A Game of Dons Read online

  “Yes, mister,” she said, still looking like a deer in the headlights.

  “And throw in some smokes while you’re at it,” he added, deciding he needed a good smoke to put this whole ordeal behind him.

  “What brand?”

  “Mh?”

  “I said, what brand?”

  He felt all eyes on him now, and realized he probably made a mistake. The cops would be in here, and they’d ask about his choice of brand, potentially tracing it back to him.

  “Um, you pick one,” he said.

  The girl hesitated. “Can you give me a hint?”

  “You should try vaping,” said Skater Girl. “Way cooler than those cancer sticks.”

  “What are you talking about? You shouldn’t vape. How old are you? Twelve?”

  “I’ll be fourteen next month,” said the girl indignantly. “And I’ll have you know I’ve been JUULing for three months now and I love it.”

  “You shouldn’t be JUULing!” cried Flint. “You’re a child—you shouldn’t be doing anything but studying and playing with your Barbie dolls!”

  “Who’s going to stop me? You with your stupid gun, Mr. Robber Man?”

  “I’m going to tell your parents about this, Nancy,” said Mrs. Merton.

  “Oh, they know,” said Nancy.

  “Well,” said the teacher, taken aback. “Well, I never.”

  “Mr. Robber, sir,” said the checkout girl, trying to get his attention by waving in front of his face. “Can you please make up your mind about what kind of cigarettes you want?”

  “Pick anything!” he cried. “Anything at all! Give me a JUUL for all I care!”

  “We don’t carry vapes,” she said apologetically, “but if you want you could get some from the 7-Eleven on Grant Street. Or at the gas station on—”

  “Camel Light. Just give me Camel Light.”

  “Camel Light was discontinued, sir. We do have Camel Crush.”

  “Fine!”

  “It does have a menthol taste. Do you like a menthol taste?”

  He closed his eyes, and breathed in through the nose, out through the mouth.

  There was a pause, then the checkout girl quietly asked, “Are you crying, mister?”

  “Just… put them in the bag, will you?” he asked. “Can you do that for me, please?”

  “All right, mister,” she said, and dumped a few pack of Camel Crush into the bag.

  “Thank you,” he said. Then he wavered. “You are insured, aren’t you?” He gestured around. “I mean, this place has insurance against this kind of stuff, right? Robbery, I mean.”

  “Oh, for sure,” said the checkout girl, perking up. “We’re part of a chain, and these chains all have insurance up the wazoo.”

  “Great,” he said softly, then nodded a greeting to Mrs. Merton—old habits die hard—and turned on his heel.

  And he probably would have made it out of the store with his dignity, his identity and his loot intact, if a big, burly copper hadn’t chosen that exact moment to walk into the shop and suddenly come face to face with him. He recognized him as Chief Whitehouse. And he could tell the Chief recognized him, too, for he shook his head. “Flint Dickens. At it again.”

  “Flint Dickens!” cried Mrs. Merton. “Why, you sneaky little…”

  “Oh, darn it,” he said, and took off the mask. “So what did I do wrong this time?”

  The Chief pointed at his shoes. Flint looked down. “My shoes? What about them?”

  “Only you wear pink socks over combat boots, Flint,” said the Chief, then took hold of his arm. “And now you better follow me to the station. I want to have a word with you.”

  Chapter 9

  “Santa came early this year,” said Alice as she checked her little envelope.

  “Yeah, well, don’t expect it to last,” said her boss, who was also her uncle. “It’s just that we’ve had a particularly good month.”

  “I know, right? Who would have thought that Happy Bays was the mecca of mortality? The apex of expiration? The, um, dean of death?”

  “All right, all right. I get your point,” said Uncle Charlie. Like many businessmen he hated to part with his hard-earned money, even if his niece had done her part in earning it. But fair was fair, and when business was good he wasn’t too stingy to share the wealth.

  As she walked out of the funeral home, Alice couldn’t stop smiling. It was nice to be appreciated, especially when that appreciation was translated into cold, hard cash. She walked the few streets to Bell’s Bakery, and stepped inside. Walking up to the cash register, she saw that Fee was counting the money in the till. It was almost closing time, and the place was empty. “And how was business today, Miss Bell?” she asked.

  Fee didn’t look up, too busy counting. “Two hundred-fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three…” She frowned. “Dang it. Now I lost count. I’ll have to start over again.”

  “Let me do that, honey,” said her mother, who was the real boss of Bell’s Bakery, even though most people would have thought that was Peter Bell, the eponymous baker.

  Fee gladly relinquished the reigns of the cash register to her mother. “I’m hopeless with numbers,” she admitted as she stepped from behind the counter.

  “So am I,” Alice said, then showed the contents of her little envelope to her friend. “But even I can tell that this will go a long way towards inviting all of you guys for dinner tonight. My treat!”

  “Did you just win the lottery?”

  “No, business is booming over at the funeral parlor, and Uncle Charlie decided to cut his one and only employee in on the action.”

  “Congratulations. Though that means a lot of people are dying, though, right?”

  “It does,” Alice admitted. It was a little odd that for business to boom, lives had to be lost. Then again, that was the profession they were in. “At least none of our customers lost their lives due to unnatural causes,” she said as she and her friend took a seat at a nearby table. Fee still had napkins to fold and the dining area to get ready for the next day. Alice occasionally helped out at Bell’s, giving the two friends ample opportunity to catch up.

  “No murders, huh?”

  “Not a single one. It’s like I told you this morning. Happy Bays has really lived up to its name lately. You know those places where nothing ever happens?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Happy Bays is turning into one of them. Nothing ever happens around here!”

  “And isn’t that a good thing?” asked Fee’s mom from behind the counter.

  Bianca Bell was the spitting image of her daughter, except for the hair color. Bianca liked to experiment, and apparently a dark burgundy was the style du jour.

  “I guess so,” said Alice, turning to Bianca. “But it also means the neighborhood watch committee has nothing on its hands.”

  “Good,” said Bianca. “That’s just what this town needs, for your aunt Bettina and her crazy friends to run amok and drive everyone crazy messing about in other people’s lives.”

  “Mabel and Marjorie are your friends, too, Mom,” Felicity pointed out.

  “Maybe so, but I don’t stick my nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  “You do, too!”

  Bianca had the good decency to blush. “Even so. I’m glad things are quiet around here. It’s good for business. All this murder and mayhem drives the tourists away.”

  “Now you sound exactly like Mayor MacDonald,” said Alice with an eyeroll.

  “A very sensible man,” said Bianca decidedly.

  “When did your mom become a stooge for the mayor?” whispered Alice.

  “I heard that, Alice Whitehouse!” Bianca said.

  And they’d just finished putting sugar in the sugar dispensers, salt in the salt shakers, pepper in the pepper shakers and syrup in the syrup dispensers, when Virgil Scattering came staggering into the bakery.

  “Oh, hey, Virgil,” said Alice. “Since when did you stop taking my calls?”

  “And mine?” Fee
chimed in.

  “You’ve got to help me,” said Virgil, gulping like a fish out of water.

  He looked feverish, Alice thought. His face was flushed, his eyes bloodshot, and he was shaking.

  “Help you?” Alice asked. “Help you with what?”

  “I buried a body this morning and now I can’t find it!”

  They sat Virgil down at a table, and Bianca immediately went to fetch him something to drink—something stronger than Coca Cola.

  “Now start from the top,” said Fee. “Imagine we’ve never heard this story before.”

  “We haven’t heard this story before,” said Alice.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  She’d never seen Virgil in quite such a state before. The man looked terrified.

  Virgil took a big helping of oxygen and said, “Where do I start?”

  “Like I said, from the top.”

  Virgil started speaking, then stopped, then spoke again. “The top of what?”

  “The top of your story, Virgil,” said Alice, rolling her eyes a bit.

  Virgil might be a cop, but he was also still the same Virgil Alice and Fee had known since kindergarten. The same Virgil who used to dispense his boogers as if they were M&Ms, claiming they had healing powers when you chewed them. And the same Virgil who’d stolen Fee’s Twizzlers and when he was found out claimed Fee had put them in his pocket.

  “I met a girl,” he said, after gulping some more.

  “Cute as can be,” sang Alice. “What? You were thinking it.”

  “Yeah, but you sang it,” said Fee.

  Virgil frowned hard. “Do you know her?”

  “No, we don’t. Please continue,” said Fee. “You met a girl.”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” said Alice, “but when was this?”

  Virgil frowned harder. “Um... Eight, nine years ago? Give or take?”

  “Right.” Alice got up.

  “Where are you going?” asked Fee.

  “I have a feeling this is going to be one of those long stories, and I’m peckish.” She took a chocolate muffin from the tray under the counter and took a bite. “From the top, Virgil.”

  “Hey, that’s my line,” Fee protested.

  “Her name is Deanna Kohl,” said Virgil, and a wistful smile suddenly spread across his features and his large ears turned red. “She’s lovely. Lovely with a capital T.”

  “There’s no T in Lovely, Virgil,” said Alice, taking another big bite.

  “Will you just listen?” Virgil implored. “I’m in big trouble here.”

  “Fine, Virgil with a big V,” said Alice. “I won’t interrupt you again.”

  “So we met at police academy. She was my instructor. All the boys loved her—and the girls, too. She was beautiful, capable, funny, exciting, and a great cop, too. So when she called me this morning asking to meet, I didn’t think twice.”

  Virgil rarely thought twice, sometimes not even once, but Fee bit her tongue. Alice was right. This had all the hallmarks of a very long, very tedious story. “So what happened?”

  “Well, she’d just killed a man with a hatchet and wanted me to bury the body.”

  For the first time since Virgil had entered the tea room, Alice and Fee went silent.

  Bianca came hoofing up, swinging through the swinging doors to the kitchen, carrying a tray with cups of tea and what looked like a bottle of brandy. She caroled, “Refreshments are here.” When she found a guilty-looking policeman and two stunned-looking members of his audience, she paused. “What did I miss?”

  “Virgil was just telling us about the body he buried,” said Alice.

  “So he could help his girlfriend cover up her crime,” added Fee.

  “Not just any crime,” Alice interjected. “Murder.” She looked perturbed, as was to be expected after having been made privy of such a momentous revelation.

  Any other woman would have dropped her tray, but not Bianca Bell. She was used to stuff like this. Murder and mayhem, as she had intimated, had a habit of infesting her peaceful little town. She’d been glad crime hadn’t darkened their doorstep, but now that it had, she was equal to the task. She put the tray on the table, then checked if the door was locked, turned over the ‘Open’ sign to indicate that Bell’s Bakery was now closed for business, and took a seat with the others.

  “Tell me all, Virgil,” she said, and poured him a liberal shot of brandy.

  Chapter 10

  Chief Whitehouse steepled his fingers on his desk. It was a little hard, for his fingers were of the sausage variety. He fixed the young man seated in front of him with a basilisk glare. Over the years, he’d perfected this glare, to the extent it was almost like a lethal weapon.

  The young man, who was large, round-faced and dressed like a robber of convenience stores, complete with black jeans, black turtleneck, black combat boots—with pink socks—and a black windbreaker, wilted visibly under the heat of the Chief’s glare.

  “Let’s get one thing straight here,” the Chief began. “You, Flint, are a criminal.”

  “I guess so,” said Flint, conceding a point.

  “I mean, you rob convenience stores, you snatch little old ladies’ purses, you break into the homes of the unsuspecting citizenry to abscond with their DVD players and—”

  “Nobody uses a DVD player anymore, Chief,” said the youth, smiling as if the Chief had just said the funniest thing in the world.

  “Who cares!” said the Chief, slamming the desk with his fist.

  “Of course,” Flint muttered, his smile vanishing as if wiped off with a squeegee.

  The Chief got up, feeling that the steepling thing wasn’t doing it for him, and began pacing his office. He’d lowered the blinds and closed the window, double-checked if the door was closed and locked, and had told the dispatcher that under no circumstances should she forward any calls. Flint, who’d been there throughout the implementation of these precautionary measures, had watched on with trepidation. But nothing could have prepared him for what was coming next. “I want you to help me find a body, son,” said the Chief now.

  Flint barked out a laugh. “Wait, what?” But when he caught the Chief’s scowl, which seemed only to have intensified during their interview, he quickly exchanged his initial expression of disbelief for the more appropriate, “Could you please repeat what you just said, Chief Whitehouse?”

  “The thing is, I could throw you in jail right now, Flint, and I would, if I didn’t need you to carry out this one small assignment for me.”

  “One small assignment,” Flint echoed.

  “I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t of vital importance to the fate of one of my officers, who made the stupid—stupid—mistake of falling for one of those femme fatales and in doing so momentarily lost his mind.” He threw up his hands. “I mean, how else would you explain the fact that he willfully, being of sound mind and body, agreed to cover up for her?”

  “Is this a rhetorical question, Chief?” asked Flint.

  “Yes, it is!” the Chief bellowed, startling the young man. “So now I want you to find the body and once you do, dispose of it as you see fit.” He wagged a finger in the kid’s face. “There’s only one thing you have to promise me, son.”

  “What’s that, Chief?” asked Flint, licking his lips.

  “Make sure that no one—and I do mean no one—ever finds the body. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir—I mean, yes, Chief.”

  “Just think… Jimmy Hoffa.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind,” grunted the chief, and took a seat behind his desk again. “Now get lost.” When Flint didn’t give any indication of getting lost, the Chief frowned. “What part of get lost don’t you understand, son?”

  “Just one quick question, Chief?”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t told me who this body belongs to, and where I might begin to find it.”

  “I see,” said the Chief, raking his hands through his gray buzz cut. “The thing is
, I’m not absolutely completely sure I should tell you.”

  “Chief?”

  “The less you know the better, Flint, and I do mean that.”

  “But you can’t expect me to find a body if I don’t have a clue who it belongs to.”

  “Something in that,” the Chief admitted. “Yes, you make a good point.” He pondered this, then decided to come clean. He was pretty sure that Flint didn’t like the idea of being hauled back to prison, and that the young thug knew that was exactly what was going to happen if he betrayed the Chief’s trust. So he leaned back in his chair, which creaked under the onslaught. “Do you know Detective Virgil Scattering, Flint?”

  “I don’t believe this,” said Alice, shaking her head. Virgil had just told them the most outrageous story and she found it a little hard to believe. The cop didn’t show any signs of duplicity, though, and knowing Virgil he was probably incapable of telling tall tales just for the heck of it. “Do you really want us to believe that you went along with the scheme just because you like this woman so much?”

  “You don’t understand,” said Virgil. “I’ve always loved her.”

  “You told me once that you’d always loved me,” she reminded him.

  He had the good decency to blush. “I did—and do—I mean…”

  “You mean that you’re one of those serial lovers,” said Alice. “The ones that fall in love quickly and frequently. So how many women are out there that you’re in love with, Virgil? Tell me that.” She knew she shouldn’t be jealous of this mystery woman and yet she was. She had no romantic interest in Virgil whatsoever, but she’d always been flattered by his unwavering affection. And now to hear that she had to share this affection with another woman kinda stung.

  “I swear to God, it’s only you and Deanna, Alice.”

  “So that’s her name, huh? Diana.”

  “Deanna. Deanna Kohl.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Very,” said Virgil reverently. He’d taken out his phone and was flicking through his picture collection. Alice saw that most of them were from either his colleagues or his mother. Then he arrived at a picture of a fair-haired beauty and showed it to them with the air of a man who’s about to reveal his favorite marble to the other playground kids.