Only the Strong

by Ethan Cross

  Kevin seemed to consider this.

  Baxter shook his head and continued, “Never mind that. Remember a couple weeks back when you were telling me about how you had hacked into all of the bus cameras, and that you are basically big brother, and how you were sure that the government was using those cameras against us.”

  “Right. They claim that all the extra cameras are because they’re beta testing some type of automation software, but I don’t buy that for a second. These asshats basically have mobile surveillance vans traveling all over the city.”

  “I read in the paper it had something to do with insurance liabilities.”

  Kevin said, “What’s ‘The Paper?’ I’m not familiar with that group.”

  “The newspaper.”

  “I didn’t know they still made those.”

  With a roll of his eyes, Baxter said, “Kids these days. Anyway, doesn’t really matter. Important thing is that I want to exploit those mobile surveillance vans for my own gain.”

  Kevin didn’t seem to be following.

  “I want you to help me use their system to save a young woman’s life. So I just got one question for you, Kevmeister, are you ready to be a hero today?”

  Kevin shrugged. “I guess. What do you wanna see?”

  Fifteen minutes later, Kevin had accessed the transit authority video systems and recalled the archived footage from the night Corin Campbell went missing. Unfortunately, the video from the bus nearest Corin’s house showed nothing of interest.

  Staring at one of Kevin’s massive flat screen monitors, Baxter said, “Can you pull up a street map with the Muni lines over the top?”

  Kevin, sitting in his command chair in front of the four twenty-seven inch screens, said, “No problem.” A few seconds later the map appeared on the screen.

  Leaning close, Baxter studied the different colored lines. “Can you print this out for me?”

  “I don’t have a printer. What’s the point anymore? If you have a coupon or something, you can just show it to the cashier on your phone.”

  “Kids. No worries. I’ll make do.” After a moment of staring at the map, he said, “We know that Corin’s car wasn’t there. So whoever took her must have also taken the car. If we trace back the cameras, and we map that out, and we kind of think fourth dimensionally, then I ascertain that we could track his path with the car and then maybe find a bus that intersected with them. We could get lucky. But what bus do we need to check next?”

  Kevin said, “While you were yammering on, I pulled up the exact hexadecimal color of Corin Campbell’s car. Now I’m going to run a search through all the archive footage from that time period searching for that specific color. We’ll get a lot of false positives, but if I narrow those results by geographic area, that will give us the best chance of finding her car on the footage.”

  With a nod, Baxter replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds beautiful.”

  “The search is running now.”

  A few moments later, after having sorted through a couple of false positives, Kevin said, “And there is Corin Campbell’s car.” He pulled the video up on the screens and added, “This is all the footage they caught.”

  The video played on, showing Corin’s car as it passed one of the city’s electric trolleybuses. Baxter studied the video, searching for any reflections or views into the car, but unfortunately, all the angles were wrong. They didn’t have a clear shot of who was driving.

  “Can you replay that again? This time in slow motion.”

  The video played at a slower speed. Baxter watched again and said, “Stop it there.”

  Pointing to a spot on the monitor, he said, “Can you zoom in here and enhance?”

  Kevin complied, and when he was finished, they had a clear picture of a man’s hand reaching across the car to close the glovebox.

  But, more importantly, the hand was inked with a very distinctive tattoo.

  Baxter, slapping his hands together excitedly, said, “There it is, dos compadres. Bingo, bango, bongo. Now, all we have to do is take this down to a Kinkos or Staples or something, get a printout, and head over to see my old partner.”

  Kevin said, “Absolutely not. No cops. I have a strict no police policy. It was in the waivers that you two signed.”

  Having mostly just hung back, taking it all in, Jenny asked, “Why do we need the cops anyway?”

  Baxter said, “It’s time we get the proper authorities involved. We’ve proven that there’s more to this case than just a missing person, and we’ve given the cops a great lead. I’ve earned my pay and done my duty. And now it’s time for the cops to step in and do their thing. Plus, I need Detective Ferrera to run that crazy tattoo through the database. With a little luck, we may have a suspect in custody this time tomorrow.”

  “How about I run the image of the tattoo against all social media photos in the San Francisco area?” Kevin asked. “Then we’ll have the guy’s name and know everything about him.”

  Jenny said, “You can do that? How? Do you pull all the images and run some kind of pixel recognition for the tattoo?”

  “Something like that. Who’s asking? Are you affiliated officially or unofficially to any kind of law enforcement agency?”

  Jenny raised an eyebrow and looked at Baxter. He said, “Take it easy there, Kevieronymus Bosch. Go ahead and run your search.”

  “It’ll take a few minutes,” the young computer expert said, still eyeing Jenny cautiously from beneath his hood.

  “We’ll wait,” Baxter said as he walked over to the one item in Kevin’s living room that wasn’t a cookie-cutter bare necessity. It was an old record player hooked up to a new sound system. A stack of worn records sat beneath the record player’s stand. Baxter mused, “I’m gonna take a minute to explore your record collection, Kevin.”

  “Those are sorted and alphabetized by genre and band name.”

  “You just go do your thing. I’ll put them back exactly as I found them.”

  Sorting through the stack of timeworn records, Baxter was careful to keep them in the same order. It wasn’t long before he found a nice Hendrix album and placed it on the turntable. Moving the needle into place, he closed his eyes and listened to Jimi sing about castles made of sand.

  Jenny came up beside him and said, “Funny that we may catch that woman’s killer based on some tattoo.”

  “We don’t know she’s dead. There’s always hope. But I certainly wouldn’t envy the torment she’s endured if she’s still alive after all this time.”

  “That’s one heck of a creepy tattoo. It was like the bottom half of some mangled skull.”

  “Yeah, it seems somehow familiar to me, but I can’t quite place it. Speaking of tattoos, what’s with your new ink?”

  “Noticed that, huh?”

  “I’m a detective.”

  She rolled up her sleeve and displayed her wrist. The new tattoo was small, barely larger than a half dollar in size, but intricate. The artist clearly had tremendous talent. The swirls and flourishes of ink, which were now outlined in irritated skin, depicted a Yin Yang symbol. Only the emblem was composed of the images of a white and black dog.

  Admiring the artistry, Baxter said, “It’s gorgeous. What was the thinking behind it? What’s its significance?”

  Jenny stared out the window as she bobbed her head along with Jimi. “My grandmother used to tell me that we all have two dogs inside us. A white dog and a black dog, good and evil, love and fear, that kind of thing. She would say that the one who survives will be the one we choose to feed.”

  “I like that. Think I’m going to steal it. Next time you hear it, just go along with me and pretend like I made it up.”

  She punched him in the arm and shook her head. “Do you really like the tattoo?”

  “I think it may be my new favorite,” he said
with a big smile, showing off his dimples.

  Kevin stepped back into the room and said, “I know this sounds crazy, but I don’t think this guy has a social media account. And he apparently doesn’t have any friends who take pictures either.”

  Baxter shrugged. “Why is that so strange? I don’t have a Facebook or Tweeter account.”

  Jenny curled her lip and looked him up and down. “Yes, you do. You’re always posting on there about your blog stuff.”

  “Damnit, Kevarino, I told you not to do that.”

  “It’s a requirement for the blog. It’s not like I’m using it to pick up chicks.”

  “I don’t like having my name and face on stuff that isn’t me. I don’t even know the username and password for my own accounts.”

  “I programmed them to all be accessible through your cell phone.”

  Baxter shook his head. “I barely know how to answer that thing.”

  “But you texted me directions earlier. How did you do that if you can’t work your phone?” Jenny asked.

  “I saw your message come in, and I saw that my phone sent you the directions you wanted.”

  “Your phone doesn’t just do that.”

  Kevin cleared his throat. “I thought you knew all this, Bax. I’ve been handling that kind of thing for you for a while now. I manage your calendar, help with tech stuff, read your messages. I—”

  Holding up a hand to stop his pale young friend, Baxter said, “So you responded to Jenny’s message for me, and you’ve been monitoring all my phone conversations.”

  “Just doing my part to help out.”

  “Stop helping me, Kevin. We’re going to have a long talk about this later, but for now, it looks like I have no choice but to go see a cop about a tattoo.”

  ~~*~~

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  The past…

  Marcus considered merely running up and trying to scare the big man with the useless weapon he had taken from the panic room. But his father had also taught him a thing or two about fighting. One of the most important lessons was to use your weaknesses as strengths. If you’re small, you have a lower center of gravity, and you needed to use that to your advantage. If you’re big, you have a longer reach.

  In Marcus’s case, he was a scared little kid, and he intended to use that weakness to kick the man in black’s ass.

  He pinched his arm until he drew blood, and then repeated the procedure until his eyes were full of tears. Then he ran screaming down the concrete corridor, straight toward the big man in the black suit. The guard started to reach into his coat, but Marcus ran right up and buried his tear-soaked face in the big man’s stomach. He said, “Please, help me! I’m so scared.”

  The big man asked, “What the hell, kid? How did you get down here?”

  Under his breath, Marcus mumbled, “Have you ever been punched in the nuts?”

  “What?”

  Then Marcus reached into his New York Yankees jacket, grabbed the handle of the gun, and using it like a club, he attacked the big man’s crotch. The blow connected with a crunch and rattle.

  Marcus stepped back as the behemoth of a man leaned over as if he was going to retch. He looked at Marcus with confusion in his eyes.

  Marcus smiled and said, “Hurts, doesn’t it?”

  And then he hammered the side of the gun into the big man’s temple. The guard toppled forward, slamming his head against the concrete wall.

  Marcus backed up several steps, keeping the gun trained on his opponent, but the man didn’t move. He was out cold.

  Wasting no time, Marcus ran to the steel door and pulled it open. There was no handle on the other side. The room beyond was lit with two red bulbs, the kind Marcus had seen on emergency signs, giving everything a hellishly red tint. The space was nothing more than a giant concrete box with a drain in the center. There were two people strapped to gurneys in the middle of the room. The young couple—a man and woman, much older than him but still what his dad would call “kids”—were naked and bleeding, their blood flowing toward the drain like watercolors. The man’s head had nearly been cut off.

  Marcus was too terrified to be disgusted, too frightened to feel anything else.

  The woman was alive, despite wounds that covered her whole body. She still screamed and moaned.

  When he spoke, it didn’t seem to be his voice, but someone older. “I’m here to help.”

  The sound must have broken death’s hold on the woman because she stopped screaming and bent her head up in his direction. Her face had been severely beaten, causing her words to sound as if she had a mouth full of gum. She said, “Thank God. Dude, you gotta help me.”

  “No shit,” Marcus said.

  He ran forward and clawed at her restraints.

  The only time he had ever seen a woman without her clothes on was in some of Eddie’s Playboy magazines. The woman on the gurney was like one of them—young, beautiful. At least, he guessed she would have looked like that if it wasn’t for pieces of her flesh being cut away. She had a dark tuft of hair between her legs and large breasts. Or, at least, they seemed large to him.

  Her chest had drawn his focus not merely because he was a boy in the presence of a naked woman, but also because he would have to reach over her to unclasp one of the restraints.

  Seeming to read his thoughts, she said, “It’s okay, kid. Just get me out of here.”

  “Who are you? Why are they doing this to you?”

  As he spoke, he undid the last of her restraints. She didn’t answer him. Instead, she dropped her trembling legs to the floor and staggered toward the nearly decapitated man. Giving no thought to the blood, she laid her head on his chest and wept.

  He heard her mumbling a name under her breath, but he couldn’t quite catch what it was. He repeated his previous questions, and this time she responded, “None of that matters now, kid. We tried to steal from Tommy Jewels, down at one of the casinos in Atlantic City. The less you know, the better. How do I get outta here?”

  He said, “How the hell should I know?”

  “You had to get in here somehow.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t want to go that way. But if you go out the door and take a right, I thought I heard the sounds of engines coming from that way. Maybe it’s a garage or something?”

  She stumbled through the steel door and over to the guard. She felt inside his jacket until her hand came out with a long black pistol with a sound suppressor threaded onto the end of the barrel. Marcus recognized it as the kind of gun that James Bond villains used when they wanted to kill someone and not have anyone hear.

  She didn’t bother to cover her naked body. She said, “Who are you, kid?”

  “I’m just a guest here at the party. But my dad’s a cop. He can help you.”

  “Nobody can help me. All I can do is run. Your dad is probably on Tommy Jewels’s payroll. And even if he’s not, his boss probably is. That’s the way this world works, kid. You fight the system, you end up dead. And Tommy Jewels runs the system, or at least his boss does.”

  She glanced down the hall, checking both ways for more guards, and then she continued, “Here’s what we’re going to do, kiddo. You’re going back to your party, and you’re going to forget that you ever saw me.”

  “No, you need help. I can’t just—”

  She grabbed his head and twisted his neck toward the hellish room that held the bloodied body of her companion. She said, “I talked him into this. His blood is on my hands. And I’ll be damned if I have your blood on my hands to. I’m the adult, and I have a gun now. Just go back to the party and keep your mouth shut. That’s the best way you can help me.”

  Marcus said, “But what about the guard? I knocked him out. I think he’s going to remember me when he wakes up.”

  Without the slightest hesitation, she raised the gun and squeeze
d the trigger. There was a small flash and a thump and a ping, and then blood splattered out from the man’s head onto the concrete floor of the corridor.

  She said, “Problem solved.” Then she rolled the guard over, removed his jacket, and slipped it over her bare shoulders. He was a big man, and she was a small woman, and so the jacket functioned more like a dress. She ejected the magazine from the gun and checked the number of rounds. She did it in the same way his dad had showed him. Slamming it back in hard, she said, “I’m not a damsel in distress, and no offense, but you aren’t a knight in shining armor. Now get your ass back to that party and keep your mouth shut.”

  “But I could at least call my dad. I could—”

  “You listen good, kid. The only way that we survive is that you don’t tell a soul that you ever saw me.”

  ~~*~~

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Ackerman leaped toward the stubby marmoset man, not worrying about breaking the rules to disarm the man with the shotgun. Besides, he had always found that it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

  Instead of wrenching the weapon from Willoughby’s grasp, he grabbed both ends of the shotgun and placed his entire weight into pulling it to down to the floor. To his great satisfaction, the knife remained affixed in both the gun and Willoughby’s hand.

  Face to face, his prey totally at his mercy, Ackerman whispered, “I will accept nothing less than total surrender. You live and the pain stops if you give me that. But nothing short of it. That means that if I let you up and even think that you are holding anything back, I will feel that you have violated the terms of your capitulation.”

  He slid the gun across the concrete floor, pulling the blade slowly through the soft tissues of Willoughby’s hand. The stubby man yelped and said, “Please.”

  “Total surrender. Everything you know, I want to know.”

  “Okay. Okay. Total surrender.”

  Ackerman smiled. “You know, if we were in ancient Sumeria—”