Ron Base - Sanibel Sunset Detective 01 - The Sanibel Sunset Detective by Ron Base Read Free Book Online Page A

fingers blurred. The sound was deafening. He couldn’t find a place to work, and he still could not remember what story he was supposed to write. If he did not produce a story he would lose his job. He couldn’t lose it. The job was all he had. It defined who he was. Without it, he wasn’t anything.
    Tree jerked awake in the dark. It took a few moments to realize he was no longer at the newspaper; there was no need to worry about stories or deadlines. He looked over to where Freddie slept, her back to him, a reassuring presence in the darkness.
    He sat on the edge of the bed taking deep breaths. He heard a noise from the other room. Visions of Reno O’Hara breaking into the house assailed him.
    Get a grip, he told himself. Newspaper deadlines did not loom. Bad guys were not invading. They were safe.
    He knew this time of night; the hours of nightmares and demons and endless uncertainty. Gloom floated, death was close.
    Had he heard something?
    He rose from the bed and slipped across to the bedroom door. He peered out through the shadows occupying the house at this hour. Nothing moved. All was quiet.
    “My love,” Freddie called. “Come back to bed. It’s all right.”
    And maybe it was.

8
    H appy tourists filled the visitors center the next morning. There was no sign of threatening evil in the person of Reno O’Hara—good news for Sanibel tourism, better news for Tree. Feeling more relaxed, he got himself a cup of coffee and then leaned against the counter trading pleasantries with the trio of volunteers on duty.
    Rex Baxter came down from his office, brightening as soon as he saw the reception area full of visitors. “Anyone here from Chicago?”
    One of the tourists recognized him from his weatherman days. Pleased, Rex soon was holding court. “I’m not from Chicago originally,” he said. “I was born on the Oklahoma panhandle. The panhandle’s so flat you can watch your dog run away for two days.”
    The group exploded in laughter.
    “People always ask me why I left Chicago,” Rex continued. “I always tell ’em it’s because the weather is so easy to forecast down here. You just paste a smile on your face and say, ‘Sunny.’”
    Someone asked if he knew Barack Obama in Chicago. Rex got that question all the time, and he didn’t like it. He had left town by the time the future president came along. “I knew Mayor Daley, though. Mayor Daley said I was his favorite weatherman.”
    “That’s the last mayor?” the visitor from Chicago said.
    “No, no, his old man,” Rex said.
    The Chicago visitor looked blank-faced.
    “What you want to do,” Rex went on, relieved to change the subject, “you want to get over to the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge. That’s where we got the replica of the biggest darn gun you ever laid eyes on.”
    “What are you doing with a gun over there?” someone wanted to know.
    “Ding Darling was a world famous cartoonist, a household word. I grew up reading his stuff at a time when editorial cartoonists still had real influence, him more than most. He was also a pioneering conservationist who did more than just about anyone to get the wetlands around here protected.”
    “Ding owned a gun?” One of the visitors sounded nonplused.
    “No, no. It wasn’t Ding’s gun, but he had it hanging on the wall in his office. Blunderbuss of a thing, used by Maryland poachers in the 1930s. The poachers filled the rifle full of buckshot, aimed it at a flock of ducks and pulled the trigger. Blam! Blam! Killed dozens of birds with a single shot, an environmental travesty, of course, the sort of thing Ding Darling fought against his whole life.”
    Scattered applause warmed Rex to his subject.
    “What me and a couple of buddies have done, we’ve built a replica of the gun, trigger mechanism, the whole thing.”
    “You can shoot this mother?” The question came from a tourist displaying a large belly beneath a red golf shirt.
    “You bet,” said Rex. “We got her loaded up with