The Killing Game (Carson Ryder, Book 9)

by J. A. Kerley

  I’d retreated to the Causeway to lean against my truck, drink beer and consider my future in a department where colleagues could suspect me of a ridiculous action. A department where the Chief of Police hated my guts. Where my best prospect had me busted back into uniform, years of hard work turned to dross. Harry’d figured out where I was and joined me.

  “Don’t even begin to think like that,” he said.

  To the west a container ship pulled from the Mobile River into the bay, a dark shadow against the shimmering lights of the city. I wondered if I could somehow stow away inside a container marked for delivery to a murder-free zone, Antarctica maybe.

  “I’m on tape again, no way to deny what I said. Maybe I could put my Baggs appraisal up on YouTube.”

  “Not funny.” Harry paused. “Or maybe a little.”

  I stared into black water lapping at the reeds and traded dark future considerations for even darker ones from the recent past. “What’s not funny is four dead in two weeks and not a single place to look.”

  “The killer’s falling apart. You said so yourself … going batshit with a sword, throwing it into the bushes. We’ll get him.”

  “How many people will he take down first?”

  Harry pitched his emptied can into my pickup bed. “You’ll be barred from the department tomorrow, Cars. What can we put in motion before the ax falls?”

  “We need to update Kavanaugh. We’ve got to run Muriel Pendel’s friends and associates through the wringer, and we’ve got to ensure every cop has seen the flier.” The word flier prompted a memory. “One more thing has to be cleared.”

  “Which is?”

  “Mailey mentioned a traffic stop where a guy shit himself after he blew through a hard red. A flat-out violation.”

  “What’s the big news? I had a guy crap himself once, an old wino who—”

  “Austin didn’t write the guy up, Harry.”

  Harry did a double-take. “The same Horse Austin who empties ten pens a week writing tickets?”

  I nodded. “If something bad happened during the stop, Austin wouldn’t have written a ticket. No ticket says no incident, no need to keep the recording in case the offender contests the citation.”

  Harry crossed his arms and watched the blinking light of a jet high in the black sky. “I’d love to see the recording of the stop. Think Mailey’d tell you day and time?”

  “He brought the incident up in the first place.”

  “How do we get the recording?”

  “They’re filed in Temp Records for a month, right? Sergeant Lizzy Baines sitting atop the pile?” I made kissy sounds. “Baines has the more-than-slightly-warms for you, Harry.”

  “Be that as it may, I’m with Sally now.”

  “You don’t have to move into a Motel 6 with Baines, bro. Just blow in her ear and give her a glimpse of leg.”

  While Harry mumbled unrepeatable phrases, I pulled my cell and had the dispatcher patch me through to Mailey. It was a B week, meaning he was on night shift.

  “Mailey? It’s Carson Ryder. Horse around?”

  Hesitant. “Not right now. He went to get, uh, a cup of coffee.”

  Sure, I thought, recalling Austin stashing the brown bag under his seat at the retirement home. With vodka replacing the creamer. “The stop with the guy who had the scoots? Harry and I need to see it. No big deal, just another part of the investigation.”

  “If Horse thought I gave you that he could make my life—”

  “For chrissakes, Mailey, it’ll look like we found it on our own. What’s really on that recording, by the way?”

  A pause. “Watch it yourself.”

  Mailey told us enough to find the recording and I promised we’d never tell Austin where the information came from.

  “All right,” I said to my partner as I slid my phone into my pocket. “All you need to do is get the tape from Baines. First thing tomorrow would be nice.” I threw my empty can in the bed of the truck and shot a look at the container ship, angling closer as it turned for open sea.

  It seemed to be saying, Last chance for Antarctica, Carson.

  Gregory leaned over the coffee table and inhaled more of the white powder, an explosion of white sparkles in his head. He closed his eyes and marveled at the clarity in his mind. In the past, his only clear thoughts had been about math and software code, the numbers and symbols etched black against a snow-white background, clear and dynamic and understandable in every permutation. Even when the numbers zipped through his head at supersonic speeds, transmuting into new structures and giving revised answers, they were easy to follow.

  It was everything else that was so difficult to understand. Love. Conscience. The ridiculous and antithetical pronouncements of the morons.

  But now it seemed he could see through the morons like windows. See their halting and faulty machinery. His trouble was having to exist at their level. To translate their chimp-like language and find faces to meet their faces. But the white powder gave him the ability to fly above them. To see in perfect clarity that which had always been denied to him. Why was something that opened one’s mind so widely illegal?

  The fucking cops again.

  Gregory was naked because it felt so good. He brushed white powder from his chest, leaned back against the couch, and thumbed the remote for the fifth time tonight. He’d stashed his video camera in the flower bed of the empty home across the street from the model home and it was providing the best movie so far: a couple entering the home for a showing, exploding out the door seconds later, the woman vomiting, the man fumbling at his cell. The cop cars racing up, the useless ambulance, the dark vans pouring out geeks and freaks like circus clowns.

  And then, Ryder, the big negro at his side. Ryder looked ten years older than the night of the Ballard girl’s event. Slumped, pale, worn. He was wearing a light jacket over jeans, the jacket looking as if he’d slept in it for a week.

  How do you like your warrior now, Blue Tribe?

  Gregory delighted when the sword was found in the bushes, though he couldn’t quite remember why he’d left the weapon – a spur-of-the-moment decision. No matter, his Event Suit kept him safe, covered from crown to toe. The suit, crafted after Ema’s comments about crime-scene evidence, made him invisible.

  The phone rang again. Ema, no doubt. She had called over a dozen times, left texts, voicemails, messages on his answering machine.

  “We should have supper tomorrow, Gregory. Give me a time, dear. I’d like to see you.”

  “Gregory, are you there, dear? Pick up, please?”

  “Gregory, are you well?”

  “How’s the volunteering, Gregory? Are you busy tomorrow?”

  Listening to the drone of Ema’s voice was like bees buzzing: Bzzz. Bzzzz. Bzzzzzz. Gregory realized he was making buzzing sounds. They tickled his lips. He wavered to his feet, laughing, and put his arms out at his sides as if he was flying. Buzzzzzzzzzzzz, he hummed, flying through the house like a bumblebee. Buzzzzzz. Six million dollars on its way, a sextitextijillionaire! Buzzzzzzz-fucking-buzzzzzzzzzzz!

  Gregory flew into the kitchen, swooped down to the refrigerator and drank from a bottle of apple juice, feeling it run down his throat as it ran down his neck and chest.

  When he replaced the bottle on the shelf he saw the Tupperware container used to store sardines, the bait for his cat-catcher. He remembered he was a master trapper of cats, a pioneer in feline entrapment. Only yesterday old lady Millard had remarked on the dwindling number of cats in the neighborhood.

  I got them, Gregory Nieves had wanted to scream in her face. I have taken away the dishrag cats!

  I picked up Mr Mix-up on the way home, entering my house to find the answering machine blinking like a strobe. Wendy stood from the couch as Mix-up ran to his bowl. She was wearing blue shorts and a white tank top and was hands down the best thing I’d seen all day.

  “Can I get you a beer?” she asked. “Or would you prefer—”

  I nodded. “Something stronger.�
��

  She fetched the Maker’s Mark, poured a double shot over ice. “I see I’m in demand,” I said, nodding at the phone as my bourbon arrived.

  “All except two are reporters asking you to deny or expand on your comments about Baggs.” She’d heard the messages as they arrived.

  “And the two?”

  “One’s from a guy named Roy McDermott. He wanted you to call when you got a chance.”

  McDermott was a former investigator for the FCLE or Florida Centre for Law Enforcement who’d recently jumped into upper-level administration. We’d worked together when Bama criminals headed to Florida or vice versa. We’d also fished together for snook, a sleek and powerful fish species found in mid-Florida and points south, my favorite gamefish. I figured he was passing through and wanted to meet for a brew. Another time, Roy.

  “That leaves one call,” I said to Wendy. “Chief Baggs, I expect.”

  “A very loud and angry Chief Baggs.”

  “I take it he used the word suspended?” I asked, sipping my drink.

  “Until further notice, which he claims will never happen. Do you want to listen?”

  “No, I want to take a container to Antarctica.”

  She watched in silence as I emptied my glass and considered my options, arriving at one I thought perfect. I went to the answering machine and pressed Erase All.

  “There’s nothing I can possibly do tonight,” I said. “So I’m declaring a moratorium on killings and case histories and politics and general human idiocy. This house is now a free space, as distant and inaccessible as Antarctica.” I twiddled buttons on my sound system. Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastorale, filled the room as I replaced electric light with candlelight.

  Wendy went to the front window and peeked between the blinds. Said, “Wow, look at that.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s snowing.”

  Gregory sat astride his Bowflex, pumping furiously, watching his shining muscles in the mirror. The white powder let him work out harder than ever before. He was sweating away toxins from food and the bacteria that infested his insides. Bacteria that had hidden in his muscles, in his guts, in his spine, all were being washed away.

  He was becoming pure.

  The alarm rang on Gregory’s computer: time to check the trap. He dismounted the Bowflex and wiped his body with a towel. There were no more faces on the wall, he’d stripped them away after returning from the model home.

  A pure man didn’t wear the faces of others: he built his own.

  Gregory walked to his office to disable the alarm. He’d put several teaspoons of the powder on his desk, spoons of it in every room. Gregory sniffed from a mound of powder and felt it sparkle across his neurons. He walked downstairs and outside, no need for clothes. If old lady Millard saw an Adonis in the dark, she’d not be offended, she’d want to fuck him.

  Gregory strode to the rear of his yard and stripped the burlap from the trap. The half-moon dropped enough light to see a small and frightened creature huddling in a corner and mewing plaintively: a kitten. Gregory returned to the house with the trap held high above his head.

  “Braka ros n’da hasun …” Gregory chanted as he walked, stealing even Ryder’s song from him. “I faw telawan telawon.”

  Chapter 47

  The next morning came too fast. Persona non grata in my own department, I met Harry in a coffee shop a few blocks away. He held up a black flash drive. “Austin’s and Mailey’s midnight stop.”

  “What’d you promise Baines?” I asked.

  “If you see someone looks like Baines and me at that fancy new seafood joint in Daphne, it ain’t us. Where we gonna look at the thing?”

  Plugging it into my or Harry’s computer was out of the question. Baggs probably had snipers focused on my desk. We jumped in my truck and I drove seven blocks to a small store off Government, the sign saying Grant’s Security.

  Nicolas Grant was Welsh, an ex-Royal Marine who’d fought in the Falklands and did tours of Northern Ireland in the tougher days. A few years back he’d visited the States, found the coastal sunshine to his liking, and made the jump, opening a security and surveillance-oriented shop. The tech types at the MPD sometimes rented equipment from Grant.

  We went inside, saw shelves of video cameras, monitors and other electronic gimcrackery. The proprietor pushed through curtains from the back, six-two, goateed and tatted and with a head shaved bald as an egg.

  “If it isn’t the terrible twosome,” Grant said in a gruff brogue, fixing a blue eye on me. “I saw you on the news last night, Carson. Telling the world the Chief of Police wasn’t fit to command an ox-cart. How are you still working?”

  “It’s a fluid situation, Nick,” Harry said, holding up the drive. “You got a player can handle video from a cop cruiser?”

  “Digital CCTV? Sure. Encrypted?”

  “Doubt it.”

  Nick held the curtains wide. “Step into my parlor.” He set us up at a bench holding a computer and monitor, plugged in the drive. “I expect you want me somewhere else, right?”

  “Thanks, Nick,” I said. “We owe you.”

  “A couple whiskies would be nice,” Nicolas Grant grinned. “But the full story would be even better.”

  Nick disappeared and I pressed the forward button. A shiver on the screen was replaced by a nighttime street scene, Austin and Mailey’s cruiser beside a building for concealment while providing a full view of an intersection. We watched the lights turn red on the north–south side. Three seconds later a white Toyota Avalon blew through the light as if it were invisible.

  Austin’s voice: “Look at that muthafucker, goddamn light was so red it was almost green again. Let’s roll.”

  Headlights led the cruiser into the street a half-block behind the taillights of the violator. Mailey’s voice next, calling the department to run the license of a white Toyota Avalon.

  Then Austin on the tape. “Let’s pull the asshole over on the next block, up by the Empire Bar. I like these hoo-hahs to know we’re on the streets.”

  Lights flashed. The cruiser raced up on the bumper of the Avalon as it pulled to the curb just past the neon-lit Empire Bar.

  The female dispatcher over the radio: “Got a read on that plate, Horse. Registered to a Gregory T. Nieves of 2367 Parchwell Drive in Mobile, twenty-five years of age. Clean record. Not so much as a traffic ticket.”

  “We’re gonna give him one, hon,” Austin laughed. “A hundred-buck cite for Disregarding. Wish I got a commission on these things.”

  “I’ll bet you do too, Horse,” the dispatcher yawned. “Have fun.”

  Both cars were stopped now. In the periphery I saw shadowy forms and figured they were denizens of the Empire Bar, out to ogle the action.

  Austin’s voice. “You take it, Mailey. I’m busy.” I heard a rustle of what might have been paper and a wet sound. It could have been an ass on the seats or a sip from a bottle.

  Mailey addressed the driver over the loudspeaker: “Stay in your car, sir. I’ll come to you. Please shut off the engine and place your hands atop the wheel.”

  I heard the door open as Mailey stepped out. The cruiser-cams were sensitive to both image and sound. The head of the stoplight runner was craned back and I caught a glimpse of an impassive face as Mailey walked to the Avalon, stopping by the window.

  “I need to see license and registration, sir,” Mailey said.

  “What did I do?” the driver said.

  “I need to see your license and registration,” Mailey repeated.

  “What – did – I – do?” the driver repeated, petulant, speaking as though Mailey was a child. I heard Austin’s door open, his voice trumpeting into the dark.

  “Hey, asshole! Get the fucking license out and do like you’re goddamn told.”

  I heard chuckling from the side and figured it was the audience from the Empire.

  “I’m sorry,” the driver said, affecting a conciliatory tone. “What’s this about, officer?”<
br />
  “What are you doing here this time of night?” Mailey said, his big Maglite scanning the rear of the Avalon, coming to rest on the driver’s face. The guy just sat there like a robot.

  “I asked you a question, sir,” Mailey repeated. “Why are you here this time of night?”

  “I couldn’t sleep, officer,” the driver said. “I was driving to relax.”

  “How much you had to drink?”

  “A couple beers, sir. But that was hours ago.”

  Austin yelled, “Get him outta the car, Mailey! I wanna look at him.”

  “Step out of the car, please,” Mailey said, pulling the door open.

  “Is there a reason why I—”

  Austin again: “GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE GODDAMN CAR!” I pictured him bellowing out the window. The guy still sat there. I heard the cruiser door open and Austin’s big feet hit the pavement. He entered the picture, lumbering toward the car with his nightstick in his hand.

  “OUT OF THE CAR,” he bellowed.

  The man exited the vehicle. Harry and I could see a dark wet sheen spreading down the man’s tan gabardines.

  “Jesus, Horse,” Mailey said. “The guy’s shitting himself.”

  The driver clutched his belly and fell to his knees. I could actually hear his bowels squirting fluid. “I – can’t – help – myself,” he moaned.

  I heard the audience begin to laugh, followed by derisive comments.

  “Look at the boy shittin’ hisself.”

  “Hey, mister, you need some Imodium.”

  One of the bar drunks stepped into the light, hip-hopping toward the man on his knees, pulling giggles from his buddies.

  “Look at the boy with his face inna trance, got shit dripping down the legs of his—”

  The man stopped with a whoof as Austin’s nightstick jabbed his sternum. He grabbed his belly and staggered away.

  “Get back to the bar, buncha goddamn drunks,” Austin snarled. ‘NOW!” I heard muttered words and receding footsteps.

  “The driver drunk, you think?” Austin asked Mailey.

  “I didn’t smell alcohol, Horse. I’m sure he’s sober.”