Bad Moon On The Rise

Bad Moon on the
Rise

By Katy Munger

A Casey Jones
Mystery

Copyright © 2011 by Katy Munger

Smashwords Edition Published by Thalia
Press

This novel is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of
either the author or publisher.
 

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Corndog Sally and her husband,
Downtown Mac, had less than a dozen teeth between them—but that
didn’t stop them from being the smilingest couple on Hillsborough
Street. Sally sold flowers out of a little stall near the General
Assembly Building while Mac puttered around the tourist-filled lawn
wagging a state-of-the-art metal detector that mostly beeped for
garter belt snaps from the 1950’s. What were those legislators
doing back in the good ole days, anyway?

Mac and Sally made a pretty good
living for over sixty years. Just about everybody in Raleigh
recognized them. They were happy people, and happy people are
getting harder to come by in this world. In fact, Sally only
stopped smiling once to my knowledge—and that was when Mac got
crushed to death in the Dempsty Dumpster behind the Happy Store
while tracking down loose change. I admit that some considered this
an ironic way for Mac to go, but the older I get, the more I view
life’s ironies as its inevitabilities in disguise. They renamed the
Happy Store a few weeks later, for obvious reasons, and they still
keep a framed photo of Mac behind the counter out of
guilt.

As for Corndog Sally, she folded up
shop after Mac died. No one I knew saw her again once the last clod
of dirt had been shoveled over Mac’s coffin. Her whereabouts were
as mysterious as her name: who on god’s green earth would call
someone “Corndog Sally,” even here in the South where stupid
nicknames are a religion?

Of course, the bigger question was
what she had done to earn such a moniker. Corn dogs are neon pink
hot dogs of dubious origin encased in soggy cornmeal then thrown
into the deep fryer until all the additives have melted into one
rubbery tube that gets a popsicle stick rammed up its ass—all so
you can hold it in one hand while gripping a jumbo Pepsi in the
other. I hoped to god Sally had never actually eaten one, though it
would certainly explain why she was so well-preserved for her age,
which had to be creeping up on ninety.

All of this, I hope, explains why I
was so surprised to find Corndog Sally waiting for me on an autumn
afternoon that was hotter than two foxes fornicating in a forest
fire. It may as well have been July. If global warming wasn’t real,
our planet was having hot flashes and we all needed to buckle our
seat belts.

It had been a good seven years since I
had last seen Sally. Time had changed her. When I came barreling
through the door, Sally, who had never so much as raised her voice
in my presence before, was toe-to-toe with Bobby D. and giving him
a piece of her mind that would have blistered a more sensitive man.
And no wonder. Bobby was not only asking her why she was named
Corndog Sally, he was assuming it was because she liked to eat the
dang things and then he had leapfrogged over all common sense
whatsoever and declared that he could beat her at a corndog-eating
contest anywhere and anytime. She just had to name the time and
place.

“
You mind your own
beeswax,” Sally spat at Bobby. “And maybe you ought not to take so
much pride in being a bigger glutton than the rest of us
folks.”

I was too astonished to say a word.
She had a point about Bobby, but what had happened to the sweet,
good-natured woman we all knew as Corndog Sally? We’d have to start
calling her Mad Dog if she kept this sort of attitude
up.

“
I’ve been waiting for you
for half an hour,” she snarled once she spotted me.

I couldn’t say much back to that.
Corndog Sally was blacker than the tar on Hargett Street and one
thing you learn in the South is that you never, ever sass a black
woman over seventy. Not only does it show bad breeding, you’re
likely to get your ass kicked if you do. There’s not a
bamboo-waving ninja master on the planet who can compete with the
way those little old ladies can whip a hickory switch
around.

Instead, I kept my mouth shut—which,
granted, is unusual for me—and showed her into my closet-sized
office, which was chiefly notable for the collection of bras
hanging from the doorknob. A girl should be prepared. Depending on
whether I plan to be running, shooting or taking my underwear off
and whirling it above my head, I like to choose between underwire,
sports or the soft lace cup.

Corndog Sally didn’t look as if she
liked to choose between anything in the way of a bra. She sat
across from me, adjusted her ‘70’s-era Afro wig, then plopped her
own waist-length babies up on the desk like she was serving them up
for supper. They looked like a pair of sweet potatoes waiting to be
buttered. I guess being that old lets you pretty much do whatever
you damn well please with your body parts.

“
What is it, Sally?” I
asked.

When she didn’t answer me, I tried
again. “God almighty, Sally—you disappear for seven years and now
you’re not even going to talk to me? I haven’t seen you since the
funeral.”

“
I saw you there,” she
conceded. “That was right nice of you, Miss Jones.”

“
Call me
Casey.”

“
Miss Jones, I want you to
find my grandson.” She slid a photo across the
desk. 

I stared at a handsome boy with a head
of curly black hair. He was about fourteen or fifteen and spinning
a basketball on the tip of his left index finger. He looked tall
and cocky and talented. He also looked mighty light to be Sally’s
grandson.

“
This boy is white,” I
pointed out.

Sally snatched the photo back. “I
don’t need me a detective to tell me that. I need you to tell me
where he is.”

“
How can he be white?” I
was unwilling to let the subject drop. When you’re me, tact is a
luxury reserved for cops about to either ticket me or undress
me.

“
He’s white because his
daddy was white.” Sally stowed the photo away in a pocketbook the
size of a sofa cushion. “Didn’t they teach you nothing in high
school?” She was assuming I had never clawed my way through
college, which was a safe bet on her part. I am not of the upper
class and it shows. If I ever walked into a Talbot’s, I suspect the
sales ladies would all run screaming for the exits.

Sally reconsidered her rudeness. “This
picture was taken in the winter time,” she explained. “He browns up
real nice in the summer sun.”

“
When did you last see
him?” I asked.

“
About four or five months
ago, when his momma stopped by, probably looking for money. My
oldest daughter wouldn’t let her in the door. For good
reason.”

“
So he’s with his
mother?”

“
I don’t know and I don’t
care,” Corndog Sally snapped. “I don’t want you to find his momma.
I want you to find him.”

I didn’t have to ask why she didn’t
want to find her daughter. Drugs are everywhere, even in Raleigh,
North Carolina. You could hike up the highest mountain on the Blue
Ridge and into the deepest cave you could spot, and you’d probably
find a circle of droopy-eyed teenagers going through their
grandmothers’ pocketbooks looking for something they could either
hock or sniff.

“
How much money do you
want to put into it?” I asked. “A missing persons case can be a
money pit.”

“
I’ve got money.” She
clutched her handbag to her chest like I was planning to rip my fee
out of her wallet right then and there.

“
Fine, I just don’t want
to spend it all.”

“
Mac left me well-prepared
for,” she said. “I can pay whatever it takes.”

“
No problem. I just wanted
to be sure,” I said, knowing an apology was in order. “It’s been
seven years, you know?  People were worried about you. No one
knows where you’ve been or what you’ve been living on.”

“
I’ve been living on the
savings from a lifetime of hard work, that’s what I’ve been living
on. And I’ve been raising my grandson,” she said. “That is, I was
until his momma came sniffing around and took him back. Probably
for the welfare money.”

“
Oh.” What else could I
say?

 “
Just find my
grandson, Miss Jones. It’s important to me. He was Mac’s favorite.
I can’t let his momma tear him down. She says she’s off drugs, but
that’s a lie. It’s always a lie. If you can’t tell for yourself
that a person’s off drugs, if they got to keep shouting it from the
rooftops, then they ain’t off enough drugs to suit me. Trey’s just
a boy and he’s a talented basketball player. The best he’s ever
seen, his coach says. He could be somebody. But not if he stays
with his momma.”

“
Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll
find him for you. Just let me have that picture back, would
you?”

It had taken ten minutes to get there,
but what do you know? The smile on Corndog Sally rose like the sun
coming up behind Pilot Mountain on a spring morning in
May.

Too Tall Johnson proved to be both a
disappointment and a contradiction in terms. What he had in height,
he lacked in length. And in technique. He had seemed like a good
idea four gin-and-tonics ago, but midnight had revealed the awful
truth: not only was Too Tall too short, he was too damn quick on
the draw to boot. He wouldn’t even make it into the ranks of Minute
Men. And, like all men, the time he’d spent in my bed was in
inverse proportion to the time he now intended to spend parked on
my sofa, flipping through television channels in search of
post-coital sports. Men like him are why I go through a dozen
Duracells a year.

“
I hate to be rude,” I
lied as I handed him his jacket. “But you have to leave my home
now.”

“
What?” He looked
confused, an expression I had come to sense often in the dark of my
bedroom.

“
Go,” I told him. “I need
to work.”

“
Work?”  He glanced
at his watch, which he had kept on during sex, although, frankly, a
stop watch would have been more appropriate.

“
The advantage to being
self-employed,” I explained, “is that you don’t have to punch a
clock.” My expression convinced him that I might take to punching
him if he didn’t hurry up and leave, so Too Tall threw his jeans
and sweatshirt back on and stumbled out into the night.

I picked up the phone and called my
friend Marcus Dupree, who is a night owl and can be counted on to
be wide awake until the wee hours of the morn.

“
Too Tall Johnson should
change his name to My Johnson Is Too Short,” I announced when
Marcus picked up the phone. There was no need to introduce
myself.

“
I could have told you
that,” Marcus said with the authority of a man who spends too many
hours hiding in the stalls of the Durham Police Department’s third
floor bathroom, trying to sneak quick smokes in between other
people’s quick pees. “He can’t stick with a case, either. His
closure rate is the lowest in the entire 
department.”

“
For the record, he didn’t
close the deal tonight, either. Thanks for the warning.”

“
Why don’t I just send you
the sexual particulars on every man in the department?” Marcus
suggested sweetly. “It would save us both a lot of
time.”

“
I thought he was cute,” I
grudgingly admitted. “At first.”

“
You must have been in
Micky's,” Marcus guessed correctly, naming a dive bar on Roxboro
Street that was home to a motley assortment of cops and robbers.
“The lighting in there is atrocious. I almost got killed there once
when I tried to pick up a man I thought was giving me the look. It
turned out to be a dyke with a glass eye. She’d obviously lost the
real thing in some bar room brawl. I was lucky to escape with my
manhood intact.”