Black Jack Justice: Dead Men Run

By Gregg Taylor

“I KNOW WHAT YOU DID” The writer of the mysterious letter could have been talking about any number of misdeeds, some large, some small, some frankly unsuitable for print. When it comes to deeply unqualified guardians of the moral high ground, it would be tough to find many that equaled Black Jack Justice and his erstwhile partner, Trixie Dixon, girl detective. But they will learn the hard way just how serious the sender was, and that in the end, only Dead Men Run.

The his and hers private detectives of Decoder Ring Theatre’s long-running radio mysteries return to two-fisted prose adventure, delighting long-time fans and new readers alike with the classic, hard-boiled feel of their exploits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gregg Taylor
• Release date: Jun 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310159251

Gregg Taylor

Gregg Taylor's love of the classic adventure stories of the golden age of radio, comics and pulp fiction are the driving passions behind the "Tales of the Red Panda" series of books. The books began as a companion piece to his popular radio adventure series "The Red Panda Adventures", heard on independant radio stations around North America and around the world as part of the Decoder Ring Theatre podcast, and have gone on to reach new audiences who love the two-fisted adventure style that recalls the work of the legends of mystery and adventure. Like the classic Hero Pulps that inspired them, the Tales of the Red Panda books can be read in any order, with or without knowledge of the radio series.

Book preview

Black Jack Justice:

Dead Men Run

by Gregg Taylor

Copyright 2015 Gregg Taylor

Smashwords Edition

*****

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*****

For Clarissa, Max and Tess,

as all good things are

Table of Contents

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 One

The name’s Dixon. Trixie Dixon, girl detective.

It’s a funny thing, how time gets away from you. When you were a kid, summers felt like they were a hundred years long; more than long enough to forget anything that you had ever learned about verbs or long division. In mid-summer evenings the sun seemed to hang in the sky at that impossible angle for an eternity and the worst thing that could possibly happen was to have to go in for dinner at last. Now, though I am by any even remotely fair assessment not only young but still in my prime, summer seems like a gone-before-you-know-it affair, whisked away before its prime on a tide of flyers for the new fall lines.

I suppose it was the ad on the back of the newspaper across the streetcar aisle that set me to just such a thought on this particular day. It was one of the first really warm days of June, and there I was, mentally organizing the tweeds in my fall wardrobe at the behest of the man from Sears-Roebuck’s ad agency. It struck me, in that moment, that perhaps time didn’t really get away from us as we grew up – maybe we pushed it away. The blank stares of my fellow passengers seemed to agree, each of them living some imaginary life, gaping into the middle distance, pretending not to see one another as the car clicked along the tracks. I turned my head and took in the rest of the car down the aisle, and saw the rapid movement of a series of heads that were suddenly very keen to appear to be looking anywhere else. It was twenty to nine on a Wednesday morning and I was being undressed by at least four pairs of eyes. It was hard not to smile, even if it was the self-satisfied grin of a kid who carries his magnifying glass to an ant-hill.

We were still a distance from my usual stop, but I decided to seize the day and take a little stroll. I headed to the back door of the car, ringing the bell as I did so, and carefully avoiding eye contact with any of my admirers, as providing them with false hope seemed unnecessarily cruel. It was a weekday, and still early, and in spite of what you might have heard, I am not a rabbit.

I stepped out onto Lake Street with a smile and a glad heart that should have portended what was to come. But it was just such a morning to make a girl detective forget that she was sashaying along an unfashionable street on the wrong side of the tracks, in a dingy little corner of a city that had never won a beauty pageant and was unlikely to make a start of it now. The sun was warm and full of promise, the leaves were full but not yet roasted by the heat of the weeks to come. I walked past the pawn shop, the greengrocer’s and the Chinese laundry with a spring in my step, feeling like a musical number might break out at any moment.

Alas, it was not to be. I stepped into the lobby of the building which housed the mighty world headquarters of Justice and Dixon, Private Investigations, and felt all of the Technicolor magic bleed out of the day. The setting transformed at once into a grainy black and white picture, which would probably end up having Peter Lorre in it. It was as if every atom of the building knew that its place in the universe was to house a private detective’s office, and play host to the circuses of human misery that go with it. I wondered if students at the secretarial school on the first floor felt it as well, and what they made of it. It must have made stenography seem incredibly dramatic.

I noticed as I passed that the out of order sign on the automatic elevator in the lobby was missing, and made a mental note to replace it before prospective clients were upset or confused by the lack of a lift. But as my foot touched the first stair, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the sign had been taken away for a reason. A particularly good reason this time, not the usual accumulation of mild obscenities I had doodled on it. I paused a moment. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The door slid open in response to my slightest touch, and I quivered a little inside in anticipation of the giddy thrill to come. Sure enough, the ancient and extremely surly mechanism rumbled to life and propelled me skyward at a pace just slightly slower than I could have achieved by walking. Truly, this was a red-letter day.

I emerged several minutes later in triumph, and my sense of achievement was only slightly lessened by the fact that there was no one there to see it. Still, I thought to myself, if I could keep this baby’s newly repaired state under wraps for a while, I could make my partner feel like an idiot when he finally noticed. Which shouldn’t have been difficult because he was, in fact, an idiot, but as is so often the case, he stubbornly refused to recognize this fact.

My partner. Part of me still shuddered when I called him that. It had been months now… and more than just a few of them, but I still wasn’t used to the idea of having Jack Justice as a partner. It had been a desperation play, really. I imagine that phrase applies pretty universally in his dealings with women, though thankfully I have no first-hand knowledge of that. Since we had worked pretty well together once, it had stood to reason that the same principle ought to continue to apply itself. And maybe it would, eventually, though I was not prepared to hold my breath.

I fished the keys out of my purse and stepped to the left to open up the grey-green door that proudly bore the words Jack Justice Investigations in faded, peeling paint. That bothered me too, but not enough that I had done anything about it. Besides, I shouldn’t have to call the painters to put my own name on the door – it should have been part and parcel of the invitation my lantern-jawed associate had extended. But if he had even noticed, he had showed no sign of it. I extended the nail of my left forefinger and peeled another piece of paint away from the J in Justice as I unlocked the door with my right. A little piece at a time, each and every day. One of these days he was going to have to do something about it, or I’d have us reduced to ac stic vest which sounded Latin and almost certainly wasn’t.

I rolled up the blinds and opened the windows to release the natural musk of the establishment which resisted my efforts to eliminate it. I had done my best to establish a degree of order upon this space since I had made it my own, but it still tended to smell like coffee grounds, cigarette smoke, old damp newspapers and defeat, in no particular order.

I had just opened up the transom over the door and plunked myself down in the chair behind my desk, lifting my feet onto the desk in a proprietary manner, when the door opened. I put on my very best astonished expression, coupled with a sarcastic sneer, all ready to welcome the lord of the manor to the workday before nine o’ clock for the very first time ever, but I needn’t have bothered. It was only the mailman.

"Good morning, Miss Trixie," he said, taking in every inch of the mile or so of nylons on display as quickly as he thought he could without risking missing any in the process.

"Good morning, Paul, I said without putting the guns away. If he wasn’t shy, then neither was I. Are you all right? You look a little peaked."

"Yeah, he breathed with an admiring tone, such as one might when having a religious experience. Yeah, never better."

"Is that the mail?" I asked, fighting to keep a serious look on my face.

"Yep, he said a little weakly, got it right here."

"Paul? I asked. You do know that there’s a mail slot in the door, right?"

"Oh gee, Miss Trixie, he said without blinking, I could never look through a mail slot. You can’t see much and you get a terrible crick in your neck."

"All right punkin, I said with a frown that neither of us entirely believed, the line between adorable and creepy is finer than you might imagine."

He shook his head and met my gaze at once. I’m sorry, Miss, he said sincerely.

"That’s all right, I said. May I have the mail please?"

"Yes, Miss," he said, pressing a fistful of envelopes into my hand, never once taking his eyes away from mine for a last, lingering look even though he really, really wanted to. In fact, his whole attitude was so entirely reverential that he would have had a shot if he’d had any idea of how to follow through. And perhaps he sensed it, because he paused for just a moment before turning to go.

"Thank you, Miss," was all he said. Alas.

There were five envelopes in all. Three were bills, which was not unusual. What was unusual was that none of the three were stamped with the words PAST DUE or FINAL NOTICE, nor were any of the amounts beyond the reach of our current finances. I opened the ledger and entered the invoice numbers and the amounts. I took the chequebook from the middle drawer of my desk, wrote three cheques to the appropriate companies in the requested amounts, signed my name, forged Jack’s signature, placed them in appropriately addressed envelopes and put them on a corner of my desk to post later in the day when I felt like a walk. This part of the business ran so much more smoothly since I had eliminated the need to involve Jack at all. Which was all fine and good, in that it made me feel like an upstanding businesswoman and responsible adult, but also less good in that it made me feel like a graduate of the secretarial school downstairs. But it was done.

The fourth envelope I recognized by the return address. It was the fifth letter from a disgruntled former client named Ernest Wood, who was writing to demand a refund because his wife, whom he had suspected of cheating on him, had left him when she had found out that he had suspected her of cheating on him. I had, on four previous occasions, composed thoughtful and well-written responses to Mister Wood clearly stating company policy regarding refunds, to wit that they were expressly disallowed under the terms of his contract. I had also pointed out that his wife had discovered his suspicions of her activities not through any sort of incompetence on our part, but rather because he himself insisted upon paying his retainer by cheque, and left his contract lying around where his wife could easily discover it. Four times these things had been pointed out to Ernest Wood, and four times he had responded by composing an even more disgruntled reply in which he demanded his money be returned. His wife was gone, he had been wronged, and by golly somebody was going to pay. He reckoned it should be us. I begged to differ. There was nothing more to say to Ernest Wood. His threats of legal action were empty, as our fee for three days of high-quality snoop an’ peep were less than any lawyer worth being sued by would charge you for the privilege of buying him lunch. I wrote the date received upon his letter and the words NO REPLY, and placed them in his file, which I then returned to the appropriate drawer. Some of that felt at least a little bit like detective work, if only the fussy and uninteresting parts. It was now nine twenty-two and my day was, as far as I knew, pretty much done. There was still no sign of Jack.

The fifth letter was marked Jack Justice – Private and Personal, and as I wanted nothing in this world to do with anything that Jack Justice would apply either of those terms to, I put it where he would be certain to see it immediately upon his entrance. On the coffee pot. Then I opened the paper and did the puzzle.

At ten forty-four, the door opened and Jack entered and hung up his coat.

"Morning, Trixie," he said without looking at me.

"Mmm-hmm, I said. Not by much, but it still is."

He paused slightly, his hat in his hand, poised above the hatrack as if ready to strike. Still is what? he asked at last, as if he did not really want to know.

"Morning," I replied with a tight smile.

"Yes, he said with a slow blink that showed that he wasn’t getting this at all. Good morning."

"Forget it," I said, rolling my eyes and going back to the puzzle.

"Already done, Jack said cheerfully. He slapped his hands together in anticipation and made directly for the coffeepot. Are you sufficiently caffeinated? he asked. I was not and I said so. He shook his head kind of sadly. Were you waiting for me?" he smiled.

"Jack, just make the stupid coffee," I said as flatly as I could.

He began to whistle softly between his teeth, just as he did every morning, and my natural defence mechanism kicked in and I began to actively ignore him. I could not say at precisely what moment the whistling stopped, though it stands to reason that the envelope perched on the percolator might have had something to do with it. I didn’t hear him open it, or see his expression change when he read it. All I know is that, as I basked in the glow of a twelve letter word for shrewdness (which was perspicacity, if anyone is interested), I became aware of an unusual return to the earlier silence. I looked up and Jack held the open envelope in one hand, now absent-mindedly crumpled beyond recognition, and in the other he held a single page. He looked at it without seeming to read it, which suggested that I had missed the actual reading, moving lips and all, or that he had finally given up in his long-standing attempts to fake literacy. I was about to make some comment to this effect, which was bound to be full of all kinds of perspicacity of my own, when he folded the letter, struck a match on the edge of his desk and lit the damn thing on fire, right there in the office.

Chapter Two

What the hell do you think you’re doing? the girl detective squawked as I dropped the flaming paper into the oversized ashtray on my desk. The answer to that felt pretty self-evident, so I didn’t say a word, but watched the letter burn and took a certain grim satisfaction from it. She was rattling around near the coffeepot, and my natural territorial hackles were raised at once, but she was only filling a tall glass with water, with which she seemed to intend to fight the raging inferno.

Leave it alone, I said flatly.

What is wrong with you? she sputtered. Do you have any idea what a tinderbox we’re sitting in? This entire room is made of dry paper and whiskey fumes.

It’s out, I said calmly, hoping that it was contagious.

What’s out? she said crossly, whipping around and spilling a generous portion of her firefighting capability on the floor behind my desk in the process.

The fire, hot-pants, I said. The fire is out.

She paused for a moment, flustered. Okay, first of all, my pants and anything in or near them that may or may not be hot are none of your concern. I cannot stress this point strongly enough.

I concede, I said, looking around vainly for anything else to mop the water up with that was not the fairly clean towel I customarily used to dry the coffeepot after