Towtruck Wars

By G. R. Daniels

"Tow Truck Wars" is an engaging, dramatic Mike Raleigh thriller. It grabs your attention from the start with a hit-and-run accident and leads you into a tale of suspense, action, and mystery. Daniels’ writing is vivid and visceral, creating strong impact. The author adds depth to the story with its conflicts and collaborations as the investigation unfolds. Well-crafted dialogue fleshes out the characters' personalities while the narrative moves from one intense scene to another. P.I. faces myriad challenges as he moves toward solving the case. This is a thrilling novel. You’re sure to find Tow Truck Wars intriguing and captivating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G. R. Daniels
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781990304088

G. R. Daniels

G. R. Daniels is the pen name of this author. He is a veteran journalist who has worked as a front-page reporter, editor, tv writer, tv on-air reporter, tv producer, radio producer, internet blogger and website writer. He also is one of the world's busiest media relations trainers and crisis consultants, working on major and one-off projects for corporations, government bodies, institutions and individuals. His popular novels offer heavy doses of action, thrills, intrigue and complex plots. They are fascinating and fun reads from someone who has been there and done that for world-wide audiences. Daniels writes often about his native Canada but also provides his readers with international stories such as Escape from Zaatari. Many readers are joining the growing audience for Daniels' exciting and absorbing novels. Become one and write a review for this outstanding author's works.

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Table of Contents

Tow Truck Wars

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

About the Author

Tow Truck Wars

By G.R. DANIELS

ISBN Canada:  978-1-990304-08-8

Copyright ©2018 Awareness Communications Inc. All rights reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Similarities to actual events, places, persons or other entities are coincidental.

TOW TRUCK WARS

A Mike Raleigh Thriller

by G. R. Daniels

CHAPTER ONE

You just don’t know when something will come out of nowhere. I wasn’t thinking of that possibility as I sat on the bench in the warmth of a beautiful spring day. It had been a long, cold winter in my part of Canada; busy but bitter. I was tired of the work and of my demanding, super-rich clients. Sitting in a small-town square was a perfect way for me to chill in the sunlight.

I couldn’t forget about work no matter how hard I tried. I took my phone out of the pocket of my light Nike jacket and held it up to check for messages. As my eyes adjusted to the screen, they caught movement at the street corner a dozen meters from my bench. A man in a black jogging outfit was bouncing up and down as he waited for the traffic light to give him a green signal. There was a car coming toward the intersection; it drew my eyes because it was speeding. My instinctive brain had done the calculations; the bouncing jogger was going to be hit by the speeding car.  

The light changed perhaps a half a second after I looked up. The jogger stopped bouncing and stepped off the curb. There was no sound - no yells, no noise of tires gripping the pavement as brakes were applied. As my brain predicted, the car slammed into the jogger who was thrown into the air. For a moment, he came toward me and I thought, crazily, that I could catch him before he struck the hard ground. His body lost momentum and he fell to the ground. I heard that sound, like that of a watermelon thrown from a height. The jogger’s head split open as his body slid across the black pavement of the road. He left a trail of blood and matter.

My instinctive brain had done something besides predicting the collision. It caused my fingers to flip up my phone’s home screen and one of those fingers to press the camera icon and its video button. I kept the camera on the street even as my eyes blinked at the violence in front of me. My brain tracked the car as it struck the pedestrian and continued on. It was a classic hit-and-run and my phone captured every bit of the run. It also caught the instant when the car was finally braked.

I couldn’t see inside the dark gray sedan; the windows were heavily tinted, beyond what the law was supposed to allow. The vehicle was now beside my bench only a few steps away from me. I rose from the bench. Before I could take a step, the window was opened. I could see the driver now but he was holding his hand in front of his face. He also was leaning across the passenger seat so his face, hand and body were low in the open window.

Give me the phone. The voice was gruff but not loud. When I didn’t comply immediately, he repeated, Your phone...  I saw the gun come into view. He was holding it in his free hand and resting its muzzle on the window frame. It was pointed at me.

I wasn’t armed. I own a licensed gun since I’m a private investigator but I seldom carry the thing. It was in the locked glove box of my own car parked a block away. To distract the man in the car, I threw my phone at him and dived off to one side. I scrambled low around the bench and dropped prone. I hoped the driver would give up and take off again.

I was a lousy pitcher in high school and my aim hadn’t improved in the past 20 years. I missed him with the phone. My phone sailed over the whole vehicle. The driver would have to be happy with that because I had no more to offer. I rose a little and peered at the car through the slats of the bench. The window slid up and the car moved off. Within a second or two, with a full-throated roar from its engine, the car was driven away until it was hidden from me by the shops farther down the street.

I rose from behind the bench and ran a few meters to the body of the jogger in its black, now blood-stained outfit. Others joined me from the sidewalks running from the intersection and from the buildings around the square. All of us wore expressions of shock and dismay. There were touches of anger on several faces. A fat man stopped meters short of the body and shouted, Anybody get the licence?  A tall woman in a summer dress glanced at the fat man and shook her head. No one else responded to him. Every eye was focused on the body of the jogger.

I have seen more scenes of violence than the average person. That is not a good thing. Some of those scenes live on in my nightmares. Some were fresh - straight out of the box and hours old. Some were weathered by time and some of these by years, not days. Few of these scenes however happened in ‘real time’. This means I have witnessed only a few acts of violence happening in front of me. This means I was not an investigator of this scene; I was witnessing this scene. It was as fresh as it gets. It was almost as violent as it gets. I wasn’t prepared.

A teenage boy came to within touching distance of the jogger. He’s dead, isn’t he? the teen asked me. How would I know? I didn’t answer. I was confused, just like everyone else.

The fat man zeroed in on me. You, he said with a chubby finger pointing at me, He stopped right in front of you. Didn’t you get the number?

I glanced at the man for a moment. He hadn’t seen the gun or he would have mentioned it. How do you know it was a man? I saw the confusion in his florid face.

What man?

Never mind, I said, turning my attention to the jogger.

What about the number, the fat man asked again looking around at the growing crowd for support. The guy was a jerk but he was a jerk with the right question. No, I hadn’t seen the bloody number. Yeah, I should have noticed the licence plate instead of placing all my attention on the driver’s face and his big, black gun. I was embarrassed by the fat jerk. That forced my primary skills to take over my scrambled brain waves. Take charge, my instincts ordered.

I ignored the questioner. Don’t touch him, I told the kid who was now leaning toward the body on the pavement. We could hear sirens and the crowd thinned a bit. The fat man took one more nasty look at me and moved away across the square. I retreated and hunted for my phone in the area where I had thrown it. I couldn’t find it.

In a minute or two, the intersection was jammed with three police cruisers, several unmarked detective units and an ambulance. A fire truck had come and gone without disgorging any of its firefighters. There was no chance the jogger with the gaping headwound was alive. Later, a fire truck would probably return and wash the blood off the pavement.

As I sat back down on the bench, a coroner’s van pulled up, parking on the grass in the town square itself. A man and a woman, dressed in white coveralls, paper booties and hairnets got out of the van and went to the corpse. The woman felt for a pulse, knowing she wouldn’t find one but following protocol. The man shooed a few people away from the body. The last to move was the teenager.

He saw it, the boy told the white-suited man from the coroner’s office. The teen pointed at me. I was getting annoyed. He was right there.

Okay, kid. Did you see anything? A man in a dark business suit had come up behind the teenager and the coroner’s assistant overhearing what the youngster was saying. The boy turned to the detective who was holding out a warrant card.

Nah. I was watching that guy. The car...

The detective didn’t have patience for the prattling of a teenager. He was shifting his attention to me. Okay. Shouldn’t you be in school or something, the cop said.

It’s lunch, said the boy in a scoffing tone.

So, go eat something. Get lost, kid. The cop turned away and headed in my direction. The teen went the other way, across the street where the hit-and-run vehicle had stopped minutes before.  I guessed there was a school over there but I was now focused on the detective coming toward me.

Kid says you saw it all, the cop said as he drew up to me. I was sitting on the bench and looked up at the detective. It wasn’t all that taxing; the man was only about five feet six or seven. I reminded myself that I wasn’t in Toronto today. This was Marston, a town just outside of the so-called Greater Toronto Area, the GTA. Marston wasn’t all that small as Ontario towns go; it had grown rapidly over the past decades as Torontonians gave up on the city’s high housing prices and went into the burbs to find affordable homes. But it wasn’t large enough yet to apply big city standards to the hiring of its police, firefighters and other first responders.

Who are you? My tone was polite. He wasn’t showing his warrant card.

I’m detective Percy Snell and I’ll be asking the questions. So, first, name, address and what are you doing here?

There was no reason to withhold anything. Mike Raleigh. Private investigator. I gave him my office address in Toronto. I was wrapping up some business here and stopped to take a break before heading home.

What business is that? Snell took out a grey notebook from an inside pocket of his suit jacket and opened it. He jotted a line or two that I guessed was my name and address.

My business, I answered. Nothing to do with what went on here, detective. I’m just a bystander.

I said I’ll ask the questions and you give the answers, Raleigh. Got it. The cop glared at me.

It was a dark gray Ford Taurus with very dark tinted windows all around. I began to give the detective what he really needed.

We’ll get to that after your business. Why don’t you want to tell me what you’re doing here, Mister Toronto?

Another man came to us. I figured him as a detective as well but hoped he was a hell of a lot more senior than Percy Snell who seemed fixated on me when he should have been concerned with the body still lying nearby.

What have you got, Snell?

I was right by the tone of voice of the newcomer. He was the senior here.

Sir. This is Mark Rally. Says he is a P.I. from Toronto. But he won’t tell me what business he has here.

Mike Raleigh, I broke in. My name is Mike, short for Michael, Raleigh, like the bicycle."

The senior cop, at least ten years older than Snell and a hundred years smarter, smiled at me. Captain Robert Varley, he told me, holding up his warrant card. Robert like Robert - never Bob. Varley like the painter.

Group of Seven, I said with a smile of my own. Love their work.

Okay, Snell, why don’t you talk to some others in the crowd. Just simple statements. I don’t care what they were doing, just if they saw the accident.

Snell glowered at me again but nodded to his boss and moved away to the small crowd that was now restrained by a line of tape some meters around the body.

Two men from the ambulance moved in. I assumed the coroner’s people had finished their work. The EMTs moved the body of the jogger to a gurney and moved the gurney to the rear of the ambulance for loading into the back of the vehicle. In a moment, the ambulance and the coroner’s van departed leaving the cops to tidy up. I noticed the fire department was back with a pumper truck. These lucky firefighters had the job of hosing the blood and brains off the pavement.

As I watched the removal process, Varley made notes in his own gray notebook. I saw he was writing down my name and a short description. ‘Dark brown hr. Approx. late 30s. six-one. 185 lb. P.I.’ and my address in Toronto. Good memory. Except, he should have known that some people are great at reading upside down and backwards. Reporters do it all the time. So do good P.I.s. 

He had a gun. Varley’s ballpoint stopped dead in its tracks when I mentioned the firearm.

Who? He stared at me with wide-open eyes.

The driver. I told Varley everything I had seen and had experienced - the hit-and-run, the car stopping, the driver rolling down the window and pointing the gun, the demand for my phone. The whole thing. And Varley wrote it all down.

So, where is the phone, Mike?

As I said, Robert, I threw it at him. I saw it go over his car.

Varley gave me a look that combined disappointment with an insult of my throwing ability.

I was better in high school, I said with a bowed head that brought a short laugh.

Has anyone picked it up yet?

I shrugged and Varley motioned for me to follow him. We trudged across the street and began to survey the ground where the phone might have landed. We saw a few food wrappings, a pile of dog poo and Varley picked up a twenty-five-cent piece but we didn’t find the phone.

I’ll check with Snell and the others to see if anyone turned up a phone. Varley didn’t look all that hopeful. I didn’t know if that was because Snell was involved in the search or if the phone had gone into hiding in someone else’s pocket. Are you sure you got the accident on the phone?

I shook my head. I didn’t review it but I know it was recording video. I saw the red dot.

Jesus. That’s too bad, said Varley snapping his notebook shut.

Don’t you use iPads or laptops, I asked with a look at the pad of paper he was stuffing back into his jacket.

Nah. No budget. And I’m a klutz at high-tech anyway.

I wondered to myself how a cop could get along without technology these days. I know we were in Marston and not Toronto but, jeez, come on folks, get with the program.

I didn’t bother explaining to Varley how I might be able to track down my phone. If I mentioned this, this detective might hang on to my phone forever, trying to turn it on. That device had some client stuff on it that I hadn’t yet backed up.  Some of that data I wouldn’t want to end up in the wrong hands. And Marston cops would qualify as ‘the wrong hands’ if Detective Snell was any indication.

So, you’re looking for a hit-and-run driver who goes around with a gun in a blacked-out car? I wanted to get away from this depressing scene and back to the city. I hoped Varley would take my summation and run with it. It worked.

Yep. Sounds easy doesn’t it, Mike? Varley got the point and was already turning away. Think a sharp P.I. would be able to solve this one before the country cops?

I wasn’t sure if Varley was being sarcastic or obliquely asking for help so I took it as the former and strolled off in the opposite direction. Shortly after, I was in my Audi SUV trundling back to Toronto at 100 kliks an hour, keeping an eye out for the Ontario Provincial Police who patrol the highways.

CHAPTER TWO

It was 4 P.M. when I left Marston expecting to run into heavy traffic before I got home. I had to shower, shave, dress in my best suit and be at the Royal York Hotel by 6:30 p.m. That was cocktail hour before the local Bar Association dinner at which my best friend would be presented with the award for Best Trial Lawyer in Ontario. I couldn’t be late even if my absence wouldn’t be noticed by anyone except Reginald Browne.

Reg - never Reggie - Browne had been my best bud for a long time, since our rather fractious first meeting when I was a cop and he was a penniless ambulance chaser. We settled our differences over a couple of lunches, found we had little in common but that we liked each other because we disliked the same things.

Lately, Reginald had been having serious problems with his girlfriend. May-Ellen was her name and she had a habit of taking off periodically to some of the world’s most bizarre locations, sometimes with other men. At the moment, she was in Belize, a tiny Central American country on the Caribbean. Belize may not be all that bizarre but it is riddled with crime.

May-Ellen went to Belize, she told Reg, to help some guy study bats. Yep, she plans to roam around guano-covered caves surrounded by the bats that outnumber every other animal in the country. When will she return. Who knows? She said she would return from Tierra Del Fuego in two weeks. She stayed there two months. Reg needed my support in bad times and good through his crappy romance. Tonight would be one of the good times.

Traffic was mercifully light and I was at home, showered, shaved, dressed and ready to go by 6 P.M.  I had time to get out my laptop and run the Find My Phone app. I had only my phone along in Marston since I was just meeting a client to wrap up a case. No need for my laptop, iPad or surveillance equipment that I didn’t like leaving in my car when it wasn’t needed. My laptop gave me a reading for my phone’s location. To do this, the phone didn’t need to be turned on; as long as it had a functioning battery and a SIM card, the app could find it.

I zoomed in on the location and found it was in a large building in Marston. This was strange. I thought I might find it but assumed it would be either at the side of the road in some hidden spot like a drainpipe or alleyway, or in the only police station in the town. Detective Varley and I hadn’t found the thing in our brief search but uniformed cops should have been assigned to conduct a thorough search. This building wasn’t a police station. According to Google Maps, it was a high school.

‘That little son of a bitch.’ I shook my head in anger. I would bet anything that my phone had been snatched up by that teenaged kid who had been such a pest at the accident scene. He saw the hit-and-run car stop near me and saw me throw my phone at the driver to distract him. The kid walked away from the scene heading in the direction of the tossed phone. Ipso facto, he had found the device and had taken it to school with him. My app showed the phone was still at the school, probably in a locker since it was long past school hours. I just hoped the hell he wasn’t distributing the video on the phone over the Internet. It was a hope against hope; what else would a teenaged boy do with juicy video of a man being killed by a hit-and-run driver?

I wasn’t mad at the kid for what I thought he would do as much as I was suddenly concerned for the boy. The driver of the dark gray car was prepared, I was sure, to shoot me to get that phone and any pictures I might have snapped with it. What would he do if he knew a kid was posting the video on the net? He could go after the raw video, the real hard evidence of his crime. And he would take his gun if and when he went after the kid.

The party was