Badge in a Shadowbox is the first novel in a series I'm currently pitching to agents. The hero is Detective Lane Watters, a good cop who becomes so badly injured during an attempt on his life that he's forced to leave the profession he loves. He has no idea what he'll do with the rest of his life or how he'll provide for the teenage son he's raising alone until he's offered a job as an investigator with the public defender's office. Now Watters must face the fact that some of his former colleagues don’t always rise to the level of professionalism and ethics he carried throughout his career, and at times this will mark him as an enemy among officers he has always considered brothers
This work brings me home to my life in public safety. I'm not particularly interested in writing memoir at this point in life, but I do enjoy using stories from my experiences to make a novel more real and fun to read. The following is an excerpt from the first scene. Let me know what you think...
Badge in a Shadowbox
The Aye Candy boasted a red neon sign flashing NUDE above a poster that warned loitering, knife fighting, “rough-stuff with the entertainment,” and “bite-fighting” would not be tolerated. Lane Watters was there for a case, the kind of case in which stoned witnesses spoke a funhouse-mirror language and the investigative trail was a zigzag line of gunpowder.
Watters was in his usual plain-clothes attire of sport jacket and slacks, no tie, but the clientele of bikers, inebriates, and fetishists all made him as a cop within seconds. He heard mutterings about “Five-O” from the shadows as he crunched across the gravel lot, yet no one challenged this man whose bearing conveyed skills valued in dark alleys. Watters glanced over his shoulder once as he reached the door before entering into a blast of hair-metal.
Aye Candy served no alcohol. Instead it sold “set ups,” which could be a plastic cup of ice or a canned soda. Liquor was of the bring-your-own, under-the-table variety, thus bypassing a city ordinance forbidding the combination of totally nude dancing with alcohol sales.
“Get you a setup, detective?” asked a humpty-dumpty of a man with hair severely parted down the middle and held in place with…grease? Watters took a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dim and smoke. Every person he saw milling about or sitting around small tables was smoking cigarettes, marijuana or hookah pipes. Neon reds and blues filtered through the smoke, and a single track-light directed all eyes to the woman dancing on stage.
Watters had to squint to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. Sure enough, his pupils focused and some of the cloud dissipated just enough for him to confirm the dancer was a nude, gyrating, mid-thirties woman in the third trimester of pregnancy. Her nails were so long as to have started to curl, and these were painted with a polish that glowed in the neon lights. In each of those thusly decorated hands, she held her volleyball sized breasts and slowly bounced them up and down in what was evidently an attempt at being erotic.
He instantly wished his pupils had not adjusted and that the smoke cloud had not cleared.
“I’m looking for Monica,” Watters yelled over the music as he turned back to the oily dumpling man and showed his badge.
The manager paused, either wanting a bribe or waiting to see if Watters had the moxie to threaten him.
“She’s a Publisher’s Clearinghouse sweepstakes winner,” said Watters. “I’m supposed to track her down so she can collect her millions.”
The sullen man suddenly broke into a huge grin, and Watters found the fact that he had orthodontic braces mildly surprising.
“She’s in the dressing room. She’s up in two songs.”
“I’d really like to talk to her before she goes on stage,” said Watters.
The man stared as if what Watters asked was more difficult than doing taxes. Watters began to think that he would, after all, have to start pointing out health code violations regarding the oily ice cubes in the ice bin, the fact that the soda cans were sitting on a putridly dirty floor, all the goings-on currently going on in the parking lot, the marijuana cloud descending from the ceiling, and anything else he could think of, but then the man made a sound business decision.
“Hey,” the manager called out to the pregnant woman on the stage. She looked up, annoyed that he’d interrupted her groove and the few one-dollar tips that very drunk men were occasionally flicking onto the stage near her platform shoes.
“Call Monica out here,” he demanded. The pregnant woman responded by dancing backwards for five steps until she was parallel to the wing curtain, at which point she craned her head behind the curtain and called out for Monica. From the neck down she never stopped gyrating or working her boobs like slow pistons.
Watters hit his threshold for the sounds, smoke and oiliness. “I’ll wait outside.”
He stepped out and immediately observed a bush moving off to his left, along with a general rustling sound from the same area. Moments later a man emerged buckling his jeans and a woman wearing a t-shirt and a towel came behind him. Both seemed irritated by his presence, and they hustled into the club. A bottle shattered in the shadows, and a woman tittered from the same direction.
Quiet settled for a few moments until a dark sedan pulled into the lot. Windows rolled down in the sedan, and all the occupants were laughing hysterically. Watters guessed it was a bachelor party. Suddenly the groom and all his best friends went wide-eyed at the sight of a parking lot of skulking thugs and prostitutes, and the whimsical idea of visiting such a place vanished as quickly as their tires screeched from the parking lot.
Monica came out wearing a luminescent bikini top that looked like rattlesnake skin, a pink thong, and clear acrylic nine-inch heels. She had almost no fat on her, but her skin hung too loosely. Her hair was dyed platinum, and even in the poor light Watters could see it was a brittle tuft, more hair spray than hair follicle.
“Is this about that driving on suspended warrant?” she asked of Watters. “My lawyer cleared all that up a long time ago.”
“Do you remember me?” asked Watters.
She scrutinized him in the yellowed street light and suddenly her eyes opened in recognition. “You’re the one who bought me that happy meal the day I fell in that cold-ass creek!”
“Thought you were gonna freeze to death,” Watters acknowledged. “No telling how long you’d been there…”
“And Larry was too stoned to figure out how to pull me out. Could’ve died. Swear to gawd, that coffee and cheeseburger saved my life.” She smiled finally, and he could see her teeth had worn down to tea-colored nubs.
“I don’t know about all that, but I wasn’t sure you were ever gonna stop shivering.”
“Watters, right?”
“Watters, that’s right. Glad to see you’re off the streets.”
“Not that this is much better,” she said nodding in the direction of the club. “But I do have a roof now.”
“That’s good. That’s good. So, I have a question for you. It’s about a case I’m working.”
Monica looked stricken. “Snitching to the cops buys you a death warrant around here.”
Watters assured her. “Look, no one will know you told me anything. You can curse me up one side and down the other when I leave, just so they won’t suspect you told me anything.”
“Can I slap you?”
“No, you can’t slap me.”
“It’d make for a better story when I went back inside.”
“No thank you.”
“Didn’t peg you as a pussy.”
“Yep, I’m a real flower petal. So, anyway, I’m looking into a rape, and I need to know about a place called the Mansion. Have you heard of it?”
Monica crossed her arms and then let them drop to her sides. She stepped back in her huge heels and then back toward him. Her lifeless hair turned this way and that as she tried to decide if anyone out there watching them right now could overhear. Finally, she took a deep breath and paid Watters back for the cheeseburger and coffee that once saved her life.
“It’s a party house. Dude there likes girls who are into meth. He invites them to his place, gives them a few tokes on a pipe, and then he tells them they gotta take a needle if they want more.”
Watters also looked around, both because he didn’t want her to be overheard, and also because there could be any number of people lurking beyond his line of vision that would love to crack him in the head.
“Thing is, once he gives them the needle they can’t move no more. They’re awake, but they can’t move. It’s something different than crystal meth he gives them. Dude’s mean. He hurts them real bad, but there’s nothing they can do about it.”
“Anything else?” Watters asked, knowing her apprehension about speaking to him was about to overwhelm any gratitude she felt.
“He shares the girls with a friend of his. Supposedly the two of them take turns doing the girls while they’re all zombied out like that. Swear to gawd, them girls can’t move or nothing, and they just use ‘em up.”
“That helps. Thanks.”
“Another thing. He likes to wear masks and costumes and shit. And there’s tunnels all over his house. They say he can go anywhere and nobody sees him.”
“How does he…?”
“Look, I gotta go. My song’s getting ready to come on, and…”
“Why do I feel like you’ve been there?”
Monica scowled at the further delay, but she answered. “Two guys who work for him came here, asked me if I wanted to party and promised all the crystal I wanted for the night. I mean, what the hell, right?”
“You remember anything about how you got there?”
“I remember passing this place with horses. I used to love horses. I had posters of them in my room.”
“Horses,” said Watters.
“Pretty close to the dude’s place. There were horses, and a sign out front on their fence that says free manure. I thought that was pretty funny. Who wants free manure?”
Just about every gardener in the world, thought Watters.
“That girl okay? I’ve been thinking about her ever since that night.”
“What girl?’
“That one we took to the hospital. She was way too young for that old dick. Figured that’s who you was talking about when you said you was looking into a rape.”
“You took a girl to the hospital? From that party?”
“We was gonna take her home, but she got all freaked out, screaming that Elvis attacked her. She tried to climb out of the back of the truck, and I had to grab her to keep from jumping out.”
Watters was quiet for too long, thinking about what Monica’s information meant to his case. The pause seemed to make Monica nervous, and she stepped back toward the entrance of the club.
“That’s all I know. And I really gotta go.”
“I appreciate your help, Monica. Take care of yourself.”
The front door opened and the oily manager stepped halfway outside. Monica glanced over her shoulder with a look of apprehension. Watters sighed.
“Okay. Slap me,” he whispered.
“Really?”
“Yeah, just don’t scrape me with your fingernails.”
At which point she slapped him hard enough that he had to wiggle his jaw back into position.
“Screw you, pig! I ain’t no snitch!”
Monica then pivoted on her stilettos and marched back in to work, cursing Watters every step of the way.
***