Elvis Has Not Left the Building Read online

  ELVIS HAS NOT LEFT THE BUILDING

  A Mystery Novel

  by

  J.R. RAIN

  Acclaim for the novels of J.R. Rain:

  “Be prepared to lose sleep!”

  —James Rollins, international bestselling author of Bloodline

  “I love this!”

  —Piers Anthony, bestselling author of Xanth

  “J.R. Rain delivers a blend of action and wit that always entertains. Quick with the one-liners, but his characters are fully fleshed out (even the undead ones) and you'll come back again and again.”

  —Scott Nicholson, bestselling author of The Red Church

  “Dark Horse is the best book I’ve read in a long time!”

  —Gemma Halliday, award-winning author of Spying in high Heels

  “Moon Dance is absolutely brilliant!”

  —Lisa Tenzin-Dolma, author of Understanding the Planetary Myths

  “Moon Dance is a must read. If you like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter, be prepared to love J.R. Rain’s Samantha Moon, vampire private investigator.”

  —Eve Paludan, author of Letters from David

  Other Books by J.R. Rain

  STANDALONE NOVELS

  The Lost Ark

  Elvis Has Not Left the Building

  The Grail Quest

  The Body Departed

  Silent Echo

  Winter Wind

  VAMPIRE FOR HIRE

  Moon Dance

  Vampire Moon

  American Vampire

  Moon Child

  Christmas Moon (novella)

  Vampire Dawn

  Vampire Games

  Moon Island

  Moon River

  Vampire Sun

  Moon Dragon

  Moon Shadow

  SAMANTHA MOON

  SHORT STORIES

  Teeth

  Vampire Nights

  Vampires Blues

  Vampire Dreams

  Halloween Moon

  Vampire Gold

  Blue Moon

  Dark Side of the Moon

  Vampire Requiem

  JIM KNIGHTHORSE

  Dark Horse

  The Mummy Case

  Hail Mary

  Clean Slate

  Easy Rider (short story)

  Night Run

  THE WITCHES SERIES

  The Witch and the Gentleman

  The Witch and the Englishman

  The Witch and the Huntsman (with Rod Kierkegaard)

  The Witch and the Wolfman (with Rod Kierkegaard)

  THE SPINOZA TRILOGY

  The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo

  The Vampire Who Played Dead

  The Vampire in the Iron Mask

  THE VAMPIRE DIARIES

  Bound By Blood

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Bleeder and Other Stories

  Vampire Rain and Other Stories

  The Santa Call and Other Stories

  Black Rain: 15 Dark Tales

  Blood Rain: 15 Dark Tales

  Red Rain: Over 40 Short Stories

  SHORT STORY SINGLES

  The Bleeder

  Co-Authored Books

  COLLABORATIONS

  Cursed (with Scott Nicholson)

  Ghost College (with Scott Nicholson)

  The Vampire Club (with Scott Nicholson)

  Dragon Assassin (with Piers Anthony)

  Dolfin Tayle (with Piers Anthony)

  Jack and the Giants (with Piers Anthony)

  Judas Silver (with Elizabeth Basque)

  Lost Eden (with Elizabeth Basque)

  Glimmer (with Eve Paludan)

  The Black Fang Betrayal (with Multiple Authors)

  The Indestructibles (with Rod Kierkegaard)

  SAMANTHA MOON CASE FILES

  with Rod Kierkegaard

  Moon Bayou

  THE OPEN HEART SERIES

  with Rod Kierkegaard

  The Dead Detective

  Ghosts of Christmas Present (short story)

  THE PSI SERIES

  with A.K. Alexander

  Hear No Evil

  See No Evil

  Speak No Evil

  Flight 12 (novella)

  NICK CAINE ADVENTURES

  with Aiden James

  Temple of the Jaguar

  Treasure of the Deep

  Pyramid of the Gods

  THE ALADDIN TRILOGY

  with Piers Anthony

  Aladdin Relighted

  Aladdin Sins Bad

  Aladdin and the Flying Dutchman

  THE WALKING PLAGUE TRILOGY

  with Elizabeth Basque

  Zombie Patrol

  Zombie Rage

  Zombie Mountain

  THE SPIDER TRILOGY

  with Scott Nicholson and H.T. Night

  Bad Blood

  Spider Web

  Spider Bite

  Elvis Has Not Left the Building

  Published by J.R. Rain

  Copyright © 2010 by J.R. Rain

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Susanna Ivy at:

  [email protected]

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Dedication

  To my brother, Jason. A true storyteller.

  Acknowledgment

  A very special thank you to Sandy Johnston for all her help.

  Elvis Has Not Left the Building

  The Dream

  “What’s your name?”

  “Elvis Presley.”

  The dream is always the same. I’m in jail. No, I’m in an interrogation room, being questioned for an alleged crime. A murder. My own murder.

  Somehow, I’m able to see through the one-way mirror. Watching me, hidden behind the glass, aren’t just the homicide detectives, but everyone I had ever known, including my ex-wife, my daughter, my mother and even my still-born twin brother, Jessie, now full-grown and looking remarkably like me in my heyday. The media is there, too, of course. Always the media. Every reporter in the land is standing there, watching me, writing fiercely, covering the mother of all tabloid stories.

  I feel sick, nauseous. My world is crumbling around me. The accusing detectives smile wickedly and shine a powerful desk lamp directly into my eyes. Cigarette smoke fills the air, hanging there like a roiling gray curtain, filling my nostrils and stinging my eyes. One of the officers blows more of the stuff directly into my face.

  “What’s your real name?” he asks me.

  “Elvis Presley.”

  “Bullshit.” More smoke, more lamps, more light. “What’s your full name, goddammit?”

  “Elvis Aaron Presley.”

  “He’s dead!” screams the detective.

  “No,” I say carefully. “I’m not.”

  From behind the one-way mirror, which looks, in fact, more like a window, someone suddenly bursts into tears. It’s my daughter, and she buries her face in her mother’s shoulder. I’m not supposed to be able to see this display through the one-way mirror, but I can. I always can. Apparently, in my dreams, I have X-ray vision.

  I’m still staring at my weeping daughter when a hand turns me violently around, forcing me to look up into a glaring light. I can’t see who’s silhouetted before me.

  “You killed him,” says the voice. The voice sounds like it could be my own.

  “No, I didn’t,” I say. “It was a hoax.”

  “A hoax?” The voice grows enraged. Now it sounds like a multitude of voices, a cacophony erupting from my legions of fans. A universal outlet for all those I had let down, hurt,
or disappointed.

  “I needed out,” I say, babbling, nearly incoherent. “I needed to start over. Everything...everything was so crazy.”

  I hear more weeping. I turn my head around. It’s still my daughter. Always my daughter. Always weeping. And it kills me. She won’t look at me, and it breaks my heart more than you know.

  “Look at what you’ve done to her,” says the voice, and now I’m sure it’s my own voice.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Say it to her.”

  I look over at my baby, my mouth open to speak, but no words come out. Someone smacks me hard across the face, rocking me. I nearly topple out of the chair. My hands, I realize, are tied behind me, as if I had been kidnapped.

  “Who are you?” screams the voice.

  “Elvis—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I don’t know. Not anymore....”

  “Who are you?”

  And here is when I always wake up, tears streaming down my cheeks, always alone in my tiny single apartment in Los Angeles, just down the road from the various studios where I had made so many of my early films. My blankets are often on the floor and I’m usually covered in sweat. My head often pounds from the usual hangover. I usually never go back to sleep. I don’t want to dream the dream again. I don’t want to see my daughter’s pain.

  * * *

  This morning was no different.

  I awoke with a start, bolting upright, momentarily disoriented. My blankets were on the floor again, as if I had been fighting a monster in my sleep. I could still hear the accusing voice in my head, but this time it belonged to my twin brother—my dead twin brother who had died at birth. I heard his voice now, clearly, eerily, reaching up through the depths of my subconscious and down through the ages, spoken in a voice that sounded remarkably like my own.

  “Today is our birthday, Elvis. But, of course, since I was born dead, today is also my deathday. Ironic isn’t it?”

  Yes, I thought, ironic.

  I sat back in bed, closed my eyes, ran my fingers through my thick hair. Tomorrow I see my shrink.

  Thank God.

  Chapter One

  This is going to hurt.

  My apartment was empty. I was standing in my bathroom, dressed in boxers and nothing else. I was about to look very foolish and I was glad there was no one else here to witness it.

  Hell, I was almost embarrassed for myself.

  With one of my own songs playing in the background, I slowly started gyrating my hips. Just a little. Nothing too wild. Nothing like I used to do. And already I could feel a tingle of pain going up my back.

  Yeah, this is going to hurt.

  But I wanted to do it. I had to do it. For quite some time now I had felt the itch.

  And it was a hell of an itch.

  I picked up the pace a little. I felt clumsy and out of sync. I stumbled once or twice as my bare feet slapped against the cold linoleum floor. One of my swaying hips nailed the bathroom door knob, sending the door itself slamming back into the bathroom wall. I think the drywall might have cracked.

  But I continued doing my thing. My crazy thing.

  Mercifully, the clumsiness quickly faded. Amazingly, wonderfully, flashes of my old self came back. I quickly worked up a sweat. My belly, round and full, pulled on my lower back. The strain was nearly unbearable.

  God, I needed to lose weight. So easy to let yourself go when you don’t care.

  But, lately, I had started caring. And slowly but surely I had started changing my diet. A salad here. A banana there. Venti mochas reluctantly switched to grande mochas.

  I tried another move. A patented move. One that had driven the women of the world crazy—

  I swung my leg and hip out, and screamed in pain. I lurched over the bathroom sink, gasping. Something pulled. I hunched there over the bathroom sink, gasping, sweating, staring at myself in the mirror. Gray hair. Custom-built face. Wrinkles.

  God, the wrinkles....

  It’s hell getting old.

  A loud knock on my front door. I sucked in some air, willed myself to stand upright. On knees that were already stiffening, I made my way to the front door, limping slightly, knuckling my lower back.

  I checked the peephole. It was my eighty-year-old downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Haynesworth. I opened the door.

  “Sorry for the noise, Mrs. Haynesworth.”

  “Well, my granddaughter’s asleep. And all that banging up here.” She squinted at me, peering through her remarkably thick glasses. Sometimes I thought she knew my super-secret identity. Then again, with her eyesight, I always shrugged off the feeling. “What are you doing up here, anyway?”

  “Trying out my dance moves.”

  “Dance moves? Mr. King, you’re far too old to be dancing. You might hurt yourself.”

  I smiled. “I’ll keep the noise down, Mrs. Haynesworth. Have a good day.”

  She continued peering at me as I closed the door. I hobbled into the kitchen—and popped a Vicodin or two.

  Or three.

  Chapter Two

  The doorbell rang.

  I was sitting in a comfortable loveseat I had scavenged for free from Craigslist.com, watching a TV that I had recently found on the side of the road, surrounded by tables and lamps and artwork that I had purchased for cheap from local garage sales.

  Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

  It was the middle of a bright winter day and I was watching Oprah, of course. What else was there to do? I liked Oprah. I think she and I would have gotten along just fine. Anyway, she was having a special tribute to the King, being that it was his birthday.

  That it was my birthday.

  Sitting beside her were two women: Elvis Presley’s ex-wife and his daughter. Both looking radiant. Both looking breath-takingly beautiful, especially his daughter. My daughter. Of course, my daughter also looked sad and lost and heartbroken. Always sad. Always lost. Always heart broken.

  Damn.

  The doorbell rang again.

  I ignored it and, entranced, continued watching Oprah’s special tribute to the King, and when the show was finally over, when I had seen enough commercials for feminine hygiene products to last a life time, I was a total emotional wreck. Hell, the collar to my polo shirt was even wet with my tears. Oddly, my knuckles hurt as well—and not just from my arthritis. Apparently, while watching the show, I had been clawing the hell out of the armrest of my recently acquired love seat. In fact, I had torn the seam of it a little. Damn. Then again, perhaps it was already torn? Hard to tell with free furniture.

  Oprah waved goodbye to the camera, and as she did so I watched my daughter look away and bite her lower lip, seemingly stifling a sob.

  Damn.

  As the show went to commercial, I heaved myself up from the sunken love seat, somehow straining my right knee in the process. The roadside TV didn’t come with a remote, so I manually clicked the thing off the old fashioned way. As I did so, high on a bookshelf next to the TV, I found myself staring at a picture of the very same girl who had just been sitting next to Oprah. Except the girl in the picture was a little girl and she was sitting high on her tiny pony, smiling the world’s biggest smile. A girl and her pony, it’s a beautiful thing. She had loved that pony and she had loved me. She looked so happy back then, so alive and happy.

  So how could I break her heart?

  Therein lies the rub.

  She hasn’t looked happy in some time. Trust me, I know this. I study every picture I can get my hands on, minutely, agonizing over the details. Was she healthy? (Yes, from all indications.) Was she happy? (No, not for a long time, but I’ve been wrong before.) And today she had looked utterly and completely miserable. The sadness in her distant, round eyes ran as deep as wells.

  Outside, someone started a lawnmower. I sighed and stepped over to the living room window. Outside, a small Hispanic man was pushing a lawnmower across a swath of grass that ran in front of my apartment complex. Swea
t streamed down his caramel-colored skin. The lawnmower was almost as big as he was.

  Up the street, double-parked, was a UPS truck. A bum was currently urinating on its right rear tire. The bum had just managed to stumble away before a fit young man with hairy legs trotted out of a nearby apartment complex and hopped up into the truck and sped away.

  And that’s when I remembered the doorbell.

  Ah, yes, all that damn ringing.

  I moved away from the window, past Kendra the Wonder Kat, who currently lay sleeping in a furry striped ball in the center of my reading chair—no doubt dreaming of mice and toys and things that go squeak in the night—and opened my front door.

  Bright sunshine poured in. Painfully bright sunshine. I shielded my eyes, blinking hard, and there, sitting on the little-used welcome mat, was a thick envelope.

  The package was addressed to E.P.

  Chapter Three

  I sat at my kitchen table with the package. The small hairs at the back of my neck were standing on end, as if a goose had walked across my grave.

  Or perhaps across my brother’s grave.

  Despite myself, I looked over my shoulder, peering down the short hallway to my bedroom. I was alone, of course. Still, I had a sense that I was being watched, and I hate that sense.

  I turned back to the package, a package that was addressed to one E.P.

  Hands shaking, heart hammering, I tore through the padded envelope with a thick and slightly broken fingernail, and removed a clear plastic box containing a watch. On the face of it was Elvis Presley dancing, doing that crazy thing he does with his legs. The watch even showed the correct time. Inside the padded envelope was also a tightly folded piece of paper. I took it out and, with increasingly unsteady fingers, unfolded it.