Ed Lynskey's Blog: Cracked Rearview Mirror - Posts Tagged "detective"

Last Night I was reading Dashiell Hammett's THE THIN MAN. Well-done humor is a difficult feat for me. What I find to be funny, you might just groan at or see as cute and silly. Hammett uses a dry wit and snappy dialogue to create his laugh spots. The old flick of Nick and Nora Charles is gas to watch, too. A small bit of humor goes a long way in my current writing projects.

I read on a messageboard that Alfred Hitchcock's The Three Investigators mysteries is out of print. Maybe they're available as e-books. As a kid, I got a big kick out of reading them. I thought it was cool for a trio of pals to have their own secret meeting place hidden in the middle of a junkyard. Before TTI came the Hardy Boys. I always liked their dad's name, Fenton. Did anybody else ever read The Happy Hollisters? They ring a dim bell in me. About the same time, I also discovered Zane Grey, but he wrote in a different genre, the Western.

NOTE about Chapter 1: My private investigator Frank Johnson has moved from his native town to his new mountain cabin seeking some peace and quiet when a loud jarring noise disturbs his evening. He phones his closest neighbor and friend Old Man Maddox to ask if he heard anything strange. Frank's latest adventure unfolds from there.

CHAPTER 1 of The Blue Cheer by Ed Lynskey

A sonic force engulfed the mountainside and echoed up the laurel hollows. Even the treetops quivered. I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin’s roofline at a bursting fireball. The heat’s explosive wave stopped me in my tracks.

Glowing red embers drifted down. The smell of scorched fabric stung my nostrils as I took a deep breath. I struggled to make sense of what I’d just witnessed.

Lately life had been a chain reaction of bizarre events. Tucked in central West Virginia, my cedar log cabin lay in that rural ghetto called “Appalachia.” To others, it was a fly-over scabland. They were wrong. Just the night before, a puma’s howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn’t get any richer than that.

Earlier in the afternoon, I’d burned up a slew of calories slinging my double-bladed axe, its solid helve jarring my palms. Aromatic red oak sat corded to the woodshed’s eaves. Finished at last, I sank the axe blade into the chopping block. I balanced an armload of wood, staggered past the parked Prizm, and caught the door with an elbow. I went inside the cabin. Pieces of bark and pill bugs dribbled to the fir plank floor.

Past lessons had taught me that the woodstove drafted better with its flue open. I lit the sappy pine cones, tipped on kindling and in a few seconds, the red oak strummed into a fire. I closed the hatch and ran a sanity check: smoke detector, ash bucket, farrier gloves, hearthstone tools, and fire extinguisher. The twig broom belonged to the previous owner, a coal miner named Stubbs, a two-packs-a-day smoker whom lung cancer had forced into a hospice in Charleston.

No hard-bitten primitive, I felt grateful for the cabin’s electric and running water. But my FM radio sat quiet. WAMU marketing gurus had bumped late afternoon bluegrass music off their programming. DJs Jerry Gray and Ray Davis, both radio old-timers, no longer broadcast that five-finger picking music. That’d ticked off plenty of listeners.

A Charles Williams novel had then engrossed me until hunger won out. I’d eaten the remnants of browned venison last night, but the pantry stocked such canned delicacies as split pea, creamed corn, and minestrone, while chef’s surprise came in the unlabeled tins. I was foraging for Charlie Tuna when the droning racket started up.

The noise drew nearer. I hurried out the cabin door to the dark stoop. Not yet luminous enough to cast shadows, the moon poked over a tree-fledged summit. My eyes scanned for the unseen buzz, a cross between an ATV and a chainsaw. What the hell was it? I retreated a few paces, stooping to search between the tree branches.

A flying triangle, backlit across the star-pocked sky, glided into sight. A UFO? Whoa, easy, country boy. You’ll freak yourself. A blimp? The breeze batted chimney smoke into my eyes. The bogie, by now a ways in the distance, banked in a languid U-turn. The fact the bogie had robotic smarts unsettled me. Could my .243 rifle knock it down? Not unless a harder target appeared. Gnawing the skin on my thumb pad, I rejected the idea.

What was the bogie? A motorized hobby plane? No, this bogie flew too fast for kids’ stuff. More than likely some Friday night yahoo cruising in his ultra-light aircraft. Such contraptions, I’d recently read in a men’s magazine, flew at 100 feet high and topped 40 m.p.h. That sounded about right.

“Hey up there, hello!” I hollered between my cupped hands. “I say, hello!”

The hum continued tracking downslope. Maybe the natives could give me an explanation. Natives? What natives? Fordham County, West Virginia, now boasted fewer folks than before the Civil War, when McNeill’s Rangers rode these trails. My nearest neighbors, the Maddoxes, lived three miles over the laurel ridge. Andes, the young fellow operating the fire tower on the knob of land between our places, had recently moved back to Racine University in North Carolina.

That’s when the midair explosion occurred and the wall of heat hit me.

I shook my head. Who’d shoot down a manned ultra-light? Second thought told me this’d been no ultra-light. I then had a different, sinister thought. Had a heat-seeking missile zeroed in on a drone and smashed it to bits?

I darted inside the cabin, my boots stamping over the plank floor. Due to the diminished winds over the last 48 hours, odds favored the land lines still up. I rustled up a dial tone. Old Man Maddox grunted a greeting after the fourth ring.

“Johnson here. Were you outdoors earlier?” I asked.

After a cough, Old Man asked me to say again, only louder. I did. “The wife and I are fighting chest colds. We’ve been playing backgammon by the stove. What bothers you, babe?” Old Man used his favorite expression.

“Something blasted a bogie out of the sky. Made a big bang with lots of fireworks. Did you see anything? Hear anything?”

“Nothing, babe. Maybe a fuel tank dropped off a prop plane and detonated. Not unheard of.”

“My guess is a missile took out a military drone,” I said.

Old Man spent a moment thinking. “There’s no airport from here to Elkton. Is Andes on fire patrol?”

“He packed off to school Wednesday. Came by and said you were away. What do you think?”

“Unreal. I can drive up and help you scout the bush, if you like. Got a couple of four-cell flashlights. Just say the word, babe.”

“It can keep till morning.”

“Sleep on it. Good idea. I’ll drop by a little after breakfast. We’ll get to the bottom of things then,” said Old Man.

I hung up. I felt let down. Ages ago, my M.D., violating all manner of ethics and laws, had written me a lifetime prescription for an antidepressant. Happy pills, he called them. I’d always fought depression, always been predisposed to brooding reflections. It wasn’t a true bipolar disorder. Doctors had yet to light up my brain like a Leyden jar. They reserved electric shock treatment as last-ditch heroics to rejuvenate vegetable minds. Until such time, I took a happy pill every night.

I tried to renew my interest in the Charles Williams noir, then strode over to my bookshelves. All of the Golden Field Guide Series—birds, trees, rocks and minerals, wildflowers, and reptiles—stared at me. But nature wasn’t enough to distract me so I went to bed. Sleep, sure. My nerve endings, exposed electrical wires, jittered together. Screw waiting until sunup. Pulling on a CPO jacket, I trudged to the corner cupboard.

I found the Coleman lantern behind the fishing tackle and wickerwork creel. The lantern swished with plenty of gas when I picked it up. I pumped up its pressure, stuck in a lit barbecue match, and fired up its twin mantles. Hissing, they threw out compact hemispheres of light, which I adjusted. I wondered what awaited me down the mountain. The fireball’s mystery had gotten under my skin and I’d never relax until I’d checked it out.

My .243 lay on a deer hooves gun rack. The front drawer to the roll top desk eased out. My fingers roved inside to find a Kel-Tec P-11’s polymer grips. Advertised in Shotgun News as the tightest and lightest 9 mil ever constructed, its knockdown power was impressive. I pocketed it and shouldered through the cabin door.

Radium-tipped dials on my wristwatch glowed on ten o’clock. I walked on the balls of my feet, halted to hold up the Coleman by its wire handle. My red Prizm grazed by the woodshed while my Lamborghini languished in the shop awaiting a tune-up. Yeah, right. I hoisted up the Coleman lantern, scanned a 360, and only spied my breath vapors.

A 10-point whitetail had tramped down from the higher ridges to eat crab apples fallen by the cistern and we’d bonded. I prayed he wouldn’t end up tied to a 4x4’s roof in three days when deer season started. I didn’t spot him at the crab apple tree, however. Unlike me, the buck wasn’t in a rambling mood.

I relied on my mental map to pinpoint the debris spill and crossed the twenty or so paces of my backyard down to the ring of big boulders. Jouncing from rock to rock, careful not to dink the Coleman’s glass globe, I descended into denser shrubbery while I felt through my pants fabric the heat from the Coleman’s porcelain-steel ventilator. Tramping down that dark mountainside, for the first time in weeks I craved a human voice, a gentle and caring female voice. Christ. Next thing I’d go soft and give marriage another fling.

My feet crunched over dry hickory leaves. Wood rangers had stapled up Smokey Bear (“Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires!”) signs along the state roads. One cigarette butt flicked out a passing car window and there’d be real hell to pay.

I smelled no odor of char or ash to orient me and had doubts if anything had reached the ground. Could it be that the ejecta cascading through space had incinerated before hitting the treeline? If so, the drone had been flying higher than I’d first estimated.

Mushy persimmons swatted against my cheeks. I’d be back to pick those delicacies later. Moonlight had washed out all but a few stars. Had any of the wreckage snagged in the treetops? Feeling chillier, I strode faster. At Trout Creek, I stopped and cursed for having overshot my target area.

I did an about face and started back uphill. A witch moth butted into the lantern’s artificial light and my boot mashed down on a round, hard object. I set down the Coleman and scooped up the object. It was a steel cylinder, four inches in diameter and perhaps a yard long. A black, crusty crud pitted it.

I’d handled such hardware before but always prior to their detonation. This was nothing less than a Stinger flight motor case, Uncle Sam’s anti-aircraft weapon lauded for its dead-on balls accuracy. I’d vowed never to hold a Stinger again.

End of Chapter 1 of The Blue Cheer, by Ed Lynskey.