Bad Boy

By Anne W. Shubert

It begins on a rainy Monday morning. Detective Sergeant Beverly Trotwood is on her way to work at the Cop Shop when a shiny pickup truck begins to play bumper tag with her Jeep Cherokee. The driver is wearing an over-the-head Bill Clinton mask.

The explosion comes next. Residents at the marina where Bev lives are startled when a bomb goes off in the galley oven of a sailboat. The owners are out on the dock at the time, but what happens to their sleeping cat is far from pretty.

Soon, anonymous letters arrive in Bevs in a basket at the office. Printed in black marker pen and signed with a Bad Boy sticker, each is a list of names. Unpleasant things happen to the people on the lists. A loan shark is beaten within an inch of his life; a trigger-happy cop is found dead in the New River.

Bev investigates the Bad Boy case. Her sidekick, Ivory Jones, helps; so does Radar Thompson in forensics. For aggravation, theyre dealt Wally Finster, a big ex-marine with a potbelly and a crush on Bev.

Bev and Ivory go on stakeout in the burbs; there is a rousing rodeo, and the Bad Boy is captured.

And Bev still hasnt decided whether or not to marry Art Ardsbarger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499055894

Anne W. Shubert

Born and brought up in a small town in Illinois, I went to University of Illinois in Urbana. There I met and married a Korean war vet who had discovered that there were warmer places than Illinois. He got his PhD in engineering, I got my MA and gave birth to five children, and we started looking for those warm places. We went to the following places: Texas, Louisiana, Fiji, Queensland, Northern Territory, Samoa, Hawaii, Mexico, and Florida. The kids grew up and scattered. For fifteen years, my husband and I lived on a sailboat in marinas in South Florida. We spent a lot of time outdoors, and another lot in libraries and bookstores. Finally, the balky diesel engine became too much of a drag, so we sold the boat and moved to Gainesville. I’ve been a waitress; clerk-typist; worked in a library; college English instructor; interviewer for an economic survey; English teacher (high school and community college); very briefly, a substitute teacher (where I learned that teachers with ratbag classes get sick a lot more than other teachers); temp; word-processor operator; secretary; data entry person; general dogsbody to a MacFreak programmer / software developer / inventor; assistant to a bankruptcy trustee; and mailroom employee in a mailing service.

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Chapter One

Raising Hell

A s near as I can remember, it all started on a rainy Monday morning in ’92 or ’93, I forget which. I was feeling downright braindead—Art and I had stayed too late at Tugboat Annie’s the night before, paying too much for drinks and listening to music by a group that ought to be run out of town for incompetence. No, that’s wrong. The bass and guitar were good, and the dude that did the keyboards was fair. It was the lead singer that was lousy; he only knew one note, and he sang it over and over. He may not have been good, but he sure was loud.

Anyway, I was running late on my way to work and only had time for one cup of coffee. It normally takes two to drag me up out of the Monday-morning pits, and when it rains, I need three. So I was driving down the Interstate in the Cherokee, propping my eyes open and wishing it was Friday afternoon about four o’clock, when this gazebo in one of those customized pickup trucks hit my right rear bumper. Deliberately.

If I hadn’t believed it before, I had to when he pulled up alongside of me and waved. I couldn’t tell by looking at the dude whether or not he was grinning, because he was wearing one of those over-the-head rubber masks—one that looked just like Bill Clinton—but I was pretty sure he was.

Then he dropped back and did it again. Bumped my car, I mean. Well, I may have been sleepy when he started the game, but I’ve got to admit that it woke me right up. That Cherokee is my baby; when I have any spare time, I spend it polishing her, or changing her plugs, or whatever.

Art always razzes me about it; says the car is a child-surrogate, but that’s just the way he talks. He’s a county medical examiner in the coroner’s office, and really brainy. Anyway it made me madder than a stepped-on coral snake when this shithead started banging up the bumper on my Jeep, but I couldn’t think of anything to do about it that wouldn’t do more damage to the Cherokee than it would to the heap he was driving, which was one of those shiny black pickups with oversize tires, fog lights, and probably an illegal siren. It had a silver Bad Boy’s Club sticker on the rear window. I saw it when he pulled ahead to make a pass at my front bumper.

I couldn’t make out his license number, though; his back plate was covered with aluminum foil. What I finally did was veer over toward him slightly and then, when he sheered off for a second, startled, accelerated the hell out of there. I knew I was risking a ticket. Florida had been putting on a big speeder-bashing push ever since the first of the year, but luckily they weren’t working that neck of the woods on that particular Monday. Probably enough skid-caused accidents on the city streets to keep ’em busy. Some people drive like they never heard of slick intersections.

I’ve got to admit I was kind of shook by the time I got to work— these things always catch up to me afterwards, when everything is all over. While the danger is there, my adrenaline kicks in and I’m okay till it’s over. Then it goes wherever it is adrenaline goes when it goes away, and leaves me without any starch left in my knees. When I got into the parking lot, I just sat there for a few minutes, trying not to shake.

By the time I walked into the huge new building where the Sheriff’s department lives (Art calls it a monolith, but of course it’s not really—all one stone, I mean. When I say that, he accuses me of being literal-minded. I say I’m realistic, and I say, to hell with it), I felt like all the blood had gone out of my head, and I guess I must’ve looked like that, too, because Wally Finster was standing just inside the door, and he said, What’s the matter, Bev—been seeing ghosts?

Wally Finster is your garden-variety he-man. To hear him tell it, and he tells it over and over, the Sheriff’s Department started going downhill the minute they hired a female deputy. I wasn’t about to let him know that any little thing like some yahoo playing bumper-tag could make me weak in the knees, so I just said, The very sight of you is enough to strike terror into the heart of all us timid virgins, Wally, and detoured around him (he’d planted himself right square in front of me, naturally) on the way to the elevator. He followed me all the way to my desk, but he couldn’t get any more out of me than that.

Later on I told Ivory Jones about it, though. She’s six feet tall—almost as tall as me—and blacker than the ace of spades, because she likes the beach even more than I do. And tough? That girl eats nails and spits tacks, just for fun. Anyway, she said she figured the asshole was just flirting with me.

Well, maybe so, I said, but what about the Bill Clinton mask and the foil over the license plate?

But she didn’t have any answer for that–just shrugged her shoulders, drank up her coffee, and plugged the empty Styrofoam cup at the nearest wastebasket. Hit it, too—dead center.

I guess the explosion was the next thing. It’s not something I tell people at work, because it’s none of their damn business, but Art and I live on his sailboat—a big Hans Christian ketch—at this marina down in Dania. The boat three slips away went up with a bang at about six o’clock that same evening—just about the time when all the liveaboards are out on the dock, maybe barbecuing something, or just shooting the shit among themselves.

Shorty Stubblefield used to say a marina’s the only kind of real neighborhood left in south Florida, and maybe he was right. Anyway, the boat—it was a big fiberglass sailboat about thirty-five feet long—went up with a noise like a field artillery piece, and bits of it flew off and landed all over the dock. Several people got superficial cuts out of the deal, but nobody, not even the owner, Larry Hanson, was seriously hurt. Except the cat.

We heard about the cat when Marian, that’s Larry’s wife, went aboard to see if she could find out what happened. Everybody told her she better not; I think they had some kind of an idea there might be another explosion, or something.

But she just said, Shut up, you guys. This is where I live. I’ve got to find out if we’re going to have any place to sleep tonight. So she went aboard, kind of gingerly, like she was ready to jump back onto the dock if it blew up again.

In a couple of minutes she was back, with this look on her face. I’ve never seen an expression like that before or since. It was sort of a combination of the horrors and the kind of look some people get if they see a piece of dogshit on the ground: disgust, I guess you’d call it. And she was white as a ghost.

What’s the matter, Marian? said Larry. Is it really that bad? She just shook her head.

It’s Ginger, she said, still with that grossed-out expression. Ginger was asleep on the settee when I came out, and now he’s all over the place. Ginger was their orange tomcat.

Mama, my cat exploded, said Dave Perkins in a little-girl voice. Dave always did have a rotten sense of humor, and he almost got his face smacked for it that time. Marian swung around on him, and her eyes fairly blazed. I never saw her so mad.

You shut your fat fuckin’ mouth, Dave Perkins, she yelled at him. "If it was your damned dog that was spread in a thin layer all over your cabin, I wouldn’t make sick jokes about it."

Then she started to cry, which was more like her. I didn’t know Marian even knew words like that. She’s always been a damn sight too ladylike to suit me. You know, the kind of a woman that wears a bra. To bed.

Well, they held the usual post-mortem about it—the explosion, I mean—after the cops and the fire department left. Funny thing was, though, there wasn’t any fire—just that one big WHUMP! and that was all. It wasn’t, like somebody pointed out, as if Installment Plan was one of your stinky power boats with a gasoline engine; she had a diesel, like most sailboats do.

And Larry and Marian had always kept their propane cylinders out on deck, for fear of explosions. When it was all over, there they still sat, one on each side of the boat, just like before. So what made it blow up? Nobody knew, or even had a theory about it.

Well, except for the bomb squad. They said it was a homemade bomb, and they were very definite about it. They asked Larry a lot of questions about what kind of insurance he had on the boat. Larry offered to show them his policy; he had it in the trunk of his car. It wouldn’t anywhere near have covered half the book value of the boat, and besides, it had lapsed six months before, when the company raised the premiums for the third time in two years.

Then they started asking around if Larry had any enemies on the dock. They asked me, when they noticed me there. Dania buys its police protection from the County Sheriff’s department, so those guys knew me, of course.

Enemies? I said. You don’t know Larry, do you? Silly question. Of course they didn’t. Larry’s so mild-mannered they used to kid him about bein’ Superman on the sly. I wouldn’t want to call names or anything, but Larry’s next door to a wimp.

Finally they went away, and Larry and Marian went to work to clean the cat off their walls and see if they could fix up a place to sleep that night. Turned out they had to spend the night in Billy Jolson’s camper van, and several nights after that, too. The bomb blew their hatches loose, and just tore hell out of their kitchen stove.

The bomb squad, it turned out later, thought that had been where the bomb was planted—in the oven. Whoever put it there must not have noticed the microwave sitting on the countertop. Marian said later she hadn’t used that big oven since Christmas.

What happened was, the bomb blew the oven door clear off, and twisted it some, too; they had to get a whole new stove, because some of the force of the explosion went upward and just trashed the stove top.

What did for Ginger wasn’t any of those things, though; that bomb had been chock full of wire nails and big brass staples. They just tore that poor dumb cat to pieces, and would’ve done the same to the middle part of anybody that had been standing by the stove when it went off. It was just really a messy business, and Larry and Marian both said they didn’t have a clue about who would want to do a thing like that to them.

Chapter Two

Love Notes

I t was right after that that I started to get the letters at work. They were addressed to me by name, Detective Sergeant Beverly Trotwood. The first one came in on Wednesday morning, but if you know anything about mail delivery in a big office, you’ll know it probably came in on Tuesday.

It takes the troops in the mail room most of the afternoon to sort out the mail and stamp it Received and all that shit, though I don’t know why they have to be so fancy about it. Anyway, there it was in my In basket on Wednesday morning. It was addressed with some kind of a marker pen, so the letters were fairly thick and you couldn’t have told anything about the handwriting, even if it hadn’t been printed. I picked up the Xacto knife I use to open my mail and slit open the envelope.

All that was inside was a list of names, done in the same black marker pen as the address. There were thirteen names on the list. And it was signed, if you could call it that, with a silver Bad Boy sticker.

You probably know what I mean by a Bad Boy sticker, but I’ll explain anyway. There’s what I always figured must be a chain of night clubs or something called the Bad Boys’ Club; you’ve probably seen their stickers on car windows. They’re sort of silver line drawings of a crew-headed kid with a mean-looking grin on his face, and then it says Bad Boys’ Club underneath. This sticker was just like those, only a lot smaller, and the final S on Boys’ and the word Club had been cut off, so that it just said Bad Boy.

I was sitting there staring at the thing when Wally Finster snuck up behind me and said, Whatcha got there, Red? Love letter? I opened my desk drawer and stuck the letter and envelope inside, and then shut it again. Hard.

None of your damn business, I said. I smiled when I said it, though. I’ve found out if you smile when you say stuff like that, it makes people even madder than if you say it with a snarl. It sure bugged hell out of Wally, that time.

You better thank your lucky stars, he said, that Rick Matamoros isn’t sheriff around here any more. He didn’t take kindly to little girls reading their personal mail on Department time.

I ignored him. It was a lot of bullshit, and he knew it. In the first place, calling me a little girl was just plain stupid. Like I probably told you before, I’m six foot one in my size eleven bare feet. And in the second place, I’d been in the Department while Matamoros was sheriff, and he never took any personal interest in what individual deputies were doing, unless they did something that embarrassed the Department, like shooting innocent bystanders or taking bribes or selling crack cocaine on the street. All old Rick cared about was getting a good press for himself, so he could get reelected, and building his personal empire.

It didn’t work, though. He got voted out, just the same, regardless of all the drug stings he set up and the grandstanding bits with the obscene rap records and the strip bars, and the appearances on nationwide talk shows. But what I was saying was, he didn’t care diddly about who read what on whose time, and neither does Bill Carstairs, the sheriff we have now. Anyway, Wally stomped off.

"What’s his problem? said Ivory Jones, who was walking past my desk with her usual cup of coffee in her hand. He look like somebody just told him what an asshole he is."

Somethin’ like that. He called me a little girl, would you believe that? Nobody’s called me that since I was seven.

She grinned. I don’t know if her teeth are really that much whiter than anybody else’s, or if they just look that way because of the contrast. "I bet they didn’t. I bet you beat the shit out of ’em if they tried it. Well, but what was he goin’ on about? Seem like he spends a lot of his time around your desk, and his is clear on the other side of the room.

And it’s right next to the water cooler, so it can’t be that. You know what, Bev? She sounded like she just had a great inspiration—what Art calls an epiphany. I think that dude’s got the hots for your body.

Well, it’s not mutual, I snapped. "The big klutz has got a major beer-belly that hangs out over his belt. I think it’s obscene. Nobody could have the hots for that. Anyway, I’ve known that for a long time—that’s why I squash him every time he opens his yap."

I opened the drawer and took out the list. This came in the mail for me. I was just lookin’ at it when ol’ macho Wally started comin’ onto me. I held it out to her.

It’s just a list of names, she said. Already I knew that, but I kept shut about it. Ivory’s a friend of mine.

I was tryin’ to see if I recognized any of ’em, I said. Do you?

She scanned down the list. Sure. Jumps right out at you. Number thirteen is Emerson Palmer. Remember him?

Well, it wouldn’t have been easy to forget Emerson Palmer, even if his name had been Joe Doakes. His name—and face—had been smeared all over the newspapers the year before, when he finally got kicked off the force. Palmer had been one of those trigger-happy cops you read about. In spades. The first three or four times it was at least doubtful; any one of the dudes he shot could have been attacking him or trying to escape.

At least all three of them had been genuine bad guys. One of ’em had just finished robbing a newsstand, one was out on parole—for the third time—for assault with a deadly weapon, and the third one was one of those guys that pretend to have car trouble and then hold up tourists that stop to help them.

Okay. But the fourth one was only a DUI. Palmer almost got himself bounced for that one, but the guy had led him a chase, and it turned out he had a pistol in his glove compartment. And the fifth one—that was a skinny black kid that was stealing somebody’s bike, and the poor sap was so scared when Palmer caught him that he almost shit himself. When he turned and ran instead, Emerson shot him in the back. People in the Sheriff’s Department tried hard to forget about Emerson Palmer.

That’s the only one I recognize, though, she said. Here, you take a look. It’s your list.

Well, it wasn’t my list, but somebody had laid it on me, so I didn’t argue. I read the names. Sure. Here’s one I know. Lawrence Hanson. He got his boat blown up just night before last.

I wondered hard if that could be a coincidence. I wonder who the other eleven are.

We talked it over and decided what to do about it. I would make copies of the list and post one on the big bulletin board just inside the office door with a note asking anybody that recognized any of the names—except Emerson Palmer’s—to get in touch with me. The other copies I would spread around the office with the same memo attached. Then we’d see what happened.

What happened was that I didn’t hear any more about the list for almost a week. Then some guy I hardly knew showed up at my desk one morning with a copy of the list in his hand. One of the names, the third one down, was underlined in red.

I know who this one is, the guy said. He’s a loan shark. Has a pawnshop out on Four-Forty-One, but if you ask him real nice, you can get him to make you a loan for only twenty percent.

Twenty percent is a pretty high rate, all right, but it’s not much more than some credit card companies charge. That makes him a loan shark?

"Twenty percent a week, said the guy. That makes him a loan shark in anybody’s book."

Does he have muscle to back him up?

The guy—he was big and kind of good-looking, if you like the type—grinned. Let’s just say that accidents tend to happen to people that try to stiff him. But we’ve never been able to hang anything on him. Nobody’s ever been willing to sign a complaint. They figure that’d be even less healthy than refusin’ to pay up.

I highlighted the name with yellow marker, same as I had Emerson Palmer’s and Larry Hanson’s, and wrote, loan shark after it. That night I hunted up Dave Perkins.

He wasn’t hard to find. He spends most of his time walking the dock, talking to people. Dave is one of those guys that call themselves entrepreneurs. Art says you can translate that as somebody that doesn’t like to work but likes money a lot.

When I said you could say that about just about anybody, he laughed and said, Well, yeah, that’s true. But your entrepreneur has a million schemes for makin’ a packet without any noticeable effort.

That made Dave an entrepreneur, all right. He’s a professional middleman, is what he is. His latest business—I almost said scam—is dealing in exotic hardwoods. I asked him once what hardwoods were exotic, and he said, Oh, teak, of course. And mahogany. And oak.

When I asked him what was so exotic about oak, he asked me how many oak forests I’d seen lately.

Anyway, what he does is wait around till somebody calls him wanting a quantity of some exotic-type wood, and then he calls around till he locates somebody that’s got that kind of wood, gets a price off of him, raises it twenty percent, and quotes it to his customer. I don’t think he ever sees any actual wood.

The reason I was looking for Dave was that, in addition to being a natural-born loudmouth (remember the crack about the exploding cat?), he always knows everything about everybody. I’m damned if I know how he finds anything out; he always seems to be talking, not listening; but I’ve never asked him a question about anybody that he didn’t know the answer to. And no bullshit, either—it’s the right answer. Sure enough, when I asked him what Larry Hanson did for a living, he didn’t even hesitate.

He runs a collection agency, he said.

I couldn’t believe it. "Larry? A repo man? Come on, Dave—you got to be kidding!"

Turned out that Larry didn’t do any of the actual repo work. If his company needed something repossessed, they hired it done. No, all they did was send out these letters. You know the ones, about how much you owe, and how long you’ve owed it, and how long you’ve got to pay before they come and take back your VCR. Stuff like that.

I still had a hard time believing it. Larry’s such a nice little guy. I think he’s the only guy on the dock that ever goes to church, even. Are you sure, Dave?

Dave was sure. So I had a notation to put after Larry’s name on my list, and that gave me another idea. I would bring the list home and let Dave have a look at it. Maybe he’d recognize some of the other names.

Before I could do that, though, I had a call to the scene of a crime. This pawnshop out on Four-Forty-One had been broken into, and the owner had been beaten to a jelly. If you figured it to be the loan shark, you weren’t wrong. That’s who it was.

They found the guy–his name was Melville Upperman–lying in a pool of blood and shit on the floor of his pawnshop. He wasn’t dead, though, just well and truly bashed up.

Upperman was a weasely little guy, with what had once been a big beaky nose and rabbitty teeth. The nose had been reduced to a bloody pulp—he had to breathe through his mouth, or not at all—and the mouth wasn’t a whole hell of a lot better.

Whoever had done him over had made a pretty good try at pushing those rabbitty teeth down his throat, so when he breathed through his mouth, he gurgled. Blood. As for black eyes, he had two of them, and would have had more if he’d had another eye or two. The shit? Well, the man was an awful coward.

They took him to the hospital and cleaned him up and bandaged him a lot; the guy had two broken ribs and a broken collarbone. He wouldn’t sleep easy for a long time—a broken collarbone hurts. I know; I fell out of a tree when I was twelve and broke mine. One of the nurses that cleaned him up told me they had a hell of a time getting the Bad Boy sticker off of his—uh—rectum. When he could talk again, I was right there with my little notebook.

His pet hunk of muscle, he said, hadn’t been around that evening. He’d gotten called away. Somebody had phoned and said Gordon’s—the goon’s name was Gordon—Gordon’s sweetie had been in a motorcycle smashup and was in the hospital with a broken leg. It turned out, of course, that the girl was perfectly all right, if you can call a floozy with a figure like a platter of dumplings perfectly anything.