Angels (Nevada James #3) (Nevada James Mysteries)

by Matthew Storm

  Krystal wasn’t in the restaurant, but it was still a little early. Meth addicts weren’t known for their punctuality, anyway. It occurred to me that I had no idea what kind of shape Krystal was in or what she might look like. If it was bad enough, the security guard might stop her at the door and turn her around. I could intervene, of course, but there was no need to make a scene. Krystal might get upset about it, and things could go downhill quickly. There was a seating area outside, well in view of the door she’d have to use. I ordered two combo meals and took them out there when they were ready. I’d gotten regular cheeseburgers for Krystal. I doubted she’d care what she ate, but if she didn’t want cheeseburgers I’d get her something else.

  At 2:05 there was still no sign of her. I wasn’t in a hurry. Dan had been right about what he’d said earlier. I really didn’t have anything to do.

  By 2:15 I was starting to get annoyed. Had I gotten the distance from here to her address wrong? Maybe she was further away than I’d thought. I pulled out my phone and mapped it. No, I’d been fairly close. She should be here by now. I’d probably have to buy more food when she got here. McDonald’s burgers didn’t take terribly long to go from palatable to not.

  A second security guard I hadn’t noticed before came over and asked me if everything was all right. The question surprised me at first. Did I look like a vagrant? Then I remembered I hadn’t taken a shower or brushed my hair today. I didn’t do those things nearly as often as I should, but it was still better than when I’d been drinking. Plus, I’d ordered food and wasn’t eating. On top of that, my face still had stitches in it, so I’d have had to admit I might look a little suspicious. Once I’d assured him I wasn’t mentally ill or about to freak out on everyone nearby he went on his way.

  2:30 came and went. I got up and threw the uneaten food I’d bought in the nearest trash can. Where the hell was Krystal? I’d refused to meet her at her place on the off chance she was setting me up for a robbery, but I hadn’t really thought that’s what was going on. She’d agreed to meet me here without protesting. But she could just as have easily come here, made up some story about the murders she supposedly had information about, and I would have paid her, anyway. I’d probably have paid her even if I wasn’t sure she was telling the truth, and if I felt like an idiot about it later, that was just the cost of doing business. But Krystal had never burned me in the past. Admittedly, she might be a great deal more desperate these days then she had been when I’d known her, but it was hard to believe she’d have come up with this cockamamie plan. Call my old office number and claim to have a tip for me? That just seemed…farfetched.

  Her house wasn’t that far from here. It would be an easy walk, but I didn’t want to tax my ankle. I got in the Mustang and headed up the street I expected she’d be walking on if she was heading to meet me. If I didn’t spot her on the way there, I could at least see if she was at home.

  Krystal was nowhere on the sidewalk. When I reached the address she’d given me, I could see that the house she’d apparently been living in had been otherwise abandoned for some time. One side looked like somebody had crashed a truck into it and then just left the scene. If this was her real address, she was definitely squatting here. There was no way she had a lease. The place had probably been condemned and was just waiting for someone to tear it down.

  I parked on the street and got out of the car, stopping for a moment to look around. My fingertips found the handle of my Glock under my jacket. Of course it was still there. It was always there. That knowledge didn’t stop me from checking twenty times a day.

  The only person in sight was a bearded homeless man half a block away wearing what looked to be pieces of two different bathrobes that had been sewn together. He was currently engaged in a heated argument with a shopping cart. Nothing around here seemed particularly out of place. Decrepit and sad, yes, but there was no sign of trouble.

  Krystal’s house had bars on its windows. The front door was closed. I went up the walkway and pressed the doorbell, but I didn’t hear anything chime from inside. Odds were this place didn’t have any electricity. I knocked as heavily as I thought would be audible inside but not also sound like someone who was coming to evict her. “Krystal!” I called out, putting my mouth near the door. “It’s Nevada James. Are you in there?”

  There was no reply from inside. I waited for a moment and then knocked again. “Nobody’s home,” a voice called from behind me. I turned and saw the homeless man I’d noticed before. He seemed to have made up with his shopping cart and was now watching me from the street. “Lady left a while ago,” he said.

  “Krystal?”

  “Don’t know her name.” He shrugged.

  “Did she look like…” I stopped and tried to think of a good way to phrase my question. “Did she look like she was going out to get a fix?” Did people still say fix? I didn’t know.

  “Nah,” the man said. “She was a business lady. Dressed nice.”

  That couldn’t possibly have been Krystal. Someone from social services? Someone coming to serve eviction papers? Either of those things would explain why Krystal wasn’t answering the door. “Do you know if there’s anyone else in there?” I asked. “Another woman? She’d be in rough shape, probably.”

  The homeless man shook his head. “Never saw one. I heard a noise.”

  “Just now?”

  “No. Before the lady came out.”

  “Okay.” I shook my head. “Do you know what kind of noise it was? People talking, maybe? Arguing?”

  “.32 caliber. Two shots.” He nodded. “Back in the war I…” but I wasn’t listening anymore. I spun around, turned the door’s handle, and was in the process of trying to bash it open with my shoulder when I realized it wasn’t locked. The door swung wide. My Glock was out an instant later, pointed into the darkness.

  “Glock 19, nine millimeter,” the homeless man said from behind me. I ignored him. At the moment I was too busy trying not to gag. The smell wafting out of the house was worse than anything I could remember having experienced before. It was like a chemical spill had met a city dumpster and they’d had children together. This place probably hadn’t been cleaned in years, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been a drug lab at some point. I had no idea what a drug lab actually smelled like, but people always said it was bad.

  I took a step forward and detected another smell. Gun smoke. Someone had fired a pistol in here in the very recent past. So the homeless guy hadn’t been wrong about that. “Stay there,” I called to him.

  “Sure thing,” he said. Then he started pushing his shopping cart away.

  “God damn it,” I said. I started to go after him but stopped myself. I could catch up with him later if I needed to. Odds were his cart would start mouthing off again and need a firm talking-to. And if Krystal was somehow still alive in here, I didn’t have the time to waste.

  From outside I was looking into what I assumed was the house’s living room. It didn’t have any furniture, and as I’d suspected would be the case, the nearest light switch didn’t do anything when I flipped it. The only light to see by was that which was coming in through the windows and door. All I could see from here was garbage, and quite possibly more of that than I’d ever seen before in one place and at one time. Most of it was in bags stacked against the walls three-high, but there was plenty that hadn’t made it into bags in the first place. It was hard to blame Krystal; there was no chance this house had trash service coming every week, and it wasn’t like she could drive to the nearest landfill.

  “Krystal?” I called out. Nobody answered. I thought I saw cockroaches scuttling around in the shadows and decided to try to ignore it.

  I made my way through the living room as cautiously as I could, Glock at the ready. It was quiet in here and I doubted anyone would be able to sneak up on me through the sea of trash I was wading through, but better safe than sorry. Meth heads often lived with other meth heads; it wasn’t inconceivable that she had roommates.
If that was even the right word for when you were squatting in an abandoned house with your drug fiend friends, anyway.

  A hallway that probably led to bedrooms was nearby. I put my back to the wall and looked down it as best I could. “Krystal? You in here?” There was still no answer. I looked across the way toward the kitchen. At least the windows let light in there to see by; I wasn’t going any deeper into the house than that without a flashlight. I probably had one in my car with the emergency roadside repair kit, but I didn’t want to go out yet. The kitchen was close enough to check first.

  And that’s where I found Krystal. She was on the floor, lying on her back. She’d never looked great back in the days when I’d known her. Meth screwed with your teeth and skin and made you forget to do things like bathe and change clothes. The years had been rough on her; she looked much worse than I remembered. She wore ratty jeans and a denim jacket that had probably gone through half a dozen owners before her. Her hair was stringy, both unwashed and unbrushed, and may have been slightly matted on one side. It had probably been a long time since she’d done anything to take care of it.

  There was also the matter of the two bullet holes in her chest. When I saw them I made a noise that was somewhere between a moan and a sigh. I wouldn’t have had a word to describe it.

  I knelt down to check her pulse, but I already knew I wouldn’t find one. Death had a way of setting up shop in a person’s eyes, and he’d already unpacked. Krystal was gone.

  I stood up and looked around. There was nobody else in the kitchen, and I still couldn’t hear any other movement in the house. Odds were I was alone in here. That made the likely killer the woman the homeless man had seen leaving earlier. I was going to have to track him down and question him, but I doubted he was going to be able to give me much of a description. Then again, he’d picked out .32 caliber gunshots from outside. Maybe he knew guns and maybe he didn’t, but he’d been right about my gun.

  I set myself to listening again. In another neighborhood I might have expected to hear sirens, but there were none in the distance. The police weren’t coming, or at least they weren’t hurrying. There probably had been no neighbors home to hear the gunfire and call them. It was in the middle of the day and there hadn’t been any other people around outside, either. From inside the house the noise wouldn’t have carried very far. Even if it had, gunfire probably wasn’t an unusual or exceptional occurrence around here.

  I needed to get my flashlight and search the house, but I’d also told Dan I’d try to be a little less like…well, myself. I got my cell phone and dialed 911. “This is Nevada James,” I said when they answered. “My badge number is…” I stopped. Saying that was a reflex I still hadn’t managed to get rid of. “I don’t have a badge. You recognize my name?”

  “I know your name, Detective,” the operator said. He sounded like he might have been in his early twenties, but his voice was taut and anxious. “I’ll dispatch SWAT to your location immediately.”

  I blinked. “What? No, I don’t need SWAT.” Why did I think Dan Evans had been in the call center to have a talk with the dispatchers? Because that’s exactly what he’d probably done. They probably had my photo up on the wall there. “And I’m not a detective anymore,” I continued. “I’ve got a dead body at…whatever this address is.” I’d forgotten it.

  I heard typing. “Detective, I can’t get a fix on your position,” the dispatcher said. “Are you underground?”

  Of course he couldn’t get a fix on my cell phone. The modifications I’d had made had seen to that. I went outside, Glock in one hand and phone in the other, and read the numbers off the side of the house. “I need a couple uniforms to lock the scene down, and notify Homicide. They’ll need to get someone out here, too.” I looked back inside the house. “And maybe some kind of Hazmat crew. I don’t know. This place really isn’t fit for humans.”

  “Sending units now,” the operator said. He paused. “Detective, if you don’t mind my asking…is it the Laughing Man?”

  “No,” I said. “It was a mistake I made.” Then I hung up on him.

  Chapter 5

  It took the first patrol car twenty minutes to arrive, which gave me plenty of time to search Krystal’s house. I got the flashlight out of my trunk and tore the place apart as best I could, which was mainly an exercise in looking through garbage. There wasn’t much to see that looked like evidence. Searching Krystal’s body was grim work, but I’d been around plenty of dead bodies before. Usually when they were still warm. It still bothered me. My brain already had a nice catalog of nightmares to give me when I tried to sleep; this was just adding one more to it.

  That search yielded a disposable cell phone in her back pocket. It was much like one of mine; she’d probably picked it up in a convenience store the same way I did. Hers had a password I didn’t bother trying to guess. I stuck it in my jacket, instead. I’d eventually give it to the detectives assigned to the case, telling them I’d been overwhelmed with everything that was going on and had forgotten about it, but I wanted to have someone I knew look at it first.

  Krystal appeared to have been getting what she’d had for groceries from a local food bank. There were several empty boxes with its name printed on the side. I snapped a picture of one with my cell phone. I didn’t see anything perishable in the kitchen; she’d apparently been living off of canned chili and assorted vegetables that she must have been eating cold. As near as I could tell she hadn’t been stealing power from the neighbors and she didn’t have so much as a hot plate to cook on. The thought of it depressed me more than I’d thought possible. She’d fallen a long way since her gang days. If I’d known about this when she’d been alive…I’m not sure what I would have done, to be honest. I’m not sure what I could have done. But I’d have tried to do something.

  Was that guilt I was feeling? My old friend who had been haunting me for the last few years? Yes. It was.

  Lastly I took a photo of Krystal’s face. I closed her eyes first. The lighting was poor enough in here that just seeing her face, you might have thought she was only sleeping. Taking her photo seemed almost obscene, but I’d need one to show people and it wasn’t like I had any others. Krystal and I had never posed for photos together back when she’d been my informant.

  The two uniformed cops who finally arrived look young enough to be my children. One of them started gagging when he stepped inside the house; I’d gotten so used to the smell I’d nearly forgotten how rank it was. I let them secure the scene and went outside to wait for Homicide.

  The detectives weren’t far behind the uniformed cops, which was nice. I had things to do now. This part was a formality and I wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. “Afternoon, boys,” I said.

  One of the detectives I’d never seen before. He was tall and had a moustache that would have looked great, if he was an actor in a 1970’s porn movie. The other one had been a patrol cop back when I’d worked Homicide. I’d met him once or twice, but couldn’t remember his name. He was smaller than his partner, wiry, and had an athletic build. He seemed young, too. Everyone seemed young to me these days. Was it because I was getting old? Or was I just tired?

  “Nevada James,” the detective I kind-of knew said. “It’s been forever.” I took a long look at him, still trying to remember his name. I didn’t have any luck. I noticed that his jacket definitely hadn’t come off the rack, but the bulge from the gun he wore under it was visible. I wondered if he liked it that way. It was too rookie a mistake for a cop that had made it to Detective to make. Any experienced cop would have had their jacket tailored to conceal it.

  I shook his hand. “You’re going to have to remind me,” I admitted.

  “John Fulton,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not sure we ever actually met.” He nodded at the guy with the porn moustache. “That’s my partner, Detective Harrison.”

  “What’s up, Harrison?” I said to the other man. Harrison nodded at me. Apparently he was the silent type.


  Fulton took a look at my stitches. “Jesus,” he said. “I heard you went through a window. Was it really on the second story?”

  “More or less,” I said. “I’ll have to remember to take the stairs next time.”

  He nodded. “Dan already told us this was one of your old informants and that she’d been asking for you. Can you fill in the rest for us?”

  I broke down the scene for them, somehow failing to mention Krystal’s cell phone in my jacket pocket. Harrison took notes. Fulton covered his nose with an embroidered handkerchief the entire time he was in the house. It was hard to blame him. If he was going to be spending any significant amount of time in here, he might want to buy a gas mask.

  Cops could be callous at crime scenes sometimes, but I was grateful neither of them made any snide comments about Krystal or the state she was in. On another day I’d probably have let it pass, but I was in a very bad mood, and I really wanted to keep my shit together until I was well out of sight. If one of them had started acting like an asshole I probably wouldn’t have been able to.

  “There’s a homeless guy in the area who saw the shooter,” I said. “You might get a description if you can find him, but there’s no way he’ll be able to testify.”

  Harrison looked up from his notepad. “Why not?”

  “Because he was arguing with a shopping cart before I talked to him,” I said.

  Fulton nodded. “We’ll find him. Hopefully he’ll be able to give us something useful.”

  “You never know,” I said. “I wouldn’t count on it, though.”

  “No idea who would have had a motive for this?” Harrison asked.

  I’d already told them what Krystal had told me. “Other than the person behind those three murders? No.”