Authors: Michael Lister
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Hard-Boiled, #Romance, #Historical, #General
Big Goodbye, The
Praise for the "Soldier" Series
Walk the mean streets of wartime Panama City with Jimmy “Soldier” Riley, a wounded, woman-haunted knight errant in Michael Lister’s resonant new noir series Publisher’s Weekly calls “a promising private detective series set in 1940s Florida,” and Library Journal says “peppered with snappy dialog, this hard-boiled mystery by award winner Lister is a swell read.”
"Lister's Hard-Edged Prose Ranks With The Best Of Contemporary Noir Fiction." Publisher's Weekly Starred Review
"Stylish, retro, and highly entertaining. Michael Lister's PI Jimmy "Soldier" Riley is a compelling new noir hero." Jason Starr
"1940s Panama City, Florida . . . tough and violent with snappy dialogue and great atmosphere, beautiful women with hidden agendas, and a long lost world that we mostly know through ancient postcards and faded photographs. Get ready for a suspenseful, romantic and historic ride." Ace Atkins
“Michael Lister has the world of Florida Panhandle noir all to himself. Tough, violent, and hard-boiled, This novel of obsession and suspense will remind you of Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, and why you started reading crime novels in the first place.” John Dufresne
“Michael Lister successfully brings back the hard-boiled 1940′s P.I. with his Jimmy ‘Soldier’ Riley series. Soldier has heart, the dialogue is relentlessly hard-boiled, and the local is steamy and original. Lister knows how to mix it all together with the steady hand of a solid pro.” Robert Randisi
“Tight, taut, terrific PI noir with a classic and fully-realized 1940s setting. Michael Lister is one of those rare, gifted writers who can immerse you with his first sentence. The “Soldier” series is a treasure—don’t miss it!” Kelli Stanley
“Michael Lister delivers the goods like Tyson in his prime, hard, fast and beautiful kind of brutal.” Gary Phillips
"A seductive mix of sudden violence and raw emotion, Michael Lister's THE BIG GOODBYE is a much-welcome contribution to the hardboiled, P.I. tradition. Cool stuff." Victor Gischler
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Books by Michael Lister
(Jimmy “Soldier” Riley Novels)
The Big Hello
In a Spider’s Web (short story)
The Big Book of Noir
(John Jordan Novels)
Innocent Blood
Blood Money
(Merrick McKnight / Reggie Summers Novels)
(Remington James Novels)
Double Exposure
(includes intro by Michael Connelly)
Separation Anxiety
(Sam Michaels / Daniel Davis Novels)
(Love Stories)
(Short Story Collections)
North Florida Noir
Florida Heat Wave
Delta Blues
Another Quiet Night in Desparation
(The Meaning Series)
The Meaning of Jesus
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The Big Goodbye
a Jimmy "Soldier" Riley Noir Novel
Michael Lister
Pulpwood Press
Panama City, FL
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Lister
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Inquiries should be addressed to:
Pulpwood Press
P.O. Box 35038
Panama City, FL 32412
Lister, Michael.
The Big Goodbye / Michael
Lister.
-----1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1888146-78-3 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-888146-79-0 (trade paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-888146-80-6 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number:
Book Design by Adam Ake
Printed in the United States
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First Edition
For Emily Balazs
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
The Big Goodbye
Michael Lister
Chapter 1
I had not yet recovered from shooting Stanley Somerset when I saw her.
Part of me hoped I’d never see her again. Part of me was constantly looking for her, scanning every crowd, straining to see around every corner, peering into every slowly passing car.
The funny thing was, I only saw her on that rarest of occasions when I wasn’t looking for her—like when I was in the middle of a case, having just shot a man.
Ray and I had been hired by a voice on the phone and a check in the mail to locate a sixteen-year-old runaway from Nag’s Head, North Carolina.
It hadn’t been difficult. The man she had run away with—her forty-eight-year-old step-dad—who had a room in the Dixie Sherman Hotel downtown wasn’t capable of keeping a low profile.
“It just don’t add up. You gonna run to Panama City, you stay at the beach, right?” July, our part-time secretary, said from the backseat of Ray’s big Packard. “Why bring her to the Dixie?”
Like Ray, the car was squarish and conservative, a late-model black four-door sedan that made him feel like a cop.
We were parked on Fifth Street beneath a warm October sun, the planted palms lining the sidewalks flapping in the wind, unable to provide any shade.
“Dixie Sherman’s nice,” Ray said. “Besides, they got beaches where they ran away from.”
Ray Parker, former Pinkerton agent, had seen the world—or so it seemed to me and July. The two of us had barely left Bay County. He was nearly twice as old as we were—wise, too. We never doubted a word he spoke—which was easier than you might imagine. Buttoned up Ray rarely spoke. He was obviously pleased by the possibility of pinching the kind of creep who’d run off with a little girl. We all were.
“Jimmy, you know what I mean, don’t you?” July asked me. “Why bring her here at all?”
She wore her hair in a short feather cut, pincurls around her ears and on top of her head. She did this, she had confided in me one time, to de-emphasize the roundness of her full face, which was just silly. She had a cute face and a long, thin neck. Girls can be so silly sometimes.
“For what we
don’t
have,” I said. “The lady paying our bills.”
“The wife,” July said.
“The
mother
,” Ray said.
Sitting at the corner of Jenks and Fifth Street, the Dixie Sherman, the only high-rise around, was built in 1925 by W. C. Sherman, and had one hundred and one rooms, each with a bathroom, a telephone, and elegant furniture—all starting at just three bucks.
When it opened in 1926 many locals referred to it as the “white elephant” downtown and called it “too much hotel” for the area, and maybe it was—back then, but here in the fall of 1943 its rooms were always full and its dance floors were the place to be on a Saturday night.
The couple in question pulled up in a new blue torpedo sport coupe Pontiac, parked, and walked into the lobby.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Three slamming car doors later we were following behind them.
July didn’t usually tag along, but Ray thought she might cozy up to the little sixteen-year-old dumb Dora while we put the cure on her daddy. Ray had saved July’s life on a case he worked before I joined the agency, and had been saving her ever since. She wasn’t much of a secretary, but then there wasn’t much we needed a secretary for. She was stuck on Ray, looked at him in that dreamy, wide-eyed I-owe-you-my-life way that’s worth shelling out the dough of a part-time salary for.
Though Ray hadn’t been a cop for a long time, he still stood out like one, so while July and I hopped the elevator with Stanley and his stepdaughter, Ray took the stairs.
As the elevator ascended, I pretended to be keen on July, which wasn’t hard to do. What
was
hard was groping her with one arm, but she was swell about it, and as I kissed her neck, she coyly fought off my advances. When the doors opened on their floor and they stepped out into the empty corridor, Stanley looked back and said, “Come on, mister, at least wait’ll you get to your room.”
“Don’t get your pulleys all twisted up, you old fuddy-duddy,” July said, pretending to try to get at him as I held her back. “Ain’t like this is Fifth Avenue or somethin’.”
I nodded toward my missing arm. “Just got back from the war and I’m a little overheated. Didn’t mean no harm. Sorry your little girl had to see it.”
“That’s okay, soldier,” he said. “We all appreciate what you boys—”