Lockdown Blues: A Tai & Trey Story

By Tina Whittle

Tai Randolph doesn't like to be stuck inside. Not even with Trey, who can be distracting in close quarters. And especially not with spring beckoning just outside the window. But when a simple favor turns into something more mysterious—and more challenging—Tai realizes that crime doesn't stop during a quarantine…and neither does her penchant for sleuthing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mojito Literary Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9798223090885

Tina Whittle

Tina Whittle's Tai Randolph & Trey Seaver series—featuring intrepid gun shop owner Tai and her corporate security agent partner Trey—has garnered starred reviews in Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal. A two-time nominee for Georgia Author of the Year and a Derringer finalist, Tina enjoys birdwatching, sushi, and reading tarot cards. She is a proud member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, where she has served as both a chapter officer and national board member. You can find out more about her and her work, plus read excerpts and short stories and other etceteras at her website.

Book preview

Forward

IT WAS ONE OF THE WEIRDEST and most challenging summers in my memory—the summer of 2020. As a way of staying productive (and also avoiding a prolonged wallow in my own anxiety), I decided to peek in on Tai and Trey (my series characters) and see how they were handling COVID quarantine.

The result is the story Lockdown Blues, which is something of a locked room mystery in reverse—instead of the crime taking place in a locked room, the solving of the crime happens within four walls

But writing it was more than a hat-trick experiment for me. I am interested in the ways that crimes impact our collective experience, how transgressions large or small tear at the social fabric, revealing how connected we are even during times of isolation. Even during a pandemic.

Lockdown Blues

I TUCKED THE PHONE between my shoulder and ear and kept typing. No, we’re not open. And before you ask, we’re not making deliveries either. Or curbside. We’re closed, like, for real closed. It says so on the website.

But I need ammo!

I smashed the button and tossed the phone on the table. Pressed my fingers to my temples.

I swear, I said, if I get one more nut job wanting weapons or bullets or black powder, I’m gonna break quarantine, drive directly to their house, and hit them with a genuine reproduction camp skillet. I swear I am.

There was no reply from the bedroom, only the mechanical drone of the treadmill and the one-two-one-two rhythm of Trey’s running shoes. He didn’t run with earphones, so I knew he’d heard me. But he was thirty minutes into an hour-long workout, and unless I literally started screaming, he’d keep pounding away, mile after mile unspooling beneath him even if he didn’t go anywhere.

The 42nd day of quarantine. A Saturday, though days of the week were hard to track. Trey had reminded me about a million times that we weren’t technically in quarantine—a true quarantine separated a person reasonably believed to have been exposed to a communicable disease but who was not yet symptomatic—and since neither of us had any symptoms of a viral infection or any contact since mid-March with anyone who had, we were technically in self-imposed isolation, he’d said.

Together. Which was self-imposed something else.

Trey was the love of my life, no doubt about it, which made being cooped up with him manageable. Unlike me, he was temperamentally equipped For These Times. An introverted homebody, he had to be pried out of his apartment like an oyster out of a really tight, really well-appointed shell.

And as shells went,