Way (eBook)

Gregg Bernstein (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
208 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
9798350984965 (ISBN)

Infos

When a teenage girl disappears, PI Cole Dunbar tracks her from a Hollywood nightclub to a cult in Northern California. Follow him and his son as they race to save her in this third, thrilling addition to the Cole Dunbar series.

Gregg E. Bernstein has been a psychologist and psychotherapist for over forty years, having written three books about his career, including 'The Heart is My Beat,' 'Therapy Confidential' and 'The Therapy Files.' He has put this experience to good use in his series of private eye novels, 'The Flower in the Sand' and 'Dead All Over.'

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It's the late Sixties. Private Investigator Cole Dunbar is called in to help a friend's neighbor whose teenage daughter has disappeared. After a great deal of background investigation at the girl's high school; a local burger joint; and a Sunset Strip nightclub, where he and his son Pedro get caught up in the infamous Sunset Strip Riots, he runs across a rumor that she may have joined a cult led by a mysterious figure known only as The Way. Following this lead to Northern California has dangers of its own, as they try to find out not only where the missing girl is, but what is left of her former self.

Textauszug

Chapter One

The phone kept ringing. And ringing. I managed to force one eye open and took a squint at the bedside clock: five-thirty . . . in the morning, for the love of Christ. I’d been asleep for barely three hours and was already working on a felony hangover, thanks to an overambitious celebration with my wife Marie last night in honor of her being made Associate Professor of chemistry at UCLA.

But right now, my problem was that savage, shrilling phone. I figured the average caller would give up after, say, six rings, so after number four I pulled the pillow over my head and kept a prayerful count: five, six . . . that should do it . . . seven, eight, nine . . . no way they’re still going to . . . ten, eleven, twelve . . .

Shit, this was either not the average person or not the average situation. It certainly wasn’t anyone who knew my sleep habits. Somehow, Marie slumbered on blissfully through the racket. I could see that the only way to stop the hemorrhaging now was to get up and answer the damn thing, but considering the time of day, I reserved the right to answer the perpetrator’s rudeness with plenty of my own. I rolled out of bed, practically knee-walked to the living room, snatched the receiver off the hook and yelled, “Do you know what time it is? What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway?”

After a long pause, a woman’s shaky voice said, “What’s wrong is that my daughter, Ginger, has disappeared.”

I was only mildly mollified. “Look lady, I’m really sorry, but leave a message with my service and you can probably see me later . . . and by later, I mean this afternoon.” I paused. “And how’d you get my home number anyway? I don’t usually . . .”

“Uh, my neighbor, Brenda Hartwick, wrote it on the back of one of your cards. She told me you’d be glad to . . .”

That figured; Brenda was the wife of my best friend Dick, and the two of them were always assuming that I cared as deeply about humanity as they did. In my own mind, I called them the Goodness Twins, though I openly admit that probably reflects more poorly on me than them.

I tried to be a little nicer. “Okay then, I’m sorry you got Mr. Hyde, but Dr Jekyll will be in his office this afternoon. Do you have that number?”

“Let me see here . . . yes, Brenda gave me your card, and . . .”

“If you turn it over to the side with all the expensive typesetting I paid for, you’ll find the number you want.”

“Oh, I see. Yes, here it is, right under your name.”

“There you go, ma’am. Now I’ll be going back to bed, but you can leave your name and number with my service anytime; they’re nice people, even at this ungodly time of night. Good night.”

“Good, uh, night, sir.”

I staggered into the bathroom, shoveled a few aspirin down my throat, and fell back into bed, hoping to wake up to a better world.

* * *

The phone was ringing again, but this time the hour was a little more humane, ten o’clock being a lot closer to when I usually emerge from my night chrysalis. Marie was long gone, of course, so once again, I had the duty.

“Yeah?”

“Did Brenda’s neighbor reach you?”

It was Marie—my aforementioned wife—calling from work to see if the hook had been set yet.

“Yes, she reached me all right, but it was the dead of night, so I wasn’t in a very charitable mood.”

“Oh no, you weren’t rude to the poor thing, were you?”

“Wait a minute, who’s the poor thing here? She called me here at five-thirty, for cryin’ out loud.”

“Oh Cole, you can be so . . .”

“Self-absorbed, unkind, harsh . . . or, here’s a thought: how about asleep?”
“Well, three out of four work for me, but listen, her only child, a daughter, is missing, so you have to make allowances, and . . .”

“ ‘ . . . be kind to me, Mister Spade.’ Is that the phrase you’re looking for?”

“Cole,” she sighed, “I’m going to cut you some slack because it’s morning, but when you do talk to her, please show some consideration for the fact that she’s going through hell. After all, how would you feel if Pedro was missing?”

Pedro was the Mexican kid, now a teenager, whom we’d adopted years ago, after he helped me out on a couple of cases south of the border. For the last year or so, he’d been learning the private investigation business from the ground up, working under my license and mostly handling paperwork and filing in the office . . . everything but “wet work,” as he insisted on calling the more active PI work like running down child support outlaws and husbands with extracurricular women on the brain.

I confessed, “Okay, you got me there; I’d be a wreck if Pedro turned up missing.” I paused. “But you have to understand, runaways and lost kids have been part of my job for so many years, that . . .”

“That you forget what it’s like for the parents?”

“Yeah, I guess so, sometimes. Okay, I promise to try and be nice to her later,” I grinned, “especially if she lays off those early-morning phone calls.”

“I’m sure it was only because she was desperate.”

“Only time will tell.”

“Goodbye, Cole,” she said with a twist of irony in her voice, “have a nice day.”

“Yeah, same to you, Associate.”

The day had started badly, but it was nothing a morning beer and a cigarette (one of the four-a-day I still allowed myself back then) couldn’t put back to rights. By eleven-thirty I’d polished off a plate of bacon and eggs, my hangover was mostly at bay and I was ready to shove off for work.

Since I married Marie back in ’57, around nine years ago, and we’d adopted Pedro a year or so later, I’d made a sincere attempt to go legit: we now owned a three-bedroom, two-bath home in the Silver Lake district, with a detached garage which housed my old ’49 Ford two-door convertible, the one Marie had been bugging me to trade in on a new model for years. But the battered old warhorse was one of the only reminders I had left that I was once young, wild and fancy-free. Of course, the truth is, I had also been young, tortured and half-crazy with trauma after the war, and it took Doc Grimes, my psychiatrist, years of work to put the pieces back together, but who’s counting? I opened the garage door and backed the old girl out, being careful of the neighborhood kids who were always scampering about. But on this November Monday at noon, they were all in school anyway.

I liked to take Santa Monica west all the way to La Brea, then hang a right on La Brea to Sunset. It wasn’t necessarily the fastest way, but lately the Hollywood Freeway was getting more crowded, even when it wasn’t “rush hour.” Besides, it took me right by Pink’s, my old stamping grounds, where I still allowed myself a stolen chili dog now and then, despite what the doctors were preaching nowadays about cholesterol, saturated fat and other bloodstream horrors. Christ, they’d already taken my pack-a-day Camels away from me; a guy’s gotta have some vices, and an occasional off-the-books chili dog wasn’t the worst I could do.

The office parking lot wasn’t what it used to be either; parking used to be free for tenants, and the management had let George, the attendant who’d been there for years, go last year, so now even tenants had to pay a monthly fee just to park their own cars.

Progress: Ain’t it wonderful?

As I grabbed my briefcase and headed toward the office, a scruffy-looking young guy with a long beard, dressed in a torn t-shirt, filthy cords and something on his feet that might once have been boots, spied me and ran over from Sunset with his hand out. “Got any spare change, mister? I been travelin’ real hard, and ain’t got a dime.”

Unfortunately for him, I saw a Rolex peeking out from under his cuffs and a ring on his finger that didn’t come from any dime store. Up close, I saw that he couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or two. I said, “Kid, you’ve seen The Grapes of Wrath one too many times, and you’re obviously on the streets by choice, so why don’t you just keep your money and I’ll keep mine?”

He yelled, “Fascist!” and turned away to stalk Sunset Boulevard until the Whiskey and Pandora’s Box opened and he could meet his friends so they could all make the scene and pretend to be hoboes together.

Not that I didn’t share a belief in what a lot of what these so-called hippies were protesting about. After all, my whole childhood was filled with my mother’s screeds about materialism, the bewitching of America by Madison Avenue and the economic imperialism that was the real reason for almost all wars, but in the thirties, Americans really were...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.9.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-13: 9798350984965 / 9798350984965