Fire Lake Read online

  FIRE LAKE

  The Harry Stoner Series, #7

  Jonathan Valin

  TO KATHERINE, AS ALWAYS, AND TO JIM

  Copyright © 1987 by Jonathan Valin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First ebook edition © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-324-2

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9354-0

  Cover photo © Joshua Sowin/iStock.com.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  FREE PREVIEW OF EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES

  MORE HARRY STONER EBOOKS

  FIRE LAKE

  1

  I GOT the phone call around one-thirty on a rainy December morning, half an hour after I’d gone to bed. The man on the line sounded edgy and tired, as if he, too, had been awakened by a late-night call. I laid the phone on the pillow beside my ear, glanced at the clock, and shook a cigarette from a pack lying on the nightstand. The man’s voice, thin, reedy, and countrified, wasn’t familiar; so if it was trouble, and it certainly seemed to be, given the hour, I figured it was the impersonal kind, the professional kind. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “Is this Harry Stoner’s house?” the man asked doubtfully, as if he was afraid he’d dialed the wrong number.

  “I’m Stoner,” I replied.

  There was a pause, and when the man spoke again he sounded confused. “You’re Stoner’s father?”

  “I’m Stoner’s son, Harry,” I said. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Hold on, now,” the man on the phone said warily, “are you saying you’re Harry Stoner?”

  I plucked the receiver off the pillow and stared at it. “Maybe you better tell me who you are,” I said, lighting the cigarette.

  “My name is Jenkins. Claude Jenkins. I’m the night manager at the Encantada Motel, out here on Wooster Pike. We got us...some trouble, Mr. Stoner.”

  “What kind of trouble?” I said.

  Jenkins put his hand over the phone, and I heard someone else firing questions at him in an excited voice. Jenkins came back on the line and asked, “You’re not a junior, are you, Mr. Stoner? I mean there ain’t no other Harry Stoners in your family, are there?”

  “For chrissake!” I said, losing my temper. “I’m Harry Stoner. Got it?”

  “Just trying to make sure I’m talking to the right party, that’s all,” Claude Jenkins said defensively.

  Fully awake now and irritated because of it, I kicked the blankets off my legs and straightened up against the headboard. “Look, Jenkins, why don’t you tell me what the problem is, then maybe we can decide if I’m the right party.”

  “Guess I better,” Claude said, after thinking it over for another second. “You see we got this guest at the motel tonight, and...well, he must have some trouble or other ‘cause he damn near killed himself. Took a whole shitload of pills. Puked all over his room and wandered out into the lot. Gladys, our girl, just happened to find him, lying beside his door with the pill bottle in his hand. We’ve been pouring coffee into him here in the office, but he’s still pretty doped up.”

  I waited for an explanation, and when it didn’t come I said, “That’s damn interesting, Claude, but why call me?”

  “He registered under the name of Harry Stoner,” Jenkins said.

  “Who did?” I asked—not getting it.

  “The guy who tried to kill himself.”

  I felt a shudder run up my spine, as if I’d seen my own obit in the newspaper. “You’re kidding,” I said, aghast.

  “I hear you, mister,” Claude said sympathetically. “But that’s the long and short of it. He registered under your name and gave your phone number, too. That’s why I called. That’s why I had to be sure.”

  I understood his confusion.

  “ ’Course, now I don’t know what to think,” Claude went on. “If you say you’re Harry Stoner, then I guess this one can’t be who he said he was...can he?”

  There was just enough hope in Claude’s voice to make me smile. Only it wasn’t particularly funny. The suicide could have picked Harry Stoner out of the phone book, I told myself. But deep down I knew that when the message in the bottle has your name on it, it isn’t by chance.

  “You figure he’s a friend of yours, maybe?” Jenkins said, dropping it squarely in my lap. “I mean him using your name and all.”

  I glanced at the clock and sighed. “I don’t know. It’s possible.” A friend or an enemy. “What’s he look like?”

  “Kind of scruffy-looking,” Jenkins said. “Scraggly beard. Shaggy black hair. Bad teeth. About five ten, one-sixty. Maybe forty, forty-five years old. Walked bent over. Had an attitude. That ring any bells?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But most of those guys are in prison.”

  “Maybe he’s fresh out,” Jenkins volunteered. “He’s dressed like it. Work shirt, work shoes, and dungarees.”

  Great, I said to myself. “What’s his condition now?”

  “He ain’t fully conscious yet, if that’s what you mean,” Jenkins said. “He keeps slipping in and out. Babbling a lot. Puking and moaning. I don’t think he’s going to croak, but he’s a far cry from walking out of here under his own power.”

  “If he’s really in bad shape, you better call an ambulance,” I said.

  “Ambulances cost money,” Jenkins said uneasily. “And it ain’t just the money. You call an ambulance in a situation like this one and you’re all over cops. We run a little bar and restaurant alongside the motel, and this boy here did a good deal of drinking at the bar before he decided to end it all. We just don’t want to call the cops if we don’t have to. It’s for his good, too,” Jenkins added.

  But I could tell he was thinking about his liquor license, and maybe the poker table in the back room or the video game that paid off in cash. It looked like Claude Jenkins was intent on making his suicidal guest my business. And for all I knew, his instinct was right. It would bother the hell out of me if I didn’t find out who the scruffy son of a bitch was.

  “All right, Claude,” I said. “You keep pouring coffee into Mr. Stoner. I’ll be out there in about an hour. If I know him, I’ll take him off your hands. And if I don’t, we’ll call the cops. Deal?”

  “Thanks a hell of a lot, Mr. Stoner,” Jenkins said gratefully. “Honest to Christ, I got no idea what to do with him—whoever the hell he is.”

  “Neither do I,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

  2

  IT WAS almost three
-thirty when I pulled into the Encantada Motel parking lot. Drowsiness and the cold December rain had slowed me down getting started. And then it had been a pretty good jaunt out Columbia Parkway, through Mariemont to that tag-end stretch of Wooster Pike known as Miamiville. I sat in the car for a moment, with the motor running and the wipers clearing the sleet from the windshield, and stared at the little flock of white-faced stucco cottages huddling beneath the ice-shagged red-and-yellow neon motel sign. There wasn’t a single light on in any of the cottages; in fact, several of them were tacked over with plyboards, as if they’d been condemned. To the west of the cottages, a slightly larger shack, with an Office sign on the door, glowed dimly in the darkness—a frail yellow light that leaked through the blinded front window and puddled up on the rain-soaked asphalt of the lot. The bar that Jenkins had mentioned was behind the office and to its right—a dark Quonset hut with a Miller sign flashing in one tiny window. A beat-up Jeep Cherokee with icy wheel wells was parked in front of the hut. Aside from my Pinto, it was the only car in the motel lot.

  I gazed through the rain at the office window and knew that I didn’t really want to go inside. I wanted to go home—back to sleep. But curiosity and an obscure, ludicrous sense of obligation kept me sitting there, albeit with the motor running. Be real, I told myself. This is a dead-end place, and whomever you find inside that office, whoever borrowed your name for an epitaph, is going to be a dead-end case. Nobody you want to know, much less look after. The truth was, I didn’t have any friends who’d end up in the Encantada Motel. I didn’t have that many friends, period.

  I cracked the car window open and let a little icy rain spatter my face. As I sat there trying to make up my mind about whether to go in or not, the office door opened. A sharp-faced man with paper-white skin and a shock of red hair stuck his head out and hollered at me. I couldn’t hear him over the wind, but I could see him plainly enough. And he could see me. He waved his arm in an unmistakable gesture of welcome.

  God damn it! I said to myself. I should have thrown the car in reverse and sped out of the lot. Instead, I turned off the engine, bundled my pea coat at the collar, and stepped into the rain.

  The man waited for me in the doorway, a smile of relief on his face.

  “Howdy, howdy!” he said cheerfully.

  I grunted at him. “You Jenkins?”

  He nodded. “I’m Claude Jenkins. Come on in out of the rain.”

  I walked into the office—a square, paneled room, furnished with a couple of egg-shaped orange plastic chairs and lit by two lava lamps bolted to pine end tables. An L-shaped counter with an empty plastic brochure-holder sitting on it divided the office in two. There was a beaten wooden desk behind the counter and a door marked Private behind the desk. Jenkins ushered me over to the orange chairs.

  “Nasty night,” he said, sitting down.

  I shook some ice from my sleeve and sat down next to him. Up close Jenkins looked like his motel—stale, seedy, and corrupt. If he’d been blond, he would have been an albino: his skin was that white and his eyes were that pallid blue. But the red hair and eyebrows just made him look wan and poverty-stricken—the kind of guy who spends his life hiding from the sun in the darkness of a one-room apartment in Riverview or a motel office in Miamiville. He had a thin, surly, chewed-over mouth trained, like a spit curl, to hold a constant, insincere smile. He wore a wrinkled white dress shirt with a pack of Luckies in the breast pocket.

  “Guess you’ll be wanting to see your friend,” he said anxiously. “He’s in the back office there, sleeping it off.” He started to get up—to show me to the door marked Private. But I put a hand on his sleeve to stop him. He sat back down slowly, brushing his sleeve where I’d touched it, as if I’d left a mark.

  “What happened here tonight, Claude?” I asked.

  “Already told you,” he said. “Your pal got drunk, took some pills, and tried to kill himself.”

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “That’s it.”

  “Did he talk to anybody while he was in the bar?” I asked. “Meet with anybody?”

  “Wouldn’t know. I don’t work the bar.”

  “Who does?”

  “Clem does,” Jenkins said. His mouth was beginning to droop into a scowl, as if someone had taken a steamer to that spit-curl grin. “Look, why all the questions? Clem’s gone home. So has Gladys, our girl. I’m the only one left here. And I’m just trying to do the right thing. Now why don’t you take care of your friend and let me get back to doing my job.”

  “We had a deal, remember?” I reminded him. “If I don’t know him, we’re going to call the cops.”

  “No cops,” he said firmly.

  “Why? What would they find?”

  “Nothing,” Jenkins said, trying to look innocent and not doing a good job of it.

  He was obviously lying, but I was too tired to push it. For all I knew, the guy in the back room was a stranger, and whatever he’d been up to at the Encantada Motel was none of my business.

  “All right, Claude,” I said, getting to my feet.

  I followed Jenkins across the office to the door marked Private. He put his hand on the knob then glanced back at me, with a warning look. “He’s not in the best of shape. Got some nicks and bruises. From bumping around in the parking lot, I guess.”

  “There aren’t any other cars in the lot, Claude,” I said.

  “There were earlier,” Jenkins said, “when the bar was still open. We had a pretty good crowd tonight, actually.”

  I thought about the ice storm I’d driven through. The rain and sleet had been falling since sunset—hardly the kind of night for a “good crowd” at a dive like this one. But I let the lie pass, again, and followed Claude through the door into the inner office.

  It was a dark room—a little bigger than a utility closet—with a cot on one wall and a stubby plastic table with a TV on it, set across from the cot. The TV was the only light in the room. The floor was littered with styrofoam coffee cups, and I could hear a coffee machine burbling somewhere in the dark. The room smelled strongly of coffee and faintly, but noticeably, of vomit.

  A man was lying on the cot—his face toward the wall. He didn’t turn toward us as we walked up to him. He was wearing blue jeans and a government surplus flight jacket with an American flag stitched on one sleeve and a serial number stenciled on the back. His long black hair curled wildly over the collar of the coat.

  “There he is,” Claude said with disgust. “I’d watch your step in here. I been cleaning up his puke since midnight. But I might have missed some.”

  I walked carefully to the cot—the styrofoam cups crunching underfoot—and touched the man on the arm. When he didn’t respond, I shook him. He turned over on his back.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said, staring at his ravaged face. I hadn’t seen that face in eighteen years. But I recognized him, all right. Lonnie Jack.

  “You know him, then?” Claude said hopefully.

  “I know him,” I said.

  I shook Lonnie’s arm again and he opened one bloodshot eye. “How you doing, Lonnie?” I said. “How you doing, man?”

  Lonnie smiled at me, then fell into a stupor.

  “His name is Lonnie?” Jenkins asked.

  “Yeah. Lonnie Jackowski. Lonnie Jack, to his friends.” I turned to Jenkins and said, “Help me get him to his feet.”

  Jenkins sighed heavily, then walked over to the cot. Together we managed to loop our arms under Lonnie’s arms and hoist him to his feet. Lonnie opened his eyes, smiled goofily, and puked on himself.

  “Christ,” Jenkins said, letting go of Lonnie’s right arm and backing away.

  I managed to catch Lonnie around the middle, before he fell. Giving Jenkins an ugly look, I worked Lonnie’s left arm over my shoulder and guided him to the door.

  “Open the door,” I said to Jenkins.

  “Don’t take him out there,” he said. “He’ll just puke all over everything. Take him out the back.” He nodded toward a
fire door beside the cot.

  “Open the fucking door, Claude,” I said, giving him another look.

  “Shit,” Jenkins said under his breath, and opened the door to the office.

  I guided Lonnie into the office and over to one of the orange plastic chairs. I hadn’t been able to see him clearly in the gloom of the utility room, but in the lamplight I could see that his face was a mess. And it wasn’t the sort of mess that came from bumping into cars.

  “How’d he get the black eye and the split lip?” I said to Claude after I’d deposited Lonnie in the chair.

  “Like I said, he must have knocked into some cars in the lot.”

  I grabbed Claude by the shirt collar and jerked him to me, butting him hard in the forehead with my forehead—like the West Indians do when they want to make a point.

  “Jesus!” Claude cried, grabbing his forehead with both hands. His knees buckled and he started to wobble. I held him up by the front of his shirt, until he got his legs back, then pinned him against the counter with my body.

  “Who beat him up?” I said, glaring at him.

  “Christ, you hurt me,” he moaned, kneading his forehead with his fingers.

  I balled a fist and he winced and turned away, throwing up his right hand weakly to ward off the blow.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Why the hell are you getting so physical all of a sudden?”

  “Because he is a friend,” I said.

  Jenkins rubbed the red spot on his forehead again. “There was a fight. At least, that’s what I heard.”

  “Before or after he took the pills?”

  Jenkins sighed. “Before. Some bikers. They hang out at the bar on Thursday nights. I guess he rubbed one of them the wrong way.”

  “You can do better than that, Claude,” I said menacingly.

  Jenkins flinched again. “I wasn’t there. But some of those bike guys...they sell shit.”

  “What kind of shit?”

  “Whatever,” Claude said. “I don’t bother them. They’re regular paying customers, and around here we can’t afford to be choosy.”