Nine Days: A Mystery (A Julia Kalas Mystery) - Hardcover

Koenig, Minerva

3.3

332 ratings by Goodreads

9781250051943: Nine Days: A Mystery (A Julia Kalas Mystery)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250051940 ISBN 13: 9781250051943

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2014

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She's short, round, and pushing forty, but Julia Kalas is a damned good criminal. For 17 years she renovated historic California buildings as a laundry front for her husband's illegal arms business. Then the Aryan Brotherhood made her a widow, and witness protection shipped her off to the tiny town of Azula, Texas. Also known as the Middle of Nowhere.

The Lone Star sticks are lousy with vintage architecture begging to be rehabbed. Julia figures she'll pick up where she left off, but she's got a federal watchdog now: police chief Teresa Hallstedt, who is none too happy to have another felon in her jurisdiction. Teresa wants Julia where she can keep an eye on her, which turns out to be behind the bar at the local watering hole. The bar's owner, Hector Guerra, catches Julia's eye, so she takes the job. But before she can get to know him as well as she'd like, they find a dead body on the bar's roof.

The county sheriff begins trying to pin the murder on Hector for reasons that Julia discovers are both personal and nefarious. Unfortunately, the evidence cooperates, but Julia's finely-honed personal radar tells her Hector isn't a killer. She risks reconnecting with the outlaw underground to prove it and learns the hard way that she's not nearly as tough--or as right--as she thinks she is.

Nine Days, Koenig's debut, is atmospheric, gutsy and fun, and Julia Kalas is an intriguing new heroine in crime fiction.

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About the Author:

MINERVA KOENIG is a licensed architect running her own one-woman practice. When not architecting or writing, she likes to sew, read, play chess, do yoga, dance, wrangle cats, and fight the patriarchy. Koenig lives in Austin, Texas. Nine Days is her first novel.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1

“Recognize this?” says the redhead, raising a nine-millimeter pistol to my husband’s face.

It’s late. We’re walking the scenic route home after closing the bar. Joe stops, watching the redhead’s partner come around on my left side. They’re both under twenty years old, with stubbly heads and slow, mean eyes.

“Sorry, guys,” Joe says, showing them his handsome fuck you grin. “We’re dry.”

“We don’t want your money, guido,” the redhead sneers. “It’s too late for that.”

A cop car ambles through the intersection at Twentieth and B, half a block behind the man with the gun, and a familiar dread tickles the bottom of my stomach. I’m not really here, but I’ve been here before. I know what’s coming.

My hands jump to my ears seconds ahead of the shattering blast that takes half Joe’s head off, and I brace for the two slugs that are coming my way. I remember that they won’t kill me. The cops will make the far corner in four and a half seconds and save my life. Not Joe’s. He’s already gone.

God damn it. Living through it once wasn’t enough?

“That’s gotta be her,” somebody said.

I surfaced from the dream and found myself beached on the rear seat of a black Chevy SUV, blinking at the back of some guy’s head. We were parked in a dark loading bay next to a bus station. Through the plate glass window, I could see a big woman dressed in a gray button-down shirt and pressed navy twills coming in from the back.

The head—Kang, his name was—folded up yesterday’s Washington Post and sat tense while his partner, Buford, traded identification with the woman inside the station. I don’t know what the hell they were worried about. Black tactical boots, paramilitary swagger, dark hair pulled back tight—she might as well have been wearing a sign that said COP, for Christ’s sake.

After a couple of minutes, Buford turned and jerked his thumb at us. Kang and I got out of the car.

Nobody had told me where I was going—security, they said—but we had to be south of the Carolinas. The air was warm and thick, with a moist, grassy smell. Florida, maybe?

It had been forty degrees and raining when we’d left Virginia on Tuesday morning, and I’d dressed for the weather. I took off my coat as we went into the bus station, shifting my travel bag from one shoulder to the other.

The woman was bigger than I’d thought at first—close to six feet and heavily broad, the smooth column of her neck rising from her shoulders like a mast from the deck of a ship. Her eyes were a nice golden brown, but they weren’t friendly.

“I’m Teresa Hallstedt,” she said, giving me a frank once-over. She seemed slightly puzzled.

“Want your money back?”

“No, but you might,” she murmured. No pause, like she’d had ready.

Kang guffawed and swatted the Post into my midsection. As a parting gift, I took it away from him without breaking any of his fingers. He and Buford muttered some farewell platitudes, shook hands all around, and beat it. My ears did a little victory dance. The two of them had been yammering nonstop since Knoxville.

The Amazon headed for the door she’d come through, without any more talk. I followed, liking the way she maneuvered herself—plenty of swagger and taking up space like she deserved it; none of the shrinking, minimizing mannerisms that big women so often resort to. For about the millionth time since puberty, I wondered what it felt like to be tall.

Outside, I had to stop momentarily to steady myself. The night sky, no longer hidden by the loading bay roof, blasted into infinity overhead, impossibly vast and ending at a horizon that seemed very far away and too low. A weird lifting sensation, as if I were falling upward. It felt like a stiff wind could come along and blow me straight to Canada.

“You coming or what?” the Amazon called across the empty parking lot.

Two and a half years cooped up in various secure locations with cops and lawyers had made me a stranger to the outdoors. I shook off my vertigo and made tracks for the burgundy four-door Pontiac. We buckled up and pulled out onto a narrow two-lane road. She eyed my sweater. “You want the air?”

Before I could answer, a burbling chirp sounded, and she brought out a slim black rectangle with a glowing blue face. I glared at it, irritation crawling up the back of my neck. I’m not a fan of the telephone, in any configuration. For my money, Bell attached his invention to the wall so you could get the hell away from it.

The Amazon listened, her lips compressing. “Fire there yet?” More listening, then, “Did she get a look at the guy?”

A green and white sign flashed by: AZULA, TEXAS. POP. 5,141.

“I’m about five minutes out,” the cop continued into her phone. “Yeah. OK, Benny. Thanks.”

She beeped the thing off and put it away, seeming to forget that I was there. I didn’t remind her.

We hummed along in silence for maybe half an hour, the sparse ghosts of small houses sliding by out in the landscape; then the Pontiac slowed and rattled over a low bridge into a town square. A stone courthouse held down the patch of dry grass at its center, a couple dozen weathered storefronts huddled around it like campers around a fire. The place could have done time for cuteness if half the buildings hadn’t been boarded up or vacant. I felt the thing between my ears boot up the automatic cost-benefit analysis it always runs through when I lay eyes on derelict real estate. My mood started to lift. Maybe this exile to the sticks didn’t have to be the end of life as I knew it.

A thick plume of gray smoke twisted up into the sky from a building on the far corner, to our left. Two fire trucks were parked at the curb in front, and a couple of guys in full hero regalia stood on the courthouse lawn, one with a radio pressed to the side of his face. A short way off, closer to us, a uniformed cop was talking to a tiny old woman at the open driver’s-side door of a police cruiser. They shaded their eyes against the headlights and stepped back as the Amazon pulled up alongside.

“Hey, Chief,” the uniform said, walking over and laying his arm on the Pontiac’s roof. He was maybe thirty-five—small, dark, and wiry—with a bristle of black hair growing low on his forehead. Second generation, I bet myself.

“Anything?” the Amazon asked him.

He shook his head. “911 caller gave the same description as Silvia did—Caucasian, blond, red gimme cap—but he was long gone by the time we got here.” He jerked his chin at the firefighters. “First-in found point-of-origin indicators that look fishy.”

“Damn it,” the Amazon growled. She put the car in Park and got out.

As the cops strode toward the firefighters, the old woman—Silvia, I presumed—inched over and peered in at me. Her face was lined and folded like one of those dried apple dolls, with shiny black raisin eyes. Thin braids the color of sheet metal lay down the front of her patterned housedress.

I gave her the eyebrows, and she said, in a surprisingly deep voice, “What did you do?”

I considered telling her I’d just killed somebody’s grandmother, but decided it was a little early to go off script. I hadn’t even been in town for fifteen minutes.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m a friend of Teresa’s.”

The raisin eyes moved off my face to the suitcase in the backseat. “From where?”

“Boston,” I said.

She smiled as if at a joke, and my radar went off.

“What’s funny?”

The cops were back before she could get an answer out, the Amazon asking her, “Silvia, you sure you didn’t recognize this runner?”

“All them white boys look the same to me.” She shrugged.

The Amazon got back into the car, saying to the uniform, “Keep everybody here, will you, Benny? I’ll be right back.”

We bumped over the fire hoses crisscrossing the street and passed along the front of the courthouse. The Amazon nodded toward the row of buildings facing it and said, “You’ve got a job interview there tomorrow afternoon.”

The buildings she’d indicated were all dark except for a two-story place with a row of Harley-Davidsons parked at the curb in front and a neon sign in the window reading GUERRA’S. Open at this hour, it could be only one thing.

“Get bored halfway through?” I asked the cop.

She cut her eyes at me. “What?”

“If you’d read my whole file, you’d know that I was just stop-gap help in the bar, as a favor to my father-in-law. Construction is my field, not slinging booze.”

She made a face and started shaking her head before I’d stopped talking. “You’re not in California anymore. Girls don’t do that kind of work around here.”

I gave her back the face. “But they’re allowed to run the police department?”

“I’m not in hiding from a bunch of neo-Nazis who want to kill me,” she pointed out. “I can afford to be weird. You can’t.”

Fucking cops. Everywhere you go, they’re the same.

Away from the square, there didn’t seem to be much of a town. We drove maybe half a mile on a curbless, pitted strip of asphalt apparently unrelated to the sporadic buildings in its vicinity, some of which might have been houses. After we turned right at a small church with a big graveyard, signs of habitation disappeared entirely except for a big white house up ahead on the right.

The Amazon stopped to let a car coming toward us exit the narrow gravel driveway before turning in. There was a young woman at the wheel, too busy keeping her beige four-door out of the ditch to acknowledge us. I felt a little zap of something come off the Amazon as we passed, but it didn’t last long enough for me to classify.

We parked on a bare patch of dirt under a low-hanging tree, and I followed the Amazon up onto a long screened porch facing the driveway. She unlocked a door and flipped on the lights, illuminating an antique kitchen with a Formica dinette against the wall, between two tall windows.

“I’ve gotta go deal with this fire situation,” she said, twisting a brass skeleton key off her ring and handing it to me. “I’ll come by in the morning so we can get each other up to speed. Call me on my cell if anything needs attention before then.” She scribbled on the back of a card with a green ballpoint. I took it, and she disappeared down the porch steps.

In addition to the kitchen, there was a bathroom with an Olympic-sized claw-foot tub, and a room barely big enough to contain the queen-sized bed shoved sideways against the wall under a high window. Another door faced me across the narrow space alongside the bed, but it was locked and didn’t open with the key. I decided I could survive the night without seeing my living room, and tossed my stuff into the closet. Then I went out to sit on the porch steps and take another look at that sky.

III

The heat woke me late the next morning. I lay there listening to the unfamiliar silence, wondering if I’d gone deaf in my sleep. Then I remembered where I was.

Wrapping myself in the bedsheet, I got up and went into the kitchen to forage. A rattle at the apartment door sounded before I could get the refrigerator open. Figuring it was the Amazon, I opened up and found a man standing there instead.

“Sorry,” he said, taking a step back. “I didn’t know Teresa had rented the place already.”

He was whip-thin but expansively framed, big bony shoulders pushing at the seams of his snug-fitting T-shirt, with frankly dyed black hair and light eyes that didn’t quite connect with mine. He gave off sex like church incense, and I felt myself remember that a few of my favorite condoms were still floating around in my bag somewhere. I’d just started thinking about asking him in when the Amazon appeared from a door at the far end of the porch.

Her hair was wet and she wore an exasperated expression. “Don’t you answer your phone?”

“I didn’t hear it,” I said, privately amused by the technical truth of the statement. I’d unplugged the loathsome instrument before falling into bed. An old habit and a good one.

“Hey, Teresa, is Richard around?” the guy asked her. “I need to get into the basement.”

“I don’t keep track of him anymore, Jesse,” she said, a stain of irritation on her voice. “Let’s go inside,” she said to me.

He put a hand out, saying, “I’m Jesse Reed, I live upstairs.”

“Julia Kalas,” I replied, shaking.

“Like the opera singer?”

I spelled it and his expression went curious, his eyes hovering somewhere around my chin. “What is that, Greek?”

“It’s Finnish.”

The feds had fought me on it at first, but there was no way I was spending the rest of my life named Smith. It wasn’t as if the name Kalas were traceable to me—at least, not by anyone I didn’t want to be able to trace me when the time came. I told the feds I’d picked it out of the phone book, and when I showed them how many Kalases were listed for Boston, they let it go. For people whose job it is to be suspicious, they were surprisingly gullible.

The Amazon gave the apartment door a push. I backed up with the knob in my hand, letting her in.

“Nice to meet you,” Jesse called after us. I saw him smirk as he trotted down the porch steps, revealing a pair of predatory canines.

“You want to watch yourself with that one,” the Amazon said as I went into the bathroom to get dressed. “You’ll be on your back with your panties on the floor before you know what hit you.”

“Yeah?” I replied, curious. “Will I enjoy it?”

She made a disgusted noise. “How the hell should I know? I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.”

Her eyes dropped to the two splotchy pink scars on my right side without changing, so she’d gotten at least that far into my file. I pulled on a T-shirt and checked my face in the mirror. It still looked the same.

“Who’s Richard?” I asked, coming back into the kitchen.

She had coffee and filters out, and was filling a copper kettle at the porcelain sink. “My soon-to-be ex-husband. He’s taking his time moving out, so you might run into him around the place. Don’t let him give you any shit.”

I got as comfortable as the chrome chairs at the dinette would let me. “Is he likely to offer me some?”

“He’s likely to do any damned thing,” the Amazon sighed, setting the kettle on the stove and lighting the gas. “Fortunately, it’s not my problem anymore.”

I wondered what her husband was like. Big guy. Rough around the edges, probably, to match her. “How long were you married?”

She waved it by, coming over to take the other chair. “Everything all right with the apartment?”

Some blood in the water there, I thought. Putting it on the back shelf to play with later, I replied, “I don’t know—I haven’t seen all of it yet. The door in the bedroom is locked, and the key you gave me doesn’t open it.”

“Yeah, that’s my place,” she said, leaning back and crossing her arms. “I split this floor into two units after Richard moved out.”

I let my eyes drift around, and she pointed out dryly, “You’re not gonna live here forever.”

That reminded me. “There’s only fifteen thousand in the bank account the feds set up. I was supposed to get fifty for the house in Bakersfield.”

“The fifteen is for a car and living expenses until you can get a paycheck coming in,” she said. “If you find a property you want to buy, let me know and I’ll get what you need transferred down.”

“Why can’t I just have what they owe me, straight up?”

Her brown eyes jumped to my face, going sharp. “WITSEC’s not in the business of giving habitual criminals big chunks of cash.”

Again with the tone. I surveyed the backyard to give my temper time to s...

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