My Bad Grandad Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also by A.W. Hartoin for Amazon

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  About the Author

  Also by A.W. Hartoin for Amazon

  Copyright © A.W. Hartoin, 2017

  www.awhartoin.com

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  Edited by Valerie Clifton

  Cover by:Karri Klawiter

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

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Also By A.W. Hartoin*

  Young Adult fantasy

  Flare-up (An Away From Whipplethorn Short)

  A Fairy's Guide To Disaster (Away From Whipplethorn Book One)

  Fierce Creatures (Away From Whipplethorn Book Two)

  A Monster’s Paradise (Away From Whipplethorn Book Three)

  A Wicked Chill (Away From Whipplethorn Book Four)

  To the Eternal (Away From Whipplethorn Book Five)

  Away From Whipplethorn Box Set (Books 1-3, plus bonus short)

  Mercy Watts Mysteries

  Novels

  A Good Man Gone (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book One)

  Diver Down (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Two)

  Double Black Diamond (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Three)

  Drop Dead Red (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Four)

  In the Worst Way (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Five)

  The Wife of Riley (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Six)

  My Bad Grandad (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Seven)

  Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Set (Books 1-3, plus bonus short)

  Short stories

  Coke with a Twist

  Touch and Go

  Nowhere Fast

  Dry Spell

  A Sin and a Shame

  Paranormal

  It Started with a Whisper (Sons of Witches

  For my father, who gave me a love of

  mysteries and history.

  I think it shows.

  Chapter One

  THE ROAR WAS everywhere. It pushed me, pulled me, and hurt my ears. I couldn’t escape. I’d tried and failed, repeatedly. So, since I had no skills and even less sense, I found myself in a broom closet that smelled like an unflushed toilet and looked worse.

  My plan was to hold my breath until it was all over, but like most of my plans, it didn’t work. I went to slam the door shut just as my boyfriend stuck his big foot in to block my ostrich maneuver.

  “What are you doing?” Chuck asked, tugging on the door that I was valiantly trying to close on his long fingers.

  “Hiding. What does it look like?” The roar got louder. “Holy crap! Do you hear that?”

  “That’s a good thing. The place is packed, just like Mickey wanted.”

  “Mickey? I could kick him in the junk. He said small. Does that sound small to you?” I screeched.

  “It sounds like 10,000 bucks.” Chuck yanked the door open and his tall, lean form blocked most of the light coming into my barf closet.

  I grabbed a sloppy wet mop, ready to thwack my way out. “He said small.”

  “This is small. Double Black Diamond usually plays stadiums. We’re talking 50,000 people. The Pageant has a max of 2,300.”

  “I’m going to barf.”

  “I thought you already barfed.”

  “There’s more in there.”

  Chuck darted in the closet and grabbed me. “No more barfing. You’re on in ten minutes.”

  “I can’t do it. I can’t,” I said, trying to wriggle out of his grasp. Hopeless. Chuck was a foot taller than me and infinitely stronger. Plus, I was wearing an unspeakable black leather getup designed to make me look even curvier than I actually was and I’d cornered the market on buckles and snaps. They were great handholds and all I had to defend myself were pointy fake nails in Harlot Scarlet and thigh-high stiletto boots. Chuck said I looked hot, but I really looked like walking porn. It was embarrassing. I’d spent my life avoiding looking like that nightmare. I was Mercy Watts and because of my uncanny resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, people expected the worst of me. I wasn’t a drug-addled dingbat or a slut and I put a lot of effort into convincing the world of that fact. The opposite impression always seemed to happen, no matter what I did, and the outfit Mickey Stix picked out wasn’t going to help.

  “Okay. Fine. Give me your shirt,” I said, hands on hips.

  “My shirt?” asked Chuck, a frown puckering his high forehead. “What for?”

  “So I can wear it. Duh.”

  “You can’t cover that up. You agreed to it.”

  I poked him in the chest. “Mickey said a stage outfit.”

  “It is. Don’t be a wuss.”

  I spun around and did an arm sweep. “I look like Cat Woman!”

  Chuck grinned. “Yeah, you do. I have to thank Mickey. You can wear that home, right?”

  Suddenly, looking like a slutty idiot didn’t seem so bad. “Are you serious?”

  The grin fell off his handsome face. “Not yet.”

  Chuck was a cop and he’d recently returned from an undercover assignment. It messed with his head in ways nobody expected.

  I took his hand and squeezed it. He let me. Progress. I smiled and said, “I’ll save it for later.”

  His grin came back. “I thought you’d burn it.”

  “Are you kidding? This thing cost like 5,000 dollars.”

  “Maybe we can sell it.”

  I did a fist pump. “Then I won’t have to sing. Yes!”

  He rolled his eyes. “It’s one song. Two at most.”

  “No. I really can’t. Stop distracting me.”

  “You signed the contract and we need the money.” Chuck manhandled me into the hall. The roar got louder. I could barely make out Mickey Stix’s voice over the din. “Hello, St. Louis! Let’s rock The Pageant!” The place went batshit crazy.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “You sang on the street in Paris. You sang at Cops for Kids.”

  “That was for you.” I made a break for it, but Chuck captured me easily, hugging me tightly. It would’ve felt fantastic if he hadn’t been preventing my escape.

  “Who else is going to pay you 10,000 bucks for twenty minutes’ work? We need the money.”

  We did need the money. That’s what I was thinking when I signed Mickey’s contract. DBD was launching an album and decided to try out their new material at a “small venue.” I should’ve asked for specifics, but all I thought about were the bills I could pay. Chuck and I owed 6,000 dollars to a Parisian couture designer and that was with a seventy-five percent discount after we went toe-to-toe with a Corsican m
obster wearing her designs. Our clothes went viral and suddenly, she was dressing movie stars. It was a hell of a discount, but I’d have gone naked before I’d put on a pair of boots that cost 2,000 dollars. I don’t even want to talk about the suit.

  The upside of our adventure in Paris was that we got new leads on The Klinefeld Group. My family’s past was all mixed up with The Klinefeld Group, along with my godmothers’ family, the Bleds. The German nonprofit’s goals were as obscure as their location. The Klinefeld Group wanted some box they thought the Bleds had. That box had something to do with my parents, our house, and the disappearance of Josiah Bled. They’d sued, stolen, and murdered to get it, but hadn’t been successful. Chuck and I had picked up great leads in Paris, but investigations are pricey. Our new info meant more trips to Europe to follow those leads and I didn’t even have a regular job at the moment. I’d accepted a nursing position at the Columbia Clinic. They paid well and it meant no more bouncing around as a PRN nurse. Steady income sounded good at the time, but it didn’t last. A mere week into my new job, there were torrential downpours. Rivers all over the tri-state area flooded and the Columbia Clinic was under five feet of water.

  “Mercy, come on,” Chuck said. “I’m getting sick of pushing you down this hall.”

  My heel let out a nail-on-a-chalkboard screech as he picked up speed and Freddie, DBD’s road manager, came around the corner with a pained look on his face.

  “Hey, Freddie,” said Chuck with a load of false cheer.

  Freddie looked even more pained, but he always looked like that. Maybe because we were the only ones who called him Freddie. Everyone else, including the band, called him Four Squared or Lucky. It was not a term of endearment. It was more like a fact. Freddie was DBD’s sixteenth road manager. You’d think that was normal in the music business. People came and went, but DBD’s people just went. Like in a bad way. They died in various heinous accidents: overdoses, drunk driving crashes, jumping out of hotel room windows on the fifteenth floor because they thought they could fly, that kind of thing. Freddie was Lucky because he’d lasted longer than any of his predecessors.

  “What the hell was that noise?”

  “Her heels,” said Chuck.

  Freddie tugged on his scraggly ponytail. He did that when he was nervous, which was most of the time. DBD was unpredictable on their own, succumbing to violent in-fighting and jealousies at the worst times. Freddie thought adding me was a disaster waiting to happen. Considering my track record, I couldn’t blame him. “What’s the problem?”

  “Just some stage fright,” said Chuck.

  “Terror,” I said with a juke to the left. Chuck snagged me by a buckle and I yelped. “It’s stage terror. Terror, I tell you.”

  Freddie pulled out five strands of hair and twisted them around his pinkie. “Oh, is that all? You’ll be fine. I thought you had a real problem.”

  “This is a real problem,” I said.

  “It’s what you call common. All performers freak at one time or another.”

  “Mickey doesn’t.”

  “He’s been doing this since the seventies. He’s so famous now he don’t give a fuck. Back in the day, he had to be tanked and twisted to get on stage. Did you barf yet?”

  “Three times so far,” I said, thinking this was evidence that I couldn’t go on. But Freddie slapped me on the back. “Then you’re all set.”

  “Hardly. What if I barf on stage?”

  “You won’t. Nobody barfs more than three times. Believe me. I’ve been doing this for a long time. Three times, that’s it. Done and dusted. Now, what’s going to happen is—”

  I grabbed his arm and squeezed until his skinny, tattooed bicep turned red. “I’m telling you I can’t.”

  Freddie ignored the pain, fluffed my hair, and popped a mint in my mouth. “And I’m telling you that we have an iron-clad contract. You go on and sing your tuckus off or I’ll sue you so hard that the only thing you’ll have left is the paint on your toenails. I might even take that.” He gently patted my cheek. “You’ll be the highlight of the show.”

  “You’re mean.”

  “It’s my job, not me.” He glanced behind him and yelled, “Dallas, get your ass out here!”

  A second later, a hipster wearing a plaid shirt, blue stocking cap, and three chin hairs ambled around the corner. Freddie wore an increasingly pained expression as he saw Dallas. The guy reeked of affected boredom. “Mercy, this is Dallas, your bodyguard for the show.”

  “Are you serious?” asked Chuck. “This guy?”

  “Dude, I got skills,” said Dallas as he pushed his black-rimmed glasses into place on his small patrician nose.

  “Dude, I will shoot you if you fail.”

  “Jesus, so uptight. Are you a cop?” Dallas showed no real concern. By the state of his red-rimmed eyes and slight hand tremor, I thought he should’ve been taking a hike.

  “Detective,” said Chuck.

  “You shoot people?”

  “Not as a general rule.” Chuck jerked a thumb at me. “She does.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’ve shot at least two people that I know of.”

  My mind was a blank. I shot people? The only thing I wanted to kill was a large mug of hot chocolate. So good for my nerves, which were shot in a huge way.

  “You shot Costilla, that terrorist in Paris, and what about Claire’s bigamous husband?” Chuck grinned at me.

  “I didn’t hit Poinaré and I never even fired at Larry.”

  “You shot a bigot? Sweet,” said Dallas, squinting with effort. “I thought you were just Marilyn.”

  “I’m Mercy,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Oh, yeah. Mercy. Is it time, Freddie?”

  Freddie tore out two more hairs and checked his watch. “Thirty seconds. Off you go.” He waved us down the hall. “Dallas will put you on.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “This guy is completely baked.”

  “Don’t worry about Dallas. He knows his business.”

  “I’m not sure he can remember his business,” whispered Chuck as we followed Dallas through a warren of hallways and up some stairs to the stage.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “He can’t.”

  “I’ll be right off stage. If anything happens, I’ll take care of it. You just sing, get the money, and don’t get sued.”

  I nodded because I couldn’t speak. Terrified was not an exaggeration. I think I peed a little…or a lot. It was hard to tell. I was sweating like an obese bodybuilder. There was the stage. The crowd roared as the lead singer, Wade Cave, finished one of their songs from the new album. The crowd was certifiable with screaming, crying, and chanting, “Wade! Wade! Wade!” I would’ve done just about anything not to go out there amongst the screams and billowing smoke, but I couldn’t form a plan fast enough. Dallas peeled me off Chuck. Tamberlin, the makeup artist, rushed over, touched up my lipstick and then maneuvered me behind the side curtains with hands that were like vise grips. Dallas blocked my last dash for safety and pushed me out. It took a village to get me onstage.

  Wade finished his last soaring note and took me from Dallas. From there it was a smoky, laser-filled blur. I felt like I’d left my body, but my body kept doing stuff. Fortunately, it was the right stuff. Wade handled me perfectly, moving me around and feeding me questions. He was at his most charming, his most rock star.

  I kept telling myself, “It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine.”

  “Here we go, St. Louis!” yelled Wade to the crowd. “Our very own Marilyn has a new one for you.”

  Freddie’s voice said in the tiny earpiece that Dallas had put in my ear, “Dedicate it to Chuck.”

  So I did. “This one is for my man. A cop. A hero. And the owner of an awesome ass. Chuck Watts!”

  Where did that come from?

  “Hell yeah!” yelled Wade. “Give it to us, girl. Mercy Watts singing “F’ed Up Friend!””

  The roar from the crowd was like a physical assaul
t. It pushed me back. I grabbed the microphone and Wade steadied me with a hand on my back. I sang. I’m not sure how I did it. I was half-blind from the lights. That helped, but mostly, it was Chuck’s reddened face in the wings. I wasn’t the only one to be mortified. That’s always a good thing. The song wasn’t about drinking. It was about a guy that was an idiot in love. Mickey wrote it about himself and his wife, Nina Symoan.

  The song went over well. Too well. Five guys and one girl rushed the stage. It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to be startled. Dallas took them down hard. He grabbed one by his man bun and kicked the legs out from under another one. The video of my first song would later go viral. Not because of me, but because of Dallas’s ass-kicking. I was a footnote, which was fine by me.

  It went so well. Mickey announced from behind his drum set that I’d sing “Sexy Curve”, my least favorite song in the world. My dad always sang it to my mom. Gross, but what could I do? I sang it. There might’ve been dancing. I’m trying to block that out. The next thing I knew, my time was up, but the crowd didn’t want me to leave. I tried and Dallas pushed me back on. It became a crowd participation thing. They chanted, “Stay! Stay! Stay!” I chanted, “Go! Go! Go!”

  Mickey came out and canoodled me, saying in my ear, “You need to stay. This is working.”

  “How much?” popped out of my mouth. I really didn’t mean it to.

  “An additional three thousand.”

  “Make it five.”

  Mickey raised his arms. “She’s staying!”

  Three more guys rushed the stage and one almost reached us before Dallas flipped him. I stayed on for the rest of the show and it was not glamorous. It was sweaty, hot, and surprisingly smelly. I was part of the smell. I’d never smelled before, but I did then. During the last set, all I could think was, How’d I get so sticky? Did somebody pour something on me?

  After it was over, I don’t even remember getting off stage. Dallas had me in a dressing room and Chuck peeled off my leather before I drank the much-needed bottle of water. Chuck pulled one of his tee shirts over my head and somebody pounded on the door. Before we answered, Mickey strode in with a huge amount of swagger. He and Chuck congratulated themselves on the greatness of the show while I struggled to pull on a pair of yoga pants without anyone seeing my thong.