Bad News: A Zack Walker Mystery #4

by Linwood Barclay

  ‘When you called, about your son, and the incident at Burger Crisp, I figured it was only a matter of time before the shit hit the fan. I want to get out in front of this. I don’t want to be dragged down by it. I’d rather be the guy who blew the whistle than get caught in this with everybody else.’

  I asked him a few more questions. Names and dates, as many specific details as I could pull out of him. Plus where I could reach him.

  ‘You gotta be really careful how you go about asking questions,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anyone knowing where all this came from, not before the story hits the paper.’

  ‘I understand.’ I paused. ‘Does your wife know what’s happening?’

  Sandler shook his head. ‘I’m too ashamed. Maybe, when it comes out, it’ll give me some of my pride back, and then I can tell her.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I gotta go.’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I have a couple of other things I have to deal with first.’ I was thinking of my trip to Canborough and beyond. ‘But in a day or so, I’ll start looking into this.’

  Unburdened, he said thank you, asked me for an e-mail address, which he wrote down, then slipped out of my car and back into his Buick. The tires of his car crunched the gravel and he backed out, turned around, and drove out of Bayside Park.

  I sat there, a plan taking shape in my mind, a plan that could get me, and Sarah, our rightful jobs back. If I had a story about rampant corruption in the health department, about restaurant owners offering bribes, making death threats, I’d—

  The passenger door opened abruptly. Before I could even think, I’d shouted, ‘Jesus!’

  Lawrence Jones settled in next to me. ‘You always that jumpy when a black man gets in your car?’ He pulled the door shut, looked at what I was driving. ‘Wow. This makes my Jag look like a piece of shit.’

  NINETEEN

  ‘Where were you?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean, where was I?’ Lawrence said. ‘I was hiding. Did you want me to sit on the hood of your car?’

  I waved at him dismissively. ‘Okay, you’re brilliant. But thanks for keeping a watch on things.’

  Lawrence Jones shrugged. ‘Everything looked pretty harmless. You hardly needed me around. From where I was watching, the guy appeared to be doing a bit of blubbering. They seem a lot less threatening when they’re blubbering.’

  ‘He unloaded,’ I said. ‘Sorry if I dragged you out here for nothing.’

  Another shrug. ‘Whatever. I only had to cancel some highly lucrative corporate surveillance stuff to do this.’

  Lawrence was looking, as usual, trim and fit and immaculately turned out. Even to hide in the bushes and keep a watch over me, he wore perfectly tailored black slacks, leather shoes, and a dark green windbreaker with a Hugo Boss emblem stitched to the collar. This one outfit was worth more than everything in my closet.

  I’ve known Lawrence a couple of years now. I was doing a feature on a day in the life of a private detective, and Lawrence, a former cop who’d gone out on his own, had agreed to let me tag along with him. That encounter turned into much more trouble than either of us ever expected, and nearly left my new friend dead. Lawrence credits me with saving his life. Not because I warded off his attackers. I just showed up in time to get him to the hospital before he lost his last drop of blood.

  And more recently, he’d been there for me, and my father, when my dad was having a bit of trouble with his neighbors.

  ‘I’m starting to worry that I’m becoming a nuisance,’ I said.

  ‘Becoming?’ Lawrence said.

  I smiled. ‘You got time for a coffee? I’m buying.’

  ‘I’d rather you bought me lunch,’ he said. ‘You mess up my day and think you can make it all better with a coffee?’

  He had to go back and get his car, so we agreed to rendezvous at a nearby diner. He ordered an open-faced roast beef sandwich and mashed potatoes, smothered in gravy. With coffee. I got a BLT with extra mayo.

  ‘So,’ Lawrence said, ‘you keeping out of trouble?’

  How could you not laugh?

  I gave him the quickest possible summary. Trixie missing. Body in basement. Me handcuffed next to it. The Flint investigation. Possibly a couple of stun gun-selling bikers on Trixie’s tail. It appeared that she had a daughter she’d never told us about. Me suspended from the paper. Sarah demoted. Wasn’t sure she still wanted me around the house. Paul fired from his job. Nasty Russian ladies putting people’s fingers into deep fryers.

  ‘Other than that,’ I said, ‘things are pretty good.’

  Lawrence’s expression never changed the whole time. He kept eating his roast beef and mashed potatoes. Finally he put down his fork, picked up his napkin, and daintily dabbed at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask how I’m doing?’ he asked.

  I waited a moment. ‘How are things with you?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Pretty good. Kent and I are still off and on.’ Kent, who owned a restaurant in the city, and Lawrence had been seeing each other for a couple of years. ‘Work is good. Fairly steady. Like I said, I’ve got some corporate stuff. They throw money around like nobody else.’ He waved the waitress over for a coffee refill.

  He sipped some, ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, and said, ‘You are seriously fucked up.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lawrence shook his head back and forth sadly. ‘Even by your standards, you are seriously fucked up.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘I can see why you’re a topnotch investigator. You size things up right away.’

  Lawrence put another forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. ‘You need any help?’

  ‘I don’t want to impose,’ I said.

  Lawrence grinned. ‘Really, if you run into some trouble, give me a shout.’ The grin faded. ‘I’ve told you this before, so I won’t get all mushy on you. But every day I’m around, since that night, I owe to you. You’re annoying, kind of a pain in the ass, but if you need me to cover your back, I’m there.’

  I allowed the corner of my mouth to go up a notch. ‘You’re not going to hug me, are you?’ I asked.

  Lawrence shoveled in some roast beef.

  ‘Ewww,’ he said.

  After lunch, I got on the road to Canborough. I figured I could be there by midafternoon. I didn’t expect to find Trixie there, but I thought I might learn more about what it was that prompted her to disappear.

  Canborough first came into view as I came over the hill on Highway 17, a couple of church spires, a water tower poking up through the trees. It was a small city, and there had been attempts of late to revive and trendy up the downtown, which had taken a hit after the local auto parts factory shut down a few years back. But Canborough still had other, lesser, industries to keep it going, plus a college on the north side of town, and there were some year-round tourist dollars it could count on. The river that ran through the center connected with a few nearby lakes that were crowded with cottages and, in the winter, there was skiing.

  I’d been up here a few times, not just for that disastrous book signing for one of my SF novels. (When you’ve had the sort of book signings I’ve had, you start to feel that the modifier ‘disastrous’ is implied.) A few years ago, Sarah and I had been invited for a weekend at another couple’s cottage, and we’d driven into Canborough to shop and wander around.

  I drove straight into the downtown, and decided not to look for a place to stay right away. First of all, I didn’t know for sure that I’d learn enough to keep me from continuing on to Groverton, and second, some of the places where I hoped to get information might be closed in another hour or two.

  The public library was my first stop.

  I’d been able to find a story or two in the Metropolitan’s database about the biker massacre, but I figured the local paper would have more about what happened before, and after, that incident.

  The library, an old brick building flanked by modern glass additions, sat across from a wooded pa
rk. I found a place on a side street to leave my car, walked back to the library, and approached the information desk. A wiry young woman told me the library had the Canborough Times on computer going back six years, and if I knew what I was looking for, it could be found pretty quickly.

  She set me up at a terminal, showed me how to operate their system, and set me loose. ‘If you need anything, just ask,’ she said sweetly.

  I conducted a number of searches using a variety of keywords, in particular ‘Gary Merker’ and ‘Leonard Edgars’. Also ‘Kickstart’, the hotel where the three bikers had been shot to death. And ‘Slots’, the name of the gang Merker and Edgars supposedly belonged to.

  And of course, ‘Trixie Snelling.’

  That last one brought up absolutely nothing.

  But the other entries produced a wealth of stories.

  Going back six or seven years, there were at least two gangs known to local police. Neither on the scale of Hell’s Angels or Satan’s Choice or any number of other major biker gangs, although they were believed to have some loose affiliations with the larger organizations. One, which was run by Gary Merker, current stun gun merchandiser, was known as ‘the Slots’. The other group went by ‘the Comets’, which had a very fifties ring to it.

  The Slots had maybe half a dozen to a dozen real members, and maybe another dozen hangers-on. Not a lot of people, but enough to bring in drugs from the big city and across the border and market them to the locals. Merker, also known as Pick, and his crew made enough money from illegal activities to acquire a controlling interest in a local bar, Paddy’s, which they renamed the Kickstart. They made some changes. The entertainment, which up to then included not much more than darts and a wall-mounted television to watch games, now included strippers. The small stage, which had occasionally featured a local country-and-western or blues singer, now featured a pole. Some of the girls who wrapped themselves around it were not opposed to providing more personal performances in the rooms upstairs.

  The Comets had similar business interests, although not an actual establishment like the Kickstart. They owned a large house on the city’s outskirts, which they’d fortified with concrete blocks to discourage drive-by shooters. They’d had a few, presumably members of the Slots who didn’t approve of attempts by the Comets to muscle in on the drug and prostitution trade. The Comets offered drugs, and had a small stable of hookers they could send to clients’ houses, or put into rooms in the city’s seedier hotels. But the Slots had a distinct advantage by running the Kickstart. As a semi-respectable business, they were able to attract large numbers of the public and, once they had a pitcher of beer in front of them, spread the word that other services were available, for a price.

  Some notable events:

  June 18, 2001: One of the Comets, Grant Delmonico, was sitting in his old Dodge Super Bee at a country railroad crossing, the kind where there are only flashing lights, no gates. He was alone, according to police. Delmonico was on a long list of suspects after a Molotov cocktail was pitched through the window of the Kickstart the previous week, a little message to the Slots to back off on the drug trade, leave some business for them. The fire was contained quickly, and the bar was only out of business for ten days.

  The Slots had put out the word that they weren’t going to take this shit, even though the police told them they would look into it.

  What police figure happened was this: A truck came up behind Delmonico, a four-wheel-drive job, with plenty of traction, and shoved his Dodge right into the side of a fast-moving westbound freight. There were skid marks on the pavement, indicating Delmonico had stomped on the brakes, tried to hold his classic car in place, but the vehicle was no match for the four-by-four. Once his bumper was caught by the fast-rolling trucks of a tanker car, the Dodge was yanked off the road and dragged down the track, twisting and ripping apart along the way.

  Delmonico was dead at the scene.

  July 23, 2001: Sebastian Loone, loosely associated with the Slots, is found beaten to death out back of a Canborough butcher shop. This is assumed to be payback for the murder of Delmonico.

  July 31, 2001: The Slots suffer another loss. This time, it’s the gang’s reputed second-in-command, Eldon Swain. The irony is, he dies in nearly the same manner as the Comets’ Delmonico, except Swain’s car doesn’t get pushed into the side of the train. It gets shoved into its path. The engineer was able to see the whole thing pretty clearly from the cab of the diesel, even though the incident happened at night. The headlight beam picked up the car, a small Japanese sedan, waiting at the flashing lights. With the engine only a few yards from the crossing, this big pickup appears out of nowhere, rams the sedan from behind, right in front of the locomotive.

  Swain was declared dead at the scene, but they had to gather his various parts together before they could get someone to come look at the body for the purposes of identification.

  April 9, 2002: The Kickstart, after hours. Someone bursts into the upstairs back room, where the night’s receipts are counted, and shoots Eldridge Smith, Payne Fletcher and Zane Heighton. The shooter disappears, with the money. Gary Merker and Leonard Edgars, who were not in the building at the time, return to find the three men dead. Canborough Police steel themselves for an all-out war against the Comets.

  It doesn’t happen.

  The Comets deny any responsibility for the Kickstart massacre. As if they’d own up to it if they’d done it.

  Police speculate that the Slots don’t respond because there aren’t enough of them left to mount a war. Merker lost his number two man a few months earlier. Now he’s lost three more. He hasn’t got enough soldiers left to go into battle.

  But there are other questions, reading between the lines. Why was it that Merker and Edgars weren’t there? Merker, at least, was usually there to check the day’s tally. Was it possible he’d cut some deal with the Comets, that he’d set up his friends for some sort of reward from the other side?

  It was all speculation. No one really knew what happened. And no one was ever charged in the deaths of the three men.

  Nothing I read in the Canborough Times’ files indicated what was unusual about the manner in which the three men were shot.

  People stopped frequenting the Kickstart. Who wanted to grab a beer where you stood a chance of getting your brains blown out? The strippers quit, found work elsewhere. Before long, Merker bailed on the Kickstart, and wasn’t much heard from again. He left Canborough.

  The Comets, it seemed, assumed control of the drug and prostitution trade in the city.

  All interesting stuff, but some big questions remained unanswered for me.

  Where did Trixie fit into all this? Why didn’t her name even come up? What did she know that had her on the run from Gary Merker? What had she seen?

  And there was another question I supposed I had to consider.

  What had she done?

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  Gary was impressed with how you never had to say to Candy, ‘Get over it.’

  He liked that she got over things so quickly. What a trooper.

  Her boyfriend Eldon, the father of her kid, gets himself smacked by an oncoming train, she pulls it together. He and all the other guys except Leo, they get a little out of hand one night, treat her, he had to admit, a bit disrespectfully, and she’s back to work a couple of days later.

  It must have been the get-well-soon card, he thought. Chicks love cards. He was actually going to bring her flowers too, then, on the way over to her apartment, but he forgot and only got the card, and yet, that seemed to do the trick. He tucked that away for future reference. A card, or flowers, but not necessarily both.

  A few months had gone by, and Candy – it was the only name he knew her by – was there pretty much every day, lots of nights too, doing her job. What a fucking relief, letting someone else handle the finances. Those rare times when he’d actually go to a bank machine – not very often, considering there was always plenty of cash around the Kickstart – and take o
ut a hundred, he had to count out those five twenties two, maybe three times, to double-check that he was getting what he was supposed to.

  But Candy, she paid the bills, took care of all those invoices, was always on top of things. Never even got that moody. He’d never known a broad didn’t get moody.

  Miranda figured she deserved a goddamn Oscar. Meryl Streep never had to work this hard at playing a role.

  Almost every day after she got home from work, she’d get sick to her stomach. It was eating her up, working day in and day out with these people. With these men who’d raped her. This man who’d killed her Eldon. She’d take a shower, like she was washing the stink of them off her every day.

  She was giving herself a year.

  Eldon had died the last day of July. She thought, Maybe I can hang in until next August. Or until Gary starts getting suspicious. The dummy accounts, the fake invoices, it was all going very well. By the time she was done, he’d be fucking bankrupt and she’d have enough to start over with Katie someplace else. But if he started getting wise, started asking too many questions, the ‘Abort! Abort!’ warnings would start sounding in her head. She had to be ready, in case she had to bail early.

  But so far, so good.

  When she started going crazy, when she thought she couldn’t stand being in the same building with them one more moment, she used thoughts of revenge to calm herself. She imagined Gary’s reaction the day she didn’t show up for work, went hunting for her, discovered she and Katie were gone. And then when he figured out what had happened, that she’d ripped him off. Big-time.

  Oh, to be the fly on the wall.

  He’d be too astonished to remember to stick his finger up his nose.

  The other guys, they seemed wary of Gary lately. They could never figure out why he didn’t avenge the death of Eldon Swain. It had to be the Comets, right? They had to have done it. But Gary, he wasn’t ready to go to war. He was cool with it.

  Didn’t seem like Gary.

  Even Leo, who didn’t think too hard on anything, asked him one time, ‘Don’t you miss Eldon? I do. He was always nice to me. When he was going out and I asked him to grab me a burger or something, he’d always do it.’