The Zen Man

“I loved every single word of
The Zen Man
!”

~
Delores Fossen
,
USA Today
Best-selling Author

“Move over Sam Spade, Nick and Nora; make room for a Denver who-dun-it, Colleen Collins’s
The Zen Man
. Brilliant and fast-paced writing. I couldn’t put it down.”

~
Donnell Ann Bell
, Award-Winning Author of
The Past Came Hunting

“Colleen Collins seduces you with characters you’ll never forget and a story that sizzles from the opening line.” (
Shock Waves
)

~
New York Times
Best-selling Author Vicki Lewis Thompson

“Colleen’s books never disappoint!”

~ Nancy Warren,
USA Today
Best-selling Author

“These two stories (
Let It Bree/Can’t Buy Me Louie
) were an absolute joy to read.”

~ Kathy Boswell, The Best Reviews

“Add
Tongue-Tied
to your keeper shelf! Winner of the WordWeaving Award for Excellence.”

~ Cynthia Penn, Wordweaving.com

“The suspense is taut and will have the audience wanting more tales like this (
Dark Angel
) by clever Cassandra Collins, who already has a growing reputation for her romantic romps (under the name of Colleen Collins).”

~ Harriet Klausner

“Colleen Collins’
Building a Bad Boy
is funny and tender, and decidedly non-traditional hero Nigel is hotter than sin.”

~ RT Bookclub

Non-Fiction Books

How to Write a Dick: A Guide for Writing Fictional Sleuths from a Couple of Real-Life Sleuths
, co-authored with
Shaun Kaufman
, available on
Kindle
.

How Do Private Eyes Do That?
available on
Kindle
.

Novels

Colleen Collins has written 20 novels for Harlequin and Dorchester. A complete listing of her books, both print and ebook, are on
Amazon
.

Keep informed of new releases by visiting
Colleen’s website
.

Copyright © 2011 by WIN, Inc.

All Rights Reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

Cover design by
Peter Ratcliffe
.

Visit
The Zen Man website
for book reviews, articles on writing and private investigations, and author interviews.

Dedication

One
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Two
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Three
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Four
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Five
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Six
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Seven
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Eight
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Nine
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Ten
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Eleven
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Twelve
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Thirteen
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Fourteen
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Fifteen
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Sixteen
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Seventeen
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Eighteen
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Nineteen
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Twenty
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Twenty-One
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Twenty-Two
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Twenty-Three
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Twenty-Four
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Twenty-Five
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Twenty-Six
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Twenty-Seven
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Twenty-Eight
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Twenty-Nine
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Thirty
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Thirty-One
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Thirty-Two
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Thirty-Three
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Thirty-Four
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Thirty-Five
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Thirty-Six
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Thirty-Seven
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Thirty-Eight
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Thirty-Nine
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Forty
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Forty-One
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Forty-Two
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Forty-Three
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Forty-Four
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Forty-Five
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Forty-Six
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Forty-Seven
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Forty-Eight
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Forty-Nine
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Fifty
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Fifty-One
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Fifty-Two
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Fifty-Three

To Shaun, the real Zen Man

“The next person who says Merry Christmas to me, I’ll kill ’em.”
—The Thin Man, 1934

The obstacle is the path.
—Zen proverb

F
ive years of being clean and sober nearly tanked as I watched a bad piece of my past trudging across the parking lot in my direction. She was far enough away that I couldn’t make out her features, or her companion’s for that matter, but I knew the car parked behind them better than I knew my own soul. Losing that car had hurt worse than losing the house, the marriage, maybe even my career. Funny how a lump of tricked-out metal can do that to a man.

I glanced at the clock. In an hour, Laura and I would start greeting a school of fifty-five sharks from Colorado’s Criminal Defense Association—CrimDefs to those in the know—who were spending their annual retreat at our lodge, technically Laura’s as she’d put up the dough, the Dinosaur Foot Bed and Breakfast and Hot Springs. We’d wanted to name it something less Barney-like, but this area had been called Dinosaur Foot—after the dinosaur prints and fossils in the region—for generations, going back to the Ute tribe who’d conducted spiritual journeys to the area, so it’d seemed smart to keep the name.

“Something wrong?” Laura stood next to me at the kitchen sink, wiping dry another holly-and-berry etched wine glass for our upcoming guests. She wore tight jeans—the kind of tight that could make a man almost forget his troubles—and a blue cashmere cardigan that matched her eyes. But the best was her face. When she frothed her hair and slicked red on her pouty lips, like she’d done today, she looked like Grace Slick in her prime before Jefferson Airplane nose-dived.

Laura, at thirty-five, was definitely in her prime, too. But underneath that hot-rock-chick Slick surface, beat the heart of a geek who loved tinkering with computers, a skill she’d applied as a senior manager at the telecommunications giant TeleForce, headquartered in nearby Denver, until her recent early retirement. One of those forced situations due to company downsizing.

When I didn’t answer, she craned her neck to peer out the window over the sink, leaning so close I could smell her familiar scent, a honey-lavender perfume that, depending on my mood, could craze me or chill me.

“What, those people heading up from the parking lot?”

“Yeah.” It was a long trek from the lot, several hundred feet that included a lung-stretching hike up stairs to reach the higher ground of the lodge. I’ve been tempted to put a sign down there—“Warning 150 steps ahead”—because after making it to the top, one feels like a basketball player at the foul line toward the end of a gut-busting game. Fortunately, after reaching the grounds of the lodge, the only other exertion they’d experience might be hiking in nearby wildflower meadows during the summer, snowshoeing in the winter, or indoor sports all year around in one of the lodge rooms or rustic cabins that edged several natural hot spring pools.

“Probably early arrivals for the retreat,” Laura murmured. “Know them?”

“One of ’em.”

“You must have super-hero eyesight because all I see is a short blonde and a tall man.”

“You’re not looking at the whole picture.”

Laura glanced over her shoulder at me, her left eye squinting. “What?”

“Check the parking lot.”

We call it a parking lot, but it’s more like a monster-size circle of chewed-up gravel at the bottom of the hill. Currently, three cars were parked there—Laura’s blue Dodge Durango, my gray ‘90 Pontiac Firebird, and a sleek yellow number that glistened like a molded cube of melting butter under the late afternoon sun.

“Who in their right mind would paint a car crayon yellow?”

“That’s no mere car, that’s a 2002 Millennium Yellow Z06 Corvette,” I said, feeling a creeping tightness in my jaw. “And the color is called
competition
yellow, not crayon.”

A gust of wind triggered a chaotic metallic tune from the wind chimes dangling outside the kitchen window.

She settled back onto the heels of her Skechers, those plump lips forming a small “o” of realization. “So that’s…”

“Mellow Yellow.” License plate used to say that, too. MLO YLO. From what people had told me, it now read WAS HIS.

Her eyes glistened with a you-poor-little-boy look a thirty-six-year-old man shouldn’t like.

It’d been Laura’s idea to host the CrimDefs’ retreat because it’d be a great way to kick off our grand opening, but I think she was more interested in my having an opportunity to pitch Levine Investigations to potential clients. I mean, what better investigator for a lawyer to hire than a former lawyer? Nevertheless, I’d fought the idea of hosting the retreat at our place with all the fury a decades-long Deadhead can muster—which meant I’d mumbled and shrugged a lot. The problem is ninety percent of the CrimDefs feel one of two ways about me—they either hate my guts or view me as rabidly unstable—so the whole notion of my pitching
anything
to them was akin to defending myself by tossing veggie burritos to fend off bullets from a firing squad.

But Laura kept reminding me no PI in the state had my credentials, namely eight years experience as a high-profile trial attorney, and that although I couldn’t give legal advice to clients, I could anticipate most lawyers’ legal needs before they arose. All of which meant I could charge more per hour than my gumshoe competitors. Such money logic inspired me to pitch my services.

That is, until that blonde, my ex-wife, arrived on the scene in Mellow.

In the years since we’d been divorced, one of her favorite pastimes had been announcing loudly and often what an exceptionally irresponsible, deranged asshole I was. I’ll cop to some past behaviors, but now that I was clean and sober I liked proving to the world that I had it together again.

“So this means the blonde who’ll soon be at our door is Wicked.”

Short for Wicked Wench of the West, my favorite reference to said ex. The bad piece of history who’d make damn sure dirt stuck to my rep this weekend just when I’d hoped to sway a little professional sentiment my way. I rinsed another soapy wine glass under the kitchen faucet. Oh, if rinsing off the debris of my past were so easy.

“Who’s that man she’s with?” Laura accepted the dripping glass from me.

“Some dude headed down a feelin-bad road.” They’d finally reached the top of the stairs, undoubtedly winded, which accounted for their snail’s pace along the curving cement walk to the lodge’s front door. As they drew closer, a wave of betrayal mixed with pity washed over me.

“Sam Wexler,” I muttered.

Laura froze, holding a half-dried glass mid-air. “Your former law partner?”

I grunted affirmatively.

“Wicked is Sam’s
date
this weekend?” She frowned. “Isn’t he married?”

“Guess wifey’s out of town.”

I thought about Sam’s wife Fern and her uncomplicated, small-town ways. She canned peaches, knitted sweaters, raised the children. Just add water and mix the perfect housewife, which is why I’d always thought he’d married her. She was the earth while he played with fire.

Laura shook her head slowly as she set aside the dried glass. She despised people who cheated on their partners, a fact I knew ‘cause that’s how we met. Almost a year ago, she’d found me in the online yellow pages under “private investigators” and hired me to follow her fiancé, whom she suspected of cheating. He was, she dumped him, and I promptly asked her out. Best snap decision I ever made.

“Wicked’s a lawyer, right?”

“Criminal defense, just like Sam and everyone else registered for the retreat.” Just like I used to be.

“Considering how many CrimDefs didn’t want to attend because of—”

“My drug-addled rep—”

“Actually I was going to say due to winter travel…anyway, considering Wicked’s unresolved anger over your divorce, it surprises me she decided to show up. Of course, there’s plenty of room.”

With six chalet-style cabins that accommodated four to six people each, and twelve guest rooms upstairs, all with fold-out couches, we could’ve easily fit another dozen or so attendees.

“No wonder Sam reserved an entire cabin for himself,” I mumbled. Poor Fern.

“If Wicked plans to stay for the entire retreat, I’ll add an extra charge to his room.”

“Make it enough to cover the mortgage.”

Laura laughed, a throaty, unrestrained sound that always gave me a rush.