Lloyd Corricelli - Ronan Marino 01 - Two Redheads & a Dead Blonde (3 page)

Now don’t get me wrong, Lowell will never be mistaken for John Winthrop’s shining city on the hill, but it’s light years ahead of other local cities with similar stories, such as Lynn, Holyoke, and Brockton—all of which continue to slowly decay. We still have problems with the Asian gangs and drugs, but unlike similar cities, you can generally walk down the street at night without body armor and a high-caliber weapon at your side.

Most of the murders here are gang related; usually kids from the surrounding towns that come to the city to work for one of the locals dealing drugs. Some have found unfortunate ends parked down by the river with a nine-millimeter hole in their temple because they think they’re smarter than the guys they work for and get stupid.

It was now close to a year since I came home to live after fourteen years serving in the Air Force as a Special Agent with the Office of Special Investigations. I’d lived through the battle of Tora Bora against the Taliban in Afghanistan, my ride getting blown up underneath me by an improvised explosive device in Iraq and an undercover assignment posing as an ecstasy dealer in the worse gang-ridden sections of Los Angeles. I’d even survived a bad marriage that had left me with little more than the clothes on my back. Six years short of retirement though, I left the military and made some huge life changes due to an amazing bit of luck.

Stopping for a cup of coffee late one night after a long surveillance operation outside of L.A., I bought a lotto ticket on the spur of the moment, never thinking it would be the impetus for some major changes in my destiny. The next night, I won the richest prize in the history of the California State lottery. Seeing as my retirement pay would have been a pittance compared to the annual checks I’ll receive from the Golden State for the next twenty-nine years, I decided it was time to move on. My good fortune opened up a whole new world, one I was eager to explore.

Prior to my windfall, I had taken a very predictable path. I went from high school, to college, to the Air Force, and I never had a chance to see life from outside the blue gates. My financial freedom gave me the opportunity to leave Uncle Sam behind and experience new things. I had secret ambitions the military couldn’t support, and it was time to give them a try. A big one was to play in a rock band, which I now did a couple of times month.

Another ambition I’d had since I was a little boy was to be a superhero. I recognized though, that a radioactive spider or a high-tech suit of armor were a bit out of reach, so being a bit more realistic, I set myself up in my current profession. It was as close as I’d ever come to donning a cape and tights in the
real
world.

My decision to separate from the Air Force did not come without consequences. I disappointed a lot of people, including my father who claimed he always wanted to say he had raised a general officer. Now I had to listen to him constantly brag about my younger brother Marc, who is the youngest police chief in the state, or so he claims. It got tiresome hearing it day after day, week after week, on and on. Maybe one day, he’ll realize the good I’ve done and stop calling me his rich, lazy son.

So why did I move back here? After I won the lottery, I had originally planned to stay in sunny California. With all apologies to The Boss, the plan was to buy a bourgeois house in the Hollywood Hills with a trunk load of hundred-thousand-dollar bills. The problem was I quickly figured out that I’d never be accepted amongst the beautiful people unless I kept my big mouth shut. They didn’t care for my brand of sarcasm on the left coast, especially amongst the politically correct factions that dominate
polite
society there.

People in La La Land don’t like it when you say how you feel or offer an unpopular opinion, no matter how close to the truth it is. It’s different in New England, and that’s high on my long list of reasons why I loved living here. New Englanders rarely hide their feelings about anything. They’re a harsh, hardy folk who don’t smile as you pass them on the street. If you smile, it is usually returned with a scowl or, in the extreme case, a face full of pepper spray.

That is a major exaggeration, but I had a hard time with it when I came home. I had grown used to California, where everyone smiles, even the muggers and gang-bangers looking to take your wallet or sell you some crack. I had to break the smiling habit, which I had worked so hard to learn. It didn’t take long for me to slip back into my old form after the first few dirty looks.

My mind wandered back to the present as the midday sun crested over the buildings. John-Bob-Fred talked on, assured that I was diligently taking mental notes. No doubt he could afford the services of a top-notch private eye, but I’m a picky guy. Some folks in my profession take whatever job they can, picking up scraps like a bouncer picks up bar flies at last call. I’m different because I don’t need the money to make rent, pay child support, finance my drinking problem, or pay my bookie. I do things because I
want
to do them not because I have no other skills.

I never intended to work as an investigator again, but karma, fate, or God in heaven painfully steered me back in that direction. Whenever I felt like closing up shop and spending the rest of my life getting fat surrounded by nineteen-year-old bikini girls on a boat in the tropics, sipping drinks with queer names, exotic colors, and little paper umbrellas, I think of Karen. She is the reason I do what I do.

My name is Ronan Arthur Marino, private investigator and closet superhero.

TWO

The
chain of events that led me down this path began roughly two months after I migrated back to Lowell. I’d dabbled in music for a long time, playing guitar and singing since high school, but was never all that serious about it. Having all kinds of free time on my hands, I decided to act on one of those secret ambitions I mentioned earlier and joined a local band. I answered an ad posted on a music store bulletin board and immediately found a good fit, a classic rock band that didn’t take itself too seriously.              

The band featured guys close to my age though they had families and jobs. We had a bass player, drummer, two guitar players and keys with the vocals shared between me, the drummer and the keyboard player. The drunks seemed to like us especially when we played “Sweet Home Alabama.” Unfortunately, drunks don’t make good music critics, and in truth, we were mediocre at best. We called ourselves the “The Jefferies Tubes” after an obscure Star Trek reference, which was my idea. It was clearly a better name than “The Screaming Sled Ferrets” that the drummer came up with.

It was a Thursday night in early October, and we were playing at a club downtown on Market Street called
Max’s Blue Room
. I’d spent many a night there in college, working the door, and nothing much had changed other than the nam
e
same bad seventies lime-green wallpaper, scuffed parquet dance floor and strobe lights. A crappy sixties era Schlitz light, meant to be hung over a pool table, hung over the worn black plywood bar. Ironically, there wasn’t anything blue to be found in the room. It occurred to me once it was supposed to be Max’s
Blues
Room, but outside of an occasional Stevie Ray Vaughn song, no one played the blues there.

The place had gone through many name changes over the years. It was the
Black Cat Lounge
when my father was in college and
The Downtown Club
when I worked there. If I ever had any kids, it might be called something futuristic like
Planet Xenon
,
but the inside would probably look entirely the same. It was so outdated that most of the college kids who frequented it probably thought Schlitz was the name of the company that made the light.

After twenty years in business, the owner Max Massaro had finally decided to call the room after himself with the relatively recent name change. I was never sure if Max was even his real name, but that’s what everyone called him, at least to his face. Behind his back, his employees referred to him as the
Oompa Loompa
. To me, he looked more like an Ugnaugh
t
the short ugly pig-like creatures that put Han Solo into carbonite in
The Empire Strikes Back
. A short roly-poly fellow with three chins, he always wore a faded Red Sox cap, the same model worn by the 1975 team, with the red front and blue brim. It never mattered which sport was in season; Max never wavered from the Sox cap.

This was a typical Thursday night like any other Thursday night during the past forty years. When school was in session, the club was jammed with college students mixed with a few high school kids with good fake IDs. Cheap beer, hookup sex and rock n’ roll were the order of the night. Some of the kids may have been doing ecstasy too, but my days of worrying about the drug scene were over. They paid little real attention to the band, since the majority of songs we played were written before many of them were born. The Jefferies Tubes was nothing more than live background music for attempted hook ups. We once tried to play some more modern stuff and learned a
Link’in Park
song but quickly came to our senses after hearing ourselves play it and vowed to beat the next person who requested it.

There were only two reasons the kids came back week after week; one financial and the other out of habit. Max wasted his money hiring my band; the dollar drafts were the real draw and any decent DJ could have filled the bill. Truthfully though, as long as we got to play, the kids danced, and the guys in the band got paid, we didn’t really care about anything else.

Across the bar, my new girlfriend Karen was hustling her ass off for tips. College kids are notoriously bad tippers, but a woman built like her could get the boys to give up their last dime for a smile. She had long blonde hair, deep blue eyes, those bee-stung-looking lips that seemed to be in vogue and a lean muscular body built through hours in the gym lifting weights and doing aerobics. Her tight jeans showed every curve, earning her extra attention from all the boys and some of the girls who swung both ways.

Karen worked the club a couple of nights a week to pay the bills until she finished up her physical therapy degree. We’d been dating for almost six weeks, and although there was a ten-year age difference, it didn’t seem to matter. She regularly teased that I didn’t act my age, anyway, and she was probably right.

Although we’d been together for such short time, there was a real spark between us that went beyond physical attraction. After three years of marital hell followed by a messy divorce, part of me was afraid of committing to a serious relationship again. Every moment I spent with Karen made me reconsider and pushed me closer to the edge of falling head over heels in love with her. I wasn’t there yet but knew we were close.

She was different than most women I knew because like me, she was a veteran, albeit Navy. Karen had spent time in Afghanistan as a corpsman and had easily seen as much bloodshed as I had. While I didn’t often talk about the things I’d seen and done over there, we’d often swapped war stories and I think it helped both of us cope a little better. It was funny but I’d spent many an hour talking with various Air Force buddies about our experiences but until Karen I’d never had a girlfriend who could really understand how I felt.

She could also hold her own in conversations on religion, politics, and sports. She was far more than a pretty face, and I found her very refreshing from the Barbie dolls I’d know in California; despite her physically resembling the prototypical Golden State girl in every way.

Like most women, she couldn’t understand how a man my age could still enjoy reading comic books. It never affected our relationship though, and she just kind of smiled and laughed at me about it. While she studied her biology books, I usually followed Batman’s latest duel with the Joker. It was odd, but it worked.

Sex with her was a religious experience. Yeah, I know it sounded cliché, but there is no better way to describe it. Most women twice her age didn’t possess the skills in bed that she did. It was like she had been given an owner’s manual for my body and committed it to memory.

On the downside, I didn’t get to spend as much time with her as I would have liked. Between work, school, and her family, I was lucky to see her twice a week. I didn’t push for more but hoped, in time, it would come. My schedule was certainly open.

My band had just started to play one of her favorite songs, the Doby Grey classic “Drift Away,
”
when I noticed a guy hassling her. She tried to walk away, but he grabbed her by the arm and kept trying to pull her onto his lap. Never the fragile flower, Karen smacked him across the face, and he stood up threateningly. I quickly scanned the room but saw no sign of Max’s steroid-ridden bouncer, Lou. As usual he was probably off trying to get laid by some underage teen.

I put my guitar down and pushed through the crowd. The rest of the band didn’t miss a beat and improvised a string of bass and keys solos. I’d like to think that it was because they were seasoned professionals but I suspect it had more to do with their fear of getting chewed out by Max for stopping in the middle of a set.

“Let her go, junior, before you get hurt,” I yelled above the noise.

As the words spilled off my tongue, I realized he was a foot taller than me and at least eighty pounds heavier. He had a thick neck, and his arms were roughly the size of my thighs. He continued to hold on to Karen as he looked down on me. His eyes were bloodshot and said he’d had way too much to drink. Damn those dollar drafts.

“Don’t fuck with me, shorty, I was all-state in high school,” he slurred.

Behind him stood what looked like the entire offensive line for a Division III-A college football team, which is to say they weren’t really all that big for linemen; though still larger than me. I wondered briefly if I could take them. They’d all been drinking, and I was sober and getting angry. There was only about a twelve hundred-pound difference between u
s
nothing that I thought I shouldn’t be able to handle one kid at a time.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass who you are; let her go,” I demanded.

“I’m going to fucking kill you,” he laughed.

He let go of Karen and balled his Cro-Magnon sized hands into fists. That was all the intent needed. I hit him between the eyes with a left-right combo. He fell to his knees, his face almost instantly a bloody mask. In the background, my band abandoned “Drift Away” and broke into the theme from “Rawhide;” not one of them lifting a finger to help me. Bastards.

Football boy shook it off and got up, his fists flailing like an unbalanced windmill. The crowd dispersed and gave him room, expecting to see the guitar player get his head handed to him. They were in for a major disappointment.

I easily avoided his blows and nailed him with a roundhouse kick to the knee and a jab to the nose, knocking him back to his knees. He started to get up again but I landed a wicked hook kick to his head, and he went down face first like a sack of potatoes. He hit the vinyl floor with a large thud. His buddies stood in shock.

“Who’s next?” I blustered, hoping none of them would take me up on the offer.

They all stepped back, not wanting to end up like their friend. Lou, a big goofy kid who worked days at a local gym, appeared ready for action. He was a day late and about five dollars for inflation too short.

“Whoa, what the fuck happened?” he asked.

“He tripped, Lou. Why don’t you help him outside, so I can get back to playing?”

“Uh, yeah sure.”

The crowd parted like the Red Sea as Lou dragged football boy out the door, leaving a bloody smear on the floor. An overweight, freckle-faced kid with red cropped hair came over and tried to apologize for his friend.

“Hey, man, I’m sorry. He just had too much to drink. We’ll take him home.”

“Make sure you get his nose checked,” I said. “It’s probably broken.”

“Uh, sure. Hey, that was pretty cool. Was that karate?”

Something told me he was a liberal arts major, just getting by on challenging classes like basket weaving and underwater firefighting. His parents would undoubtedly be shocked someday soon when they realized all the money they had spent on tuition qualified their son to be a used car salesman.

“Yeah, something like that,” I said.

He nodded and left, satisfied that he’d met a bonafide apprentice to Bruce Lee. I breathed a sigh of relief over not having to fight a half-ton of stupid.

“Pretty fancy shooting, Tex. You learn that from some comic book?” Karen asked in her best cornpone western accent.

“Yup. Wanna’ see my six shooter?”

“Mmmmmm, promises, promises,” she cooed playfully. “Maybe someone deserves a reward.”

“Should I bring my posse, ma’am?”

She leaned in and whispered in my ear, “No, but I’ll be bringing mine.”

Her play on words started a strange stirring in my utility belt that combined with the smell of her perfume drove me wild. Closing time couldn’t come soon enough.

Suddenly the shrill of Max’s voice cut destroyed the moment. “Hey, Ronan, I’m not paying you to stand around and try to fuck my waitresses.”

“I just stopped some college boy from messing around with her,” I shot back.

“Yeah? Well, I ain’t paying you for that either.”

“You’re all class, Max,” I said as I made my way back to the stage.

We launched into the 3 Doors Down version of “Loser,” one of the few songs we knew from the past ten years and probably the most appropriate for the moment. I also had an unexplainable urge for a Wonka Bar.

The life of an unappreciated hero is not an easy one, but I always found a way to persevere one way or another. The rest of the gig was uneventful and we played on until the wee hours, another night of music for college students to get drunk by.

* * * *

We finished loading out our gear around one-thirty, and the rest of the band took off for a late-night calorie-fest at Denny’s. I begged off from such culinary delights, because it wasn’t good for my girlish figure. The guys didn’t seem to mind the developing Dunlop syndrome around their waists.

It was getting chilly, and I could see my breath meaning the temperature had dipped below fifty. Fall would soon give way to winter, my first one back in New England in well over a decade. It was time to go out and buy a couple of snowmobiles to get me through the season. Another mental note, one I was sure to forget until that first snowfall.

I waited in the alley behind the bar for Karen to come out. Max made the girls clean up, put up stools, and do other tasks that a bar back would perform if he wasn’t so cheap and had hired one.

A sassy hard-body petite redhead named Cassie exited first. She and I had this harmless little flirting thing going on. Karen didn’t seem to mind and thought it was kind of cute.