Bones and Ashes (A Dal Weeks and Jack Summers Mystery)

By Lee Capp

Thirty years. My, how the time has flown by. And with that has come changes. But that’s the way it is. Nothing ever stays the same. As old Johnny O’Brien always used to say, “Time is like a river. Either flow with it or drown.”

Here, in the near future of Bones and Ashes, 2053 has seen a bunch of changes. Johnny, long retired, has finally passed on and left Watchmaker Enterprises to a younger man, Chief Investigator Dallin Weeks.

Weeks, in respect to his late mentor and friend, opens an investigation into a Detroit cold case long troubling the mind of the retired O’Brien; the depression era disappearance of a young girl, kidnapped by henchmen of mobster boss Scarface Al Capone and thought to be murdered.

A nice safe journey down family history lane.

Or is it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lee Capp
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215360507

Lee Capp

Lee Capp (Larry Lee Caplin) was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1949, back when the Motor City was the crown jewel of the Midwest, and the center of the manufacturing might of America. Raised on motors and Motown and brought up in a tiny suburb called Walled Lake, he had a very misspent youth focused on rock and roll music, amusement parks, good friends (some of which were even girls) movies, golden age television shows and fortunately lots of really good books. Personal favorites among them were the popular anthologies of Alfred Hitchcock and Dorothy Sayers and the crime novels of Ellery Queen and Mickey Spillane. In addition to being a life-long writer of what he calls "Unsold and unsellable dumb stupid stuff" Capp has worked in many fields during his long career, including a short but very interesting stint as an apprentice embalmer in a Tucson, Arizona funeral home and a fish monger in Seattle, Washington. The fish selling he has said was equivalent to an advanced college degree in the study of human nature. Johnny O'Brien is a compilation of Capp himself, who descends from Irish, Scottish and English farmers, fishermen and lumberjack immigrants, and he says, a number of other (verbally at least) bad-assed friends of his youth. Capp says that "if we all were even a tenth as tough as we thought we were, we could have ruled the world." Lee Capp and his wife Bea, retired at last from the workaday world, now reside among the pines, ponds and streams outside Seattle, Washington, where he continues to see just how much trouble he can get Johnny O'Brien and Matt McCabe into the next time around. Contact the author at [e-mail], On Facebook as Larry Lee Caplin (Lee Capp) and [e-mail]

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BONES AND ASHES

A Dal Weeks and Jack Summers Mystery

LEE CAPP

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Smashwords Edition

Bones and Ashes

Copyright 2023 by Lee Capp

All rights reserved.

Cover Design & Layout: Laura Shinn Designs

http://laurashinn.yolasite.com

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be copied or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author or publisher.

Bones and Ashes is a work of fiction. Though some of the cities and towns actually exist, they are used in a fictitious manner solely for purposes of this work. All characters herein are works of fiction and any names or characteristics similar to any person past, present or future are purely coincidental and unintentional.

Connect with Lee online at:

Email: [e-mail]

Facebook: https://facebook.com/larry.l.caplin

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

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

Epilogue

About the Author

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Dedication

For Johnny O’Brien. The best imaginary friend

a guy ever had. Thanks, pal.

What a trip.

And to the very real, late, great, Norman Selby, aka,

Charles, the Kid McCoy. In the Pantheon of scallywags

of great renown, you sir, were the scallywaggyist.

All my love to you. And my hopes to meet you up yonder.

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Acknowledgements

The extent to which this novella may be good is due almost entirely to the contributions of my incredible sounding board/wife, photographer, and young adult author, Nadene Berryhill Caplin.

As always, artist/cover designer/formatter, Laura Shinn made it look nice, and be readable.

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PROLOGUE

Bellevue, Washington, Summer of 2053

The cloying odor of flowers assailed my nostrils and canned organ music my ears as the knob turned easily in my hand and I pushed the viewing room door inward.

I willed my body to enter a place that it did not want to go. I made it go anyway. Inside was the dead body of a man, and that man was my friend, and I had come to pay my final respects.

Johnny O’Brien had lived hard and died easy. And quick. A massive chest buster. He would have liked that. No fuss, no muss. Eighty-two. A fast exit. No long goodbyes for old Johnny.

I had met him when he was busily engaged in trying to save the world. Literally. From a madman with a nuclear bomb and a bad attitude of biblical proportions. I helped him do it and took two high powered rifle slugs in the chest for my efforts, making me pretty much a crippled and useless ex DC gumshoe cop.

I lived but left half a lung behind on the operating table. Johnny stepped in and took me under his wing and into his life and taught me everything he knew. Which was a hell of a lot. Mostly about how to be a good man. I always hoped it took, but sometimes I doubted it.

I guess you could say he saved my life.

By the time he was starting to slow down and thinking about full-time retirement, he had built a detective agency worth millions. And he sold it all to me. A nobody. For a one-dollar bill.

Like I said, there was only one Johnny O’Brien, and there’d never be another. I didn’t even intend to try to fill those unfillable shoes. But I did and do try daily to live up to the expectations that he had for me, and the trust and faith he put in me.

I didn’t really care that much for the name of the agency I had purchased—Watchmaker Enterprises, so I changed it. To Bones and Ashes, to better reflect the cold cases which make up the bulk of my business.

My name is Dallin Weeks. Just Dal for short and to my friends. And like my old pal Johnny, I’m a private eye too.

And just like him, my specialty is murder.

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CHAPTER ONE

A Toast

Our little group sat around the table at Applebee’s, waiting for our drink refills. After the funeral at Sunset Hills in Bellevue, I had invited Matt and Linh McCabe to lunch with the understanding that there would be plenty of libations. We were on our second set of Diet Cokes at the moment. It would have been nice to have been able to hold it at a Denny’s, but alas, the last of Johnny’s favorite restaurants had closed nearly fifteen years before. Time marches on, I guess.

It seemed a hollow gesture, but none of the three of us felt much like anything stronger. Coke, the beverage of choice of our ever-sober friend, seemed to set the right tone.

The funeral went well. At least to the point when Matt began to unfurl the American flag that he had personally brought from home to drape on the casket. You see, Johnny had never been in the military, although he had served at the pleasure of the Commander in Chief on one very important occasion. Anyway, the funeral director decided that he couldn’t allow the flag to be placed and tried to stop Matt. Matt, being the real nice person he is, was just beginning to try to reason with the guy in a gentle and well-mannered fashion, when I brought it all to a sudden halt by the simple expedient of dragging the little mutt backward by the collar of his shirt for about fifty feet and sitting him back down unceremoniously in his chair.

He seemed happy to stay there when I explained to him that if his ass came out of it again, I would slap the cheesy little moustache off his face. Apparently, those were acceptable terms, as he remained there for the rest of the service, as though his butt were glued to the thing.

At the end of the ceremony, Matt and I properly tri-folded the flag up nice and since there was no widow to give it to, Maggie having preceded him in death, I was simply going to take it back to my office. Bones and Ashes, LLC, was in the exact same spot that Johnny had started Watchmaker Enterprises so long ago. I was going to mount it in a glass case on the wall, right next to an old bullet hole from one of Johnny’s