Bricker caught up with Missy in a parking lot to the west of Flamingo Park, writing tickets with such furious abandon that she never saw him creeping up behind her. No wonder the meter maid murderer’d had it so easy—when these girls worked, they worked. Worked with a focus Bricker had to admire, deep down.
It also occurred to Bricker in passing that a bright one-piece outfit with blue and white polka dots was not the best choice if he hoped to remain unseen by the meter maid murderer. But he had to do the best he could, given the circumstances. So he crouched low and followed Missy as she made her rounds.
Just then Bricker saw something: a Shadow.
A Shadow flitting from one tree to another, moving so fast he was barely discernible to the naked eye. The guy must be wearing all black with a hood or something concealing his head. Maybe one of those ski masks terrorists used that revealed only their eyes.
Luckily for Bricker, he was behind the guy, not to the side, so his garish costume went unnoticed.
As the Shadow moved from tree to tree parallel to Missy, Bricker moved from car to car, keeping just behind Missy and the Shadow.
Just when Missy reached the final car in a long row and was busily writing up her ticket, the Shadow lurched at her from behind, throwing a rope, garrote or some such wire around her neck. He twisted it violently and Missy dropped her ticket-writing device as the meter maid murderer jumped onto Missy piggyback style causing her to topple to the ground.
Bricker felt a surge of energy the equivalent of a thousand Red Bulls and leaped forward, jumping on the meter maid murderer’s back and grabbing him around the neck to pull him off Missy.
The meter maid murderer released his hold on the garrote and rolled off Missy’s back into a tumble with Bricker. They fought furiously for a few minutes until Bricker, stronger of the two, prevailed. He finally got the meter maid murderer on his back and then sat on his chest astraddle as he reached for his Glock buried in the folds of his clown costume. He pulled out his weapon and then hopped off the killer to get a little distance between him and the guy.
“Okay, the party’s fuckin’ over, asshole. Jake Bricker caught you red-handed. You stay there.”
He went over to check on Missy, keeping his gun on the meter maid murderer.
Missy was dead as a doornail, eyes bulging out like a dead frog on a dissection table in a tenth grade biology class.
“Well, you fuckin’ asshole, you got all twelve of them. Take off that ski mask.”
An arm reached up and Billy pulled the ski mask off his head.
“You!” Bricker breathed out in a hoarse whisper.
“Yes, me... you fucking lummox, oaf, ignoramus, moron, asshole.”
“Don’t call me an asshole.” Bricker paused, tilted his head toward Billy. “You know, I always suspected it might be you,” he said quietly.
Billy got to his feet, his facial features livid, furious with emotion, his chest pulsating with uncontrolled rage.
“Suspected me? You fool! You’d suspect your own fucking mother before you ever suspected me, you asshole.”
Billy rushed up to Bricker, but Bricker stuck the gun under Billy’s chin.
“Hold it, there, Billy-Boy. Think you’re so smart, huh? Naw, it was there all along, lurking in the back of my mind.”
“Well, there’s certainly plenty of room back there!” Billy screamed. “There is no back of your mind. There is no front of your mind. There’s no middle of your mind. There is no mind at all!”
“Hey, keep your voice down. Are you trying to say there’s nobody home up here,” and Bricker, pointing the gun to his head.
“Nobody home? There aren’t even any neighbors!”
There was a pause as Bricker eyed Billy.
“You’re sick, you know that?”
“I know I’m sick, you dickhead.”
“What made you do it, Billy-Boy?”
“Don’t call me Billy-Boy.”
“What made you do it? Come over here. Sit down.”
They sat on a little knoll and Bricker lit up a Montecristo. But he kept his gun on Billy.
“It was at the awards ceremony last year. After I covered the awards, I came out and found a ticket on my windshield. They gave me a God damn ticket. They even ignored my press card on the dash.”
“All this over a ticket?”
“Well, after I got the ticket and snatched it off my windshield, I looked over my shoulder and all twelve of the bitches were standing there laughing. Laughing!”
“Well, it is kinda funny, when you think about it.”
Billy glared at Bricker with such intensity that Bricker held his gun back up.
“Laughing at me. I went to court to fight the ticket. The judge just looked at me like I was dog turd on the street that he’d just stepped in—he threw out my case. Just like that. I couldn’t sleep at night. This whole thing just put me over the top. I planned. I obsessed, I waited. And then I began my crusade...”
“Your crusade to rid South Beach of meter maids?”
“But I knew I was sick. And I wanted you to catch me, Jake. I wanted you to catch me. I did everything I could in my power to make it easy for you to catch me.”
Bricker hung his head.
“Sorry to let you down, Billy-Boy.”
“You don’t know how many times I was on the air and wanted to yell it from the tree tops—to tell the people I was on their side, that I was ridding the city of this pestilence of meter maids, that I was going to free the people to park wherever they wanted.”
“Well, you certainly had a run of luck. You did kill twelve of ‘em. Were you gonna stop with these twelve?”
“I hadn’t decided, actually, now that you ask me.”
Billy hung his head.
“Well, Billy-Boy. You’re definitely out of the meter maid murdering business. As your best friend—and a cop—I’m officially retiring you.”
“I guess it’s the chair for me. Old Sparky. I’m gonna fry, aren’t I, Jake?”
“No, we do lethal injection now. They say it stings a little when the needle goes in, kinda like anal sex, you know? But nothing major.”
Billy let out a heavy, resigned sigh.
“Well, I guess we better go,” Billy said, his head low, dejected, his spirit deflated. “You just broke the biggest case of your life. You’ll be a star.”
Bricker looked over to the expired Missy sprawled on the grass beneath an oak tree.
“You know, Billy-Boy, I know what you did was bad.”
“I know, I know,” Billy sniffled in a low, pathetic whimper.
“But they were only meter maids.”
Bricker put his gun back into the clown suit.
“Still, I’m ready to face them music,” Billy raised his head stoically.
“Yeah, let’s get goin’,” Bricker said, hauling Billy up and putting a fraternal arm over his shoulder as he led him back to the lights of the carnival. “I wanna get one of those hot dogs before they close the concession.”
“What?”
“And maybe a root beer.”
“A root beer?”
“You know, Billy-Boy. What you did was bad.”
“I know.”
“Real bad.”
“I know it was bad. Bad, bad, bad.”
“But I’m gonna let you off with a warning this time.”
Billy stopped in his tracks and turned to Bricker, his eyes blinking furiously.
Bricker smiled and clapped him on the shoulder, turning his best friend back toward the lights in Flamingo Park.
“But, fuck... if I ever catch you doing something like this again...”
Epilogue
As with any complex story, there were a few loose ends to tie up over the next few days. There was the question of Slimy’s body buried under a couple of thousand pounds of nickels and dimes in the warehouse. Bricker was able to dispose of Slimy by borrowing Billy-Boy’s Jeep and taking the body way out in the Everglades to a place he knew alligators ga
thered to breed. And when they were fucking, alligators worked up a tremendous appetite, so there wasn’t much left of Slimy after about ten minutes.
There was the matter of the warehouse full of money. Nobody knew it was there except Major Enid Bunstable, so he called on her and told her what he knew. He offered her a deal: she and Bricker would put out the story that Salvino Salazar was really the meter maid murderer, that she and Bricker had been working together to solve the case, and had settled on Salazar when certain clues led them to the tow truck driver, including his sexual relationship with Pretty Rios and Missy Cuthbert. Slimy had vanished from South Beach before they could arrest him.
Major Bunstable, in turn, would resign from the PMS Force and return with honor to her native Munich where she could easily secure a position as sergeant-major in the local constabulary. Bricker, for his part, would send her $500 a week for the rest of her life, culled from the proceeds in the warehouse.
With the information he got from Bunstable, Bricker went and met the landlord out at the warehouse, and took over the lease.
With money no longer an issue, Billy-Boy was installed in an asylum in Switzerland and in a few years was expected to make a full recovery from the paranoid schizophrenia bedeviling him.
Bricker arranged for Alice to quit the PMS Force trainee program and move in with him and Marilyn Monroe (as well as a recent addition to the family, Cassie Castro’s Great Dane, whose name turned out to be Thor) .
Alice developed into a surprisingly good cook and watched Martha Stewart’s show every day to learn how to be a homemaker. He warned her to ignore Martha’s bossy lesbian tendencies.
And twice a week, Bricker took two large plastic jars of coins to eighteen different Publix markets scattered around South Florida and cashed the change in for net proceeds of about twenty grand a month.
The way Bricker figured it, he had it pretty nice. Major Bunstable told him she figured there was about $5,000,000 worth of coins in the warehouse. If he was cashing in $20,000 a month (the way Bricker figured it), he could live off $20,000 a month (or $240,000 a year, plus his cop’s salary), and keep spending that amount for twenty years.
Sweet.
It was even sweeter than the already bloated pension deal the City of Miami Beach offered the cops to induce the cops’ union to endorse the self-serving and less than visionary politicians for reelection.
Bricker gave the idea of “early retirement” a fleeting consideration, but when he looked deep into his soul, he realized he had to live up to the noble idea of “Giving Back,” so he decided he should remain on the Force. After all, he was a slave to his work, consumed by it, and when you’re really good at something, he thought, you ought to keep doing it.
For Jake Bricker, the successful resolution of the meter maid murders wasn’t really the end of anything. The way his mother might have put it, it really really—if you looked at it from a different perspective—just...
The Beginning
The Meter Maid Murders Page 23
