High Strung Read online

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Praise for Jacki Moss and WITH A BULLET

  High Strung

  Copyright

  Dedication

  If you haven’t yet read

  Chapter 1—Rotten Day, Rotten Week

  Chapter 2—Smoke ’Em

  Chapter 3—Bombastic

  Chapter 4—Timing is Everything

  Chapter 5—Devotions

  Chapter 6—Head Case

  Chapter 7—Skedaddle

  Chapter 8—A Good Case of OCD

  Chapter 9—Synchronicity

  Chapter 10—The Dangcat and the Dang Brat

  Chapter 11—Grounded

  Chapter 12—The Orangutan Theory

  Chapter 13—The Gamut of Emotions

  Chapter 14—Pointing Fingers

  Chapter 15—No Strings Attached

  Chapter 16—Cut to the Chase

  Chapter 17—Mark My Words

  Chapter 18—Brat BOLO

  Chapter 19—A Bump in the Road

  Chapter 20—Selective Amnesia

  Chapter 21—Eye of the Storm

  Chapter 22—Convergence

  Chapter 23—Forever

  A word from the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Once people have crossed certain psychological lines, like cold-blooded murder, like hands-on, up-close-and-personal, gory, bloody murder, they lose all boundaries. Now anything is possible for them. Now they know what they are capable of, and they have absolutely nothing to lose if they do it again. They are a hand grenade with a very loose pin to anyone within shrapnel range.

  Praise for Jacki Moss and WITH A BULLET

  “My only recommendation is that the author add the recipes in the back of the book. But as you may know I love recipes. This is a really good read, I would recommend.”

  ~Rae’s Books and Recipes

  ~*~

  “Murder, music, and characters that the rest of the world calls wacky (and we Southerners call our friends and relatives) run rampant through north Alabama and Music City in WITH A BULLET. This book is a rollercoaster ride of mystery and hilarity. Moss has captured the people and places of the 1970s mid-south as accurately as a Polaroid camera. Fast-paced and tightly plotted, this book will keep you turning pages and laughing late into the night.”

  ~Shannon Norwood (5 Stars)

  ~*~

  “Great read! WITH A BULLET takes you inside of Nashville’s music scene. A captivating tale of songs, mystery and murder. Once you start reading it, you do not want to stop. Looking forward to the next book.”

  ~Kelly D. (4 Stars)

  High Strung

  by

  Jacki Moss

  Music City Mysteries, Book Two

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

  High Strung

  COPYRIGHT © 2016 by Jacki Moss

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Debbie Taylor

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Mainstream Historical Rose Edition, 2016

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1035-0

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1036-7

  Music City Mysteries, Book Two

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To Mom, who inadvertently,

  and sometimes intentionally,

  gave me a chaotic and colorful childhood

  that compelled me to delve beneath the surface

  of people and find their kernel of truth, good or bad.

  If you haven’t yet read

  the first book of the Music City Mysteries,

  WITH A BULLET,

  you will want to do so to catch up fully on

  Cafton’s background and more

  behind-the-scenes views of the music industry.

  Chapter 1—Rotten Day, Rotten Week

  Ear-splitting sirens wailed from the behemoth fire truck screaming bloody murder just two feet from Cafton’s rear bumper, chasing, forcing him down Sixteenth Avenue in the dead of night as he frantically tried to get out of its way. “Perfect. Just perfect. Just what I need to cap off this rotten day,” he groused, muttering between his clenched teeth, gripping the steering wheel like he was hanging off a cliff by it.

  Like he didn’t have enough stress right now. His recording engineer had been AWOL all day; some whack-job telepest had been calling him with death threats; Bynum had called, exasperated that one of his opening act band members missed the tour bus and the band had to leave without him; and he had run out of his sodas.

  And now, this.

  Cafton hunched over the steering wheel, trying in vain to coerce his car to respond to his angst and magically get him out of this nightmare. I think this is technically careening. A glance in his rearview mirror showed him the vein in his forehead visibly bulged and throbbed just under the surface of his pinkish, subtly freckled skin, highlighted by the flashing lights of the vehicle behind him.

  A mediocre and exceedingly reluctant driver under the best of circumstances, Cafton Merriepennie under extreme duress while threading through Nashville’s stingy, dark, historic Music Row streets—streets bordered cheek-to-jowl with parked cars—was a sure-fire recipe for an insurance-deductible-eating, rental-car-requiring, premium-hiking, at-fault wreck. Cafton’s jaw locked tighter. His tongue pressed up against his front teeth, threatening to pop them out like popcorn from a carnival popper if this didn’t resolve quickly.

  The fire engine’s headlights seared like lasers into his rearview mirror at just the right angle to temporarily blind him. The streaks of light pierced his squinting eyes and etched squiggly patterns on his totally dilated, sensitive retinas. Precision would have been his friend, but he wasn’t holding out hope. One teeny miscue and he would sideswipe a parked car, or two, or three, or at least detach their side mirrors, and then be steamrolled by the foreboding fire engine.

  “All for a soda. Damn my addictive personality,” he admonished himself, raking his tangerine-colored, wispy hair out of his jade green eyes with his trembling fingers. Cafton paid close attention to his genetically inherited propensity for addiction. It was the trait in his father that resulted in Cafton and his mother being repeatedly victimized until they fled the family home when Cafton was only ten years old. Cafton’s father had been addicted to alcohol and the adrenalin rush he got by habitually beating the slop out of Cafton’s mother.

  Cafton’s apprehension of addictions was why he didn’t smoke, drink liquor, do drugs, or sky dive. Well, he didn’t sky dive because he just had common sense, but he did proactively avoid temptations and impulses that might trigger a destructive addiction in him.

  Some people are adrenalin junkies. Cafton was a serotonin junkie. But he knew the constant draw to get a fine mellow on was certainly real and equally addictive. His main deviation from his mellow quest was, as a nurse friend had once explained to him, the phenylalanine in some sodas.

  In the grand scheme of things, though, Cafton thought an addiction to carbonated beverages was unlikely to result in serious adverse consequences. Until now.

  He snapp
ed the mirror downward and searched for a gap in the chock-a-block parked cars to escape into. As much as he desperately wanted to resolve this nightmare, he had nowhere to go, and didn’t seem to be able to get out of the way no matter what he tried. “Good grief,” Cafton’s version of pre-cussing, oozed from between his taut lips.

  His heartbeat thumped out a rhythm in his neck. It escalated from a slow 6/8 with the accents on the first and fourth beats, to a quick 2/4. He heard and felt his blood pressure as it whooshed up the side of his neck and into his ears. His bony-fingered death grip on the steering wheel flushed all the corpuscles from his knuckles and all feeling from his fingers. His ashen knuckles were a stark contrast to his crimson red face and ears. He looked vaguely like an unstruck wooden match.

  Cafton’s unintended deportment was that of an actor in a low-budget, sci-fi horror movie escaping abduction by fangy, slobbering aliens, certainly not like someone who ventured out late at night for a leisurely drive through the neighborhood to grab a six-pack of soft drinks.

  This was rare for Cafton. Not just being chased like a terrified rabbit, which would be rare for anyone, but simply driving at night. He vigorously avoided driving at night, especially late at night, due to his miserable night vision. The current fiasco definitely reinforced this avoidance habit. “This is why I don’t drive at night,” he groaned. “You just never know what’s just around the corner, or, in this case, right on your bumper.”

  He had run out of sodas and thought a quick trip down to the murder market on Seventeenth, just one street over, wouldn’t be a problem. He thought wrong. So very wrong. Or, maybe so very right. Depends on if you’re a cup-half-full or -half-empty kind of person. Cafton was usually a half-full kind of person, but as he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and saw his life flashing before his eyes, his resolve on how full the metaphysical cup was had begun to waver.

  He found himself questioning a lot of things, especially the judgment of the developers of this historic community who years ago didn’t install driveways for each home.

  He should have walked, even if it was brisk out. He should have just walked, he scolded himself. But it was late at night in a major metropolitan city in the mid 1980s, when securing money for illicit drugs was driving a crime wave. He practically had a bullseye painted on his ass, he reminded himself. No, he had to drive. Then again, he could have just gone back to bed and waited until the morning, he reasoned. Cafton’s Libra tendencies, balancing all options, were in full swing.

  There’s an empty spot. He clicked on his blinker so he didn’t get plowed over or punted all the way downtown by the massive fire truck, wheeled to the right, and slid into the space. There, I’m out of your flippin’ way, he screamed silently. Go!

  His eyes locked onto his left side mirror and watched for the fire truck to pass. In his panicked state, he had failed to notice the inferno, his home, to his right, three doors down the block behind him.

  Now parked, he shook so violently he felt like he was going to rattle apart into bones, teeth, and jewelry right there in his car, waiting for this insanity to pass. But it didn’t pass.

  Instead of going around, the fire truck and its shrieking entourage of three more equally infuriating emergency vehicles pulled up just behind his rear left fender in the street. They added to the chaos by each one laying on their air horn, non-stop. It sounded like the sirens of the London Blitz of 1940.

  “Now what? Go the hell around! Around! I’m out of your damned way. Go around!” He screamed over his left shoulder into the glass of the driver’s side window. His shouts reverberated back at him, exacerbating the cacophony and causing the window to fog.

  He pulled back into the street.

  “I may lose my mind right here and now,” Cafton muttered to himself. “What a time for Bynum to be on tour. What a time for Dangcat to be missing. Dammit, I need a soda.”

  Cafton Merriepennie was co-owner of New Song Café, the penultimate music showcase venue in Twangtown. It was in flames behind him. Even worse, it was his personal residence.

  If you had money, or influence, or power in Tennessee or the music industry, you knew Cafton one way or another. If you were lucky, if you earned it, you were his friend. There were very, very few who earned friend status. In fact, who Cafton considered to be friends could be counted on one hand, with the pinky left over.

  While Cafton was being chased down Music Row to Lord-knows-where by fire trucks, Bynum and his band, and his opening act, were on their way to their ritzy hotel in the French Quarter. Their posh tour bus had left just a few hours before to kick off Bynum’s North American tour to support his new album release, right at the height of Mardi Gras. Tour season was starting with a groan.

  Meanwhile, Dangcat was missing. He was Cafton’s recording engineer and soundboard wizard for Merriepennie Music. He was a perfectionist, an artist, a friend (friend number two on the hand system), and a recovered heroin and cocaine addict. When he hit the skids a few years back, his former label dumped him to fend for himself. He was homeless and doing whatever it took to put a needle in his arm. Bynum and Cafton rescued him. And now they couldn’t find him.

  Cafton, for the first time in a very long while, felt overwhelmed and alone. It had been a rotten day, capped off by an even more rotten night, to cap off a rotten week.

  Chapter 2—Smoke ’Em

  “Dammit! What the hell do you want? I’m over as far as I can get! Do ya want me up in someone’s porch swing?” Cafton shrieked at the convoy of unrelenting emergency vehicles behind him. “I’m dizzy as a duck,” he griped to no one in particular. The array of red, blue, and white lights strobing the nighttime blackness irritated his astigmatisms, rendering him slightly disoriented, and very exasperated. If he had ever watched war movies, he would have thought he was in the middle of one. But that was not one of his points of reference.

  “This is like just getting off the Tilt-A-Whirl after eating three scoops of ice cream.” Cafton almost gurgled.

  Sweat from his hands moistened the hand-sewn leather steering wheel. He wiped his watery palms on the thighs of his well-worn jeans, slid his imported, tortoiseshell, night-driving glasses back up his glistening nose toward his forehead, and clenched the wheel at ten and two again, mostly to stabilize himself. “Breathe,” he commanded himself. “All I have to do is breathe.” He gasped three truncated breaths.

  Cafton spied an open spot on the left and whipped the car into it. He put the car in park. He let his head roll back onto the headrest, dropped his fatigued arms into his lap, and closed his eyes. Relief.

  “Hey! Hey! Hey! You! Yeah, YOU!” A man in full firefighter garb hammered on the passenger-side window with his massive gloved fist.

  “Christ on a cracker!” Cafton jolted in his seat. The seatbelt dug in across the left side of his neck, threatening to slit his jugular vein if he made a false move.

  “Move the hell outta the way! This ain’t no peep show! Move it!” The bigger-than-life man encased in crookneck-squash-yellow firefighting coveralls and a Day-Glo yellow helmet with a clear face shield nearly shattered the car window while bellowing at Cafton.

  Cafton rolled the window down to defend why he was in this particular spot. The open window let in thick, acrid smoke and a barrage of commanding verbal abuse from the yellow man. “I live, uh I live right back there!” Cafton choked out, pointing with his left forefinger over his right shoulder. “This is the first spot…”

  “I’ll yank your butt outta this window, bust the other windows, and run our hoses through them if you don’t move this bucket of bolts from in front of the hydrant,” roared yellow man.

  Ah, a hydrant. That’s why there was a space. Damn my luck, thought Cafton. He glanced to his left. Sure enough, a fire hydrant he had not noticed sat there bigger than dammit.

  “Got it. Moving now.” So much for getting out of the way. Cafton put the car in drive and swung it to a sharp right, back into the one-way street now blocked behind him with fire trucks, ambu
lances, and police cars, but totally deserted in front of him. “Bucket of bolts, my ass,” Cafton stewed as he drove at a snail’s pace up the street, scanning side to side for another refuge. “This vehicle has the best safety record on the road. They don’t call them ‘bricks’ for nothing.”

  The fire engine pulled alongside the space he’d just vacated and stopped. Firefighters spilled out of the truck, like Shriners bolting from a clown car, and started unrolling giant canvas hoses. Cafton spied another empty spot half a block down, checked for a hydrant, and pulled in.

  “Whatever has them all in a lather looks damn serious, but they sure as hell are on top of it.” he conceded. Cafton tried to inhibit his brain from dumping more adrenalin into his already overexcited system. “I just need to settle my nerves and stop my legs from jitterbugging before walking home. I’ll look like a sloshed marionette and get arrested for public intox if I don’t.”

  He rummaged around elbow-deep in the center console compartment of the car and extracted a half-full—or half-empty, depending upon how you looked at it—bag of butterscotch candies. The amber paper wrapper crackled like a log cabin fireplace as his hands quivered, untwisting the golden cellophane. Sweet, buttery comfort. He glided the silky goodness onto his tongue and waited for the familiar sugar rush to kick in. Some people used cigarettes, three fingers of scotch, or a joint as a crutch to calm down. Cafton’s crutch was butterscotches. Okay, maybe he had two addictions.

  As the candy melted, he concentrated on controlling his breathing so he didn’t hyperventilate and swoon right there on the side of the road. This is no time to get the vapors and pass out. There’s plenty of time for that later.

  He stuffed the empty wrapper in with a half-dozen others in the ashtray and adjusted the rearview mirror to examine the spectacle behind him. It was surreal. Like nothing he had seen in real life and never wanted to see again. There was lots of smoke, the carroty and scarlet flickers of a robust blaze, and men in assorted official uniforms scrambling around. Scrambling around, uh, his house…