Fire and Rain

  Fire and Rain

  A Casey Jones Mystery

  Katy Munger

  Thalia Press

  Copyright © 2019 by Katy Munger

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published by Thalia Press, August 2019

  Edited by Alexandra Lankenau

  To my amazing girl, with thanks for never putting me through the whole pole dancing thing. Thank you for proving that grace, intelligence, and kindness can come in the most beautiful of packages.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  It was just what the world needed: topless dancers who were sisters. And dwarfs. Who knew? Certainly not me. Yet there I was—in Raleigh, North Carolina, mind you—wading through West Street on a steamy Friday evening in September, shoving my way past hundreds of shame-faced men sheepishly waiting in line to take a peek at the Tinajero sisters, otherwise known from coast-to-coast as the “Tiny Dancers.” This was somewhat of a misnomer if you took into account their enormous breasts. Those babies were even bigger than mine and I can go entire weeks without a single man looking at my face when I talk. Of course, I was willing to bet their breasts were at least half plastic. Mine are au natural.

  I don’t think the men in line cared how the Tinajero sisters came to sport boobs the size of a toddler’s head. They were paying twenty dollars apiece for a fantasy I did not want to fathom.

  I pushed through the crowd, taking comfort in the fact that my own sex had better things to do. Only a handful of women, at most, waited for a chance to storm the doors of The Pink Pussycat and gawk at the Tiny Dancers. Otherwise, it was wall-to-wall men: truck drivers, bikers, restaurant workers, students, lawyers, cops, my dentist—hey, it could have been worse, it could have been my gynecologist—an entire battalion from nearby Fort Bragg plus enough white collar workers to jumpstart the Carolina economy. I resisted the urge to explain to the waiting men that their penises would not be any bigger, just because the dancers were smaller, and headed for the backstage door.

  The man guarding it was the size of a grizzly bear. He took one look at me and opened the sacred portal. I didn’t want to ask how he had recognized me. When you’re a big blonde with black roots, you don’t ask those kinds of questions.

  The owner of The Pink Pussycat, Sammy Templeton, was standing in the hallway, though he still had one foot inside the Ladies Room. He saw me and wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx. Which was fitting since he was smoking a cigar that smelled like a wet dog drying in front of a dung fire.

  “Rats,” I greeted him, using the nickname he had long ago accepted as his fate. “What’s shaking?”

  “Same as always. Pink, firm, female flesh.”

  “Does it have to be pink?” I asked. “It’s way past time you diversified.”

  “It’s just an expression,” Rats explained. “I am an equal opportunity employer.”

  “Don’t you mean equal opportunity exploiter?”

  “That, too,” he admitted cheerfully.

  I liked that about Rats. He was in a sleazy business but he retained the relentless optimism of a religious cult member on Prozac.

  “Lead me to these tiny dancers you speak of,” I said. “The last dwarf I met was a guy who came up to my boobs and he was having such a good time I never did get a look at his face.”

  “They like to be called ‘little people’ these days,” Rats said with an air of superiority.

  “Really?” I asked. “Because I was planning to call them by their names.”

  I got a closer look at the new suit Rats was wearing and whistled. “Expensive threads, Rats. You moving up in the world?”

  He touched the tips of his pencil thin mustache. I could practically see the whiskers sprouting from each side of his nose. Sammy Templeton looked disturbingly like his rodent namesake from Charlotte’s Web and so had been called “Rats” ever since he’d made his first squeak in the world. When your own father is first with a nickname worthy of middle-school, you know you’re in for a bumpy ride so you may as well embrace it. Rats didn’t just embrace it, he owned it. He even had a gold tie clip in the shape of a piece of cheese that was studded with tiny diamonds and he sometimes stuck a giant rubber tail in the back of his pants so that it dangled below the bottom of his jacket when he walked through a crowd. Rats was a rakish, good-natured fellow.

  “Business is booming,” he told me proudly. “I’m opening up a club in Garner and the one outside Charlotte is raking it in. The Pink Pussycat is going to be big one day. I may even franchise the clubs.”

  Oh lord. Just what those shopping centers full of Wendy’s, Burger Kings, Walmarts, and Home Depots needed: a blinking neon pink sign that announced “ALL GIRLS, ALL DAY LONG!” beneath a leering cartoon tomcat. Move over, Mr. Peanut. There’s a new cat in town.

  “I’m getting a divorce, you know,” Rats added hopefully as we reached the end of the hall.

  “Another one? Good lord, Rats. You need to stop putting a ring on it. It’s so yesterday.”

  Rats took advantage of better lighting to assess me from top to toe, clearly finding my current 180 pounds a bit more than his standards of “Shake it, baby, shake it,” tolerated. He was not being lewd, though Rats was admittedly an idiot savant of lewdness. He just viewed the female form in the same way a horse trainer might view a promising colt. He knew every nuance of every inch. He had high standards. One tiny flaw could take you out of the running. I had once been trapped with him in a basement for two hours while the cops raided an after-hours club above us. During that time, I had been subjected to a tediously-specific history on the Southern exotic dancer. The gist of his spiel—which would have earned him a Master’s degree at one of those goofy northern liberal arts colleges—was that the early 1980’s had changed the world of strip clubs forever. Once the money got serious, the professional workout artists arrived. No longer was it enough to be naked, enthusiastic, and desperate for cash. These days, you had to have a perfect body and incredible stamina to make it in most flesh joints. And I was now not only too heavy for such a career, I was a good twenty years over the hill.

  “If you were younger, the extra meat on those bones of yours might be acceptable. At least in the mornings, when the men are less picky,” he said reassuringly, as if there was a snowball’s chance in hell I’d take such a comment as a compliment. Realizing I might be offended, he added, “Not that it doesn’t look good on you, of course. You’re still a beautiful woman I wouldn’t dare cross.”

  I tried not to let his observation about my weight nick my ego. But I did press against him as I squeezed past to meet my two newest clients. “Excuse me,” I said sweetly, as if I had no idea my breasts had whumped him in the face like we were having a pillow fight.

  Apparently, I still had the fire. Rats grinned at me, flicked his cigar ashes on the floor, and wiggled his eyebrows again. Let no man say that Sammy Templeton did not appreciate little ole me.

  Inside the dressing room, my entrance was less appreciated. For a pair of women facing vicious death threats, the Tiny Dancers looked supremely unconcerned. They also didn’t look all that different from me. At least not sitting down. Together, we were a trio of cheap blondes in varying sizes. Yes, their arms were a littl
e shorter, their torsos a bit thicker proportionately—but when your arms are long enough to reach your cocktail and your torso is obliterated by 44 DDD breasts, such distinctions are immaterial.

  “Girls,” Rats announced. “The cavalry is here.”

  I whinnied and the two women looked at me with double doses of disdain. They were not impressed with my appearance. With a single glance, they managed to let me know that I was no competition for them.

  “Her?” one of the sisters said scornfully. She turned her back on me and finished applying eyeliner heavy enough to make Cleopatra look positively dewy-eyed.

  The other sister was more polite. “I’m Candy,” she said, rising from her chair.

  For the first time, it was clear I towered over the sisters. But their fashion sense left me in the dust. Candy Tinajero was dressed in a fringed buckskin outfit reminiscent of Tiger Lily in Peter Pan—if Tiger Lily had been a slut intend on deflowering the Lost Boys. The neckline on her faux doeskin dress would have emptied an entire Baptist Church within seconds. Or maybe filled one, the way things were going for the Southern Baptists these days.

  “I’m Casey Jones,” I told her. We shook hands. Candy’s handshake was firm, not at all like the lifeless carp a lot of women offer.

  “This is Roxy,” she said, nodding toward her sister.

  Roxy slid her eyes at me but said nothing. She was dressed in a purple sequined blouse, tight white hot pants, white leather boots that reached hallway up her thighs, and a purple cowboy hat. Well, wee doggies. In addition to satisfying the public’s fetishes for short women and big breasts, all the cowgirl fans in the audience were in for a big treat tonight.

  Strangely, I found myself intrigued by their cowgirl and Indian motif. What the hell were they planning to do on that stage anyway? So long as it didn’t involve donkeys, I thought I could take it.

  “Rats tells me that you’ve been receiving some pretty ugly letters,” I said. “He says they’re very specific in their threats. Can I take a look?”

  “Be my guest.” Roxy poked an envelope on her dressing table with a carefully manicured fingertip.

  “How long until you go on?” I asked as I retrieved the thick envelope. I was wondering when their attention would wander to the dollar bills being tucked into their G-strings instead of their own safety.

  “At least an hour,” Candy chirped. She plunged her hands into her bra and hoisted up her breasts until the nipples peeked halfway up beyond her buckskin top. They quivered and bounced like two puppies at play, pink noses and all.

  “You two must have a lot of fans,” I said, opening the envelope. “Did you see the line outside? It’s the longest I’ve ever seen at this club.”

  “I bet you say that to all the guys,” Roxy cooed. Her eyes slid over my body. I was into black stretch fabrics at the moment, since I couldn’t fit into anything else in my wardrobe, anchored by black boots. It was an overweight Emma Peel look. Roxy’s gaze lingered in all the wrong places for a strictly heterosexual female. But when I checked to see if her sister had noticed, Candy met my eyes in the mirror and smiled a little too coyly. Was she cruising me, too, or just checking out the competition? Good god, if the Tinajero sisters were also lesbians, and word got out, the line of panting men outside would stretch all the way to Kentucky.

  Rats took a final puff on his cigar and managed to fill the dressing room with his exhalation before he left to make sure the lighting had been adjusted to accommodate the Tinajero sister’s unique height requirements on stage. I fanned the air with the envelope full of threat-filled letters, which at least succeeded in pushing the smoke away from me. Able to breathe again, I read the letters inside while the sisters finished putting on ten more pounds of makeup apiece.

  Death threats did not begin to describe what was inside those envelopes. The sicko who had written the letters had a serious mutilation fantasy going on about the Tinajero sisters. He wanted to chop ‘em, grind ‘em, slice ‘em, dice ‘em, cube ‘em, and shred ‘em. Which made my job easy. I just had to find a sociopathic Veg-O-Matic salesmen and I’d have the bastard for sure.

  “The cops didn’t take these seriously?” I asked, holding one aloft.

  Roxy snorted as loudly as a stallion, but I didn’t point out the similarity for fear they’d find a way to incorporate it into their Western act. “It’s not like we’ve stayed in one place long enough for any of the cops to care,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose I could convince you that you need to take a break from dancing?” I suggested. “Just until this gets resolved? There’s a lot of men out there waiting to get close to you. It’s going to be tough to protect you.”

  The chorus of no’s that met this suggestion shut that idea down fast.

  “Me and Roxy have been on the road nonstop for going on two years now,” Candy explained. “We’ve got to make money while the hay shines, know what I mean?” She rose and shook her money maker speculatively in front of the mirror, checking the bounce of her breasts. They bounced just fine. In fact, if she got too close to any of the customers, there was a good chance she would knock someone out cold.

  “Then how did you receive the letters?” I asked. None had addresses on them, just “TO THE TINY DANCERS” computer-printed on the outside. That narrowed the suspect pool down somewhat, I decided. How many people knew how to feed an envelope through a computer printer without leaving it looking wrinkled, ink-streaked, and as if it had been dropped in a garbage disposal? Probably three in the entire world.

  “The letters have been waiting for us at some of the clubs we’ve gone to over the last six months,” Roxy answered as she applied yet another layer of pink frosted lipstick to her pouty little mouth.

  “So these letters were sent by someone who knew your itinerary?” I asked.

  Candy shrugged. “It’s no big secret. We have a website.”

  Of course they had a website. Everyone had a website. My Aunt Minnie had a website. Only what Aunt Minnie was showing on hers probably did not compare with what the Tinajero sisters were showing on theirs.

  “And the whole itinerary is online?” I said.

  Roxy stared at me like I was a particularly stupid pet she was thinking about taking back to the pound. “How do you think our fans could find us otherwise?” she asked.

  “Look for a really long line of idiotic men and fall in with the crowd?” I suggested.

  “Now, now,” Candy said. “My sister and I work hard and we’re good at what we do. We’re artists.”

  “Of course you are,” I agreed. “And you’re performing a valuable service, too.”

  I did not add that, in my opinion, their valuable service was the big fat cash fee they were handing over to me and my boss, Bobby D., for investigating the death threats.

  They stared at me suspiciously and returned to their preparations. “Do you know anyone—” I started to ask, but Candy cut me off.

  “We have no idea who is sending the threats. We don’t have any vindictive ex-boyfriends. We have the same sweet old manager we’ve had our entire lives and he has no reason to resent us.”

  Their entire lives? Good god, just how long had they been stripping anyway?

  “Are you his only clients?” I asked.

  “No.” Roxy reached under her skirt and adjusted something that required hopping on one foot. I did not ask what it was. “He has a whole stable of performers. He works out of Naples, mostly with retired circus performers. Need his name?”

  “I already have it,” I said, somewhat smugly.

  Roxy gave me a look I could not interpret. And did not want to.

  “So you have no idea who might be doing this?” I asked.

  “We have no idea,” Candy said. “At all.”

  “That’s not a lot to work with,” I pointed out.

  “Just keep us safe,” Roxy said crossly. One of her false eyelashes had fallen off and lay on the countertop like a tarantula in distress. “That’s why we’re paying you.”

  “I�
��ll need to talk to your family,” I announced, heading for the door. Time to claim a good seat outside before the Mongol hordes overran the “dance emporium” as Rats liked to call his converted whorehouse. Oops, I mean warehouse.

  “Our family?” Candy asked, sounding apprehensive.

  “You do have a family?” I said. “You weren’t hatched or anything?” Or maybe dropped by flying monkeys instead of the stork? I thought to myself.

  “Hey, we crawled out just like everyone else,” Roxy snapped.

  I bet she had.

  “Do your parents know that you strip?” I asked.

  “We dance,” they sang out in unison, so loudly I took an involuntary step back.

  “How old are you anyway?” I finally thought to ask.

  “Twenty-three and twenty-four,” they answered, again in unison. Stereo dwarfs. Excuse me, stereo little people.

  “And, yes, our parents know we’re in show business,” Candy added. “How else would we be able to send a bunch of cash home every month?”

  Well, I had one idea on that score. But I couldn’t just flat out ask them about it. I’d have to find out on my own whether or not they entertained any customers privately on the side.

  Roxy was watching me very carefully. I have to admit, it made me nervous. She had this way of looking at you like she was about to savage you for dinner and just needed to find a tender spot to get started.

  “Our parents know what we do for a living,” Candy explained. “They just don’t like to be reminded of it. My mother, in particular, is very religious.”

  “I’ll be discreet,” I promised. Since they did not know me, they did not laugh at that particular phrase coming out of my mouth.

  As I reached the door, it opened to reveal a resigned-looking Mexican man holding a Shetland pony by a red leather halter.