by Jon Grilz
“This girl,” Charlie said, holding up Kay’s picture again. “I want you guys to tell me if you’ve seen her before and where.”
Dick kind of groaned in the way a guy waking up with a hangover might, but Clarence must have thought he was going to say something, because he cursed again and swore he’d kill Dick if he said anything.
Charlie took it as a roundabout, polite way of the man telling him exactly what he needed to know. He walked over to Clarence and looked down. “So you have seen her,” Charlie said. “That’s good. That means you can tell me where and who you’ve seen her with, so I can move on.”
Clarence cursed and spat at Charlie.
All Charlie could really muster at the moment was a sigh in lieu of what he really wanted to do, which he knew would come eventually anyway. He calmly walked over to Dick and gently tapped him on the cheek. “Dick, are you awake?”
“Uh…yeah,” Dick said.
“Good. I want you to look at this picture again and tell me where you’ve seen her and who you saw her with. Take your time. I’m sorry I hit you on the head and am now expecting you to remember something, poor planning on my behalf,” Charlie said.
Unfortunately, Clarence didn’t take the time to let Dick think and decided to do some more yelling. “Who are you to be in here making demands, you fucking punk?”
Charlie walked over and put a strip of duct tape over Clarence’s mouth, frustrated that things weren’t going as smoothly as he’d hoped. “Okay, fellas, here’s the deal,” Charlie said, taking off his hat and setting it on the counter. “I’m not much one for prying information out of people. Plenty of guys in my line of work are very good at it and pretty damn inventive. Water-boarding is surprisingly gentle by comparison to some of the shit I’ve seen these guys cook up. I prefer to punch people, call it poor upbringing, since it doesn’t always get the best results.” Charlie sighed again, groaned, and sat down at the table next to Dick, who had started to struggle a little against his restraints.
Charlie cracked his knuckles one by one and looked down at the scars that checkered his fists. “You know, I’m a big fan of those old kung fu movies and I have this friend who knows a thing or two about physics. You know what he told me?”
Dick shook his head weakly, terrified to say a word.
“He said that regardless of what you’ve seen in movies, it’s impossible to pull a man’s heart out of his chest. He said the closest you can get is to punch the chest over and over and over again until the ribs break and splinter and puncture the skin and surrounding tissue, and eventually, you could kind of spoon out what’s left.” Charlie took a moment to look back and forth between Dick and Clarence, both of whom were finally paying attention. “Gentlemen, the girl in the picture is someone that was very near and dear to me, and I’m pretty pissed that she’s dead—even more so that she was found in the gutter, high on that junk you boys cook up in here. Still, I’m gonna make you a deal. There are two of you in here, and I’m gonna kill the man who refuses to tell me what I want to hear. I’m gonna hit that man in the chest so many times that I’m gonna be able to scoop out his heart, whether he’s still alive or not.”
Neither man said anything, but Dick’s eyes opened wide in terror.
“Come on, guys. Let’s not be dramatic. Accept the situation as a result of poor life choices. One of you is going to die today. And one of you is going to tell me what I want to know.” Charlie walked over to the door and opened it just far enough to grab the sack he’d left outside on the steps. He heaved it up on the counter. “This,” he said, opening the sack, “is a vibratory tumbler.”
Still, both men remained silent.
“I’m pretty lucky that guy at the gun range had an extra. I thought about getting a paint shaker, but who the hell knows where to get one of those these days. Can you guess what I’m gonna do with it?”
Guessing wasn’t necessary, as both men knew. “Wait,” Dick yelped, and Clarence mumbled something through the duct tape along the same lines. Being the shake-and-bake entrepreneurs they were, they were fully aware that shaking the bottle too much meant the gasses would build up and explode.
Charlie was glad he didn’t have to explain it to them and sound more dramatic, though he was wondering if he could actually punch through a man’s chest. He felt a pang of regret when he realized Dick would have been an better crash test dummy, but the floor was a better surface to get the desired impact.
“I-I know who she is,” Dick said. “I just didn’t recognize the picture right away. Her name is Kay, right?”
Charlie looked over his shoulder, down at the man who was taped to the floor. “It’s not looking too good for you, Clarence.” He turned back to Dick. “Go on.”
“I saw her hanging around with Damon. She’s one of Damon’s girls.”
“Damon?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah, Damon. I thought you worked for him. I mean, no one’s dumb enough to just walk in here and rip Damon off. Obviously you’re one of his guys, right?” Dick started to sweat.
Meanwhile, Charlie walked over to where Clarence was still moaning about something or another on the floor. “Well, Clarence, I guess that’s it for you. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk.” Charlie got down on his knees, then paused for effect. “You know, I’m not entirely sure this won’t give you a heart attack. I guess we’ll find that out together.”
The first punch landed flush over Clarence’s heart with a dull thud. Clarence let out a low moan. It was a strange sound to hear, but Charlie hadn’t really knocked the wind out of him, nor had he hit him in the face. It was all a learning experience. The second punch landed a little more crisply, and Charlie felt a rib crack. It all snowballed from there, and as he thought about Kay and all the others who were strung out because of those asshole makeshift chemists, he couldn’t help himself. All he could see was Kay lying there, cold, dead, and pale on the coroner’s table. His mind wandered to her walking around the trailer park, and he pictured her sitting on a couch somewhere, stoned out of her mind and being assaulted by faceless forms. He saw it all and pounded away on Clarence’s chest over and over and over again. Soon, all Charlie could hear was the rush of blood in his own ears.
Somewhere in the background, Dick’s whining voice wailed, “Oh, Jesus, Oh, God,” over and over again.
Charlie face dripped with sweat by the time he stood again and he wiped his chin with the sleeve of his shirt. Clarence was motionless, his eyes bulging with broken blood vessels, and Charlie wondered if it had been a heart attack or some kind of aneurism that killed him—not that it really mattered. He grabbed a paper towel from next to the kitchenette sink and wiped his brow. “So, Dick,” Charlie said, slightly winded, “now that Clarence is out of the picture, how about you tell me a bit more about this Damon?”
Dick was very accommodating. He told Charlie as much as he could remember. He recalled the important details, like where Damon lived, about how many guys worked for him, when major pickups were supposed to happen, and stuff like that. In particular, he mentioned that a major weight pickup was scheduled to happen a few days, unfortunately Damon kept the details of that deal to himself.
Charlie thanked Dick and patted him on the shoulder before he reached down and grabbed Dick’s wallet from his hip pocket, then did the same with Clarence’s lifeless body.
“Are you kidding me? You’re robbing us too?”
Charlie looked back up at Dick. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly the good guy here, Dick, and even a guy’s gotta eat.” He pulled the cash out of the two wallets, folded it over, shoved it in his pocket, then he walked over to the counter to grab his hat.
“What the fuck are you doing? Aren’t you going to at least untie me?”
“Naw,” Charlie said as he grabbed an empty bottle from the counter and a pouch of pills from Dick’s backpack.
“Wait…what the fuck are you doing now?” Dick repeated.
“You already asked that,” Charlie said, �
�but I’m guessing it’s rhetorical.” Charlie dumped some of the pills into the bottle and added a few of the chemicals he found hidden under the sink. He also grabbed a few thumbtacks, screws and hanger nails that he found in a drawer, then set the bottle into the tumbler and placed the excess chemical bottles in a circle around it.
“Hold up, you said you’d let me live,” Dick said, squirming violently from his place on the table.
Charlie walked back over to Dick and looked down. “No,” he said, “I told you I’d kill the guy who didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.”
“You can’t turn that on. You’ll blow up anyone next door too,” Dick said in a brief moment of enlightenment.
“Don’t worry,” Charlie said as he stretched out a piece of duct tape. “If you notice, I didn’t fill that bottle all the way. I know explosives, and this one won’t be too big. That’s why I added the shrapnel. It’ll finish cleaning up the mess that the meth explosion doesn’t.”
“You can’t do this,” Dick said.
“I can’t?”
“You can’t kill me, man!”
“And why not? You’re just a meth dealer.”
“I did what you asked. Please, mister, I-I—”
Charlie smiled. “I suppose not all meth dealers are bad. What, you’re trying to make money for your family because you have a terminal disease or something? Just tryin’ to feed your kids?”
Dick’s eyes darted back and forth. “Yeah, yeah, that’s it. My family. My kids are starvin’, man, and I can’t find work, so I—”
Charlie clicked his tongue again. “Damn. Well, I hope you invested your money well.” Charlie then put the tape over Dick’s mouth, walked back to the entrance without looking back, and flicked on the tumbler just as he closed the trailer door.
Chapter 8
Sergeant Nikki Hamill walked around the perimeter of the trailer home that looked like the Coke can she’d left in her car overnight the winter before; the sides were pushed out, the insides a total mess. Perez had gone off to interview neighbors with a couple other officers, on the off chance that they’d seen something and the even more off chance that if they had, they’d be willing to talk about it with police.
The fire department cleared the area and chalked up the explosion as meth related. The fire chief made it a point to mention that the neighbors were lucky, as only a small batch blew.
Nikki took off her not-too-bad looking knock-off sunglasses looked around inside the trailer after she had the go-ahead from the fire department, who made sure there weren’t any fumes or other explosives around. From the blast pattern, it looked like the two dead guys inside had used a velocity tumbler to shake up the meth, a tool usually used to clean bullet casings. When Nikki pointed out that the two dead men were tied down when the bomb went off, the captain just shrugged and said something about a big loss for society.
“Well? What’s your best guess on this one?” Perez asked as he approached the trailer door.
Nikki looked to see Perez in one of the only three suits he owned, none of which fit him very well. His blue striped tie—and what remained of his thinning hair—twitched in the breeze, his white shirt looked wrinkled from sitting too long in the dryer without being ironed. Even though he’d lost about fifteen pounds in the six months they’d worked together, likely due to depression in dealing with his wife’s illness—not that he ever talked about it—he still had a little belly around the middle, but it didn’t look bad on him. Why did men always seem to age better than women? Nikki scowled at the realization that if she had a spare tire or muffin top like that, it’d look awful and she’d hear all kinds of jokes, but on him it looked almost distinguished. Perez scratched the side of his head with his pen, right on the salt-and-pepper streak just above his right ear. Even though he was always clean shaven, and as handsome a man as he was, he never really looked put together, and the trend was progressing in a downward spiral. Nikki wished Perez would talk about it, but he wasn’t one for wearing his heart on his ill-fitting sleeve.
“Someone had an issue with these two,” Nikki said. “Whoever it was tied the two down and set the tumbler going.”
“Grisly way to make a statement,” Perez said. “Any idea who might have done it? Maybe a pissed-off neighbor, some vigilante who got tired of drugs in the park?”
Nikki smiled; she knew Perez was fond of hyperbole on investigations. He liked to make things sound more dramatic than they really were. She was pretty sure he did it on her behalf, making a mockery of her enthusiasm as some sort of repayment for her teasing way of calling him “Boss.” Regardless of their banter and good-natured ribbing—or maybe, in part, because of it—she liked Perez. They had been partners for six months, and he was the only guy on the force, married or not, who didn’t try to hit on her or give her shit about being a woman with a badge and a gun, especially since she’d traded in her patrol blues for a sergeant’s badge. “That or maybe a fallout with an employer or buyer. You think Damon could have had anything to do with this?” Nikki asked.
“Let’s hope not. He hasn’t been seen around town for a while, small miracles, and I think he’s been pushing his stuff closer to the drills—not that we can ever get anything to stick to that slippery piece of shit,” Perez said, spitting on the ground.
Nikki wondered if it bothered her partner more that Damon was a dealer or that he was good at getting away with it. Ever since Damon had first shown up two years earlier, the meth possession rates had skyrocketed in their little slice of heaven. They’d only managed to snag a couple dealers, and most of what they’d seized came from other busts like drunk driving or assaults. Damon had a knack for covering his tracks and was clearly looking to revolutionize the business. There hadn’t been a meth lab explosion in months, and any that had happened previously had been linked to independent tweekers looking for a fast score. Damon played things too smart for Nikki’s and Perez’s taste; few things short of an airstrike or Navy SEALs Team Six would have been enough to get rid of Damon and his slimy influence in their community. He was a piece of shit, just like Perez had said, and anything that even came close to his person carried with it an unmistakable stench.
“I checked with the park manager,” Nikki said.
“And?” Perez asked.
“And she said somebody was over here asking about Dick and Clarence yesterday.”
“Dick and Clarence are the, ahem, victims, I take it.”
“Yeah, but she couldn’t give a description.”
“Didn’t have her glasses?” Perez asked.
“Uh, I think maybe one too many glasses would be more appropriate,” Nikki said, making a drinking motion with her hand, pinky and thumb extended.
The slow crunch of tires driving over the loose rock made Nikki turn to see a black Town Car slowly roll past the scene on a cross street. Perez caught her stare and turned to look as well. Two men in sunglasses exited the car. They were dressed plainly enough in jeans and sweatshirts, and they looked around impassively.
“Can I help you, fellas?” Perez asked in a half-yell across the way.
If the two men heard him, they didn’t react. They simply looked around the scene, then glanced at each other and nodded oddly, as if they were talking telepathically or something. Without a word between them or any answer for Perez, they got back in their car and drove away.
Perez shrugged at Nikki. “Meh, just tourists, I guess,” he said, “or rubber-neckers.”
“I guess. I’ll run the prints off these two,” Nikki said, “if there’s anything left to print after the chemical burns. Maybe I can find some kind of connection.
“All right,” Perez said. “While you’re at it, check into that tumbler. Maybe we’ll be lucky and find out it was purchased around here somewhere.”
“It looks old.”
“Even better. Maybe the meth-heads lifted it from somebody who can ID them. See if we can get a better ID on the bodies than just given nam
es. I’m gonna do a few more door-to-door checks and see if anyone noticed anything or anyone in or around the trailer before or after it blew up.” He started to turn away, then stopped. “Hey, if you’re going back to the station to run those prints, can you do me a favor?”
“Sure, Boss. Shoot.”
“In the top drawer of my desk, there’s a coffee cup in an evidence bag.”
Nikki starred back at Perez with an arched eyebrow. “A coffee cup?”
“Yeah,” Perez paused, “I bagged it yesterday.”
Perez didn’t have to explain any further. He’d bagged the cup Charlie Kelly had drank out of when they talked to him about his friend’s death. He didn’t have any reason to have kept it. Nothing short of what he liked to refer to as his cop sense.
“You don’t have a problem with that, do you?” Perez asked.
“Of course not,” Nikki said, her voice restrained, professional. Though, it irked her to think that Perez thought so little of her; she would never let some guy she’d flirted with get between her and an investigation. “One thing’s for sure,” Nikki said as she walked back toward her car.
“What’s that?”
“If Damon is involved in any way, this isn’t over. You and I both know it’s just the beginning.”
“Yeah, I know,” Perez said, wiping his brow with a handkerchief, “and that’s just what I’m afraid of.”
Chapter 9
As far as Damon was concerned, the sun rose at his whim and set when he was tired of looking at it. That was what he told his crew, and he and they swallowed it whole. As much as he distrusted new faces, he liked to do the dog-and-pony show; he loved to quickly put the new recruits in their place, make them feel small around them. The last thing he needed was for some little base-head to start thinking he could branch out on his own. Plus, he needed to fill the vacant spot his little learning lesson out on the prairie had created. It had taken almost two hours to bury the body. “Here’s the deal,” Damon said as he paced back and forth in front of the two new guys, neither of which looked like they were even old enough to buy him a pack of heaters. “You fuck with me, you’re dead. It’s that simple. No backing out now. You’re sittin’ here because someone vouched for you, because you slung a little White Bitch for us, and showed you can do the game.”
