“Geez. I didn’t think people did letters like this in real life. The movies, sure, but real—˝
“Jake! Will ya read the fuckin letter?”
“Sure, calm down. Sure.”
The letter read:
“Meter maids everywhere will die! No one will escape my unrelenting wrath. Can any Sleuth catch me? Watch the movie and find out who I am.”
“‘Watch the movie,’” Bricker said, “what’s he mean by that?”
“He’s playing with us, Jake. He’s really playing with us.”
Billy paced the room anxiously, back and forth, back and forth, running his hand through his hair.
“Will you sit down? You’re makin’ me nervous.”
Billy grabbed a second beer and popped it open.
“You want one?”
“Sure, and put the rest of ‘em in the fridge, willya?” Bricker studied the note a second time while Billy put the beers away. When he came back, he said, “What’s this all got to do with Sleuth?”
“Did you ever see that movie? It was back in the seventies.”
“Well, since I was barely born, not really.”
“All right—it’s an old movie with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier.”
“So?”
“I went on Netflix. They have it so you can stream it right away, so I’ve been watching it.”
“You watch it on the computer or the TV?’
“The TV. I got one of those little boxes that let you do that.”
“Turn it on.”
Billy sat down and picked up the remote. Bricker saw that he’d stopped the movie in progress.
They watched the crucial scene where it’s revealed that one character is really someone else.
“What do you make of it?” asked Bricker.
“What do you make of it? You’re the fuckin’ cop!”
“Well, you’re the top investigative reporter for WHY-TV. What do you make of it?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, what was the movie about?”
“You have to look at it, from the beginning.”
Bricker whipped out his iPhone and went on the Internet.
“I’ll look at it later. But for now, it says here on Wikipedia that Michael Caine is playing this guy named Milo Tindle, who’s killed by Olivier, who’s playing a famous writer named Andrew Wyke, because the younger guy, Tindle, was fucking Wyke’s wife. But two days after killing Tindle, a detective named Doppler comes to interview Wyke about the missing Tindle, and he gets Wyke pretty worked up before he reveals that he, Doppler, is really Tindle in disguise.”
“Meaning what? That the meter maid murderer is not really the meter maid murderer?” asked Billy.
“Or, that he’s somebody else pretending to be the meter maid murderer?” said Bricker.
“Or, he’s the meter maid murderer pretending to be somebody else.”
“Didn’t I just say that?” Bricker said.
“Kinda,” Billy nodded.
“Well, he’s trying to send us a message. He wants to get caught. That’s what Louie Lewis was trying to tell us the other day. He’s in disguise like Michael Caine or something.”
“Well, he’s killed six meter maids already. You’d better glue yourself to the next one, Jake. If you do, you’ll catch this son of a bitch, no question.”
“Yeah, no question,” Bricker agreed, “this time we’ll get the motherfucker.”
And Jake Bricker did follow Pretty Rios, maybe twelve hours a day throughout July, until the New Moon began and he stepped up his surveillance to eighteen hours a day, with Billy filling in when he couldn’t. He was groggy from lack of sleep, but he didn’t care. He knew he had to soldier on if he hoped to catch the meter maid murderer in the very act of killing Pretty Rios. In all honesty, he didn’t really care if Pretty died. He only cared about catching the meter maid murderer. Cold and uncaring, he thought. But that’s how he felt.
Pretty did not pull any night shifts during the New Moon, so Bricker knew she’d have to be assaulted in broad daylight while at work, or sometime after she got home.
Four nights into the New Moon—it was a Friday—and this meant Pretty would be pole dancing at Solid Tin in Doral. Bricker didn’t relish the idea of spending hour after hour in Solid Tin with its sticky bar top and its smelly bartender with the missing teeth and the scraggly hair. He also didn’t want to be recognized by Slimy Salazar, who’d shown up every Friday Bricker’d tailed Pretty home. So he was sure to be there tonight.
Bricker consulted with Billy about the Slimy Salazar problem and they decided it would be best if Bricker wore some kind of disguise. The Trilby would have to go, because nobody but Bricker wore a hat in Miami, unless it was some old Cuban in a Panama hat playing dominoes down in Little Havana. They decided Bricker should wear a wig because he was so handsome he would stand out like a sore thumb in the crowd of losers frequenting Solid Tin. Billy chose what to Bricker looked like a very unflattering dirty blond wig. They finished off this “look” with a pair of dark-rimmed glasses with plain glass in them. No one would recognize Bricker in this get-up, not even Slimy Salazar.
Later, when it was dark and Bricker was stationed across the street from Pretty’s apartment building, the evening unfolded according to the pattern he was used to. Pretty went in, cleaned away the dirt from her day job as a merciless meter maid, came out all fresh and excited, perky and happy, and walked the four blocks down to Solid Tin. Bricker followed her in his car. Once she was safely inside, Bricker ditched his Trilby, donned his wig and put on the eyeglasses.
He went into Solid Tin and made for the far side of the bar, as far away from the stage as he could get, and in the darkest part of the room except for the nooks and crannies where johns met dancers for a little more privacy.
True to form, Slimy Salazar bounded in, full of the promise so many working stiffs feel when they get off work after a long week and look forward to a little R&R. Bricker assumed Slimy was pretty high on the totem pole at TWERP Towing, because Friday night was primo time for towing. Bricker’d looked into his schedule, and he always worked the even busier Saturday nights, so he was obviously using his Fridays to spend time with Pretty.
Solid Tin was busier this night than most Fridays. Men came and went, too many for Bricker’s comfort level.
When Pretty came onstage, Bricker felt secure enough leaving her for a few minutes. No one was going to kill her up on stage (unless of course the meter maid murderer was also a dance critic), so Bricker went outside to have a look around back.
It was deadly dark outside, a bit of a humid breeze coming in from the southeast. The fronds in a few tall palms on the side of Solid Tin rustled in the wind. Bricker went around back, pulled out a flashlight and looked down the alley. There was nothing but a sole light above Solid Tin’s back door, and even it wasn’t six feet high. Bricker walked down the alley to the back door. The structure itself was so low Bricker could see he’d actually have to stoop down a little to get through the beat up door. There was a dumpster directly across from the back door.
Bricker tried the door knob. It turned. He cracked the door, peering into the backstage area of the club. The loud music poured out into the darkness. Pretty was dancing to a crummy Spanish-language cover of We Are Family, by Sister Sledge, but Bricker found it extremely annoying: So-mos Fa-mi-li-a.
Bricker heard footsteps approaching from inside, quickly closed the door and ran to crouch behind the dumpster. The back door swung open and he heard a heavy grunt as someone heaved something heavy up into the dumpster.
But the guy missed. The trash bag landed not in the dumpster, but on the back edge of it, splitting and pouring half its soaking contents into the dumpster and the other half onto Bricker’s head and shoulders.
Bricker froze as he heard the back door slam as his whole upper body was drenched in a dozen different warm and odoriferous liquids: he picked out two or three types of beer, the juniper berries in gin, a hint of Wild Turkey and som
ething sweet and sticky that smelled like Southern Comfort, but he couldn’t be sure. Oh, yes: coffee grinds. Definitely the acrid smell of coffee grinds. Some of them even in Bricker’s ears.
So-mos Fa-mi-li-a.
He could hear the stupid fuckin’ lyrics coming from inside Solid Tin.
He got up and took off his jacket, shaking it clean of lemon peels, cherriy stems and soiled bar naps. He pulled a foul, coffee grind encrusted orange wedge off his Trilby-less head. His wig was soaked.
Bricker pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face clean of the smelly, sticky liquids as best he could before checking the back door to make sure it was locked. It wasn’t. Obviously, management was blithely unconcerned about the security level at Solid Tin.
He pressed the lock on the inside door knob and went around to the front of the building. He thought twice about going in, but when he thought about it a third time, he was sure the dentally challenged bartender, having a BO stronger than anything in the trash bag, would notice nothing amiss.
So he went in, took note that Pretty was wrapping up her set, and dashed to the dreaded toilet to wash his hands. The sink in the men’s room was as black as the night outside. A single bare bulb above the filthy sink (with maybe forty watts of power) flickered on and off tenuously. A drunk was hunched over a toilet in an open stall barfing his guts out.
Bricker went to the sink and turned on the faucet. There was, thankfully, cold water. The drunk looked over his shoulder at Bricker, who could see a dim outline in the mirror over the sink smeared with God knows what kind of grime.
“Quieres divertirte, muchacho?”
Which, roughly translated, means: “Wanna have some fun, fella?”
Bricker got out of there as soon as he could and took up his station on the far side of the bar in the pool of darkness he’d come to appreciate just as Pretty made her exit. He ordered another beer and checked his watch. Pretty would be out to see Slimy in ten minutes, no more than twelve. Slimy struck up an animated conversation with a couple of losers next to him at the edge of the stage, and the way he was pointing to the door where Pretty made her exit, Bricker was sure he was bragging to the guys that he was Pretty’s man, and that he was fucking her, and what a great ass she had, what a tight pussy.
And so forth and so on.
At twelve minutes, and no Pretty, Bricker got antsy. At fifteen, he was nervous. He saw Slimy get up and yell backstage.
“Hey, Pretty, donde carajos estas?”
Which, roughly translated, Bricker took to mean, “Hey, Pretty, where the fuck are you?”
But Bricker barely heard Slimy, because he was already running out the front door. He raced around back, turned the corner and came up short in a dead stop as he looked at Pepita Rios swinging from the light fixture above the back door.
He approached slowly, his gun out now, his flashlight searching everywhere in the bushes behind the dumpster, in the dumpster itself. Everywhere. He was dead silent as he listened for the slightest sound, the slightest indication of footsteps crunching dead leaves. Anything. But the wind rushing through the palm fronds covered most small sounds.
There was nothing. The meter maid murderer was gone. He turned to look at Pretty.
Her eyes bulged out, the sheer shock of the attack registering clearly on her very unattractive face. Her mouth was agape. Bricker shook his head in disbelief as he examined the murder weapon, in plain view.
Her long auburn hair was the murder weapon: fucker’d wrapped it around her neck three or four times and then pulled on it, twisting it until it strangled her as if it had been a rope or a garrote.
“Very clever,” Bricker said softly, admiring the guy’s ingenuity.
Just then, however, he heard footsteps from within.
It wouldn’t look good, he thought, him being in the alley behind Solid Tin casually observing the body of Pepita Rios swinging and swaying to and fro in the evening breeze with no suspect in cuffs. No, this clearly was not a good position to be in.
So he ran like a jackrabbit, slipping his Glock into his shoulder holster as he ran. He turned the corner just as someone opened the back room and knocked it against Pretty’s body blocking the way.
Calls and screams filled the humid night air, followed by the sound of people running after him. Whoever it was ran back into the club to alert everybody else. By the time Bricker got across the street and into his trusty Crown Vick, men were rushing out the front door of Solid Tin, spilling into the street.
Bricker, like a fool, panicked and peeled rubber as he sped off (instead of just driving away casually), and even switched on his headlights. He was half a block away before he realized this and quickly turned his lights out so no one could see his plate number. But those guys were so fucked up with drinking that they never could’ve seen his license plate.
A mile away he slowed down, pulling over to catch his breath. He was thoroughly drenched, not by the garbage in the split open trash bag, but by sweat. He mopped his brow with his already sopping, smelly handkerchief.
By the time he got home, he’d calmed down. He slipped into his house and took off all his clothes, which he stuffed into a garbage bag. He would dispose of all these clothes tomorrow. There’s no way he was taking that suit to the dry cleaners. He could see the look on their faces when they saw all the stains. He grabbed an Amstel Light out of the fridge and drank it down in one long swallow.
Jumping into the shower, he washed himself thoroughly, then hauled himself out and put on a terrycloth robe. He drank another beer and, feeling totally refreshed, crawled wearily into bed where he settled down to review the events of the evening.
It was painfully obvious (looking back) that the meter maid murderer had already snuck into Solid Tin when Bricker closed the door and locked it. The door opened from the inside, so it was not a hassle for the bartender to empty garbage bags. It also was not a hassle, after the meter maid murderer had gagged Pretty, to throw the bitch over his shoulder and drag her out back where he proceeded to throttle her and string her up on the light fixture where she dangled like a puppet, hanging from her own hair.
Bricker closed his eyes in anguish.
He could just hear Billy-Boy tomorrow when he told him the bad news.
Oh, well, he thought, rolling over on his side to get some sleep. He was content in the knowledge that he had yet another chance, one more opportunity, because tomorrow he’d begin tailing Miss August, Fatiwa “Fatso” Farhat.
This time—yes, this time—he’d catch the son of a bitch!
13 – The National Guard Arrives
Bricker woke to a sparkling morning. His bedroom was on the southeast side of the house, so the morning sun streamed in like the life force it was. Outside, the air was bright and fresh, made new by an overnight thunderstorm that washed all of South Beach of the grime and grit of the previous day: the streets were clean, the trees and grass, all starting over. Bricker’d had to get up at 3 A.M. to close the windows against the pounding rain, but opened them again at 5 A.M. when the storm passed over. Now a rejuvenating breeze filled the room.
Bricker took a deep breath and stretched. It was 6:45. He didn’t want to miss the morning news, so he jumped out of bed and went straight to the TV.
The shit had already hit the fan by the time he tuned in. The word was out about Pepita Rios’s vicious strangulation. It was all over the TV news, and not just local, but all the national morning shows: Today, Good Morning America, CNN, XYZ’s The Morning Show, you name it. It was front page news in every newspaper in the country, from the Mullet Wrapper to the Miami Herald to the New York Times. The story was huge abroad, from Le Monde to the Daily Telegraph.
But Sara Succubus on The Morning Show was particularly snide and nasty. She was in the habit now of doing one of those little sidebar stories where she stuck it to the cops deeper and deeper, a little sharper every day.
“The cops want me to stop,” she sneered this morning. “I’ll stop when they catch the demented crazy per
son who killed my little sister and my dear mother!”
Whew, thought Bricker. She’s got some nerve.
He saw the way Sara let her sister and mom live. It was disgusting. She didn’t give a damn, but nobody but Jake Bricker knew it.
He’d had a close call, getting away from the scene just in time. Everybody was talking about the “suspect” seen by a couple of dozen drunken losers cascading out of Solid Tin as he sped away. The good thing was, they were so soused up, all their stories varied. But word was leaked that a couple of the Solid Tin patrons had seen the tag number of the suspect’s car.
For the life of him, Bricker couldn’t believe any of them could have come away with his complete plate number. It just wasn’t possible.
The Big Event of the morning had to do with a news conference called suddenly by Governor Ken Kudzue in which he announced the immediate deployment of a National Guard battalion to the shores of South Beach.
Governor Kudzue announced that he’d be flying to Miami to welcome the first wave of troops that very afternoon and to coordinate their deployment with local officials.
Word was he hadn’t even bothered to inform Mayor Germane of this development, or Chief Ramirez. And both were said to be in a major hissy fit over this grandstanding move by the governor. (This was his third trip down since the killings started. Johnny Germane wasn’t the only one running for reelection.)
True to form, by one o’clock Bricker was sitting at the Deuce staring longingly at Boobs McCoy’s formidable rack and leafing through his dossier on Fatso Farhat. Boobs brought over his second Ezra Brooks and he smiled as she went through her performance art piece involving the two ice cubes.
“Thanks, Boobs.”
“No problem, pussy-boy,” she winked.
She turned on her heels and went to the other side of the bar to talk to some bedraggled drag queen.
The Meter Maid Murders Page 10
