Short Fuse (The Charlie Davies Mysteries Book 0) Read online

  Short Fuse

  Clare Kauter

  Short Fuse

  Copyright © 2016 Clare Kauter

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  This book is dedicated to you!

  …

  Just kidding. This book has been cheating on you for some time now. Tough luck, pal.

  One

  “And had you noticed Topher acting differently over the past couple of weeks? Was anything upsetting him?”

  I had to force myself not to roll my eyes. Really, officer? Is that the best you can do?

  “Hmm, let me think. There was that time a car swerved off the road to try and hit him. I think he was a little upset about that. But, you know, he’s always been a bit of a wuss,” I answered. “Or it could have been that he didn’t make it onto the chess team again this year. He was devastated. They keep forcing him to play football instead.”

  The man who was questioning me closed his eyes for a beat. Apparently he found me annoying. Join the club, pal.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no’, then.” He paused as he wrote something down. “Though I find it hard to believe that there was nothing out of the ordinary. I only met him briefly, but even I could see that there was something troubling him.”

  “Well, of course,” I answered. “You’d know better than me, being the discerning policeman you are. I struggle to comprehend men’s emotions thanks to my tiny lady-brain.”

  “That’s not what I –”

  “No,” I said flatly, cutting him off. “There was nothing, he was behaving perfectly normally and we were all very shocked when he disappeared. I have no idea what could have driven him to this. If only there was some sort of possible explanation…”

  The policeman glared at me. Harcourt, his name was. He’d given a talk at our school a week before about how drugs weren’t cool or how wearing seatbelts was important or some other thing that everyone already knew. He’d also shown up at my place of work late one night and bought milk. Malevolently.

  He’d taken my statement when a car hit me while I was walking down the street – on the footpath.

  Now he was the officer who was in charge of finding my brother.

  Not going to lie, I wasn’t filled with confidence.

  Two

  ‘Good morning’ is not a phrase in my vocabulary. It’s an oxymoron to me, as it should be to any sane person. There is nothing ‘good’ about being woken by an alarm clock. Most people say that if they could go back in time and change the course of history, they’d kill Hitler or something. If I could go back in time, I’d kill the alarm clock guy. (I’m not joking. I’ve looked into it at length. Having weighed all the pros and cons, taking everything into account, I think that even though he said some things that people apparently think are important, Plato deserves to suffer for his alarm-related crimes.)

  Breakfast cereal is another crime of the morning. It’s cold and wet, yet crunchy. This is not an appropriate combination of adjectives in any context, and certainly not for anything that goes in your mouth.

  Morning also entails getting ready (a waste of effort) for one of two terrible options: school or work.

  Gerongate High is that generic public high school that exists in every town, where you can tell from the name exactly what you’re getting into. You know the one. Anything called ‘[Location] High’ is basically the same school in a different area. It will have roughly one student-related incident of arson every six months, and every year or so someone will get high and send the entire establishment into lockdown by threatening a teacher with a spatula.

  I hate school. I know, revolutionary. I’m not very good at it, but that’s not what I hate. (I’m not very good at a lot of things – school doesn’t exactly have the market cornered.) My real issue is that being told what to do every minute of every day is so endlessly frustrating. That is why I put roughly 3% effort into all tasks set by my teachers, and why I’m coasting along on a 55% grade. Why bother trying? The last time I’d done well in a test it had ended with me straddling the principal in front of the entire school, and not in a fun way. I know I’m not going to attend university (more school? Where you have to pay to go? Why hello, worst nightmare), and I’ve already resigned myself to a life of retail. It is what it is.

  My job at Gregory’s Groceries (run by a guy named Jeremy – I don’t know, he got the sign cheap or something) is still awful, but it’s better than school. As much as I hate customer service, standing for long periods of time, greeting chipper customers who for some reason turn up at 8 a.m. on the dot whenever I’m opening the store and chastise me for being so much as a minute late, as if they have something better to do with their time (I know for a fact that you’re unemployed, Margaret – I know every detail of your life because you just won’t shut up about it), and also working in general, on the plus side it requires zero brain function.

  Another upside of my terrible, terrible job (which certainly isn’t the pay, because that equates to roughly one small soy latte per hour) is that my manager, Jeremy, doesn’t care about customer service. Like, at all. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean Jeremy is a good boss. He’s old (like, thirty at least) and yet he follows around one of the girls from my school who is seventeen. He goes to watch her cheerlead at school sports games in other cities. Oh yes. He travels across the state to be with a schoolgirl. Creep alert.

  But nonetheless, I do kind of enjoy working for someone who once told a customer who ‘had a problem with my attitude’ (get in line, lady) that he ‘had a problem with her face’. When she started huffing and talking about respect he told her to just pay for her groceries or get the eff out of his store. After that he instructed me to tell any future ‘I want to talk to your manager’ customers that being polite wasn’t part of my contract and I was the cheapest employee there so they weren’t going to fire me. He also typed out an all caps sign stating our ‘Price Match Policy’: IF YOU SEE AN ITEM CHEAPER IN ANOTHER STORE, BUY IT THERE.

  We’ve got enough regular customers to make a baseline income, and I guess Jeremy isn’t interested in growing the business. Plus, nothing in Gregory’s ever goes off, so he doesn’t lose any revenue there. As Jeremy says, ‘expiry dates are just a suggestion’. Which is why he pays me extra to change the use-by dates on food after hours. He says ‘best before’ is very non-specific, and changing that date to a later time doesn’t really change anything. It was still best before that date. Logically, it makes sense. Ethically, I don’t care. If people were willing to shop somewhere as scummy as this place, they knew what they were getting into the second they walked through those doors.

  But back to the story…

  It was Monday morning, which is the worst thing it could possibly have been. Monday + morning = I don’t know, I’m not great at maths. But it’s definitely a negative. I stumbled through the scho
ol gates five minutes after the bell had rung, telling everyone that the day’s torture was about to begin.

  Even with my glasses on, my vision was blurry. It takes me a while to warm up in the morning. You know, kind of like an old computer. Takes me forever to wake up, even when I do I’m still a bit slow and you’re a little worried that I’m going to burst into flames at some point because I don’t appear to have been assembled correctly and I’m running Windows ’95.

  Sorry, that got a little off track.

  Anyway, I stumbled into my first class – woodwork – five minutes late. This was so standard that most of the teachers had stopped bothering making a big deal out of it. It’s not like I was missing out on a valuable woodwork education that would come in handy for future employment. Quite apart from being something of a useless life-skill, I was so clumsy that the teacher had banned me from using any of the machines or equipment other than sandpaper on the first day of class.

  “I don’t want you to die on my watch. Sit in that corner away from the machines and touch nothing for the entire term and I’ll give you an A. Deal?” It had sounded like a good deal to me, though I’d beaten him down to a B. (No top marks for me, thanks very much. Nothing good could come of that.) A more studious person might have used that time to catch up on their homework. (I did not do homework – a protest. I went to school to learn. I didn’t believe in taking my work home with me.) I used this time to subtly read romance novels by hiding them inside the dust jacket from The Concise Encyclopaedia of Birds. Right now I was halfway through When The Moon Hits Your Eye – Gianna had nearly managed to seduce the sexy stranger with the dark secret, but now she was worried that he might freak out when she revealed that she was a werewolf.

  I tell you this in confidence. No one can ever know about my romance addiction. I’d lose all of the street cred I got from being one of the five kids from my school they sent to anger management classes (out of whom I was the only one who hadn’t subsequently been sent to juvie). Not that those classes had turned out to be particularly useful. They focused on teaching us how to channel our anger into physical activities, which seemed like a bad idea to me since channelling my energy into hockey is what had landed me in anger management in the first place. Well, channelling my energy into a hockey stick. Which may or may not have channelled its own energy into another person.

  The stress ball they gave us seemed more like my thing. Much more calming. That was until the same person who’d been the object of the hockey stick debacle decided to steal my stress ball. He and I have different recollections of what happened after that, but all I’ll say is that he didn’t even have to stay overnight in the hospital and his X-rays came back clear, so really he was just whining about nothing.

  I wish it weren’t the case, but I have a feeling he’ll come up again at some point in this story, so I guess I’d better introduce you. Everybody, meet James McKenzie – my arch nemesis.

  James McKenzie is my brother’s best friend and as much as I love Topher (the aforementioned brother), he’s a terrible judge of character. People are just blinded by James’s frustratingly attractive exterior and fail to see the soulless creature that hides underneath. To be clear, when I say ‘frustratingly attractive’, I don’t mean frustrating in that way. I just mean that it’s annoying because all of my friends are in love with James McKenzie.

  James does sports and studies hard and tutors younger kids and just generally tries to weasel himself into everyone’s good graces. He’s like one of those male protagonists you see in teen movies, who can’t deal with all of the success that is coming their way and have a breakdown because they’ve had too many scholarship offers. His hair is dark and his build is athletic and people seem to like that about him. In my opinion, personality > looks. That’s some maths even I can do.

  Three

  “And this was all he left behind? A note telling you not to worry?”

  Harcourt pushed the note, which he’d put in a plastic sleeve, across the table towards me. It was half an A-4 sheet of paper, torn along the bottom, reading: ‘Charlie, I’m sorry to leave without saying goodbye, but I’ve gotta go. Be safe.’

  “Is that the whole letter he left you?” Harcourt asked.

  I frowned at him. “You literally have it in front of you,” I said. “You think I’m lying about it?”

  “It’s torn at the bottom.”

  “Ooh, well, that is very compelling evidence. I can see why they put you in charge around here.”

  “You see, I don’t think you’re telling me the truth, Charlie,” said Harcourt. It was a tactic I’d seen in a thousand cop shows – the detective pretending he’s smarter than the criminal, that he has the whole thing figured out. Of course, I wasn’t a criminal. At least, I wasn’t the one he was looking for. Not that he was even looking for a criminal, now that I thought about it... Wait, what was I saying?

  Harcourt was staring at me intently across the table that sat in the centre of the interrogation room. Oh, right. My brother. The reason I was here.

  Harcourt thought I was lying. Which, of course, I was.

  “Why would I lie?” I asked, not really responding to what he’d said. He didn’t seem to notice that I was deflecting and took the bait straight away. Gulped it down like a greedy catfish. (That is kind of a weird simile, I know. Don’t overthink it. Speaking of similes, did I have an English assignment due soon? I needed to check that with someone. Ordinarily I’d ask Celia, but she and I weren’t exactly on speaking terms at the moment. Maybe I’d just milk the fact that my brother had run away to get out of schoolwork. That seemed like the best course of action.)

  “I don’t know, Charlie,” he answered. “I think you’re trying to protect Topher. I know he’s your brother, but if you’re lying for him then it’s misguided. We just want to know he’s OK. We’re here to help him.”

  A loud exhale escaped my mouth. Well, I say ‘escaped’. I didn’t do all that much to stop it. Harcourt raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Help him?” I repeated. “That’s what you’re trying to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like how you’re helping me by finding out who ran me over?”

  I noticed his mouth twitch at that.

  “It’s early days. I’m still looking into it.”

  I rolled my eyes and lowered my voice, mimicking his. “You see, I don’t think you’re telling me the truth, Detective.”

  Four

  By the end of woodwork, Gianna had revealed her wolfish nature to Jacques, and he’d responded by saying that they could never be together. Prick. I suspected it was because his dark secret was that he was a vampire and hence they were sworn enemies, but still. Jerk.

  I left class with Jo and Celia. I’d been friends with them both since kindergarten, which is why I’d let them talk me into choosing woodwork as one of my electives. (Woodwork? Really?) As it happened, that had turned out to be a really good choice (hello, free period), but they hadn’t known that I’d end up spending that class doing nothing. They just wanted us to do all the same electives, and since they apparently wanted to gain some practical skills, woodwork it was. Peer pressure didn’t usually get to me, but when it came to those two I was powerless. Best to just submit.

  Period two was normally a practical PE class. Monday mornings were not really worth getting out of bed for. First period: sitting out of woodwork. Second period: sitting out of sport. Usually I went to the change rooms with the others to get my name marked off before heading to the library. (I had a similar arrangement with my PE teacher as I did with the woodwork one. No one wanted me to die on their watch, and I was happy to do my part in that.)

  Alas, today, that was not to be. When we reached the change rooms, our teacher announced that we were to have a talk from the local police. Everyone groaned. This was the kind of thing you wanted to happen during a maths period, not during a bludge like P.E. Good timing, police. No one was going to listen now. Not that they would have in the first place. For m
ost of the people at my school, a life of crime was the only viable career option.

  Detective Inspector Chief Investigator Sheriff (look, OK, I hadn’t really paid attention during the introduction) Harcourt was a big guy. Tall, mid-fifties, bushy moustache, decent biceps, slight beer belly. He was doing a PowerPoint presentation, but no one was listening. I could see a couple of kids openly napping.

  The assembly hall was filled with students from grades 7-12, although roughly half the people from Year 9 and up had wagged the lecture. Good for them. Stick it to the man. Half the teachers hadn’t even bothered to show. I would have ditched too, but it was cold outside and when we’d walked past the school library on the way here it was locked. Sometimes the librarian did things like that. I don’t think it was strictly allowed, but I was pretty much the only person who ever went there anyway.

  “Any volunteers?” Harcourt asked, and I could feel the ripple of panic as the entire school stared at the ground, ensuring that there was no chance of making eye contact with him. No, we wanted to say. No volunteers. If you’d organised this presentation better, you’d be able to do it by yourself. We’re busy not making fools of ourselves.

  Luckily, we were saved. A brave soul up the back had taken the bullet for all of us.

  “Yes, young man, you come down the front here.”

  We all turned to see who it was. I groaned inwardly. Of course. James McKenzie.

  My brother, who was sitting next to James, sank down in his seat, clearly trying to become invisible. I didn’t blame him. I’d be ashamed if one of my friends had volunteered, too.

  “And I’m going to need another volunteer – I’ll let you pick this time, young man. I’m looking for someone about your age and size, preferably someone who’s a talented drawer and a very fast runner.”