my wife – Marsha

Always there for me and

always keeping my moral

compass headed in the

right direction!

Acknowledgements:

I’d like to thank my wife, Marsha and daughter, Jane as well as Annmarie Schwanke for their work editing this novel. Their efforts have made the story a bit better and the content easier for you, the reader, to decipher. I would also like to thank them for some of their suggestions, but not all. A few of their ideas were just plain goofy.

Why don’t you have Doc and Mia take singing and dancing lessons together? That would appeal.

Or

You need to re-write the last seventy five pages. Jeez!

Warnings:

Note to would-be young readers:

As a former teacher – and therefore someone sworn to be concerned about the minds of our youth – I have to warn the under eighteen group that Clearwater Heat contains a number of four letter words – it also has some with two and three and a few with five and even six letters – so watch out. I must also tell you that you will come across some pretty suggestive scenes and some very bad people – but nothing is likely to overly stimulate you or disgust you – sorry. If you are under eighteen and read this book – you may go blind – or – you may win the lottery if you can get your hands on a ticket. In any case, good reading bubba.

Best Regards,

Doc April 20th, 2012

(in Clearwater Beach, Florida – and loving it.)

P.S. – If any of you feel a strong need to communicate with me – try

[e-mail]

or visit my website

alrennie.com

Note: Clearwater Beach and the area surrounding it is truly my idea of paradise. It is a beautiful place to visit and live. The violence depicted in the Clearwater series is just fiction – i.e. – it never happened. Go there and find out for yourself. You’ll love it.

A few Reader Responses to Clearwater Journals after it appeared on Free e-books:

Brilliant! Couldn’t put it down, thanks – Catherine Cooke

What a riveting story with bouts of wry humor. Again Please. – Bruce

Excellent read with more twists and turns than a road through the mountains. Enjoyed every minute! – Kingstonbears

A really well written book. Loved it a bunch. Hope he does another soon. Maybe a series??? – Wa6ype

A truly fun read, great sense of humor and a good plot. I recommend this author with pleasure. – Evelyn

Excellent writing, fast paced, liked it a lot. – Toerien

Gripping story, believable characters. Would definitely recommend. Very well written. Thoroughly enjoyed it. – Rachel Caldicott

Put my life on hold until I finished it. Great read! You live the character’s emotions and you can’t be sure of the outcome until the last page. – Charles Hough

Great read! Interesting characters and twists – not to mention just enough quirky to make it more real. – Holly Atkisson Gilmer

Enjoyable reading – a combination of a thriller and a love story – Pentii Grant

Easy reading – I look forward to another from Rennie. A book you don’t want to put down; a book you don’t want to end. – Annie Welch

Fantastic, loved it, couldn’t put it down, and didn’t want it to end! – Eloise

Thanks! Great book – I can’t wait for more! – Abu Hamzah

What a great book! Fast paced and great characters. – Sara Walsh

And from a reviewer who read the entire Clearwater series and evidently enjoyed it:

This series rocks!

CHAPTER 1

Monday, April 2, 2012 – We go to work for Morse.

So, are you guys up for this? Bob Morse asked as he sipped his now warm black coffee.

I looked at Coop for the answer to that one. Fred Cooper is a retired Tampa detective and the moral compass of our little company. A week or so ago, Morse asked us to take on what looked like a pretty lucrative deal that involved spying on an unfaithful wife. The idea was to break the existing conditions of a stiff pre-nup agreement. I had been polishing the lens of my new Nikon and humming an offbeat rendition of Your Cheatin’ Heart when Fred had said – no way it’s not for us.

This morning, we were sitting at Square Plates eating breakfast. Square Plates is a small mom and pop restaurant in Belleaire, Florida that Bob Morse likes to meet at when he is in one of his paranoid moments. In that particular phase of his personality, he truly believes everybody in his law firm is spying on him. If the office guys aren’t watching him, then one of his four ex-wives has her own P.I. out trying to pump up the alimony payment that he pays to each of them every month. Recently, Bob had taken an interest in Coop’s daughter, Samantha. So far that interest has not been reciprocated. When and if she ever gets around to giving Bob Morse more than a second look, the lawyer will have to add Fred Cooper to the list of guys out there interested in what he is up to.

In the last month or so we had starting doing some work for Morse’s law firm, but Cooper Holiday Investigative Services wouldn’t be breaking into a Forbes listing any time soon. Our brief employment history has included shooting our first client and getting twisted entirely out of shape by the second. No one in their right mind would describe the results of those cases as an auspicious start in the private detective game.

Yeah, I think this one works for us, Coop said after due deliberation of ten seconds. But we go back to square one. We are not using Phil Peterson’s file for more than amusing fiction reading, Coop stated. How is Peterson by the way? he added as if he really cared.

Not good, Morse said. He hasn’t come off the by-pass surgery in any condition to return to work in the next while. You know Phil did do good work for me in the past. Maybe he had his stuff together when he did the work-up on this one.

And maybe pigs can fly, Coop said. Morse just shrugged his shoulders.

I’ll read it, I said to keep things moving along and Morse happy. Coop and I still believed Phil Peterson had been bought off by Robert Golden – one of the brothers that I had apparently shot and killed a few weeks ago.

Phil Peterson had been the chief criminal investigator for a number of years for Morse’s legal firm. That changed when he had to have triple by-pass surgery. That procedure hadn’t worked out too well for Peterson. We had been brought in to work for Morse and take over Peterson’s files as temporary clean-up hitters. While no one, except me – and then only privately to Morse – had said we suspected that the guy had been bought off by Robert Golden, his work was sloppy and incomplete. It left out too much to be very useful. In fact, his investigation notes – instead of helping us – had slowed our efforts down because he simply had misrepresented fact. And now Morse had just told us that this same guy, Peterson, had started to work on this case in the days before his surgery.

The situation that Morse wanted us to follow-up on was for a client named Harold Meeson who he was representing. Harold had been charged with manslaughter and arson. The cops and the DA’s office contended that the guy set fire to his business to claim an inflated insurance policy. The person who had died in the blaze had been a homeless person who had found shelter with some cheap wine in a storage shed that abutted the back of the warehouse. Morse wanted us to get background on the victim as well as any extenuating circumstances that he could use to reduce his guy’s sentence through an aggressive plea bargain. So far the prosecutor, a young gun assistant D.A. in the case, had not been too interested in anything but a straight guilty plea and the mercy of the court scenario. This was Florida. Mercy of the court in this state is like Haley’s comet but a little less predictable. To me, the interesting piece of this case was that the business owner, Harold Meeson, continued to claim that he was innocent. Even his lawyer, our employer, Bob Morse, was not buying that one but accepted it as part of his preparation. The reality was – guilty or innocent – this guy, Meeson, would get the best defense his money could buy. Bob Morse was quickly becoming a legal luminary on the west coast of Florida and his verging on exorbitant fees reflected that fact. However his acquittal rate generally hovered around the ninety percent mark. In other words, having Morse work for you was like a get out of jail free card. Meeson had put up most of what he had left for collateral to buy Morse’s services. We would be part of that team he was paying for.

As we finished up at Square Plates, Morse handed me the thin file on the case that Peterson had put together. On a quick flip through it, I was not impressed.

I don’t expect miracles here guys, Morse said as he prepared to leave the little restaurant. Just do the best you can to find something I can work with to get a better deal than is on offer. You can pick up duplicate copies of the discovery work I have so far. I think Assistant D.A. Hank Grasswell is holding back a bit of the old useful. If he is and I can prove that, it might make for an interesting chat in the judge’s chambers before the trial. Jeez, I don’t need another friggin trial just now. A quiet plea bargain favourable to my client is what I want. I need it. I’ve got to slow down.

What does your client want? I asked before we got the latest blood pressure readings of an over-worked, feeling sorry for himself lawyer named Bob Morse.

He wants it to go away entirely, Morse replied with a faint smile, but that’s just not going to happen in this lifetime. He’ll understand that after I get a better picture of what we are up against.

We’re on it, Coop said. By the way, how’s Ida May working out?

I’ll tell you what – the woman is straight frigging amazing. Her research skills are beyond what I expected. And I expected a lot based on what I’d seen her do for you guys. Talk about being able to think outside the box – I’ve thought of asking her about how she finds some of the stuff that she digs up, but I’m afraid her methods might step over some legal line in the sand and get me into a deep pile of poop with the Law Society. So I’d rather not ask. If there is any way she would come to work in my office instead of working out of your place, I’d appreciate it. The e-mails, text messages and faxes are okay, but it would be a lot handier if she was right there and I could talk to her directly when I needed to.

But then the bad guys that are watching you would know about her and try to enlist her to the dark side, I said playing to his paranoia.

Nice, Bob Morse said appreciating my play. We sometimes messed around in each other’s heads. So far, he has landed me in a couple of shoot-outs, so I guessed that he was a bit ahead of me in the messing with the head department.

Good to know that she is working out so well though, I said. Let’s get going Fred. We should be able to get started on this right away.

Actually, Fred and I can take some credit for finding Mrs. Ida May Thornberry’s new job with Morse’s legal firm. We were the ones who inadvertently brought her to the attention of the guy. In the hours after I crossed swords with the people who had killed Mia’s sister, my brother Frank had hired Morse to handle my defence. The other side, at Coop’s insistence, backed down and never charged me. The fact that the cops knew Morse was in my corner probably pushed that decision along. Since that incident, Bob and I have become something like friends when he is not trying to manipulate my skill set. In fairness, he has acted promptly, professionally and effectively on my behalf through a number of subsequent scrapes that I have not enjoyed with the local legal system. The most recent incident involved the gunshot deaths of two very wealthy and not very nice brothers – Bobby and Brian Golden. In actual fact, when the police came through the door, I was caught holding the proverbial smoking gun – literally. But I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t. It’s complicated.

When I first met her, Mrs. Thornberry had been working as the librarian at the now defunct Clearwater Beach Library – a satellite branch outlet of the Clearwater Library system. The first meeting did not bode well for a continuing friendly relationship. She threw me out of the place for laughing too loudly at the blond jokes I was learning. I needed the jokes to impress Mia. The second meeting had gone better when I asked for help researching information about the death of Mia’s sister. It was then that I realized how talented the woman was. Since then we have had an interesting friendship. She credits me with saving the life of her grandson and then taking care of the guy who shot the kid – another smoking gun accusation. More recently, she and Fred Cooper have started stacking library books together, but I’m not allowed to talk about that.

Fred and I had come from different directions to reach Square Plates, so after agreeing to meet back at our new office in a small strip mall on Gulf to Bay in Clearwater we headed off in our own vehicles – Fred in an older beat up Chevrolet Impala and me in an older pristine Jaguar XJR. Fred regularly drives about ten miles an hour slower than the speed limit permits, so I figured I had a chance to swing by IHOP on the beach and say hi to Mia. She had already headed off to work when I rolled out of bed this morning, so a little – hey –how are you doing – was in order.

Mia is my significant other who also happens to be pregnant with yet another significant other – Little Joe – who will be putting in an appearance around the end of May or early June. When I first met her, Mia was the all-Canadian girl next door, but maybe not so innocent – and definitely not so Canadian. She was the stereotypical tanned, blond, blue-eyed young beauty with the firm, fit and petite body of a cheerleader or gymnast that every adolescent male dreams about at some time in his teens. Those days were a distant memory for me even then, but she’s with me now and that’s all that counts.

When I stood in the small waiting area trying to spot a free table in Mia’s section, Janille slid up beside me and asked if she could help me. When Janille slides up beside you, there isn’t much space left. I sometimes refer to her – although never to her face – I’m not that insensitive – or brave – as linebacker girl. Linebacker is probably unfair to linebackers everywhere. To be more accurate Janille is big enough to play the entire left offensive line for the Tampa Bay Bucs. But this was the new quiet and sophisticated Janille. On other occasions