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  RETURN OF THE NOMAD

  Copyright © 2019 by Beatrix Banner

  All right reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THANK YOU!

  READY FOR THE NEXT MYSTERY?

  Chapter One

  I was back in L.A.

  It had been a long time since I’d last set foot in this city. I was on my way to meet Archie, an old friend of mine who’d saved my ass more times than I could count. He was a police detective and we’d met while he was in the academy. I’d pointed him in the right direction on a few cases in the past, thanks to knowledge I’d gathered from some acquaintances who are no longer with us. He’d steered me away from that same trouble on a couple of occasions.

  I stopped on the sidewalk as noise from the traffic and weekend revelers ricocheted off the buildings that lined Overland Avenue. My heartbeat quickened slightly. I closed my eyes and wiped my palms down the legs of my jeans. I cricked my neck and breathed in a deep lungful of air. A dull ache spread across the scar tissue on the left side of my stomach as my lungs stretched to full capacity. I let the breath out as I focused in on the sound of the cars passing by me as I stood on the sidewalk. It was a warm night, but my skin pricked as a cool breeze swept down the street. I opened my eyes and looked up. Dusk was gone and the evening sky was turning dark. There were probably stars up there, but the lights of Los Angeles had killed them all. I took another, shallower breath, let it out steadily, and continued down the street.

  It was not an unusual Friday.

  I met Archie on the next corner at a quarter to nine. He looked tired. He grabbed my elbow and pulled me down the street to Jimmy’s, our usual haunt whenever I was in town. We’d been going there since we were kids. Hell, I practically grew up there. It was a pretty quiet little spot. They’d never checked our IDs and once they’d gotten to know us, ‘our’ booth in the far corner of the bar gained a permanent reserved sign.

  We pushed through the door, into the warmth, music and bustle. We got a nod from Jimmy himself, behind the bar. The usual Friday night chatter filled the air as we elbowed our way through the bodies and slid into our booth. I watched Jimmy hip check a waitress and send her over for our order. Cindy had been at the bar as long as we had. She was smart and beautiful, with a smile that’d make most folk drop to their knees and beg for the privilege of kissing her feet, but her eyes told you she had your number in every way. If you weren’t an asshole, she had your back, too.

  “Two beers, Cindy.” I looked at Archie’s drawn face and cocked an eyebrow. “Cold ones, and maybe a whiskey chaser for my friend, here...”

  “Coming right up, sugar.”

  I smiled at her and she smiled back. Then she sashayed away to the bar. I smiled. I’d missed all this. It was good to be back in L.A. I looked over at my friend.

  “So, what’s new?” I asked, aware from his fidgeting that he needed to get something off his chest.

  “Oh, you know, same old. Work’s crazy, pretty sure my hairline is receding, both of which are major contributors to a lack of any kind of date, let alone a relationship.” He laughed, but I could tell he was genuinely stressed.

  “What’s going on at work?”

  He sighed and slid his long body down a little in his seat, then ran his fingers through his dark blond hair.

  “McDaid’s got a lead on this case. I don’t even know where to begin.”

  I made a face. McDaid was Archie’s partner. We were not the best of friends, mainly because he was an asshole. Archie must have seen my face.

  “I know, I know, I know. You don’t get him. He’s actually a pretty decent guy if you give him a chance. Anyway, you heard of Frank Porcino?”

  “Mr. Mobster? Sure.”

  “Yeah, in his dreams. More of a middle man than a real capo, but yes, that’s the guy. So last week he’s out enjoying an evening with some of his boys. They’re at the Jazz Garden, you know it? On West 6th.”

  I nodded. I was familiar.

  “So he calls over the waitress and gets his flirt on with her while he orders a couple rounds of drinks for everybody, trying to be Mr. Popularity. She brings over the drinks. He takes a sip. He’s asking her what time she gets off work and next thing, he’s on the floor. Foaming at the mouth, kicking his legs and begging for his mother. Then he’s gone.”

  “Jesus,” I replied, taking in the image. Porcino was a name you heard a fair bit around the shadier parts of Los Angeles. He was a sadistic bastard, I thought to myself, but, like Archie had said, he’d never managed to rise too far through the ranks. He had no problem stepping on those beneath him, but he never had the guts to challenge the guys above. So he got stuck in the middle, getting his kicks and dimes from the local drugs and protection rackets. Anytime he was seen out, he’d be surrounded by at least three of his boys. So for someone to get close enough to kill him… Well, now, that was unusual. Suffice to say, he had made it clear in his early days that he was not a guy to be messed with, as lazy for progression as he appeared to be.

  Archie shook his head. “Mmm, Jesus’s footprints were not in the sand on that day. But get this. We’re stuck, there were no forensics, witnesses saw no one suspicious, no leads...”

  “What about the glass?”

  “Zip, only Porcino’s prints.”

  “Did you talk to the waitress? Where’d she get the glass from? What about the barman?”

  He leveled me with a look. “What do you think? Oh! Duh! I nevah thought o’ dat!”

  “You said McDaid had lead on the case. He’s stupid enough to overlook it.”

  “Will you shut up, please, and let me tell the damn story?”

  “I’m sitting here waiting! Get on with it already!”

  I grinned at him. He sighed.

  “You done? So, after I do a bit of digging, I come to find out that this ain’t some random, one time thing.”

  “What?”

  He leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “So far, I have come across two separate cases in the last couple of months that look awful similar.”

  I arched an eyebrow at him, becoming interested. “Similar how?”

  “Mobster, involved in the drugs trade, taken down by poison. Now, I know it’s not a lot to go on, mobsters get killed, it goes with the territory, and they’re spaced out—Sacramento, S
an Diego... PDs that far apart aren’t necessarily going to compare notes on that kind of thing.” He shrugged. “But aside from the fact that poison is a very rare weapon to use, I can’t find a goddamn thing to connect them.”

  I took a pull of my beer, smacked my lips and sighed. “Yeah, who the hell is using poison anymore? That went out with the Borgias.”

  “Right? It’s weird.”

  “Very. Some Agatha Christie shit…” I said absently, frowning into my glass. “I mean, setting aside the poison, it almost sounds like old school gangland killings.”

  He shrugged and made a face. “Nyah… That was my initial thought, too, but gangland killings are always associated with turf wars, and we always know about them in advance. So do the Feds, and they liaise with us. But A, these killings are too spaced out to be a turf war, and B, there is no turf war! Neither us nor the Feds, nor word on the street, nobody is talking about a turf war.”

  “That is weird. Can’t say I’m sorry, one less mobster on the street. But it is weird.”

  Cindy reappeared and placed two ice cold glasses of beer and one chaser down on the table, winked at us and sashayed back to the bar. Archie picked up his beer and took a long drag, which he followed up with an obnoxious, satisfied sigh.

  “Love that girl.” He knocked back the chaser and banged the glass back down on the wooden table. “No, I can’t honestly say I’m all that sorry about it either. But that doesn’t help much. It’s still driving me nuts, and I haven’t a damn clue where to even begin.”

  He rubbed his face, then ran his fingers through his hair before sighing noisily. I swirled the beer around my glass for a minute, thinking.

  “Is it the same type of poison in each case?”

  “No, doesn’t look like it. Though a lot of the symptoms presented similar. All fast acting and all very foamy. But we’re still waiting on lab reports.”

  “What happened to these other guys?”

  “Each one’s a little different. Like the killer was adapting.”

  “Different gangs or no?”

  He nodded and drained some more of his beer, then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Different gangs, similar rackets. We did some digging and it turns out all three of them were pretty heavily involved in drugs. Some also provided protection, some prostitution, the usual, but mainly heroin and coke.”

  We sat in silence for a moment while I thought. Archie looked around, happy to find a distraction from work. Eventually, I asked, “Wait a second, didn’t the California Mafia kinda die out back in the ’90s?”

  He snorted and put a lopsided grin on his face. It made me want to pinch his cheeks.

  “Allegedly. Word on the street says they’re moving back in, though. Feds tell us all the major cities are seeing some level of resurgence in the Italian Mob. I’ve heard murmurs from informants for a long time that they never totally died out, especially up in San Francisco, San Jose and here. The story is they went underground, but the Chicago Mob held them a seat at the table with the Five. They knew they’d be back.”

  He grimaced. I felt a chill crawl down my back.

  “You think that’s true?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I think it’s true.”

  “So what do you know about the other two cases?”

  “Mostly we know about the first case, nothing much on the second yet beyond a name, Joseph Testa, and the fact that he was found outside his office block. We’re waiting on the rest of the report. The first guy was a gangster named Albert DeMayo, out of San Diego. He was poisoned with some plant called Tansy. The poison caused convulsions, spasms, that foaming at the mouth I mentioned.” He shook his head a moment. “And seriously messed up his kidneys. Apparently, if you know how, you can extract some kind of highly toxic oil from the plant. We’re not sure how it was applied yet. But…” He puffed out his cheeks and blew. “You know, this kind of stuff happens in the movies, or like, literature, you know?”

  “Clearly somebody’s been doing their reading. What’s your next step?”

  “Fuck if I know. McDaid’s as confused as I am.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s just McDaid, right?”

  “Give the guy a break. He’s not so bad.”

  “No, he’s a regular Sunday morning.”

  He ignored me. “But I’ve got a feeling my immediate future consists of trawling through endless files from all over Cali to see if there are any other cases that tie up with these. We’ve got to find some kind of connection, beyond the poisons. There is some guy out there, linked to these murders, and he is leaving some kind of ‘prints’...” He seemed to make speech marks with his voice. “On them. I just have to find out what those ‘prints’ are.” He shrugged. “And we’ll see what the lab results say.” He paused, swirling his beer around his glass. “I mean, this guy is a real talent, purely just for being able to pull this shit off for this long without arousing any suspicion. I’d be impressed if it wasn’t so goddamn disgusting… McDaid lost his lunch when he saw the state of Porcino.”

  I snorted. “Tough guy McDaid?” I laughed, probably unpleasantly.

  Archie suppressed a smile. “He’s not an asshole, he’s just a grumpy fuck with no sense of humor.”

  “Ah, my mistake.”

  Jimmy, our mutual old friend and owner of the bar, pushed through the crowd, holding three glasses of beer. He sat himself down in the booth next to Archie and deposited the foaming glasses on the table.

  “How you kids doin’? S’been a while.” He looked at Archie with mild concern. Truth was, he looked the worse for wear. “Wassa matter with you?”

  “Same shit, different day, Jimmy. How’re tricks with you? How’s the bar doing?”

  Jimmy nodded his head back and forth. “You know how it is. Surviving. We get by. Pamela helps out when she can so we keep our heads above water. She’s a good kid, like yous.” He turned to me. “She was asking after you, Ana. Asking if you’d been in recently. I told her I hadn’t seen you in a while, but I’ll let her know you was in tonight. She’ll be glad to hear that.”

  I smiled, remembering my old friend. “Yeah, I’ve been out of town for a long time. It’s not always easy to stay in touch. I’d appreciate you telling her. Let her know I’ll give her a call.”

  He looked up as Cindy gave him a shout from the bar. “Little help here, old man!”

  He winked at me, grinned at us both and grabbed his beer. “I better go or I’ll be in trouble. Catch y’all later.”

  We watched him shuffle back over to the bar. Archie looked at me for a moment with no real expression. “You guys go back a long way, don’t you?”

  “Me and Pam? Most of my life. We used to play together as kids. We were like sisters.”

  He smiled. “That long, huh? I had no idea.”

  “Yeah.” I sat a moment and made beer-rings on the dark wood. “After my parents died…”

  “You never talk about that.”

  I kept my eyes on the dark table. “I ain’t about to start, pal. So, when that happened, she and Jimmy kind of kept an eye on me, till I was sent to my grandpa’s ranch out in Paso Robles.”

  “Paso Robles? You grew up on a ranch out there? Man, I loved that place so much. You know me and my parents used to vacation out there? They used to rent a house by the river. Before it was mostly sand.”

  I smiled. “Yeah. It’s a great town, great place. Gramps bought the ranch after he got back from ’Nam.” I laughed. “It was a real ramshackle old thing. I loved it. Still do now he’s fixed it up, but back then there were so many places to get lost. I used to come down to the city and visit Pam here. Then she’d come up for vacations and keep me company. She was pretty wild even then. We’d get into trouble while he did the place up, tended to his grapes, his olives—and his weed.” I laughed.

  His eyebrows shot up.“Really? Sounds pretty sweet.”

  “It was. You should come up and check it out sometime.” He grinned and nodded and I drained the last of my beer and stretched. “You
know what? I think I’ll call her now. I should catch up while I’m in town.”

  “Good idea. One more for the road?” Archie gestured at my glass as he slid out of the booth. I nodded and picked up my phone.

  “Why the hell not? I ain’t got nobody waiting on me.”

  I dialed and heard it ring twice before before her voice came on, so familiar and yet somehow changed: like when you return to your childhood home but it belongs to somebody else now.

  “Hello?”

  I put a smile in my voice. “Pam, it’s me, Ana.”

  “Ana? Holy shit, man! How are you? I was just talking to my Dad about you! Where are you?”

  “Yeah, it’s been a long time. How are you? You doing good?” She didn’t answer. I could hear rustling in the background. I got the impression she was distracted, but I ignored it. I spoke to fill the silence. “I’m actually at the bar right now. He mentioned you... I thought I’d call. You free? Why don’t you come over? It’d be good to catch up.”

  “Yeah! I’m doing just fine.” She laughed like I’d said something funny. “Sorry, I’m just—yeah, so, tonight’s not good for me, but tomorrow could work, I mean, I might have to…” I heard rustling, then another laugh. “No, yeah, let’s do tomorrow.” I just about picked out a knock on her end of the line, then more rustling. “Listen, I can’t wait! But I really can’t talk right now. I think there’s somebody at the door. I can meet you at, like, ten A.M. outside the bar? We’ll go for some coffee. There’s a place down the street. I gotta run, Ana, but I’m so, so glad you called! I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

  Dial tone.

  I put the phone down on the table. My eyebrows knitted together as I looked at the screen, as if it held the answer to a question I didn’t know how to ask yet. I felt a little troubled. She had sounded like her usual self: bubbly, a little wild—and she had always been easy to distract. I told myself I was just imagining it, though I wasn’t even sure what it was.

  Archie arrived back at the table with the beer and a couple of whiskey chasers. Beer would help. So would the whiskey chasers.

  “You get through?” He asked.