When I turned around the guy was less than six feet from me, pointing a twelve-gauge shotgun directly at my midsection. He was thirty-something, neatly barbered and well-dressed but a bit disheveled and a little unsteady on his feet. Probably needed a few drinks to screw up his courage. He didn't look particularly adept with the shotgun but from that range he wouldn't need to be. "Did you enjoy it?" he asked with a twisted smile.

"Enjoy what?" I answered, playing for time. He had me trapped in the middle of the street; I had just locked my car behind me so I couldn't back away. If I rushed him he'd cut me in half and if I ran in either direction I wouldn't make it two steps.

"Fucking my wife."

I'm a big, good-looking guy with a nice smile and a healthy libido who has had more than his share of one night stands and afternoon romps with women whose marital status was tactfully not discussed, so the irony of getting my ticket punched over a piece of ass I never got was not lost on me. "You got the wrong guy, pal," I said, holding my hands out in a gesture of surrender. "I've been working all night."

"Bullshit," he said. "I just followed you here from the Goode Tyme motel."

Great, I had not only let an inebriated amateur get the drop on me I had let him follow me for ten blocks without picking up the tail. If I had a shred of self-respect I'd resign as a private investigator and drive a cab. "Look," I told him, "my name is Trent Turley and I'm a private cop. I was at the motel doing undercover surveillance. If you'll let me I can show you my license."

With two fingers I slowly pulled open my jacket and reached into the inside pocket. What I really had in there was last season's fishing license, complete with a king salmon stamp I never got to use, encased in plastic in case I got drunk and fell off the boat again. I was hoping it would look official enough to a drunk standing six feet away. "Here," I pitched it toward him, purposely a little high and to the left.

When he took one hand off the weapon to reach for it the shotgun sagged and I lunged forward, fitting my lead hand over the barrel and the fore-end and managing to push the gun down and away just as it discharged with a deafening roar. Pellets ricocheted off the pavement and pinged against nearby cars. I jerked the gun out of the guy's hand and jammed the butt into his stomach just hard enough to put him flat on his ass. He twisted to one side and vomited then started crying. Christ. I pulled him up by his shirtfront. "C'mon," I said. "Let's get out of the middle of the street before the cops get here."

Up in my condo he sprawled on the sofa, still sniffling, while I made a pot of coffee. I know what they say, if you give a drunk coffee you'll just have a wide awake drunk but it was better than having a passed out drunk. I set the coffee near him on an end table and sat across from him."You gonna tell me why you tried to kill me?" I asked.

"You know why," he mumbled miserably. "You've been having an affair with my wife. You just spent the last three hours with her at the motel."

I shook my head. "Nope, I was telling the truth when I said I was an investigator on a case. Give me your wallet."

"I don't understand..." he began.

"Just do it," I said, putting a little bass in my voice.

He handed over the wallet. It was a nice leather job with lots of compartments for lots of credit cards, most of them of the gold or platinum variety. I found his driver's license. Jeffrey Carver, it read, with an address up in the tony part of the hillside. Coincidently, the woman I had been tailing had the same last name and the same address.

"I was hired to follow your wife and get pictures of her in compromising positions," I explained as I handed back the wallet. He sat up on the couch with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

"By who?" he asked with a bewildered expression.

"Her husband."

The next morning I met my client downtown near an alley that ran behind the Egan Convention Center. He was dapper in a dark suit with faint blue pinstripes and a beautiful silk tie perfectly knotted at his throat.

"Is that them?" he asked, pointing at the empty manila envelope I was carrying.

"Yeah," I replied. "Let's step into the alley where there aren't so many prying eyes."

We did. When he reached for the envelope I grabbed a handful of that beautiful blue tie just below the perfect knot and slammed him into a dumpster hard enough to rattle his fillings. His eyes and mouth both flew open in shock. "You can't do that!" he howled.

"I just did. Now who the hell are you?"

"I...I told you." He stammered

"I know what you told me," I said as I pulled him forward half a foot and slammed him against the dumpster again. "Now I want the truth."

He dredged up all the dignity a man in his position could muster and warned me, "I work out, you know."

"I'm sure you do," I nodded. "But forty minutes on the elliptical four mornings a week isn't going to help you much in an alley fight with me. Give me your wallet."

"I will not," he answered indignantly.

"You will too," I leaned into his face, "or I will kick your ass and take it."

He handed over the wallet. It was another nice one. Dapper Dan's real name was David Griffin and he lived in Turnagain by the Sea, another posh neighborhood. Opposite his license was a picture of him and a mousey brunette woman and two little girls taken on a sunny beach somewhere other than Alaska. I released him and handed back the wallet.

"What is this all about?" he demanded as he straightened his tie and his overcoat.

"You're not Jeffrey Carver."

"So?" he asked. "What do you care as long as you get paid?"

"I care," I answered, backing him into the dumpster again, "because someone tried to ventilate my best leather jacket last night, while I was wearing it. Why do you have me following another man's wife?"

He buried his hands deep in his pockets and looked off down the alley. "Janelle and I have been involved for about a year." Goddamn rich people, they don't screw around they get involved. "But now I think she may be seeing someone else and I don't...I don't want to lose her." When he looked back at me there were tears in his eyes. I don't give a shit what Oprah says, I think that grown men who cry are pussies.

I had been following Janelle Carver for nearly two weeks and I had news for Griffin, she was seeing several someone else's. Janelle Carver was, in the parlance of the meat business, a prime cut. Look around the grocery store sometime; you'll see plenty of choice cut but damn little prime. She had a face that would inspire da Vinci and a body that could tempt a saint, and if the short time I'd been shadowing her were any indication, she didn't mind sharing the wealth. I'm not a psychiatrist so I couldn't say why a drop-dead gorgeous woman with a rich husband and a beautiful home would hop into the sack with every third or fourth man she met, but I'd bet it had to do with something besides a need for sex. Maybe she did it for the same reason a dog licks his own balls; because he can.

"That your wife in your wallet?" I asked Griffin. "The brunette?"

He nodded.

"You're not paying me for advice," I said, "but if I were you I'd go home to her and those two little girls and forget about Janelle Carver."

David Griffin looked off down the grimy alley again. "I wish I could," he said.

When I got back to my condo my first impulse was to kick the whole can of worms to the curb and forget about it. But technically I was still on the clock to Griffin, and I had no guarantee Carver wouldn't decide he'd been duped and take another crack at me. I called an acquaintance that worked for a weekly business magazine and ran the names Jeffrey Carver and David Griffin past him.

"Crossroads Air Resupply," he answered without hesitation.

"Which one?" I asked.

"Both," he replied. "They're partners."

Things were getting uglier by the minute. "What does the company do?" I asked.

"Refuels and re-provisions private jets that pass through Anchorage," he said. "We're the air crossroads of the world you know."

"Yeah, yeah, I read the sign out at the airport too. The company profitable?"

"Very," he said.

"The two of them the only partners?"

"Actually," I could hear him clicking on a keyboard, "the company is owned by four equal partners, Jeffrey and Janelle Carver and David and Rochelle Griffin."

How cozy. I thanked my friend for the info. As I sat pondering the possibilities something occurred to me. I got out the phone book and called Crossroads Air Resupply but after I gave Jeffrey Carver's secretary my name she came back and informed me Mr. Carver was not accepting calls today. Bullshit. I grabbed my jacket and keys, if he thought he wouldn't be happy talking to me on the phone he sure as hell wasn't going to be happy seeing me face to face.

Carver's secretary figured out who I was almost the instant I walked into the reception area and she made a valiant effort to get between me and his office but I brushed her aside and put a shoulder to the door. Jeffrey Carver was seated at a large desk doing whatever it is business people do all day and he jumped like he'd been shot when the door banged open.

"What's the matter Jeffy?" I taunted him from the doorway, "Not feeling quite so talkative today?"

He was a sorry sight, eyes bloodshot and bleary, complexion ashen and unshaven, hands shaking slightly on the keyboard of the computer in front of him. He was miserably hung-over and deathly embarrassed. I had been in his shoes and I knew how he felt but that didn't mean I was going to cut him any slack. His secretary was flapping around behind me like a wet hen. "Would you like me to call the police, Mr. Carver?" she huffed.

"Yeah, Jeffy," I chimed in, "why don't we get the police out here and try to explain to them what's going on?"

Carver cleared his throat. "That won't be necessary, Marie," he said finally. He motioned me to a chair after she left and closed the door. "What do you want?" he asked bleakly after I was seated. He had trouble holding my stare and looked like he might vomit again.

"How'd you know your wife was screwing around?" I asked bluntly.

He went into his head-in-hands misery routine. "She's been doing it for years," he whined, "everybody knows..."

"No," I interrupted. "I mean how did you know about last night specifically? You didn't follow her to the motel or you would have known she wasn't with me. How did you know she'd be at the motel with another man?"

He wiped at his reddened eyes with the back of his hand. "I got a letter in the mail telling me where she'd be and when."

"From who?" I asked.

"It was anonymous," he hesitated for an instant. "That means..."

I cut him a look. "I know what anonymous means; I made it all the way to the fifth grade in school. Where is it?"

Carver reached into the left hand drawer of his desk and handed me the letter. It was computer typed on a piece of plain white paper and read;

I turned the sheet over in my hands; there was nothing distinctive about it. "Do you still have the envelope it came in?" I inquired.

He pulled the envelope out of the same drawer. His name and the address of the company were computer typed as well and there was, of course, no return address. The envelope had not been stamped but rather run through a postage meter.

"Mind if I take this with me?" I waved the envelope at Carver.

He shook his head. "I don't care," he mumbled. I got the feeling he would have given me his left nut if he thought it would get rid of me.

In the outer office Marie was eyeing me like I was an axe murderer. Across the reception area David Griffin's secretary, a young woman with a severe haircut and mannishly dressed, bobbed her head obliviously to iPod music. I noticed a postage meter on the credenza behind Marie's desk. I stopped in front of her and jerked a thumb back toward Carver's office, "I think your boss is having a heart attack," I said in a conversational tone.

Her eyes widened and her face filled with alarm. She pushed her chair back from her desk so abruptly they both nearly went ass-over-tea kettle onto the floor but she caught her balance and headed for Carver's office like an Olympian sprinter. I took the opportunity of her absence to filch a letter from her outgoing mail basket but just as I folded it and slipped it into my pocket I looked up and saw I was being watched. Rochelle Griffin, the mousey brunette from the picture in David Griffin's wallet, was in a doorway across the reception area. I was sure she had looked right at me as I stole the letter but instead of saying anything she slunk back into her office and disappeared.

Back at my place I had a drink and compared the envelope Carver had given me with the one I had stolen and found they had been metered on the same machine. Now that I knew where the heads-up had come from I just had to figure out why. All four of the company principals had offices in the building and Jeffrey Carver and David Griffin each had a secretary; that gave six people access to the postage meter. Like I said, I'm no psychiatrist but for now I discounted Carver sending the letter to himself, and I couldn't see an upside to David Griffin being the mailer.

If Carver hadn't been totally shit-faced Griffin very well may have been splattered across the motel parking lot. That left the two wives and the two secretaries. Janelle Carver seemed unlikely but not impossible, maybe she wanted her husband to catch her screwing around and force her to stop or maybe she was one of those women who got a rush out of two men fighting over her. Marie seemed very protective of Jeffrey Carver but that could be professional and not necessarily personal. David Griffin's secretary looked like she'd be more interested in Janelle Carver than her husband and Rochelle Griffin seemed to be afraid of her own shadow.

I was lining this all out on a tablet when the doorbell chimed. When I opened the door Janelle Carver was standing in the hallway waving one of my business cards under my nose. "A little birdie told me you're the professional snoop that's been following me around," she said as she breezed past me into my condo. She was stunning in a low-cut white silk blouse and a white skirt slit almost all the way up to her ass and a pair of four-inch "come-fuck-me" pumps on her feet. Her honey blond hair danced playfully on her bare shoulders and her sapphire blue eyes were full of invitation.

"If you're here to screw me into keeping silent," I said when I caught my breath, "let's get to it."

She tilted her head and smiled slightly. "Really?" she asked.

"Nah," I shrugged. "Professional ethics and all that bullshit, you know."

She nodded and looked me up and down with a frank eye. "Although, God knows, I've done worse. So little Jeffy has you following me to see who's getting what he isn't."

"Can't say," I said.

She seemed not to hear me. "You might ask that sanctimonious little asshole where he's been dipping his wick lately. I can guarantee it's not where you'd think. Or," she went on, talking as much to herself as me, "maybe it's not Jeffrey at all. Maybe it's David."

"Can't say," I repeated.

Janelle Carver nodded to herself. "Yeah, it's probably David. He's been clinging to me like a goddamn vine lately. If it's David I'm afraid you're going to be out of business in pretty short order, I e-mailed him twenty minutes ago and asked him to meet me for a drink tonight. I'm going to break it off with him. I hope he can take it."

"I'm sure he'll survive," I answered. "He's got a loving wife and a family to fall back on."

"Men," she smiled ruefully, "you're so easily led...and misled. Oh well, nothing new, I'm the Whore of Babylon and ice wouldn't melt in Miss Priss's mouth."

"Who's Miss Priss?" I asked.

"Can't say," she mocked me. Then she tucked my business card into her exquisitely filled bra and I watched the nicest ass that had ever come through my doorway go back out. I went to the window and watched her strut to her powder blue Lexus, thinking that professional ethics suck.

Then I put my own libidinous frustrations on hold and tried to get my mind back on the case. Janelle Carver had made two cryptic allusions that seemed to intimate her husband was getting his ashes hauled at the office, by someone I wouldn't suspect. As far as I was concerned that could be any one of the other three women so I decided to set up surveillance at the far end of the Crossroads Air Resupply building parking lot and see what I could learn. It was four-thirty when I got there and I figured everyone would knock off around five but I was wrong. David Griffin hopped into his car about six and his secretary was picked up ten minutes later by another woman who gave her a peck on the cheek when she got in the car. Marie headed out at six-thirty and Jeffrey Carver left the building just before seven like a man on a mission. Rochelle Griffin was still inside when I packed it in ten minutes later. I had deduced if Jeffrey Carver was nailing one of the three women he wasn't doing it in the parking lot.

Thirty minutes later I was home coddling an egg for the Van Hale's Famous Caesar Salad I was preparing when my cell rang. It was Detective Rolly Harris of the Anchorage Police Department. I wouldn't say Harris and I were friends but he treated me a little less like stuff you scrape off the bottom of your shoe than most cops.

"I got a double homicide under the overpass down by the railroad yard," he said without fanfare.

"Okay," I said kicking off the heat under my egg.

"Two of our good citizens were shot-gunned to death while they sat in their car," he went on. "Your business card was on the console between the two vics, know anything about it?"

"I'll be right there."

Ten minutes later Harris was waving me through the police line under the downtown overpass. The scene was taped off and there were evidence markers surrounding Janelle Carver's Lexus. The inside of the car looked like a slaughterhouse. What was left of Janelle Carver was slumped in the driver's seat and David Griffin was splayed against the far door, arms thrown impotently up in front of his shattered face.

"Holy Christ," I whispered at the carnage.

"'Bout as bad as it gets," Harris agreed. "Looks like the shooter stood about here," he positioned himself two feet from the driver's door, amid a ring of ejected shotgun shells, "and just opened up on them. From this range one round each would have been more than enough but the perp dumped the whole magazine into them. Friends of yours?"

Before I could answer one of the other plainclothes called out to Harris. "We got a call-in Rolly. Says the guy's name is Jeffrey Carver, got an address up on the hillside."

"All units roll," snapped Harris as he jumped into his cruiser and sped off up the hill, lights flashing and siren blaring.

Back in my own car I played a hunch. Janelle Carver had told me she e-mailed Griffin to meet her this evening, I was guessing someone at Crossroads had seen the message and alerted Jeffrey Carver to the rendezvous, then, knowing what would happen, called the police. Maybe whoever it was hung around to see how it all came out. I pulled into the parking lot just as Carver was entering the building, the twelve-gauge pump dangling loosely from one hand.

I dug my little Charter Arms Bulldog out of the glove box and followed Carver cautiously into the building. The door to Rochelle Griffin's office was slightly ajar and I could hear voices inside. I sidled up and peeked in.

Rochelle Griffin was standing behind her desk and Jeffrey Carver was leaning against the far wall, the gun hanging limply at his side. "I told you to go home when it was over," she was admonishing him.

"I started to," he explained, "but I needed to see you."

She chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip for a second before asking, "Did you do it?"

Carver nodded numbly.

"Did you get them both?" she persisted; there was a strange brightness in her eyes and her tone as she spoke.

I pushed the door open with the toe of my shoe. "Yeah," I said. "He got them both. He got them both good."

Rochelle Griffin's head snapped toward me, Carver's movement was more laconic, like he was in a trance.

"You have to kill him, Jeffrey," she hissed. "He knows everything, he knows what you did, and he'll ruin all of our plans."

I pointed the Bulldog at Carver. "You'll never even get it cocked, Jeffy. It wouldn't matter if you did kill me, the police know who you are and they're looking for you right now." I looked at Rochelle Griffin. "And, unless I miss my guess, he doesn't really fit into your plans, does he?"

Carver blinked slowly, like a man in a fog. "You called the police?" he asked me.

I nodded toward Rochelle Griffin. "Not me. Lady Macbeth here is my bet."

He looked at her without comprehension. "Why?" he asked. "I would have done anything for you."

She looked at him and smiled. The façade began to crack and like most sociopaths she couldn't pass up an opportunity to tell everyone how smart she was. "Oh, sweet, sweet Jeffy, you did everything I needed done. Your slut wife and my whore-chasing husband are dead, and you're going to prison for the rest of your life."

"I don't understand..." he started to say.

"Use the head on your shoulders for a change, Jeffrey." She turned a pitying look on him. "They're dead and you're gone, who does that leave the company to?" She smiled brightly. "Oh, that would be me, poor little Rochelle, the one everyone talked over instead of to, the afterthought, the one everybody treated like a potted plant in the corner." Her expression turned grim. "Well, no more. I played you all like a bunch of pawns and now I'm going to get some respect, some deference. I own Crossroads Air now, it's all mine."

She turned back to me. "You can arrest him now," she said dismissively.

I shook my head. "I'm not a cop." I lowered my gun and began to back out of the room.

Her face clouded with fear when she realized what I was doing. "You...you can't leave me here with him!" she shrieked. "You can't!"

I stopped at the door. "Yes," I said. "Yes I can." I closed the door behind me.

Halfway across the reception area I heard a woman's scream cut short by a shotgun blast and when I got to the exit there was another muted blast. Outside I called Rolly Harris then leaned on my car and waited for him to arrive.

-END-

Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Faughnan