Circling the Runway
by J.L. Abramo
on Tour April 20th - May 31st, 2015
Synopsis:
Private Investigator Jacob Diamond and San Francisco Detective Sergeant Roxton Johnson are famous for not getting along. Cats and dogs. Oil and water. Liston and Ali. Jake and Rocky.
When an assistant district attorney is murdered in his high-rise apartment building, and Johnson suspects his lieutenant may have something to do with it, he can think of no one else to turn to for help—no one he can trust except Jake Diamond.
If the mismatched duo can avoid stepping on each other’s toes long enough—they may be able to stop circling the runway and land on the villain’s doorstep. Lieutenant Laura Lopez, Detective Ray Boyle, Joey Clams, Vinnie Strings and Darlene Roman are all back in the first new Jake Diamond escapade since Counting to Infinity.
Book Details:
Genre: Mystery PI
Published by: Down & Out Books
Publication Date: April 19, 2015
Number of Pages: 260
ISBN: 978-1937495879
Series: Jake Diamond Mysteries, Book 4
Purchase Links:
Read an excerpt:
ONE
James Bingham stood at the curb in front of the high-rise residence, talking with the taxi driver who had dropped off the occupant of apartment 3501 a few minutes earlier. Bingham was inquiring into the availability of deeply discounted cartons of cigarettes. The cab driver assured Bingham he would hook him up that weekend.
Bingham walked back into the lobby as the cab pulled away.
As James Bingham approached the security desk he heard footsteps approaching from behind. Before Bingham could turn to the sound, his head was clamped between two large hands and with the twist of two powerful wrists Bingham was dead.
The woman opened the door leading from the stairwell to the thirty-fifth floor apartments only wide enough to see the hallway in both directions. Finding the hallway deserted, she pushed the door open just enough to slip through. She moved down the hall to the right and stopped in front of the door marked 3501. She pulled a plain white letter-sized envelope from the pocket of her coat and slipped it under the door. She returned to the stairwell doorway, passed through it and started down the stairs. She looked at her wristwatch—it was twenty-six minutes after midnight. She walked down to the thirty-second floor and took the elevator to the lobby. She glanced out of the elevator door. The security guard station was still unoccupied. She quickly exited, nearly colliding with a man walking a dog in front of the building.
The dog walker, Ethan Lloyd, would later say he saw a woman wearing a long blue coat at nearly half-past twelve, alone, sporting sunglasses. A blue scarf wrapped around her head. Ethan considered the coat unnecessarily heavy for such a mild evening, thought the dark glasses were oddly inappropriate for the time of night, and added that the scarf did a very good job of hiding her face and hair. He watched the woman as she moved away from the building along Third Street. Lloyd lost sight of her heading north toward Market Street.
Ethan Lloyd entered the building wondering, as he had wondered going out less than twenty minutes earlier, why James Bingham, the lobby doorman, was not at his post.
Bingham was actually there, but Ethan Lloyd could not see him. James was on the floor, hidden behind the large desk with a broken neck.
The man who had unceremoniously snapped James Bingham’s neck moved to the door of apartment 3501 and he used a key to enter. Less than three minutes later he was about to open the apartment door to leave when he saw a white envelope slide under the door. He stood perfectly still. He heard footsteps moving away from the door and he heard the stairwell door close. He waited a full fifteen minutes before leaving and, as instructed, used a shoe found in a hall closet to keep the door from shutting completely.
The man left the building through the parking garage and he walked calmly down Third Street to Howard Street. Before reaching the intersection of Third and Hawthorne, just beyond the Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, the passenger door of a parked Cadillac opened to the sidewalk and he was invited by the driver to get in.
“Well?” the driver asked.
“Done deal,” Sal DiMarco answered.
“Did you ditch the key?”
“I did.”
F*** me, Sal thought—remembering he had forgotten to ditch the key.
He carefully slipped the apartment key from his pocket and dropped it under the seat of the Cadillac while the driver was occupied watching for an opening in the busy street traffic.
“Any problems?”
“A bit of collateral damage, no worries.”
“Tell me about it,” the driver said as he pulled away from the curb.
The woman in blue continued walking up Third Street to Market Street, crossed Market to O’Farrell Street, went west to Powell Street and circled back down to Market.
The woman disappeared down into the Powell Street BART Station.
At half-past midnight the raucous crowd at Johnny Foley’s Irish Pub and Restaurant was so deafening that Tom Romano, Ira Fennessy and Jake Diamond had to escape. They clawed their way out onto O’Farrell Street heading for the Powell Street BART Station one block away to grab a taxi.
“Did you see that woman?” asked Ira, as they crawled into a cab.
“What woman?” Tom asked.
“Going down into the station. Did you see her, Jake?”
“I can’t see anything, Ira. What about her?”
“She was all in blue.”
“And...”
“Should have been green, don’t you think.”
“I can’t think,” Diamond said.
“Where to?” asked the cabbie.
“O’Reilly’s Bar, Green Street, North Beach,” Ira answered.
“Jesus, Ira, have a heart,” Jake pleaded. “Let’s end this nightmare.”
“Not until the fat lady sings Danny Boy.”
“God forgive us,” said Diamond. “We should have played pinochle.”
“Anyone in the market for cheap cigarettes?” the taxi driver asked as he pointed the cab toward Broadway.
Benny Carlucci stumbled out of The Chieftain Irish Pub on Third and Howard Streets. Carlucci was asked to leave—not very politely. He found himself out on the street alone. He tried to remember if he had arrived with anyone, but soon gave up trying.
He walked west on Howard Street toward Fourth, passing the Moscone Center on his left and the Metreon to his right. Benny walked down Fourth toward the train station at King Street. He spotted a black Cadillac parked halfway up on the sidewalk between Harrison and Bryant under the Highway 80 overpass.
There was definitely something not right about that car in that place at that time.
Benny was a curious kid. The vehicle stimulated his interest.
Carlucci casually approached the Cadillac, looking up and down Fourth Street as he moved. Other than what appeared to be three teenage boys horsing around a few streets down toward the train station, the area was deserted.
Benny expected to find another drunk, like so many others running and falling all over town—this one most likely passed out cold behind the wheel of the big car. Carlucci peered into the passenger door window. The vehicle was unoccupied and the keys dangled from the ignition. He quickly surveyed the street once again and tried the door. It was unlocked. Carlucci pulled it open and slipped into the driver’s seat. He was thinking a ride home in a Coupe de Ville would beat the hell out of a long drunken trip on the train and then a bus ride from the train station to his place on Cole Street off Fulton. The car started with the first turn of the key. Carlucci turned left onto Bryant Street, turned up Third one block to Harrison, then Harrison onto Ninth Street heading toward Market. Market onto Hayes onto Franklin to Fulton Street and Benny Carlucci was on his way home in style.
The police cruiser, siren blaring, pulled Carlucci over at Masonic Avenue, across from the University of San Francisco, just three short blocks from Benny’s apartment.
The attractive woman who came out of the Civic Center BART station had little resemblance to the woman who had walked down into the Powell Street station twenty minutes earlier. Gone were the dark glasses. Also gone were the heavy blue coat and the blue scarf, replaced by an emerald green two-piece jogging suit and a mane of strawberry blond hair tied back with a green elastic terrycloth band. The .38 caliber Smith and Wesson was now strapped around her ankle.
Once above ground, on Hyde across from the plaza, she jogged in place for a minute before starting up McAllister to the Civic Center Parking Garage. She picked up her car and drove out Geary Boulevard to 25th and then up Lincoln Boulevard to Baker Beach for a solitary run in the sand.
Just before one in the morning, Blake Sanchez stood at a dark street corner in Oakland and watched as one of his least favorite neighbors moved the doormat on his porch and lifted a loose board. Sanchez saw the man place something through the opening and under the porch and then replace the board and the mat before entering the house.
Sanchez took another deep pull off his dope pipe and made a mental note.
What I don’t know would fill a book. What I didn’t know about her could fill a library. It felt as if I was getting closer to her, but it was like looking into a fun-house mirror. She had constructed so many layers of self-deception, she could deflect a jackhammer. I had no idea what she wanted and I convinced myself I didn’t care. It was not an attraction based on the intellectual or the spiritual. It was nothing logical, just biological. The sex wasn’t all that great, come to think of it—and I was thinking about it too often. I thought I was in love with her long after I was sure I didn’t like her. If she had any idea about what she wanted, she kept it a deep dark secret from herself. At first I saw something in her, honesty, selflessness—something she couldn’t see, because it was never really there.
“What do you think?”
“About what?” asked Ira Fennessy.
“I wrote that,” Tom Romano said, sitting between Jake and Ira in the back seat of the taxicab, holding a tattered sheet of paper in his hand.
“Why would you write something like that?” Ira asked.
Jake decided to stay out of it. His head felt the size of the Trans America Pyramid, point and all.
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “For fun I guess.”
The taxi pulled up in front of O’Reilly’s to let them out. The insane crowd was spilling out onto Green Street.
“You have no idea what fun is,” Ira said, “but you are about to find out.”
Jake wanted to protest. He desperately wanted to say something, anything that might rescue them.
But he couldn’t get his tongue to work.
“I liked what you wrote,” said the cab driver as they piled out of the taxi to join the mob.
It was well past midnight, a new day—but it was still St. Patrick’s Day in San Francisco.
James Bingham stood at the curb in front of the high-rise residence, talking with the taxi driver who had dropped off the occupant of apartment 3501 a few minutes earlier. Bingham was inquiring into the availability of deeply discounted cartons of cigarettes. The cab driver assured Bingham he would hook him up that weekend.
Bingham walked back into the lobby as the cab pulled away.
As James Bingham approached the security desk he heard footsteps approaching from behind. Before Bingham could turn to the sound, his head was clamped between two large hands and with the twist of two powerful wrists Bingham was dead.
The woman opened the door leading from the stairwell to the thirty-fifth floor apartments only wide enough to see the hallway in both directions. Finding the hallway deserted, she pushed the door open just enough to slip through. She moved down the hall to the right and stopped in front of the door marked 3501. She pulled a plain white letter-sized envelope from the pocket of her coat and slipped it under the door. She returned to the stairwell doorway, passed through it and started down the stairs. She looked at her wristwatch—it was twenty-six minutes after midnight. She walked down to the thirty-second floor and took the elevator to the lobby. She glanced out of the elevator door. The security guard station was still unoccupied. She quickly exited, nearly colliding with a man walking a dog in front of the building.
The dog walker, Ethan Lloyd, would later say he saw a woman wearing a long blue coat at nearly half-past twelve, alone, sporting sunglasses. A blue scarf wrapped around her head. Ethan considered the coat unnecessarily heavy for such a mild evening, thought the dark glasses were oddly inappropriate for the time of night, and added that the scarf did a very good job of hiding her face and hair. He watched the woman as she moved away from the building along Third Street. Lloyd lost sight of her heading north toward Market Street.
Ethan Lloyd entered the building wondering, as he had wondered going out less than twenty minutes earlier, why James Bingham, the lobby doorman, was not at his post.
Bingham was actually there, but Ethan Lloyd could not see him. James was on the floor, hidden behind the large desk with a broken neck.
The man who had unceremoniously snapped James Bingham’s neck moved to the door of apartment 3501 and he used a key to enter. Less than three minutes later he was about to open the apartment door to leave when he saw a white envelope slide under the door. He stood perfectly still. He heard footsteps moving away from the door and he heard the stairwell door close. He waited a full fifteen minutes before leaving and, as instructed, used a shoe found in a hall closet to keep the door from shutting completely.
The man left the building through the parking garage and he walked calmly down Third Street to Howard Street. Before reaching the intersection of Third and Hawthorne, just beyond the Thirsty Bear Brewing Company, the passenger door of a parked Cadillac opened to the sidewalk and he was invited by the driver to get in.
“Well?” the driver asked.
“Done deal,” Sal DiMarco answered.
“Did you ditch the key?”
“I did.”
F*** me, Sal thought—remembering he had forgotten to ditch the key.
He carefully slipped the apartment key from his pocket and dropped it under the seat of the Cadillac while the driver was occupied watching for an opening in the busy street traffic.
“Any problems?”
“A bit of collateral damage, no worries.”
“Tell me about it,” the driver said as he pulled away from the curb.
The woman in blue continued walking up Third Street to Market Street, crossed Market to O’Farrell Street, went west to Powell Street and circled back down to Market.
The woman disappeared down into the Powell Street BART Station.
At half-past midnight the raucous crowd at Johnny Foley’s Irish Pub and Restaurant was so deafening that Tom Romano, Ira Fennessy and Jake Diamond had to escape. They clawed their way out onto O’Farrell Street heading for the Powell Street BART Station one block away to grab a taxi.
“Did you see that woman?” asked Ira, as they crawled into a cab.
“What woman?” Tom asked.
“Going down into the station. Did you see her, Jake?”
“I can’t see anything, Ira. What about her?”
“She was all in blue.”
“And...”
“Should have been green, don’t you think.”
“I can’t think,” Diamond said.
“Where to?” asked the cabbie.
“O’Reilly’s Bar, Green Street, North Beach,” Ira answered.
“Jesus, Ira, have a heart,” Jake pleaded. “Let’s end this nightmare.”
“Not until the fat lady sings Danny Boy.”
“God forgive us,” said Diamond. “We should have played pinochle.”
“Anyone in the market for cheap cigarettes?” the taxi driver asked as he pointed the cab toward Broadway.
Benny Carlucci stumbled out of The Chieftain Irish Pub on Third and Howard Streets. Carlucci was asked to leave—not very politely. He found himself out on the street alone. He tried to remember if he had arrived with anyone, but soon gave up trying.
He walked west on Howard Street toward Fourth, passing the Moscone Center on his left and the Metreon to his right. Benny walked down Fourth toward the train station at King Street. He spotted a black Cadillac parked halfway up on the sidewalk between Harrison and Bryant under the Highway 80 overpass.
There was definitely something not right about that car in that place at that time.
Benny was a curious kid. The vehicle stimulated his interest.
Carlucci casually approached the Cadillac, looking up and down Fourth Street as he moved. Other than what appeared to be three teenage boys horsing around a few streets down toward the train station, the area was deserted.
Benny expected to find another drunk, like so many others running and falling all over town—this one most likely passed out cold behind the wheel of the big car. Carlucci peered into the passenger door window. The vehicle was unoccupied and the keys dangled from the ignition. He quickly surveyed the street once again and tried the door. It was unlocked. Carlucci pulled it open and slipped into the driver’s seat. He was thinking a ride home in a Coupe de Ville would beat the hell out of a long drunken trip on the train and then a bus ride from the train station to his place on Cole Street off Fulton. The car started with the first turn of the key. Carlucci turned left onto Bryant Street, turned up Third one block to Harrison, then Harrison onto Ninth Street heading toward Market. Market onto Hayes onto Franklin to Fulton Street and Benny Carlucci was on his way home in style.
The police cruiser, siren blaring, pulled Carlucci over at Masonic Avenue, across from the University of San Francisco, just three short blocks from Benny’s apartment.
The attractive woman who came out of the Civic Center BART station had little resemblance to the woman who had walked down into the Powell Street station twenty minutes earlier. Gone were the dark glasses. Also gone were the heavy blue coat and the blue scarf, replaced by an emerald green two-piece jogging suit and a mane of strawberry blond hair tied back with a green elastic terrycloth band. The .38 caliber Smith and Wesson was now strapped around her ankle.
Once above ground, on Hyde across from the plaza, she jogged in place for a minute before starting up McAllister to the Civic Center Parking Garage. She picked up her car and drove out Geary Boulevard to 25th and then up Lincoln Boulevard to Baker Beach for a solitary run in the sand.
Just before one in the morning, Blake Sanchez stood at a dark street corner in Oakland and watched as one of his least favorite neighbors moved the doormat on his porch and lifted a loose board. Sanchez saw the man place something through the opening and under the porch and then replace the board and the mat before entering the house.
Sanchez took another deep pull off his dope pipe and made a mental note.
What I don’t know would fill a book. What I didn’t know about her could fill a library. It felt as if I was getting closer to her, but it was like looking into a fun-house mirror. She had constructed so many layers of self-deception, she could deflect a jackhammer. I had no idea what she wanted and I convinced myself I didn’t care. It was not an attraction based on the intellectual or the spiritual. It was nothing logical, just biological. The sex wasn’t all that great, come to think of it—and I was thinking about it too often. I thought I was in love with her long after I was sure I didn’t like her. If she had any idea about what she wanted, she kept it a deep dark secret from herself. At first I saw something in her, honesty, selflessness—something she couldn’t see, because it was never really there.
“What do you think?”
“About what?” asked Ira Fennessy.
“I wrote that,” Tom Romano said, sitting between Jake and Ira in the back seat of the taxicab, holding a tattered sheet of paper in his hand.
“Why would you write something like that?” Ira asked.
Jake decided to stay out of it. His head felt the size of the Trans America Pyramid, point and all.
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “For fun I guess.”
The taxi pulled up in front of O’Reilly’s to let them out. The insane crowd was spilling out onto Green Street.
“You have no idea what fun is,” Ira said, “but you are about to find out.”
Jake wanted to protest. He desperately wanted to say something, anything that might rescue them.
But he couldn’t get his tongue to work.
“I liked what you wrote,” said the cab driver as they piled out of the taxi to join the mob.
It was well past midnight, a new day—but it was still St. Patrick’s Day in San Francisco.
Author Bio:
J. L. ABRAMO was born in the seaside paradise of Brooklyn, New York on Raymond Chandler’s fifty-ninth birthday. A long-time educator, journalist, theatre and film actor and director, he received a BA in Sociology at the City College of New York and an MA in Social Psychology at the University of Cincinnati.
Abramo is the author of the Jake Diamond mystery series including Catching Water in a Net (recipient of the MWA/PWA Award for Best First Private Eye Novel), Clutching at Straws, Counting to Infinity, and the prequel Chasing Charlie Chan—as well as the stand-alone crime thriller, Gravesend.
Abramo is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, Private Eye Writers of America and Screen Actors Guild.
The author lives in Denver, Colorado.
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This is a giveaway hosted by Partners In Crime Virtual Book Tours for J.L. Abramo & Down and Out Books. There will be THREE winners of an ebook copy of Circling the Runway by J.L. Abramo. The giveaway is open to US residents only. The giveaway begins on April 18th, 2015 and runs through June 2nd, 2015. Visit each of the tour stops for additional giveaways! a Rafflecopter giveawayGet More Great Reads at Partners In Crime Virtual Book Tours
My review;I just finished reading , "Circling the Runway" by J. L. Abramo A Jake Diamond Mystery and I found it to be an interesting story. Jacob Diamond is a Private Investigator who does not like working with Roxton Johnson who is a San Francisco Detective Sergeant. The problem is that when someone is found dead and they happen to be important Johnson has no choice but to call Jacob Diamond even though he doesn't really want to. After all he only trusts him. Maybe if they start to try to work on the crime together they will solve it. But, will they be able to help each other long enough? I liked the characters and the storyline. I will be reading the author's other books as soon as I can. I give this book a 4/5. I was given this book for the purpose of review and all opinions are my own.
So glad to see a return of Jake Diamond! Looking forward to catching up with him myself. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts on this new mystery.
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