Cheese Wrestling: A Lt. Jack Daniels/Chief Cole Clayton Thriller

by J. A. Konrath

  About CHEESE WRESTLING

  Cole Clayton is a small town cop used to small town crime. But when a girl goes missing, it leads him from his small town to Chicago, where he teams up with a tough Homicide cop named Jack Daniels.

  What is the meaning of cheese wrestling? Hint: You probably don’t want to know. And neither does Jack. But sometimes you have to deal with the worst of humanity to bring out the best in humanity.

  CHEESE WRESTLING

  There are things worse than murder…

  CHEESE WRESTLING

  A LT. JACK DANIELS/COLE CLAYTON THRILLER

  J.A. KONRATH

  BERNARD SCHAFFER

  DISCLAIMER

  While the following story is fiction, cheese wrestling is, regrettably, true. Please don’t spoil it for other readers.

  The authors offer their apologies on behalf of the human race.

  CONTENTS

  Begin reading CHEESE WRESTLING

  About the Authors

  Also by Bernard Schaffer

  Also by J.A. Konrath

  Copyright

  ALICE MCDERMOTT

  She wants to stretch her legs out but she can’t for some reason.

  Her mouth is dry, and she’s thirsty. Alice wants to ask for water, but when she opens her mouth, only monosyllabic nonsense comes out.

  She blinks, sees a girl next to her. Remembers her from earlier, when they were taking pictures. Mandy or Sandy or something like that.

  So hard to focus through the heroin high.

  Alice closes her eyes and rides the wave.

  COLE CLAYTON

  Let me get this—” Clayton started to say, then paused, forcing himself to keep from smiling. It wasn’t easy. He backed up in his seat and cleared his throat. After all, this was serious business. “Let me get this straight, now. Your name is Poop?”

  The heavyset biker sitting handcuffed in front of him nodded, his expression solemn. Cole Clayton scratched his chin and nodded, then turned to look at the woman. She was paper-bag tan, and wrinkled like she’d been stuffed with newspapers and left outside in the sun to dry.

  Heroin.

  It might have been meth, except she didn’t have all the deep sores meth heads get from picking at themselves, trying to get the imaginary bugs off, and she still had her teeth. He looked at her arms and legs and didn’t see any track marks, which just meant she was shooting up in places he couldn’t see. Between her toes, maybe. The crotch? He’d seen crazier. A good heroin jones would suck the life out of you like hookworms and leave nothing behind but a crusty shell.

  Clayton looked at her sallow face, sunken so deep he could see the ridges of her cheekbones. “How you doing, darling?”

  “I’m all right.” Her voice was thick as cigarette smoke.

  Clayton smiled gently and said, “And you’re officially the Property of Poop?”

  “Yeah.”

  Clayton gritted his teeth, dead-serious about not smiling. They were probably oblivious to him even if he did. Their denim cuts were draped across empty chairs in the office, cuts being the term for sleeveless vests bikers and their old ladies wore. Poop’s was as filthy as an outhouse, which was appropriate. You weren’t supposed to wash the thing. The top rocker was emblazoned in bright red letters that proclaimed the Sin Serpents Motorcycle Club, with a large circular patch in the center that showed a cartoonish snake baring its fangs and forked tongue.

  Right under each snake were the words Poop and then Property of Poop.

  Clayton looked back at the woman and said, “You must be mighty proud,” but he said it to her the way you might congratulate a mother when her daughter wins the Corn Queen Crown, and she took it that way, beaming for a moment. He had at least ten years on the woman, but her mileage far outdistanced his.

  Even if there’s starting to be more white than gray in my goatee.

  He glanced over the duo’s heads, at a yellow brick hanging on the wall in his office. It came from the FBI National Academy, and they didn’t just hand them out to everybody. You had to earn it with sweat, and Clayton had done so, going up against cops from all over the country and even some from other parts of the world, and then he’d come right back home to Potter County, Pennsylvania. Chief of a town with one traffic light.

  That was all right, though, he figured. It gave him the chance to get to know regular folks like Poop and Mrs. Poop. She was wiggling her wrists inside her handcuffs, starting to get the shifts real bad. Dope sick. If he made them wait a little longer, they’d tell him anything he wanted to hear, as long as it meant getting out to score a little smack. If he made them wait too long, they’d start puking all over themselves, and then each other. Clayton’s office was already a bit disorganized, and he didn’t need to add that to the décor.

  “How’s this fella treat you, pretty good?”

  “He’s all right, I guess,” she said.

  “That’s nice,” Clayton said. “How long you two been together?”

  They looked at one another for a moment and Poop crunched up his nose in thought and said, “I guess about ten years or so?”

  “Ten years?” Clayton said, letting out a whistle. “Impressive. You don’t hear about many people sticking together like that these days.”

  Poop smiled, proud of his old lady, and he said, “Ever since she come into the club I had an eye for her. I said to Pig Hide, ‘I’ll give you five thousand dollars’ on the spot. It was all the money I had, but it was worth it, cause just like that, she was mine.”

  Clayton grunted but caught the smile in time and said, “You paid five thousand dollars to another biker named Pig Hide for her?”

  “Most amount any Sin Serpent ever paid for someone’s woman,” she added proudly.

  “No kidding,” Clayton said. He bowed his head, showing admiration for her morphine-thin arms and straw hair and said, “Well, who couldn’t see why.”

  “It was worth it,” Poop said.

  She turned and looked at her old man, her skeletal face gentle toward him as she said, “And it was worth it for me too, cause he treats me good. He don’t whoop me or make me screw nobody else.”

  “No?” Clayton said. “Well, that’s good. And nobody ever tried to buy her off you, Poop?”

  “Oh, they tried,” Poop laughed. “All the time. I only sold her once though. Mushroom was busting my balls all night about being whipped an’ all that. I told him I wasn’t and to prove it I sold her to him for a few hundred dollars and a case of Busch.”

  Property of Poop gave her man a sideways look that could melt glass.

  Apparently it was a sore subject.

  “A good girl like this? I bet you regretted it.”

  Poop nodded and said, “It didn’t last long. By the end of the night I told Mushroom I wanted her back and he told me to go to hell, cause he ain’t porked her yet. So I told him, go ahead and take her in the bathroom and get it over with and I’ll take her back after that.”

  Clayton leaned forward, finding himself fully invested in the story now. “So what happened then?”

  “He took her in the bathroom and she was putting up a fuss. Cussin’ us both out cause she didn’t like Mushroom and he was getting rough on her. He started pulling her by the hair and all and as soon as that bathroom door closed, she commenced to hollerin’. I decided enough was enough and I went in to go get her.”

  “And then?”

  “I shot him.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I shot him. He had her bent over a sink and his pants were down and he couldn’t do nothing but st
and there looking at me with his pecker hanging out. It looked just like a mushroom too, didn’t it?”

  “It sure did,” the woman said, nodding. “Especially on the top part, all flat and smooshed up, like.”

  Clayton sat there, straight-faced, not moving, and said, “When you shot him, did you kill him?”

  “Nah. I just winged him in the shoulder and then put one in his ass as he ran out.”

  Clayton let out a long, slow breath. “So what happened then? Aren’t there rules in your club about trying to kill one of your fellow members?”

  “Uh,” Property of Poop said, leaning forward and raising her hand like she was in third grade. “He didn’t try to kill him. He just shot him.”

  “Right,” Clayton said, nodding. “Does that happen a lot? You guys often shoot each other and trade women and such?”

  “Not anymore,” Poop said sadly. “Things changed at the club. Now it’s a bunch of wannabe’s and yuppies. Geeks that watch TV shows and think they know what the life is really all about. It ain’t like it was back in the day.”

  Property of Poop leaned forward and winked. “Back then it was fun.”

  Clayton glanced up once more at the gold F.B.I. brick. He couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like the brick was smirking at him. He’d gotten into this line of work to do some good in the world, to help people. But sometimes he wondered if there was any good left, or anyone worth helping.

  “Mushroom used to be an okay cat, too. We cheese wrestled lots of times.”

  Clayton wasn’t sure he wanted to ask, but he understood it was part of his job.

  “What is cheese wrestling?”

  Poop explained it, in excruciating detail, beaming as he did.

  Clayton used up enough self-control for several lifetimes in order not to wince.

  “And why, exactly, did you cheese wrestle?” he asked, his tone even.

  “Sometimes for money. Sometimes for women. Sometimes for fun.”

  “For fun?”

  “It’s a hoot,” Property of Poop said. “You oughta try it sometime.”

  Trying to steer this train wreck of an interview back on track, Clayton asked the pair more about buying and trading women. But even as he did, he knew the image of cheese wrestling would be forever seared into his brain.

  Forty-five minutes later, his faith in humanity shattered, Cole Clayton walked out of his office, leaving the door open. He looked at the first uniformed state trooper he saw and said, “You moving out of my way? I need to get to the hand sanitizer. I might just take a bath in it.”

  “I’ll get it for you, Chief,” the trooper said. Good kid. Ten foot five, strong enough to wrestle a Kodiak, but not bright enough to beat one at checkers. Just the way the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania liked them.

  There were four other troopers waiting for him, investigators dressed in suits and uniforms dressed in short-sleeved uniform shirts with clip-on ties. Lieutenant Jason Forrest, the station’s head of criminal investigations, folded his arms and said, “Well? Did they tell you anything?”

  Clayton shook his head and said, “Nope. Same stuff they told you.”

  Forrest scowled and said, “All that time, and nothing about the missing girl?”

  Clayton held up his hands innocently and lied to his face. “What can I tell you? I was wrong. I guess I got bad information.”

  Forrest’s eyes narrowed on the Chief and he stepped forward, standing close enough that Clayton could feel the man’s breath coming through his nostrils. “Don’t you screw with me, you son of a bitch. You held up my men for an hour so you could go in there and hob-knob with that scumbag and his junkie whore, and you’re just going to stand there and—”

  “Who the hell you callin’ a junkie whore, pig!” the woman shouted from inside the interrogation room.

  “Shut your junkie whore mouth before I shut it for you!” Forrest shouted over Clayton’s shoulder.

  “You can’t talk to her like that!” Poop shouted through the door.

  “He can’t say that!” Property of Poop cried. “Chief, I wanna file a complaint!”

  “Abuse, abuse!” Poop cried out. “Police brutalization of our persons! I want my attorney, pig!”

  Forrest closed his eyes, shuddering as he tried to contain himself. He raised a crooked index finger at Clayton’s face and said, “If you are withholding information in a criminal investigation, so help me God, I will nail your ass to the wall.”

  Clayton let out a slow breath. He wished, for a moment, he could deal with someone his equal. Or at least semi-professional. But they didn’t make them like that around these parts.

  “Let’s be real, real clear about something, Jason. The missing girl is from my jurisdiction. You boys were asked to help me find two bikers who might have information about it. Find, not arrest. But they’ve already been booked and questioned, and the only reason you brought them to my jail and called me—at 3 A.M. on a Wednesday—is because you couldn’t get anything out of them yourself. And now you want to threaten me on top of that?”

  “He was drunk and stoned on his motorcycle going down the highway at eighty miles an hour!” Forrest said. “And she had an outstanding warrant. What did you expect us to do, look the other way?”

  “Allegedly drunk and stoned!” Poop bellowed. “You ain’t got no blood results back yet, and I said I want my attorney!”

  “Sometimes this job is about priorities, Jason,” Clayton said. “You ever stop jerking off to your own stats and you might ever figure that out someday.”

  “Honey?” they heard the woman’s voice creak weakly. “I’m gonna be sick. I’m gonna—” and the unmistakable sound of retching came from inside the interview room, followed by a stench so horrific the troopers standing near the door covered their faces.

  Well, junkies were nothing if they weren’t predictable.

  “Point your head that way, girl!” Poop shouted. But then he started puking too.

  Cole Clayton took the bottle of sanitizer from the trooper as the rest of them positioned themselves at the door, all of them yelling at one another, trying to be heard over the sounds of the two people projectile vomiting inside the small room. Clayton squirted the clear gel into his hands, rubbed them vigorously together, and let himself out.

  He walked to his car and sat down inside, turning it on to get the engine running while he rolled down the windows. It was clear and bright that evening, the crisp, cold air chasing all the clouds out of the sky. He could make out a small patch of glittering lights in the distance and knew it was where he belonged. That was his town and his home, one of the few incorporated areas not protected by the State Police. Clayton pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and dialed the first number that came up. “Hey, hon. It’s me.”

  “You on your way back?” she said. She sounded tired, like she’d been trying to stay up waiting for him.

  “I don’t think so. I’m gonna be driving for a while.”

  “Where you headed this late?”

  Clayton looked out the window again at the stars and the fields and the distance where he longed to be and said, “The airport. I got a break in that case I’m working on. Gotta catch a flight out to Chicago.”

  ALICE MCDERMOTT

  Alice rolls onto her other side, bumps her head against the side of the cage.

  A dog cage. She was in a dog cage.

  She reaches through blurry vision for the door latch.

  Locked.

  She doesn’t understand why Sergei locked it. He didn’t force her into the cage. He bribed her with smack and she climbed in willingly.

  Did the lock mean she’d get more smack soon?

  Alice closed her eyes, hoping with all her might that it did.

  JACK DANIELS

  You read about the big cases. But most of them aren’t.

  In my town, where homicides average one point five a day, the ritual killings and whodunits always grab headlines and make for good press, but they’re not the majority of murder
cases I work. Most are much more low-key, typical, and sad.

  People walk around in fear of a stranger coming out of the shadows to grab them. Some serial killing maniac with a fetish, or a stranger driving a white van ready to yank the first kid he sees off the corner of their neighborhood and take them to his own private hell.

  The reality is, you’re in a lot more danger from the people you know. Friends. Co-workers. Most of all, the ones in your own family.

  Especially the ones in your own family.

  Herb was staring down at the dead bodies, leaning forward with his gut hanging over the crime scene tape. “I know how this happened. It’s a no-brainer.”

  I glanced at the fresh clump of brain-matter spattered against the living room wall and then back at Herb, my face creasing into a frown. There was no need to say anything. We’d both put in fifteen hours, and the exhaustion, stress, and general unpleasantness of the day had turned me sour and Herb into a bad stand-up comedian.

  He pointed at the couch where the woman was laying with her eyes closed, resting on the pillow with her hands tucked under it peacefully, despite the fact that the back of her head was gone.

  “Husband comes in, see his wife on the couch, today’s the day, and he walks over to her and bam. Lights out. Then, when he realizes he’ll never have anyone to cook for him again, he puts the gun against his temple and enters the murder-suicide statistic books.”

  “Because she won’t ever cook for him again? Is everything about food with you?”

  “Of course not. I also fixate on sugary beverages.”

  I stared at the dead man, the shotgun a few feet away from his body, consistent with him killing himself and dropping it.

  “No note,” I said.

  “Crime of passion, instant remorse. No time to write a note. Bet the coroner finds a BAC of at least point one five.”

  I eyed the empty gin bottle on the sofa and decided not to take that bet.