Wanted: Lighthouse Keeper

By Erin O'Quinn

A bitter drunk meets a recovering paraplegic with a target on his back. Almost on the rim of the Arctic Circle, they’ve both run out of places to hide.

Dirk Black is a lost soul with a troubled past. When the washed-up cop happens to see an odd notice in a newspaper, his unshakable sense of irony sends him to a remote point in Scotland’s Shetland Islands. There he discovers something he’s never wanted and bloody hell doesn’t need—a computer nerd and recluse who’s confined to a tiny promontory in the North Sea.

Stephan Tavish is a scholar and business entrepreneur who’s managed to run from his family and from society, hoping for peace of mind in the solitude of his own land and his ancestor’s old isolated lighthouse. But karma has bitten him in the arse. He finds himself in a very dark place where he needs to ask for help, from a stranger who ’s lost himself in a whisky bottle.

Two alienated men, each with a mystery to solve, end up working together at the edge of nowhere. Together, they discover that something in their own past may hold the key to a very intriguing

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erin O'Quinn
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215068847

Erin O'Quinn

Erin O’Quinn sprang from the high desert hills of Nevada, from a tiny town which no longer exists. A truant officer dragged her kicking and screaming to grade school, too late to attend kindergarten; and since that time her best education has come from the ground she’s walked and the people she's met.Erin has her own publishing venue, New Dawn Press. Her works cover the genres of M/M and M/F romance and also historical fantasy for all ages.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Erin O ’ Quinn

New Dawn Press

ISBN: 9781005472443

First electronic edition published by New Dawn Press

Published in the United States of America with international distribution.

Cover Design by Erin O’Quinn (Bonita Franks)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author ’ s imagination or are used fictitiously; and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

WARNING: This writing contains explicit sexual descriptions and is intended for a mature audience over the age of 18.

Wanted: Lighthouse Keeper

Erin O’Quinn

Introduction

The kernel of the idea for this story was an actual item in The Scotsman newspaper. The details, of course, are constructed from my imagination. It really is an unending source of joy to me, to learn how much the people of Scotland love their land, their history, the music of their rich language. The national tartan of Scotland is a dense tapestry whose warp and weft are woven into my deep core. The MacGregor blood still calls.

I’ve bent actual history here and there to dovetail with the story. So, for instance, the lighthouse that stands on Fethaland in the Shetland Islands is a modern one constructed of aluminum and solar screens, erected in 1977. The original, historic lighthouse built by Stevenson sits forty miles farther to the south. But the spirit of it has made its way into the present story. The lighthouse and landscape on the cover are symbolic only.

Readers might know that lighthouse keepers are a relic of the past. In the Lighthouse Keeper series, the term is used for other, perhaps subtle reasons. Read on, and discover…

Blurb

A bitter drunk meets a lonely paraplegic with a target on his back. Almost on the rim of the Arctic Circle, they’ve both run out of places to hide.

Dirk Black is a lost soul with a troubled past. When the washed-up cop happens to see an odd notice in a newspaper, his unshakable sense of irony sends him to a remote point in Scotland’s Shetland Islands. There he discovers something he’s never wanted and bloody hell doesn’t need—a computer nerd and recluse who’s confined to a tiny promontory in the North Sea.

Stephan Tavish is a scholar and business entrepreneur who’s managed to run from his family and from society, hoping for peace of mind in the solitude of his own land and his ancestor’s old isolated lighthouse. But karma has bitten him in the arse. He finds himself in a very dark place where he needs to ask for help, from a stranger who’s lost himself in a whisky bottle.

Two alienated men, each with a mystery to solve, end up working together at the edge of nowhere. Together, they discover that something in their own past may hold the key to a very intriguing future.

Chapter 1:

Looking for a Halo

Wanted, Lighthouse Keeper. Survival skills helpful. Apply by July 30, 2021.

On the bar top, a well-thumbed weekly newspaper called The Shetland Times was folded over to the Want Ads fun and profit section at the back, fodder for horny drunks looking for an imaginary lay. Or maybe even a temporary job. The stark notice among gaudy promises of Lovely Lasses! and Work From Home! caught his eye.

In spite of a grinding headache and thoughts of verra painful suicide from the scalding fucking rotgut coffee…even through the fog of hangover, his lips twitched in a smile.

Only a few more words in the advert—an internet address—were enough to make him enter the cryptic dot com letters into his cell contacts before signaling the counter man for a refill.

Ye know this crap costs as much as da whisky, right, Jock-o?

His dismissive glare didn’t do much to shut up the man who poured more dark glue into his cup.

New in da Islands? It was more a statement than a question.

Might be.

Come by ferry did ye?

Maybe.

I hear a hitch in your voice. Highlands, not Islands.

Does it matter?

Highlands might get a free refill.

He managed a tight grin. Och, then the Highlands. He pulled a name from his splintered memory. Brig O’Cally.

Three or so years ago…a certain small hotel near the river…a stop-over between Ballater and Blair and Perth…laugh lines deepening around storm-gray eyes…

The pub-man settled in for a chat, elbows on the grimy counter top. I had a lady friend lived there once. Good times.

Aye. Good times. He looked up from the chipped mug. You got a computer for your guests who can plonk a keyboard?

The man laughed. Och aye. Back table. Five pounds, five minutes. WiFi code is LUCKY, an I hope ye get thaur.

Get where?

Och, lucky.

He slid a 5£ note onto the counter and took his cup with him to a small table near the men’s privy. The wobbly thing wasn’t much larger than a bar stool, enough to fit a circa-2010 bubble Mac and a straight-back chair against the wall. Not an ideal place to watch porn. But private, in a way, being so close to the privy. Ha.

It took less than a minute to log into the WiFi and type in the address. What he found was as much a surprise as the advert itself.

It was a job application form, but hardly one to tempt even the devil himself to apply.

Describe yourself in ten words . The provided space was enough for just that.

What is a lighthouse?

Weaponry and salary preferred.

Contact name and cell number.

Thank you for your interest. Will respond by July 31, 2021.

He glanced at his watch, mildly surprised that today’s date was July 29. He sighed and typed for three minutes, max, before logging off, swallowing the dregs of his coffee, and leaving the Sea Shanty Bar & Grill to the other drunks and derelicts.

He’d told himself after Mark died…after the numb grief, the stumbling attempts to do his job, the claps on the back and pitying looks from well-meaning colleagues…he’d told himself it was time to start over again. Not in Dundee, at the grimy gray PS headquarters where he’d managed to survive a four-year stint as undercover CID detective. Not anywhere near the stop-overs where they’d traveled on holiday together for a few slap-happy years. He’d go north. North, anywhere he could set one foot after another without remembering places and faces.

He couldnae recall most of the odd jobs he’d taken, just to earn bus fare and rental cars and ferry boats, just to buy Scotch and ever warmer clothing on his trek to the bloody North Pole. He had money in a safe place, for emergencies that he hoped would never come, so he never worried about his next meal or his next drink. So why the fuck had he ended up here? Here on a spit of land in Scotland’s forgotten frontier— here , in a clapboard-halfway house near the Sea Shanty, sleeping off another night of drink and despair?

Mark was gone. Almost two years ago, a lump of coal for Christmas. When a memory skittered across his soggy brain as it had this morning…Brig O’Cally…he could usually pull a bottle out of somewhere and go on forgetting.

But today, he seemed to be a nano-second off his usual pace of rambling, ambling loneliness. Someone, or something, had tripped the taut wire he’d strung to hold himself together.

Describe yourself in ten words.

Lost. Hair-trigger tense. Searching. Unforgiven-unforgiving. Final fucking frontier.

Okay, so that’s nine words. Or maybe hair-trigger is just one word .

He fell onto the narrow cot trying to think of just one more honest word. When he woke, the wan light filtering through a greasy window told him night was falling, no matter how bloody much it looked like morning…and his ear told him the fucking cell phone was ringing in his back pocket.

He let it go to text, falling again into the chasm of deep sleep he’d chosen as his second-favorite happy place.

He woke hungry.

A vague memory…the word grill from sometime this morning. Or last night. Whatever. He avoided looking at his haggard face in the cracked shaving mirror. A trickle of cold water from the gray basin next-to-the-toilet-next-to-the-cot was enough to bring life back to the numb skin of his stubbled cheeks, barely enough to wash a little puffiness from under the deep wells of his unfocused eyes. Not so much sea green, he decided, as brackish…

He smoothed out a few of the worst wrinkles in his flannel shirt, retrieved his jacket from the back of a chair, and left the tiny motel four-plex, walking along the boardwalk, back to the pier where the Sea Shanty beckoned with its grill and wee drams. Almost at the pub, his cell rang again. Shaking his head, he fished it out of his denims pocket and glanced at the screen.

Livingstone wasn’t a name—was it? Probably a funeral home, another spam caller. The call log showed this was the second time today from the same source.

He paused at the door while the phone continued to ring, trying to recall why he needed to answer, before taking the call anyway.

What the hell. What?

" A high place with a beacon, invented by angels to save seagoing idiots. Best definition I’ve ever found for a damned lighthouse." The voice was rich, deep, humor-tinged. A talented speaker…a politician…a preacher?

He’d done his best to shred most of his memories, but those words were his own, and now he remembered a reckless few minutes this morning in front of a sodding Apple computer.

I hadnae thought anyone would respond to a joke—your advert, and my response.

If it’s a jest, sir, it’s on me. My great-grandfather built the northern-most lighthouse on the Mainland of the Shetland Islands. The year was 1880.And aye, he was some kind of angel.

A briny sea-breeze tickled his throat, an unworthy substitute for a dram, and the aroma of frying fish sent a rumble from his stomach. I’m busy. Why are you calling? Who is this?

Ah, people call me Livingstone. And you are…

Black.

Just ‘Black’?

Call me Mister Black. I cannae believe you still want to waste your time with me.

I’ll tell you why. Because you decided to answer from the gut instead of the empty billfold.

This asshole is a little too close to the truth. Fine. I answered your advert on a whim. Why would a lighthouse caretaker need survival skills? Why would he need more weaponry than a piece of driftwood or a handyman’s wrench?

"Why indeed. Your whim may turn out to be your lifeline, sir. Our lifeline. I need a man with a sense of humor, with a brain, one who thinks of his fists before he thinks of his firearm."

The man named Dirk Black chuckled. He’d typed hands , then Glock 17 in the space reserved for preferred weaponry. He’d left the salary part unanswered.

What about the other stuff…the obvious lost soul in search of any fucking answer at all?

Lost soul? Nae, a man with a sense of mission. A man with no family or friends to tell him what he cannot do. A devil looking for a fucking halo.

You’re radge, Mr. Livingstone. I’m a drunk looking for his next wee dram, and that’s bloody all. Can we finish this after supper? I’ll call you—

No, you won’t call. I already know that. Just eat while we talk. I’ll polish up a halo and have it waiting at the end of our conversation. Ten minutes. All right?

The voice was pleasant, a little nerve-wracking in its scalpel-thrust insights, and humorous in a verra annoying way.

All right. You have a deal. Keep talking.

Dirk walked inside, to a corner table in the back. He sat listening to the voice of a stranger, convinced he wanted nothing to do with the sketchy