Scars (Nevada James #2) (Nevada James Mysteries)

by Matthew Storm

Smartass, he sent back. You okay?

  Fine. May move again tomorrow. Let me know if you get anything new.

  Will do.

  I was about to go back to picking at the chicken carcass when the phone rang. It was Brad Ellis this time. It occurred to me that I’d been ignoring Sarah’s messages. Maybe she thought I was mad at her. “Hey,” I answered.

  “Sorry to bother you, Nevada,” Ellis said. “We’ve got another crime scene. Can you spare us some time?”

  I sighed. “Look, Brad, I don’t mean to be a bitch, but I don’t see what I can contribute to this. Sarah said she had some ideas. She’s a good detective. You seem okay enough. What do you want me to do here?”

  “We just need another pair of eyes,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Tell me where.”

  Ellis gave me an address in Balboa Park and hung up. I looked at the phone for a moment, thinking things over. I really didn’t feel like looking at another body. Nor did I really want to see Dan right now, and it was almost certain he’d show up at the crime scene sooner or later. He might try to bundle me up and put me on a plane to South America, no doubt while lecturing me on the need to keep safe.

  Still, it might be better to make an appearance. I just needed to remember to keep my cool, not let my emotions get away from me, and most of all not to completely flip out and start yelling at people that weren’t there. A good display of sanity and reasonableness might be enough to keep Dan off my back for a while.

  I tucked my Glock into its shoulder holster and put the .45 Dan had given me on my hip. He’d be happy to see I was carrying it. I almost looked like a real cop.

  Once outside I rolled the Mustang’s window down so I could feel the night air. It tended to relax me, and being relaxed would be a plus once I got to the crime scene. Traffic was light and I managed to find the address Ellis had given me within about fifteen minutes. It was a small, one-story house in a residential neighborhood that had seen better days, but not so bad people would be afraid to walk down the street after dark. I recognized Sarah’s car parked in the house’s driveway. It was the only one there. A few other cars were parked along the streets in either direction, but this was a residential neighborhood. Cars were supposed to be parked here. None of them were police cars, though. I didn’t know what Ellis drove, but nothing here appeared to be an unmarked police car, either.

  I got out of the Mustang and looked up and down the street. Everything about this place looked like just another pleasant night in San Diego. There were no cops anywhere in sight. I couldn’t hear any sirens in the distance. There was no yellow tape set up around the house. Either I was in the wrong place, or this wasn’t a crime scene at all.

  The address on the house was the one Ellis had given me, though. I was in the right place, unless he’d gotten the address wrong. I took my cell phone out of my pocket and unlocked it so I could dial Dan’s number. He’d know about a new murder by now. If I was in the wrong place, that was one thing. But if this where Ellis had sent me...

  A man’s voice came from behind me. “Drop the phone, Nevada.”

  I lowered the phone to my side without turning around. “I’m not dropping it,” I said. “It was expensive. Besides, with the modifications I had made, it’d be damn hard to replace.”

  “I said drop it.”

  “And I said go fuck yourself.” I tossed the phone through the Mustang’s open window. “There. Good if I turn around now, Brad?” I turned around before he had a chance to answer. Brad Ellis stood there. He had a gun in his right hand pointed at me in a traditional gunfighter’s stance. It wasn’t all that accurate a position to fire from, but he didn’t really need accuracy at this range. With the gun at his side, it would be hard for anyone at a distance to see what he was doing. We’d look like two people chatting.

  I looked at the gun. It looked like a Walther to me. Whatever it was, it wasn’t his service weapon. That would have been too easy to trace.

  Ellis smiled at me. “Surprised?”

  “I don’t surprise all that easy,” I said. “Sing something from Evita and I’ll be surprised.”

  He looked almost disappointed. “I’m standing here with a gun pointed at you.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But as traps go, this isn’t all that great.”

  “Fair enough. I had something else planned, but my timetable got pushed up kind of abruptly. Sarah’s a much better detective than I thought. Now give me the .45.”

  It had been a reasonable gamble that Ellis wouldn’t be willing to drop me out here in the street over not breaking my phone, but leaving me with a gun was another matter entirely. I reached for my hip slowly, then took the gun from its holster with my thumb and forefinger. “On the ground,” he said. I knelt down, holding my arm at an angle so my jacket wouldn’t swing open. When it was on the pavement and I’d stood back up he nodded. “Kick it over here.” I kicked the gun to him. He picked it up and stuck it in the front of his pants like he thought he was in an action movie. If he wasn’t careful he’d blow his dick off. Not that I’d have minded if he did.

  “Is Sarah still alive?” I asked.

  Ellis nodded. “Of course. This wouldn’t have been any fun if it was just the two of us. The game has to have a prize, doesn’t it?”

  “Wow,” I said. “You’re just…bugfuck, aren’t you?”

  He ignored that. “In the house. Walk ahead of me, nice and slow. Don’t do anything we’ll regret.”

  “It’s pretty much guaranteed one of us is going to regret this shit,” I said. But I let him march me up the walkway to the house. The door was unlocked and he was careful to stay out of my reach as I opened it, just in case I turned and tried to attack him with my hands. The man had done his homework; I had to give him that much. The last guy I’d hit had suffocated to death on his own broken trachea.

  The front door led into the living room with a kitchen area off to the right. I didn’t bother taking off my shoes. I looked around as Ellis shut the door behind us and turned the deadbolt. The furnishings in here were modest but functional. The one couch in the room was worn through to the padding in a few places, and the television was at least a decade old. Everything in sight was dusty and there was a staleness that suggested nobody had cleaned in here in a long time. It reminded me of my old house, back when I’d been drinking and not bothering to take care of anything.

  “Dining room,” Ellis said.

  I walked slowly, scanning the room for anything I could use against Ellis when the time came. The smell of fresh garlic suddenly distracted me. Either Ellis was afraid of vampires or someone had been cooking in here very recently. There was no sign of whoever lived here, though. Or whoever had lived here. I suspected the house’s owners might not be around anymore. Whether they’d left of their own accord or Ellis had killed them remained to be seen. Possibly in the dining room. He’d brought me here for a reason, after all.

  The dining room table was rectangular and had been covered with a tablecloth featuring a muted flower design. Three places had been set, and three dinner plates with a meal of steak, a potato, and vegetables had been placed on the table. Three wine glasses had been filled, and a decanter with the remainder of a bottle of red sat nearby. He’d even set out a basket for dinner rolls.

  In other circumstances, even if Ellis had been the Laughing Man, I might have been tempted to sit down and eat something. The food smelled a lot better than my supermarket chicken had. But the sight of Sarah Winters duct-taped to the chair at the head of the table, another piece of tape covering her mouth, was enough to put me off the food. She was alive, eyes wide, and looked as terrified as I could remember ever seeing another person. Not that I blamed her.

  The whole setup looked oddly familiar, but it took me a second longer than it should have to place it. In my defense, I’d been pretty well plastered the last time this had happened. “You really are a copycat,” I said to Ellis. “You recreated my dinner with the
Laughing Man.”

  “Have a seat,” Ellis said, motioning to the empty chair on the far side of the table with his gun. I walked around Sarah and sat down. Sarah kept her eyes on me as I went by, then looked back at Ellis. He sat down across from me. “What do you think?” he asked.

  I looked around. “It’s better,” I admitted. “You’ve actually created a scene here. The food is a nice touch. Of course, it’s hardly original.”

  Ellis put his gun hand down on the table but kept his finger on the trigger. He’d miss me, barely, if he fired from that position. I still wasn’t in a spot to do anything about it, though. “It doesn’t need to be original,” he said. “The original was incomplete. Unfinished. This one won’t be.” He nodded at the plate in front of me. “You should try the steak.”

  “I already ate,” I said. “If I’d known you were making steak, I might have waited.”

  Sarah tried to say something but it was muffled by the tape. Ellis glanced at her. “I think Sarah would like some,” he said. He looked back at me. “I can’t feed her and hold the gun, obviously, but if you want to give her something, I won’t stop you.”

  “I think what she was saying was you should get up and run away from here as fast as you possibly can.”

  Ellis smirked. “Why? You going to kill me, Nevada?” He tapped the barrel of his gun on the table. “I don’t think you’ve thought about how this ends.”

  “It’s pretty obvious you haven’t, either,” I said. “How are you going to explain this? Are you going to say you found us here, dead, and you have no idea what happened? This is some haphazard shit you’ve got going on here.”

  He nodded. “That’s true. I had to advance my timeline much faster than I wanted to. I’d thought I’d have time to play with you for a while, just to show him I could do it better. But Sarah here…” he frowned at her. “Sarah started asking questions. She was pretty subtle at first, but then someone in the department told me she ran the GPS on my car to see where I’d been going.” He shook his head at her. “I’m not stupid enough to have used my own car,” he said, “but the fact that you were asking was trouble enough.”

  I shifted my left arm, just enough to give me better access to my Glock. I was fast, but not enough to clear the shoulder holster and get a shot off before he put a bullet in me. Drawing from a seated position was going to be awkward, anyway. It would add time I didn’t have to waste getting into position. Even if he took his hand off his gun he’d be able to recover it and get a shot off before I could. “You haven’t explained how you’re not going to get caught.”

  “I’ve got some experience rigging crime scenes now,” he said. “I think I’ll manage.”

  I shrugged. “You should still run. I promise I’ll give you five minutes before I start chasing you. How about that?”

  Ellis stared at me. “How are you so calm?” he asked. “Did you…” he glanced around the room. “No. Nobody’s coming. If you had a SWAT team on the way they’d have kicked in the door by now. You act like you knew it was me and none of this is a surprise, though.”

  “I didn’t know it was you,” I said. “My money was on someone in law enforcement, though. I kept going out there and critiquing crime scenes. The killer was learning from me. You thought it was about the blood and the bodies, but that was never right. It was about art. It was about the meaning he left behind.”

  Ellis nodded. “I did catch on.”

  Sarah said something else and struggled against the tape that held her in place. Trying to distract him, I thought. Clever girl. If she could goad him into taking his attention off of me long enough, maybe I could do something. He’d never fall for it, though. He’d kill her first.

  “It took a shift in my thinking,” Ellis said. “I didn’t get it at first, but now I do. But it’s also about the game.”

  “Which is why I’m here? Why you sent me flowers? That was a nice touch, by the way, but I knew they weren’t from the Laughing Man.”

  “No,” he said. “You weren’t supposed to. The game isn’t about me being the Laughing Man. It’s about me succeeding him. The student becomes the master. The game is the game, and we are the players.”

  “If Buddha cuts a tree down…” I started. “Wait, that’s wrong. Give me a second. I’ve got one. If the bear shits in the forest, is he also the Pope?”

  Ellis blinked. “What?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said “I thought we were having a contest to say a bunch of stupid nonsense. ‘The game is the game?’ What the fuck does that even mean?”

  “It means I’m playing with him, not you. We’re the kings. White and black, sitting across the board from each other.”

  “Am I a queen, then? Or how about a bishop? I always liked bishops.”

  He shook his head. “No. You’re just a trophy.”

  “That’s no fun,” I said. “But anyway, somehow I think you’re the only one playing this game. You think the Laughing Man gives two shits about you? You’re just a pretender.”

  “That won’t be true once you’re dead. Then he’ll play with me. I’ll be the only one worth playing with. I’ll have proved it.”

  I thought about that. “I guess I can kind of see what you’re getting at,” I said.

  “And what do you think?”

  “Honestly?” I asked. “I wonder what happened to you.” I shook my head. “Dan said you were in a shoot a while back and you barely got through your psych evaluation after. Was that it? Was that what set you off, or are you the type of psycho who set fires and wet the bed when you were a kid?”

  Ellis reached into a pocket and removed a folded straight razor. He snapped it open and admired the blade. “It was the shoot,” he said. “That’s what did it. It was…transformative.” He sighed. “You’ve killed, Nevada. I know you have.”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at me, eyes wide. “What was it like for you? The first time?”

  My first shoot had been a killer who had holed up in his bedroom and come out shooting when I tried to talk him down. Everything about it had been clean, but… “It made me sick,” I said. “I cried for a week.” I shook my head. “I still see him sometimes. In crowds. Just for a second. I’ll look again and he’s gone.”

  Ellis looked at me like I’d just told him I hated ice cream and puppies. “Really?”

  “Really. Let me guess. Yours made you feel alive for the first time. It filled you with…I don’t know. Power? Sex stuff? If you tell me you came in your pants I’ll come over this table at you, I swear to god.”

  “Nothing like that,” he said. “It was power, Nevada. Just the power.”

  “I almost feel sorry for you,” I said. “Almost. Not enough that I won’t blow your head off if I get the chance.”

  Ellis fingered the straight razor. “I’d love to use this on you while you’re still alive,” he said. “I really wonder what that would be like. But it would be breaking the rules, of course. The game is nothing without rules.”

  I sighed. “The game again. But you screwed up, you know? You made a mistake.”

  “Oh? I don’t see how.”

  “You know the Laughing Man is watching me. He’s obsessed, you could say. You know what he did with the last guy who tried to off me.” Ellis squinted at me. “Walked up behind him and cut his throat right when he was in the gloating stage. What makes you think…” I took my eyes off of him and fixed my gaze on the spot over his right shoulder.

  Ellis turned his head to look behind him, which took his gun even farther off of me than it had been before. That was all I needed. In the time it took him to realize nobody was coming and look back I had my Glock out of its holster and pointed at his head. “That wasn’t the mistake,” I said. “The mistake was not knowing I’m a Glock girl.”

  Ellis stared at my gun, then his eyes drifted down to look at his own. He wasn’t in position to shoot. “Don’t do it,” I said. “Even if you manage to get a shot off, I’ll drop you. Put it down.”

  Sara
h said something that sounded very much like “Ha!” through the tape covering her mouth.

  Ellis looked at his gun for a moment longer, then slowly lowered it onto the table and took his hand away. “You’re right,” he said. “You got me.”

  “Put your hands flat on…” I started, but Ellis shoved the table at me instead, knocking it into me and sending me flying backward in a waterfall of plates and food. I got off one shot in his direction as I fell to the ground, but it went wide. He was gone an instant later, running for the front door. I heard it open as I got to my feet. “Damn it!” I shouted. I braced to go after him but Sarah started screaming something through her tape, shaking her head wildly. She was right. As much as my instincts wanted me to go after Ellis, it was too dangerous. He could be waiting in the bushes for me to come out, and he still had my .45, and probably his service weapon, as well. Plus it would mean leaving Sarah here defenseless, and there was no help on the way if something happened to me.

  I pulled the tape off her mouth. “My god, Nevada,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I should have…”

  “Forget it,” I said. I took a steak knife from off of the floor in one hand, keeping my Glock at the ready in the other, and went to work on the tape that bound her to the chair. The minute she was free I started looking for a phone, finding one in the kitchen. Thankfully, it had a dial tone. “It’s over,” I told Sarah. “We’ll wait here until SWAT comes. That asshole won’t get far.”

  Chapter 20

  The first uniforms arrived six minutes later and secured the scene. Then the detectives came to do their thing, and shortly after Dan Evans arrived to do his thing. His thing involved a great deal of cursing and slamming his fist into the wall hard enough to put cracks in it. Sarah and I gave statements. Sarah had been onto Ellis fairly early. If I hadn’t been ignoring her messages it was possible none of this would have happened. I didn’t feel great about that.

  After a while I told Dan I needed to step out and get some air. Part of that was the truth. The air outside was cool and it did help clear my head. And then I got in my Mustang and headed for Miramar.