What Doesn’t Kill Her

by Max Allan Collins

  Jordan leapt, landing with a knee on his chest that sent blood and spittle flying from his grunting mouth. She twirled her hand and the chain wrapped itself around that hand, which became an iron fist with which she battered him, pounding him in the face, stopping when she was looking down at a blinking scarlet mask, not wanting the trouble killing him might cause.

  She got off him.

  The white kid lay on his back like an overturned bug. He was moaning and a tooth she had freed was sticking through a cheek.

  She was breathing a little hard, but nothing extreme.

  “Yo, bitches,” she said. “Come dance anytime.”

  They said nothing, just moaning there on their backs. She went to each of her attackers and kicked them twice in the ribs—they responded with “Unh! Unh!” “Unh! Unh!”—and then she went over and found the knife and collected it. A switchblade. Old school.

  She was chaining her bike to the lamppost when the Hispanic, his broken arm swinging like a busted fence gate, stumbled over to his friend and helped him to his feet and they hobbled into the dark, whimpering like the kicked dogs they were.

  In her apartment, she put the switchblade in the silverware drawer as if it were a butter knife. She doubted those two would ever be back, but if so, she would be ready. Nice to know that what she’d taught herself could be put to practical use. Stepping to the fridge, she shadowboxed with the picture of the male face held by a magnet to the door.

  She felt ready for what lay ahead.

  Smiling, she stripped, went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower—hot as she could take. As the mirror started to steam, she stepped under the spray, the hot needles feeling just fine; she still felt exhilarated. She started to reach for the soap, but her fingers faltered.

  Her stomach did a little back flip and her knees went weak. Slowly, she sagged and slid down to a sitting position, the hot water still pounding her. She just sat there, for quite a while, huddled in the corner in a fetal position. Maybe she was crying. Maybe it was just the shower spray. She would never tell.

  Not even herself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After his encounter with Basil Havoc, Mark would have to play things much closer to the vest. No one besides his partner Pence and Captain Kelley himself knew of Mark’s investigation into the apparently related “family” murders.

  Yet somehow Havoc had made him. Had either Pence or Kelley told somebody else, a trusted reporter or another cop maybe, about Mark’s homicide-investigation hobby? That seemed unlikely, but either the guy got tipped off or he maybe was even smarter than Mark had imagined.

  And Mark didn’t take this man lightly. If Havoc was the killer, that made him one resourceful son of a buck. You couldn’t kill as many people as Havoc apparently had, over all those years and jurisdictions, and avoid capture without a Mensa-level IQ and a certain jungle cunning.

  At work, Mark stayed focused and intense, as always. He and Pence had been busy as heck trying to track down a burglary ring, where the clues and witness interviews just wouldn’t mesh. After some digging, it became clear two somewhat similar such rings were operating in the same area.

  Either one or both of these crews had been at it for the better part of a year now. Sooner or later their luck would go south, and either somebody would be home, or would walk in on them. Then what? Home invasions, no matter how carefully planned, could erupt into violence.

  Or as Pence colorfully said, “What if these crews find out about each other? I mean, we did. And suppose they don’t cotton to havin’ competition? Further suppose they turn up to burgle the same building, the same time? All of a sudden, we got two simple robberies turnin’ into one great big fuckin’ O.K. Corral.”

  How serious was the situation? Serious enough for purse-string pincher Kelley to green-light overtime. In this economy, that put these burglaries on a par with bank robbers.

  Or maybe a serial killer.

  Nearing midnight, they would normally have still been at HQ, pushing papers, sifting for clues; but Pence had gotten a lead from a snitch of his. Right now they were sitting surveillance outside the back door of Gold Medal Pawn, a rundown shop in an equally rundown neighborhood.

  The snitch had told Pence that Robert Slowenski, owner of Gold Medal, was up to his old fencing ways and clearing goods for a burglary ring. This would appear to be one of the two such rings the Pence and Pryor team were seeking to bust.

  In his seventies, darn near wide as he was tall, the nearly bald Slowenski was known by his colleagues (and the cops) as “Slowhand,” a nickname the pawnbroker claimed dated back to when he’d once sold a Stratocaster guitar to Eric Clapton. While Clapton had indeed performed in Cleveland from time to time, the story was likely fanciful, because the nickname actually related to Robert Slowenski’s reputation for being slow to pay.

  Though the front of the store was dark, a dim bulb extended over the back door in the alley, with Slowhand’s dodgy-looking Lincoln Town Car parked not far away, barely allowing passage for any other vehicle.

  Farther down the darkened alley, Pence and Mark (behind the wheel) sat in their unmarked Crown Victoria, right where they had been for the last three hours. Mark had wanted to be a detective for a very long time, but he wondered if he’d have gone into this line of work had he known about the dulling boredom of a stakeout.

  Each detective had a penlight in one hand—Pence had a newspaper in his lap, the light shining on a Sudoku puzzle that was a mystery the seasoned detective would never solve, while Mark examined a clipped newspaper story about Brittany Sully and the dust-up she had caused at Strongsville High School when she asked another girl to the prom.

  Pence grunted, “How the hell are you supposed to work these dumb things? My old man helped beat the Japs. Is this their fuckin’ revenge?”

  Mark said, “It’s all logic.”

  Pence threw him a look. “And I’m not logical? You think I broke all those cases by bein’ not logical?”

  “You’re logical enough, but you’re trying to do one square at a time. You need to see the whole puzzle.”

  They stayed at their individual tasks for a while, each occasionally glancing toward the pawnshop’s dimly lighted back door to make sure Slowhand wasn’t going anywhere. In Mark’s mind, the old song “I Shot the Sheriff” kept playing, unbidden.

  Finally, Pence doused the penlight, tossed the newspaper onto the dash, and announced, “Fuck it! They win. First they sink the Arizona, now my ancient ass.”

  Mark grinned, shook his head, but kept going over the newspaper story.

  “What the fuck are you up to?” Pence asked. “Readin’ the clippings of all your triumphs on the force? Oh. I forgot. You haven’t had any.”

  Sticking his newspaper above the visor, Mark clicked out his penlight, and said, “Not doing anything.”

  “Don’t shit a shitter,” Pence said. “I saw that story when it first came out. About that gay girl, who got murdered in Strongsville. Her and her whole fam-damly.”

  “Actually she wasn’t gay,” Mark said. “And the whole family wasn’t killed.”

  “No? Could’ve fooled me, all those dead bodies.”

  “Her brother is gay, and she was just showing some solidarity. And he’s still alive, overseas, in the military.”

  “Like you care.”

  Mark glanced at the older cop sharply. “What?”

  “You don’t care about that family any more than I do. Don’t know them from Adam. Or Eve or my hairy left ball. This is about you still moonin’ over that chick from high school days, right? The one you never even dated?”

  Mark said nothing. He tried to keep the irritation from crawling up his neck in a red rash. He knew Pence liked to pull his chain, and he also knew there was no real malice behind it.

  “Marky Mark, ain’t you never gonna let that go? Why don’t you do what I do, when I wake up at night, thinkin’ about Betty Lou Miller who wouldn’t look at me sideways in high school?”

  “What
do you do?”

  “I get out of bed real quiet, so as not to wake the wife, and pad down the hall into the john and beat my meat, hummin’ the old school song.”

  “Must you be so crude?”

  “No, it’s a lifestyle choice. You do know we’re a couple of Cleveland detectives, and not Mormon missionaries goin’ door-to-door, right?”

  Tightly, Mark said, “She deserves justice.”

  “The Jordan girl? Sure she does. But that doesn’t mean she’s going to get any.”

  “She might. She may.”

  Pence sighed, like Atlas switching shoulders. “You know, kid, every cop’s got that one case that nags him, way after he’s put in his papers. So I get where you’re comin’ from.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yup. But you had your white whale before you ever got to be a cop. You don’t learn to let that shit go, my son, it will eat your ass alive.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Pence looked sad suddenly. “No you won’t.”

  Then they both saw headlights coming down the alley toward them. A van.

  Why should a van, a simple ordinary vehicle, make his sphincter tighten and his mouth go immediately dry? When he had first teamed with Pence, the older cop had told him that the job was ninety-five percent boredom and five percent sheer freaking terror.

  Tonight Mark was getting the full one hundred percent.…

  Working to keep his breathing regular, Mark waited. Next to him, Pence was doing the same thing. They slouched in their seats down far enough that no one in the van might spot them. At least not from a distance. Maybe a half a block away, the van’s headlights switched off as it pulled in.

  Without really thinking about it, Mark let his hand rest on the butt of his pistol on his hip.

  The van stopped on the other side of the pawnshop’s back door, beyond Slowhand’s parked Lincoln. That gave Mark and Pence a slight advantage. They had Slowhand’s car between the van and their own.

  “You remember to click the dome light off?” Pence whispered.

  “Yeah,” Mark whispered back. “I’m not an idiot.”

  “We’ll discuss that later.”

  The van’s front doors opened and two African-American males climbed out. In the dark it was hard to see much, and the dim bulb over the pawnshop door was little help. The guy on the passenger side was a head taller than the driver, and they wore jeans and cutoff sweatshirts; but from this distance, Mark could determine little else.

  The African-Americans walked to the back of the van and opened its rear doors. While the pair was back there, blocked by the vehicle, Mark and Pence slipped out of the Crown Vic, neither shutting his door tight. Using Slowhand’s car for cover, they crept closer.

  Mark stayed on the driver’s side, hanging back by the Lincoln’s bumper, just in case the two guys came around the van’s passenger side.

  On the other side of the Lincoln, Pence—despite his bulk—was all but invisible in the alley’s inky shadows. Grunts came from the back of the van, where the doors closed, and then the two men shuffled around the driver’s side, lugging something awkwardly between them.

  As the pair got closer to the light above the door, Mark could see that they carried a massive flat-screen TV, fifty-inch screen anyway. The shorter man, the driver, led the way, going backward, his taller associate bringing up the rear.

  Mark already had his gun out and at his side, barrel pointed straight down, ready to come up fast.

  When the pair got to the door, the driver used his foot to give it a couple of solid kicks.

  Then they waited.

  Mark and Pence, staying low, edged alongside the Lincoln.

  After a moment, the taller guy hissed, “Where the fuck he at? He slow keepin’ time, too?”

  Still cradling his end of the TV, the driver managed a tiny shrug. “Fuck do I know? Maybe he’s takin’ a dump. Do I look like that John Edward dude?”

  Then he kicked the door three more times, rattling it, making his partner almost lose his grip. More general profane bitching followed for maybe thirty seconds, then the door swung open and bald squat Slowhand himself filled the frame.

  “You’re late,” he said to them in a low, gruff growl, small dark eyes darting up and down the alley, like bugs looking for a place to land.

  “We late?” the driver said. “We been knockin’ for half an hour, man! You slow in the hand or the head?”

  “Just get that fucking thing in here,” Slowhand said, stepping out into the alley to clear the doorway.

  Pence popped up next to him. “Raise ’em, Robert!”

  Mark stood and, in a voice much calmer than he felt, said, “Hold it right there, fellas.”

  The driver did so, but his taller pal dropped his end of the TV and took off down the alley like a sprinter after the starting gun.

  Unable to juggle the big TV from one end, its weight and awkwardness conspiring against him, the driver watched with wide helpless eyes as the expensive electronics item tumbled from his grasp and smashed onto the concrete alley, bits of the screen shattering and scattering everywhere, like ice breaking up.

  “Fuck it!” the driver said, and put his hands up.

  “You goin’ after him?” Pence asked, nodding toward the tall guy, who was already nearing the alley’s mouth.

  “No,” Mark said, then eased toward the driver. He wasn’t going to leave Pence with two suspects to deal with. He told the driver, “Grab some wall.”

  The driver assumed the position, hands flat on brick, feet spread. He’d been frisked before.

  Patting the driver down, Mark asked, “Care to tell me the name of your homey? Cooperation is a beautiful thing.”

  “Snitches get stitches,” the driver said, not even bothering to look over his shoulder.

  “If that’s the way you want it,” Mark said, and read him his rights.

  As he cuffed the man, Mark looked over and saw that Pence already had Slowhand cuffed, as well. The cop may have been old and fat, but he could still handle himself—with an equally old and fat perp, anyway.

  Soon patrol cars rolled into the alley and the detectives loaded in the two suspects, who both wore the glum resignation of the career criminal who knew such indignities would occasionally occur.

  Then Mark and Pence went in through the pawnshop’s open back door. The interior was only slightly better illuminated than the alley. Three of the back-room walls were lined with shelves, most of the two-by-four and plywood variety, filled with every kind of cheap merchandise imaginable. The fourth was home to a desk, atop that a computer whose screen saver consisted of beautiful naked women (this would seem as close to them as Slowhand was likely to get), and next to the desk a tiny table supported a small flat-screen TV. Whatever Slowhand was up to back here, it wasn’t immediately apparent. The crime scene team would be combing through this junk for days, and that didn’t include the stuff in the shop’s larger front end.

  While Pence thumbed through the messy stacks of paper on the desk, Mark strolled along the shelves, shining his penlight into the darkness. Televisions, computers, portable hard drives, Blu-ray and DVD players, stacks of DVDs (predominantly porn), power tools, musical instruments, and one shelf’s worth of piled clothing.

  The latter turned out to be costumes—Indian chief, firefighter, policeman, power worker, leather guy. Had the Village People hocked their wardrobe? This was apparently the inventory of a costume shop. He just shook his head. Pawnshops were amazing places—people would pawn anything, from a screwdriver to a samurai sword.

  “Take a gander,” Pence said, and Mark left the shelves and crossed to the desk.

  Pence pointed to the computer monitor, where Slowhand’s eBay page was displayed. The pawnbroker was selling a lot of stuff online. Not unusual, this day and age.

  “There was a screen saver going,” Mark said. “You touch something? Crime scene unit wouldn’t appreciate that.”

  His partner shook his head innocently. “You s
tompin’ around must have vibrated the desk or something.”

  “Oh-kay.”

  Ignoring Mark’s skepticism, Pence said, “Item here you might like to add to your eBay watch list.”

  Mark leaned in. “That’s the Lladró sculpture from the Mohican Avenue job. In Collinwood.”

  Pence nodded. “How about this one? Catch your fancy?”

  “Hah. That upscale grill from the North Royalton burglary.”

  “Yeah. Which tells us what?”

  They had already determined that while the two robbery crews overlapped, some territory appeared unique to each.

  Mark gave his partner half a grin. “Either this bunch of turds is invading the other ring’s turf or…”

  Pence said, “Slowhand is fencing shit from both rings.”

  “Detective Pence—nice going.”

  The bigger man puffed up. “Back atcha, Detective Pryor. Now, shall we go interview a certain scumbag pawnshop owner?”

  Mark gave him the rest of the grin. “We shall indeed.”

  As they were walking out, Pence asked, “Turds? Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  Mark’s grin turned silly and embarrassed.

  “Are you blushin’, kid?” Pence grunted a laugh. “You are one of a fuckin’ kind, my boy, one of a freakin’, fuckin’ kind.”

  In the interview room, they found Slowhand sitting at the scarred table, drumming his fingers—nerves or boredom? In any case, the pawnbroker said nothing when they entered. In fact, he didn’t look at either cop, as Mark took the chair opposite him and Pence remained standing, prowling like a big anxious cat. Up in the corner, a video camera captured everything, and Mark knew Captain Kelley was on the other side of the one-way glass behind him.

  Pence took the first swing at the little round pawnbroker. “In all my many years on the force, I have had the misfortune of dealing with some dumb sorry fucks, Robert my man, but you might well be king of the dumb sorry fucks. My apologies we ain’t got no throne available for your royal ass.” He shook his head, then leaned in, getting right in Slowhand’s face. “eBay, for shit’s sake?”