The Alex Troutt Thrillers: Books 1-3 (Alex Troutt Thrillers Box Set)

by John W. Mefford

  I pulled the chin strap tight and caught Archie out of the corner of my eye.

  “What the hell are you doing? It’s not going to bite.”

  Archie’s stressed face looked like he was trying to convince himself to stick a stake in his heart. Or adorn a hat with lice.

  “Wait a second,” I said as he hovered the helmet about three inches from his head. “You’re afraid the helmet will mess up your new fro.”

  I started to giggle, then covered my mouth.

  “Screw you.”

  Ralph turned back around and gave Archie a funny look.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “I, uh...I’m not thrilled with being in closed spaces. Yeah, I start to feel claustrophobic when I have a hat on my head, especially one this big.”

  Ralph led us to the fire truck and up to the roof at the base of the turntable ladder. He put a foot on the first rung and stopped.

  “I don’t want fifty people on this thing at the same time, so one of you goes first, followed by the other. Then I’ll bring up the rear. Also, make sure you secure your safety belt.”

  I nodded and took a step. “I guess I’ll go first.”

  Ralph held up his hand. “Not until your partner secures his helmet.”

  Turning around, I saw Archie gripping both sides of the helmet. It was on his head, but it didn’t appear to be touching his precious hairdo.

  “Seriously, Archie? Get a grip, man.”

  “I’m good. Just waiting for the signal.” He tugged the chin strap tight as he winced.

  Ralph and I both shook our heads in annoyance, and then I began the hike upward. Barely ten rungs up, I could feel the wind pick up. Lifting my eyes to the end of the ladder, I could see it sway a bit.

  “Is that normal, the ladder moving and all?” I shouted down to Ralph.

  “Yep. You just learn to ignore it and trust your training.”

  I nodded and kept moving, but I could hear Archie say, “But we never got any training. Are you sure it’s safe?”

  “Jesus H. Christ. Don’t tell me they gave me someone who was afraid of heights?” Ralph said with an exasperated tone.

  “Alex, you must be afraid of heights. I’m not afraid of heights,” Archie said as his voice pitched higher.

  “Whatever.” Truth be told, I wasn’t thrilled with heights, but it wasn’t a crippling fear. I continued making slow, steady progress up the ladder. I glanced down and found Archie about ten rungs behind me. Ralph appeared to be coaxing him to move faster, or to move at all. I wasn’t sure which.

  Five rungs from the top, I paused. I could see the side of Sam Beck’s face, a few wayward strands of long hair fluttered in the wind. Peeling my grip off the rung above me, the stiff breeze cooled my hand that had started to get clammy. The anticipation of seeing any crime scene often brought an unsettled feeling. At a hundred feet above the ground and knowing that I’d likely be forced to observe a macabre image that might haunt me for weeks, my stomach had already started its flip-flop routine.

  I forced out a breath and climbed two more rungs.

  “Holy shit,” I said to myself.

  I had to blink twice to make sure it was real.

  Beck’s head sat awkwardly against his left shoulder. Like the other victims, it appeared he’d showered in blood. His own blood, I was certain.

  I lifted to my toes. Not much blood in the seat of the roller coaster, so it was safe to assume the act of murder had likely taken place on ground and then Turov had placed Beck on the roller coaster, turned it on, and stopped it at the top.

  All to make a statement. To create her perfect little killing vignette.

  I could hear Archie grunting behind me. The ladder rocked a bit with each step he took. He sounded as if he was...I tried like hell not to go there.

  Shifting my feet six inches to the right, I followed the trail of Beck’s blood to his back. I shoved my hand to my mouth, hoping I wouldn’t hurl all over the men below me.

  His spine had been split in two right down the middle. Beyond that, it was a complete mess of lifeless body parts flopping outside his cavity.

  “Is that his spinal cord?”

  “What? I gotta see!” Archie sounded like a teenage boy eager to see his first Playboy centerfold.

  He bumped the bottom of my calves.

  “Hold on, Archie. I’m not sure this ladder is wide enough for two people.”

  He and Ralph engaged in a quick conversation while I pulled out my phone and took several pictures.

  I swiped my thumb to open a group text, then heard a swooshing sound as I hit send, hoping the technology wouldn’t let me down, and Nick, Brad and Carella would soon see the images. Especially Carella. If he had yet to interview Bruno, showing him the images might elicit something more than his regimented Semper Fi response.

  A grunt in my ear just as I felt a man’s body press against my backside.

  “Whoa there, Archie.”

  “Hiya, Alex,” he said in my ear while chomping on a piece of gum.

  A spearmint odor wafted across my space.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I was completely wedged against the rungs of the ladder, his man parts all up in my business.

  “I think I just got over my fear of heights,” he said with far too much excitement. “Ralph gave me a piece of gum and told me chew it to the rhythm of a song. He said it helped him when he first started in the department almost twenty years ago.”

  “Okay, but that doesn’t explain why you think you can grope me from behind,” I said through gritted teeth. I pulled my elbow back and considered ramming it into his sternum.

  “You don’t want me to tumble to my death, do you?” He patted my elbow.

  “You took your hand off the ladder.”

  “Sure did. Want to see me go with no hands?”

  “Tempting, but you’d probably grab me if you started falling.”

  As I turned back to continue inspecting the body, Archie jostled the ladder.

  “Dude, what now?”

  He moved up another step, his head now just above mine.

  “Holy crap, Batgirl. That lady knows how to throw a murder party.”

  “Pretty sick, huh?” I turned my sights to Beck’s neck and back. The grisly sight was even worse on the second view. Craning my neck to improve the angle, I think I saw crumbled pieces of his vertebrae dangling from flesh and dried blood.

  I looped my arm up and transferred the phone to my opposite hand.

  “You’re taking more photos? You must have a sick scrapbook at home.”

  I clicked the phone off and realized my breathing had become quite labored.

  “Dammit, Archie, it’s time to get off me. I didn’t know your scrawny ass had this much weight.”

  “It’s not my ass that weighs a lot.” He forced out a chuckle.

  Oh, how I wished we were on the ground.

  “Can you start moving down the ladder?”

  “Say please.”

  “Get your ass off me, dammit.”

  “You seem focused on my ass,” he said through laughter. “But it’s not my ass that’s on you.”

  “Archie!”

  “Hold on. I see something.” He bumped my helmet over my eyes as he reached across the dead body.

  “Don’t screw up the crime scene, Archie. We can’t afford to destroy any evidence—”

  “It’s a piece of paper,” he grunted while reaching farther. “Stuck in the collar of his T-shirt, but it looks like it might fly out. I just about have it.”

  “And?”

  “Hold your horses, sweet pea.”

  More grunting, then, “Got it.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Nasty. It’s covered in blood.”

  He rubbed his fingers on the back of my jacket.

  “Did you just...?”

  He chuckled as he opened the paper just above me, gripping it with both hands.

  “It’s written on a credit card receipt from so
me place called Mary Lou’s Diner.”

  “Okay. What does it say?”

  “Boy, her handwriting is bad.”

  A gust of wind blew it out of one of Archie’s hands.

  “Dammit, don’t lose it.”

  He gripped it tighter. “It says, An adrenaline rush like Sam has never experienced. Me either:). Enjoy my work, AT. Something tells me we’ll meet soon.”

  An intake of air caught in the back of my throat as another breeze drew water from my eyes. I replayed the words. Obviously, she was enjoying this cat-and-mouse game more and more. She would kill, and we would come running. In between the murders, we’d barely had time to work the crime scenes, review any obvious pieces of evidence, and if we were lucky, take a deep breath. Getting ahead of the curve to figure out who might be next had been slow going at best.

  The last part of her message replayed in my mind: Enjoy my work, AT. Something tells me we’ll meet soon. Was she just taunting me because of my connection to Mark and, in her mind, I was the face of all law enforcement? I’d met her just once in my life. I found it hard to believe that she had the same pent-up rage against me that she apparently felt for the victims. The sheer number of murders was mind boggling, but so was the predictability of who and where.

  My pulse doubled its pace as I thought through our options. It was hard to imagine how the murders would stop unless we caught that one big break. But where would it come from and would we even have the time to notice it amongst the constant flow of carnage?

  “Let’s get the hell off this ladder, share the note with the team, and figure out our next steps.”

  Archie complied without saying a word, which, in itself, shocked me. Maybe he knew when I couldn’t take anymore. Two rungs down, I could feel the vibration of my phone. I stopped, hooked my arm around a rung, and pulled out my phone to see who it was.

  Carella.

  I tapped the green button. “What’s up?”

  “You won’t believe the shit I just got on tape.”

  “You interviewed Chappaletti?”

  “It wasn’t easy, and he insisted on his lawyer being there,” he said, panting like a dog who’d just run a mile.

  “What did you get?”

  A tug on my pants leg.

  “Hold on. I don’t want to get pulled off a ladder a hundred feet above the ground,” I said into the receiver.

  “What Archie?”

  “Who is it?”

  “Carella. He just got through talking to Chappaletti.”

  “Let me hear,” he said, taking a step back up.

  “Hold on there, guys,” Ralph said from below. “This shit is crazy. You can’t be holding conference calls, conducting business as usual while we’re a hundred feet up.”

  “Sorry, Ralph.” Archie and I both spoke at the same time, and then we locked eyes for a brief moment.

  I went on to say, “A minute wasted could cost us another life. Give us two minutes.”

  I heard Ralph mumbling something about holding a gun to our heads, but I’m sure he was just blowing off steam.

  “You guys are on a frickin’ ladder?” Carella asked.

  “We are,” I said while trying to shift my weight lower so Archie could hear. My fist knocked his helmet over his eyes.

  “Hey, dammit, watch the hair.”

  “I hit your helmet. At least the one sitting on top of your hair, which also looks like a helmet.” I spoke into the phone. “Carella, tell us what you learned.”

  “Well, it wasn’t until you...hold on. Sounds like you’re in a frickin’ wind tunnel.”

  I knew I would regret it later, but I said, “Archie, move your ass up here.”

  “There you go again. You and my ass.”

  “Archie?”

  “I’m moving, dammit. You sound like my old little league coach. He taught me how to cuss.”

  He lifted his body up one more rung, and his face was eye level with my breasts.

  “Damn, I just hit the jackpot!”

  “Unless you want me to put my foot straight up—”

  “But then you’d rack me, and I’d let go of the ladder and fall to my death.”

  “Glad you understand the proverbial ledge you’re standing on.”

  I noticed he tightened his grip on the side of the ladder.

  “Sorry, Carella. We’re in position. Go ahead.”

  Archie’s lips turned upward, a snide comment at the edge of his lips. I gave him the eye.

  “The first thirty minutes of the interview went nowhere. Same Semper Fi crap. On some of the questions, his lawyer would butt in and tell him not to respond.”

  “Lawyers. What use do they serve?” I couldn’t help myself. “Go on,” I said.

  “Sir, you’re disturbing the others. You need to step outside.” An unfamiliar voice.

  “Carella?”

  “But...okay, dammit. Whatever,” Carella said, followed by a loud creaking noise.

  “Crap. They kicked me out of the front reception area. I’m standing outside now. So, I was saying, I saw your email come in with the pictures of Sam Beck. Without asking permission from his lawyer, I just stuck my phone in front of Bruno’s face.”

  He coughed a couple of times, and it sounded like he’d hacked up a black lung.

  “Any reaction?”

  “Reaction? He fuckin’ lost it. He started wailing, pounding his fists on the table and shit. It was disturbing.”

  “Dammit. So he knew this guy, Beck,” I said to Archie, who just gave me a simple nod. “I wonder if there’s some type of strange lover’s triangle thing between Bruno, Beck, and Turov.”

  Archie said, “But Bruno is alive, and it appears she might have hired him to do some dirty work.”

  “Maybe Bruno won the contest.”

  “Guys,” Carella broke in. “He spilled his guts. Bruno, Beck, Turov...they were all part of a special ops force run by the CIA.”

  I looked down at Archie. “You knew this, didn’t you?”

  Shaking his head intensely, he shot back, “What the hell? I don’t know shit about this.”

  “You’re full of it, Archie. You and your cloak-and-dagger fraternity had this information and kept it away from our team.”

  “There’s more,” Carella said just as Archie had pointed a finger at me, nearly poking my breast.

  I thought about snapping it like a twig, but I didn’t want to send both of us airborne. Ralph wouldn’t be happy.

  “More about what?”

  I could hear his labored breathing again. “This is some heavy shit. Although, Archie, you might already know it. Hard to tell with you.”

  “You guys have it all wrong. I—”

  “Save it for another time,” I said with an eye roll. “Carella?”

  An even deeper exhale. “What he told me is classified information. His lawyer told me that after our discussion.”

  “Okay, who gives a shit? Go on.”

  “Bruno said Margaret gave the group a nickname. The Bandits. At times, she’d called them the Little Banditos.”

  “They stole something?”

  “Yes, but more than that. More than anything, Bruno said, she always said they made off like little bandits.”

  “What did they steal?”

  “That was their first mission, deep in the heart of Afghanistan. They were directed to intercept a drug-smuggling exchange, steal the product, and kill anyone who tried to stop them.”

  “What the hell would the CIA want with a bunch of drugs?”

  “Opium. Supposedly worth close to a hundred million dollars,” Carella said.

  Archie stayed silent as I cast my gaze across the amusement park. A couple of hawks glided past my sights and landed on the far loop of the roller coaster.

  I shook my head. “Archie, this is for you as much as Carella. Why is the CIA in the business of stealing from drug smugglers? Risking lives to do it, even.”

  Archie gave me another tight-lipped shrug.

  Carella said, “Bru
no didn’t get into that. He and his squad just followed orders. But it had to be about the money, right?”

  I wanted to grab Archie by the lapel and shake him until he opened up. But given our lofty position, I used a single finger to nudge his shoulder.

  “Hey, be careful, Alex.”

  “So tell us then.”

  “I don’t know, okay? I’m a field agent, not the director of Homeland Security.”

  I growled, and I could feel perspiration beading at my hairline.

  Carella spoke up. “That was just the first mission. There were more. A lot more.”

  “Did he give you details on each of them?”

  “Not even close. He guessed they went on eighteen, maybe twenty total missions. Each one, he said, was more dangerous than the previous. Some of the guys started getting scared and spoke up, wondering if they were being put on a suicide mission.”

  “You know we haven’t even touched on how Turov was a part of this group. Remember, women, especially, Marines, aren’t allowed in combat.”

  “Bruno actually chuckled once when I noted the same thing. He said that Margaret not only had the strength of the strongest guy he knew, but she had skills no one could match. Hand-to-hand combat. The best sniper he’d seen. But more than anything she had this instinctive drive to kill. Bruno and his buddies called her The Machine because she was able to carry out the orders and didn’t seem to care who was killed in the process. Margaret never batted an eye. Said she was born for that role.”

  “Straight from the horse’s mouth,” I said in a monotone.

  “Crap really hit the fan for the Little Banditos on their second-to-last mission. Two Marines were killed, along with one contractor hired by the CIA. They blamed each other...contractors against the Marines. It was ugly, and Bruno said the group figured they’d be disbanded and they’d all return to their normal jobs.”

  “But there was one more mission,” I said.

  “Yep. Intel had come in that there was going to be a meeting of top officials from six different factions of terrorist leaders, including a splinter group from the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Hezbi Islami, and a couple of others. They were gathering in a small home at the edge of the main valley in the Kunar province. Supposedly, it’s one of the major hotspots in the entire Middle East. Borders Pakistan.”