The Killing Game

by J. A. Kerley

  Ema brushed a speck of lint from his shoulder. “You never call, dear. I’ll call you.”

  Gregory numbly endured another hug and left, closing the front door behind him, the trap in his hand. Within a few steps heard the television resume its former level … nothing beats the great taste of Swanson Family Dinners. Be sure to pick up … We interrupt this program to bring you a special update…

  Gregory was backing down the drive when the door opened, Ema waving a handkerchief. “Yoo-hoo! Gregory!”

  He cursed to himself, jammed on the brakes, rolled down the window.

  “What is it now, Ema?”

  “Can I see you for a moment, dear?”

  We found out where Nieves’s sister lived, but in a very bad way. The call came to 911 and we were at the house in minutes, siren blasting, engine pushed to its limits.

  Cops swarmed the place. The sister, Ema Nieves, was on the couch, a frayed bundle of tears and terror. Nieves was on the floor in the hall, a 380 caliber bullet just to the left of his heart. His hand was clutching a boning knife, a wicked instrument. The front of his shirt was a river of scarlet. He was on his back and staring at the ceiling.

  I took the poor woman’s hand and moved her from the living room to the kitchen, helping her into a chair. I debated whether or not to question her at this sensitive time; a hospital might have been best, tranquilizers. But I needed to hear what had happened.

  “Can you talk, Ms Nieves?” I asked.

  Her eyes were closed tight. Tears had washed make-up down her cheeks. “I-I’ll try.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “H-hh-he … I couldn’t…’’

  “It’s over, ma’am,” I consoled her, taking her hand in mine. “You’re safe and that’s a very good thing. Can you explain what happened?”

  “G-Gregory tried to kill me,” she sobbed, shaking her head. “H-he’s my b-b-brother and he, he…”

  Harry had brought a glass of water. Ms Nieves drank and it seemed to help her get steady. She wiped her eyes, handed the glass back, whispered, “Thank you.”

  “Take your time, Ms Nieves,” I consoled. “I understand that it’s tough.”

  Ema Nieves took a deep breath. She paused and closed her eyes as if looking for something inside her, strength perhaps.

  “G-Gregory came by without calling. It was strange because he always calls. I was in the bathroom and heard a terrible banging on the front door. It scared me so I tiptoed into the living room. The next thing I knew he pushed through into the house. H-he had crazy eyes, like I’ve never seen before. He said I’d betrayed him, that he was going to cut my throat. He had a knife.”

  “Did he say why he wanted to kill you?”

  She looked at me, hands shaking, her face a mask of confusion. “H-he kept accusing me of being a spy for the police. I didn’t know what he was talking about. It was so crazy. He started to come toward me, waving the knife, getting louder.”

  I looked at Harry. Paranoia. Part of Gregory Nieves’s dissolution, I figured.

  “Has your brother been acting strange lately?” I asked quietly.

  She stared. “How did you know?”

  “You were with him when he tripped a waiter some days back?”

  Another how-did-you-know? look. “H-he told me the waiter somehow had it in for him. It was terribly strange and embarrassing.”

  I looked toward Nieves’s sprawled and lifeless body and saw the dark revolver on the floor a dozen feet from his body. A photographer was crouched above the gun, flashing off shots.

  “That’s your gun, Ms Nieves … Ema?”

  She glanced at the weapon, head snapping away as though the image was too ugly to bear. “I l-live alone, and it made sense. I b-bought it this spring. Took lessons. I wanted to make sure I was doing everything right. Wh-when I heard the pounding on the door I … I took the gun into the living room and I, and I—”

  Her wall of courage fell apart and she collapsed into my arms, crying as if everything in her life had dissolved into dust.

  “I know it doesn’t sound like it, Ms Nieves,” I whispered, gently patting her shaking back. “But you’re a very lucky woman.”

  53

  Two weeks passed. It was a Saturday and the recruits had graduated in the afternoon. It had been a splendid sunlit ceremony, with flags and gunshot salutes and an eloquent speech about tradition. A pity the speech had come from Baggs, who wrote little of it and understood less. Our dual mea culpa media moment was one week past. There’d been a news blitz for a couple days, then a guy in Orange Beach got bit by a shark and everyone forgot about cop stuff.

  I had a small party at my place. Harry was among the crowd, of course, with Sally Hargreaves. Director of Forensics Wayne Hembree attended with his wife. Rein Earley was there, taking bows for a fine and funny speech about her days at the academy. A patrol officer for a year now, Rein was Harry’s niece, though few knew it. Doc Kavanaugh floated in, as wizardy as always. I’d invited Clair, not really expecting her to attend, but she arrived with a date, a fortyish cardiologist who was so good looking I figured he had to be gay or have issues or both.

  Wendy was there, naturally. I hadn’t seen much of her the last few days, what with cramming for the exams. She aced everything, by the way. I wish I could have invited the entire recruit class as thanks for rebuilding the video and its second life. But I’d offered some gratitude last week by taking everyone to a dinner I’d be paying down for months.

  I was leaning against the rail and sipping a Sazerac. I turned my cell phone off, since everyone I wanted to talk to was at my house. Dropping it back into the pocket of my jacket, I felt a piece of paper. It was the message Roy McDermott had left on my office phone, The snook are calling.

  I’d paid it no heed at the time, too much going on. But now it called up a conversation from a year ago, Roy and I flyfishing for snook at the Ding Darling Nature Preserve on Florida’s Sanibel Island, the outflowing tide pulling the elusive, aerodynamic sportfishes though the brushy passes as the setting sun turned the twilight air to gold. A light breeze rattled the leaves of the palmettos. The early stars were winking down.

  “My idea of heaven, Roy,” I’d said, unwinding a cast, the water warm and lapping at the hem of my cutoffs.

  “Close enough for me,” Roy said, a dozen feet to my side and tying on a new fly. Then, after a long pause, “You ever think of changing jobs, Carson? A lot of places could use someone like you, give you a leadership role. They treating you right at the MPD?”

  I’d launched a cast across the shimmering water. “They’re treating me fine, Roy.”

  “Things are changing at the FCLE,” he’d said, quietly, almost as if talking to himself. He looked up. “If I ended up with some control over hiring, Carson, you wouldn’t be against my giving you a call, would you?”

  Three foot of fish rocketed from the water ahead of me, my fly in its mouth and my rod bending near in half. “Got a better idea, Roy,” I’d laughed, following the fish out into the channel as line sizzled from my reel. “Have the snook give me a call.”

  I was mulling over the incident when Wendy walked up and leaned beside me. “Howdy, stranger,” she said. She was wearing a sleeveless white blouse and very brief pink skirt. Her hair floated in the warm breeze and she looked so very young.

  I tucked away my recollections for the moment and pretended to shoo her away.

  “Sorry, lady, real cops aren’t allowed to talk to newbies.”

  “That so? Maybe I’ll go talk to the guy Dr Peltier brought. Yum.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered. Wendy leaned close and gave me a peck on my cheek. “How goes the Nieves investigation?”

  “New twists and turns every day. We found an animal trap in Nieves’s truck and cocaine in the glove box. Both explain a lot. But the big find was on his mantel: a vase filled with pennies. Each coin had a name taped to the back – people who Nieves thought insulted him is the presumption. He probably shook out a penny, then we
nt into stalking mode.”

  “My God. How many pennies?”

  “Forty-three.”

  “Talk about thin-skinned. Were you a penny?”

  “Oddly enough, no cops were. Five names were people in the EEOSA. Others we may never identify.”

  Harry and Sally walked up, Sally shaking Wendy’s hand. “Congratulations, graduate. Carson says you played a part in figuring out the Nieves motive.”

  “Oh no. It was just a game in class, a hypothetical.”

  “You started me thinking about pain having meaning beyond its infliction,” I said. “It helped make the connection in the Square.”

  Wendy frowned. “But weren’t you already thinking along those lines, Carson? ‘A murder is too good a thing to waste?’ Part of your hypothetical?”

  “I, uh…”

  “Of course he was,” Harry said, slapping my back. “Trouble is, the poor boy’s too dumb to realize how smart he is.” It got a laugh, and provided a distraction, as Harry knew it would. Sally noticed her wine was getting low and went to refill, Wendy following. Harry watched them weave through the crowd to the kitchen.

  “Lawd, Carson … how did we both end up with ladies that put us to shame?”

  “I’m afraid Wendy’s too young for me, Harry,” I lamented. “May–December or whatever.”

  Harry laughed so loud it echoed off the house next door, like laughing twice. “For chrissakes, Carson. You can’t even tell time. It’s March–June or thereabouts.”

  “I’m still over ten years older than her.”

  “You happy? She happy?”

  I nodded.

  “Then let’s change the subject, because it’s ridiculous. You met with Ema Nieves this morning, right? How’s she doing?”

  I’d promised Ema I’d check on her every few days and stopped by earlier. “Ema’s had time to think, Harry. Things are getting clearer.”

  “How so?”

  “She mentioned something from the Ceaușescu days called the Departmentul Securitari Statului, one of the largest secret-police organizations in the Eastern Bloc. The DSS had officers at the orphanage and Ema suspects her brother was molested by them. They wore blue uniforms.”

  “Jesus. The Blue Tribe. But Nieves’s only police contact here was with Austin and Mailey, and Austin did everything to help the guy.”

  “We’ll never know what Nieves was seeing in his head. Or how it got there.”

  “But Ema’s doing better, I hope?”

  “She’s quit her job, too torn up to work, but it seems she’s the sole beneficiary of Nieves’s will.”

  Harry raised an eyebrow. “Sole beneficiary?”

  I nodded. “Gets it all.”

  He took a sip of his drink, both of us watching a light far out on the water, a freighter, I figured, halfway from hither and crossing to yon.

  “I know Gregory Nieves got destroyed in childhood, Carson, but his money will do more good with a person like Ema. I sense a strength in there. She’s a survivor.”

  “Ema might even wring some good from the horror,” I said. “She’s considering writing a book about how she missed warning signs of her brother’s illness, hoping to keep it from happening to others. An agent already contacted her.”

  “My Brother the Killer?” Harry mused. “Those true-life things can go big, Cars. Bestseller list. Oprah. A movie. Has Ema told Doc Szekely yet?”

  I nodded. “Ema called Szekely as soon as a book came to mind. Ema wants the Doc to make a few contributions from the psychological side.”

  “What does the Doc think of the idea?”

  I glanced up at the moon, moving toward full and wearing a hopeful face – at least, that was how it appeared to me. After all the horror and uncertainty of this case it was finally good to have something positive to say.

  “Szekely thinks writing a book is exactly what Ema needs,” I said. “A project to keep her occupied.”

  I heard my phone ring in the kitchen, watched through the window as Wendy answered. She listened for a moment, raised a quizzical eyebrow, then put her palm over the receiver and called to me through the screen.

  “It’s some guy who says his name is Mr Snook, Carson. You want to take it?”

  Wait if you wish, read on if you dare …

  THE DEATH BOX

  An exclusive preview of

  J.A. Kerley’s new Carson Ryder thriller

  COMING IN DECEMBER 2013

  1

  The stench of rotting flesh filled the box like black fog. Death surrounded Amili Zelaya, the floor a patchwork of clothing bearing the decomposing bodies of seventeen human beings. Amili was alive, barely, staring into the shadowed dark of a shipping container the size of a semitrailer. Besides the reek of death, there was bone-melting heat and graveyard silence save for waves breaking against a hull far below.

  You’re lucky, the smiling man in Honduras had said before closing the door, ten days and you’ll be in Los Estados Unitos, the United States, think of that. Amili had thought of it, grinning at Lucia Belen in the last flash of sunlight before the box slammed shut. They’d crouched in the dark thinking their luck was boundless: they were going to America.

  “Lucia,” Amili rasped. “Please don’t leave me now.”

  Lucia’s hand lay motionless in Amili’s fingers. Then, for the span of a second, the fingers twitched. “Fight for life, Lucia,” Amili whispered, her parched tongue so swollen it barely moved in her mouth. Lucia was from Amili’s village. They’d grown up together – born in the same week eighteen years ago – ragged but happy. Only when fragments of the outside world intruded did they realize the desperate poverty strangling everyone in the village.

  “Fight for life,” Amili repeated. But her hand was the first to fall away and she drifted into unconsciousness. Sometime later Amili’s mind registered new sounds and sensations. The deep notes of ship horns. The roar and rattle of machinery.

  Was that the calling of gulls? The metal box trembled and Amili struggled to lift her head. Something had changed.

  “The ship has stopped, Lucia,” Amili rasped, holes from popped rivets allowing ample light to outline the inside of the module, one of thousands on the deck of the container ship bound for Miami, Florida. The illegal human cargo had been repeatedly instructed to stay motionless and quiet through the journey.

  If you reveal yourselves you will be thrown in a gringo prison, raped, beaten … men, women, children, it makes no difference. Never make a sound, comprende?

  Eventually they’d feel the ship stop and the box would be offloaded and driven to a hidden location where they’d receive papers, work assignments, places to live. They had only to perform six months of employment – housekeeping, yard work, light factory labor – to relieve the debt of their travel. After that, they owned their lives. A dream beyond belief.

  “It must be Miami, Lucia,” Amili said. “Stay with me.”

  But their drinking water had leaked away early in the voyage, a split opening in the side of the huge plastic drum, water washing across the floor of the container, pouring out through the seams. No one worried much about the loss, fearing only that escaping liquid would attract attention and they’d be put in chains to await prison. The ship had been traveling through fierce storms, rainwater dripping into the module from above like a dozen mountain springs. Water was everywhere.

  This had been many days back. Before the ship had lumbered from the storms into searing summer heat. The rusty water in the bottom of the module was swiftly consumed. For days they ached for water, the inside of the container like an oven. Teresa Maldone prayed until her voice burned away. Pablo Entero drank from the urine pail. Maria Poblana banged on the walls of the box until wrestled to the floor.

  She was the first to die.

  Amili Zelaya had initially claimed a sitting area by a small hole in the container, hoping to peek out and watch for America. But an older and larger woman named Postan Rendoza had bullied Amili away, cursing and slapping her to a far corner by t
he toilet bucket.

  But the much-traveled module was slightly lower in Amili’s square meter of squatting room. Rainwater had pooled in the depressed corner, dampening the underside of Amili’s ragged yellow dress.

  When the heat came, Amili’s secret oasis held water even as others tongued the metal floor for the remaining rain. When no one was looking Amili slipped the hem of her dress to her mouth and squeezed life over her tongue: brown, rusty water sullied by sloshings from the toilet bucket, but enough to keep her insides from shriveling.

  Postan Rendoza’s bullying had spared Amili’s life. And the life of Lucia, with whom Amili had shared her hidden water.

  Rendoza had been the eighth to die.

  Three days ago, the hidden cache had disappeared. By then, four were left alive, and by yesterday it was only Amili and Lucia. Amili felt guilt that she had watched the others perish from lack of water. But she had made her decision early, when she saw past tomorrow and tomorrow that water would be a life-and-death problem. Had she shared there would be no one alive in the steaming container: there was barely enough for one, much less two.

  It was a hard secret and a terrible one to keep through screams and moans and prayers, but Amili had stuck to her decision. Decisions were her job: every morning before leaving for the coffee plantation Amili’s mother would gather five wide-eyed and barefoot children into the main room of their mud-brick home, point at Amili and say, “Amili is the oldest and the one who makes the good decisions.”

  A good decision, Amili knew, was for tomorrow, not today. When the foreign dentistas came, it was Amili who cajoled her terrified siblings into getting their teeth fixed and learning how to care for them, so their mouths did not become empty holes. When the drunken, lizard-eyed Federale gave thirteen-year-old Pablo forty pesetas to walk into the woods with him, Amili had followed to see the Federale showing Pablo his man thing. Though the man had official power it had been Amili’s decision to throw a big stone at him, the blood pouring from his face as he chased Amili down and beat her until she could not stand.