A Good Day for Chardonnay by Darynda Jones

15

Man arrested for practicing karate on swans.

The swans won.

—DEL SOL POLICE BLOTTER

Anita texted as they headed out to Tinsley’s Crossing. Other than a couple of reported sightings that never led anywhere, Santa Fe PD had no movement on the Elliot Kent case. Sun wondered if anyone even looked into the sightings. They certainly never told her about them since she’d become sheriff, and she had been lead detective.

She also got a text from her blind date from hell, which she ignored. Because that would make the problem go away. And a text from her former partner-in-crime and the queen of bad decision making, Nancy Danforth, asking her if she would be in town soon and suggesting they get a drink. Getting a drink with Nancy was never a good idea, yet Sun fairly drooled at the thought. She missed her. Simple as that.

Though no one could take Quincy’s place in Sun’s heart, Nancy came in at a close second. She’d been her only true girlfriend in the city and fun didn’t begin to cover Nancy’s list of admirable traits. Sadly, moderation was not one of them.

She texted her back. Let’s make a date, but you have to promise you won’t lose your underwear again. Or hire male strippers.

Her phone dinged almost instantly. LMAO. Deal.

Since the cab of Levi’s truck was filled with a dark and impenetrable silence—he was sulking—Sun decided to stop glancing at his magnificent profile every few seconds and do some research on their stabbing victim. She didn’t know how long she’d have enough of a signal to get internet.

There wasn’t much on the elusive Mr. Seabright. Levi had been right. The guy was a ghost. Other than the fact that there were apparently a dozen Keith Seabrights in the state, after sifting through those, she managed to find a few mentions on various military enthusiast sites.

The only two pictures she found of him were grainy and could have been shots of her great-aunt Sally for all Sun knew. Then a post popped up on Facebook. A pregnant woman in El Paso, Texas, claimed an assailant in a ski mask had hijacked her car with her two-year-old son inside. He held a gun on her and had ordered her to drive out of the city.

They were at a stoplight when a soldier dressed in army fatigues, average height, dark hair, walked across the crosswalk. He looked inside the car and must’ve noticed how scared she was, but she thought he’d kept walking. A few seconds later, the passenger’s side door opened and the man was ripped out.

The woman didn’t hesitate. She floored it and drove straight to a police substation. The post went on to explain the Army had no knowledge of one of their soldiers intervening in a civilian altercation.

A link led to a news clip on the incident. A reporter held a microphone up to a by-the-book police chief. “The move was risky. He couldn’t have known the gun wasn’t loaded. It could’ve gone off and we would never authorize or condone the use of that kind of force.” Another officer came onto the screen. “Let’s call a tomato a tomato. The guy’s a hero.”

Nothing she read about the guy, if any of it was actually about him, led her to believe him capable of kidnapping. She was leaning farther and farther in Levi’s direction and not just physically, because he was like gravity.

“As far as you could tell,” she began, choosing her words carefully, “from the times you interacted with him, Seabright’s nephew, Eli, was not being held against his will?”

After a sideways glance that held more glare than curiosity, he said, “Not at all.”

“And you’re sure he only has him in the summers?” If that were the case, where was Elliot Kent the rest of the year?

His left shoulder rose just enough to make him tighten in reaction to the pain the movement caused. “No,” he said, his voice strained. “Sometimes Eli was with him. Sometimes he wasn’t. That doesn’t mean he snatched the kid.”

He turned up a bumpy mountain road and winced. She pretended not to notice.

“You said he was hypervigilant Saturday night, like he was on a job. What exactly does Keith Seabright do?”

“Odd jobs here and there from what I could tell.”

“So like handyman stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“And that would require the need for hypervigilance? Because building a shelf over someone’s toilet is so dangerous.” When he didn’t answer, she exhaled. Loudly. So he would know she’d done it and she meant every molecule of air that left her lungs, too. “Levi, you’re still legally bound to this office. To the badge. You were deputized, a fact you only seem to remember when it benefits you.”

Former sheriff Redding had been the first to deputize Levi long before Sun came along. Levi was not only a legit businessman despite his upbringing, he was an expert tracker due to his summers being spent with the man many considered to be his biological grandfather.

After another reluctant moment, he caved. “Seabright’s been known to do a side job here and there for certain … government agencies.”

“He’s a mercenary?”

“Only when it’s for a good cause. He left the do-as-you’reordered life ten years ago.”

“I’ve never met a mercenary.”

“That you know of.”

“True. So now he hunts and picks berries and uses gas-generated power to charge his cell?”

“He usually gets his berries from the farmer’s market, but yeah. Pretty much.”

The farther up the mountain they went, the rougher the road became. Sun looked in the rearview to make sure Quincy and Zee were still with them.

“You’re thinking what I’m thinking. He’s staying at Walden’s old place.”

“That would be my guess.”

“You weren’t kidding when you said he lived off-grid.”

“Nope.”

Walden had been living in town for the last few years, which worked better for him since he owned the only convenience-store-slash-gas-station in the area, but he’d once lived in a mobile home on his family’s land. The home burned down, but the hookups were still there.

Sun thought back to how evasive Walden was when they’d questioned him. “I’m beginning to think Walden knows more about Seabright than he’s letting on.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“But if Seabright is so off-grid, will Eli be okay? What if he’s out here alone?”

An unconcerned smile spread across his face. “That kid could weather a winter in the Siberian tundra. Seabright taught him everything he knows.” He thought a moment, then asked, “Do you think the attempt on Seabright’s life has anything to do with Eli?”

She’d wondered that, too. “I have no clue. We certainly can’t rule it out, though what one has to do with the other is lost on me. How do you know him?”

“Seabright? He’d come into the bar sometimes and we got to talking. On top of everything else, he’s a certified electrician and did a few odd jobs at the distillery for me. Got to know him a bit. He’d bring Eli around every so often.”

She ticked off the man’s attributes on her fingers. “So he was in Special Forces, is a certified electrician, lives off the land, and does odd jobs for distilleries and secret government agencies. A true jack-of-all-trades. How did Elliot even end up with him?”

Levi studied the road, if one could call it that, his expression a mixture of concern and contemplation.

“The fact that your friend is a mercenary does shed a new light on things. I just can’t fathom how. Or why.”

“I was thinking the same thing.” The truck dipped as they traveled over a large pothole and Levi’s jaw flexed in response.

“Can I do anything?” she asked.

He glanced over at her in surprise. “I think you’re capable of just about anything.”

A grin widened her mouth before she reined it in. “I meant to help. This is clearly painful for you.”

“Ah. Open the glovebox.”

She did, assuming there’d be a bottle of painkillers inside, but she only saw registration and maintenance papers and an insurance card.

“Underneath the manual.”

She lifted the truck manual and felt around until she pulled out an envelope.

“You can take that home with you. Keep it safe. It would make me feel better.”

“What is it?”

“My will.”

The deadpan she graced him with only made him laugh. In turn, he winced again, much to her delight. “Hey, you asked.”

“Are you planning on dying soon?”

“No, but plans change.” He said it with such finality, it stopped her from probing further, and they rode in silence after that.

She folded the envelope in half and stuffed it in her bag. It made sense that he’d have a will. He was now worth a small fortune. And the fact that he didn’t trust his family hardly surprised her, but why give it to her? Why not just leave it with his lawyer?

After a thousand years of solitude, Sun started singing “Oklahoma” in her head just to give it something else to do besides think about the man sitting next to her. The case—or cases, depending—gave her a headache. The possibilities were simply too vast, and until they dug deeper, there was no sense in speculating. She needed more solid evidence to form an official opinion.

They pulled up to a cabin Sun hadn’t known existed. No sign of a burned-out mobile home in sight. Not that she knew all of the small hunting cabins in the area, but this one was actually pretty nice. The exterior well-maintained and any fire hazards kept far away from the main dwelling.

“Is this Walden’s place?”

“Used to be. He built a hunting cabin but told me once he never used it and was thinking about selling. That was years ago. So either Seabright bought it from him or he’s renting from whomever did.”

After the team took up position, Quincy on the southeast corner and Zee on the northwest, Sun and Levi took the stairs to the porch. Sun stood to one side, and knocked. When they got no response, she knocked again. “Sheriff’s office. We need to talk to Eli about his uncle. Is he in?”

Still nothing. She tested the doorknob. Despite having three dead bolts, the front door was unlocked. She glanced back at Levi in question.

He shook his head. “He’d never leave it unlocked.”

A tingling sensation raced up her spine. She drew her weapon and eased inside. Small for a house but rather large for a hunting cabin, the interior was bright and airy with finished walls and a loft on one side. Large windows allowed for natural light to filter in through the trees when it could and solid furnishings graced a corner here and there.

“Eli?” Sun said, crisscrossing one foot in front of the other, her duty weapon in both hands at her side. “Your uncle Keith has been injured. We just want to make sure you’re okay.”

She came to a small room under the loft. It was filled with the usual plethora of weapons one would expect to find in a hunter’s cabin, but it also had a TV and an Xbox that ran on a generator next to an outbuilding. There was also a small desk and a bookshelf lined with books. Fiction mostly, both kid and adult, but several textbooks as well on every subject from history and English to science and algebra.

“Has Seabright been homeschooling him?” Sun asked.

Levi’s expression would suggest he was just as surprised.

One of the books sat open on the desk with a pencil and notebook beside it. Elliot, or Eli, seemed to be working his way through Algebra Two. “Not bad,” Sun said, checking over his work.

Sun went to the back door and let Zee in. “Nothing, boss.”

“Thank you.” She turned to Quince as he entered.

He shook his head. “Not a sign of him.”

They did a quick survey of the rest of the cabin, then holstered their duty weapons.

Quincy lifted a pan. “It looks like they haven’t been here in days.”

“That’s a decoy,” Levi said.

Quincy raised it to show him. “It’s a pot of beans.”

He grinned. “A pot of decoy beans. It’s not real. It’s meant to throw anyone who might be looking for them off their trail. He was here this morning.”

Sun’s heart raced into overdrive. After all this time, could she really be this close to finding Elliot Kent? “How do you know?” she asked him.

He grabbed a toothbrush out of a small medicine cabinet in the bathroom and tossed it to her.

“It’s damp,” she said to Quince.

Quince took out an evidence bag, and she dropped it in. If nothing else, they could test the DNA, make sure it was Elliot.

Levi tested a towel hanging on a rack. “I’d say he’s only been gone a couple of hours.”

“Seabright’s good,” Zee said, inspecting the corner of the cabin where Eli clearly slept.

Sun noticed it was nearest the pellet stove, the best place to be in the winter, but between two windows to catch the cooling breeze in the summer. “Good in what way?”

“You said Eli was from Bisbee?” Zee asked Levi.

He nodded.

“See this?” She lifted an ashtray with the word Bisbee displayed across it, and Levi smiled knowingly.

“A decoy?” Sun asked.

She nodded. “A decoy.”

“How do you know?”

“Look at all of this stuff.” She gestured to the multitude of cheap keepsakes. “You would only find these at a travel center off the highway. Have you ever been to Bisbee? Nobody who’s actually from a town has this much dime-store crap on display. He’s no more from Bisbee than I’m from Mars.”

“I drove through there once,” Quincy said, helpfully. “Bisbee. Not Mars.” Again, helpful.

Sun was one step closer to finding the kid. Elliot Kent. She’d dreamed of him so often. Prayed he was okay even though statistically the odds were beyond astronomical.

“He could be watching us right now,” Levi said.

“You think?” Sun walked to a window that looked out over the mountainside. “Levi, he sent us a signal in the Quick-Mart. A clear cry for help. Why would he do that if he weren’t in danger?”

“If that were the case,” Quincy said, “why not just go to the sheriff’s station?”

Levi shook his head. “I don’t know, but something spooked him. He would never leave the door open.” He looked at her. “I can track him. But he probably took off on his dirt bike.”

“Thus, he’s long gone.”

“Right, but let’s think about this. Seabright and the kid came back out here after the run-in at the store.”

“Right,” Sun said. “Maybe Seabright brought him out here to keep him safe? Then he went back into town to try to figure out what was going on? That man tried to stab him outside the store. He had to know it wasn’t random.”

Levi nodded. “That’s why he was being so hypervigilant. He knew someone was after him.”

“He knew there was a hit out on him,” Quincy said.

Sun chewed her lower lip. “If that’s true, why wasn’t he carrying that night?”

“No firearms inside of any business that serves alcohol,” Levi said, eyeing her like she’d lost her mind. “No exceptions. I thought you knew the law.”

“I am well aware of the law, but then why go into the bar in the first place? If he couldn’t carry a weapon inside?”

Levi dropped his gaze and cursed under his breath. “He needed to talk to me. Son of a bitch. If I’d known … I was outside …talking to another patron.”

“Ah, yes. Crystal.” Only according to Crystal, there wasn’t a lot of talking going on.

He cast her a curious glance. “Yes. She was talking about her boyfriend. And she asked me for a job.”

“Classic. So, you’re a counselor, too?”

“All bartenders are counselors.”

“In all the years your family has owned that bar, I have never once seen you tend bar.”

“Because you’ve been in there so often,” he said, his words dripping with sarcasm.

Quincy lifted a serrated hunting knife. “You said Seabright headed back to his truck before he got to talk to you?”

“Yes,” Levi said. “He probably knew he’d been drugged.”

She turned to her team. “I need to get to Santa Fe and talk to Elliot’s mother personally.” She looked at Levi. “Can you give them a lift and I’ll take your cruiser, Quince?”

“I’ll take you,” Levi said.

Quince looked at her askance. She nodded in agreement, so he asked, “Should we call in a team to process this place?”

“Not just yet. Let’s try to get Eli to come to us first.” She sat at his desk, ripped a page out of his notebook, and began a letter. “But just to be safe, try to get some fingerprints and a DNA sample.”

Zee hopped to it. “You got it, boss.”

Once Sun had cell service again, she checked in with Anita. “How’s it going with Mrs. Fairborn?”

“That woman has a very active imagination.”

“Yeah?”

“Can we publish her confessions and make money off of them?”

“No.”

“Boss,” she said, pleading, “this one has aliens.”

“No way.” She cupped her hand over her phone. “Send it to me as soon as she’s finished.” Reading Mrs. Fairborn’s confessions had become the highlight of their day. She’d once confessed to stealing a pool noodle and using it in a bank robbery that led to a night of debauchery with a male stripper named Chad. The problem was she never explained how the pool noodle played into the bank robbery.

Either way, the woman had missed her calling.

“You got it, boss,” Anita said with a giggle. “Also, Las Vegas PD called. They found the truck and the owner. It was reported stolen from a hotel in Trinidad on Friday. The owner was traveling and slept through the whole thing.”

“Surveillance?”

“All the hotel got was a black-clad male, medium build, who could steal a truck in under sixty seconds.”

“They targeted it for the Texas plates to throw us off.” She looked over at Levi. “Well, most of us.”

He winked at her. Winked! She could only take so much of that man.

“Are you worried about him?” she asked Levi after she hung up.

“Which one?”

“Either, I guess. Both.”

“Then yes.”

They’d made it back to the main road, so his white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel eased a little.

“How are you to drive?”

“Fine.”

“Are you certain?”

“Don’t I look fine?”

He did indeed. “It’s just, if you need to take something for the pain, I can take over.”

“I don’t need to take anything for the pain.”

“I could’ve sworn I smelled whiskey earlier.”

He smirked. “I could’ve sworn I smelled wine.”

“Damn. Really? I’ve had a lot of coffee since last night.” Her experiment with Quincy was the gift that kept on giving.

“Unless your coffee was made with fermented grapes, I’d say the wine is still in your system.”

That was disturbing.

Just like she had with Hailey, Sun considered not telling Levi about her visit with Wynn, but part of her really wanted to see his reaction. To gauge it. She steeled herself and said, “I wasn’t going to tell you this until I had more information, but I went to see your uncle Wynn yesterday.”

He was so much better at the poker thing than she was. Instead of reacting at all, he stilled and kept his gaze laser-locked on the road. The only indication he even heard her was when the muscle in his jaw jumped under the pressure of his bite.

“He says he killed your uncle Kubrick.”

Nothing.

“Which is funny, since you told me you did it.”

Zip.

“Then again, half the town has confessed to that killing.”

Zero.

“Including Jimmy.”

That got him. He turned to her in surprise. “Jimmy?”

“Mind telling me why half the town is confessing to a fifteen-year-old murder?”

“My nephew, Jimmy?”

“The one and only.”

He cursed and turned away from her. “They’re all lying.”

“Including Wynn? The DNA test came back with a match. Wynn Ravinder.”

He looked down in confusion, then said, “That’s not possible.”

“DNA tests don’t lie.”

“But people do.”

“You have another explanation?”

“I already gave it to you. I killed him.” His tone was razor-sharp when he added, “He’s playing you.”

Sun looked out the window. “The evidence says otherwise. He’s requested to be moved to Santa Fe. The DA is getting it done as we speak.”

As though that answered everything, he leaned his head back, the barest hint of a smile lining his mouth. “Of course.”

“He also says he knows who Kubrick’s accomplice was,” she added, her stomach clenching at the thought. “Auri’s biological father.”

The stunned expression he turned on her made her take a mental step back. “Is that what this is about?” His reaction was genuine. Nobody was that good.

“He’s going to sign a full confession,” she said, testing him further, “and tell me who the accomplice was in exchange for the move.”

Her phone rang, the sound just sharp enough to cut through the tension.

“Hey, Quince,” she said, thankful for the interruption.

“You aren’t going to believe this.”

She sat up straighter and put him on speakerphone. “Try me.”

“Guess who got paroled a couple of weeks ago. And there’s no way this is a coincidence, boss.”

It took her a sec, but then it dawned on her. “No way.”

“Yep. Matthew Kent. Elliot’s father.”