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56 pages

English

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People are dying in the small oceanside village of Vista Tranquilla. Are these deaths accidents or are they crimes? Detective John Fitch, who is new to the job and average in every way, must dive deep to uncover the truth while masking his own awkwardness and inadequacies as he navigates his role in the small town’s police department.
John, however, has help from a very non-conventional set of friends. Friends that he must hide as he races to uncover dark truths and protect his quaint coastal community. Friends that could mean the end of his career while a potential killer is still on the loose.

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Short Stories

Fiction

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Publié par	Xlibris US
Date de parution	11 octobre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781669850991
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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MURDER, FISH, AND NORWAY

Glenn EJ Williams

Copyright © 2022 by Glenn EJ Williams.

Library of Congress Control Number:
2022918783
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-5101-1

Softcover
978-1-6698-5100-4

eBook
978-1-6698-5099-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 10/11/2022

Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
847688
CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten

For Mom and Dad
I miss you every day.

Hindsight is used by those with awareness.
Foresight is used by those with wisdom.
Thank you for teaching me to use both!

ONE
I am six years old, and I am SO pissed. Mom took away my stuffies (what I called my stuffed animals), because I talk to them too much. Yeah, DUH, it would be rude not to return polite conversation.
So, when the quack Doctor told her to take them away, yeah, the conversations stopped. I had no friends left and I sat in my room for years drawing superhero’s that are just stick figures and reading fantasy novels instead. Real healthy Doc, thanks a LOT.
Somehow, when they asked me if I “REALLY” hear the stuffed animals talking, my answer, which was, “Don’t you?” caused them to suggest I may have a disorder.
That was 1999.
Turns out, I have a dissociative personality. I don’t lose time or become someone else exactly, but I did have some years where some cool people lived in my head with me. They sort of talked to me through other objects, like, say, stuffed animals.
They didn’t tell me to burn shit or anything like that but, they were my friends and I missed them for years. And then, I stopped taking my meds in 2010. A couple days later, BAM, the band was back together.
Arvind, the smartest person (or stuffed animal) you could ever meet, came back to me one day as my Clayton Kershaw bobble head. He greeted me and was happy to see me. I was shocked, scared, and happy all at once. I cried. I REALLY did. It was not until later that same week when Andrea and Roku also came to visit in the form of my Tick and Arthur action figures.
(Look, if you don’t know who the Tick and Arthur are, you don’t deserve to know. Shame, shame on you.)
That was in my very late teen years.
My besties are all unique. As I would get to know them over the years, the special traits each of them had would become clear. Andrea is an amazing code breaker, puzzle solver. She can literally destroy any magazine crossword puzzle in a minute, whereas Roku has this over-active sense of empathy and awareness. He was always the first to comfort me when I was a child. I think I missed him most during those years of medication and boredom. Of course, I already said that Arvind is the smartest person I know. That is a total understatement by the way!
I’m John. John Thomas Fitch. I am a cop and I live in the central coast of California. A “totally bitchin” town called “Vista Tranquila.” This means, “Quiet View” in English, due to the lack of noise, roads, and the serene ocean we are nestled up to.
It’s all about surf and wine tasting around here. I do neither.
I am the template for an average Caucasian man. I’m roughly five foot ten inches tall, and I weight roughly 180lbs. Most of that is a mix of junk food, whatever muscle I can create by doing ten push-ups a night, well, OK, three times a week anyways and I have a lovely head of puffy brown hair. I have a receding hairline that I call a FIVE-head, as it takes five fingers to touch hair if I line my hand to my brow. I wear decent clothes, if not expensive, certainly not cheap, but I wrap the garbage as best I can in mid-grade style. I am awkward and insane.
About the only interesting this about me is the fact I am an orphan. Both my parents became lost at sea when I was young.
It is assumed that the sailboat they were on, somewhere near Norway, must have capsized in rough weather. The boat and the six passengers were never found. I carry an old picture of them in my padfolio. An old Polaroid of the six doomed passengers right before they left on the trip. My dad loved using old Polaroids, even after the film was hard to find.
Don’t worry, I was crazy BEFORE that happened.
Any questions?
I am a cop. I made detective a few months back. I am one of three we have in this entire region. I feel pretty lucky to have passed the criteria to even be on the police force based on my childhood history. But “officially” that was WAY back when I was a young kid. I got lucky to be in a small town.
Regarding being a detective, truth is, no one else wanted the job. Not much to do.
My issue is that I am not a great detective. I am VERY detail oriented and write SUPER clean reports, I just don’t solve much. I mainly log complaints, do a bunch of follow up and occasionally find some stolen items.
It’s honest work, but I have ZERO instincts. Stuff you cannot teach.
The other two detectives are seasoned pros and do the big stuff. Detective Raines is nearing retirement and many of us wonder if he can find a way to relax and do nothing. He is intense, in an awesome older guy sort of way. Rumor is that he has a six-pack under that suit, and he is over SIXTY!
Kari Skarsgard is a handsome woman with a very calming and pleasing disposition. She is the one that gets people to spill stuff they did before they KNEW they spilled it! At least that is what I hear. I have yet to observe her doing her magic. I think it is the charm she emits due to her slight accent, which sounds to me to be Norwegian. I mean, DUH, “Skarsgard” right! She is also a huge wine enthusiast and knows everyone in this region, or so she says. I think she will make a great mayor someday if half of what she says is true about her knowledge of the area.
Once I got into the force, I had to make sure no funny stuff happened. Meaning, imaginary friends had to go away. As I reached my mid-twenties, it had been years since I heard from them. It was easier to deal with the isolation as an adult as compared to a lonely kid.
Our Monday routine in our small police station is to have a morning briefing, watch Skarsgard put away a maple-bar in three wolfing bites and sort of go over our open task list and do a divide and conquer approach to the week.
I figure Skarsgard is about 38. Not quite 40, but not mid-thirties either. I’d say about 6 years older than I am. I spend too much time wondering if younger guys are her type. I wonder if she even has a type. She literally never talks about personal stuff and never has a date to the wine events. I try to stalk her social media posts and can’t find anything. I mean, NO SOCIAL MEDIA AT ALL! It baffles me to the point of obsession how private she is, and how a 60-YEAR-OLD has a SIX PACK! Again, I am a crap detective.
We have an awesome Salt-Water fish tank in the main bullpen that was donated by the local Chamber of Commerce. One of my primary duties is to feed the three fish that reside in the tank twice a day. The crab gets whatever is on the bottom. Kind of like me.
Donuts, CHECK, Fish, CHECK, File, catalog and generate reports, W-I-P.
Yup, just me laying down the law. Yawn.
------------
When something big happens in the “V-T” everyone knows it. Vista Tranquila is too small a community for anything to go unnoticed. Husbands don’t cheat on wives, unless they are itching to be caught, Wives don’t flirt with the pool-boy and kids don’t usually step too far out of line. It’s just our thing. Being steady but unspectacular. So, when a young woman’s body was found last week. It was major news and very disruptive.
Young woman, in her twenties, sandy blonde hair was found lying in a coastal hillside amongst the tall grass in a meadow area. Local livestock roam and feed in these areas and the staff tending them found her. No signs of injury, she was just lying there dead.
We will know more when the autopsy report comes back, but nothing obvious. Consider that we have no real throughfare and usually bodies are dropped off nearer to a major highway so, it’s not clear that this is a “dead drop”.
The active theory around here is MAYBE a “Spring Waver” come into town and had an overdose. Dropped here by the others at the “party.” It makes it local foul play but not aggravated assault or murder.
When the Spring Wave , as we call it, comes once a year, we get a lot of non-locals come to look at the California Poppies and have some down-time in our beachfront village. It is small but has great food, drinks and wine tasting for a weekend.
We ride the Spring Wave as a local commerce boost and welcome it. Usually, the arrests go up some due to DUI’s and public dis