The First Rule of Ten Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  THE FIRST RULE OF TEN

  “Awareness and adventure go hand-in-hand in this wow

  of a whodunnit. It’s got plenty of surprising plot twists,

  but even better, it’s rich with insight into the complexity

  of human relationships and being alive in this

  modern-day world. What could be better?”

  — Geneen Roth, author of Women, Food and God

  “Talk about a ‘perfect Ten!’ Savvy, sharp, and spiritual,

  Tenzing Norbu is one of the most compelling detectives

  I’ve encountered on the page. And The First Rule of Ten

  is a great introduction—a complicated, involving story

  that combines cults, crime, and Buddhist

  teachings to great effect.”

  — Alison Gaylin, Edgar-nominated author of

  Hide Your Eyes, Heartless, and You Kill Me

  “Now this is a detective for the 21st century! Who could

  resist a former Buddhist monk who lives by the dharma,

  drives a vintage yellow Mustang, eats five-star vegan

  PB&J’s, and enjoys a close relationship with a sentient

  being named Tank—a blue Persian of a certain size?

  On the other hand, his relationships with beings of the

  human persuasion aren’t nearly so smooth. Which is

  great for a P.I.—no one messes with Ten—but lousy for

  romance. Tenzing Norbu is wholly original and very, very

  real—a great addition to detective fiction.

  The First Rule of Ten has really got me hooked!”

  — Julie Smith, author of the Skip Langdon series

  Copyright © 2012 by Gay Hendricks

  Published and distributed in the United States by: Hay House, Inc.: www.hayhouse.com • Published and distributed in Australia by: Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.: www.hayhouse.com.au • Published and distributed in the United Kingdom by: Hay House UK, Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.uk • Published and distributed in the Republic of South Africa by: Hay House SA (Pty), Ltd.: www.hayhouse.co.za • Distributed in Canada by: Raincoast: www.raincoast.com • Published in India by: Hay House Publishers India: www.hayhouse.co.in

  Cover design: Charles McStravick • Interior design: Pam Homan

  Photo of Gay Hendricks: Mikki Willis

  Photo of Tinker Lindsay: Cameron Keys

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. The use of actual events or locales, and persons living or deceased, is strictly for artistic/literary reasons only.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hendricks, Gay.

  The first rule of ten / Gay Hendricks and Tinker Lindsay. – 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tenzing Norbu Mystery.”

  ISBN 978-1-4019-3776-8 (tradepaper : alk. paper)

  I. Lindsay, Tinker. II. Title.

  PS3608.E5296F57 2012

  813’.6–dc23

  2011039773

  Tradepaper ISBN: 978-1-4019-3776-8

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-4019-3777-5

  15 14 13 12 4 3 2 1

  1st edition, January 2012

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  The Second Rule of Ten

  Chapter 1

  Topanga Canyon, Calif.

  Jan. 12, Year of the Iron Tiger

  Lama Yeshe and Lama Lobsang

  Dorje Yidam Monastery

  Dharamshala, India

  Venerable Brothers,

  Last Friday night, I tasted one of life’s sweet little experiences.

  Saturday, I got shot.

  It makes me wonder if I have a low tolerance for things going well in my world.

  Or maybe I just need to be more mindful of what’s going on, both outside and in.

  This may come as a surprise to you, but I’ve decided to put some rules back into my life—just not the scriptural kind I was so good at rebelling against back when I lived in the monastery. These are life-rules, drawn from my own experience, regardless of whether it’s humbling, exhilarating, or painful. Rule Number One is this: If you’re open to learning, you get your life-lessons delivered as gently as the tickle of a feather. But if you’re defensive, if you stubbornly persist in being right instead of learning the lesson at hand, if you stop paying attention to the tickles, the nudges, the clues—boom! Sledgehammer. Or in this case, the mangled slug of a .45 automatic.

  The truth is, the pain caused by the bullet-graze was insignificant compared to the deep ache of uncertainty provoked by my brush with death. I felt lost, swarmed by questions to which I had no easy answers. But once I could see a way forward, I actually started feeling grateful to Leon—the poor, misguided being who pulled the trigger.

  I do regret how much I scared Bill. I’d never seen him look like that—drawn and pale, his eyes dark with fear. He told me when he heard the shot, found me on the floor, he thought I was done.

  Turns out I was, just not in the way Bill meant.

  You two know me best, so you know this is true: From the time I was a teenager, reading all those contraband detective novels by candlelight in our sleeping quarters, I never wanted to be anything but a modern incarnation of Sherlock Holmes. So when I made Detective five years ago, I thought I had my life all wrapped up, with a nice, pretty bow on top. But lately, the realities of working for the LAPD have been closing in on me. I can hardly breathe anymore.

  Some cops are happy to spend the bulk of their time shuffling papers and testifying in court. They’d rather pass their days getting hammered by defense attorneys than roam around out in the big world, messing with actual criminals. Not me. I like the action. I spent enough years sitting cross-legged in confined spaces, eyes closed, sheltered from anything that might challenge reality. Or nonreality, for that matter.

  No offense.

  It’s just that every minute in court, or chained to my desk, is a minute I’m not out putting bad people away, which last I heard was the whole point. The number of hours I spend on real police work has been declining steadily over the past couple of years, until these days when I’m lucky if I pull 15 hours a week outside.

  Poor Bill’s no stranger to my discontent. My partner’s been putting up with a swelling stream of complaints about the paperwork, the politics, the endless bureaucratic hassles and mandatory regulations that are taking all the joy out of the job. I mean, monks deal
with endless rules, too, but at least where you are, the goal is freedom from suffering. Not piling on more and more of it.

  Once again in my life, something had to give. Once again, something has.

  It’s over. I’m no longer a cop.

  Well, time to go. Tank is eyeing his empty food bowl with impressive concentration. I send my prayers and good wishes to you both, as always. Please give Kino my heartfelt congratulations on becoming Abbot. Tell him I am well. You can also tell my father. Should he ever ask.

  Until next time,

  Ten

  CHAPTER 1

  I was just sitting down to a cold beer and hot corn soup, at the end of a long week, when my phone rang. I glanced at the number.

  Great. Her. My stomach contracted, arming me for whatever barbs my ex-girlfriend Charlotte had in store this time. I tried to breathe a little flex into my gut. Good luck with that.

  “Hello?” I said. “Charlotte?” I braced myself for the onslaught.

  Then she surprised me.

  “Ten? I’m getting married. I thought you’d want to know.”

  Charlotte, married. To someone else. A hot streak of jealousy sliced through me, which made no sense at all, considering I was the one who broke things off.

  “Tenzing? Aren’t you going to congratulate me? You owe me that, at least.”

  And there it was; the familiar “you owe me” card. It loosened up an avalanche of bad memories—the many ways I constantly infuriated her, the times she, in turn, disappointed me. Our last fight bloomed inside my brain like a bad seed. Prompted by her insistence that I had bought the wrong kind of lentil (I hadn’t), the small spat quickly escalated, culminating in my yelling at Charlotte, in one of my finer expressions of loving-kindness, that I’d never liked the way she smelled. Since the day I met her.

  She responded by swatting me with a dish towel, a sharp snap to the side of the head.

  Honestly? I admired her for it. It woke me up to the hard truth that we were never going to be right in each other’s eyes. And that it didn’t have a thing to do with either of us. Not her. Not me. We were just a couple of warm bodies stepping into old, familiar roles, long established in the past, and sure to run us well into the future if we didn’t do something to change the wiring. Two con artists conning each other, with the occasional great sex thrown in just to keep us good and confused.

  That fight was the last time we saw each other.

  I could sense Charlotte’s edginess growing on the other end of the line as she geared up for one last dramatic blowout. The familiar tension bounced back and forth between us, looking for an ally.

  My eyes drifted across the room to the big plate glass window framing the far wall. It was dark outside, but beyond that darkness lay the ocean, wide and expansive, mutable yet constant. I felt its spaciousness waiting out there. Just waiting for me to acknowledge it. I took a deep breath.

  “Congratulations, Charlotte.” I said. “I wish you both well.”

  I hung up gently. Then I just stood there, phone in hand, trying to digest this new chunk of information. I waited. After a moment, my insides shifted. The heaviness inside—that cold iron ball that had hardened around all the times we’d disappointed each other, pissed each other off—actually started to soften, to melt a little. Well, what do you know?

  “Hey, Tank,” I called out to my favorite feline, curled up on his cushion. He opened one eye. “Guess what? She-who-hates-cats is getting married.”

  Tank’s tail flicked once. He was pleased. So was I. Relief and something bordering on glee flooded through me. Now and forever, there would always be a buffer, somebody else she could blame for everything being wrong with her life, before she got around to blaming me.

  I strutted around my house for the rest of the evening, feeling pretty good about my existence on this fine planet.

  The next day I got shot.

  Here’s how it went down. My partner Bill Bohannon and I were finishing up a quick lunch, steaming bowls of Pho at a Vietnamese place we like in Echo Park, before heading back to Robbery/Homicide. As I opened my fortune cookie—don’t ask me why, but Angelenos demand fortune cookies from any Asian establishment, Chinese or not—the radio crackled to life: “Code three, four-one-five. Possible DV in progress.” Headquarters was calling for any available patrol cars to investigate a Domestic Violence incident. The address was only a couple of blocks from the restaurant. I glanced down at my tiny strip of future: “Destino está pidiendo,” it said. A Vietnamese fortune, written in Spanish. Only in Los Angeles. I turned it over.

  “‘Destiny is calling,’” I read to Bill. As if on cue, the radio crackled out a repeat of its call to action. “Let’s go,” I said.

  Within minutes we skidded into the driveway of a dismal-looking little bungalow near Rampart, first on the scene. Ramshackle front steps led to a splintered porch boasting a couple of metal folding chairs so battered they were safe to leave outside, even in this neighborhood.

  A siren wailed in the distance. I had a fleeting notion that we should wait for backup, but Bill was reaching for his door. That’s all it took. I rolled out of mine and hit the ground without missing a stride.

  I was sprinting toward the porch, Bill somewhere behind me, when he yelped out in pain. I glanced back. My partner was hopping up and down on one foot, swearing a blue streak. Bad time to twist an ankle.

  Here’s where things started heading south. And from there they careened even further, about as far south as things can go.

  Loud shouts erupted from the house. I was caught between Bill’s gimpy ankle and the fracas inside. My gut begged me to pause, but the adrenaline screamed, “Go!” The split second of indecision ended with the unmistakable report of gunshot, followed by a wailing female scream. I drew my revolver and ran to the screen door.

  “Hot shot! Hot shot!” I heard Bill yell into the radio behind me. “Code ninety-nine.”

  I pressed my face against the thin mesh and peered inside. A man slouched on a sofa to my left, cradling a .45-caliber semiautomatic. He was around my age, maybe 30, lanky, Caucasian, with a scraggly beard and long, greasy hair. Pretty calm, considering. I followed his gaze across the room, where a second man was sprawled on his back on the floor, a ragged hole in his chest.

  Not good.

  A woman in her 20s, also lanky, also Caucasian, huddled in the corner, hand to her mouth. Her screams had subsided into a series of strangled, high-pitched yelps. I looked closer. One of her eyes was swollen shut, a purple and black protrusion under her brow.

  Apparently I wasn’t the only one with relationship issues.

  Bill called out, “What’s happening?”

  “Stay put for a minute,” I called back. “We’ve got a situation here.”

  “Ten, don’t you dare even think about going ins—”

  I stepped inside, vaguely aware that the swelling volume of siren wails indicated at least two squad cars en route, and getting close. Not much time to try to resolve this peaceably before it turned into a goat rodeo.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the guy, keeping my voice calm and friendly. He was lazily twirling the heavy automatic in his hand, like he was used to handling it. I saw it was a Springfield, an M1911. He wasn’t pointing it at me, though, so I kept my Glock at my side. “Leon,” he answered dreamily.

  He canted his head in my direction. I checked out his pupils. Fully dilated. He was seriously stoned on something.

  “What’s yours?” he asked.

  “Ten,” I said.

  “Say, what?” Leon said.

  I inched over to the body. The guy wasn’t moving, and his skin was the leached gray-green that signals zero life force. But I had to be sure. I squatted beside him and lightly pressed his neck, where there should have been the steady rhythm of pumping blood.

  Nothing. He wasn’t even circling the drain. Whoever he was, he appeared to be gone.

  I sent off a quick, silent blessing: Om mani padme hum. May you enjoy peace and joy in
the afterlife and in all your future lives. Reciting the mantra would hopefully plant the seed of liberation in him, sinner or saint.

  I straightened up. “My name is Ten,” I told Leon. “Like the number.”

  “Ten,” Leon said. “Never heard that one before.”

  “Short for Tenzing.”

  “Never heard of that, either.”

  “There are lots of Tenzings where I come from,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah? Where’s that?”

  “Tibet, by way of India,” I said.

  “No shit,” he said. Then, “I been to Iraq.”

  It was like I’d landed on some television talk show, only this show had a real live killer-host, who was playing with a loaded hand cannon.

  I started moving closer to Leon, careful to keep my weapon at my side. I didn’t want to turn this into a pissing contest. Or maybe I did. Tiny tingles of adrenaline started to dance in my bloodstream, the precursors to a full-on flood. My heart bumped faster against my ribcage. My senses sharpened. Delicious. A small voice inside whispered a warning—Careful, Ten. You’re playing with fire here. Disarm him, and wait for the others.

  I ignored it.

  “Did you get that hardware in the military, Leon?”

  He hefted the big pistol in his hand and looked at it with fondness. “Yeah. First time I’ve shot it since Fallujah.”

  “Nice piece,” I said. “Right now, how about putting it down and let’s talk some more?”

  This got a hard laugh out of him.

  “No disrespect,” he said, “but I don’t want to talk to you that bad, Mr. Ten. Tell you what I’m gonna do instead. I’m gonna make your job a little easier by confessing to this crime here.”

  He waved the muzzle toward the body on the floor. “See that piece of crap over there with the hole in his chest?”

  I nodded. Took another baby step toward him.

  “I shot him.”

  “You did, hunh?” Another step, nice and slow.

  “Yep…. Should’ve done it years ago. Should’ve done it the first time he beat the living hell out of my little sister.”