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

by J. A. Konrath

  “He’s… got something going on.”

  Harry’s nose wrinkled. “Fat boy bailed on you? Seriously? I thought you guys were attached at the hip. You have some sort of falling out? Because I was chummypants with El Chubbo for a while, but he’s got some serious personality problems.”

  I didn’t want to discuss it. “Chandler and Fleming, McGlade. Any ideas?”

  “I can reach Hammett. Though—I’m being candidpants here—my juevos are still bruised from the last time I saw her.”

  “Don’t contact Hammett.” That woman was crazier than the people we were looking for.

  “Your call.” Harry took out his phone and spoke as he pressed his touch screen keyboard.

  “Super-secret agent spy post,” he said, typing out loud. “Fleming, we haven’t bugged you since the White House. Jack Daniels and I need help. Also Chandler. Call ASAP. Harry McGlade.”

  “How can you text her if you don’t have her number?”

  “I didn’t text. I blogged.”

  “You just blogged?” I said, incredulous.

  “Faster than taking out an ad in the personals. Fleming’s a hacker. She monitors the net, no doubt has spiders looking for key terms. When she finds the names Fleming, Chandler, Jack Daniels, Harry McGlade, and the words bugged and White House all in one post, she’ll call me.”

  I cast a gaze at Katie, who was still entranced by the cat. “What if someone else is looking for those same terms, Harry?” I asked.

  “You mean the NSA? Hell, who cares? Those paranoid bastards already set up a video camera over my bed.” Katie glanced over at him. “It was the NSA,” Harry told her, “I swear.”

  I was more concerned about other, unnamed government organizations. Ones the NSA didn’t know about. Organizations that could make me, and everyone I know, disappear without a trace.

  I was having this obviously delusional paranoid fantasy when my cell phone rang.

  UNKNOWN NUMBER.

  I picked up, and with a hint of trepidation said, “This is Jack.”

  “The place we ate at, with the carrot cake,” said a female voice I recognized. “Tomorrow at 2 P.M. Bring the idiot. Make sure you aren’t followed.”

  Then she hung up.

  Harry read my face. “Told you so.”

  “We have to go to Washington,” I said, putting away my cell.

  “We?”

  “She told me to bring the idiot.”

  “Woo-hoo!” Harry said, doing a fist pump. “I’m in. She’s obviously been pining for me. Which one was it? Moodypants? Wheels? Both? They owe me a three-way.”

  I frowned. Because they were identical twins, the sisters sounded the same. I guessed the caller was Wheels—Fleming—because she was the one there when Harry ordered carrot cake at that diner in DC. But she could have told that to Chandler.

  “Book a flight,” I told Harry.

  “How about the cat whisperer over here?”

  Katie and I exchanged a glance.

  “I’m just going to follow you,” she told me.

  I sighed. “Book it for three.”

  LUCY

  The cardboard Amazon box clutched in his scarred hands, K pushed open the door to the playroom at the far end of the hotel.

  The smell was… strong.

  Death had many scents. Some good. Some not so good.

  The aroma of blood excited Lucy, stirring something in her similar to hunger or sexual arousal.

  Bile was more of an acquired taste, akin to enjoying a fine whiskey. The first few times, it was pungent. But then it began to develop nuances and different notes, and the complexity became appreciated.

  Lucy appreciated urine more as a side-effect than as an odor. Making someone piss themselves in fear and pain was fun, but the smell wasn’t something she salivated over.

  Rot and shit were just plain awful. That’s why there were two main rules when torturing someone to death. First, cauterize wounds to prevent necrosis. Second, don’t perforate the bowels.

  The playroom smelled mainly of blood. And body odor—a fragrance that had no place in a torture chamber, or anywhere else.

  There was also the gag-inducing smell of excrement.

  Lucy held what was left of her nose, and she and K approached the man on the rack. She couldn’t remember what the young man had done—he was a snitch or a rival cartel member or a witness. Or maybe Emilio—the drug lord who owned the compound—was simply as offended by the man’s BO as Lucy was. If being pungent was a crime, this guy deserved at least a dozen death sentences.

  And now, to add to his unpleasant stench, he’d crapped himself.

  It was a bad one, too. Eyes-watering, taste-it-in-the-back-of-your-mouth bad. Lucy had no idea how women could have babies. Wiping asses every day for two straight years seemed worse than any torture she could dream up.

  K seemed equally irritated. He handed Lucy the box, removed his folding knife from his pocket, and held it against the man’s throat.

  “I was going to give you a chance to go free,” he said. “But little boys who mess their pants don’t deserve freedom. This is what they deserve.”

  Apparently little boys who messed their pants deserve a Columbian necktie.

  Bo-ring.

  Lucy quickly left the playroom, finding a cheap dinette chair in the kitchen area, and sat there with the box in her lap as K went to fetch a clean-up crew and another victim. She yawned. What started off as a potential rekindling of the killing spirit had once again devolved into something rote. Rather than celebrate a fellow human being’s suffering, Lucy felt like they were just going through the motions.

  It was sad, really.

  Some men came and took out the body in a plastic bag. Then a smiling Mestizo woman who had more wrinkles than a Shar-Pei padded into the playroom with a mop and bucket. Lucy wondered what she could be so happy about, cleaning up blood and poo for a living, and then began to envy the cleaning woman for her baseless happiness. The envy became so strong that when the cleaning woman came out of the playroom with the smile still on her face, Lucy unholstered the Springfield XD she carried on her belt and shot her twice in the chest.

  “Why did you do that?” K asked, hobbling up behind her.

  “She was pissing me off.”

  “How?”

  “She looked happy.”

  They both stared at the woman, who’d collapsed on the floor but somehow managed to not spill her dirty bucket.

  “She was good,” K said. “A miracle worker with clothing stains.”

  Lucy frowned. “Aw, shit. She was the one who did the laundry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She used just the right amount of starch when she ironed.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lucy was angry at herself. Then she noticed the woman’s chest was moving. “Hey. She’s still alive.”

  “I’ll get the men.” K trudged off again.

  The men came, put the woman on a blanket, and picked her up. Lucy almost told her sorry, but wasn’t sure how to say it in Spanish. Besides, apologizing wasn’t one of her strengths. Somehow, she always came off sounding sarcastic. Instead, Lucy sort of gave the cleaning woman the universal oops shrug as she went past.

  The woman was trembling, and seemed to be trying really hard not to cry.

  Awkward.

  A few minutes later another group of men came (or maybe it was the same group of men, Lucy wasn’t really good with faces), lugging along a man in iron shackles. The prisoner was in his twenties, one eye swollen shut from a recent beating. K and the guards exchanged some rapid-fire español.

  “His name is Juan,” K told Lucy. “He was caught selling Tussin to school children.”

  “So kids aren’t allowed to get high in Mexico?” Lucy asked.

  “They drink too much and OD. Bad for business.”

  “It was only two kids who died,” Juan said, his English pretty good. “Mexico has plenty more.”

  “You broke the rules,” K told him. “Emilio doe
sn’t allow sales to kids.”

  Juan spat on K’s feet. “Hijo de puta. You kill kids in your crazy arena games. I saw you make two ten-year olds fight to the death with machetes.”

  “True,” K said. “But they weren’t taking drugs.”

  Juan’s look remained defiant. “I lost three thousand pesos on that match. I was only trying to make my money back.”

  K unsheathed his Spyderco Harpy knife.

  “Another Columbian necktie?” Lucy groaned. “Really?”

  K glanced at her. “No. I have something else in mind for this one.”

  The menacing way K said it gave Lucy goose bumps on her scar-free patches of skin.

  “Emilio wants you in the games,” K told Juan. “My protégé here wants to cut you into little bits and make you eat yourself.”

  “Protégé?” Lucy repeated. “K, that’s sweet.”

  “But it is your lucky day, Juan. I’m going to give you a chance to walk out of here. But you have to do something for me. Interested?”

  “What do I have to do?” Juan asked.

  K motioned for Lucy to hold up the Amazon box. When she did, he sliced open the cardboard with his Harpy. Slowly and seductively, as if undressing a lover. Then he reached inside and gingerly took out—

  An electric hot plate.

  “What are you going to do to him?” Lucy asked. “Cook him a can of beans?”

  “That’s racist,” Juan said. “I’m Mexican, so it has to be beans?”

  “I wasn’t talking about refried beans,” Lucy said. “I meant like American pork and beans.”

  “The kind with brown sugar?” Juan nodded. “I like those.”

  “I’m vegan,” Lucy said, “except for occasionally drinking blood. But when I was a kid my mom made pork and beans all the time. There was never more than a few tiny pieces of pork in it.”

  “I know, right? How can they call it pork and beans when it doesn’t have hardly any pork?”

  “Stop talking about pork and beans,” K ordered. “This idea is from a story in an old issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. March 2005. It’s called The Agreement.”

  “What is it about, K?” Lucy asked, though she was still thinking about pork and beans, and wondered if they sold cans of it anywhere in Baja. Lucy was still vegan, but she figured it would be simple enough to avoid the pork when there were only three bites per can.

  “The story is about a gambler who loses at cards and is going to be killed because he can’t pay. But he’s given a choice. If he can keep his hand on a stove burner for ten full seconds, his debts will be absolved.”

  K took the hot plate out with a dramatic flourish. It was one of those models with a round, spiral burner, and didn’t look menacing at all. He unwrapped the cord, had one of the guards plug it into an extension in the hall, and set the burner down on a rickety Formica table. K twisted the only knob on the appliance, and the coil began to glow orange.

  “The best and the worst pain is what we do to ourselves.” K said, staring hard at Juan. “Do you want to go home?”

  Juan nodded.

  “Place your palm on the burner and hold it there. If you can last for ten seconds without pulling away, you’re free.”

  Juan eyed the hot plate like it was a small dog known to bite.

  “Put my hand on that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And hold it there for ten seconds?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here’s a better idea. You eat a bag of dicks.”

  Lucy looked at K, then told the guards, “Hold him.”

  They wrestled the cuffed man to his knees, and Lucy pressed the red-hot grill into Juan’s face, holding it there for longer than ten seconds.

  Oddly enough, it smelled sort of like pork and beans.

  K then cut off the man’s pants and said, “What was your idea? Eat a bag of dicks? How about you tell us what that’s like.”

  Juan never did tell them what it was like, because he choked to death. Which was a shame, because Lucy was curious to see what other body parts they could have forced him to eat.

  “So how did that Hitchcock story end?” she asked, as the guards hauled Juan’s body away.

  “I don’t know. Last page was ripped out.”

  “I bet it didn’t end with the guy eating his own junk.”

  “Probably not.”

  They went to the sink to wash up, sharing the canister of powdered soap. K squinted at his purple robe and frowned. “Blood stains.”

  “Sorry about that, K. Maybe she’ll survive.”

  “She really is a miracle worker with stains.”

  “And ironing.” Lucy used a wooden brush to get the bits of tissue out from under her fingernails. “So if he actually lasted the full ten seconds, you really would have let him go?”

  K made a croaking sound, like someone with emphysema trying to clear his throat. He made the sound again, and again, and Lucy suddenly realized he was laughing.

  She joined in.

  PHIN

  Baja

  Phin wasn’t built for surveillance. He was built for action.

  Watching a target took a skill set antithetical to the one he had. Phin had been keeping an eye on Hugo Boss, and his spotters, for sixteen hours, and had prepared for the stake-out as best he could. He’d picked three spots where he could have them all in sight while remaining off their radar. Binoculars, with screens on the lenses so they wouldn’t reflect and give away his position. A case of water. Beef jerky and candy bars—things packed with calories that wouldn’t spoil. A thermos to urinate in. Caffeine pills. A notebook, to jot down the movements and guard changes of the snipers on the rooftops, the car makes and models and tags, the number of deals Hugo made.

  For four hours, he’d park in a spot up the street. Then he’d get out of the car and sit in an alley, next to the world’s smelliest Dumpster; seriously, it smelled like someone vomited up a skunk with diarrhea and let it bake in the ninety degree heat for a week. But it was close enough to the action that he wouldn’t need the binoculars, his cover disguise a stained shirt and half a bottle of warm beer in a paper bag. After four hours in the alley it was back to the car and a new parking spot, in the opposite direction.

  It was grueling, boring, mind-numbing work. This spying stuff wasn’t Phin’s thing, and as the minutes ticked slowly by he felt more and more wound up.

  But he learned a lot about their operation. Hugo had a five hour shift, then was replaced by another guy—this one in Armani. Armani was replaced by a third dealer, this one in Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, the gaudy ensemble topped off with a straw pork pie hat with a flowery band that matched neither shorts nor shirt. Then back to Hugo.

  They dealt some grass, occasional baggies of powder, and a lot of syrup. All three used the same parked car as their storage locker, and Phin had yet to see the supply replenished. He did some quick calculations and figured he’d watched over twenty thousand dollars’ worth of transactions in a sixteen hour period.

  Now the sun was up, heating up the interior of the car. Neither Luther Kite, nor his scarred ward Lucy, had paid Hugo a visit. Were they getting their painkillers elsewhere, maybe via fake prescriptions? Was the painkiller trail a dead end, and they weren’t even using? Were they even still in town?

  Phin considered his options. Grabbing one of the dealers and asking him if Luther was a client would be risky, and even if the dealer recognized Luther, that didn’t mean he knew where Luther was staying. Trying a different approach meant abandoning this one, and Phin could picture Luther driving up to score painkillers five minutes after Phin left.

  He tried to think like Luther, but that wasn’t one of Phin’s strengths. He knew street thugs, pimps, gang bangers, junkies, hustlers, and whores. Jack was the one who knew psychopaths. Though Phin had encountered a few serial killers—old cases of Jack’s—he couldn’t put himself in their minds like she seemed to be able to.

  Luther came to Mexico with Lucy. Why? To escap
e capture in the US? Because he had some sort of stake here? A hideaway? A supply of cash? Drugs?

  Drugs were available everywhere. And Luther wasn’t exactly Public Enemy Number 1. He was no doubt on some law enforcement watch lists, and there were arrest warrants, but he was just one of hundreds, probably thousands, of wanted murderers. And there were plenty of places to hide in the US. Luther and Lucy had been doing so for years.

  Why Mexico?

  Phin recalled the video that brought him there. A man being dragged behind a car. That wasn’t the act of someone on the run, trying to avoid attention.

  That was the act of a maniac. A psychopath. Someone insane, who got off on the pain of others.

  Maybe Luther and Lucy weren’t in Mexico to hide from authorities.

  Maybe they’d come to have fun.

  Phin played with the idea. Baja had plenty of tourists who didn’t know the area. Plenty of poor locals no one cared about. Police that could be paid to look the other way.

  It was like a Disneyland for serial killers. They could operate under the radar, having their pick of disposable victims, with impunity.

  Maybe, instead of staking out dealers, Phin should go to the police. Find out if there had been any more people dragged to death. If they could be bribed to ignore crime, maybe they could also be bribed to reveal it.

  That seemed like a better idea than watching Hugo Boss for another four hours.

  Phin tucked away his notebook, and started the car.

  He’d driven a block when the steering wheel began to pull right and he heard the distinctive THWAP-THWAP-THWAP of a flat tire.

  Already twitchy from the caffeine, Phin went into instant paranoia mode, taking his FNS in hand and doing a three-sixty scan of the area as he pulled over to the side of the road. The street looked normal, no obvious threats.

  He parked, shut off the car, and waited, continuing to look around. At the next corner were three men sharing a cigarette. Across the street was a parked car, empty. Phin glanced back at Hugo Boss, and he was in front of the club, business as usual.

  It could have been regular old bad luck. Maybe he ran over a glass bottle, or a jagged chunk of asphalt—the streets weren’t in the best shape.