Circling the Runway (Jake Diamond Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  CIRCLING THE RUNWAY

  A Jake Diamond Mystery

  J. L. ABRAMO

  Praise for Circling the Runway

  “Jake Diamond is back and it feels like the return of an old friend. One of my all-time favorite PI series—Circling the Runway is the best yet.”

  —Steve Hamilton, Edgar Award-winning

  author The Lock Artist

  “Think it is impossible to find a new take on the wise-cracking San Francisco PI? Meet Jake Diamond and think again. Jake and his crew—both the good guys and the bad guys—are sharp and smart, convincing and complex.”

  —SJ Rozan, Edgar Award-winning

  author (as Sam Cabot) of Skin of the Wolf

  “J.L. Abramo’s Circling the Runway offers the swagger and strut of Raymond Chandler, the skintight plotting of James M. Cain and smart-ass one-line humor smacking of Mickey Spillane. “

  —Jack Getze, author of Big Money

  and Big Mojo

  “In Circling the Runway, J.L. Abramo is shooting at us again—and he’s doing it from every shadow and hidden doorway, from every window and passing car. And damned if every bullet doesn’t hit its mark perfectly. “

  —Trey Barker, author of

  Death is Not Forever and Exit Blood

  “J.L. Abramo’s Circling the Runway takes up where Black Mask boys like Hammett, Gardner, and Carroll John Daly left off. It’s loaded with tough guys and hard-boiled action—emphasis on the hard.”

  —David Housewright, Edgar Award-winning

  author of Unidentified Woman #15

  “Jake Diamond returns after a ten-year hiatus, and his reappearance is well worth the wait. Abramo offers yet another smart, funny and action packed installment to his award-winning series with Circling the Runway.”

  —The Denver Review

  Copyright 2015 by J.L. Abramo

  First Edition: April 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Down & Out Books

  3959 Van Dyke Rd, Ste. 265

  Lutz, FL 33558

  http://downandoutbooks.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, events, or locales is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Circling the Runway

  Acknowledgments

  Bio

  Also by J.L. Abramo

  Other Titles from Down & Out Books

  Preview of Les Edgerton’s The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping

  Preview of JB Kohl and Eric Beetner’s Over Their Heads

  Preview of Jack Getze’s Big Mojo

  For everyone who ever told me

  I should do what I need to do.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  James Bingham—a dead doorman

  Ethan Lloyd—a dog walker

  Blake Sanchez—a kid with a bad idea

  Jake Diamond—a private investigator

  Benny Carlucci—a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time

  Darlene Roman—Jake’s associate

  Joe “Joey Clams” Vongoli—an Italian American businessman

  Tony Carlucci—trouble

  Kenny Gerard—another doorman

  Tug McGraw—a loyal companion

  Norman Hall—a stalker

  Sergeant Roxton “Rocky” Johnson—an SFPD police detective

  Amy Singleton Johnson—a Philadelphia Singleton

  Davey Cutler—a police officer

  Lieutenant Laura Lopez—a homicide detective

  Roberto Sandoval—a deceased Assistant District Attorney

  Manny Sandoval—a low-life, no relation

  Dr. Steven Altman—a medical examiner

  Angelo Verdi—a talkative specialty grocer

  Vinnie “Strings” Stradivarius—a friend who tries

  Sergeant Yardley—a surly desk sergeant

  Hank Strode—a back door man

  Lionel Katz—a mouthpiece

  Liam Duffey—a District Attorney

  Marco Weido—a man with no allegiances

  Megan Nicolace—a vice detective

  Nicolai Roman—Darlene’s father

  Don Folgueras—an Oakland police lieutenant

  Sal DiMarco—a double-crossed hit man

  Bruce Perry—an Oakland police officer

  Travis Duncan—a scary friend

  Ralph Morrison—a police wannabe

  Ray Boyle—a Los Angeles homicide detective

  Bobo Bigelow—a multi-talented felon

  Carmine Cicero—a thug

  Justin Walker—a person of interest

  Juliana Lani—a sharp cookie

  Daniel Gibson—an immigration man

  Derek London—a businessman

  PART ONE

  SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

  There are people who observe the rules of honor as we

  observe the stars—from a distance.

  —Victor Hugo

  ONE

  James Bingham stood at the curb in front of the high-rise residence, talking with the taxi driver who had dropped off the occupant of apartment 3501 a few minutes earlier. Bingham was inquiring into the availability of deeply discounted cartons of cigarettes. The cab driver assured Bingham he would hook him up that weekend.

  Bingham walked back into the lobby as the cab pulled away.

  As James Bingham approached the security desk he heard footsteps approaching from behind. Before Bingham could turn to the sound, his head was clamped between two large hands and with the twist of two powerful wrists Bingham was dead.

  The woman opened the door leading from the stairwell to the thirty-fifth floor apartments only wide enough to see the hallway in both directions. Finding the hallway deserted, she pushed the door open just enough to slip through. She moved down the hall to the right and stopped in front of the door marked 3501. She pulled a plain white letter-sized envelope from the pocket of her coat and slipped it under the door. She returned to the stairwell doorway, passed through it and started down the stairs. She looked at her wristwatch—it was twenty-six minutes after midnight. She walked down to the thirty-second floor and took the elevator to the lobby. She glanced out of the elevator door. The security guard station was still unoccupied. She quickly exited, nearly colliding with a man walking a dog in front of the building.

  The dog walker, Ethan Lloyd, would later say he saw a woman wearing a long blue coat at nearly half-past twelve, alone, sporting sunglasses. A blue scarf wrapped around her head. Ethan considered the coat unnecessarily heavy for such a mild evening, thought the dark glasses were oddly inappropriate for the time of night, and added that the scarf did a very good job of hiding her face and hair. He watched the woman as she moved away from the building along Third Street. Lloyd lost sight of her heading north toward Market Street.

  Ethan Lloyd entered the building wondering, as he had wondered going out less than twenty minutes earlier, why James Bingham, the lobby doorman, was not at his post.

  Bingham was actually there, but Ethan Lloyd could not see him. James was on the floor, hidden behind the large desk with a broken neck.

  The man who had unceremoniously snapped James Bingham’s neck moved to the door of apartment 3501 and he used a key to enter. Less than three minutes later he
was about to open the apartment door to leave when he saw a white envelope slide under the door. He stood perfectly still. He heard footsteps moving away from the door and he heard the stairwell door close. He waited a full fifteen minutes before leaving and, as instructed, used a shoe found in a hall closet to keep the door from shutting completely.

  The man left the building through the parking garage and he walked calmly down Third Street to Howard Street. Before reaching the intersection of Third and Hawthorne, just beyond the Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, the passenger door of a parked Cadillac opened to the sidewalk and he was invited by the driver to get in.

  “Well?” the driver asked.

  “Done deal,” Sal DiMarco answered.

  “Did you ditch the key?”

  “I did.”

  Fuck me, Sal thought—remembering he had forgotten to ditch the key.

  He carefully slipped the apartment key from his pocket and dropped it under the seat of the Cadillac while the driver was occupied watching for an opening in the busy street traffic.

  “Any problems?”

  “A bit of collateral damage, no worries.”

  “Tell me about it,” the driver said as he pulled away from the curb.

  The woman in blue continued walking up Third Street to Market Street, crossed Market to O’Farrell Street, went west to Powell Street and circled back down to Market.

  The woman disappeared down into the Powell Street BART Station.

  At half-past midnight the raucous crowd at Johnny Foley’s Irish Pub and Restaurant was so deafening that Tom Romano, Ira Fennessy and Jake Diamond had to escape. They clawed their way out onto O’Farrell Street heading for the Powell Street BART Station one block away to grab a taxi.

  “Did you see that woman?” asked Ira, as they crawled into a cab.

  “What woman?” Tom asked.

  “Going down into the station. Did you see her, Jake?”

  “I can’t see anything, Ira. What about her?”

  “She was all in blue.”

  “And...”

  “Should have been green, don’t you think.”

  “I can’t think,” Diamond said.

  “Where to?” asked the cabbie.

  “O’Reilly’s Bar, Green Street, North Beach,” Ira answered.

  “Jesus, Ira, have a heart,” Jake pleaded. “Let’s end this nightmare.”

  “Not until the fat lady sings Danny Boy.”

  “God forgive us,” said Diamond. “We should have played pinochle.”

  “Anyone in the market for cheap cigarettes?” the taxi driver asked as he pointed the cab toward Broadway.

  Benny Carlucci stumbled out of The Chieftain Irish Pub on Third and Howard Streets. Carlucci was asked to leave—not very politely. He found himself out on the street alone. He tried to remember if he had arrived with anyone, but soon gave up trying.

  He walked west on Howard Street toward Fourth, passing the Moscone Center on his left and the Metreon to his right. Benny walked down Fourth toward the train station at King Street. He spotted a black Cadillac parked halfway up on the sidewalk between Harrison and Bryant under the Highway 80 overpass.

  There was definitely something not right about that car in that place at that time.

  Benny was a curious kid. The vehicle stimulated his interest.

  Carlucci casually approached the Cadillac, looking up and down Fourth Street as he moved. Other than what appeared to be three teenage boys horsing around a few streets down toward the train station, the area was deserted.

  Benny expected to find another drunk, like so many others running and falling all over town—this one most likely passed out cold behind the wheel of the big car. Carlucci peered into the passenger door window. The vehicle was unoccupied and the keys dangled from the ignition. He quickly surveyed the street once again and tried the door. It was unlocked. Carlucci pulled it open and slipped into the driver’s seat. He was thinking a ride home in a Coupe de Ville would beat the hell out of a long drunken trip on the train and then a bus ride from the train station to his place on Cole Street off Fulton. The car started with the first turn of the key.

  Carlucci turned left onto Bryant Street, turned up Third one block to Harrison, then Harrison onto Ninth Street heading toward Market. Market onto Hayes onto Franklin to Fulton Street and Benny Carlucci was on his way home in style.

  The police cruiser, siren blaring, pulled Carlucci over at Masonic Avenue, across from the University of San Francisco, just three short blocks from Benny’s apartment.

  The attractive woman who came out of the Civic Center BART station had little resemblance to the woman who had walked down into the Powell Street station twenty minutes earlier. Gone were the dark glasses. Also gone were the heavy blue coat and the blue scarf, replaced by an emerald green two-piece jogging suit and a mane of strawberry blond hair tied back with a green elastic terrycloth band. The .38 caliber Smith and Wesson was now strapped around her ankle.

  Once above ground, on Hyde across from the plaza, she jogged in place for a minute before starting up McAllister to the Civic Center Parking Garage. She picked up her car and drove out Geary Boulevard to 25th and then up Lincoln Boulevard to Baker Beach for a solitary run in the sand.

  Just before one in the morning, Blake Sanchez stood at a dark street corner in Oakland and watched as one of his least favorite neighbors moved the doormat on his porch and lifted a loose board. Sanchez saw the man place something through the opening and under the porch and then replace the board and the mat before entering the house.

  Sanchez took another deep pull off his dope pipe and made a mental note.

  What I don’t know would fill a book. What I didn’t know about her could fill a library. It felt as if I was getting closer to her, but it was like looking into a fun-house mirror. She had constructed so many layers of self-deception, she could deflect a jackhammer. I had no idea what she wanted and I convinced myself I didn’t care. It was not an attraction based on the intellectual or the spiritual. It was nothing logical, just biological. The sex wasn’t all that great, come to think of it—and I was thinking about it too often. I thought I was in love with her long after I was sure I didn’t like her. If she had any idea about what she wanted, she kept it a deep dark secret from herself. At first I saw something in her, honesty, selflessness—something she couldn’t see, because it was never really there.

  “What do you think?”

  “About what?” asked Ira Fennessy.

  “I wrote that,” Tom Romano said, sitting between Jake and Ira in the back seat of the taxicab, holding a tattered sheet of paper in his hand.

  “Why would you write something like that?” Ira asked.

  Jake decided to stay out of it. His head felt the size of the Trans America Pyramid, point and all.

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “For fun I guess.”

  The taxi pulled up in front of O’Reilly’s to let them out. The insane crowd was spilling out onto Green Street.

  “You have no idea what fun is,” Ira said, “but you are about to find out.”

  Jake wanted to protest. He desperately wanted to say something, anything that might rescue them.

  But he couldn’t get his tongue to work.

  “I liked what you wrote,” said the cab driver as they piled out of the taxi to join the mob.

  It was well past midnight, a new day—but it was still St. Patrick’s Day in San Francisco.

  TWO

  Thursday, March 18, 2004.

  Trouble is like rain.

  It arrives when you least need it.

  And when you are least prepared for it.

  I opened my eyes and looked up.

  6:04 A.M.

  The time was projected on the ceiling in large bright green numbers and letters from the clock radio beside the bed—a birthday gift I thought was cute for about two days. It was like an advertisement for unfulfilled wishes. I had hoped it would be much later. I wanted to close my eyes again. Not move. But my bladder wa
s a merciless bully.

  I tossed off the bed covers and the cold hit me like an ice cream truck. I discovered I was dressed for going out, or at least dressed the way I had dressed to go out the night before.

  I felt infinitely worse than I had when I fell into the bed only three hours earlier, which seemed incredible though not surprising. I tried remembering how I had made it home, but gave up on it quickly. Not a clue.

  It had been nearly a year since I had moved back into the house near the Presidio, but I often woke up forgetting where I was. At that particular moment I was having a lot of trouble remembering who I was.

  I slipped on my baby blue Crocs and staggered to the bathroom to urinate, intending to be back in the sack in record time. Instead, I finished my business and stumbled down the stairs, found my jacket on the steps halfway down, tried keeping my balance as I put it on and made it out to the front porch for more self-abuse.

  I lit a Camel non-filtered cigarette.

  It was colder outside than in, but wouldn’t be for long. The porch faced east and once the morning haze burned off it would be drenched in sunlight. The house had been marketed as being cool in summer. The pitch neglected to publicize the frigid in all other seasons feature. On a balmy day in late winter, which this day promised to be, when you entered the house was when you battled the elements.

  Both cars were safe in the driveway, which led me to believe I had not driven either one the night before. If I had, one or both would have been twisted knots of tortured rubber, glass, vinyl and steel. Most of the automobiles in the neighborhood were less than two years old and had names that were German or Swedish. My vehicles were a brown 1978 Toyota Corona four-door sedan and a red 1963 Chevy Impala convertible. I loved them both for different reasons and used them accordingly. I was relieved to find them both intact after a stupidly excessive night of green beer and Jameson’s Irish whiskey. I am not a big drinker—but give me a good excuse like St. Patrick’s Day, a pal’s birthday, a Friday or Saturday night, or the joyful sounds of birds singing and I can usually keep up with the Jones’.