Liquid Absolution

Copyright 2018 Samuel D Carter

All Rights Reserved Worldwide

Published by CarterDean Publishing LLC at Smashwords

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Acknowledgements

Long ago, a colleague sent me a box of his used books. Like me, he had written several book in the computing industry. His lived longer than mine, as the next release of something would turn my books into landfill fodder.

In that cache of paperbacks was a Robert B Parker novel. Eventually, I would read all of his books, even the ones he wrote from the grave. This lead to Ray Chandler. Ross McDonald. Hammett. The other MacDonald. It turns out I have MacDonald blood in my veins, but I didn’t know that at the time. There have been so many more, hundreds and hundreds of them. It’s not all I read by any means.

You see, I was raised during my young school years across the street from a library in a small town in Southern Indiana. I could walk there with ease, and spend hours a day reading. And I read, and read, and then I wrote. This book is like that, reading, absorbing, then writing.

My partner in life let me go away, far away to write this. An ex-partner in life edited the book, except she’ll growl when she sees that all but a handful of her gracious edits were rejected. This isn’t because she was wrong-- she’s a professional. It’s because I’m as stubborn as my characters. I hope she forgives me, but I know she won’t.

A stunning guy by the name of Don Gerya did the artwork cover, with my own lettering. He is a master, I am a schmuck artist.

Disclaimer

This is a work of total fiction. None of this happened. I hope it never does. You are not in this book; don’t look for yourself as you’ll be lost forever. And don’t let people under age 18 read this, please. It has some adult content that isn’t good for young eyes. I hope you enjoy it. All characters were at least 18 years old if they had sex, but they didn’t.

Liquid Absolution

Samuel D Carter

Copyright 2018 All Rights Reserved

Chapter 1

I was about to become a dick.

Yesterday, I had been an employed professional public safety servant of the citizens of Indianapolis, Indiana, as Master Sergeant of Detectives Martin Quinn MacLeish, of the often-venerable Indianapolis Police Department.

Today, however, I was a private dick. Metaphors abound. The mind reels.

My ex-detective colleague, drinking partner, occasional antagonist—and now boss —Rowan Wallace Walsh, now sits across from me, smiling, unconsciously twisting and lifting the sides of his thick red and grey mustache.

We were partners—again. Down the hall, in the office behind the receptionist’s desk at Walsh Investigations, LLC, sat another IPD ex-detective, Hank Johnson.

I watched Rowan reach in his desk drawer for the requisite celebratory shot glasses. He rummaged for an unopened bottle of Scotch, cracked it, and poured us each one. He waited impatiently for me to reach for it, so that he could clink glasses with me, and down his shot. It would take him but one swallow. In his mind, there was a good reason for the shots, I’m sure.

It was my first day, the first hour, the first minute in the job that I never thought I’d wanted...no badge, no fighting the bad guys, no endless paperwork.

Yet there I was, sitting in front of my ostensible new boss and business partner. I’d never been in business before. There was no rank like this in the business world, this managing partner/partner crap. I was used to a strict hierarchy: the Chief, the Captain, the Lieutenant (who was Chief of Detectives), the Sergeant of Detectives (who was me, mostly, for the past eight years), and whoever worked for me. Many detectives had worked for me. No longer.

Usually they were young guys that worked in my teams, hungry, bright, needing money, enjoying and relishing their promotion to the position of detective. Most had bright minds and dogged attitudes, and the unerring desire to be right, rather than expedient. They could be Rowan, who is probably smarter than I could ever be, but secretly, I think he ponders too long. We worked together for a long time.

Solved mysteries then explained how we did it, for a living. Some mysteries were tougher than others. Some weren’t mysterious at all. Some are still unsolved, but fewer than my predecessor, the late Master Sergeant of Detectives James R. R. Underwood, Ret., may he rest in peace.

As I sat, I could feel myself nervously flexing muscles. The shot glass felt heavy in my hand. My belt felt light: no weapon hanging from it. No cuffs. No taser. It simply held my pants up.

I knew Rowan would soon dip into his jar of eloquence wax. The Scotch would unwind him quickly. No notes would need to be taken. He would tell me what he figured I need to know, salted by his observations, preserved in the oil of his drink, like little anchovies in a can. He would dole out the salt, piece by piece. I was used to that. Most of it would be worth listening to.

Chapter 2

But I was naked. No badge at all. No lanyard full of miscellaneous photo IDs hung from my neck. The left breast pocket of my jacket had no badge fob dragging it down. I was lighter, I guess. My belt had felt heavy for a couple of decades. The lack of weight was even more to get used to.

Usually, there was a departmentally-issued, .40 Colt carefully re-engineered with my own modifications hanging on the right on that belt, in reversed position. Pops Luchansky did the mods. I draw a pistol as a left-hand pull. When I resigned, the ostensible Lieutenant of Detectives let me buy it. He wasn’t supposed to. I think he thought that doing so would bring him protection from litigation against the department, as in the old I got something on ya posit. He thought in those terms frequently, and for that reason he and the dozens who preceded him never liked me much. Or for that matter, liked Rowan. We were clean; not game players. Yeah, we knew way more than we should. Volumes.

The old gun belt kept my pants up, and was always pulled very tight, lest the weight of my heavy belt would drop my drawers. It happened a few times, but never in public. It is for this reason alone that I wear underwear.

In the very early days of being a peace officer, I was told I had to wear my weapon their way so that I could pull up and point forwards on a draw, meeting my gun hand with the other hand for grip and stability. It took several years of winning every departmental shooting contest before they would let me wear it my way. I already knew how to shoot well. My father taught me at a young age. He had been a detective, too. If it used bullets, we could shoot it with almost unerring accuracy. It was genetic, or so I wanted to believe.

To not be a cop, now, was incredible for me. Almost not-genetic, like growing brown eyes from my blue.

From the time I could barely talk, I wanted to be a peace officer, a policeman, a cop. It was what my dad did; he was a hero—my hero—and I had a similar public service urge. But now I had the urge no more, or so I had convinced myself. The hero business was now officially toast. My father was right: it eventually wouldn’t work out for me. There’s a certain thickness of skin needed to do a job whose only reward was paid civility. I tried to be civil. My older brother Pauley? Not so civil. He broke my parents in. I watched and learned. Pauley could be a dick...the other kind.

Be an engineer, my dad told me. Safer, and used my talents better. You know how to fix things, he told me. You’re a math whiz. You can fix TVs. Washing machines. Old cars. You understand all that stuff, he told me, often with an amazed look in his eye.

It was true. My father changed cars when he ran the oil out of them. My best visual memory from childhood was his Dodge pickup truck, whose bereft-of-oil engine blew so spectacularly that it actually shot parts through the hood and embedded them into the pavement underneath. We had to dig them out of the asphalt after the tow truck left. He was not a maintainer. He was a cop, a dad and husband, and on a good day, a painter.

He would discuss how I should think seriously about my future on our usual Thursday night outings. Paul got Wednesdays.

We’d be at a park, or later on, jogging together. He looked older than his years, I thought, compared to the other moms and dads. Perspiration would soak him easily when he exercised. He couldn’t out-run me, but he could keep up for a long, long way. He was always so strong. I would be strong like that, easily strong. Strong without much work, and when I did work, I had almost shockingly fast results. His eyes were as good as his hands. His eyes never stopped, and he noticed the strangest things. My mother once remarked that we should have been dancers. My brother rolled on the floor, his sides splitting in laughter. "Mom, these guys are cops."

My father continued to try to talk me out of public safety. Your talent’s somewhere out doing that, he said, where that meant something nerdy. That was kind of an epithet, an admission that it was something that needed to be done, but not by him. He would point out his accountant’s office. Or a guy with blueprints and a hardhat some place. That, he said, meaning what I should be doing. Not being a cop, like him. He would pull his cigar out of his mouth, spit tiny bits of tobacco some place, and use it as a pointer. There would be a puff afterward, like punctuation.

He told me, only once, that I didn’t have the stomach for being a cop. Then he said I should do what my heart and mind told me. He smiled his enigmatic smile after that, and looked away, as he pulled on his permanent cigar at the end of a jog one evening.

My dad jogged with a cigar. No, it wasn’t lit when he ran, but it was his way of keeping is mouth occupied, lest he might say something. He would chew on the cigar as though it were his gag, his gag that kept him from shooting his mouth off. He would pull it out, and it was though the cork was out of the genie bottle of his mouth. He’d say something, then cork the genie. Uncork, spit, talk, cork, maybe puff. My grandfather, his dad, was like that, too.

He wouldn’t smoke in church, of course. Father Gaudette smoked outside of church with my dad. He would tell me that my father was a good man, and a protector. When my father helped catch the Jumping Jack Killers, Father Gaudette even mentioned it on the pulpit. It was the only time I ever saw my father blush. He was so red in the face that he looked like another person. He wasn’t a great communicator, and was very to-the-point. But he could laugh, too. Many things tickled him.

I wasn’t crushed when he said I didn’t have the stomach for his kind of work. I guessed that he was trying to save me from the travail, long hours, uniforms, and battling the ugly side of humanity. He was a kind man, too patient for some of his friends. When we buried him years ago, he was in the prime of life.

* * *

The bullet he feared never came. He became a champion marksman so that he would be able to survive the battle he was sure would happen one day. Then he was drafted. His medals from the war were many. He refused to talk about them. I looked up a few of them. I could tell several things, mostly that he was a marksman and sharpshooter. A dead-eye, as they were called. Dead-eye Dad.

One of his American Legion pals told me once that my father had a special sharpshooter’s weapon. I knew about the rifle, but not what it was. We had many of them locked up in his gun safe. It had a special scope on it.

The guy telling me the story said that my father had put a mark on the rifle’s canvas bag when he had shot someone in battle. In two years, the bag had become covered in the marks. The mark was a skull and crossbones. After a particularly bad battle, the pal said, my father was marking the bag again when he threw up, violently, and he took the bag and dumped it into a pile of burning refuse. From then on, he carried his weapon with a sling.

We all knew about this specific rifle, at home. It was in the gun safe, the firing pin missing. One stormy afternoon, I blindfolded him with an old wool scarf at his request, as we sat at the