GUMSHOE
ON THE LOOSE
Also by Rob Leininger
The Mortimer Angel Series
Gumshoe for Two
Gumshoe
Other Novels
Richter Ten
Sunspot
Killing Suki Flood
Maxwell’s Deamon
January Cold Kill
Olongapo Liberty
GUMSHOE
ON THE LOOSE
A MORTIMER ANGEL NOVEL
ROB LEININGER
Copyright © 2018 Rob Leininger
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-60809-274-1
Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing Sarasota, Florida
www.oceanviewpub.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For my wife, Pat,
who puts up with a lot.
A lot.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel wouldn’t exist without the dedication and expertise of the Oceanview Publishing team: Pat and Bob Gussin, Lee Randal, Emily Baar, Lisa Daily, and others. Many thanks to all of you.
Thanks also to my “readers,” Tracy Ellis, Madelon Martin, and my wife, Pat, for making it appear as if I know what I’m doing.
And a special thanks to fellow writer and best-selling author John Lescroart for his unflagging support, for making me smile with almost-daily e-mails, for believing in the Gumshoe series, and for his gift to the world of the Dismas Hardy novels.
GUMSHOE
ON THE LOOSE
CHAPTER ONE
I AM A murderer.
Technically speaking.
One of these days I’ll have to look up the applicable statutes to get a better handle on that, see if there’s any wiggle room, but I don’t think the wording offers much in the way of latitude when you remove someone from this earth with malice aforethought—so, yeah . . . technically I committed a good-sized felony, not that I’m about to give myself up. On the other hand, the Bible says something about an eye for an eye, and it was written centuries before the Nevada Revised Statutes, so I think I’ll be okay during check-in at the Pearly Gates. If not, I’ll have Maude Clary—Ma—for company in the other place.
Saturday evening I was sitting at the bar in the Green Room in Reno’s Golden Goose casino with Ma to my left and Holiday to my right, so I had the only two women in the place all to myself, a situation with cosmic underpinnings. As a gumshoe, a PI, albeit in training, women have flocked to me like pigeons to a statue. I had no control over that. I didn’t encourage it. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it—not that I wanted to, since it put a little extra spring in my step. Ma was my new mentor and boss, sixty-two years old. She could drink me under the table any day of the week, not that we ever gave it a try. And Holiday, perched beside me, was a hell of a sight, twenty-five years old, a gorgeous girl with three inches of tight tummy showing, and enough pneumatic cleavage to cause a riot.
Pneumatic? I know from experience that if you remove the inner tube from a bicycle tire and pump it up for a while, it gets big and firm. I did this when I was twelve. I kept pumping and it eventually popped, made a hearty bang—the bicycle tire, just to be clear. But I’m older now and more worldly, able to compare over-inflated bicycle tires to other things. In life, this is called growth and sophistication.
“Don’t look now, but you’re getting more than your share of attention,” I said to Holiday, referring to three college-age guys at the far end of the bar, drooling in her direction.
She gave them a cursory look. “Yep.”
“I said, ‘Don’t look.’”
“I heard you. In case you didn’t know, ‘Don’t look’ means, ‘Hey, look.’ Also, Mort . . .”
“What?”
“In bars, you’re still impossible to talk to. Other places, too, like in cars, restaurants, airports, but bars are the worst.”
“Anyway, kiddo, nice big smile at the lads. It’s likely they’re athletes. They’ve got a team salivation thing going. I think the guy in the Eddie Bauer polo shirt is in the lead.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t sound impressed. This is your thing, remember?”
“Not like it was before. I mean, it’s okay, but it doesn’t have the kick it used to. Right now, it’s practically gone.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. What I’ve got with you is a lot better.”
“Okay, then, I’m not sorry.”
Ma lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of carcinogens toward the ceiling. “You two oughta get a room.”
Holiday gave me a look. “Not the worst idea ever.”
“Can’t. This is Saturday.”
“Rules were meant to be broken.”
“If you break rules, you have no rules.”
“Spoilsport.”
The trio of hopefuls looked like poli-sci grad students, early to midtwenties, preppy in a modern-era way, shooting me dirty looks, no doubt wondering what a girl like Holiday was doing with an old coot like me, forty-two years old. At their age, I would’ve done the same. They would have stared bug-eyed at us if they knew what redlined her engine.
The television above the bar was tuned to a local station. News at Eleven came up on Channel Four. First up, no surprise, was the ongoing story of Jo-X’s disappearance. Jonnie Xenon was Nevada’s very own “gangsta” rapper, an opportunistic, foulmouthed piece of shinola, twenty-four years old, who had taken advantage of all the flaws and loopholes in the First Amendment to make millions while encouraging kids to kill their parents and rape their hoes—a ho being pretty much any female in the vicinity who still had a pulse, not that a pulse was an absolute requirement according to Jo-X. He was pulling in something like five or six million a year, another reason I
