Swan Song and Other Mystery Stories by Jack Halliday

Author:Jack Halliday
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: suspense, crime, mystery, hardboiled, noir
ISBN: 9781434443571
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

BLACK SUNRISE

The sky looked like the back of a broad’s black chiffon blouse.

You know the kind: with spider-like fingers of thicker thread fanning up and out from the solid cloth below the shoulder blades. And the sun struggling to elbow its way through the strands of pollution and failing, providing an eerie contrast between what should be and what stubbornly is.

I found myself at the bottom of a ravine as near as I could figure. My horse was long gone and I can’t say I blamed him for “gettin’ outta Dodge.” I would have gladly gone with, if I hadn’t been tossed, ass over teacups, when he spooked and reared at the backfire and blast of exhaust when they made it away from us.

* * * *

I guess it all began back at the Bottoms Up Bar where I was cooling my jets and looking over the facts on the case they’d dumped on me. There seemed to be fewer and fewer rangers available lately and more and more cases, and I know my way around a horse and...well you get the idea.

Kramer slid this one by me before I could decline so there I was nursing a beer and reading all about Joe Jiminy (I kid you not) and his alleged involvement in a “B & E” that left a rich old duffer of a family practitioner with a squashed skull, an empty safe and a missing wife.

More like a daughter.

Don’t you get tired of clichés?

Of course life is where they come from, isn’t it?

I remember a writing class I took back in college. I wrote up a little mob piece and described the protagonist as a rough-hewed feller with a long scar from eyebrow to chin on his left cheek.

The teacher really took me to task over that one: called it “clichéd” and “devicey” and informed me that no editor would ever take it seriously.

Like he would have believed me even if I’d told him I was describing a distant relative!

Anyway, I decided to go on out to the doc’s place and examine the crime scene for myself.

The house and surroundings looked about how you would expect them to. The building itself was an overdone brick, stone and wooden affair with one of those wrap around porches you sometimes see in Queensland, Australia today, or the American south of yesteryear.

I tethered Bill (my trusty Quarter horse) to the porch rail, dismounted and saw nothing of interest either in the yard nor nearby. The house itself was set off from the main road and even that isolated thoroughfare was fairly quiet with only a few luxury cars parked nearby and what looked like a lawn care company van situated near the corner.

I slowly made my way onto the front porch and peered through the slits in the blinds on the small window in the front door. I tried the knob and it opened unexpectedly. The cool blast of the air conditioning unit greeted my perspiring body and I was mighty glad of it.

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