GUMSHOE
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GUMSHOE
A Mortimer Angel Novel
ROB LEININGER
Copyright © 2015 by Rob Leininger
FIRST EDITION
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: 978-1-60809-163-8
Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing
Longboat Key, 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, as always.
GUMSHOE
CHAPTER ONE
FOUR HOURS INTO my new career as a private eye—a gumshoe—I found Reno’s missing mayor. Me, Harold Angel’s son, as unlikely as that was to all those who know me. Mayor Jonnie Sjorgen had been missing for ten days. By the time he’d been gone a week, he was national news, so my locating him was a major coup that got me well-deserved but unwanted media attention. More about that later. First, there were the two gorgeous women who came into my life.
* * *
I was sitting at the bar when the first girl wandered into the Green Room at 10:56 p.m. and looked around. Other than two middle-aged ladies drinking mai tais at the farthest table from the entrance, and, of course, me, the place was empty.
An old Star Trek rerun was winding up on the TV over the bar, the real deal from before my time with Kirk and Spock, old funky bad-ass Klingons in bad costumes.
Tucked into a corner of Reno’s Golden Goose Casino, the Green Room was a dim, unlikely watering hole overlooked by many of the locals. It was also too tucked or too dim to attract the attention of folks from out of town, which made it a good place to get a quiet buzz on or get loaded to the gills.
Pretty damn fine evening, it was, too. I had sole possession of the bar’s remote, and I was about to start a whole new career in the morning as a PI, Reno’s very own Sam Spade, when this finely tuned Penthouse creature appeared at the entrance and looked around with nothing promising on the horizon except me.
Which shows how much looks can be deceiving.
After giving the place a quick scan, she sauntered over and eased onto the stool next to mine at the otherwise empty bar. This was, of course, a sizeable mistake on her part, but how was she to know? And what were her options? I gave her a quick scan of my own. By some clever, possibly industrial, process, she had been poured into a slinky black dress that had responded by filling out more than adequately in all the customary places. Or maybe she’d been dipped in liquid silk and inflated.
But enough about her. In my personal experience, and in the court of public opinion, IRS agents rank somewhere below that of politicians or prostitutes. As a result, my place in society for the past sixteen years had been fixed somewhere beneath the rock you’d look under to find a Sunset Boulevard hooker or the politician atop her.
Sixteen interminable years. It was time for a change. First week in July I finally made it. Told the IRS to shove it and took three weeks off—a well-deserved mini-vacation before embarking on my new career. I figured this change in my life, as radical and irresponsible as it was, was going to be a snap, exactly what I needed as I approached the midlife-crisis years. As it turned out, I was wrong about the snap, but that was anything but new.
It’s said that a change of careers is stressful, but I didn’t see it that way. Why would I? I was going from one of the world’s worst jobs to one of the best. My equanimity was also due in part to the large number of Pete’s Wicked Ales I’d downed that evening, elbows planted on the bar’s oddly colored green leatherwork, awash in dim green lighting as Scotty fixed the Enterprise’s busted warp drive for the umpteenth time. Warp drives in the future, I decided, were like the Xerox machines of today—a promising and useful technology, but buggy.
I took a sidelong look at my newly acquired drinking partner. It wouldn’t be long before she hit on me. That she would was pretty much guaranteed, practically a requirement of my upcoming position as a private investigator, which would begin—I glanced at my watch, not a Rolex or even a knockoff—in about ten hours. The girl showing up at this pivotal moment in my life was predictable, written in the stars as they say, my way of getting a jump on what I knew was destined to become routine.
She was a looker, all right. Slender, frizzy blond hair, long legs, perfect curves, sleek as an otter. I took another hit of Pete’s from a longneck as I awaited the inevitable. I’d read the books. I knew the drill. No doubt there’s an entire chapter on gorgeous gals in the PI’s manual. I gave the guy in the mirror behind the bar a fatuous wink, and he winked back at me, right on cue. Turns out both of us were drinking Wicked Ale. I liked that.
During my years as a field agent for the IRS, I could count true friends on the fingers of one hand, with a few fingers left over. Reno’s phone book was a roster of potential enemies. After finally dumping the whole mess—all those years, including a percentage of what had metastasized into an almost attractive pension
