All The Way Gone

By David Kearns

Delorean Harper is a knight in tarnished armor who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. When he’s offered a high-paying job working for a real estate baron in a small beach town, it seems like easy money and a chance to lay low for a while. He hadn’t planned on doing battle with lethal predators who want Delorean off of their hunting ground.

Delorean’s new job has some upsides, too, including a rent-free house at the top of a hill facing the Pacific Ocean. The view isn’t bad, either - his downhill neighbor is Angie Silver, a gorgeous performance artist who uses her body as a paintbrush and her surroundings as a canvas. Delorean tries to be a good neighbor by helping her turn one of her dark fantasies into reality, and when the video is published and goes viral, she becomes famous. Unfortunately, her fame comes with a price, attracting the attention of both her violent ex-husband and an obsessed stalker with something to prove.

When Angie goes missing, the detective assigned to the case discovers Delorean’s long history of violence and makes it clear that he is the prime suspect. Delorean knows that he’ll have to solve the mystery of Angie’s disappearance on his own, and it won’t be easy, because cold-blooded killers know how to hide their tracks. Delorean’s headed into a dark forest where he’ll uncover secrets of desperate passion, serial murder, and opponents more clever, patient, and deadly than he could ever have imagined.

All The Way Gone is the fifth book in the Delorean Harper series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Kearns
• Release date: Sep 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005060213

David Kearns

I'm a mystery writer inspired by authors who know how to mix suspense, humor, violence, passion, and humanity in a way that carries the reader along on a great ride. The Delorean Harper series tries to do just that.I live in Portland, Oregon, the epicenter for coffee shops, microbrews, rainy winters and glorious summers.My favorite mystery authors are John D. MacDonald, Robert Parker, James Lee Burke, Adrian McKinty, Mickey Spillane

Book preview

All The Way Gone

David Kearns

Copyright 2021 David Kearns

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles by David Kearns

All The Way Down

All The Way Under

All The Way Back

Pretenders

Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook 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 recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication: For Carole Sue and Teddy LaRue

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance of the characters to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Delorean

I’m on Oceanside Beach when they cross my path. It’s a Saturday night in early September, and I’m out for a five-mile run on sand that’s flat, wide, and dry. It’s eighty degrees and the air is dead still, seeming to amplify the slap and hiss of the shallow waves collapsing against the beach. The moon, a regular companion for my nighttime runs, paints the scenery like an old black-and-white movie. I can’t say that I mind it. Clouds intermittently darken my path, but for now the sand looks grey, the foam in the surf is lacy silver, and the grass on the hillock between the beach and Pacific Avenue is a ghostly white. I’m leaving the last of the lights in Oceanside behind, and ahead it’s just darkness and sand and water.

Even though I haven’t run far, I’m already looking forward to getting home and drinking a cold beer on the deck of my rental house. Usually I want an India Pale Ale after a workout, but sometimes an Imperial Stout goes down pretty well. Maybe I’ll have the IPA on the deck while I’m cooling off from my run and then drink the Stout in the living room while watching a movie. When you live alone, these are the kinds of discussions you have with yourself. If Sandy were still around, we’d probably bypass the beer entirely and just sit outside and look at the stars. It’s a funny thing, and maybe it’s a sign of mental illness, but sometimes I think I hear her calling my name from the bedroom when I’m cooking in the kitchen, or I imagine hearing her voice beside me when I’m jogging on the beach. She’s moved to Washington D.C., though, and she’s not coming back. She’s in another world since she became a United States Senator’s Chief of Staff; I’m sure she has her hands full from sunup to sundown.

At any rate, I’ve just gotten into a steady rhythm when revelers ahead of me interrupt the quiet and solitude I crave. A woman’s voice carries on the still air as she shouts the word asshole and then give it back. I hear a man’s voice chiding and then laughing. There’s enough moonlight that I can see fresh footprints in the sand, and they’re headed the same direction I’m going. The indentations look like they belong to a woman wearing low-heel flats, her right foot turned slightly inward, and he’s wearing lug-soled hiking boots with heels rounded off from long use. They aren’t walking, either. The length of her stride and the amount of sand she’s kicking up tells me she’s running. Strangely, the direction of his footprints tells me he’s facing her as he jogs backward. I’m thinking about what that means as I watch her shape materialize in the distance as a woman wearing a white blouse over a dark, mid-thigh skirt and black shoes. It startles me to see a woman running on the beach at night dressed like that.

She’s probably two hundred yards away, but I guess her height at five feet five, and her hair looks brown or black, shoulder length. I watch her stumble, falling on the sand and rolling before coming to a stop on hands and knees. She lets out a scream of pure frustration, gets to her feet and starts running again. Then I see the object of her pursuit, and he’s about twenty yards in front of her in a sleeveless t-shirt, jeans, and work boots. At least six feet tall, built like someone who uses his muscles for a living, and he’s wearing a Halloween wolf mask. He’s hustling backwards, waving something at her, staying out of reach. With his height advantage and longer legs he could turn around and outrun her if he wanted to get away. Instead, it looks like he’s pacing himself, staying close enough that she’ll keep chasing him until he’s lured her to a place where no one will see or hear the assault.

Like hell, I say out loud.

When I run, I carry a ten-pound dumbbell in each hand to give my arms a workout, but I drop the dumbbells as I pick up the pace. I hear the sound of my breath kicking up, feel my legs moving beneath me, the wind rushing past my ears. I’m really cooking as I start to close the gap to the two of them, my arms and legs pumping in a satisfying cadence of power and motion. I feel something primal building in me as the adrenaline starts to flow, the balls of my feet hitting the sand with the staccato pitch of a sewing machine, and my stride builds towards full-tilt-ass-kicking mode. I’m about a hundred and fifty yards from war.

That’s when he stops running backwards and holds something out to her like it’s a gift, like he’s handing a corsage to his date on prom night. I see a quick flash, and I realize that he’s taken a picture of her with the camera on his cell phone.

A hundred yards.

I watch her slow to a stop, and then reach for whatever he’s holding. He grabs her outstretched hand and yanks her towards him, throwing her off balance.

Oh, shit, I think. He’s got hold of her. I feel another jolt of adrenaline, and I find a new gear in my body’s transmission. I start moving at a pace that could qualify for the U.S. Olympic track team. The wind roars in my ears from the speed I’m putting down, and I’m barely aware of my feet making contact with the sand. I’m not running any more, I’m flying. And I’m coming in for a landing on the wolfman.

Fifty yards.

I see her free hand come around, reaching towards the muzzle on his wolf-mask. Then he screams like one of his tonsils was ripped out, and as he lets go of her I stupidly think, That’s what a wolfman sounds like. I see her take a short step back and then drive her right foot into his crotch like she’s trying to kick a football through the uprights from the fifty-yard line. He lets out a second howl, this one so full of murderous pain that I fear for her life. I know he’s going to kill her if I don’t get there in time. I’m certain of it.

Twenty-five yards.

He lets go of her and staggers back, and she bends over to pick something up. As he tugs at the mask with one hand and cups his balls with the other, she backs away while shouting profanities.

She’s moving straight into my path, and I hit the brakes so I don’t mow her down with my momentum.

She turns quickly in my direction, her face registering shock that someone else, another predator, is closing on her from behind.

I open my mouth to ask if she’s okay as she hits me with a full load of pepper spray, hosing down my face with what feels like liquid fire. My world turns red and implodes a split second later. Then my self-preservation instincts engage and I twist my body to keep her from kicking me in the balls, too, but the kick doesn’t come. And even with my head on fire, I’m grateful she spared me the kick to the crotch that she put on the wolfman.

I squint through scorched eyelids, watching the hazy shape of her white shirt disappear into the darkness between me and Oceanside, leaving me with lungs that feel like burning burlap sacks. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

I wipe my face with my tee shirt sleeve, and then try to get a read on where the wolfman is. I see through blurry eyes that he’s already gone. With resignation, I bend over and put my hands on my knees, clutching my shorts like a basketball player who’s been left in the game too long and run out of wind.

I dry heave as I shuffle towards the surf, using the sound of the crashing waves to orient me towards the water. I feel the water splashing over my shoes, my ankles, knees, and then the ice-cold Pacific hits me with a cryogenic punch to my crotch. I feel the air go out of my lungs as the shock hits me, and I fall face-first into the water, praying the salt water will put out the fire.

Does submerging in the surf actually help? To the extent that near-freezing water makes you numb in a minute or two, I guess the answer is yes. I stay under for as long as I can, rubbing my hands on my face in a futile attempt to get the pepper spray off of my skin. Then I come up for air, go back under, and rub more salt water against my face. I can’t tell that what I’m doing is making things any better, but it certainly isn’t making it any worse.

After a while my eyes don’t hurt as much. My lungs, though, where she sprayed pepper spray straight into my mouth, that’s another story. God … Damn … I can’t stop coughing. I stand up in the waist-high surf, my legs and arms anesthetized by the cold, and then move towards the sand, the surf slapping against my thighs and backside with each step I take. When I reach dry land, I peel my gritty eyelids open and take a look around. She’s still gone. He’s still gone. Game over.

I turn towards Oceanside and start the lonely walk back towards town. The smell of the pepper clings to me with the tenacity and force of skunk spray, and I consider stripping off my clothes and leaving them on the sand, but the idea of walking home naked seems worse to me than the condition I’m already in, so I leave my running gear on and trudge back to the beach access point across from The Fat Pelican. There are a few people milling around the opened double doors for the Pelican, and they turn in my direction as I cross the street.

I hear a lady compliment me on my orange spray tan as I pass. Then her companion, a man with a deep voice says, What the hell did you get into?

I wish I knew the answer to his question. Something I’ve never seen before, that’s for damned sure.

I continue through the parking lot for Oceanside Beach State Park, and I squish my way uphill in waterlogged running shoes past the tidy houses with their raked gravel parking spaces and waist-high ceramic pots full of sea oats, yarrow, and lantana, and take a right at the top of Maxwell Mountain Drive. Home sweet home.

I cross my parking space and step down onto the darkened deck, strip naked, and toss my clothes into the trash can. I let out a long breath and then push open the sliding door that lets me into the kitchen, and pad wet-footed to the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror. The pepper spray has stained me bright orange from my hairline to the neckline of my tee shirt. I guess the spray soaked through the shirt, too, because my chest is a pale shade of orange all the way down to my waist. I shake my head, get into the shower, and scrub my chest and face with bar soap and a washrag until all the hot water is gone. Then I towel off, palm four aspirin into my mouth, get into bed, and sleep the sleep of the dead.

Delorean

I wake up and rub my itchy eyes, wondering in my half-asleep state if my memories of the previous night are accurate. I don’t have to wonder too long, because the first coughing fit starts when I put my feet on the bedroom floor. Then I see my bloodshot eyes and faintly orange skin in the bathroom mirror and smell the cayenne pepper in my sinuses. Seems real enough. I guess the next time I put on my knight-in-shining-armor gear, I need to wear a diving helmet. I get into the shower and scrub my face with bar soap while I’m sucking on a menthol cough drop. Then I get dressed, eat breakfast, cough more dry coughs, and walk down Maxwell Mountain Road to the beach.

The wind has kicked the surf up, and root beer-colored sea foam blows across the sand like chunks of scorched Styrofoam. There are beachcombers near the parking lot, but the farther I walk the fewer people there are. I’m puzzled by people’s behavior at times. Someone will drive for hours to see the water and sand, but when they get to the beach they seldom stray more than a few hundred yards from their car. It’s like they’re afraid to explore the thing they just made a trip to look at.

After I’ve walked for a while, I find my barbells lying where I’d dropped them the previous night, and I liberate them from the wet sand before washing them off in shallow water pushed in by the tide. It feels reassuring and familiar to have the cold metal in my hands again. I’ve run with those weights so many times they feel like an extension of my arms. I continue another couple hundred yards before coming to a place where I can still see evidence in the sand of last night’s confrontation. There are round-heel boot prints facing flat, petite shoeprints, a muddle of smeared marks where she turned and ran, and deep footprints from my own running shoes where I’d hit the brakes before turning towards the water.

I don’t know what I’d expected to find; I just felt like I needed to come back. I sit on the powdery sand, stare at the waves, and think about whether I should contact the police. I’m not sure what I would tell them, though. That I saw a woman lured to a remote spot where she kicked someone’s ass after being provoked? It looked to me like she got cleanly away, so wouldn’t she have called the police if she’d felt threatened? Maybe they