Free Frank Sinatra in a Blender by Matthew McBride Page A

Frank Sinatra would have already gotten to it by now. In fact, I doubted he waited longer than it took for me to close the door.
    In some ways, I envied Frank. His days were filled with eating, football fucking, and shit taking. He greeted each day on his own terms. You just had to admire that kind of philosophy.
    I could see my destination looming in the distance—White Castle. Second only to Denny’s as the restaurant of choice after a hard night of drinking, coke snorting, and pill popping.
    I pulled into the drive-thru with nervous anticipation. I was about to play a dangerous game. I’d always considered myself a gambling man, but combining both chili and White Castle in the same sitting was like playing Russian Roulette with your asshole.
    I ordered a crave case to go and a large Dr. Pepper and I shared my thoughts on string theory vs. quantum mechanics with the black gentleman at the window. I screeched out of the parking lot as more snow began to fall and I went home to eat dinner with the only friend I had.
    •••••
     
    Ron Beachy grew up on a farm in Illinois , in Amish country. He had nine brothers and sisters and all of them worked from the earliest hints of morning light until the welcome darkness that late evening brought. He never liked that life. Nor did he support the idea of a life spent foregoing simple things everyone else in the world took for granted. Like electricity.
    Ron was a firm believer that some things were just worth having. Even from an early age he could see there was life beyond the trees that separated his county from the next. At night he’d see the lights on the horizon, blazing through the pitch-black darkness with a cornucopia of swirling colors. The thought of crossing that line became a goal when he was twelve and his father forced him to set up his own cabinet shop.
    Little Ronnie was up by five every morning, out in his shop ten minutes later. He’d start working on the pieces he’d stained the night before. His tools were a hammer, a tape measure, and a box of finishing nails. He’d work in the shop until dusk. Then he’d go out to the woods at first light the next morning to check the traps he’d set the night before.
    He’d bring whatever opossum, squirrel, coon, or coyote he trapped back to the shop and turn them loose. Let them run all day in his cabinet shop until he got home from school. Then he’d kill them and skin them out.
    After breakfast, the Beachy children would arrive at school by horse and buggy. His older brother David would operate the reins. This was the pattern his life took until the day he turned eighteen, when he left home with a trashbag full of clothes and three hundred dollars. He walked to the county line and as the sun came up he took the steps he had waited so long to take.
    Then he crossed into a world of brutal violence. A world where men murdered other men because they didn’t like their haircut. He joined the Police Academy and his first job was Deputy Sheriff of a small town in Franklin County. With a population of a couple of thousand, it was a place to start, but Ron missed the excitement that he’d found in the big city. He’d been to the racetrack, the casinos, and nightclubs.
    The city was a brave new world to explore and he greeted each day as a new adventure. There were suicides, homicides, drive-by shootings. Ron Beachy buried himself in policework. He immersed himself in crime scene reconstruction until he was the expert that other cops went to when they needed answers.
    Ron became known for his unconventional methods, and he was a pioneer with a natural ability to view each situation through cleaner, unspoiled eyes. He had superior instincts and a strong moral compass. He was a creative thinker and a visionary in the field with a solid reputation as the most highly accomplished detective in St. Louis. That’s why Chief Caraway assigned Ron Beachy to the credit union case.
    •••••
     
    Sid picked up Johnny No