Jack Daniels and Associates: Bronzeville Blowback (Kindle Worlds) (A Jack Daniels/Boone Childress Mystery Book 3) Read online

  Text copyright ©2015 by the Author.

  This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Joe Konrath. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Jack Daniels and Associates remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Joe Konrath, or their affiliates or licensors.

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  Bronzeville Blowback

  A Jack Daniels/Boone Childress Mystery

  David Macinnis Gill

  writing in the world of

  J.A. Konrath

  About Bronzeville Blowback

  Navy vet turned firefighter Boone Childress returns, hot on the trail of the arsonist who killed his fiancée, a trail that has taken him to Chicago where he teams up with Lieutenant Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels, a veteran Chicago detective with a nose for killers, to track the arsonist down.

  But the arsonist had other ideas.

  Burning houses for profit has become boring, and he's looking for a way to spice things up—by heating things up for Childress and his allies.

  Authors’ Note: Bronzeville Blowback was originally published in another version featuring different characters. If you read the original Bronzeville Blowback, there is probably no need to read this one, unless you’d really like to, then please feel free.

  1 - Childress

  Boone Childress took the turn into the apartment complex on two wheels. The rear end of his truck fishtailed against the curb. He ignored the jolt and slammed the pedal down again, leaving a ten-foot streak of rubber.

  When he reached the end of the parking lot, he drove through the open space, hopped the curb, and tore down the sidewalk. He jammed the gearshift into park and flew out of the car. The property manager was showing the place next door, and she screamed something very loudly. Her voice sounded very far away and garbled, as if she were talking through a wall of water.

  He put a hand up to let her know she was wasting her time and sprinted past to the stairwell that led to the apartment. He took the steps two at a time. His breath hung in his chest, and a tunnel formed in his vision.

  Cedar.

  Cedar!

  He hit the second floor and kept climbing.

  Out of nowhere, a pair of legs appeared on the stairs in front of him. New tennis shoes. Skinny legs. Oxford shirt worn over a red T-shirt.

  The face of his neighbor, Digger, appeared. "Hey dude. Nice flowers. You sure know the way to a lady's heart."

  "What flowers?"

  "The two dozen roses the guy just delivered a few minutes ago. He knocked on my door, and he said you lived down the—"

  "Move!" Boone shoved him aside. "Don't go anywhere!"

  Like the landlady, Digger said something that rushed past like a loud wave, but his words were lost in the noise. Boone hit the third floor at a full sprint, but even before he reached the door, he smelled something terrible. Down the gallery, he saw something that made his heart sink.

  Smoke.

  Smoke—thick, black, and evil—was roiling under the apartment door. Little puffs, nothing more than a light blue haze, came through, as if someone were smoking a cigarette on the other side and exhaling slowly in even waves.

  "Cedar!"

  He dialed 911 on his cell.

  "Active fire in multi-structure apartment complex!" He forced himself to give the address before switching to speakerphone . "I'm a firefighter," he yelled at the phone while turning his key in the lock. "I'm going in!"

  He unlocked the knob and gave it a sharp turn. The hot metal scalded his palm, but he didn't scream from the pain.

  He screamed when the door refused to open.

  The safety bolt had been thrown.

  "God dammit!"

  His shoulder slammed into the steel door. It didn't give.

  Bam!

  He hit it again. The frame shook but wouldn't budge as the curtain of smoke continued to pour from the space around the door. He knew the one-bedroom apartment was choked with deadly gases that would make it impossible for his fiancée to breathe.

  Now, it was bolted from the inside.

  "Son of a bitch!"

  He backed up as far as the railing would allow. The only way inside was through the window.

  He knew as soon as the glass broke, a jet of hot gases would escape, blowing out the rest of the window and showering him with jagged shards that would flay him alive. He also knew if he didn't break in, Cedar was a dead woman.

  If she wasn't dead already.

  "Don't even think that!"

  He gritted his teeth and ran straight toward the window. He pulled his knees up and elbows in, then slammed through the panes like a cannonball.

  When the super-heated air exploded, he landed on the carpet, covered in dozens of superficial cuts, bleeding through his plaid shirt. He wasn't dead, though, and that was the only thing that could stop him from finding her.

  "Cedar!"

  She wasn't on the couch.

  "Cedar! Talk to me!"

  Over the roar of the blaze sweeping up the walls to form a blanket of white heat on the ceiling, he couldn't even hear his own voice. He had been in fires before, pulled people out of bigger blazes than this, and held up falling beams with nothing more than a Halligan bar, but he'd never been in an inferno without a fire coat and helmet.

  The air scalded his lungs. Blood seeped from his wounds. He crawled on hands and knees through the living room. His eyes watered from the toxic chemicals rising from the synthetic carpets, and his hands felt like they were submerged in boiling water.

  He checked the kitchen and the bath but found only a super-heated inferno. He pulled his shirt over his mouth, his eyes spewing tears as he blinked against the fumes.

  On the floor in a thick soup of smoke, he found her. She was lying on her side. Her hair had fallen over her face, hiding her tender, kind eyes. He set an ear on her chest and heard nothing.

  No pulse.

  No breath.

  "Cedar! Don't you dare die! Cedar!"

  His head spun, and the lights went out.

  * * *

  "No!" Boone screamed and sat bolt right up in bed. "No!"

  He rose to the edge of the mattress wearing a pair of old pajama bottoms. The hotel room was frigid. The heat had stopped working in the night, but his body was covered in sweat, and he shivered, either from the cold or the adrenaline in his veins.

  The furnishings were sparse. Just a double bed, a lamp, and a small bathroom. Outside, he could hear the traffic from the Central Artery, the commuters heading to downtown Chicago for their day at work.

  He lay back on the bed. The springs creaked, and he threw an arm across his face to hide his eyes from the light. He had spent the last two days driving his old Ford truck from the mountains of North Carolina to Chicago, and even his bones were bone tired.

  On the bedside stand, his cell phone buzzed. "Childress."

  "Hey, Boone. Just calling to see if you made it all in one piece." The voice on the other end was his grandfather, Dr. Abner Zickafoose. Doc had helped him track his target all the way to Chicago, and he was the only one who knew his whereabouts. "How much gas did the truck use on the way?"

  "Doc, we both know that you don't give a flip about what kind of mileage the truck got. What are you really asking?"

  "You are my only grandson. I don't want
to see you in a jail cell."

  "What happens, happens."

  "Daniel Boone Childress, you listen to me. I know you loved that girl something awful and you'll do anything to make her killer pay, but the last thing she'd want is for you to serve his time. Think about that before you do something rash."

  "When have you known me to act without thinking?"

  "You're more rash than a pile of poison ivy leaves. Listen, how about I jump on an airplane and meet you? There are lots of extra flyer miles in my account, and it's been decades since I've seen the sites of historic Chicago."

  "All I am doing is checking out a few leads, Doc. You'd be bored out of your mind." Boone pinched his nose. The lack of humidity in the air was drying his sinuses out. "Give me a couple of days, and I'll be in touch."

  "You better be."

  "Bye, Doc."

  Boone opened the windows and looked at the traffic on I-90. It was already as thick as molasses. Despite his grandfather's fears, Boone had no intention of serving time, but he had come to find Cedar's killer. Nothing was going to get into his way until he found the man and put an end to him.

  He held up his hands in the morning light. Scars crisscrossed his palms and his arms, a mix of cuts from the broken window and burns the fire had given him before it took away his fiancée. Months later, he still awoke every morning, wishing it had all been a nightmare, yearning to feel her body at his side. But no matter how much her absence hurt, it didn't change the cold hard facts.

  The woman he loved had been murdered, and he was alone.

  2 - Daniels

  In a smoke-filled room behind a mom-and-pop Polish deli in Bay Park, a hefty man named Gorky sat at a card table shuffling the deck. It was after three in the morning, and the poker game had been going since the deli closed at nine.

  To Gorky's left was a skinny guy they called Sticky Pete. He smoked a cigar as fat and round as the dealer's fingers and played with his caterpillar eyebrows. That was his tell, a sure sign that he was holding at least a pair in the pocket.

  To Pete's left was a runt named Joey. Joey wore sunglasses, even though the light in the back room was so dim, you could hardly make out the cards. Joey liked to wear the glasses. He called them cheaters and dressed like he'd watched too many episodes of The Sopranos. He believed the dark shades kept the other players from reading his eyes, which gave him a competitive advantage. Too bad every time Joey had a good hand, he picked his nose. The only thing in Joey's pocket was a collection of boogers.

  To Joey's left was a man named Lincoln. He had black hair with a tinge of early salt-and-pepper. His blazer was thrown over the back of his chair, and he wore a light blue dress shirt with a monogrammed collar and a runner's watch on his right wrist. His nails were freshly manicured. At the moment, he had the lion's share of the pot, having won three hands in a row, not realizing the hyenas were circling.

  The sad truth was, he was about to lose his ass.

  More than his ass.

  Sitting to his left and filling out the last seat was an almost middle-aged but well-dressed blonde with lines around her eyes and a blank expression in her eyes. She had the best poker face at the table. She was also holding pocket aces and a .38 Colt Detective Special strapped to the inside of her thigh.

  "Here comes the river," Lincoln said as Gorky the fat man dealt the sixth card.

  "That's the turn, you stupid fuck." Joey's eyes darted toward Lincoln, and he made a sour face. "Get it right, huh?"

  The blonde noted the face. She also noted that unlike the other players at the table, Joey wasn't packing. He was a stand-in, not part of the game—the real game.

  Gorky and Sticky Pete weren't here to play poker.

  "Your bet," the fat man told Pete.

  Sticky Pete flicked ash off his cigar. "Check."

  "Fuck that," Joey said. "Two kings on the board, that's worth at least ten." He tossed a chip on the pile. "Raise you."

  "I'll see your ten." Lincoln dropped a fifty. "And raise you forty."

  "Is this the last hand?" The blonde scanned the table, noting the guys' screwed up facial expressions. She had asked the question three times already. "Right?"

  "Yes, sweetheart," the fat man said. "This is the last hand."

  "That's good," the blonde said. "I got things to do."

  "Like what?" Joey pulled down the cheaters so he could leer over them. "You have a hot date? Because if you don't, I got some ideas."

  "Yeah?"

  "Oh yeah, baby."

  "I've got work in the morning," she said. "So here's an idea for you. Put up or shut up." She pushed her chips into the pot and stood up. "All in."

  It was the universal sign that a player was all in. It was also a sign to the van parked outside that the deal was about to go down.

  Outside on the street, crammed into the van with an audio tech, Sergeant Herb Benedict of the Chicago Police Department sat on a stool, his prodigious belly hiding the tops of his thighs. He munched a bag of chips while he watched the video monitors. He wore heavy earphones that prevented him from hearing his own loud crunching, as well as the comments the audio tech was making under his breath.

  "You go, Jack," Herb said. "Too bad you sandbagged all night and now you get pocket aces. You're not even bluffing."

  Herb watched the action via the body camera attached to his partner's lapel. The lapel belonged to the blonde, aka Lieutenant Jacqueline Daniels of the Chicago Police Department Homicide Division. She and Herb had been staking out this game every Friday for a month, waiting for their suspect to show up. Tonight, the guy had strolled into the back of the deli with wads of cash and not an iota of self-preservation.

  Jack and Herb didn't work Vice, but this was a special case. A major case.

  The game was a front. Gorky and Sticky Pete ran a rigged floating game to draw in suckers. If the suckers lost, they kept the cash. If the suckers won, they beat them up afterwards and stole the cash. It was a win-win proposition. Except this time, Gorky and Sticky had caught themselves a big fish—a banker whose poker money was chump change compared to what he had access to.

  "That's an awful big bet, sweetheart." Gorky fingered the top card on the deck. "You don't want to wait for the river?"

  Jack shook her head, then shrugged. "Why prolong the inevitable? I just wanna see if these boys got anything in their pants besides a couple hidden aces."

  "Sugar," Joey said, "you don't have to pay to see what's in my pants. It's a sure bet, if you know what I mean, ba-da-bing."

  He winked over the cheaters.

  Jack fought the urge to make him a real soprano.

  Gorky dropped his hand into the discard pile. "Count me out."

  "Me, too." Sticky Pete stubbed out his cigar. "Too rich for my blood."

  Two down, one to go.

  Joey was up next. "You bluffing? I think you're bluffing. You look like the kind of girl who would say that she was going to do something, and then when it came time for it, you wouldn't come through. I think you're bluffing. Are you bluffing, sweet cheeks?"

  Pretending her eyes were a hammer drill with a diamond tipped bit, Jack bored through Joey's thick skull with her eyes. She imagined what it would be like to stick the barrel of the .38 up his nostril and say, pick your boogers with this, Joey.

  But that would be a bad thing. Jack tried not to do bad things, no matter how tempting they were.

  "You know what?" Joey tossed in his hand. "I'm out of here."

  And then there was one.

  Lincoln flicked the corners of his hole cards. By Jack's count, he was holding a pair of tens. Along with the pair of kings on the table, he was one card away from a full house. Jack could tell what he was thinking by the way his forehead wrinkled: One card, he was telling himself, and you can take this chick to the cleaners.

  After clicking his chips repeatedly, Lincoln finally did what Jack knew he would. "I call." He winked at the fat man. "Show me what you got, Gorky."

  "Whatever you say." The fat man grabbed
the edge of the table and flipped it over. "I got this! Eat it!"

  Chips and cards flew into the air like a flock of spooked pigeons. Joey screamed and threw off his glasses. He scrambled for the back door on all fours.

  The fat man moved quickly for someone with his girth. He wrapped a finger around the trigger of a sawed-off shotgun taped to the bottom of the table. He aimed it at Lincoln, both barrels trained on the banker's monogrammed chest pocket.

  "Give 'em up!" he yelled.

  "Give what up?" Lincoln said, apparently unaware that Gorky had cocked the triggers.

  "The keys to the bank safe, asshole! Hand them over!"

  "I've got a better idea." Jack stuck the barrel of the .38 against Gorky's temple, wishing so much it was Joey's nostril. "Put down the shotgun nice and easy, and I won't shoot you."

  Gorky's eyes turned toward her, but his head stayed still. "Who the fuck are you?"

  The blonde pulled off the wig, revealing a mass of frizzy black hair. "Lt. Jacqueline Daniels, Homicide, Chicago Police Department. You're under arrest."

  In the monitoring van, Herb threw his bag of chips in the air. "Way to go, Jack!" Then he caught his breath as his thick jowls wobbled. "Whew! Got to pace myself. Too much exercise for one day."

  The audio guy yanked his headphones off. "Sergeant! Do you have to do that?"

  "Do what?" Herb said. "I'm just being happy for my partner. That was one hell of a bust."

  "Not the bust," the sound guy said. "You're throwing chips all over my equipment."

  "Sorry," Herb looked into the bag. "Damn, nothing but crumbs left." He turned the bag up and poured the dregs into his quivering maw, looking like a SeaWorld walrus begging for the last sardine. "Sorry again. You know, Jack's always fat shaming me about my weight, but I'm just happy being Rubenesque."

  "I thought Rubenesque meant plump in a pleasing way."

  "Yeah. What of it?"

  "Your way's not so pleasing."

  Herb swatted him with the empty bag. "Eyes on the monitor, jackass."

  On the video feed, Gorky was slowly putting his shotgun on the floor.

  Jack told the fat man to step away. "Keep your hands where I can see them. Don't do anything stupid, because I've filled my stupid quota for the month, thanks to Joey."