Last Call - A Thriller (Jacqueline Jack Daniels Mysteries Book 10)

by J. A. Konrath

  Phin interrupted. “What kind of surname is Glente? It’s not common.”

  “I looked it up. It’s Danish. Means bird of prey. Pretty coolpants. So, anyway, I took Sinnamon to Cracker Barrel—true story—and in the middle of lunch rush she gives me a handy under the table. Totally worth the three hundred bucks an hour. Plus, she barely touched her chicken fried steak, so I took that home with me. It’s always a bonus when you don’t have to feed the escort. Kinda like getting free undercoat protection at the car wash.”

  Phin tuned him out and pictured Katie’s face. Weren’t many Danes with black hair, but that could have been dyed. And those with Nordic ancestry weren’t known for their ability to tan, but Katie had an Arizona glow to her skin. Perhaps the name was a fake.

  “Did you see that YouTube video?” Phin asked, cutting off a Harry story about how he once had sex in the car wash, but he didn’t really count it on his tally sheet because it was with an inflatable doll.

  “Yeah. Major yuckypants.”

  Phin had watched it several times after Katie had left. “Do you think it’s Luther?”

  “How should I know? Blurry as hell, only lasted a few seconds.”

  “If you had to guess?”

  “Seems like the kind of sick shit Luther Kite would do. Plus he had that ghoul next to him.”

  “Ghoul?”

  “That scarred chick. Skinny little serial psycho. Lucy. After Michigan, I put together quite a little dossier on her and her buddy, Donaldson.”

  “Can you even spell dossier?”

  “Yeah. It starts with an F and ends with a U. Why do you have to be an asspants and mock all of my dope detecting skills?”

  “What is up with you adding the word pants to the end of everything?”

  “Oh. I’ve got an anonymous blog. It’s called The Mansplainer. So I did that pants thing once—I called a commenter dickpants—and it started trending on Twitter. Hashtag dickpants. Now it’s become my signature.”

  “People actually follow you?”

  “Hell yeahpants.”

  “Okay then, Harrypants—”

  “Blog is anonymous. No one knows it’s me.”

  “Okay then, assholepants—”

  “That’s pretty meanpants, Phin.”

  “Can you just make your point about Lucy, without saying pants again?”

  “I can’t make that promisepants. As for Lucy, she’s one for the true crime books. Ran away from home when she was a kid, started hitchhiking and killing anyone who picked her up. Same MO as the video; she would drag them behind the car on a chain, pulling them down the street until their clothes scraped off, stopping every few hundred meters to spritz their skinned bodies with lemon juice. So she meets up with Donaldson—he’s yet another psycho from Jack’s past. He likes to pick up hitchhikers and torture them to death. Donaldson and Lucy hurt each other real bad. We’re talking major league freak show disfigurement here. And somehow they bond from the experience,” Harry said. “Pants.”

  Lemon juice. That must have been what was in the spritz bottle on the video. When she squirted that poor bastard, he thrashed around like he was being electrocuted.

  “So you think that’s Luther in the video?”

  “Tough to say. He’s got that hood on. He’s all scarred up. But I think it is. The clincher is the knife. For someone who has killed as many people as Luther Kite is supposed to have killed, there isn’t a lot of information on him. But all sources agree that he favors a Spyderco Harpy.”

  Phin was familiar with the Spyderco brand. He paused the video, then used his browser to enlarge the picture. The silver knife being used to carve trenches into the screaming man’s back had a curved blade, like the beak of a hawk.

  “So what’s the planpants?” Harry asked.

  Phin didn’t have to think about it for more than a few seconds before he made his decision. If that really was Luther, and Lucy, Phin wasn’t going to wait around for them to eventually come calling. Jack and Sam shouldn’t be forced to live in constant paranoia. Better to nip it in the bud.

  If that really was Luther and Lucy, Phin would fix it so they’d never bother his family, or anyone else, ever again.

  “I’m going to check it out. Don’t tell Jack where I went.”

  “How can I? I don’t even know where the hell you’re going.”

  “Just stay quiet, McGlade.”

  “Want me to go with you? We could make a road trip out of it. Hey! I could invite Sinnamon! You’d have to pitch in for her hourly rate, though. It’s okay; getting a handy isn’t like cheating. It’s more like a rigorous, joyful greeting. Think of it as saying hello, in the nicest way possible. Jack lets you greet people, right? Or if that doesn’t work for you, I can bring my inflatable doll. We’d probably need some wet wipes or something if we take turns.”

  Phin hung up on him before he could say pants again.

  Then he watched the YouTube video once more and tried to prepare himself for what he needed to do.

  KATIE

  Screaming filled her radio earpiece.

  The video. That would be Phin’s sixth viewing.

  Katie wanted to ask him about it. Wanted to get his opinion. She had her suspicions about its origin, but her skillset didn’t include detective work. When she’d met with that idiot, McGlade, she’d gone there to hire him and Jack to help her track Luther down. But McGlade didn’t actually inspire confidence. All he really inspired was a desire to bathe.

  Jack Daniels, however, was another story. If anyone could find Luther, it was Jack.

  Which was why Katie watched Phin drive away, a duffle bag in hand, and didn’t follow him.

  Maybe Phin would find Luther. Maybe he wouldn’t.

  But once Jack knew Phin was gone, she’d go looking for him. And Jack would lead Katie to Luther Kite.

  Katie made her way deeper in the woods, past the property lines, into some undeveloped land alongside a creek. Trees, bushes, years of fallen leaves, and an occasional dirt-covered beer bottle with its label obliterated by the seasons. No one came back there.

  She stood beneath a large elm, removed a foldable pruning saw from her pack, and spent an hour clearing a line of sight to Jack’s front yard. Then she set up her scope on a small tripod, settled in, and waited for the retired cop to come home.

  DECADES AGO

  Detroit

  The voices outside the door had been raised for several minutes now, and the argument was escalating.

  Standing by the window, she stared through the iron bars as snow fell onto the street six stories below. For a moment, she touched her fingers to the freezing glass, the closest she could come to experiencing the world outside. Right now, it was cold. In the summer, it would be hot. Because of the orientation of the building she occupied, she hadn’t actually seen the sun in over two years.

  This room was her world.

  She ate here.

  Slept here.

  Lived in a heroin-laced fog here.

  And in between all the forced horror, she escaped into the worlds of her paperbacks and old magazines whenever she had a moment to herself. That was the best thing about her life by leaps and bounds. Once a week, a green-eyed man named Winston would come bearing an armful of tattered, yellow-paged paperbacks from a nearby thrift store.

  If business had been good, he’d bring her five, plus a magazine or two.

  If it had been a slow week, two or three.

  If she’d broken a single rule: none.

  But she hadn’t broken any rules. Not in a long time. No escape attempts. No suicide attempts. And they didn’t even have to beat her anymore. The worst thing they could do was deny her reading material. Deny her that escape. As far as punishments went, she’d have opted for a ruthless beating over no new books or magazines, any day. Pain went away. Pain could be forgotten. But without the escape of her stories, her thoughts inevitably drifted back to all that had been taken from her.

  Those thoughts were unbearable.

&nb
sp; But the printed word took away the pain, even more than the drug needle.

  Ann Rule, Joel McGinniss, Vincent Bugliosi, F. Paul Wilson, John D. MacDonald, Agatha Christie: these writers were her saviors. Without them, she’d have surely wasted away to nothing.

  She turned from the window, from the snowy city whose name she did not know, and moved across the one-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t much. A gas stove. An ancient refrigerator that hummed constantly like a diesel engine. A couch that had clearly been pulled off the side of some disgusting curb and still smelled like someone else’s trash.

  Stopping at the door, she put her ear to the wood.

  When she’d heard the footsteps coming down the corridor, she’d assumed it was time to go to work.

  But something else was happening out there that sounded like trouble.

  Two of the voices she immediately recognized.

  She couldn’t forget them if she’d wanted to. They would haunt her always.

  The third…

  Sounded familiar.

  Low, gravely, with a touch of psychotic mirth.

  Yes, she knew that voice. He’d been here many times to see her.

  Donaldson.

  A heavyset man who wore a paper-thin veneer of good ‘ol boy conviviality over something ugly. Even uglier than the men who kept her here.

  It was his voice she heard bleeding through the door: “I don’t know! File it in your shit happens folder. It ain’t my problem, gentlemen.”

  “It is actually,” one of her captors said—the short one with massive thighs she knew as Ben. “You were supposed to use a rubber. House rules.”

  “Really?” Donaldson snorted. “You two want to lecture me about rules?”

  “You come here, we have an agreement on how to do things. You can slap the girls around, use them however you want. But you gotta use a rubber.”

  “Not my problem,” Donaldson said. “She’s not my property. She’s yours. I just rent her. How do I even know I’m to blame?”

  “Because everyone else,” Winston said, “uses a goddamn rubber.”

  “I don’t even remember the last time I was here. I only blow through town every few months.”

  “And that’s how far along she is. Bottom line; we want three hundred bucks to make this right.”

  “Bullshit!” Donaldson began to laugh. “You shooting up what you’ve been pushing, Winston? I’m not paying to fix your whore’s condition. It’s an occupational hazard.”

  She took a step back from the door. Through the receding heroin fog, she reached down, put her hands on her belly, realizing for the first time: it’s a bump. A small one, to be sure, but a bump nonetheless. She’d noticed it last time she was in the shower, but had written it off as bloating.

  What if…

  “We’re all reasonable men,” Winston said. “We don’t want this to get ugly.”

  Donaldson’s voice got low. “You have no idea how ugly this can get.”

  “Is that how you want to play it, friend? Two against one? Is that risk worth a few hundred bucks to you?”

  “I came here to get laid, and I get a shake down. This how you treat all your longtime customers?”

  “We just want to make this right. And we’ll even throw in a freebie.”

  There was a long pause. “Fine. You want me to take care of this?”

  “That’s all we’re asking.”

  “I’ve got some equipment down in my trunk that should do it. I’ll be right back up. We’ll get this done right now.”

  “Hold up. You’re not qualified to do this.”

  “It ain’t rocket science. It’s just—”

  “We aren’t going to trust the well-being of our property to you and your toolbox.”

  Another pause.

  “Fine,” Donaldson said. “But if I’m paying, I should get to watch.”

  “You serious?” Ben asked.

  “It’s my baby. And I’ve never seen an abortion before. Could be fun.”

  “Deal.”

  She listened as footsteps trailed off down the hall, then went to the window. Outside, a curtain of snow descended on the city in a perpetual loop. The cars below were all frosted now, and the first snowplows had begun to make their rounds.

  She was still clutching her belly.

  A life was growing inside of her.

  A life was growing inside of her.

  It didn’t matter that half the DNA belonged to a monster.

  Half the DNA was hers.

  She was a mother. The tiny being growing inside her was her child.

  Her family.

  Suddenly, she couldn’t see the snow anymore.

  The world was a blur through her tears.

  JACK

  Chicago

  The earliest flight to Chicago I could get was a red-eye leaving at 10:15 P.M., and it cost five times as much as I’d paid to come to Florida. The ridiculous amount I spent didn’t stop the plane from being delayed.

  I called my house for the eighth time that day. No answer. Called Phin. No answer. Called my house. No answer. Called Phin. No answer. Called my partner, Harry McGlade, to see if he knew anything and got his voicemail greeting.

  “This is Harry McGlade. I’m not picking up the phone because: A – I’m screening my calls and don’t want to talk to you, B – I’m engaged in a business transaction involving the exchange of sexual favors for money, or C – It’s after midnight and I chased a sleeping pill with four beers.”

  I left a message for him to call me. Then I tried Phin again.

  No answer.

  I got to O’Hare at a little after five in the morning, exhausted because I have a hard time sleeping in a bed let alone in the cattle call the airlines dub coach, then cabbed it to my house in Bensenville. My husband, and my dog, were gone.

  My cat was there, but didn’t seem happy to see me. I kept my distance.

  I immediately located the whereabouts of my dog, as Phin had left a note next to the phone with the number for the kennel he dropped him off at. But there was no evidence that pointed to where my husband had gone. He’d cleared his computer history. He’d erased the house security footage. I checked call logs to both his cell number, and the house, and the only numbers that came up were mine, and McGlade’s.

  We only had one car, which Phin had left for me (probably because there was an anti-theft tracker in it and he didn’t want me to locate him), so I braved rush hour traffic and got into Chicago a little after nine. Since McGlade never got to the office before noon, I went to his home.

  Harry’s current place of residence was a condo in Streeterville overlooking the lake. I parked in front, and walked up to the doorman.

  “Is jackass here?” I asked.

  “Hello, Miss Daniels. I haven’t seen Mr. McGlade this morning. Would you like me to ring him?”

  “I’ll go up,” I said. “Can you please watch my car?”

  “Of course.”

  I handed him the keys in case he needed to move it, and then took the elevator to McGlade’s penthouse. I let myself in without bothering to knock.

  Harry’s home was furnished in 1990’s rich douchebag; leather sofas, nude Nagel prints on the walls, a Japanese shoji screen, hunter green everywhere. I heard sounds coming from the hallway, and found Harry in his round, king-size bed, watching something on his tablet.

  “Hiya, Jackie. I’m watching Waveya.”

  He turned the screen my way and I saw five cute Korean girls in tiny outfits doing a sexy synchronized dance to the music.

  “I’ve watched this eighteen times,” he said, evidently unfazed that I was in his home. “I think I’m in love. Which of the five do you think is cutest? I’m leaning toward Ari. But MiU has that redhead thing going on.”

  “Don’t you ever pick up your damn phone?”

  “Nope.”

  “What if it’s an emergency?”

  He smiled big and shot me with his index finger and thumb. “That’s why I gave you an emergency key
.”

  “And what if I’m having the emergency?”

  Harry shrugged. “You refused to give me a key. You were worried I’d show up in your house unannounced, like you’re doing right now.

  This wasn’t getting anywhere. “Where’s Phin?”

  “Phin told me not to tell you or he’d beat me up.”

  “And if you don’t tell me, I’ll beat you up.”

  McGlade tapped his chin. “Decisions, decisions.”

  “This isn’t a joke, Harry. If you know where Phin is, spill it.”

  “It’s a long storypants.”

  “Storypants?”

  “I’m doing a blog, so now I add the words pants to—”

  “I don’t care,” I said, cutting him off. “Where is my husband?”

  “You mean physically? Or emotionally? Because, I gotta be honest, sometimes Phin acts pretty darn juvenile.”

  I murdered him with my eyes. “Where is he, Harry?”

  “It’s sort of a long story. Where should I start?”

  “The beginning.”

  “Okay. A long time ago, my parents had unprotected sex, and nine months later I was born. I was given up for adoption, probably because they couldn’t accept a child with such a freakishly large penis. Want to see baby pictures? You’d be like, whoa, does that baby have three legs?”

  “Fast forward.”

  “Okay. Two weeks ago I was in a Cracker Barrel with an escort named Sinnamon. She ordered a chicken fried steak, which she didn’t eat. Do you know what a handy is?”

  “Do you know what a broken nose is?”

  I balled up my fist. Harry didn’t flinch. He knew I wasn’t actually going to beat him up. But if the only way to stop his comedy routine was with threats, I had one that would work. I dug my Colt out of my Michael Kors purse and pointed it at the bronze statue on his nightstand.

  “Not my Erté Prisoner of Love! Okay, I thought my playful banter might loosen your resolve, but you win. While you were in Florida, a woman came to see you at the office. A writer named Katie Glente. She wanted to hire us to find Luther Kite.”