Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Dark Sleep: A Mike Angel Mystery
    Dark Sleep: A Mike Angel Mystery
    Dark Sleep: A Mike Angel Mystery
    Ebook238 pages3 hours

    Dark Sleep: A Mike Angel Mystery

    By David H Fears

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    “Dark Sleep,” #17: Mike’s check for a missing person case bounces, leading him to the client’s house, where he discovers a triple murder: the client, his girlfriend and a mystery man in black. The client’s wealthy mother hires Mike to sort things out. Mike chases leads about the dead girl to Southern Oregon, where he falls into the clutches of the Domino woman pervert and her sex machine. Action includes getting sapped, escape from a cement cell, shootout in the fog with two thugs, snooping into an illegal casino, and chasing down the mastermind behind the murders, and the plot to recover missing jewels from the Romanov collection of Russia.

    Adult language and situations, set in Oregon in 1976.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid H Fears
    Release dateApr 8, 2016
    ISBN9781311283191
    Dark Sleep: A Mike Angel Mystery
    Author

    David H Fears

    David was known by the handle “professor” as a boy (no doubt the thick black spectacles, Buddy Holly style), and has had a lifetime interest in Mark Twain. He has also written nearly one hundred short stories with about sixteen published, and is working on the 14th Mike Angel PI Mystery novel.Fears is a pretty handy name for horror stories, but he also has written mainstream nostalgic, literary, some fantasy/magical realism, as well as the PI novels. For the past decade he has devoted his full time to producing Mark Twain Day By Day, a four-volume annotated chronology in the life of Samuel L. Clemens. Two volumes are now available, and have been called, “The Ultimate Mark Twain Reference” by top Twain scholars. His aim for these books is “to provide a reference and starting-off place for the Twain scholar, as well as a readable book for the masses,” one that provides many “tastes” of Twain and perspective into his complex and fascinating life. He understands this is a work that will never be “finished” — in fact, he claims that no piece of writing is ever finished, only abandoned after a time. As a historian, David enjoys mixing historical aspects in his fiction.David recently taught literature and writing at DeVry University in Portland, his third college stint. His former lives enjoyed some success in real estate and computer business, sandwiched between undergraduate studies in the early 70s and his masters degree in education and composition, awarded in 2004.He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and has lived in New England, Southern California and Nevada. David is youthful looking and is the father of three girls, the grandfather of four and the great-grandfather of two; he’s written, “It all shows what you can do if you fool around when you’re very young.” David’s a card. How many of us think humor has a place in mystery tales or history tomes? He claims his calico cat Sophie helps him edit his stories while lying across his arm when he is composing, and sinking her claws in with any poorly drawn sentence. As a writer, a humorist, a cat lover and father of girls, he relates well to Clemens. Writing hardboiled PI novels is his way of saying "NUTS!" to politically correct fiction.UPDATE: Beloved Calico Sophie died on Apr 24, 2016 at 13 & 1/2 years. She is sorely missed.

    Read more from David H Fears

    Related to Dark Sleep

    Titles in the series (20)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Hard-boiled Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Leonard Pitts Jr.: The Year of Reading Women

      Jan 6, 2021

      I don’t mind admitting that I could really go for a good fistfight just now. Or a race against time to foil a terrorist plot. Or a zombie apocalypse. A zombie apocalypse would definitely hit the spot. As some of you will recall, I gave up those and o

      3 min read

    • Article

      Paperback ghostwriter!

      Mar 9, 2023

      Paperback ghostwriter!
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Book of Loki

      Mar 12, 2018

      The Book of Loki
      20 min read

    • Article

      Losing The Plot

      Jun 19, 2022

      Our bathroom had dark-blue wallpaper with birds and flowers on it, like the wallpaper in an English country house. The paintwork was putty-coloured, with a putty-coloured bath shelf that Dad had built for Mum. As well as room for Mum’s mug of Nescafé

      9 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Sep 1, 2023

      Table Talk
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Courage To Be Happy

      Feb 1, 2023

      MARRIAGE and columns have this in common: you tend to repeat yourself. More than once in these pages, I have quoted the New Yorker’s legendary film critic Pauline Kael. After President Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972 she wrote: ‘I live in a rather

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Reader

      May 1, 2020

      The Reader
      5 min read

    • Article

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Tim Lane

      Dec 8, 2021

      We stopped at the Topaz Internment Camp, where my wife’s family was held during World War II, near the tiny town of Delta, Utah. We found the apocalyptic remnants of one of our country’s great shames. The post A Year in Reading: Tim Lane appeared fi

      7 min read

    • Article

      Right Royal Madness

      Feb 9, 2022

      Taking up the latest fashion in one’s fifties is ill advised, but sometimes one just can’t help oneself. So it was when I was inadvertently catapulted into the ranks of the ultratrendy last year, diagnosed as mentally ill. Bipolar, to be precise. It

      3 min read

    • Article

      GhoST StoRies

      Apr 12, 2021

      GhoST StoRies
      8 min read

    • Article

      Chost Stories

      Apr 12, 2021

      Chost Stories
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Brontez Purnell

      Dec 7, 2020

      Don’t read this shit unless you like being really really really triggered. The post A Year in Reading: Brontez Purnell appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Dark Sleep

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Dark Sleep - David H Fears

      Chapter 1

      Contents of the thin blue envelope caught me up short. Lionel Chesterton the Third had bounced a check on yours truly. I’d put it back through the First National Bank thinking clerical error. Had to be. After all, young Chesterton had just entered the age of majority, claimant to millions from the estate of his late father, the Second Chesterton, who on all accounts got his boodle from the First Chesterton by running rum across from Canada to Detroit during Prohibition. How could a multi-millionaire bounce a measly five hundred dollar check to a private investigator to locate his missing fiancé? I’d barely had time to draw up a file on the girl, Virginia Hopewell, one of a gaggle of silver-spoon-in-mouth debutants flitting about Portland’s upper crust during this year’s spring debut, 1976. Coming Out they called it, way before the term became a badge for queers.

      After calling the bank to hear non-sufficient funds, reality set in; they were sorry, very sorry but could not shed further light on the affront, could not tell me the balance in Chesterton’s account, could not even describe the man. Bankers are born dumb.

      I dialed the Third’s office. A recording said he was on vacation. Probably fatigued from counting his cash, which he felt too risky to deposit. But millions in a mattress makes for fitful sleep.

      I showed the check to Molly who laughed in my face. Cute number, my Molly, who enjoys laughing in my face followed by hot kisses most of the time. This time a sassy pink tongue neener-neener substituted for kisses. She was in fine fiddle, whatever that means. My ex-partner Rick likes the phrase.

      Maybe he’s check-kiting to keep churning his cash. Or, maybe he’s forgotten Virginia and ran off to some island hideaway after donating his fortune to an obscure charity, like our ‘Save the Snails in the Olympic Forest’ movement.

      You’re still good for one-liners, kiddo. Been hanging with Rick and Cathy lately?

      Rick Anthony, now approaching his three-score and ten birthday, partnered up with me after retiring from the NYPD back in ‘61, but recently spent most of his exhaustive detective energies between the sheets with his 28 year old blonde beauty of a wife. Pa Kettle weds Tuesday Weld. Still, we rooted for them.

      After running off a year ago to the Oregon coast, Cathy Hawthorne, now Anthony, seemed to settle in to the idea and restrictions of being wife to a senior citizen. Not so senior he couldn’t respond carnally, mind you, but perhaps too senior in his ideas about other fun. A stimulating afternoon for Rick is defined by cross-word puzzles, loitering around my office, and watching reruns of Jeopardy, which went off the air the year before and now object of a massive letter-writing campaign that ultimately brought the snoozefest back to the boob tube. I would have preferred Amos & Andy, but every man jack stumbled over himself in those days to avoid offending the blacks. That eggshell dancing started the great American foolery of finding offense in every noun and verb, a movement to squelch ideas from the great repository of ideas — universities. Ironic that such a movement would begin there.

      Cathy had become auntie to our son, Markie, taking him off Molly’s hands on every possible occasion. Her eggs were growing stale and the impatient ticking of her biological clock forced trips to doctors for her and Rick only to be told Rick’s age might be a factor, but to keep trying. I couldn’t picture Rick as a dad at his age, but Cathy pointed out Cary Grant’s notorious (no pun on his movie by the same name with the smooth Ingrid Bergman) knock up of Dyan Cannon which resulted in his only offspring, a daughter. Grant, age 62 at the time, a record Cathy obviously eyed with the hope of apple pie and booties and a listing in Guinness World Records, 1976.

      You’ve got the check writer’s home address. Hop in your Butt-wheels and chase the piker down. Perchance he’s found his ingénue.

      You really have to stop picking up Rick’s gab. It doesn’t become you.

      Yeah? Well, when you’re stuck talking with a two-year old all day, any adult conversation’s a plus. I might add that you talk like the 1940s much of the time and I don’t complain. Take a gander at that wall calendar, Bub. It’s 1976.

      You know I splashed into puberty in the 40s. Dad grew up in the 20s and I listened to every word he said. You figure it out.

      Nah. Too droll for this sex kitten. Meow!

      Besides, your idea to retire from Bob’s insurance dodge and play hausfrau. Them’s the breaks.

      Not retire. Try sabbatical.

      Another Rick word. You mean vacation, laying about.

      Potty training’s no vacation, Bub. You should try it.

      Every adult walking around has made it through that low bar.

      Get out.

      I did. I steered the ’50 Ford Molly calls Butt-Ugly over to the Waverly Country Club area, pulling up to the Third’s stately white plantation-style house on two acres near the river.

      I expected a butler in swallow-tail coat to sniff in my face, but no answer after three rings of the bell and the same number of busted knuckles on oak. I tried the gold door knob, real gold it seemed. Locked like Fort Knox. Maybe more gold knobs inside.

      Not given to shyness, I strode around the house, checking windows. No lights on, though with bright sunlight and hordes of windows, there wasn’t need.

      A slider at the back patio had one of those pussy locks any respectable credit card can flip. Since I was aggrieved to the amount of five hundred clams, I felt justified in slipping through the slider to a back room with two full-sized billiard tables, a glitzy bar featuring several brands of bourbon I’d never heard of, and a giant grizzly bear head mounted over the fireplace big enough to hold a roller-derby exhibit in. The grizzly didn’t like me being there. If it could it would have leaped from the wall and charged me. Even without a body the head would be tough to fight off.

      I made my way to the front of the house and just for anal concern I unlocked the front and cracked the door open, in case someone challenged my presence I could claim the front stood open. Butt-Ugly Ford still out front, squatting like an ugly duckling.

      There’s a kind of stillness in an empty house that’s unnerving. Quiet that makes my ears ring. Every house has its own array of sounds: drips from a leaky faucet, ticks from grandfather clock, pops and creaks from settling walls, and other noises which occupants don’t hear after awhile. When entering a deathly still place I imagine a stunning blonde humming in the shower, soaping up her front for some clean fun. My imagination is muscular about soap and blondes. Such images douse spooky feelings and make hairs on the back of my neck lie back down. I’ve never actually found such a soaped up blonde waiting for an intruder like Hitchcock and other silver screen luminaries plant in our heads. Still, I keep hope alive. If I check enough bedrooms ….

      I was a free-range private eye, checking out each room in the lower level, noticing everything and nothing, like a court-appointed attorney. With each room I felt more unease, gut-level burdens about what I’d find. I did open a desk drawer to spy a book of checks on the same bank as my bogus draft. I passed up the opportunity to write myself in the payee line and charge double for the bounced paper.

      The stairs leading to the second floor were of the winding, Gone With the Wind-variety and I took them like I was sneaking up on a serial murderer in bed with Rita Haworth, not to think bad about Rita.

      I headed to the master bedroom first, identifiable for large double-doors, one side half open. Where is the light switch at most bedroom entrances? On the right. This one was on the other side. Then I recalled young Chesterton was a southpaw. He’d had the palace made to order. Or his old man had.

      The odor of cordite met my nose with the first step into the bedroom.

      My client wouldn’t be writing any more checks.

      Naked to the waist, sprawled diagonally across the foot of the bed with a huge hole in his forehead, his left arm dangled through the fancy bed-stand clutching a snub-nosed automatic. Enough brains splattered out on the bedspread along with a saucer sized piece of his skull to make anyone retch. Grateful I’d skipped lunch.

      The sight of him in his death pose, jaw stuck open, was awful enough. But he wasn’t alone. There’d been quite a tea party sometime a day or two before. Fully nude save for the tiniest of bikini bottoms was Virginia Hopewell, the girl I’d been hired to find. I don’t get off on nude babes who are beyond the pale, so I studied her face to convince myself she was the same girl in the photo Mrs. Slaterlee gave at my hire.

      Virginia sprawled awkwardly on her back next to the bed, two small holes in her noteworthy chest. In itself a crime. The blood looked black in the dim light and well congealed. In her right hand, also clutched with the last energy of her young life, another snub-nosed automatic, a .32, identical to her fiancé’s. Those popguns aren’t much better than toys, but at very close range any firearm is deadly. Their main claim is their small size, allowing them to be carried without advertising. These were his and hers models, no doubt. Rick once used one as an ankle back up.

      My eyes tried not to linger on her dead form, the way her breasts tilted, larger than most women can brag about but with nipples far smaller and fainter than such gazongas usually sport. Tiny nipples aren’t motive for murder, though.

      Rigor had only recently set in. For some reason I felt sorry she was dead, like a conversation rested in my brain meant for her. I mean, more sorry than the other two. I’m a romantic of sorts who hates to blame a crime on a good looking skirt, even when it’s undeniable. And I hate the waste of a lovely young thing even more. She had been lovely in her two plus decades, the kind of woman who I imagined stunned sucker males since toddler-hood.

      The third body sprawled against one of those French cabinets used for extra clothing. Rick would know the name, and likely even the manufacturer. He was way into furniture trivia. This guy’s cannon, no trinket; six-inch barreled revolver looked British, maybe a Webley. The only such gats I’d seen close were chambered for .455 ammo. I came across a few such weapons in my brief stint for the NYPD back in the fifties. New York City’s a polyglot of weaponry, at least half the cannons illegal. One killer I nailed even used a medieval mace. Nasty weapon.

      I checked the last body over for identification. Nothing. Not even a label in his all black outfit, at least the articles I could easily get to. Cat burglar? I inspected his revolver. Two missing slugs. By the condition of Third’s skull, one slug had found it’s mark. A hole in the wall stood out on the purple wallpaper showing where the other slug slept. As to the wounds in Virginia’s chest, they weren’t from the Webley. Small, like the .32 my ex-client gripped. Did Lionel shoot his main squeeze? Or in his moment of death had his gun gone off awry? Screwy. Only Rick could make sense of this party.

      Usually when I stumble on a body I call Central Precinct and get out of their way. Usually, however, I don’t find a group shoot where all the participants are good shots and do each other in, but it’s what I was bug-eyeing. So I found a phone downstairs and dialed Rick Anthony. Surely in his 29 years on the NYPD detective squad for the 51st and other realms, he’d come across multiple bodies and a puzzle like this one. At least I hoped he had and knew he could offer insights before we called in the law.

      I had no client. I had no retainer. Still, the blue-stamped Non-Sufficient Funds on my check niggled. What the hell had gone on?

      Chapter 2

      I snooped in drawers and closets while waiting for Rick. Right before I heard his Triumph Spitfire roar up — a gift he bought Cathy for returning to the marriage bed — I spied a sealed blue envelope on a writing desk at the far corner, my name scrawled in black ink in the same hand as my bogus draft. Addressed to me and likely not evidence, I slipped it into my inside coat pocket. Whatever Lionel’s last words were to me they’d keep. They might clear up why the check bounced and whatever his plans were about his case.

      Rick’s hearty Hail my young sleuth! echoed up the staircase and I threw a dog whistle back down and shouted. I met Rick at the bedroom door.

      He looked around and gave the standard cop query: Touch anything?

      Nothing. Except to see if the guy in black had ID or clothing labels. Clean as a priest after sneaking out of a nunnery at midnight. And a sealed envelope with my name on it I pocketed.

      Envelope? Let me see.

      I showed it too him. He grunted and handed it back.

      Call the law?

      Not yet. I wanted to get your take on it first. The young man with half a head there gave me a bad check to find his fiancé, the girl with the faint nipples and two holes next to one. When I didn’t get an answer on the line, I dropped by to ask him to cash this.

      I held up the check and Rick gave it the once-over.

      Same hand. From these sumptuous environs, it’s a conundrum why his bank account would be barren.

      My thinking exactly, Sherlock. There has to be an explanation, but it can wait. As I see this little shindig: girl shot man in black who shot Lionel the Third who fired wildly striking his fiancé. Yet, only my impetuous first take. Reflex hardly accounts for Lionel shooting the girl after his brain came apart.

      Rick took his time and examined each body. Dead about 24, he said. Reflex is unpredictable. They all fired within a millisecond. You might be right but she was shot twice — unlikely, quite unlikely. More plausible, staged by a fourth person. Ballistics will show who shot whom, though there’s no doubt who shot young Chesterton. Once the law identifies the Wembly shooter, it may begin to clarify.

      Staged? Too bizarre for a set up. Who’d believe all three were killed in a triangle? I’m not buying staged.

      There may be another shooter who left the scene. If the .32 slugs don’t belong to these guns, that would be the case. Or, said shooter plugged one or more with these guns, then wiped them and stuck them in the paws of the dead.

      Another shooter? A foursome’s only good for cards. Nobody bluffing here.

      Regardless, you have no case as of now. Your client never gave you consideration, seeing as how the check bounced. He’s shuffled off his mortal coil.

      Please. Why can’t you just say he’s dead?

      He’s dead. I do value directness, though street talk’s often lacking details. I could say he’s snuffed, deep-sixed, offed, on the way to a dirt nap. Whatever makes you happy, my young sleuth.

      Don’t try new approaches for my account, Pops. At your age they wouldn’t take. See anything here other than three corpses suggesting set up?

      Young Chesterton, shirtless; Young Virginia nearly nude. Afternoon delight interrupted by the clothed man with the British cannon? Robber perhaps? His ID is critical. Clearly, Chesterton didn’t need your services at some point. He’d found Virginia, which might explain the bounced check. It may be one of many accounts and he withdrew funds after finding her, though it seems off. Does the deceased have family you might apply to?

      Father long gone. Only child he said. Didn’t mention other family, but when a rich man buys it relatives come out of the woodwork.

      We took a last look around and headed down to wait for the law. As far as I knew Bret Fiskar ran homicide detective squad these days, after the sad early passing of Leon Choad from a heart attack. Choad was a double for the TV dick, Columbo, while Fiskar was simply nasty, with the humor of a morgue attendant. I’d tangled with the sarcastic dick on several cases. He always put me down. I didn’t think much of his style or his skills, which were few. I wasn’t shy about pointing out his warts.

      He fancied himself good at imitations, doing a fair Richard Widmark laugh, and a worse tricky Dick Nixon. Sawed off runt, contemplative face of a beagle, breath not much better. His permanent gray-black face shadow said he didn’t own a good razor or shaved in the middle of the night.

      Fiskar walked in with two uniform badges, one a fresh rail the other gray at the temples.

      We steered the trio to the master bedroom. After a brief look he directed the rail to go down and call the Medical Examiner.

      No we didn’t touch anything, I said peremptorily. Except to examine the Webley in the older guy’s hand. We let ourselves in the open front door. I came to inquire why the young man on the bed hired me to find his fiancé, the female there, with a bogus check, if you’d like to see it.

      I said all this to the back of Fiskar’s head and he made no reply until he asked if I knew the three. I gave him names of the engaged couple, and said the man in black had no ID, no identifying clothing tags or laundry marks, though I hadn’t stripped him down.

      He gave a smidge of his Widmark laugh and said out the side of his mouth, Not like you Angelo. I’d think you’d checked his asshole for notes before calling us.

      I let the nasty remark slide. Exchanging rectum remarks with Fiskar strikes me as stooping to his level of crude, stupid and blind.

      "Well, you don’t have the Chief’s good side nowadays with new

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1