Reformed criminal Julia Kalas travels from small-town Texas to Mexico on the trail of a missing persons case in the second installment in this atmospheric, critically-acclaimed series Julia Kalas has found a place for herself in small-town Texas. After being forced to relocate by the Aryan Brotherhood and witness protection, she's working on getting her budding construction business off the ground. But her newfound status as a sometimes-problem solver doesn't stop local cops from giving her the hairy eyeball when a dead body is found stuffed in the upstairs closet of her latest remodeling project.
Not up for another game of pin-the-tail-on-the-murder-suspect, Julia takes private detective John Maines up on an offer of employment working a missing persons case at the Texas-Mexico border. The fat check he dangles in front of her as payment will be enough to set her up in comfortable retirement far away from the tiny Texas backwater, which suits Julia just fine.
However, fate, as usual, has other plans for her. In South Texas, Julia learns that the dead man in her closet has been identified and that a warrant has been issued for her arrest. As she tangles with Mexican drug lords, shady surgeons, and a gang of Native American women with an axe to grind, she can't ignore the sinking feeling that things are about to get a hell of a lot worse before they get better.
South of Nowhere is the action-packed follow up to Minerva Koenig's original and thrilling debut, featuring an intriguing mystery and a gutsy heroine mystery fans will love.
Release date:
February 2, 2016
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
304
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“He’s been dead awhile,” Liz Harman said, rocking back off her knees to open the field case she’d set next to her on the scarred wood floor.
The doctor, who also served as the coroner in this tiny little Texas backwater, wasn’t telling me and Benny Ramirez, Azula’s newly minted chief of police, anything we didn’t already know. The parts of the body sticking out of the red bedsheet it was wrapped in looked like beef jerky.
Liz reached into her case, withdrew a thermometer, and leaned back down into the coffin-sized hole in the floor where the dead guy lay. I’d found it while ripping out some old linoleum in the wreck of a farmhouse I’d bought last year. I shouldn’t have been working on the place, since I didn’t legally own it yet, but my life had been feeling out of control lately, and the only fix I know for that is to tear up some vintage real estate and then put it back together again. I’ve found everything from mummified rodents to meteor fragments in the course of that therapy, but this was a first.
The hole had been covered with well-fitted, loose wood planks instead of the longleaf pine flooring that was typical in the rest of the house. The planks were easy to lift, and I’d done it, to see what was underneath: an old heating chase, full of dead guy.
Liz snapped on some latex gloves and motioned to Page, her young goateed assistant. Benny got hold of my elbow, dragging me back a few steps. “Are you for real?”
I gave him my best what-the-fuck look, but he didn’t blink, so I said, “You know who I bought the place from, right?”
He didn’t say, “The broad who tried to slit your throat last winter?” because we’d both been up to our ears in all of that. Instead, he just grunted and glanced toward the two medicos. “Any guesses on cause, Doc?”
“The man’s a raisin,” Liz snorted, with her characteristic gruffness. “He’s got some holes in him, but there’s no way to tell from what until I get him back to the shop and look under the hood.”
Through the wavy old glass in the tall windows, I gazed down the long slope to the river at the south edge of my future property. Neffa Roberts and her father, Lavon, were out in their vegetable patch up the other side, eyes shaded in our direction. Cop cars and ambulances were rare beasts out here.
“I’ve got to go up to Gatesville this afternoon to finish up some real-estate paperwork with Connie,” I told Benny. “Want me to ask her if she killed the guy?”
“We don’t know that anybody killed him yet,” he said, lowering his head to look at me from under his thick black brows, “and you oughta be hoping it stays that way.”
I opened my mouth, but he didn’t slow down. “This is the second dead body you’ve stumbled across in less than a year.”
“I wasn’t responsible for the first one, either, if you’ll recall.”
That shut him up. He looked away, adjusting his equipment-swollen gun belt with the insides of his wrists, like James Cagney. “You going up there by yourself?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
His eyes dropped to my left shoulder, where Connie had stuck the knife in. “It’s just weird.”
Most people don’t maintain a friendship with their would-be killer, so I could see where he was coming from, but the remark irked me. “She didn’t know what she was doing, Benny.”
“The shrinks said she was sane.”
“Sane’s a relative term.”
Liz got up and came over to us, stripping off her gloves. “My best guess on time of death is more than three months ago, but less than six. That’s about as close as I can get right now.”
Benny scratched his ear, peering at her. She gave him an annoyed look and said, “I assume you want it on the front burner, as usual.”
Page had spread a body bag on the floor, and now Benny stepped over to help him haul the corpse out of the hole next to it. The back of my neck started to crawl, and then came that familiar lurch of high, cool nothingness, and my mind turned off like someone blowing out a match.
My gut has always run several lengths ahead of my conscious thought process, so I’m used to a certain level of intellectual vacancy, but this was different, and it had been happening more and more often since the events of last winter. The brain wasn’t even loading into the starting gates anymore. Not all the time, but often enough that I was getting used to people looking at me funny. In addition, a recurring feeling of suffocation was waking me every morning; a sensation of pushing something wet and heavy off me so that I could float up into wakefulness. It felt like I was doing my thrice-weekly weight-training workout with my brain as well as my body.
When my gray matter came back online, everybody had changed places: Benny and Page clomping across the downstairs porch, Liz at the door on the other side of the room, watching me with a question on her face.
Not anxious to find out what it was, I stepped out into the big central hallway and shut the bedroom door. Little puffs of paint dust huffed out around the door frame, and I pulled the musty odor in, lead be damned. Nothing smells like an old house. If I could bottle it, I’d wear it as perfume.
Liz fell in behind me as I started down the stairs and said, “Have you been out to see Dr. Conroy yet?”
Liz Harman’s “crusty old country doctor” act—a bit of a stretch for someone probably in her mid-fifties—hid a terminal case of motherly concern, which manifested itself in frequent bouts of unsolicited advice to her patients about stuff that was none of her business. My mental health had been at the top of that list for months now, and it was getting old.
“Do you get a kickback for referrals or something?” I cracked at her over my shoulder.
She chuckled, but when we got to the bottom of the stairs, she still hadn’t taken the hint.
“Look, whatever’s going on with you isn’t going to get better on its own, and it might be real simple to fix. You’re not going to end up in a padded cell, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“I’m fine,” I said, letting some of my annoyance show now.
“You’re not fine,” she replied, with surprising alacrity, “but you’re not irrational, so I don’t understand why you keep resisting treatment.”
Because I’d done my eight rounds with the head-shrinking profession when I’d been drafted into the U.S. Federal Witness Security Program three years ago, the prospect of a rematch was about as repulsive an idea as any I could think of. The inside of my head was no place for strangers, no matter how weird it was getting.
There wasn’t any point anyway; I was pretty sure I’d have to tell the truth about my life history to get anything out of psychiatry, which meant letting someone in on who I really was. Now that I was no longer under WITSEC’s wing, having been unceremoniously kicked out after my keeper had turned up dead under mysterious circumstances the previous November, that was information I couldn’t afford anyone else to get. Not even a professional who promised confidentiality. That’s how I’d gotten into my current situation.
A weary anger prickled across my shoulders. I was so tired of this worn little paranoid crevice between rock and hard place. The house and my burgeoning construction business helped a little—they kept my attention occupied enough that I didn’t fall off a psychic cliff every fifteen minutes—so that’s what I focused on. There was enough crumbling architecture in Azula to keep me off the shrink’s couch indefinitely, if I could just manage to find some buildings without dead people in them.
I stepped out onto the long front porch and waited for Liz to follow suit before closing and locking the door. She headed for her county-issued Pontiac, and the ambulance started down the long caliche driveway.
“You coming?” the doctor asked, pausing at her car.
“Yeah, in a little bit.”
She hesitated for only a fraction of a second before getting in, but that was enough to set off my preternaturally sensitive internal radar. I thought about it as I walked to my truck, questioning, as I always did now, whether the alarm was legitimate or if Liz had just inadvertently stepped on something sensitive but meaningless. Having to second-guess an instinct I’d been able to trust completely in the past was a pain in the ass, but I’d been scared straight by my near-death experience the previous winter. Maybe my self-doubt was an improvement. Who knows how many times I’d been wrong before and not known it?
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