Bullet Beach Read online

  The Deets Shanahan Mysteries

  THE STONE VEIL

  THE STEEL WEB

  THE IRON GLOVE

  THE CONCRETE PILLOW

  NICKEL-PLATED SOUL *

  PLATINUM CANARY *

  GLASS CHAMELEON *

  ASPHALT MOON *

  BLOODY PALMS *

  BULLET BEACH*

  The Carly Paladino and Noah Lang

  San Francisco Mysteries

  DEATH IN PACIFIC HEIGHTS *

  DEATH IN NORTH BEACH *

  * available from Severn House

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2010

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2010 by Ronald Tierney.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Tierney, Ronald.

  Bullet beach. – (The Deets Shanahan mysteries)

  1. Shanahan, Deets (Fictitious character) – Fiction.

  2. Private investigators – Indiana – Indianapolis –

  Fiction. 3. Missing persons – Investigation – Thailand –

  Fiction. 4. Serial murder investigation – Indiana –

  Indianapolis – Fiction. 5. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  813.5'4-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-055-5 (ePub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6954-8 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-285-7 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  Dedicated to Lost Brothers

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Sincere appreciation for the contributions from my brothers Richard and Ryan and from David Anderson, Jovanne Reilly and Karen Watt.

  ‘I live my life as if every moment precedes my death by seconds.’

  — Fritz Shanahan

  ONE

  If Dietrich Shanahan didn’t make the trip now, odds were diminishing that he ever would. For a man of seventy-two, he was in pretty fair condition. His organs worked – most of them, most of the time. He was agile enough to putter in the garden and had enough endurance to take his dog Casey on long, brisk walks. He could make the overseas trip pretty easily, but who knows how much longer that would be the case. True, his mind was slipping a bit. That particular facet of aging seemed to accelerate after a bullet made its way through his thick skull not that long ago.

  The incident had him clinging to life, something he hadn’t had that much affection for until, in his late sixties, he met Maureen and living became meaningful. Though he would never tell anyone this – he wasn’t given to sentimentality – she made life worthwhile. Only she. If she were gone there would be no point.

  Maureen, a couple of decades younger, was beautiful, smart, fearless, funny and hungry. Almost always hungry. Hagan Daz Swiss Almond Vanilla was a better gift than diamonds. Dinner at a nice restaurant and she was happy for a week. He had no idea what she was doing with him. While he considered himself unfairly fortunate, he wasn’t about to ask her why. That would only screw it up.

  From the bathroom, even with the door closed, he could hear her doing her morning routine, slippered feet padding about the hallway’s hardwood floor, then hushing away in the distance as she went to the kitchen. He’d been up for a while, long before she climbed out of bed. He had his own routine. He’d fed the ancient, bony cat, Einstein, and let his sixty-pound, spotted and speckled Catahoula hound out the back for his morning constitutional. A little breakfast and coffee as he read the morning paper.

  He dropped his razor and in his search noticed the cap of the toothpaste further over by the bathtub. He kicked the razor toward the cap so that he’d have to bend over just once. What laziness he thought. He noticed his embarrassment as he glanced at his own image in the mirror.

  Shanahan was feeling a little self-conscious, a new and foreign feeling. He’d decided to grow a beard for the first time in his long life. He’d always thought them pretentious, but he was going where no one knew him – another continent altogether. And in some way he didn’t quite understand he wanted to see without being seen.

  Maureen was coming with him on the trip. He knew the reason she was coming with him. She wanted to make sure he was all right. She wouldn’t admit it because if she did he wouldn’t allow her to come along. And he wouldn’t ask her if that was the reason because he didn’t like the idea of her lying. It was one of those compromises he learned to make late in life.

  On the other hand, she was the one who suggested he go. It was her idea to exorcise – out of the many he had been forced to confront – the remaining ghost in his life.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ Shanahan asked Maureen as he came into the kitchen. She washed some blueberries to put into her yogurt.

  ‘I always sleep well,’ she said, grinning. ‘A guiltless conscience.’

  ‘That’s telling.’

  ‘Telling what?’ She had that look.

  Perhaps he could pull it back.

  ‘That you are an angel.’

  ‘Ah,’ she smiled, ‘very good.’ She wore tan slacks and one of Shanahan’s old, white shirts, open two buttons at the collar. Her auburn hair caught a bit of morning light that angled through the window. ‘You are much more agile in the word department than you were when I first met you,’ she said.

  That was true. And to further show what he’d learned, he kept quiet.

  She looked down, stepped over the sleeping cat, and headed toward the coffee maker. Einstein had found the sunlight as well and sprawled in the warm spot it made on the floor. If cat years were the same as dog years, Einstein was one hundred and twenty-six. The vet called him an ‘elderly gentleman.’ Though he moved slowly and his bones sometimes made him look like a walking tent, there was an enduring elegance to the old tom.

  ‘We should get to the airport by ten thirty. The plane leaves at midnight,’ she said.

  Shanahan went outside. In a few hours, the air would thicken and the temperature would climb. It was best to get the watering in early. Otherwise, he’d have to wait
until evening. August was to summer as March was to spring – ugly months. Were there the Ides of August? It wasn’t all that much better in Thailand in August. He and Maureen could expect hot, humid days in between the monsoons, he thought.

  He unwound the hose and pulled it toward the big beds of lilies and iris. Both the irises and the peonies, down a slight embankment, were on their last legs. The growing season for most of the plants in the garden was over. Maintenance seemed to be the challenge – prolonging life, he thought as his thumb on the nozzle produced a fine spray that danced a bit in the air before falling toward the ground.

  No dreams of Fritz last night. But his brother permeated his thoughts. Sometimes it was hard to tell which thoughts came from actual memories and which were dreams. Could be both, entangled somewhere in the complex circuits of the brain. But the dreams of Fritz vexed him, resurrected a tremendous guilt. He wasn’t one, he thought, to dwell in the past. But here it was. Whatever madness possessed him to find out about his brother after sixty years was intensifying. And there was a race now – to find Fritz Shanahan before one of them died.

  He moved the spray, the low sun creating various rainbows in the mist. The air was heavy and made the morning quiet and still. The quiet was eventually breached. A wife shouted something to her husband. Shanahan looked down the slope of the slight hill his home rested upon, through a break in the scraggly trees and across the creek to the street on the other side. A man in a gray suit climbed into a late model Hyundai. The man yelled back. Casey, nearly as old as Einstein, was awakened by the noise and noticed a trespasser. He made a half-hearted effort to catch the squirrel, turning the event into more of a scolding than a murder attempt. Quiet, still again except for the sound of the water coming out of the hose.

  It was a long shot, Shanahan believed, trying to find his brother. The news article in an English-language Thai newspaper was two years old. Maureen found it on the Internet. The paragraph was just one item in a compilation of recent crimes.

  American expatriate Fritz Shanahan, 68, was released yesterday when witnesses failed to show up for a trial. Shanahan, under investigation for smuggling, had been arrested for assault and battery in January.

  Two years ago. That would make this seventy-year-old Fritz Shanahan the right age. Could there be two seventy-year-old Fritz Shanahans in the world? After days of searching Maureen could find nothing more of old Fritz. Yet it was enough for a plan. A silly plan Shanahan was inclined to think. Even if Fritz was still alive and still in Bangkok, finding him wouldn’t be easy.

  Maureen tapped the horn lightly as she backed her Toyota down the driveway. He turned, waved. She was off to pick up some things for the trip and she would stop by the realtor’s office to make sure her clients were being covered in her absence. She was gone for the day. He was on his own.

  The bar was empty. Harry, the owner, sat at the far end, face in his hands. He looked up as Shanahan approached. He shook his head and was quiet for a moment.

  ‘Growin’ a soup catcher, Jesus Christ, Deets, what in the hell is wrong with you?’

  ‘Thought I’d see what it looks like.’

  ‘Looks like hell, that’s what it looks like. You get yourself a grocery cart too? I got a razor around here somewhere. You can shave it off in the men’s room.’

  ‘Now that I’ve got your opinion, I guess I’ll keep it.’

  ‘You know, you’ve been actin’ strange for awhile now. Sixty years drinkin’ the same beer and then you just change to Guinness. Just like that.’

  ‘Sixty years?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You saying I started drinking at twelve?’

  Harry laughed. ‘Look at this, will you? Just look around. You know what happened to my customers?’

  Shanahan shook his head ‘no’, pulled up a stool a couple down from Harry. Harry got up, ducked under the bar and found a bottle of Guinness for Shanahan.

  ‘Dead,’ Harry said. ‘That’s what happened.’

  ‘You kill ’em?’ Shanahan asked.

  Harry set the bottle in front of Shanahan and went to the back bar to pour him a shot of J.W. Dant bourbon.

  ‘No, I didn’t kill ’em,’ he said.

  ‘I was thinking the stew did it. You never got it right.’

  ‘No,’ Harry said, suppressing a grin. ‘My stew didn’t kill anybody. Might have made ’em wish they were dead, but it didn’t kill ’em. What I’m sayin’ is that they’re all dying off, or moving some place where the sun takes the chill off their bones or where people look after them. Nobody left in the neighborhood. Not even much of a neighborhood left.’

  Harry was right, though he wouldn’t tell him that. It wasn’t the same neighborhood and it wasn’t the same times. People didn’t go to neighborhood bars and drink the afternoon away anymore. Not like they used to, anyway. It had been happening little by little, year by year. And finally, Harry noticed.

  ‘It’s the end of an era,’ Harry said. ‘I can’t make it here anymore.’

  He couldn’t. Used to be that there’d be three shifts of men coming into the bar each day. An old, early crowd – sometimes a few women with them. They went home just about the time the younger blue-collar workers came in after work. And there’d be the late night guys. Guys. Mostly guys – many of them like Shanahan was at the time, drinking a few beers to while away time they didn’t know how else to fill. Shanahan thought of it as God’s waiting room.

  ‘The lease is up first of the year.’ Harry shrugged and it seemed to say that to continue was futile.

  ‘Oh crap, Harry.’ There wasn’t anything Shanahan could say. He’d like to say something a little more sympathetic, but he couldn’t get it out and even if he could Harry would be uncomfortable. They’d known each other for decades and never said anything nice to each other, nothing consoling certainly.

  ‘Well enough of the schmaltzy stuff,’ Harry said, poking at Shanahan’s beard. ‘What’s with you and your friend there?’

  ‘Going to go look for my brother.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Didn’t know you had one.’

  ‘Practically speaking, I guess I don’t.’

  ‘You’re not making sense again.’

  ‘One night when I was young some people came and took my brother away. Never saw him again.’

  ‘And you’re just now getting’ around to lookin’ for him?’ Harry asked, suddenly animated with frustration. Shanahan would call Harry ‘excitable.’

  ‘Slipped my mind,’ Shanahan said. There was no point going into it. It was hard enough for Shanahan to understand. Why had he waited so long? Why was his mind dredging it all up? Why was it so important now? ‘How about another shot?’

  ‘Where are you looking?’

  ‘Start in Bangkok?’

  ‘Thailand?’ Harry looked shocked.

  Shanahan nodded.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight,’ Shanahan said.

  ‘And just when were you plannin’ on tellin’ me?’ Harry asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘About now.’

  Harry shook his head.

  ‘And Maureen?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s going too.’

  ‘Why on earth would she go on that kind of trip with you?’

  ‘Brand new menu.’

  Shanahan looked down the empty bar, shook his head. While things were slowing down for Harry, they were speeding up for Shanahan. He had a lot to do before the search for Fritz actually began.

  After they switched planes in Chicago, Maureen and Shanahan would be off on a quiet, five-hour flight to San Francisco. The plan was to freshen up at a cheap hotel in San Francisco, spend a little time with Shanahan’s son, daughter in-law, and a grandson for brunch and catch another late night flight to Hong Kong. From Hong Kong to Bangkok, last known address for a Fritz Shanahan.

  TWO

  Howie Cross never thought of himself as having a Good Samaritan-type personality. He tried to do the right th
ing, if he knew what it was, in any given situation; but he hadn’t spent his life doing good things for people as a matter of course. True, he’d been thrown off the police force because he had trouble putting people away for possession of marijuana and he disliked the idea of hassling prostitutes who had entered that life willingly. Unfortunately these weren’t the qualities the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department wanted in a vice cop. On the other hand he wasn’t volunteering at a soup kitchen or carrying a protest sign.

  Lately, though, he was drawn in to these sorts of things. He had decided to take care of an orphan, originally thought to be his. Even though she wasn’t he had grown to love her and felt the need to protect her. He spent weekends with her at his parents’, where the young girl lived now, and where he began to repair his folks’ aging, teetering farmhouse. Now he was taking his friend – and in some ways mentor – Deets Shanahan and his companion Maureen to the airport. He had also volunteered to take care of Shanahan’s dog and cat. They weren’t happy about the change in scenery, but they were familiar with it and would adapt.

  Was there a Saint Howie, he wondered, hidden under his Peter Pan complex? He laughed in his empty car. After dropping the animals at his house and Maureen and Shanahan at the airport, he headed toward the Eastside where he would pick up Slurpy. The two of them would drive a little further east and then north to pick up a repo Lincoln near 21st and Drexel. No Saint Howie, he concluded. If there was some sort of post-life justice system, his worries were simply about which rung of hell he’d occupy for eternity.

  It wasn’t quite midnight, when Cross found Slurpy at Slurpy’s home away from home. He was sitting on the steps at the bar’s rear exit staring out into the parking lot.

  ‘Hey Slurp,’ Cross said as the huge guy climbed into the passenger seat. Cross could feel the car dip to that side. Slurpy slammed the door shut. It wasn’t an angry gesture. It was just the way he did things. Slurpy wasn’t a bad guy. He was a little slow, seemed to have to be told everything twice and tended to behave as if all problems had physical solutions. This unfortunate set of characteristics and his – Cross guessed – three hundred and forty-five pound body made him unpredictable and extremely formidable.