Cliché aside, they could run, but damn well couldn’t hide. Not too long – not with her working theory that collective thought delving into evil of an evil mind could decipher how dangerous criminals jacked up their crummy crimes in the first place.
Her name? It was her notoriety. Off the Bay where Atlantic zephyrs blew in, she was hailed as Nelle, Nelle Callahan… more precisely, DETECTIVE NELLE CALLAHAN, if you angled your eyeballs, squinted your peepers, and read backwards black-painted, gold-edged serif letters through frosted transom glass over her splintered mahogany door. She didn’t care much if her door was splintered. She just liked that it was mahogany and could take a bullet. Nelle Callahan believed in things around her staying solid. She trained her mind same way. Hard. Resilient. True. Taking no guff – no way, no how.
With the help of her author-posse-of-minds in the night, Nelle garnered insight past where mere motives went to slosh back a good Jack D. Razor senses honed crime-profiling like the trigger finger of her reliable Colt 45. On target. She taught herself to freeze-frame pulse-pounding action intuitively. Play the scene over same time it’s going on. Watch where danger heats. Site your adversary’s mistakes. Make them make their dumber move first. Then put the world out of miseries they instigated. Insight-Action. Shimmied Nelle Callahan perspicaciously over, around and safe to sidelines of maniacal madness. Propelled her past what turned connivers and creeps’ desperations to dastardly danger.
To comprehend “crime-in-the-mind”, was the go-to of Nelle’s know-how. The keen noggin under long, loose auburn waves knew when to stop them in their tracks, cut them off at their pass… or needle them to flub up asinine mistakes. All served to tighten numbskulls’ nooses.
Nelle Callahan’s sturdy mahogany door – pummeled from the corridor by the double-impact of two hefty hurling bodies bent on bad intentions – surged open. Crunch and crash collided with the olive green metal file cabinet she knew was way too close to the door – but hell, who had time to move furniture? The two surging hurlers battering Nelle’s mahogany had a gun raised level from each grubby hand. The two guys’ four guns made their one point more forcefully than her Smith-Corona. Got Nelle’s attention. She didn’t finish her paragraph.
“Wild West Show doesn’t roll into town for a month or so, boys,” Nelle deadpanned, shifting fingertips from F D S A and J K L;. She flexed ruby-tipped digits where her intruders could see ‘em. Smiled at the leering gunmen as if a light breeze had just rolled off the sea. A seabreeze she wished to face up to and linger within. If Nelle was a song, they’d call her The Breeze. She aimed serenity at the fuming armed duo. A sure shot. She pissed ‘em off to not wreaking the havoc their knuckleheads had primed them to wreak.
Nelle scrutinized. The two thunk her their passive prey. She drifted ruby manicure in serpentine motion down to a soft ladylike-looking clasp upon her skirted lap. Best way to charm snakes. Between folds of chocolate brown suede, best way to stroke her own trusty weapon. Likewise, she stroked their egos. Disgusting egos. She knew these bums. They were no sugar in anyone’s coffee, no cream rising desire. Their motive for busting open her mahogany? That Nelle didn’t know… Best to play ‘em.
“Why, if it isn’t the almost handsome Jasper Brattleboro and the brawny semi-brainiac Harvey Highwinds, darkening my doorstep, damaging my mahogany. Both lookin’ pretty slick, what with oozy sweat puddling over my Aubusson.” She glanced at Highwinds, shorter, bristly brunt of the two. “That big word means ‘carpet’, Harv.” Nelle grinned wide. Wafted her left hand with a magician’s flourish toward the open window. “Not raining today, boys. What gives? Ya got something heavy on your minds letting loose all this liquid exertion? Makes an astute mind such as mine think you can’t even handle what you came here to muck up.” Using diversion, her right hand moved her Colt right where it might be most useful.
“Shut up Nelle,” snapped Brattleboro.
“Still the charmer-disarmer, I see, Jas,” continued Nelle. “You the brains of this swell break-in or just backing brawn?”
“Hold your wisecracks for pals who banter, Callahan,” Highwinds huffed. “We need a doc, and we need one now.”
“I got Johnson & Johnson Band-Aids in my desk drawer here. What part of your pride’s wounded?” Nelle leaned to her right, reaching for a lower drawer’s brass handle.
Brattleboro jostled pistol and purpose. “Just keep your hands in your lap there, Nellie. Nobody gets hurt that way.”
Reflexively, Nelle’s hands centered back on the keys of the keyboard before her. Deft fingers curved, ready to pounce. Caramel eyes flashed challenge. “Aw geeeez, Jasper. Who the heck writes your material? Lemme give it a shot, will ya? Hunh? Will ya?”
“CAN IT NELLE! Can it!”
A bloody excuse of a hunched-over man hobbling from the hallway leaned sideways into Nelle’s doorjamb for balance, support or maybe bravado… Could be all three, Nelle conjectured, studying what was going on beneath his almost-stance. The guy commanded respect, despite his pitiful plight. That she gave him. Could’ve been the uniform. Could’ve been the ragged flesh hanging off his left arm and the torn burn hole encircling where she imagined his heart did its palpitations. Could’ve been the excuse that when they lived together, a long pack of springtimes ago, he always got his way. Wasn’t the way Nelle could bide livin’ by. Why she got away.
“Woman, you gonna bloody up your manicured lily-whites to help us, or sit there smug, high and mighty?” rasped a gravelly voice from the past she’d never seen coming back at her. “We’ve got a bounty, an APB, a pissed off pack of troopers, a case of mistaken identity and what feels like Voodoo or Hoodoo cursing our lackluster heads.”
Adrenaline fluttered smack dab against something gone hot, sloppy and molten within. Definitely not lackluster. Nelle didn’t much like recounting ‘what-could’ve-beens’ with the wrong man at the right time. Yet, she was ready. Three-to-one odds, but she was ready. Nelle Callahan was borne ready – turning adversity to advantage. She shot finesse ~
“I’m not sentimental – I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last – the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”
“Damn it to hell, Nelle! I’m half-dying on your doorstep, way I know you always wanted to ogle my tragic end. Yet here Miss Prissy-Literary-Ass sits! Spewing Scott Fitzgerald crap at me?” The hunched flesh now solely propped-up by how solid Nelle’s stalwart doorway was, lifted dark tousels of his hairy head. He roared as a lion past his prowl. Cost him effort. Lost him blood. The raging head leveled a gaze that scorched the narrow room across a broad, battered desktop into the only eyes that could strip his guard bare ass naked.
Ford Parker, professional hired gun hindrance aside, couldn’t live that way, and couldn’t live to let a woman that got under his skin, know about that way. That’s why he got away.
Parker raised his good right hand waist high. Pointed it toward his fierce gang. “This goes down as one of the most harebrained, dumb-ass, last-ditch, pitiful effort ideas you numbskulls ever thunk up. Bring me to Nelle’s. Yeah, right.” He spat. Directed his ugly spittle shot straight to a spot over the Aubusson they’d bought together. He knew she was still fond of it. He knew she wasn’t of him.