Next Last Chance

By Jon A. Hunt

Tyler Bedlam isn't a private eye because he needs the money. But understanding rich people's problems won't help him survive them.

Protecting a client from her desperate past puts Tyler in a crossfire between the FBI, rival mobs, and a trick-shot killer who protects his blackest secret one numbered bullet at a time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jon A. Hunt
• Release date: Dec 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781087854922

Book preview

NEXT LAST CHANCE

a Tyler Bedlam Novel

by Jon A. Hunt

For Rachel,

who loves books and horses.

Even ornery ones.

This novel is a work of fiction.

No characters herein are real, except for Minnie Pearl and Ray Charles, who are mentioned in passing and with due reverence. Otherwise, similarities to actual persons are coincidental.

Several locations and structures described are genuine, with slight literary adjustments made where necessary to suit the story. Businesses and residences (such as the Hillbriar estate) exist solely in the author’s imagination.

Law enforcement entities mentioned in the following narrative are real, but their hierarchies and operations are the author’s less-than-educated guesses.

Again, it’s fiction.

This revised edition, published in 2019, corrects typos and minor errata that slipped through in the original.

Copyright © 2016 by Jon A. Hunt

All rights reserved.

ISBN (eBook):  978-1-0878-5492-2

Prologue

It was a proper graveyard, not one of those twelve-by-twenty plots of crabgrass and tottering stones scattered across the South that go unnoticed till they get in the way of a new strip mall. Iron gates closed the entrance after hours. Gnarled magnolias stood guard. Memories, rendered in ornate marble and granite, marched in ordered rows beneath the trees. Morning sunshine crept past the vertical stonework with reverence. It ought to. This was Mount Olivet. Famous bones were buried here.

I hardly met Mount Olivet’s class requirements, yet there I was, propped against the presentation side of a century-old headstone, slovenly as any backstreet drunk. Blood stained my shirtfront. My hat was on the ground and I wasn’t wearing a tie.

A mockingbird in the branches tested his borrowed repertoire on approaching policemen, but they were too busy stepping over bodies to pay attention. Their drawn service weapons were pointless: the shooting had finished before sunrise. One of them crouched to study the guy tipped against the tombstone and the dead one face-down just past my toes. He could only be sure the corpse was face-down because its heels and jacket collar turned skyward; most of the head had been blown off. The officer looked young. He also looked like he might be sick soon. It scared the hell out of him when I blinked.

You gonna be okay?

His face had gone white and his eyes were wide. He managed a feeble nod.

I was a little worried about you, I said. Is Rafferty here?

Another nod.

Go fetch him, will you? I’ll wait.

The kid was up like a shot and hollering. I kept my word and stayed put. There was no need to hurry at the moment and I wanted to contemplate my surroundings. My next stay in a graveyard was bound to be longer, but you don’t get to look around once you’re under the grass.

Chapter One

Lieutenant Rafferty spent a lot of time in the field because he was a large man with an office the size of a tissue box. The room had no windows. A fluorescent light crowded the ceiling. When the door swung in from the corridor it just missed a birch veneer desk, the primary function of which seemed to be keeping the walls from slapping together. Rafferty’s broad six-six frame was comically out of scale, but I wasn’t about to give him a hard time while I shared the tiny room wearing an oversized orange t-shirt from the detention laundry.

He pressed on an edge of the gray plastic tub full of my belongings. The tub tipped up toward him. My wallet, keys and cell phone slid to the downhill end with a clatter.

No gun, he observed with a rumble.

I left it in my car.

He let the tub drop back to the desktop and slid it my direction. He also reached over and swatted the door shut.

Where’d you leave your car?

In the year I’d known him, Rafferty hadn’t demonstrated great capacity for small talk. We generally got along. I sometimes tracked information down for him when department protocol tied his hands. He fended off my occasional legal difficulties in return. But he wouldn’t easily tolerate my beating around the bush.

Green Hills, I said, in spite of that.

The Lieutenant arched a ruddy brow. Green Hills was more specific than Nashville, but not by much. The problem was I’d left my car at a client’s home to follow someone on foot. If I’d suspected I was going to wind up getting shot at in a cemetery ten miles across town, I’d have driven and brought my gun. Maybe. I wasn’t sure what I ought to have done. But dropping clients’ names is never a good idea. A private eye no one trusts doesn’t have a bright future.

We stared at the desk between us in silence till that got unbearable, then Rafferty leaned away so the back of his chair bumped the wall. Instead of pressing the issue, he just regarded me with the sort of blank expression people pay money to see on orangutans at the zoo.

Why are you doing this?

You know I can’t—

He raised his palm. When a guy holds a hand that huge in front of you, you shut up.

"I mean, why scrounge around for grandma’s lost jewels, why waste your time running insurance checks, why roll in the dirt? You don’t have to. Do whatever you want, whenever you want to, long as it’s legal. Hell, if you did break the law, the other guys can’t afford your kind of lawyers. You can’t tell me last night was fun."

Others had asked the question. The cooling device my father invented hugged the processors in nearly every computer, phone, television and telecommunications satellite on or near the planet. My inherited ownership of Cool-Core Technologies meant a Fortune 500 world lay at my fingertips. Yet I played dead in graveyards and rubbed elbows with the downtrodden in Music City, USA, like I needed to work for a living. My choices made sense to me. That didn’t make them simple to explain to anyone else.

I’d be bored out of my skull sitting on a yacht, I said.

Rafferty grunted. You’re nuts. All right. Forget the car and who you’re working for. Just tell me about last night. The only live body we found at Mount Olivet was Ty Bedlam. I’d love to hear his story.

I’m not much of a storyteller today, Jerry. How about we talk more later?

I hadn’t slept for twenty-eight hours. I also wasn’t certain how much of the previous night’s business I’d be smarter not to discuss.

Rafferty insisted. Your stories are always more interesting before they’re rehearsed.

Arguing wouldn’t get me far. I was a material witness to multiple homicides. If it came to it, Rafferty had no qualms about locking me in protective custody down the hall. My safest bet was to try and satisfy at least some of his curiosity now.

To show him how stubborn I could be if I wanted, I made him wait till somebody brought a pot of fresh coffee.

•••

I have a driver’s license and a decent car. But when I arrived at Mount Olivet, I arrived on foot. When you’re trailing someone, you don’t necessarily have the luxury of choosing how you travel. The man had slinked away from the fence of a high-brow client with an extortionist problem, and that intrigued me. Why risk spying on a victim directly? He already had something they wanted. And if this wasn’t anyone connected to the blackmail attempt, who was he and what was he doing? Nobody gets paid to stand around and wonder, so I followed him.

I was so spontaneous about it I left my car parked in my client’s driveway. And since I’m not in the habit of visiting clients’ homes armed, I also left my gun locked inside the car.

(I mentioned my spontaneity and the man at the fence to the Lieutenant. How fancy the fences were and why I’d been hired, I left out of the narrative.)

My quarry wore jeans and a black jacket, had dark hair and average build, but I couldn’t get near enough to see more. He seemed magnetically attracted to the shadows under the oaks along the four-rail horse fence at the front of the property. Seeing him at all had been a lucky accident. As daylight failed he blended into the city, his every movement made with the practiced nonchalance of a person whose livelihood depended on being unseen. Except for a baffling tour through SoBro on the buses, he went on foot.

(How’d he pay? Rafferty wanted to know.

Not with a bus pass, I said.)

By midnight I realized I hadn’t been all that clever a tracker. I never got as close as it seemed to losing my game. The mystery man meant to be followed, not necessarily by me. Mount Olivet must have been the intended destination: half a dozen other hunters entered the grounds as I did, from various directions. They weren’t the type interested in historical epitaphs. Every instinct I’d ignored till then screamed for me to be somewhere else. I stepped away from the shadowed wall of a crypt where I’d hidden from the moonlight.

That’s when I spotted Mount Olivet’s newest addition sprawled in the grass.

I pressed back into the gloom. Being easy to see hadn’t worked for the other guy. Passing clouds made the moon’s glow inconsistent and the graveyard had no lights—it wasn’t the sort of place people visited after dark—so I could tell only that the figure was too large to be the person who’d led me there. Glossy darkness on a tombstone beyond the body convinced me he was beyond help. I hadn’t heard a thing.

My ears strained for telltale sounds. Cars hissed along Lebanon Pike beyond the trees to the north, groggy drivers heading home or to the next bar. Something moved to my right, a shift on the fringes of vision. This time I heard the shot but had already launched myself sideways. The bullet plowed a trough in the grass beside me and sprayed dirt in my face. I squirmed on my belly to the dark side of a grave marker.

Three more blasts answered from different directions. None came from angles which could account for the dead man.

I readied myself for a moment when a rag of cloud shut out the moon. When it happened, I lunged. My cloud wasn’t as large as I’d hoped. Cool gray revealed me to an unfriendly world. Crucifixes and cherubim passed in a blur, punctuated by staccato flares. Not every shot had me in mind, but those that did ruined a lot of expensive stonework. Blackness interrupted my path, blackness wielding a gun. A rapping bang and fire burst from the figure’s center. Fortunately, he aimed over me and his opponent proved the better marksman. With a wet cracking sound, the person before me lurched upright, returned violently to earth. I tumbled over the body and skidded against a marble angel. Chiseled wings spread to shield me from the treacherous moon. Too bad what I really needed protection from was on the ground.

Another gunman stepped into the moonlight. Unwise, I thought, but then I was the one on his butt with his back against a tombstone. The man assumed a classic shooter’s stance, legs apart, weapon in both hands at the ends of rigid outstretched arms.

He never fired. Someone else put a bullet through the back of his head before he could pull the trigger. Gruesome heat splashed over me and my would-be executioner toppled. I hadn’t heard that shot, either.

A silencer.

Somebody wasn’t playing by everybody else’s rules. He probably used an infrared scope, too, as brutally accurate as those unheard rounds had been. For at least one person tonight, Mount Olivet was no battlefield. It was a hunting ground.

Probably plain coincidence kept me from being killed like the others. I lay still as a corpse and tried hard to look the bespattered part. A few more shots came from farther away, each ending with the thump of muted impact. It was over by dawn. I stayed put. The place was littered with enough impatient dead people already. I played ‘possum till the cops found me.

•••

Rafferty hadn’t interrupted since asking about the buses. He settled back from the desk.

You didn’t mention names.

I was careful not to.

He growled a little. I’m not asking. Yet. If anybody can sniff his way into trouble that doesn’t belong to him, it’s you. But there’s some serious shit going down, and my job won’t get any easier if you wind up in a morgue. The Bureau is sending people. Before they get here and tell me not to, I’ll share enough of what we’ve found to make you consider distancing yourself.

From—?

"I don’t know. Certainly from the only person who walked away from Mount Olivet last night. Maybe from your clients if there are connections. We’ve got reasons to be nervous."

He swept a computer keyboard into place from its corner of the desk and turned the display so we could both see it. Snatching an unsharpened pencil from a ceramic mug full of them, he deftly applied the eraser end to the keys. Rafferty typed faster with the soft end of one pencil than most folks do with ten fingers. The screen flashed through a series of security pages. Rafferty’s pencil navigated to a single mug shot. At least the image resembled a mug shot. The usual number crossed beneath it. There were no profiles, however, and the angle seemed odd.

Know him?

Happily, no. The face on the screen looked like the antagonist from a horror film. You know, the one who chases people with the chain saw. Who is he?

"No clue. He packed a Clint Eastwood special and forensics found seven older bullets that hadn’t done him in."

That explained the mug shot’s eerie appearance. Dead men rarely smile for a photo.

Last night?

Yep. Cleaning him up for the picture wasn’t hard. One shot, in the left ear and out the right. Bullet didn’t expand much.

His pencil tapped more keys to summon another portrait, this one complete with front, sides and a subject who’d been breathing when the shutter clicked. Rafferty’s placid eyes turned my way. I answered negatively.

Edward Delgado. Good at dodging murder charges. Last one was reduced to manslaughter and he escaped on the way to Allenwood Penitentiary. Both his guards died in the process. Supposedly he was working for an outfit in Pittsburgh.

Past tense again.

Somebody killed Delgado last night at Mount Olivet. One shot. Let’s see how quick you pick up a pattern.

The next face seemed a decent sort, but photographs can be deceiving. Jeremy Blackwood enjoyed gunning people down at bus stops and train stations. Rafferty’s records credited him with six such kills in four states. He’d never been across the Mississippi till he came to Nashville to be shot through the heart in my favorite cemetery.

Four more followed. Each had a violent and elusive biography whose last chapter had been written at Mount Olivet. None were familiar. Whatever answers Rafferty might have expected from me would have to be found elsewhere.

Sorry, I told him. I must run with the wrong crowd.

"These guys are the wrong crowd, the Lieutenant said. And they all dropped in on Nashville a week ago. That’s why you and I are having this little chat."

To what end? Far as I can tell, there’s no connection between this and my current case.

Caterpillar eyebrows lowered over Rafferty’s gaze, which had gone suddenly intense.

I didn’t much believe myself, either. My gut knew I’d wandered into nastier business than just blackmail. Hunches never hold up in court, though, and I owed every client I took on reasonable discretion. Reasonable discretion meant playing dumb in a homicide detective’s office. I shrugged.

Rafferty made a noise like a grumpy volcano. No grounds to keep you. And you’re not going to listen. But I’m asking you to lie low till we figure out who lured seven of the country’s toughest gangsters to Nashville and shot them all dead in the same night. You and the killer are the only ones who lived through it. And I know why.

Dumb luck? I tried.

I doubt it. You weren’t on the list.

He reached into a drawer and retrieved two clear plastic bags. He spread the larger bag flat on the desk. It contained a single sheet of paper, creased into thirds for stuffing into an envelope, with seven rows of numbered names printed in twelve-point Times New Roman.

"This landed in my mailbox yesterday. My mailbox at home. Local postmark, no prints. The names matched some rough characters my team’s been trying to track down, and nobody outside that team should have known I was in charge.

"Eleven hours later, every one of these men is dead in the same place, shot once with the same gun. In the exact order shown here."

Excuse me?

The Lieutenant lifted the second evidence bag. It contained several smaller bags, each of which encased a metallic blob. The slugs weren’t ordinary. Their distortion was significantly less than typical fired rounds: they were jacketed like long-range hunting bullets, the surrounding metal unusually bright copper. The base of each was scribed with a number.

Iron alloy in the jackets, Rafferty said. The few we didn’t see outright would set off a fifty-dollar metal detector from four feet away. We were expected to find them. We were expected to compare them to that list. We’re the audience. Mount Olivet was a stage.

I exhaled noisily.

Rafferty nodded. Whoever this is knows we were looking. He—I’m only guessing gender—knows where I live. And he’s a better shot at midnight than any of us are at noon. People like this love spectators after the fact, but they aren’t crazy about accidental witnesses. When he finds out you were there and you’re not dead yet, then what? What you do and who you do it for are your business. But I’d think hard about it.

I will, I promised.

It would be difficult not to.

Chapter Two

Rafferty insisted an officer drive me home. I was too wired to disagree. Two pots of burnt coffee had propelled me through the morning, but my hands shook like a ninety-year-old’s and when the caffeine wore off I’d better be horizontal. The detective who played chauffer tipped me into the front of an unmarked Chevy Impala.

My condo was seven blocks from the station. I hadn’t planned it that way. The place was available when I moved to Nashville, the view from the balcony was terrific, and if I ever wanted to take in some culture the Schermerhorn Symphony Center waited right outside the front doors and across the street. I hadn’t succumbed to a desperate need for Beethoven yet, though it could happen any day. Being able to stroll down Third Avenue and chat with Jerry Rafferty in his broom closet of an office hadn’t entered into my purchase decision.

My finger stabbed the correct elevator button out of habit. I was a little muddy as to whether mine was the nineteenth or twentieth floor. But my door was the one with the enormous plainclothes officer standing in front of it.

Orders. The man flashed his badge in answer to my glare. He had the shoulders of a linebacker and plainly didn’t care what I thought of anybody’s orders.

Okay, I said. "But let’s not creep out my neighbors. Come in and lean against the inside of the door where everybody won’t see you."

My key engaged the lock on the second try. The plainclothes man crowded through the door with me, one hand under his jacket. Nobody waited inside for him to shoot, but since he’d been so gung-ho, I left him to find the light switch and deposited my hat and keys on the kitchen counter. Not much daylight spilled in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, which was unusual. The condo was an architecturally stark compilation of hardwood floors, raw concrete columns, and plate glass exterior walls with no regard for sufferers of acrophobia. Ignoring panoramas of city streets and the Cumberland River was as impossible as finding a place to hang a picture, and there was almost always light. Streetlights, sunrises, lightning when storms rolled through, the glare of Nissan Stadium across the water when the Titans played—I rarely needed a lamp on to get around at night. The reason for the current dimness turned out to be low, heavy black clouds that crawled through town three stories up before the streetlights were supposed to wake.

My loaner friend had the kitchen lights burning. He leaned against a wall and assumed what he must have thought was an inscrutable expression. He just looked bored to me. I thumbed on my phone.

For all my high-tech family history, I’d never much gone in for electronics. My laptop computer spent most of its existence weighing down magazines on the coffee table. The television looked very nice in a mahogany stand, so I kept it there though the cellophane hadn’t yet come off the remote. But my cell phone had gee whiz written all over it.

Processing power, data storage and battery life were on par with newer computers than mine. The on-board cameras were exceptional. A shock-resistant waterproof housing kept the insides safe, and the phone would only function if I was the one holding it. My contact lists, email, text messages and other data were backed up remotely and encrypted, but the physical device locked itself using technology based on capacitive fingerprinting; essentially it knew me by touch. Even then, I had to have a conscious pulse rate to make the thing go. One of my father’s best engineers at the Cool-Core research facility in Nashville had built the phone for me.

I’d kept it powered down since yesterday’s deadly goose chase. One telemarketer with exquisitely bad timing can get a person in my line of work killed. Four missed calls announced themselves on the touchscreen, all from the same familiar number. Tomorrow would be a better time to deal with that. I found Rafferty’s number and dialed. When he answered the background noise suggested I’d caught him in a car. Anywhere but that microscopic office.

You hired a babysitter?

Rafferty’s chuckles sounded identical to his annoyed growls. Even seeing his face, I could rarrely tell the difference. "Smally’s a good man. I figured you’d sleep better with someone on the lookout. For that matter, I’ll sleep better."

My guardian shifted awkwardly in the entryway, which didn’t have room to spare while he stood there.

"Smally?"

Kid him about it. He thinks it’s hilarious.

Uh-huh. If he tries following me around tomorrow, I’ll ditch his ass.

His job’s to mind the house. If I have you followed it won’t be that obvious. Rafferty ended the call with that same unidentifiable chuckle/growl.

Whiteness stuttered across the river to mimic the flicker my phone made when I shut it off again. The clouds decided since they were in town, what the hell, let’s have a storm. A hollow rumble proclaimed their decision and fat drops splashed against the glass. I remembered how badly I needed a shower. Officer Smally commandeered a breakfast bar stool and extracted a drugstore paperback from his hip pocket. I left him to it and stumped to the master bath.

The borrowed jail t-shirt went into the laundry hamper. Everything else landed in the bathroom trash. My regular clothes had a definite roadkill bouquet and I’d rather buy new shirts than discuss the stains with my cleaners. I stayed in the shower a long time.

Smally had plowed halfway through his paperback when I returned to the kitchen in my pajamas. If he planned to stay awake all night, I hoped he’d brought his own reading material. He was the sort who marked his spot by folding page corners over. The last thing I intended to read myself till tomorrow were the words Jack Daniel’s on a bottle label.

The windows afforded no outside views now, just squirming streaks of driven rain lit from behind by lightning. It occurred to me that Mount Olivet, too, was receiving a much-needed cleansing. The famous bones would appreciate that. I downed my whiskey, left the tumbler on top of the television stand and went to bed.

•••

Morning came and went without my participation. My stomach lost patience around noon, however, and had me up and showered shortly thereafter. I went ahead and shaved while I was at it. I’d have to see my client in Green Hills if I wanted my car back, and I didn’t want to be escorted off the grounds for looking like a transient.

I surveyed the results with little satisfaction. The face in the mirror still matched my license and carry permit, black hair with salty hints at mortality along the temples, square jaw that would need another application of the razor by suppertime, the same blue eyes I’d started out with thirty-seven years ago. So why did I feel like someone other than the person those laminated cards in my wallet declared me to be? I chalked it up to one bad night in a graveyard and finished dressing.

My spare holster hid in the back of the closet. The gun that fit the