Read The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller for Free Online Page B

Shooter’s terrible.” He yawned again in my ear. “Go back to bed, Raymond.”
    “Nah, I gotta get up. Hey, Smokey?”
    “What?”
    “You should see this new girl…”
    “Oh no, Raymond. Not another one.”
    “You have to meet her. She’s special.”
    “They’re all special, Ray. You notice a pattern there?” A slow sedan listing to one side pulled ahead of me, causing me to change lanes. “Two cars on a long run of nothin’, and this guy has to pull in front of me. Where are you when I need you?”
    “Shoot ’im,” Ray said.
    “Now there’s an idea,” I said.
    “Hey, this girl?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Oh man. She’s hot.”
    “I don’t need the details, pal.”
    “Can you hang on? I gotta get a drink of water.”
    “No, I can’t hang on. I’m coming up on Camino Capistrano.”
    “Oh, okay. Well, her name’s Tamika. She’s a guess-what.”
    “What would that be, Raymond?” My tone wasn’t patient.
    “A stripper. Down in Oceanside.”
    “Terrific.”
    “Yeah,” he said cheerily. “What do you think?”
    “I think you should be tied up and whipped hard.”
    “You want to come do it?”
    “Goodbye, Raymond.”
    “Hee-hee,” he said.
    Off the freeway, I drove the quarter-mile down a road known only to shooters and people in search of nursery plants, kitchen tile, or getting their fenders fixed.
    Sweeps of willow, mulefat, and oleander bushes waved in the wind on the left side of the road. The thick stands wereperfect bedding-down places for illegals coming up from the southern border. Sometimes those voyagers crossing the tracks that zipper between the road and the distant cliff-side misjudge the speed of a train, and a tech like me is called out. Once, a man with an urge to self-destruct drove a shiny new car onto the rails and sat there, waiting. Ray says there’s nothing like train deaths for mayhem, forget your mere murder. No one can imagine, he says. Problem is, I can.
    When I pulled up to the square structure that housed the shooting range, I was still annoyed that Ray stood me up, but I had to smile at the thought of his last words to me on the phone. Ray with a stripper. Just like him. A stripper. Bless his little ol’ heart.
    Because, once upon a time, I myself had been a dancer on a low-rent stage—in Vegas, home to the bummed out, broke out, beered up, or bratty. Maybe I qualified as that last. I was a dancer, exotic, as they say. Get right down to it, a stripper, true and blue. Ray knows about the history, has the decency to refer to it only once in awhile and then only when we are alone. I was seventeen when I started. It was me. It wasn’t me.
    Today it seems simply not important. Murder is. Justice is. Serving and protecting, like Ray Vega and thousands of others do every day, is. If Ray-my-virile-buddy-Vega wants to date a stripper, well, we’ll just let him.
    I shot the Glock first and did pretty well on a target of a man in black silhouette, giving him a belt line and a happy-face, then took out my new “spurless” revolver with the hammer shrouded in the frame so it can’t snag on clothes when used for a pocket gun. It was a long, hard trigger pull. When the gun finally fired, the muzzle-lift was so fierce the cylinder-release tore skin off my thumb-knuckle. I’d be shooting out street lamps before I’d knock over a bad guy. A young guy behind the counter in the check-inroom was watching me through the glass. He put on a set of ears and came through the double doors into the gallery. “What you got there?” he shouted.
    “S-and-W. It’s cute, but I can’t shoot for shit with it,” I said, and offered the gun to him.
    He aimed one-handed and fired five dead-center in the ten. “You’re not used to the size,” he yelled. “It’s got a hell of a long trigger pull.” Then he emptied the cylinder while holding the weapon
upside down
and pulling the trigger with his pinkie. The tight circle he cut was at the edge of the bullseye, three-o’clock, but a