Red Rum: A Rosie Casket Mystery R.M. Wild (inspirational books .txt) 📖

him a few months ago. Yeah, that guy. Wanted to be a minister. I know. There’s only so much beer in the world, it gets old, you know? Skunks out. Definitely. Okay. No problem.”

Mettle tapped his fingers on the steering wheel while we waited for Billygoat to return with the requested information.

“Yup, I got a pen,” Mettle said. He motioned for me to get one from the glove compartment. “452 Rufous Street. Thank you. Absolutely. Maybe Friday. Alright, man. Sounds good,” Mettle said and hung up. “Great, I’ve committed myself to high-carb beer.” He turned to me. “Rats. I’ve forgotten it already. Why didn’t you write it down?”

“No need,” I said and tapped my forehead. “I know exactly where that is.”

We followed the crescent edge of the harbor around its sickle-like bend, departed old town, and passed some of the newer suburban developments that had sprung up in the 1980s when one of the old timers in Dark Haven had croaked and given his wife permission in his will to sell off a few hundred acres of harbor-gazing meadow.

Well past the old Stony Point Grocery, we made a left onto Rufous Street and then pulled into a trailer park of tiny houses, many of them still sitting on the flatbed trailer that had been used to deliver them. The last time I had been here, I had come to look for Mark Halbert, one of the lawyers at my foster-father’s firm who had been kidnapped by Phyllis Martin.

We passed about a dozen of the tiny houses, each as cute as a dollhouse left outside in the rain, and then we came to an empty plot.

Mettle parked and leaned forward to see out the windshield. “There’s no house here.”

Indeed, sitting in the middle of the wet grass was a large tent.

“The plot to the right is 450 and the plot to the left is 454. This has to be the spot. Maybe Caesar can’t afford a house.”

“Why not? He’s got a government job,” Mettle said.

“I stand corrected. He must be rich.”

We got out of the cruiser. Caesar’s tent—if it was indeed Caesar’s—was sitting on a square patch of yellow grass, all of it dead.

“Looks like his trailer might have been towed away recently,” I said as we went up to the front flap. “What do you do if there’s no door to knock on?”

“We shout,” Mettle said. He cupped his mouth. “Caesar? You in there?”

The vinyl tent answered by whipping as loudly as a flag in the cross wind.

“What are the rules for entering someone’s tent without a warrant?”

“I don’t know,” Mettle said. “It never came up at academy. Everything here is observable, though. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to unzip the flap a little. We could say we found it that way.”

The tent poles wobbled in the wind. I unzipped the vinyl flap and crouched for a look inside. The tent was stuffed with junk: a sleeping bag, pots and pans, even an old cast iron stove.

“This guy’s a total weirdo,” Mettle said. “He probably uses that stove to keep warm, but look how smooth the vinyl is on the back of the tent. He’s already melted half his kitchen.”

Next to the stove, was something that looked like it had fallen from the sky and landed on Wile E. Coyote’s head.

“Is that an anvil?”

“Looks like it,” Mettle said. “He probably uses it to keep the tent from flying away.”

“With that awful haircut, what would Caesar need that giant bottle of hairspray for?”

“Probably setting things on fire,” Mettle said.

A few books were stuffed into a plastic bin, two of which were copies of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Next to the bin was a half-empty case of beer cans. There were even a few twisted metal ornaments, tiny horseshoes, and a hammer.

“Looks like our little ugly-haired friend had a cute little hobby,” Mettle said. “I bet he comes out here at night and bangs away on the glowing metal. The neighbors probably love it.”

I pointed to a bunch of metal rods sitting on top of the anvil. “What are those things?”

“My guess is ferro rods,” Mettle said. “I learned how to use them in the Cub Scouts. You scrape the sticks together and they spark.”

“I wouldn’t mind one of them for my fireplace. That would be way easier than using matches and burning my fingertips,” I said and dropped the flap. “So now what?”

“Given the time stamp on those videos, I’m guessing Caesar’s still at work. What do you think? Are you up for a little stakeout?”

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“I said stakeout. Not take out. But now that you mentioned it, let’s go grab a bite to eat and come back. We’ll make a picnic out of it.”

27

If this was Matt Mettle’s idea of showing a lady a good time, he had better re-examine his game. He drove us to the Walmart, bought a few cans of tuna, a jar of dill pickle slices, a box of plastic forks, and a case of bottled water.

“What is all that junk?”

“Stake-out food,” he said as he put the grocery bags on the back seat.

I pinched my nose. “If your plan was to make me want to go on a diet, you have succeeded mightily. Couldn’t you have gotten Peanut Chews or something?”

“Nope,” he said. He popped the lid off the pickle jar, fished his fingers in the green juice, and then placed a pickle slice on his tongue as if it were a sacramental wafer. He retracted his tongue, smiled, and swallowed it whole.

“You forgot to chew.”

“You don’t want to do all the work for your stomach. It needs a workout too,” he said. He fished out another pickle and offered it to me. “You want one?”

“No thanks.”

He popped it on his tongue and the pickle juice ran down his chin. “Suit yourself. More for me.”

When we got back to Rufous Street, a gray mist had rolled off the harbor and worked its way between the tiny houses.