Popping the Shine

By JC Simmons

This is the newly released COMPLETE VERSION of "Popping the Shine (Book 6 of the Jay Leicester Mysteries Series)" by critically acclaimed southern author JC Simmons.

New Orleans settings, gangland murder, police corruption, and international drug operations are the backdrop for J.C. Simmons' sixth serial mystery. Simmons' famed Aviation Consultant/Investigator, Jay Leicester (pronounced "Lester"), is drawn into a worldwide drug manufacturing operation when an old family friend's grandson is brutally murdered and nailed to a French Quarter street in New Orleans, Louisiana. What begins as a simple visit to pay respects at a funeral brings Leicester face to face with gruesome killings and evil people driven by power and money.

This is not about famed New Orleans Queen Marie Leveau, or Voodoo, or gris-gris, or 'Wangas,' but the evil that lies within the hearts of man, an evil so vile that killing an infant means nothing. This is an intense and fast-paced thriller that is plot driven, character oriented, and a must read for any Mystery/Thriller aficionado.

There are 10 ebooks in the Jay Leicester Mysteries Series by JC Simmons:

Blood on the Vine
Some People Die Quick
Blind Overlook
Icy Blue Descent
The Electra File
Popping the Shine
Four Nines Fine
The Underground Lady
Akel Dama
The Candela of Cancri

• Language: English
• Publisher: JC Simmons
• Release date: Jan 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781936377633

JC Simmons

JC Simmons is the author of an Ernest Hemingway biography, several short stories and ten critically acclaimed serial mystery novels, known as the "Jay Leicester Mysteries Series". Included in the series are: Blood On The Vine, Some People Die Quick, Blind Overlook, Icy Blue Descent, The Electra File, Popping the Shine, Four Nines Fine, The Underground Lady, Akel Dama, and The Candela of Cancri, all of which have been recently re-released as ebooks by Nighttime Press LLC.From the Author's mouth:My flying career and writing in general was inspired by a single book titled, Fate is the Hunter, by Ernest K. Gann. Writing specifically as a style was manifest due to a single book titled, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, by Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s official biographer. A friend and Emergency Room doctor, Edgar Grissom, who would later publish the definitive bibliography on Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Descriptive Bibliography, loaned me his copy of Baker’s bio one summer back in the early 70s. The rest, as they say, is history.During the next few years, I read everything by and about Hemingway. Never has a writer influenced me more. My first foray into the world of letters was to be about Hemingway. John Evans, owner of Lemuria Books, and my mentor in all things literati, pointed out that there were literally hundreds of bios on Hemingway. However, a scholarly study on the man and his work had never been done in a Q&A format. So was born the “Workbook.”Evans, Grissom, Evan’s store manager, Tom Gerald and his assistant Valerie Sims, all collaborated on the manuscript. It took two years to finish. I learned much on the journey.It was from this endeavor with the Hemingway bio that emerged the Jay Leicester Murder/Mystery series. Even the name Leicester came from Hemingway’s brother, who also published a bio, My Brother Ernest Hemingway, in 1961.Hemingway once said he “learned to write landscapes by looking at the paintings of Cezanne in the Louvre in Paris,” and “that it’s not how much one puts into a book, but what the writer leaves out that makes the story.” From him I learned how to write true dialogue, and how to add the sights, sounds, and smells so that the reader feels he is there. While I did not try and copy his style, thousands have tried and failed, I did take what he offered and used it well, I hope. You the reader will make that determination.J.C. Simmons was born, raised, educated, and stayed in the great State of Mississippi. He is a retired Airline/Corporate pilot and lives with his wife on the family farm in Union, Mississippi where he is working on a autobiographical work detailing his life and times as a pilot.

Book preview

POPPING THE SHINE (Book 6 of the Jay Leicester Mysteries Series)

by JC Simmons

Copyright 2012 by JC Simmons

Smashwords Edition

This ebook, POPPING THE SHINE, is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. POPPING THE SHINE may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

PUBLISHED BY NIGHTTIME PRESS LLC

Copyright © 2012 Edition by JC Simmons

All rights reserved

Check out all ten books in

The Jay Leicester Mysteries Series:

Blood on the Vine

Some People Die Quick

Blind Overlook

Icy Blue Descent

The Electra File

Popping the Shine

Four Nines Fine

The Underground Lady

Akel Dama

The Candela of Cancri

Now available at the usual outlets

Popping the Shine

(Book 6 of the Jay Leicester Mysteries Series)

By JC Simmons

PROLOGUE

One week earlier

The one-legged hooker, who worked the Bourbon and Royal street area, limped along the pavement with a heavy-set redheaded Catholic priest holding an umbrella over her. He always saw that she got home safe. It was near four a.m. on a hot muggy night, and rain had been falling for two days. The silver, square-shaped, H2 SUV rolled slowly along the damp, fog-shrouded street in the New Orleans French Quarter. The driver watched the two hunched-over figures disappear into a small courtyard, then continued easing along the narrow paved cobblestone street humming a tune he'd heard on BET television during Black History Month:

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves

Blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the walnut trees

At the corner of Chartres and St. Anne, with the three spires of the St. Louis Cathedral looming out of the mist, the driver stopped the car and looked carefully around the deserted streets and Jackson Square. Satisfied, he said, Do it.

Two men exited the SUV, dragging a semi-conscious young man. They laid him face down and spread-eagled in the middle of the intersection. One held his limbs as the other drove Bridge Spikes through them, nailing him to the scum-covered pavement. The young man groaned, not sure what was happening.

One of the men, a short, stocky, bald, ex-con, said, It's done.

Cut him. Send a message, the driver said without emotion.

Lifting the chin of the young man, the ex-con ran a knife from one side of his ear to the other with practiced proficiency. Blood gushed onto the street. Both men jumped back into the SUV, and it slowly faded away into the fog that enveloped the Vieux Carré.

The young man, as he was bleeding out, thought, I do not know what it is that I am supposed to do. Then he was dead.

CHAPTER ONE

The Pileated woodpecker broke the silence of the woods with a staccato sound starkly reminiscent of an AK-47 on full auto. I unconsciously ducked and reached for my magnum that was inside the cottage in my ditty bag. Still jumpy from a terrible nightmare about my last case, I cursed the pair of birds that lived in a dead Live Oak in front of the small cottage I keep on a two hundred-acre farm near Union, Mississippi. It is my retreat from humanity, and it is God's country. People left you alone, and if I felt the need for intellectual company there was always the cattleman whose land joined mine. Not only is he better read then me, but he is, for some obscure reason, a World War Two naval historian, and I had learned, early on, not to argue with him on any tactical operation of the South Pacific Theater.

Unrolling my day old copy of the Clarion-Ledger, a newspaper published in the state capital where I keep my office, I sat down with a cup of coffee on the front porch of the cottage. An early morning fog slowly burned off, revealing the trees, hollers, and growing briars that sorely needed my attention. It was a scene straight out of the Deer Hunter, and was one of the things that makes the farm special to me.

Bold lettering on the front page of the newspaper caught my eye: BLACK TEENAGER NAILED TO FRENCH QUARTER STREET, THROAT CUT--KLAN SUSPECTED. Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ may be the catalyst.

Good God, I thought. What's the matter with journalists today? The Klan hasn't been active in New Orleans in twenty years and I don't seem to remember Jesus being nailed to the pavement. Disgusted, I started to throw the paper away, but a familiar name flashed out at me. The teenager was the grandson of a local celebrity, Shine Garner. No, I thought, couldn't be…

I read the rest of the article with renewed interest. The murder sparked national coverage. Anytime a young black person dies under suspicious circumstances in the south, outrage and accusations soon follow. Quotes from black special interest groups including the NAACP, Rainbow Coalition, Nation of Islam, and others, however well meaning, start with the inflammatory rhetoric, and racism is the watchword of the day. Television appearances by Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and maybe even Jim Brown are all but guaranteed.

The dead teenager was in fact the grandson of Willy 'Shine' Garner. Willy gained fame back in the sixties at the New Orleans Airport, known then as Moisant International, where he ran a shoe shine stand on the A concourse. He could, literally, make music with a shine rag. While not the only one, nor the first, to perform what was called Popping the Shine, Willy was simply the best, and possessed a personality that transcended southern segregation in all its ugliness. No one thought of Willy as black, he was simply a musician who shined shoes, and when the National Football League formed the expansion team known as the New Orleans Saints, Willy was adopted as the official Saints 'Shine' man and became a local celebrity.

'Shine' Garner was much more to me than a man with a talent for entertaining people, he was a man who helped raise me from an infant on our eight hundred-acre family farm near Osyka, Mississippi, where he share-cropped with my grandfather, a local judge. He taught me much; how to hunt, fish, field-dress a deer, milk a cow without getting slapped in the face with a shit-filled tail or have a bucket of hard earned milk kicked over. He showed me how to plow a stubborn mule and skid a middle-buster back to the barn without digging the plow point into the ground, and how to pick cotton and harvest corn, all under the watchful eye of the judge. I first tasted homemade buttermilk biscuits and country ham at his house and learned to love turnip greens and corn bread cooked on an old wood-burning stove.

Folding the newspaper, I lay it on the blue marble table and leaned back in the chair, watching a spring warbler fight with a house sparrow for a perch on the feeder swinging from a post oak near the porch of the cottage. It had been ten years since I'd seen Willy and I was suddenly ashamed, but sometimes life and the living of it gets in the way of the important things. It was time for me to pay a visit to Willy 'Shine' Garner.

***

At sun up, I packed my ditty bag with a change of clothes, a box of Charlemagne cigars, my old trusty .357 S&W magnum, and a new tool, a laptop computer. Locking the cottage, I threw my bag into the pickup truck and drove to the small grass airstrip near town where I keep my restored 1941 Stearman bi-plane; a gift from an appreciative client. I'm an ex-airline pilot and run my own aviation consulting business. Companies hire me to set up aviation departments, audit existing flight operations, and help pilots who are headed for trouble with drugs or alcohol. Insurance companies use me to recover aircraft from businesses or people who default on loans, and the government hires me in clandestine operations that I cannot discuss. It mostly involves the drug trade or terrorism.

The weather is clear today and, as I preflight the Stearman, I carefully check for golfers who use the small runway as a driving range. Located next to the local country club, the airport is seldom used, so one cannot blame the folks for taking advantage of the open space. Still, a golf ball or duffer hitting a spinning propeller is not a good thing.

Taking off to the west and climbing to six thousand-five hundred feet, I talked with Jackson approach control and then Memphis center and took up a heading direct to New Orleans International Airport. It is a halcyon day for a pilot, and is hard to put into words the thrill and exhilaration of being airborne. Having some twelve thousand hours aloft, not a lot of time for old aviators, though enough to qualify me as an experienced airman, I never tire of the sights, sounds, and smells of flight. There are days when one does not want the landing to come, and then there are times when one wishes desperately to be somewhere else when things are not going well with the engines or there are rocks or fire in the clouds, but a true airman never tires of flying his craft through the footless halls of air.

It is early summer and everything is green. Fresh plowed fields etch the landscape and seem to breathe in the sunlight. Patches of fog still lay eerily in valleys and pine forests seem to stretch on forever. Thousands of tiny ponds and lakes glinted in the east like raindrops. This is one of those unexpected mornings when everything under nature's cloudless blue sky has become exactly the way it should be, but almost never is. The spring just passed was cool and rainy, and perhaps for that reason the surrounding farmland has taken on those heart-bursting effusions of color that are almost more than a soul can comprehend or contain. Nature is being kind without knowing it, as nature can be cruel without knowing it. At such a moment, it seems as though no other day will ever attain the impossible splendor of this one. Already, I feel nostalgia for this time even as I live it. There is an urge to memorize everything I see because I know its blazing flourish will begin to fade as soon as I land, and never appear precisely like this again. It is a day that should be seen so clearly, and held so dearly that one will never forget how it looks and how it feels, for one's existence is finite and always in danger of ending unexpectedly.

Now, up ahead of the Pratt and Whitney radial engine, I can see Lake Pontchartrain lying like a big silver dollar and, joining it to the west, a quarter-sized Lake Maurepas. Located at the bridge separating the two lakes sits Middendorff's Restaurant, a place that serves the absolute best thin-sliced fried catfish. The twenty-four mile long causeway across Pontchartrain suddenly appears, white and straight, as if a child has drawn a dividing line through the water.

New Orleans approach control cleared me down to two thousand feet, gave me a heading for a straight in to runway one nine, and asked that I keep my speed up as long as possible due to a Delta 767 five miles in trail.

Delta 3742, New Orleans, we are gonna have to widen you out for slow moving traffic ahead five miles and descending through two thousand.

Roger, New Orleans. How about switching us to runway 10, we're running late this morning?

Negative, Delta 3742. The east-west is closed for maintenance.

Keying the mike, I said, New Orleans, one Juliet Lima, I'm in no hurry today. Why don't you give me a heading to circle around and come in behind the Delta running late. He's burning a lot more fuel than I am.

Roger, one Juliet Lima, fly heading zero nine zero and maintain one thousand-five hundred. Delta 3742, New Orleans, the little airplane is gonna come in behind you. Continue descent to two thousand, report the airport.

Delta 3742, down to two thousand with the runway. November one Juliet Lima, that wouldn't be old Jay Leicester, now would it?

Yeah, who's this?

Webb. Thanks for the help this morning. I owe you one.

Hello, Captain Webb. You owe me a lot more than one. Talk to you later.

November one Juliet Lima, New Orleans, fly heading three six zero, report the 767 in sight. You are cleared to follow him. Contact tower on one one nine point nine.

One Juliet Lima, I've got the Boeing in sight. Good day.

Bobby Webb and I flew together back in the late seventies. He was a natural aviator and a good friend. I was glad for him when he was hired by Delta Airlines. We had kept in touch over the years. It was good to hear his voice over the radio.

Coming in behind the big Delta Boeing 767, I was careful to land beyond his touchdown point on the runway to avoid that deadly, unseen turbulence