Midnight Rain: A Detective Jack Dunning Novel by Arlette Lees

vacationing back in September, another boy was found on the road. When you get more dead kids than dead dogs on the same stretch of road it makes you wonder, don’t it?”

CHAPTER 10
    Joe is not himself for the rest of the day. He bumbles through his routine dropping change, spilling a cup of coffee, burning a chocolate cake. He wanted to apologize for the mean things he said yesterday, but his opinion about the dangers of the devil juice haven’t changed.
    Cookie watches Joe pull into traffic at the end of the day, then goes down to the bakery for the newspaper. Dr. Albright’s visit had been a waste of time. All he recommended were the things that hadn’t been effective in the past. He told her to keep the ice bag on her head and charged her an extra quarter for the house call.
    She sits at the bistro table and flips through the pages of the Morning Sun. If there’s something about a murder or assault, it might explain her strange dream. There’s news of foreclosures, livestock sales, a church rummage sale and a .22 slug in the gas station window. No violence, mayhem or murder. As she’s folding the paper, she sees what appears to be a business card on the floor near the door. Curious, she walks over and picks it up.
    CONCHITA MONTOYA
    Dance Instructor
    TOP HAT SCHOOL OF DANCE
    Rumba, Samba, Tango Classes
    Saturday Evening 8:00 O’clock
    Cookie turns the card over and sees a penciled message on the back. “Cho, is complimentary lesson, 11213 Railroad Spur Rd. XOX Chita”
    Cho? Chita?
    So, this is what Joe is up to, stealing her elixir, starting an argument…a sneaky way to justify making time with another woman. Her miserable days with Skipper come back in a sickening rush. The lies. The late nights at the office. The weekends with “the boys.” Shards of light slice through the neural pathways of her brain, distorting her vision to the point of partial blindness. By the time she feels her way up to the apartment, one eye is swollen shut and her head is exploding with pain.
    * * * *
    Frances has had a bad day and when Frances has a bad day, so does everyone around her. When Mittie, her twenty year old house maid, broke a Tiffany lamp, she blew her stack and banished her for the weekend. Now, she’s alone with no one to talk with and coughing up more blood than usual. She’s always considered herself indestructible, but just lately she has to admit to not being entirely well.
    Frances lights a cigarette and pours a whiskey straight. It burns her throat going down. Like father, like daughter. If Red O’Hara smoked and drank, she smoked and drank. In her eyes, he could do no wrong, nor she in his.
    Tonight she sits in the living room in one of her darker moods, missing her father more than ever. She’s never been the same since he took a bullet in the back, nor has she been able to establish with any certainty, Leland’s movements on the night he died.
    Now that she knows that Leland isn’t even Leland, her suspicions have deepened. Red wouldn’t let down his guard with a stranger, but he might with his son-in-law. With their marriage unraveling, Frances is worth more dead than alive and a bullet in the back is one tradition she doesn’t intend to share with her father.
    The phone rings and a vein jumps in her temple. She snatches up the receiver. “What?” she says. A flurry of dry leaves shoot past the windowpane and a branch scraping against the house sounds like fingernails on a blackboard.
    “It’s Darrell Singleton, Mrs. Dietrich.”
    “Yes, yes, what is it?”
    “There’s been a new development. I’ll give it to you now and send you a written report in the morning. I’m calling from a phone booth across from the auction barn. I followed Mr. Dietrich to the German Social Club.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    “Tonight’s their first meeting. Before the doors opened I mingled with the crowd out front.
    “So?”
    “Your husband met up with a young woman, but I had the feeling they weren’t