As my friends made light of a bad situation, I’d made out a couple of tweakers near the courtyard, not to mention a girl sitting on a railing who looked like she’d sell her mother and her body for a quarter gram of meth.
When my roommates came back over to me, I said, ““Are you guys sure you want to spend the night here? I’ve got work to do and you can’t interfere.”
“We can help you on the case,” Natalie said, clapping her hands in excitement. “I heard you saying something on the phone about Jezzie Rose, that runner. Is the dirty lumpfish that whacked her somewhere around here?”
“I can’t say. And you can’t help me on the case. This is police business.”
“Not a problem,” Mo said, giving Natalie a little head shake, maybe to appease me. “We just need a good night’s rest and then we’ll be on our way in the morning.”
It was against my better judgment but I felt sorry for my friends missing out on their vacation and ending up in Bakersfield. “I’ll go get us rooms. I want you all to stay here.”
Five minutes later, Bernie and I were standing in the lobby of the Snow White Motel. I looked over the registration desk at a diminutive clerk with a name tag that read, Bruce.
The clerk eyeballed Bernie. “Cash no credit cards and all I got is a Dopey, a Grumpy, and a Wheezy. It’ll be an extra ten for the dog.”
Bruce was about five feet tall, with a bushy uni-brow that came to a point above his bulbous nose. His grin exposed a large set of teeth that looked like they were borrowed from George Washington. The smile seemed permanently fixed on his face, like he’d been shot with a Botox stun-gun. There was a political poster on the wall behind the clerk with a headline that read, Badenov for Mayor. I realized I was talking to Bruce Badenov, the mayor of Oildale.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to understand what the mayor had meant about the rooms.
“They’re dwarf rooms, named after the seven dwarfs. Only got three left.”
“Oh, I don’t remember a dwarf named, Wheezy.”
“We’ve got more than seven rooms, so Earl and Gladys ran out of names, had to improvise. We also have a Wimpy, a Limpy, and an Itchy, but they’re already taken.”
“Earl and…”
“My aunt and uncle. They built the place in the late seventies before I inherited. Aunt Gladys went a little Disney with the theme and Uncle Earl went along with it. He did all the construction himself.”
I complimented Earl and Gladys’s nephew on the establishment, realizing that I was looking at a man who was the king of the Snow White empire and the mayor of Oildale, a rare combination. Maybe Bruce would someday be Governor. Stranger things had happened, considering the state had a history of being run by actors and imbeciles.
I explained about my three roommates needing to share a room. The mayor said they could take the Dopey room which had two beds and he’d bring over a rollaway. I agreed to the arrangement, realizing that finding a Dopey room for my roommates and then a Grumpy room for Charlie must be some kind of once in a lifetime karmic convergence. I took the Wheezy room for me and Bernie, deciding it must have been named for the air we were forced to breathe.
I’d just paid for the rooms and gotten the keys when I heard a commotion in the parking lot. I ran back to where I’d left my friends, finding only Nana.
“What’s going on?” I said. “Where are Natalie and Mo?”
“It’s the killer,” Nana said, her dentures clicking away as she pointed down the street. “Mo and Natalie just ran after him. They recognized him from TV.”
I took off running with Bernie on his leash in the direction Natalie and Mo had gone. The dark air had turned colder since we’d arrived and the heavy fog now blanketed the area. It was impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction. I called out to my friends.
“Stop, I’ve got a gun,” I heard Natalie scream from somewhere up ahead in the foggy darkness.
Seconds later I heard two shots ring out, followed by more screaming.
“Natalie, Mo where are you? I yelled, moving in the direction of the shots with my service weapon drawn, still unable to make out anything.
“Over here,” I heard Mo say. “We got a problem, Kate.”
Seconds later, Bernie and I finally made out the figures of Natalie and Mo in the fog shrouded landscape a block from the motel. Natalie was bent over the body of a man. She was holding a gun.
“What happened?” I said, realizing that Natalie had her ex-husband’s antique pistol in hand. “Did you shoot him?”
“Wish I had,” Natalie said. “The shooter was Barry Ralston, Jezzie’s killer. The dirty wanker let loose on this bloke and then ran off.”
I used the small flashlight on my keychain, illuminating the dead body. The victim looked to be in his twenties. He’d been shot twice in the chest.
“Ralston,” I said to my friends. “Which way did he go?”
Before I got an answer Bernie apparently decided to take things into his own hands and took off, yanking his leash out of my hands, and sprinting away from me. An instant later, he’d disappeared into the fog.
“Bernie, bleib!” I screamed, using the German training command for him to stop. It was too late. My dog was gone.
Mo brought one of her big arms up, motioning down the road where Bernie had gone after the shooter. “Ralston just disappeared into the night, Kate. He was like some crazy-ass Bakersfield zombie.”
Copyright © 2014 by MZ Kelly
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Table of Contents
Note from the author
Also in the Hollywood Alphabet Series:
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
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
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