Shay O'Hanlon Caper 03 - Pickle in the Middle Murder Read online

  Midnight Ink

  Woodbury, Minnesota

  Copyright Information

  Pickle in the Middle Murder: A Shay O’Hanlon Caper © 2013 by Jessie Chandler.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2013

  E-book ISBN: 9780738732350

  Book format by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Lisa Novak

  Cover illustration © Gary Hanna

  Editing by Nicole Nugent

  Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  To the staff of Borders 531. We came, we saw,

  we conquered, and we cried. Never fear,

  Barney’s Brain Train lives on,

  for you are within the pages of this book.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost I’d like to thank the staff of Midnight Ink and Llewellyn Worldwide. Terri Bischoff, Nicole Nugent, Courtney Colton, and the rest of the hardworking staff who make books happen—thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  My apologies to the MPD and Scott County, for taking creative liberties with the titles and duties of their ranks.

  Acknowledgements are hard. I know I’m going to leave out someone, or in this case, a number of someones, purely because my memory sucks. Please know how appreciated you are. Really.

  Alyssa, thank you for telling me you wanted to see a dead body in an outhouse in my next book.

  Huzzah, the Minnesota Renaissance Festival! Without the Fest, I wouldn’t have found the privy, and without the privy, we’d be back to a boring old outhouse. Rose the Candlemaker, thank you for making beautiful wax roses and Smelly Bears, and for allowing me to drop you into my story.

  Jill Glover, thanks for the rooster-in-the-city idea. I took it and ran!

  DJ, it was an excellent roller coaster NaNoWriMoing with you at the Andover Caribou. Get that kick a** manuscript out there! And to the ’Bou Crew, thank you for keeping the Cinnamon Spice tea, turkey sandwiches, and dark chocolate hot chocolate with extra whipped cream flowing. You all do a darn good job, as do all of the Twin Cities Caribou and Starbucks in which I hunker down to write. Thank you for letting me take up space and bandwidth.

  Pat and Gary of Once Upon a Crime Mystery Bookstore in Minneapolis, thank you so much for having such a great venue for mysteries and crime fiction, for sharing new favorites, and for anticipating the next release of our favorite authors. Remember, one more book won’t hurt!

  To my great team of readers and revisionists, including but not limited to Judy Kerr, Mary Beth Panichi, Patricia Lopez, Lori L. Lake, Sharon Carlson, Pat Cronin, Angel Hight, DJ Schuette, Liz Gibson, Brian Landon, my writing group (the Hartless Murderers), the BABAs, and many others who I know I am forgetting—thanks from the bottom of my heart.

  Betty Ann, thank you for your continuing support, in so very many ways. I absolutely could not do this without you. And I forgive you for the dogs.

  To all the booksellers out there who sell books because they love books: you are the ones who make things happen.

  Last, but never, ever least, I send out a heartfelt thanks to my readers. If there were no readers, there would be no books, and that would be very depressing. Please keep reading, and don’t forget to support your local, independent bookstores.

  ONE

  Nobody ever told me that a Renaissance faire would be a strange and surprisingly bawdy event. My girlfriend, JT, finally decided it was high time to introduce me to Elizabethan culture, twenty-first-century style. So on a glorious day in early October, she dragged me through a portal consisting of weathered, arched entry doors situated beneath a replica medieval castle gatehouse and keep.

  It looked good from the outside, but inside, unfamiliar sights and sounds pummeled my senses. I heard Old English accents, smelled wood smoke, and saw that more than half the people in the courtyard were dressed like they’d just time-traveled from King Arthur’s court. With roasted turkey legs.

  But the strangest sight was a man squirming around on his back on the hard-packed dirt next to a giant pickle barrel. A ragged vest barely covered his naked chest, and dusty brown pants were tucked into knee-high leather boots.

  He raised an enormous pickle in the air, looked me right in the eye, and shouted, “Come over here, miladies, and check out me huge, tasty tonsil tickler! It’ll fill you right up!”

  He waggled his brows and eyed me as through I were the last woman on earth. With a leer, he thrust his pelvis into the air.

  I backed away in a hurry and turned to JT. “Tonsil tickler? I hope he’s kidding. I had absolutely no idea the Renaissance Festival was so, so … ” I frowned as I searched for the right word.

  “Risqué?” JT cocked an eyebrow at me in amusement.

  A man on stilts and dressed like a king’s jester nearly knocked me down as he hurried toward the entrance.

  “Not just risqué. I mean, it’s strangely charming in its own sort of cheesy way.”

  As we listened to the pickle man’s lewd patter, I wondered how long he planned to writhe around on the ground bragging about his huge pickle. Considering the number of briny cukes floating in the gigantic metal-banded wooden barrel, he was going to be in the dirt for a while.

  Yet delighted fest-goers figuratively and literally ate up the pickle dude’s antics, and I decided it was a good thing he had a helper taking dollars and doling out the cukes.

  In all my thirty-two years, I had never had the time or inclination to attend the annual Renaissance Festival held in Shakopee, Minnesota. I was too busy with life in general and with the Rabbit Hole in particular—the coffee café I co-owned with my good friend Kate McKenzie—to take time out for Ren Fest, as the devotees call it. I thought it would be a goofy feudal fantasy world, perfect for Dungeons & Dragons types, but not for me.

  JT gave me a nudge, affection radiating from her warm brown eyes. “Does this shock your proper Midwestern sensibilities?”

  “Nope.
But I swear I learn something new about my straight-laced, gun-toting cop girlfriend every day.” My tone was teasing, but it was essentially the truth. Most of the time JT carefully toed the line. I truly had no idea she would be entertained by raunchy pickle peddlers, half-dressed wenches, jousting knights, and honeywine mead. Her enthusiasm was completely out of character, and although it surprised me, I loved it.

  The sight of her happy, relaxed smile warmed my heart. She needed this. As a homicide detective with the Minneapolis Police Department, JT worked far too many hours, stressed too much, and didn’t chill out enough. It was really hard for her to cut loose.

  The sun glinted off JT’s shoulder-length chestnut locks, which she’d worn loose instead of in her business-as-usual ponytail. She was easy on the eyes, but with her hair framing her high cheekbones and square, determined chin, she was breathtaking. She wore faded blue jeans and a soft, blue-and-black checked flannel shirt with rolled sleeves over a black T-shirt. Yup, definitely sizzling with a capital S. Sometimes I looked at her and couldn’t believe someone like her would still be with someone like me after nearly a year. The length of our relationship was a record on my end. My MO was usually love ’em well and leave ’em fast, but there was something about JT that turned me upside down and inside out. I thanked my lucky stars for that every day.

  At our feet, Dawg, my tank-sized boxer, leaned against my leg. His upper lip, as usual, was hung up on a lower tooth. He sat with his head cocked in curiosity as he watched the pickle man’s shenanigans.

  JT’s recent canine addition, Bogey the bloodhound, energetically snuffled the ground nearby. He was a reddish-black police school dropout, a sweet dog with a nose addiction. After Bogey’s previous owner, a rookie Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, had been murdered last spring, JT’d volunteered to take him in. We hadn’t realized the mutt’s sniffing problems went beyond simple doggy ADD.

  Bogey’s nasal drug of choice wasn’t cadavers, drugs, or criminals in hiding; it wasn’t missing children or hikers lost in the woods; it wasn’t cheeseburgers or even bacon. What made Bogey happier than anything else were crotches. Anyone’s. Criminal or non-criminal. Man or woman. Child or baby. His only requirement was the more aromatic, the better. The hound was a work in progress, but he was learning to control himself.

  The deep voice of the well-muscled pickle-hawker brought me back. “Come now, travelers. Eat me pickle. You know you want me pickle. It’s juicy and very firm and only costs a dollar.” The man tilted his head back and looked upside down at JT and me. “You know your mouth is watering to taste me big, hard, salty specimen.”

  “You want to taste his ‘big, hard, salty specimen’?” JT asked me.

  “No thanks. Maybe later. Why don’t you go ahead and enjoy all that goodness?” I cut her a smirking, sideways glance as I shifted my backpack into a more comfortable position. After living with JT for the better part of four months, I knew she was not in the least tempted by anything soaked in vinegar.

  “Ignore that rascal wallowing in the dirt like a beast! Come peruse the King’s Nuts!” I turned to see a nearby woman bellowing under the shade of a large tattered umbrella that sported uneven yellow stitching reading King’s Nuts. “They are shapely and crunchy. Much tastier than yon smelly gherkin.” The umbrella was attached to a faded-to-gray wooden cart loaded with nut rolls of various kinds.

  More bystanders stopped their window-shopping and gathered around to observe the slinging of food- and genitalia-inspired insults.

  The purveyor of the King’s Nuts wore layered skirts and a teal bodice that barely covered her chest. The constricting corset shoved her goods up so far she was close to having a wardrobe malfunction. I was afraid her boobs would explode out right into some potentially delighted but unsuspecting patron’s face.

  I tugged JT from the fray and we continued our ambling stroll through the sixteenth century. The sights and sounds were overwhelming already, and we’d hardly gotten past the front gate. It was odd seeing men and women playing dress-up and talking in the Shakespearean English. I wanted to find it juvenile, but deep down, I had to admit this whole medieval thing had an addictively ludicrous, over-the-top appeal.

  Even the shop buildings that lined the rolling edges of the tree-filled grounds appeared authentic to the period. Huts with tall, gabled roofs stood proudly beside stumpy thatch cottages. The cement-like dirt ended where stones and rough wood planks had been laid as flooring within the shops. The sheer number of merchants and their varied goods sent my brain reeling. Even the store names were suggestive, like Cock ’n Dragon, which sold totally awesome rooster and fire-breathing reptilian artwork.

  JT elbowed me as we wandered slowly along. “Come here,” she said. She dragged me and the dogs up to a shop called Wax Werks by Rose the Candlemaker.

  A crowd was gathered by the front entrance.

  “Check it out, Shay,” JT said.

  I pulled my eyes from the doodads for purchase and moved over to where JT had entrenched herself in the throng. I craned my head to catch a peep of what everyone was looking at.

  The shopkeeper, dressed in appropriate period regalia, slowly and methodically dipped a rose in wax, in water, and then in more wax of various colors. All the while, she chatted with her audience, answering questions and explaining how the whole process worked.

  “Want one?” JT asked.

  Before I could answer, the rose dipper glanced at us with a friendly smile. She looked from JT to me. “Oh, I think that is a grand idea, me dears. What is milady’s favorite color?” She looked at JT, waiting for an answer.

  It appeared as if I was about to have a hand-dipped rose whether I wanted one or not. “Purple,” I answered before JT had a chance to run my colorful likes and dislikes through her brain.

  The woman gave us a satisfied grin and went to town.

  As was JT’s style—and as was reinforced by her profession—she tossed casual questions at our flower creator as she worked. Before I knew it, JT had coughed up either “Master” Card or “Lady” Visa to pay for my stiff new flower. After an exchange of thanks, JT tucked the rose in the pack on my back. If you can’t beat ’em, it was sometimes best to simply go along for the ride.

  We followed the uneven, hilly pathway that wound through the Fest site. The sound of roaring cheers and laughter made it hard for me to hear JT attempting to explain the finer points of Renaissance fanaticism.

  Finally I gave up and said, “What the hell is going on over there?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s find out.” JT led me toward the source of the chaos.

  We rounded a two-story shoppe made of wooden shakes and smooth, worm-eaten logs and came upon a line of wagons ringing a baseball diamond–sized space. Between two of the wagons, a hand-painted sign tacked crookedly on a post proclaimed this area the Gypsy Robin Hood Stage. Beyond the caravans, a throng of people cheered at three energetic guys performing on an elevated platform.

  My stomach rumbled loud enough to be heard over the crowd. “I guess I’m hungrier than I thought,” I yelled in JT’s ear.

  She rolled her eyes at me, then surveyed the area for edible options. “Well,” she hollered back, “there’s a spinach pie place over there.” She pointed to a shop in the distance.

  I curled my lip.

  She scowled at my expression. “Okay, then. I think you can get bangers and mash.” I looked over at a shop where two bored vendors stood behind a counter with their chins propped on their fists. What did it mean when a crowd this size seemed to be avoiding the place?

  A subliminal message was working itself out on my psyche. Maybe there was something to be said about the pickle guy’s approach to slinging his wares. “I think I want a ‘big, hard, salty specimen.’”

  JT’s brow furrowed in the cutest way when she tried to figure something out. It was furrowed now as she attempted to decipher my request, although I had no idea h
ow she could forget something as bizarre as that pickle vendor.

  With a laugh, I said, “A pickle, goofball. I want a pickle.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were pregnant.”

  “Not on your life, my love.”

  I grinned as I watched JT wrangle Bogey from a nosedive toward the zipper of the pudgy man standing next to us. He was cheering at the guys onstage and didn’t seem to notice Bogey’s rude manners.

  Dawg woofed at Bogey, his forehead all crinkled up. Sometimes I thought he was actually embarrassed by Bogey’s wayward nose. Dawg barked again and plunked his butt down on my foot, sitting so far back that his hind legs stuck up in the air. Very manly, my Dawg.

  “Bogey!” JT shouted to be heard over the boisterous crowd. Bogey pulled up short, returned to JT’s side, and heaved a frustrated sigh. Then he plopped on his stomach and slapped his chin on the ground with a disgruntled groan that I heard over the raucous crowd.

  I looked at the pathetic expression on Bogey’s face. “Maybe you could find me a nice big juicy pickle while I ply these two ravenous beasties with a treat.”

  JT laughed. “Okay. Stay and listen to the show. I think those nut jobs on stage are the Tortuga Twins. Coop would love them if he wasn’t in Duluth with the Green Beans.” Nicholas Cooper, better known simply as Coop, was my best pal. He loved this kind of stuff, including role-playing games and other such nonsense. He belonged to an environmental group called the Green Beans for Peace and Preservation that coordinated protests and gatherings to help promote awareness of environmental and social issues. Keeping Asian carp out of Lake Superior was their latest statement-making foray.

  JT handed me Bogey’s leash.

  “Hurry up, fair wench. I’m not in the mood to wait for me vittles.”

  “I think vittles is more a cowboy-era term. How about victuals?”

  “Whatever.” I attempted a friendly cuff, but she ducked out of the way and danced backward a couple of steps. Then she blew me a jaunty kiss, pivoted, and disappeared into the crowd.