{"id":52,"date":"2017-07-16T14:54:03","date_gmt":"2017-07-16T14:54:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/?p=52"},"modified":"2017-07-16T14:54:03","modified_gmt":"2017-07-16T14:54:03","slug":"new-al-pennyback-mystery-bad-girls-dont-die-soon-to-be-released","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/charlesray-author.com\/index.php\/2017\/07\/16\/new-al-pennyback-mystery-bad-girls-dont-die-soon-to-be-released\/","title":{"rendered":"New Al Pennyback mystery, ‘Bad Girls Don’t Die,’ soon to be released"},"content":{"rendered":"

For fans of Al Pennyback, the DC-based PI will be back on the shelves soon in\u00a0Bad Girls Don’t Die.\u00a0<\/em> Here’s a look at the planned cover, and a sneak peek at the first two chapters.<\/p>\n

\"Bad<\/p>\n

Chapter 1<\/p>\n

The first thing she noticed was the darkness. It wasn\u2019t the dark, just able to make out vague shapes kind of darkness, but the stygian, can\u2019t see your hand in front of your face kind of darkness. For a heartbeat, it frightened her, really, really frightened.
\nWas she dead, she wondered? Is this what death is; a great darkness, cut off from everything, a nothingness? If so, then hell, which is where she thought she surely was, was not the place of eternal fire as her grandfather had often threatened, but was, instead, a place of aloneness, a place of dark silence, which, she concluded rather quickly, was infinitely worse than being consigned to the fire along with all the other sinners\u2014the bad people like her. At least, in the fiery pits, she could see others who were suffering the same fate. Here, alone in the darkness, she faced eternity the same way she had come into the world, alone and stripped bare.
\nAll of this took place in a single heartbeat. Just enough time for her to know that she was not dead. At least, not yet.
\nAnd, after that single heartbeat, the oppressive darkness began to lift. As the irises of her eyes, which had for some reason contracted to pinpoints, began to open, the darkness was no longer so . . . dark. In fact, she began to be able to make out vague shapes. A light-grey rectangle high above her that might be a window of some sort, but it was either covered by a thin cloth, or painted over. Long, narrow rectangles that in time resolved themselves into wooden beams interlocked in a pattern of large squares above her head, and receding into the murky darkness in the distance. From this pattern, other beams ran straight down, ending at a grayish, dusty looking surface.
\nPiece by piece, her mind began to assemble what her eyes were seeing into a semblance of reality that she could comprehend. The beams were the supporting framework of a floor, with load-bearing beams, that indicated she was in a basement, and from her inability to see a far wall\u2014she could feel the rasp of wallboard at her back\u2014a rather large basement.
\nThis was familiar. She\u2019d spent a lot of time in basements in her life, or in what passed for a life since the untimely death of her parents when she was eleven years old. A basement was where she\u2019d often been sent when she\u2019d been \u2018bad,\u2019 which was most of the time.
\nShe tried moving, and found that she couldn\u2019t move her hands apart. She could, however, bend them, so she did. Holding them near her eyes, she could just make out the silvery color of duct tape, several layers of it wrapped tightly around her wrists, pinning them together. She tried moving her legs, and was rewarded with a clanking sound, and the rough scraping of something hard against her ankles.
\nWell now, this is new. Never before when she\u2019d been sent to the basement had she been shackled. Sure, the door to the ground floor had been locked, but she\u2019d had free run of the place.
\nHad she been really so bad this time? Had she done something to merit this extra punishment? In that heartbeat of time it had taken her brain to determine her location, it had not determined the why. A significant piece was missing.
\nWhy am I here?
\nThen, as her vision became clearer, she realized that this was not the basement with which she was familiar. This was a place she\u2019d never been before.
\nWhere am I?
\nAs her heart rate, which had been she now realized, as fast and loud as a kettle drum, slowed, and her breathing, which had been a rapid panting, returned to something approaching normal, her thoughts began to clear, and they weren\u2019t comforting.
\nIs this where I\u2019m supposed to die? Am I now to pay the price for the bad thing I did? What did I do?
\nShe found that the thought of dying did not itself trouble her as much as dying alone in this dark place, to lie undiscovered for who knows how long. Would she be found some day, when she was nothing but a pile of yellowing bones, or would she be buried and forgotten, never to be found, when at some point in the future the structure above the basement collapsed into a pile of rubble, or was demolished and covered by some new construction. That thought bothered her.
\nI will not be forgotten. I will not die here.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chapter 2<\/p>\n

Buster and I were having a late lunch at Mom\u2019s, a Friday tradition we\u2019d recently established, but that we missed about every other week because one or the other of us was tied up with a case. I was having meat loaf with mashed potatoes and gravy, with four of Mom\u2019s famous buttermilk biscuits on a saucer at the side of my plate, while he was attacking a pile of golden fried chicken, sweet corn, baked beans, and corn muffins. We were both drinking iced tea, mine unsweetened, his with so much sugar in it I could see the prisms of light refracted in the amber color.
\nBuster is Buster Mayweather, a detective lieutenant with the District of Columbia Metro Police, and one of my oldest friends, and Mom\u2019s is . . . just Mom\u2019s; a soul food diner that has been a presence on Sixteenth Street near U Street, in the renovated U Street corridor of Northwest DC, since Buster and I were still messing our diapers.
\nAnd, I am Al Pennyback, Albert Einstein Pennyback on my birth certificate, thanks to a mother who had a thing for the German scientist, and a dream that one day I would follow in his footsteps\u2014I disappointed her by joining the army right after I graduated from high school\u2014but, people who know me know better than to use my full name. To them, I\u2019m just Al. To strangers, I\u2019m Mr. Pennyback. I\u2019m a private detective. I run a two-person shop on Fourth Street, just north of Fort Lesley J. McNair in the District\u2019s Southwest section, where my partner, Heather Bunche, and I provide investigative services to people who can\u2019t get help from the system, when we\u2019re not serving papers or tracking down deadbeat clients on behalf of Holcombe, Stein and Chang, the law firm that has us on a ten thousand dollar per month retainer, thanks to the efforts of my other best friend, Quincy Chang, a colleague from my army days at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where I served in a special unit attached to Delta Force, and he was a Judge Advocate General officer serving in the JAG office at post headquarters.
\nWhen you add Sandra Winter, my girlfriend of long-standing, and Carlton \u2018Blood\u2019 Raine, an octogenarian former CIA field agent, you have the only five people on my list of friends\u2014well, I guess you also have to add Buster\u2019s wife, Alma, and his twins, Albert and Sandra, for whom Sandra and I are godparents. Not, mind you, that I\u2019m an unfriendly person, but I have high standards, and they\u2019re the only people who make the cut.
\nI have a few people who aren\u2019t exactly friends, but are people I\u2019m willing to talk to, so you can see I\u2019m not a total recluse. In fact, I\u2019m actually a quite nice person when you get to know me.
\nI watched Buster demolish several drumsticks, including biting off the knobby ends of the bones, chewing, and swallowing\u2014to get at the marrow, he says. The amazing thing is, eating as much as fast as he does, he never seems to get indigestion. In fact, sometimes he seems like an alligator, swallowing his food whole rather than chewing it.
\n\u201cWhat\u2019s on your mind, bro?\u201d he asked, snapping me out of my reverie.
\nI hadn\u2019t realized that I was sitting there with my fork of meat loaf halfway to my mouth, looking through the plate glass window at the street beyond.
\n\u201cNothing,\u201d I said, which was mostly true. It was nothing that needed to be the topic of conversation. \u201cJust bored is all. Heather and I haven\u2019t had a decent case for months, and I\u2019m tired of sitting in my office looking at the cracks in the ceiling.\u201d
\nIt didn\u2019t help that it was a Friday near the middle of September, and the weather was perfect. There are two times in the DC area when the weather is actually livable, mid-April to mid-May, and mid-September to mid-October. Except for the pollen, the spring is almost perfect, with bright flowers, moderate temperatures, and the beginning of short dresses on the Mall, while fall also has nice temperatures and the riot of autumn colors. With the area\u2019s humidity, both summer and winter can be hell, with summer sweltering and winter biting cold. The good weather had apparently melted away the tendency to misbehave, because we\u2019d had no cases come in over the transom since mid-July, and even Quincy\u2019s law firm hadn\u2019t sent us a case to work. Not that I mind taking their money for doing nothing, it\u2019s just that I don\u2019t like sitting around doing nothing. That\u2019s the way my folks taught me, a day\u2019s work for a day\u2019s pay. The not liking being bored part is all mine.
\n\u201cSo, you\u2019re bored, are you? Well, next case I get, I\u2019ll let you tag along as an observer. Ain\u2019t quite the same as actively investigating, but at least you won\u2019t have to be sitting in your office staring at the walls.\u201d
\nI\u2019m not much of a passive bystander, but his offer was better than sitting in my office staring at the Potomac River and the Washington Ship Channel through the gaps in the trees surrounding the condos behind my office, or staring at my computer screen as the damn machine trounced me in yet another game of computer chess. Besides, Buster was working homicide now, so any case he got was likely to be interesting.
\n\u201cOkay, you got yourself a deal,\u201d I said.
\nJust at that very moment, his phone buzzed. He took it out.
\n\u201cMayweather,\u201d he said, and then listened, nodding frequently. Finally, he said, \u201cOkay, I\u2019m rolling now. Tell the officer on scene I\u2019ll be bringing a civilian observer with me.\u201d He swiped the screen of his phone to turn it off and stuffed it back into his pocket. \u201cHow\u2019s that for service, eh. You got something to do.\u201d
\n\u201cAn interesting case?\u201d I asked. It pretty much had to be, since he worked homicide. I just hoped it wasn\u2019t a gang shooting or something, because they often left collateral damage in the form of innocent bystanders. I\u2019ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my time, but kids still get to me.
\n\u201cJust might be. We\u2019ll know when we get there,\u201d he said. \u201cDrink your tea, and let\u2019s roll. I\u2019m parked around the corner, so follow me.\u201d
\nI\u2019d lucked out and found a spot almost directly in front of Mom\u2019s plate glass window to park my bright green classic VW, which I affectionately call \u2018The Bug,\u2019 and for a change had actually arrived ahead of Buster.
\n\u201cOkay, lunch is on me,\u201d I said, draining my tea in one long gulp and heading for the counter where Mom, in all her 300-pound glory, wrapped in a lime-green one-piece made of enough material to make a four-man tent, waited near the register.
\nShe smiled as I approached, holding out my credit card. Normally, she\u2019d make a fuss if you didn\u2019t eat all your food, and I\u2019d left nearly half of mine on the plate, but she obviously had seen Buster on the phone, and knew the drill, so she just smiled and took my card.
\n\u201cYou enjoy yo lunch, hon?\u201d she asked in that girlish voice of hers. I\u2019ve never been able to figure out how such a tiny, beautiful voice comes out of such a large person.
\n\u201cIt was great, as usual,\u201d I said. \u201cSorry we have to eat and run, though>\u201d
\n\u201cI know how it is,\u201d she said, as she rang up the charges and ran my card. \u201cThat\u2019s okay. Next time you two boys come in, I\u2019m gon\u2019 have somethin\u2019 special fo you, okay?\u201d
\n\u201cI can hardly wait.\u201d And, that was totally true. Mom\u2019s food, prepared lovingly by her husband of a whole bunch of years, is probably putting Buster and me on the road to clogged arteries, but it brings back memories of my childhood, sitting in my grandmother\u2019s kitchen while she fried chicken, vegetables, and bread\u2014people in the part of Texas where I grew up fry just about everything\u2014and, it tastes like what heaven must be like.
\nI grabbed the receipt from her, stuffed card and receipt in my pocket, and dashed out the door just as Buster came around the corner in his 2002 Electric Blue Buick Century. The engine growled, he\u2019d had the factory V-6 swapped out for a V-8, as he tapped the gas pedal, and the damn thing seemed like it wanted to pounce on something. Despite the tricked-out engine, it was the most conservative looking car Buster had driven in a long time. In addition, it came of a Canadian assembly line, breaking his tradition of driving only American-made cars. \u201cBesides,\u201d he\u2019d said, when I kidded him about it. \u201cCanada is almost like America.\u201d
\nI couldn\u2019t rag him too much. I mean, how many six-foot, two hundred-pound ex-Special Ops guys do you know who drive a VW Beetle, and a bright green one at that?
\nI was slipping behind the wheel when he drove past, and even at a crawling speed, the Century\u2019s power was apparent. It was a beast waiting to pounce.
\nAnd, I felt a bit the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For fans of Al Pennyback, the DC-based PI will be back on the shelves soon in\u00a0Bad Girls Don’t Die.\u00a0 Here’s a look at the planned cover, and a sneak peek at the first two chapters. Chapter 1 The first thing she noticed was the darkness. It wasn\u2019t the dark, just able to make out vague … <\/p>\n

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