Stein Stung Read online

  STEIN, STUNG

  HAL ACKERMAN

  A HARRY STEIN SOFT-BOILED MURDER MYSTERY

  a division of F+W Crime

  Dedication

  Love and gratitude to my fierce and lovely warrior, Barbara Poelle. I will never forget your telling me you were reading my manuscript on the subway and laughing out loud. Now look what you’ve gone and done.

  Deep thanks and gratitude to Ben LeRoy and Alison Janssen Dasho for their ongoing belief and support.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  To Orin and Patti Johnson, to the members of the California State Beekeepers Association who shared their stories; and to all the men and women who quietly go about the business of feeding the world.

  This is a work of fiction. But Colony Collapse is real.

  Four years after the bees are gone, humanity is gone.

  ~Albert Einstein

  Prologue

  Ned Peering had his family up and out of their motel room at seven thirty, marching them with good humor to their Range Rover for a day of family fun. He was a man who believed his irrepressible enthusiasm registered as infectious good cheer. Ned’s goal for their Valentine’s Day/MLK Day three-day weekend was to visit or pass through as many California parks and attractions as they possibly could.

  His wife, Barb, a librarian in the Sacramento school district, had grown tolerant of Ned during their nineteen years together. Tolerant was not what she had hoped for when they married. She had wanted something powerful and unforeseen to change her life forever.

  Sanford, their fifteen-year-old son, who was called Skip because he had skipped first and fifth grades, enjoyed family trips. That was not the only social aberration that kept him removed from his peers. He was a repository of answers to questions no one would ever think to ask. (According to the rules for the Olympic Walking Races what is the greatest number of feet a competitor can have off the ground at one time and still be walking?) Like his father, he was wearing a California Angels baseball cap and Bermuda shorts that exposed white hairless legs.

  Sitting alongside Skipper in the back seat, or rather slouched into an impenetrable C-curve, was his sister, Sabrina, seventeen going on twenty. She wore spandex shorts over tights and a leotard. Her body was like a lush rolling meadow that was posted with signs warning that TRESPASSERS WILL BE DISDAINED.

  Ned breezed his family through the redwoods, diagonally secanted across two points on the circumference of Yosemite so he could check that off his list, and began the climb up the eastern side of the Sierras that would carry them down into the San Joaquin Valley. Ned excelled at projecting ETAs, not only for a trip’s final destinations but also for a series of interim checkpoints along the way. He hustled into the parking lot for Mountain Oaks Inn within ninety seconds of his morning projection, exceptional even for him. He glanced hopefully at his wife for a nod of approval, but she was using the side-view mirror to refresh her crimped blond hair.

  There were vacant spots closer to the restaurant but Ned prudently parked in a shady spot under a stand of eucalyptus. His family would be comfortable when they came back to the car. It was one of the many anonymous good things he did for which he sought no acknowledgment.

  The jukebox played country music as they were led to a semicircular booth under a window. The place had a rowdy western feel. Dark wood paneling. Large framed oil paintings of men on horseback in the days. As the Peerings ordered, an eighteen-wheeler maneuvered laboriously into the parking lot. Nothing about it was remarkable. There would have been no reason to notice the stiff-legged gait of the driver as he checked the security of his payload— neatly stacked white wooden boxes, all of uniform size, perhaps two feet by three feet—then made his way across the gravel-strewn parking lot to the café.

  Skip noticed that the truck had South Dakota plates. His mind immediately skipped to its capital, Pierre (pronounced Peer); its exports, wheat and sunflower seeds; and the odd fact that South Dakota bees produced a higher yield of honey per colony than the bees of any other state, including Hawaii. Sabrina noticed the driver was tall with raw, bony shoulders atop a body that once had been leaner. That he walked like a bronco rider who had been thrown a few times too often, and probably gobbled down a handful of Advil in the morning with his black coffee and bourbon. A man who could teach things to a girl she’d regret.

  Their food came, nestled up and down the length of their waitress’s pudgy right arm. Skip was still hungry for breakfast and had ordered bacon and eggs and white toast. Barb felt lunchy and ordered a steak sandwich. Ned surprised everybody by forgoing his usual grilled cheese and tomato and ordering a banana split. Sabrina didn’t care and disdained the cottage cheese and fruit her mother had ordered for her. She flipped through the ten pages of jukebox selections mounted above their table.

  “See anything you like?” Ned asked.

  Her father’s interest instantly sapped hers. “It’s all country,” she said dismissively and stopped looking.

  “Country can be good,” he said, and backed up his claim by referring to the person who just happened at that moment to enter his visual frame. The driver they had seen out in the parking lot must have had gone directly into the bar through a separate entrance. He emerged now into the dining room with a drink in hand, perhaps a little tipsy, or maybe it was just the sudden contrast to the brightness of the room that startled him and made his first step look unsteady. He located his destination and serpentined his way among the bustling waitresses and noisy lunchtime crowd toward the men’s room.

  “I bet this guy likes country,” Ned said in his wide-open, affable voice. “Am I right, Frank?” He read the name stitched above the pocket of the truck driver’s shirt.

  The driver cocked his head to one side and looked down at Ned from his six foot two inch natural height, enhanced by the heels of his engineer boots. “Do I know you?”

  Ned ignored Barb’s warning pressure on his left arm. He knew an invitation to conversation when he heard one. “My name is Ned. I was just telling my family that you probably liked country music.”

  “Is that right, Ned?” Frank looked down at each member of Ned’s family. His gaze did not linger as long on the side of the banquette where the men sat as it did on the other, occupied by the mother and by the daughter, whose acetylene eyes burned behind their asbestos curtain.

  “What makes you think I like country music, Ned, or are you just one clairvoyant sonofabitchin cowboy?”

  “I’m certainly no cowboy,” Ned chuckled, wishing that the fellow had just said yesirree Bob and kept moving. But now he had set his drink down on the leatherette bolster behind Skip’s shoulder. There was a lull in the jukebox music so people at other tables looked around.

  “What else do you know about me?” Frank asked. “That I cheat at cards? That I have a knife in my boot and a hunger for pretty women?”

  Ned may have been the last person in the room to feel the undercurrent, but he fel
t it now and wanted to extricate with honor. “I certainly didn’t intend to be rude,” he assured him.

  “Do you think I like to dance?”

  “We really just want to finish our meals and get to Disneyland. I’m sorry if I gave any offense.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” the driver said, and clapped Ned’s shoulder with a grip that nearly paralyzed his left side. “I do like to dance.” He reached into the right side pocket of his tight blue jeans and spattered some change across the table in Skip’s direction and told him to play E-9. Skip had already memorized the charts.

  “E-9. ‘If I Said You Have a Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me?’”

  Frank’s eyes were drawn to the heat of the partially averted, young, ice blue gaze. But as the whine of the steel guitar penetrated the air it was not her hand that he reached for. “What about your wife, Ned? Does your wife like to dance?” He held all the Peerings in a hypnotic trance. He extended his hand and led Barb from the booth to the center of the floor and held her against his chest so the brim of his hat crested her face like a broken halo. He waltzed her into the middle of the room, elevated her feet onto the tops of his boots. Watching their bodies fold together, Skip thought of Africa and South America.

  ***

  The stunned silence in the aftermath of what happened was as mesmerizing as the event itself had been. The bourbon Frank had poured into Ned’s partially eaten banana split left its bitter reek over the entire booth. Technically, Ned had not been assaulted. He had not been struck. No bandages were needed to stanch the flow of blood. It was more that the bandages he habitually swathed himself in had been stripped away, revealing to the room full of strangers, who would forget soon enough, and to his wife and children, who would forever remember, his true nature. He had watched and done nothing while the stranger danced with his wife. He had silenced his children’s questions with assurances that it was all right. When the music ended, she had walked, unsteadily at first, to the ladies’ room.

  Frank had bowed gallantly to her. He then returned to the bar for another drink before sauntering across the gravel-covered parking lot, his hands tucked into the back pockets of his straight-legged jeans. He didn’t have to look back to know that Sabrina was watching through the window, fixated on his muscular haunches, imagining her hands tucked into his back pockets. He put on a show as if he were mounting his palomino: left foot on the bottom step, grasping the roof like it was a saddle horn and swinging his right leg into the cab. He slammed the door shut. The diesel engine gargled to life. He ground the gears with intent, two unyielding tectonic plates rasping across each other’s surface. He crunched gravel across the lot and blew his air horn as he drove onto the road.

  Only after the last vestige of sounds had receded did Barbara Peering return, her slender body recomposed, her jacket back in place.

  “Are you all right?” Ned asked, daring to seek out her eyes.

  “Am I all right,” she repeated.

  They delayed their departure over the semblance of coffee, giving the driver enough time and distance to avoid another encounter. In the parking lot, the sun had shifted position and the anticipated shade from the eucalyptus trees was gone. The interior of their Rover was a kiln. Sabrina complained that they needed the air conditioner.

  “Not going uphill,” her mother said, keeping in place their rules of the road even if everything else had been shattered.

  “It’s okay,” Ned murmured. He reached for the dial. His fingers briefly met hers at the dashboard, where he let them linger to assess whether the current in her hand carried solace or repulsion. Reaching the summit of the eastern crest, an ovation of sunlight bathed the expanse of the San Joaquin Valley below them.

  “San Joaquin was the father of the Virgin Mary,” Skip informed everyone.

  The vista of farms under cultivation was marred only by a mysterious dark, palpitating cloud that gyrated and changed shape below and ahead. From their angle and altitude, perspective played tricks with the eye. The phenomenon could have been small and nearby or a distant monumental cataclysm. Skip grasped the back of his mother’s seat for leverage and pulled himself forward for a better look. The dark cloud hovered in place, then thinned into a long chain, rose up, gained altitude, broadened, flattened, expanded into a long streak of black lightning, then disappeared, as if the entire elaborate display had been a stage effect or hallucination.

  Ned took each of the next three hairpin turns with emboldened speed, bearing into the turns like he had a sports car under him rather than a top-heavy vehicle with a propensity for rollovers. “Evel Knievel,” said Barb. She had not looked at Ned since the incident.

  He murmured a mild protest about being behind schedule, but he slowed down to an obedient twenty. Sabrina slumped deeper into her seat, sensing that the diminished speed meant more time spent with these people. It was from this angle that she glimpsed down through the tree line to where the road emerged below after its next curve. “Shit!” she exclaimed.

  The Rover skidded to a long sliding stop thirty feet from what looked like a felled brontosaurus splayed across the road. Twin geysers of diesel smoke billowed up from the eighteen-wheeler’s engine and exhaust. The four hundred white boxes that had been tied down and packed with such precision now lay strewn and broken across the road. The four doors of the family’s Range Rover opened in cautious unison. The rear guard advanced first. Ned cautioned the children about going any closer but his authority was gone. They went forward, outflanking their father’s extended arms.

  The truck’s cab had separated from the rig and was bent over on its side as though felled by a ferocious beast. Out of the open window, resting on its lower frame, ready to be guillotined, the neck of the driver hung at an impossible angle. The expression on his face, which had been so fiendishly cocky when he summoned Ned’s wife, was now distended beyond recognition. His cheeks were four times their normal size. His forehead bulged off its cranium. His eyes were ghastly, and open.

  It was the ice queen who lost her cool. Sabrina watched with grossed-out disgust as an orange and black striped body crawled feebly out of Frank’s open mouth. “Eeewww. It’s a bee,” she said, and drew back.

  “Honey bee,” her brother verified. “Apis mellifera.”

  It beat its wings twice, toppled in a vain attempt to fly, tried one more time, and fell motionless on Frank’s cheek, corpse on corpse. An electronic hum began to fill the air. So transfixed were the foursome that it took several moments of the sound’s approach before they noticed and looked up. At first nothing was visible. It sounded as though police helicopters were approaching from just over the other side of the mountain. And then the sky darkened.

  Ned stampeded his family to the car. Sabrina stumbled and slipped to the hard ground. Her brother did not stop to help. Her father lifted her to her feet and carried her to safety. He remained a sentry until his wife and children were safely inside. The shadow descended from the sky like a pterodactyl, then partitioned into a hundred parts, a horrifically beautiful still life of hanging clusters.

  Before he could reach his door, the first swarm settled on Ned’s back. He felt its vibrating weight like a rear-mounted engine. The next one wound itself slowly around his right leg. He stood without moving. Inside the car his horrified family watched the spectacle. His other leg was now covered as well. Excruciatingly slowly he reached out his arm, indicating for them to shut the one remaining open door. His outstretched arm was surrounded. Then the other. Sabrina whimpered. “What are they doing to Daddy?”

  “Bees go crazy for bananas,” Skip replied. “He had that banana split.”

  The soft scarf of organic life revolved itself upward now around Ned’s chest, then higher until it covered his throat, his mouth, his eyes, and totally encased him. Inside the whirling darkness the buzzing filled his senses. It went beyond hearing. His body became a tuning fork in sympathetic vibration with the universe. He felt an eerie nostalgic ecstasy, as though he had been here be
fore. And then nothing.

  Chapter One

  Bliss.

  Stein scrunched his hips deeper into the lush foam pad cushion of Lila’s chaise to catch the full warmth of the sun. Through the glorious heydays of his youth, Stein and his merry band of miscreants dedicated their lives to the disruption of the lives of the privileged and contented. But experiencing it firsthand was a whole other deal. While February acted out its Napoleon complex on the rest of the world, making up for being the shortest month by punishing it with marrow-crunching cold, it was seventy-seven degrees with clear skies here in Beverly Hills.

  Maybe it was getting past fifty, as none of Stein’s male antecedents had done. Maybe it was having security for the first time in his life. Maybe it was the mellow Santa Anas blowing off the desert, not hot and crazy like they did in October, but with a warm glow so it felt like you were having your five-minute audience with God and he’d grant you any reasonable request.

  Look where he was! Lord of the Lila manor, the two-story home her husband had left to her, in what she called the “slums” of Beverly Hills, south of Wilshire. Three thousand square feet. The pool that she kept heated all year long. The Jacuzzi. Her Guamese housekeeper, Mercedes. For him, the luxury was still more an amusing novelty than anything he really cared about or needed. He still refused air-conditioning and microwave ovens and his car had crank windows. The selling point was that Stein’s sixteen-year-old daughter Angie was happy here. It was not only that her room was twice the size of her room at Stein’s old apartment and she was exempted from a fair number of upkeep chores. There was stability. During the six years of joint custody spending equal time with both parents, Angie always referred to Stein’s apartment as “Dad’s place.” After six months at Lila’s house, she was calling it home.

  Lila was great with her. Lila never had children of her own, though she had raised her husband’s from ages six and eight into their early adolescence when he got pulled down by cancer. Angie was like a new electronic gadget to Lila, a crazy, delightful, unmanageable surprise every time she pressed a button.