Free Murder by Numbers by Kaye Morgan

Kevin laughed. “Sure, I had one teenager trying out the old ‘boys will be jackasses’ thing. He pulled a drive-by in our parking area with a paintball gun.”
    â€œWhat did you do?”
    â€œI invested in one of those gadgets for myself, and waited till the little turd showed up again. I covered his windshield, gave his pickup a new color scheme, and unloaded the rest of my magazine on the kid’s butt.” His grin had a little bit of the wolf in it. “The velocity of a paintball is about a tenth of a rifle slug, but it still stings when it hits.”
    Liza shook her head. “Typical. You sound like all those Chuck Norris jokes I keep hearing.”
    Kevin laughed. “You mean, ‘Before the boogeyman goes to sleep, he checks that Chuck Norris isn’t under the bed’?”
    â€œNope, the one I was thinking about was, ‘Chuck Norris doesn’t sleep—he waits.’ That sounds like you, lying in bed with a paintball gun, staying up for this jackass.”
    â€œI prefer to think of it in terms of Chuck’s best movie quote.” Kevin deepened his voice. “‘You just messed with the wrong guy.’”
    Is that what happened with Chissel? Liza wondered. Did he mess with the wrong guy?
    â€œWhat do you think about Deke Jannsky?” The words were out of her mouth before she really thought about them.
    â€œFor what? Messing up Main Street or doing in Oliver Chissel?”
    â€œEither.” Liza leaned farther through the window. “Both.”
    Kevin hesitated for a long moment before he replied, looking sharply at Liza to make sure she was serious. Finally, he shrugged. “Deke is certainly a major lowlife around town. A lot worse than…some people I could name.”
    Liza nodded sadly, thinking of the ne’er-do-well friend they’d lost the last time major crime had touched Maiden’s Bay.
    â€œThat said—I dunno. Deke would have to have a pretty big mad on to start wrecking the shopping district. After all, he lives here, too.”
    â€œThe last time I saw him, he was pretty mad,” Liza said. “He got fired from his job as an extra on the film because he wouldn’t follow the rules.”
    She paused for a second, frowning. “In fact, he was acting as if he’d put in a lot of work, and that doesn’t happen with extras. Most of the time, they’re just sitting around, waiting while the shot is set up.”
    Her frown got deeper. “Suppose he had been working, screwing things up on the set so filming would be delayed and he’d get extra hours?”
    â€œNow that would sound like Deke,” Kevin said. “Has there been a lot of sabotage?”
    â€œChissel made it sound like there was,” Liza replied. “All I saw was some impolite graffiti painted on a shed asking the film company, though not in so many words, to leave.”
    â€œWhat color was it?”
    She gave him a look. “Glitter pink.”
    â€œToo bad,” Kevin said. “Not exactly Deke’s style. Now, if it had been blue—” He broke off when he saw the look on Liza’s face. “I guess you weren’t around the time Deke decided to redo his kitchen table and chairs on the cheap and easy. He brought them outside, opened a can of spray paint, and began spritzing away.”
    Kevin laughed. “Maybe he was hungover, or maybe he was just being Deke. Anyway, he didn’t notice that there was a pretty stiff breeze blowing, and very little of the paint was getting on the furniture. By the time he finally got done, he’d barely touched his furniture, but he’d turned most of his lawn a beautiful shade of blue, except for the silhouette of a cheap dinette set in the middle. That lasted a few weeks last summer, and it almost became a tourist attraction.”
    In spite of her efforts to be serious, Liza found herself chuckling at the mental image. “I guess