Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom by A. L. Haskett Read Free Book Online

Duncan demanded, “who’s on trial here anyway?”
    “Exactly!” said Tiffy, and both Benjamin and the jury of old women fixed stony eyes on Duncan.
    “I’m losing my baby!” cried Fiona.
    “Quiet, woman,” Sean Delaney said. “You’re embarrassing the boy.”
    “Mr. Delaney, if you don’t mind, I’ll admonish the witness.” Benjamin turned to Fiona. “Control yourself, Mrs. Delaney, or I’ll be forced to have Woody discipline you.”
    Woody had been half-asleep through the proceedings, but he perked up some and produced a nasty looking bull whip.
    Duncan turned to Sean. “I’d like to wake up now if you don’t mind.”
    “Not at all.” Sean Delaney clapped his hands.
    Duncan woke to gunshots and screams. He tried to get up, but he was tangled in his sleeping bag. He fell hard to the floor. The gun fired again. Glass shattered, tires squealed, an engine roared. Duncan crawled to his window and looked out.
    A young Hispanic man lay on the sidewalk in front of the hardware store, glass strewn about his body and a dark stain spreading across the sidewalk around his head like a wet, black halo. He wore a white t-shirt, blue jeans, and a blue bandanna around his bleeding skull. A young girl with long black hair knelt wailing beside him. A woman peered out of the Hollywood Bar and Grill and screamed. Soon spears of red light whizzed through Duncan’s windows and across his walls and sirens and police radios filled the street. Girls from the Hollywood, clad in lace and high leather boots, pushed up against yellow police tape and watched paramedics work over the silent man. One paramedic stepped away and the other leaned back. A man and his wife walked beneath Duncan’s window as a man in a coroner’s jacket took a body bag out of his truck.
    “Just another drive by,” Duncan heard the man say and then he and his wife were gone.
    Duncan pulled on his pants, put on his Stetson, and took a beer from the refrigerator. He set his easel beside the window and laid his paints and brushes across the desk. Cat paced between Duncan’s legs as he watched the coroner load the dead man into a van and take him away. By the time the last police car had gone, Duncan had sketched a rough outline of the scene below. The street he painted with his eyes, but the dead man and the girl he painted from a snapshot in his mind. But his brain was not a camera and the picture evolving on canvas lacked the detail with which Duncan normally painted. The result was simple and dark and brutal. The young Mexican lay dead on the cement, his blood black, his face turned away, one leg bent backwards at the knee.
    But the evolving painting was not about death, it was about grief, and the focus was the kneeling girl, her face in shadows but the anguish obvious in the curve of her back and her hands on her dead lover.
    And all around them, dots of broken glass like diamonds cast unwanted into the gutter.

 
    Four
    All that remained of the rodeo clown was a mild stench.
    It did not interfere with his sleep, but it vexed Benjamin during his waking hours, and made his meals unpalatable. He took shallow breaths until a deputy came after breakfast and led him to an interview room with a plexiglass partition and salmon colored walls. Benjamin did not suspect that he was about to endure the first of two tests of honor in what would be a day of minor tribulations. All he wondered was who had come calling. He settled in a metal chair facing the glass and surmised it must be Duncan. He was first sad that his friend had ceded his dream so easily, then pleasantly relieved when Woody entered the room opposite the glass. A laugh perished in his throat when Fiona followed him in.
    “Well, slap my ass and call me Sally,” Benjamin said. “Fiona, if you weren’t the last person I expected to see here.”
    “Ben, for once in your life,” Woody said, “just shut up and listen.”
    “What the hell.” Benjamin sat back and folded his arms.
    “The way it