Scatman Dues (Freaky Florida Mystery Adventures Book 6) Read online

  Scatman Dues

  Freaky Florida Mystery Adventure, Volume 6

  Margaret Lashley

  Published by Zazzy Ideas, Inc., 2021.

  Copyright

  Copyright 2021 Margaret Lashley

  MargaretLashley.com

  Cover Design by Melinda de Ross

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For more information, write to: Zazzy Ideas, Inc. P.O. Box 1113, St. Petersburg, FL 33731

  This book is a work of fiction. While actual places throughout Florida have been used in this book, any resemblance to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, the names of places have been altered.

  What Readers are Saying about Freaky Florida Mystery Adventures...

  “The story lines are crazy, and all you want is more!”

  “Hilarious, weird and entertaining.”

  “The X-Files has found its funny bone!”

  “I read a lot, and Kindle suggested your book. This book is laugh out loud funny. Is everyone in Florida crazy?”

  “I have read Tim Dorsey, Carl Hiaasen, and Randy Wayne White. Those writers are funny but they need to watch out for you.”

  “Not too many writers can make me laugh out loud, but Margaret Lashley is now officially on my short list of favorite laugh-out-loud authors. With witty sarcasm and stupid odd characters who make it so easy, I’m an official new fan.”

  "A funny cozy, science fiction, thriller, mystery all rolled into one great story!"

  "I read the whole book in two days, something I’ve never done before! I just couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen next!"

  Dedication

  In loving memory of Randall James Hamilton Zwinge, better known as The Amazing Randi. 1928-2020.

  I hope you were wrong about life after death—and a couple of other things.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  What Readers are Saying about Freaky Florida Mystery Adventures...

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  More Freaky Florida Mysteries

  About the Author

  Prologue

  I’m Bobbie Drex, and I have a confession to make.

  Becoming a private investigator wasn’t exactly a profession I chose. At least, not intentionally—and certainly not while in complete control of my faculties.

  If you want to know the truth, I’d been knee-deep in a vodka bottle when I’d ordered an online P.I. training course from a cheesy, late-night infomercial. I’d been even more out of my mind the next morning, when I’d sobered up and discovered the credit-card charges were non-refundable.

  Fueled by frustration, stubbornness, and an inability to throw away hard-earned cash, I’d gone ahead and completed the course. I’d figured what the hell—it might’ve come in handy for my glamorous job as a part-time mall cop.

  As it turned out, I never got the chance to find out.

  A few days later, a ricochet bullet popped me in the forehead, putting an end to my glorious security-patrol gig. I’d returned home from the hospital with my head shaved, my health insurance cancelled, and my family’s auto repair business in the crapper.

  Awesome.

  The only bright spot had been finding my training course certificate in the mailbox. But after reading the fine print, that bright spot had turned as dark and unwelcome as a suspicious mole.

  I’d discovered that, in and of itself, my new “Private Investigator Intern Certificate” was barely worth the paper it was printed on. In order to become a full-fledged Florida private eye, I’d also have to complete two years of on-the-job training with a licensed investigator.

  (Insert expletive of your choice here.)

  Anyway, I was wadding up the stupid certificate and hurling it into the bin when something even more aggravating happened.

  An oddball named Nick Grayson showed up at my door.

  The mysterious, green-eyed stranger sported a vintage fedora and a shiny private-eye badge—and he was on the hunt for two things.

  One was repairs to his ratty old RV. The other was ... uh ... Mothman.

  And he’d wanted my help with both.

  At the time, I couldn’t tell if Grayson was a gift from the Universe or another sick joke at my expense. But back then, my life was so deep in the dumpster I’d decided to take him up on his offer.

  I’d joined his weird crusade tracking down cryptids for cash.

  As Grayson’s P.I. intern, I’ve spent the past seven months roaming the dirty backwaters of the Sunshine State in a rundown
Winnebago—with a guy whose own human pedigree was as sketchy as the creatures we investigate.

  If all that weren’t bad enough, we operate our research deep within the stomping grounds of Florida Man—where it’s doubly hard to tell a monster from a maniac.

  Sometimes, it’s darn-near impossible.

  They say hindsight is 2020. Well, let me tell you what. That infamous year’s got nothing on the unbelievable crap that’s gone down since I climbed aboard Grayson’s magical mystery motorhome.

  Little did I realize, I hadn’t seen anything yet ...

  Chapter One

  I cracked open a sleepy eye and groaned. It was official. I was the only grown-ass woman in the entire universe who was “sleeping” with her boss—literally.

  As in, “snoring-in-your-face, no-sexy-time” literally.

  Worse yet, I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  Ever since my big lug of a cousin came and wrecked the sofa-bed I usually slept on, I’d been forced to share the queen-sized bed in the back of the RV with my irritatingly handsome boss and partner, Nick Grayson.

  My cousin Earl had headed back to Point Paradise a week ago. He’d left me with a mangled mattress and a horrible headache. While the headache came and went, the ruined sofa persisted. Unfortunately, so did Grayson’s fixation on using me to fine-tune his weird brainwave monitoring device.

  According to my mad-scientist partner, Grayson’s modified EEG machine was supposed to measure my brain’s alpha-wave activity in response to threatening stimuli. What that meant for me was regular sessions of having my skull plastered to the contraption via electrodes, then having my eyes blasted with images designed to scare the living crap out of me.

  I mean, how lucky can one girl get?

  Believe it or not, there was actually a method to Grayson’s madness. Through sheer willpower and deep-breathing techniques, I was supposed to learn to override my instinctual flight-or-flight responses and remain calm in the face of fear. The higher my alpha waves remained on his monitor, the better I was doing.

  Fun times...

  Besides learning how to not freak out in the face of carnivorous cryptids and cantankerous crazies, as part of my internship Grayson was also instructing me on ways to deflect unforeseen attacks by vile, blood-sucking creatures.

  Not that I needed the practice.

  After swimming in the deep end of Florida’s dating pool for the past two decades, I’d joined his team fully equipped with my own armor-plated life raft—and an arsenal of moves that could blow an entire army of despicable, handsy parasites clean out of the water.

  But as for Grayson himself, he hadn’t once tried to put the moves on me.

  It was a fact that both duly impressed me and annoyed the living hell out of me. Was he being a gentleman? Or—horror of horrors—was he just not that into me? The man was a master of mixed signals. But then again, I wasn’t sure if I wanted him myself.

  Mainly because I wasn’t totally convinced Grayson was a card-carrying member of the Homo sapiens genepool.

  You see, during the two weeks we’d become unintentional bedmates, the closest thing to a romantic gesture I’d witnessed from Grayson was when he’d gone and cleaned the toilet without me asking.

  As a bona fide Earth woman, that action alone had been enough to make me question whether Grayson was a real human male, or some kind of mutant clone.

  Not that I didn’t already have enough reasons to be suspicious about the guy. Given Grayson’s strange diet, encyclopedic vocabulary, and secondary bellybutton, I had some pretty serious doubts about his family tree. Was the weirdo a mere mortal? Or was he some lost, alien life form trying desperately to find a payphone to call home?

  I sat up in bed and glanced over at Grayson’s empty side of the bed.

  Here I am, about to turn 38, bunking with a mild-mannered Martian hiding behind a Freddie Mercury moustache. Not exactly a situation designed to send a girl over the moon...

  I sighed and scratched my cheek. Half of me was dying to find out the truth about Grayson. The other half of me was worried about dying if I found out.

  Still, there was a chemistry between us that was undeniable.

  We just had to perfect the formula.

  I ROLLED OUT OF BED and padded barefoot to the main cabin of the old Winnebago Grayson and I traveled in together. As usual, my bedmate and boss was wide awake—annoyingly alert and neatly dressed in his perennial uniform of black T-shirt, black jeans, and black boots.

  Perched in his favorite spot at the small banquette booth across from the kitchen, Grayson’s short-cropped dark hair matched his moustache. His face was ruggedly handsome. And he had the kind of wiry body that comes from intense focus on something other than food. As usual, that focus was now being directed to the only thing more annoying than his apparent prime directive of lifelong celibacy—

  —that stupid EEG brainwave machine of his.

  “Ah. You’re awake,” Grayson said, never looking up from his precious contraption. He fiddled with a few knobs on the device, making the needles on the monitors jerk around like a Richter scale in an apocalypse.

  “If you want to call it that,” I quipped.

  “You’re just in time,” he said, ignoring my comment.

  A frown pinched the corners of my mouth. I scrounged in the kitchen cupboard for a clean coffee cup. “Just in time for what?”

  “To test my theory.”

  I shot Grayson some caffeine-deprived side-eye and poured myself a cup of coffee from the carafe on the stove.

  “Theory?” I asked, then took a life-giving sip.

  “Yes.” Grayson finally looked up from fiddling with the monitor. “Drex, you’ve been displaying unusually high alpha waves on the last few tests. I’m trying to determine if this means my program is truly desensitizing you to strange phenomena, or if the test itself is influencing the results.”

  I groaned. “Grayson, if you don’t let me drink this coffee in peace, I’ll be determining the results of your lifespan.”

  Grayson’s eyebrow formed a Spock-like triangle. “Duly noted.”

  I ripped open a package of Pop-Tarts with my teeth and slammed them into the toaster. As I waited for them to heat up into warm, life-saving rectangles of blueberry-flavored salvation, my curiosity got the better of me.

  I turned and stared at Grayson. “What did you mean when you said the EEG test itself could be influencing my results?”

  Grayson’s cat-like, green eyes locked on mine. “Non-objective anticipatory response, of course.”

  I stifled another groan. I should’ve been used to this by now. “More human-like speak, please, robot man.”

  Grayson studied me for a moment, then winced slightly when I took a savage bite of Pop-Tart.

  “I merely meant that your anticipation of viewing shocking images on the test program could be subconsciously tempering your response,” he said. “Your expectations could be putting you into a sort of ‘prepared state,’ thus influencing your reactions to the images themselves.”

  I sucked blueberry goo from my front teeth. “It’s seven a.m., for crying out loud. Could you dial down the Mr. Science spiel one more notch?”

  Grayson chewed his bottom lip for a moment, studying me as if I had white fur and whiskers. “How’s this?” he said. “You know what’s coming, so you mentally brace for it.”

  “Ah,” I said, and flopped down across from him at the banquette. “Forewarned is forearmed.”

  “Exactly.”

  Grayson’s cheek dimpled. It was the only way I could tell he was smiling, because his lips were perpetually obscured by a bushy black moustache that looked like the mothership that had delivered his bushy, shuttlecraft eyebrows.

  He curled his long fingers around his coffee mug. “This ‘mental preparation’ could be skewing your alpha-wave results to a falsely high level.”

  I sighed. “Or, it could mean I’m finally getting the hang of dealing with otherworldly creeps.�
��

  “Hmm.” Grayson rubbed his chin. “I suppose that’s one of the other possibilities.”

  “One?” I set my coffee cup down and tried to gather pertinent facts from my groggy brain for my rebuttal dissertation, but got sidetracked. A manila folder was tucked under Grayson’s laptop. The edge sticking out had the words Experiment #5 written on it.

  I frowned at the folder suspiciously. “Okay. What other possibilities are there?”

  Grayson shrugged. “Quite a few, actually. Elevated alpha waves could be a causal symptom of the vestigial twin lodged in the center of your brain.”

  I sat back, surprised. “You think my twin has something to do with my high alpha waves?” I shook my head. “Sure. Why give me any credit?”

  “Drex, I’m merely stating that the mass could be exerting pressure on your pineal gland, inducing a feeling of bliss.”

  “Bliss?” I laughed jadedly as an image flashed in my mind from a week ago. I’d been yanking the spikey legs off cicadas for a casserole at a Duck Dynasty bug barbeque.

  “Well, Grayson, whatever ‘bliss’ I feel sure isn’t coming from job satisfaction.”

  Grayson locked eyes with me. “The bliss I’m talking about would be totally unassociated with your current reality.”

  I smirked. “It’d have to be.”

  I jabbed a finger at the folder peeking out from beneath his laptop. “What’s experiment number five?”

  Grayson covered the label with his hand, then studied me for a moment. “That’s on a need-to-know basis, Drex.”

  Frustration shot an arrow directly into my temple. “Come on, Grayson! I thought we were supposed to trust each other!”

  Grayson cocked his head and raised an eyebrow at me. “Is that why you broke into my locked cabinet last week?”

  I winced. “I already apologized for that. Besides, Earl did it first.”

  Grayson eyed me coolly. “If Earl jumped off a bridge—”

  “Fine!” I blurted. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry.”

  Grayson looked down his nose at me. “Apology accepted.”