Kate & Blake vs The Ghost Town (Kate & Blake Cozy Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  Kate & Blake vs The Ghost Town

  Kate & Blake Cozy Mystery number 1

  Dakota Kahn

  Contents

  Copyright

  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

  About the Author

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental. All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Kate & Blake Vs The Ghost Town Copyright © 2015 Dakota Kahn

  Cover images from Shutterstock.com

  Created with Vellum

  Chapter 1

  I, of course, didn’t realize it at the time, but my big mistake was thinking the words, And now everything’s going to be okay.

  That’s like rolling down your windows in your new sports car, getting out and leaving your keys in the ignition, WITH the engine running, blocking Fate’s driveway. Sure, nothing’s going to happen. Fate isn’t going to see you out the window, hear you say, “Everything’s going to be okay” and say, “That’s what you think, Kate, old buddy.”

  But think it, I did, walking from the closest thing my weird hometown had to a ritzy Italian place, Sicily’s, with the warmth of lunchtime wine in my belly and the hint of my fiancé’s kiss still lingering on my lips. I could have the wine because it was a Friday, and I’m my own boss.

  I could have the fiancé because I’m cute, he’s handsome, we’re in love and both back in our hometown after stints in the big city that showed we were not made for stints in the big city.

  I’m Kate, in case you didn’t catch that. Kate Becker, attorney at law, Whispering Pines prodigal child, owner of a duck, soon to be married to the chief deputy of a small Sheriff’s station. Also recently appointed as the local public defender, which brought in an unsteady stream of very low-paying work in a town without much crime.

  Not a town, I hoped, without much use for lawyers for other purposes. There was one other law firm in town, with a letterhead that said Barker, King and Hill and an entire building in the business section to call their own.

  I don’t own an entire building. I rent a small office space in a strip-mall office park, between a chiropractor and some old man who made hats. He made me a hat when I moved in. I haven’t worn it.

  I was coming from the restaurant after a late lunch, which my always busy Blake had left from early. I finished his spaghetti and meatballs (he eats like a six year old) and drank his half-finished glass of wine so I felt like I could have been rolled, like a fat old barrel, across the street, down the block, and through the park in the center of town that brought me to my place of business.

  Blake left lunch after getting a squawk from his radio.

  He picked it up, looked around the restaurant to make sure nobody was obviously spying on his very important local deputy duties, and talked back into the squawker.

  “I’m off right now, Gretchen,” Blake said, his voice suddenly gruff and officially police-y.

  The voice that came through the squawk box was having none of his lip. Gretchen had been old when Blake and I were kids in high school. Maybe some black magic had been used to keep her alive, and apparently in the Sheriff dispatch room for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since I’d never heard him talk to anybody else there.

  “Naw, you’re not, honey,” Gretchen said, her voice mechanical and weird through the radio. “We’ve got a full blown riot breaking out in Alvarado Park and if you’re not there in two minutes, Woody’s going to have a heart attack and Sheriff Dulap’s going to have to split you into two people to get all our work done. Mush, deputy! Mush!”

  Blake clicked off the squawker, looked around again to make sure that he wasn’t being overheard by anyone but lil’ old me, and muttered, “Chief Deputy.”

  “A full blown riot. Wow. What, is there a pick-up soccer game going on that somebody didn’t fill out a form for?” I said.

  “I wish. You can tackle those people. No, the developers are doing a final public presentation of their plans for the ghost town. That protest group is going to show up, everybody’s going to be yelling at each other. There was some commotion about it this morning, but I skipped out and went and had lunch with the prettiest girl in town.”

  “You had lunch with Debbie Rose? Where’d you go?” I said, smiling.

  Blake didn’t miss a beat. “Nah, Debbie’s gotten a little chubby. She’s slid down in the rankings. I was with Wendy Hayako. She still looks like she did in 11th grade.”

  “Mmm. Well, a man has to keep his options open,” I said, suddenly feeling a twinge of jealousy even though I was the one who started the joke. Blake just should have rolled his eyes and ignored it. Men.

  Walking to Alvarado Park myself, my mind working through a list of the prettiest girls in town and elaborate revenges I could plot against them, I nearly fell right into the middle of that riot without realizing it.

  Suddenly I was in a mass of humanity (as much of a mass as you can get here in Whispering Pines, which was a good solid few dozen folks.) At the head of the mass was a tall sturdy Hispanic woman wearing a lovely summer dress, holding a bullhorn to her mouth and shouting something. Miguela Sepulveda, one of the last of the families that were in Whispering Pines back before it was Whispering Pines.

  What she shouted was unintelligible, but I think I caught the word “unconscionable!” in there, and then someone started talking about heritage.

  All of this vitriol and shouting and pumping of fists was directed toward a raised platform and a podium that was erected in the middle of the park, at which sat a collection of people who were very much not Whispering Pines types. I could almost include the mayor, Wesley Reynolds, who was not from town and I’m convinced only moved here because he wanted to be a mayor of someplace, anyplace, and we had an opening. Sure, that had been almost a decade ago and he’d won and re-won elections since then, but I was gone most of that time, so I looked at him with my suspicious eye for newcomers.

  At either side of the mayor sat the official newcomers. The interlopers. The Developers. I looked at them very suspiciously even though I had been studiously avoiding anything like knowledge of what they were developing, what exactly was happening, and anything that would force me to have an opinion on the matter.

  “Isn’t this great?” said a husky voice, suddenly in my ear.

  All the hairs on my neck and my arms stood up. Holy cats, run! My body said.

  But I didn’t need to run. It was just Linda Rapp, her abnormally strong fingers on my neck and abnormally deep voice in my ear.

  She was actually a tiny woman, and she had to get on her tip toes to talk into my ear, but I was convinced that, if push came to shove, she could lift me over her head, twirl me like a baton, and throw me into Snake Fork lake two miles out of town. Maybe with one hand.

  Linda was my office
neighbor, the keeper of my spare office keys, and my most regular visitor since I had a coffee maker that worked and she was… economizing. I don’t know why she had to economize since she had a steady stream of chiropractor business heading in and out the door. I would watch them come and watch them go while sitting at my desk, waiting for anybody who needed my lawyer prowess.

  It was always a long wait.

  “It’s the best thing that could happen,” she said, smiling at me. Her little face was almost hidden by the enormous sunglasses that she always wore, night or day. She wore a white doctor’s outfit and looked like a scientist from an old black and white movie, doing experiments and “treading on God’s domain”, as they said in those movies.

  She looked like she would tread, stomp, charge wherever she pleased.

  “What is? The protest? The development? I haven’t been following along,” I said.

  “Oh, oh, the riot,” she said, stretching that last word out into an almost snake-like sound.

  It didn’t look like much of a riot to me. Whispering Pines is a solid middle to lower middle class community. I’d been in San Francisco during some social turbulence. Compared to that, this was like a Wal*Mart lunch rush when there was nothing particularly interesting on sale.

  “Why is that good? Do you want the developers to leave?” I said, suddenly hungry to fix my ignorance on the state of, well, anything in town.

  “Because a riot means fights. People punching, running around. Falling. Falling and hurting their backs. It is like money in my bank,” she said.

  Linda had the slightest hint of an accent, and an occasional turn of phrase that sounded not quite American. If this were the 50s, I’d be sure she was some kind of smuggled-in Nazi scientist. Or maybe she was just peculiar.

  “Oh, you don’t want people to get hurt,” I said.

  “It means lawsuits. Lawsuits for you,” she said, pointing at me, and smiling again.

  “Nobody in town has any money to sue for,” I said, with a shameful bit of sadness in my voice. It would be nice to have a big fat lawsuit to put money in my bank, too.

  “Sue Wendover or sue Sparks. Sue them both. Get the town together, class action.”

  Wendover or Sparks. The Developers. I asked Linda to point out which was which, and she did.

  “Wendover, he’s the one that looks like he came out of clothes catalog. With pin on his tie.”

  He sat to the left of Mayor Reynolds, who called for calm and respectful quiet, and received bullhorn shouts in return.

  Wendover did look extremely well-coiffed, with the gray at his temples mixing so perfectly with his almost blue-black hair that I wondered if he’d colored it himself, to look older. His face had on a tight smile that might have been put there surgically.

  Next to him sat a woman with a feathered hat and a pant suit who looked like she could have come from a completely different black and white movie than Linda Rapp. One from the 40s, where she was an American stuck somewhere in Europe. She was dressed and made up like a kind of doll, really, but she had a shrewd, tough face that was not the least bit doll-like.

  Next to her was another man, obviously in the Wendover camp. He wore a dark gray suit that didn’t seem to want to fit him. He had incredibly broad shoulders and his crossed arms looked like they could lift me and Linda Rapp in one hand and send us both to Snake Fork with a shrug.

  “Mr. Greene,” Linda said, pointing at the big man. “He is foreman or something for Wendover. Overseeing everything. And there, Sparks on other side. He looks like a California millionaire,” Linda said, nodding like I’d know what that meant.

  Sparks leaned forward in his seat, his hands on his bearded chin, watching the protestors with apparent real interest. He had hair just long enough to say, “I’m a rebel” without being quite long enough to seem really rebellious. He wore the modern billionaire outfit, designer jeans and a sports coat over a sweater, which looked casual and not too fancy and probably cost more than my yearly rent.

  He sat alone on the platform, but a man stood just beneath him, on the ground, silent with his hands folded in front of him, at strict attention like a trained dog. He must have been barely half-past five feet, but he had the focus and solid strength of somebody formidable.

  Right now, he seemed primarily occupied with keeping his eyes on Rip Chiaki, a semi-homeless man who was a regular fixture in town. Whispering Pines has a shelter where Rip was welcome, but he didn’t manage to make it inside every night. He wandered on the periphery of the presentation, looking unusually determined.

  I guess he was something like a town drunk. Those aren’t as funny as they seem in the movies, and people did what they could for him. Give Rip one thing, he was always dressed nice, after a fashion. At least his suit coat was nice, with shiny cufflinks, and his tie with a tie-clip attached, that he wore over his striped pajamas. Those links and tie-clip, they were the first thing I remember about Rip from when I was a kid. He always wore them: the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil monkeys. A set that all went together.

  Maybe it wasn’t elegant wear, but when you’re 10 it looks pretty keen. Not so to the rich set, though: the man standing down in front of Sparks kept his gaze on Rip like a spotlight.

  “Spark’s guard dog,” Linda said. “Oh, maybe we can see if we can get him to punch someone.”

  “Money in our bank,” I said.

  I stopped for a minute to watch the spectacle. Mayor Reynolds looked like he was about ready to jump over that podium and throttle Miguela and her bullhorn with his own hands.

  “This isn’t helping anything,” he said, bellowing into the microphone, which made his own voice just as distorted as Miguela’s in her bullhorn. “This is just slowing things down.”

  “We’ve seen their plans. We’ve seen what they want to do to our ghost town!” Miguela said. People shouted approval. “And we’ve said no!”

  “We had a vote!” Reynolds said, his usually bright red face starting to turn distinctly tomato colored. “A vote! Plans approved. Duly elected council!” He didn’t seem capable of getting a complete sentence out.

  “And the people are voting, with their feet, with their hands, with their voices!” Everybody around Miguela cheered.

  “But still,” she said, holding her hands out to quiet the rabble she was rousing. “But still, that man, Wendover, has already started construction!”

  Wendover got to his feet in a sudden movement, his robotic smile never changing. He walked to the podium, and Mayor Reynolds, his chest heaving with breath and suddenly looking old and tired, happily handed over the microphone.

  “Whew, people are excited!” Wendover said. “I love it. Wendover and Greene Amusements wants the people of Whispering Pines up in arms. Shouting, and soon you’re going to be jumping for joy when the council, in just two days, approves the WP Casino and Resort on the site of your very own ghost town!”

  A few people actually applauded this, too, which had Miguela looking over her crowd. Trying to pick out the disloyal.

  “That’s right. We’re going to wake up Whispering Pines. And yeah, we put up part of our set for our stage show because seeing it on a piece of paper like that,” he said, waving his hand at a poster that was set up just behind him. “Seeing that isn’t going to get anybody excited. Heck, I can barely stand to look at it. But imagine, in a few short months of construction, every day Wild West shows, a gun fight! Hangings! Saloons and bordellos and roulette tables… arcades for the kiddies and everything! The town will never be the same!”

  Mixed applause again. I’m not sure why hangings was in the middle of that whole list, but Linda tapped me again. I bent down to get to Linda level.

  “That’s what they built. The gallows for their show. It’s a thing, you know, put a man on a horse, put his neck in the rope. The horse runs, some gunslinger shoots. Fun for kiddies.”

  “I didn’t know kids were so hot for hangings,” I said, and then there was shouting. Somebody shrieked.

&nbs
p; I looked up just in time to see Rip was on the stage, right behind the podium, grabbing at Mr. Wendover! Wendover stepped back as the slim armed old man, pajama-and-suit-coat flapping, pulled at Wendover’s tie.

  I could barely hear what Rip shouted. Something about “Disgrace!” and “Debauchery!” and “Ruining!” and then he was yanked, roughly, by the big Mr. Greene.

  Mr. Greene may have been a business partner, but he seemed more at home playing bouncer. He had Rip Chiaki up in his hands squirming like a puppy, and the way he held him it looked like he getting ready to give him a hard pounding.

  Mr. Wendover had fallen over, landing just in front of Spark’s guard dog. That guard dog, who had been watching Rip until he disappeared behind the platform, had been ready to jump, but it wasn’t his master who was attacked, so he didn’t move. Didn’t even offer a hand to help the man up.

  Throughout it all, Mrs. Wendover had remained seated, her expression completely remote. She watched her husband get up and brush himself off, but didn’t seem ready to move a single muscle to do anything.

  Mr. Greene was doing it all. He was saying things off mike that I will not repeat, shaking Rip like a doll he was about to break apart, limb by limb. He even reared a punch arm back, and was about to strike when another man caught that arm, pre-empting the slugging.

  My heart leapt and I almost clapped when I saw it was my Blake who restrained the big gorilla. Greene looked back at him, all fury, until he saw the badge and the cool, completely in control look on Blake’s face, and stopped cold.

  There was pandemonium, shouting and all kinds of stuff, but I had an office to get to. I came up to slip my card in Rip’s pocket as Blake took him away, and to kiss Blake on the cheek for being a hero.

  Then as far as I was concerned, none of this had anything to do with me anymore, and I could go to my office and spend the day in peace. And now, I thought, everything’s going to be okay.