Paul Buchanan earned a Master of Professional Writing degree from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Chapman University. He teaches and writes in the Los Angeles area. The second PI Jim Keegan novel Valley of Shadows will be published in 2021.

For the illustrious Jim Blaylock,
the most generous of writer-friends

CHAPTER ONE

Monday, August 13, 1962

IT WAS BARELY dawn when the little dog’s yapping put an end to Jim Keegan’s restless night of ankle-deep sleep. He pulled himself up to a sitting position on the sofa. The dog, his late mother’s Welsh Terrier, barked at him again from the living-room floor, her stubby tail wagging madly. It was time to let her out.

Keegan’s mouth tasted of Irish whiskey and stale graham crackers, a vile residue of the morning’s sleepless wee hours. He’d bought the whiskey—a fifth of Jameson—last night at a liquor store on Sunset on his way up to his mother’s hilltop cottage. He’d hoped a shot of it might help him sleep once the August daytime heat finally loosened its grip. But one shot wouldn’t do it. The crackers he’d found around 2:00 a.m., rummaging in his mother’s kitchen pantry. They were behind a can of Del Monte peaches.

Keegan ignored the barking dog and looked around the cottage’s small den, working the kinks out of his neck. The room was crowded with the worldly belongings of a very old woman who had spent too many years holed up here with no one but a dog for company—silver-framed photographs and delft figurines, lace doilies and countless yellowing Zane Grey pulps. The place smelled of old laundry and Luden’s cough drops, which the old lady had eaten as if it was candy. The cottage was bigger than Keegan’s own apartment down in Mid-Wilshire, but sleeping here amid his late mother’s belongings made him feel claustrophobic just the same.

His mother’s terrier—the dog answered to Nora—now crouched in the center of an oval braided rug, aquiver with excitement to see Keegan finally rousing himself. She crouched low to the rug with her rump raised high, and barked at him twice more, a pair of strident, high-pitched yelps.

The sound cut through Keegan’s skull like a rusty saw. “I heard you the first time,” he groaned. He rubbed his forehead and stretched his legs out under the coffee table. A twinge of pain rippled across his lower back. That’s what he got for falling asleep on his mother’s wood-framed Victorian settee again. At fifty-three, you’d think he would know better.