What others are saying about…
A Dirty Way To Die
Manny
Shepherd is a breath of fresh air for the PI scene. A Dirty Way to Die rocks, and J. Douglas Knauer writes with just
the right combination of grit and savoir-faire to give the book both style and realism.
---Michael A. Black, author of Hostile Takeovers and I Am Not a Psychic, with Richard Belzer.
Pulse-pounding action, a flawed hero with a code
of ethics, and the inside story on women mud wrestlers combine for an exciting adventure in J. Douglas Knauer's A DIRTY
WAY TO DIE.
---Luisa Buehler, author of The InnKeeper: An Unregistered Death; Grace Marsden
Mysteries ~ Think Monk in a skirt solving Cold Cases ~
Sexy and lusty mud-wrestlers and murder. Manny has his hands full. Looking for some entertainment? You’ll
find it (in A Dirty Way To Die).
---Frank J. Scully, author of Resurrection Garden,
release date January 1, 2011, MuseItUp Publishing
A
Dirty Way to Die
A Manny Shepherd, P.I. Novel
J. Douglas Knauer
A DIRTY WAY TO DIE
An Echelon Press Book
First Echelon Press production August 2010
All rights Reserved.
©2010 Judith A. Knauer, Living Trust
Original Cover Design © Nathalie Moore
Echelon Press, LLC
9055 G Thamesmeade Road
Laurel, MD 20723
www.echelonpress.com
ISBN:
978-1-59080-690-6
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product
of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or
specific locales as portrayed in this work of fiction are coincidental and unintentional.
Produced in the United States of America
This is dedicated…
to the ones I love…and
all those
with
a wry sense of humor.
Author Note:
Thanks go out to the
professional mud wrestling squad and road manager who allowed me to interview them some time ago for research on a planned
romance novel. It later occurred to me there would not be one New York or otherwise editor who would look at a romance
about mud wrestlers. So I began killing them off. "Murder in the Mud" seemed like a great working title.
Some of the Vietnam
insight came from letters received between 1967 and 1969 from retired 101st Airborne Sgt. James D. Arnold Jr.,
whose treasured friendship continues to endure; and from two former Navy Riverines or River Rats as they preferred to be called, who carried the infamous war's agonies to the grave.
Then there's the small town pharmacist
whose help proved invaluable. Thank you, Lynn Swinford.
Thanks to the Bloomington Writer Gang: Gayla Betts, Vicki Miller, Candace Armstrong,
and Michelle Anderson, as well as Carrie Johnson for their fine editing tips.
I thank Nancy Chirich and Tom Colgan for
their positive comments and inspiring encouragement in the early days of this novel. Editor Tom Colgan calling after giving
"Murder in the Mud" two readings remains an honor. Nancy gave the early novel two readings and said she really enjoyed
the story. I thank Karen Syed for taking the leap.
1
Manny Shepherd mentally
followed the trickle of sweat under his jeans from the small of his back down to his crack, bypassing the scar where the bullet
fragment lodged like a coward in an unreachable niche between his spinal cord and vertebrae. He pulled a handkerchief from
a back pocket and wiped it across his forehead. This sweat he could stem without drawing a public indecency charge.
In combination, the inaccessible metal fragment and
Illinois' summer humidity forced Manny to favor his left side when he walked. The limp used to embarrass him, but he wasn't
nineteen anymore. Very few knew how he got the wound in Nam. Just as well. The war ended eleven years ago and Manny now thirty-one,
knew all the butt jokes by heart. He wondered how many guys would still think their jokes funny if he shot them in the ass.
Pain exploded down his leg and echoed back behind his
eyelids. In the same instant fear slumped into his gut that had nothing to do with his pain. The sinking feeling took over.
Manny sucked in a deep breath and wished to be almost anywhere else but here.
Peoria's Heart of Illinois Fair held sour memories. He stood still and took another
tension releasing breath. Right now it wasn't memories bothering him. The sinking sensation in his gut was never wrong
and only meant one thing: close by bad shit lay waiting.
Manny checked his surroundings as he approached the fair's main entrance. A colorful assortment of humanity
roved the grounds up ahead.
A young man, his mind
secured by headphones nearly buried in his red Afro, snatched Manny's two bucks admittance at the entrance booth. The
baseball-mitt-sized fist reappeared through the hole in the wire window and stamped a red hexagon on the back of Manny's
hand. Manny stared at it for several seconds.
"Sonuvabitch,"
he said under his breath and almost turned around and walked back to his Chevy van. However, if he didn't find his friend
Steve Mallinotti and sit with him during the big show tonight, Steve might never speak to him again. He weighed his options
and decided yeah, pissing off Steve would be bad.
Manny strolled onto the fair grounds and checked his wallet again before he put it away. His Firearm Owner's
Identification card, or FOID, was in there all right alongside his Illinois Private Investigator license.
The Walther PPK he sometimes wore under his left arm
wasn't on him. He’d locked the gun in a dresser drawer after practice at the range earlier today. While back in
the apartment, he thought he wouldn't need the gun out here at the fairgrounds. Now he wasn't so sure.
He blew a breath out puffed cheeks and stepped into
the mindless mass of fair goers. Four teenage boys passed him on his right and swaggered ahead of him in jeans, baseball caps
and attitude.
Manny reached inside
his jeans pocket, extracted a tiny plastic bottle and shook the last two Tylenol into his palm. He popped them into his mouth
and tried to summon enough saliva to swallow them. The capsules refused to budge from between one cheek and his gum.
"Dammit," Manny mumbled around the pills.
He strolled deeper into the bowels of Exposition Gardens.
Just ahead a concession stand’s flashing lights tried to announce 'Fresh squeezed lemonade'. Five bulbs remained
black. Being burned out seemed to carry over to the thirty-something bleached blonde manning the stand.
She flashed him a big smile and leaned twin rose-tattooed
forearms onto the counter so he couldn't miss her huge half-exposed breasts. She chewed gum with her red lips parted and
appeared to take pleasure listening to the gum crackle.
"Hi, honey." Her voice said ‘this is what it’s like to be inside a chain-smoker.’
"You here to see the girls?"
"A
small lemonade."
"Sure you are."
Her shrewd smile never faded as she reached behind her and grabbed one of a dozen Styrofoam cups already filled with 'fre-h
sq-e-zed lem-nad-', which is what the working bulbs said. She took a small silver scoop and shoveled ice chips on top
of what Manny predicted would be a watery too-sweet drink.
"There you go, honey. A buck seventy-five. Hope you got your ticket 'cause the show sold
out." She nodded her head toward the grandstand area. Her long, coarse hair didn't budge.
"I used to be one a them." She nodded toward a nearby poster announcing tonight’s
event. "Mud wrestle. Down in Louisiana. Topless." She winked one mascara-laden eye.
Lemonade and Tylenol caps blew out Manny's mouth and spattered his shirt, the nice
pinstriped blue one Lisa bought for him. The words mud wrestle and Louisiana in combination caused one kind
or another involuntary reaction in Manny since his last summer before he enlisted.
He glanced down at the capsules-his headache and leg pain relief-lying in fairground
filth. Here the "five-second rule" didn’t apply.
"No shit? Louisiana?" He coughed. "Sorry. Went down the wrong way."
He threw a long hard look toward her as she stood laughing
in her deep cigarette smoker’s cackle. She smacked the counter with one flat palm and fingers cloaked in multiple made-in-Japan
rings.
Manny gulped the remaining
drops of lemonade and shook ice chips into his mouth to crunch on. He strode away quickly and tossed both the empty cup and
Tylenol bottle into a nearby trash barrel haunted with flies.
Two topless mud wrestler beauties ended his virginity in Louisiana and gave him an itch requiring medication.
This way back when age eighteen carried its own rules in his hip pocket and made it okay to get drunk as a skunk with his
shrimp boat mates. He thought if he ever ran into those women again he would recognize their faces. As he hurried away from
the lemonade stand he realized after all this time he wasn't that sure, which meant the rose-tattooed blond may
know him better than she should.
He zigzagged among the
food concessions, chased by a greasy sweet breeze. The fair made for a great place to get sick. Walnut taffy, deep-fried corn
dogs, cotton candy with an icy beer chaser. The aroma really boosted the acid already jetting up his gullet because of his
bad-shit premonition.
Manny glanced skyward.
The giant Ferris wheel loomed overhead. The garish wheel looked like the same one from his life-changing moment in 1970.
Fourteen years ago he swore he'd never come back.
Life between then and now played down the teen trauma. From then, part of Manny’s life history dumped on him with an
impact too enormous for most men to bear. He told himself he was normal. Sometimes he told himself lies.
Open livestock barns stood between him and the grandstand
special feature attraction. He held his breath and hurried through the ripe sour manure cloud to get upwind of the hogs. Cows
and horses could put out a tolerable odor, but damn, pig crap held a Masters degree in mean stink.
His jaw started to ache. Manny caught himself grinding
his teeth as he made his way toward the grandstands. His attention to everything around him became more acute when he felt
this bad-shit warning.
Carnies returned his
hard suspicious look without breaking a beat in their calls for pushovers to come try their jerry-rigged games. Yells and
whistles ripped through the dusk.
Sometimes, if he let
it, loud racket like this could swallow Manny whole. Now and then dark memories would flood in and he'd be hard-put to
distinguish between the noise of a good time and the combination of men screaming through
erratic gunfire and hammering rain. Doc Goold handed him Xanax to take as needed for the panic attacks. He preferred to fight
through them.
"Dammit, Steve."
This recollection of bad shit and even the reason he now stood in Exposition Gardens fairground had one person to blame: Steve
Mallinotti.
Manny wound his way
around groups of teens and resolved not to step on the little kids who screamed just to see who could be loudest as they raced
for rides on the gunnysack slide and the bumper cars. His headache mushroomed, no thanks to whirring motors whose gears groaned
for grease.
An excited edginess
stirred the crowd tonight. It didn't take a genius to figure out where the Special Features ticket booth sat. The tiny
building looked like the last flower of summer being swarmed by a squadron of bees.
A zillion colorful flyers clung possessively by tacks, nails or twine to every previously
naked light pole, tent flap, and fence post on the fairgrounds property. In bold print they declared tonight's main attraction
as a must-see bevy of beautiful, professional mud wrestlers straight from the home of the National League Cardinals and the
Arch to the West.
The St. Louis Slingers!
Manny arrived at the
impressive closed gate in the tall chain link fence dividing the grandstand from the horny crowd that
paid extra to sit on metal chairs in the horse track so they would be closer to tonight's entertainment. He handed
his admission ticket to the track to a bald guy with a grey goatee.
Manny scrutinized the crowd in the grandstand while the guy's shaky hands held Manny's
ticket and tried to tear off the stub while barely able to reach over multiple layers of stomach contained by red suspenders.
Finally he got it torn in two and gave Manny back his half to prove he'd paid for the seat. Actually, Steve had paid for
it.
Despite the underlying humor of this whole
situation, Manny's uneasy fear wasn't waning. If anything, its weight felt heavier.
