Key Death (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 4)

by Jude Hardin

  I climbed out of the Jimmy and walked toward Alison’s building. By the time I made it to the second-floor landing, the guy from the pickup truck was sticking a key in Alison’s door.

  “Hi there,” I said, catching him before he turned the key and opened the door.

  I startled him. He turned with a jerk. “Can I help you?” he said.

  “My name is Nicholas Colt. I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for a woman named Alison Palmer.”

  “May I ask why?” he said.

  I guessed him to be in his early thirties. Medium build, long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. He wore denim shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and Converse All Stars. Red ones. I’d owned a pair just like them forty years ago.

  “I’m investigating the murder of a man named Phineas T. Carter,” I said. “I understand Ms. Palmer owns the condominium where it happened.”

  “The police—”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “What was your name?”

  “Robbie Asbury. I’m Alison’s husband.”

  “OK. Now what were you saying about the police?”

  “Yeah, the cops already went over everything with her, and of course all the evidence is long gone. The place was a mess. The carpeting in the living room had to be replaced, along with the Sheetrock on one whole wall.”

  “I’d still like to talk to her,” I said. “Would you happen to know what time she might be home?”

  “She’s here now,” he said. “I parked my car right beside hers.”

  “Nobody answered when I knocked,” I said.

  “She worked last night, so she might still be asleep. Let me just go in and check.”

  “OK.”

  He turned the key and opened the latch, picked up his six-pack and groceries from where he’d set them on the stoop, walked inside, and shut the door.

  Thirty seconds later I heard him scream.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Robbie Asbury came running out the door with his hand over his mouth. He leaned over the second-floor railing and puked into the bushes below.

  He was crying. “She’s dead,” he said. “Oh my god, Alison’s dead.”

  I walked into the apartment, making sure I didn’t touch anything. It felt as though a giant electrified paintbrush swiped a chill from the base of my spine to the top of my scalp. Alison Palmer was on the bedroom floor, on her back, staring blankly at the ceiling. There was a horizontal incision on her forehead, about two inches above her eyebrows. It was crusted with dried blood. I imagined that the cut went all the way around, but most of it was hidden by her frizzy brown hair. I imagined that the top of her skull had been gently lifted and then glued back down once the contents had been removed.

  The sight of her lying there was too much. I felt my stomach lurch, sure for a moment that I was going to join Robbie Asbury at the railing.

  I pulled out my cell phone and dialed 911.

  “Emergency Services,” a female voice said. “Is this an actual emergency?”

  “The Zombie,” I said. I could barely speak.

  “Excuse me?”

  “There’s been a murder,” I said.

  “Where are you calling from, sir?”

  I tried to think. It finally came to me. I told her the address. “There’s been a murder,” I said again.

  “Sir, I want you to stay on the line until someone gets there. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Are you inside the apartment right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you please describe what’s happening there right now?”

  “Nothing’s happening,” I said. “There’s a body on the floor.”

  “Is anyone else there with you? Are you in any immediate danger?”

  “No.”

  “Is the victim male or female?”

  “Female.”

  “I want you to look closely at her chest. Is she breathing?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “I want you to press two fingers against the side of her neck and feel for a pulse.”

  “She’s dead,” I shouted. “You understand that? She’s not breathing and she doesn’t have a pulse. I know this for a fact. I know it because she doesn’t have a goddamn brain.”

  “Sir, I need you to try to remain calm. Did you feel for a pulse like I asked you to?”

  I hung up. I knew what was coming next. She was going to tell me to start performing CPR until rescue arrived. She was going to tell me to give Alison Palmer mouth-to-mouth and pump on her chest with the butt of my hand. And if I thought there was the slightest possibility of any of that helping, I would have done it. But there was no point in putting my mouth on those cold blue lips and forcing air into those breathless lungs. There was no point in cracking those stiffening ribs in an effort to revive that bloodless heart.

  Alison Palmer was dead.

  I walked out of the apartment. Robbie Asbury was still heaving over the rail and crying hysterically.

  I wanted to say something to him. Try to soothe him. But what do you say in a case like that?

  Everything’s going to be all right.

  Everything wasn’t going to be all right. Everything was incredibly fucked-up, and there was no indication that everything was not going to be incredibly fucked-up anytime soon.

  I decided not to say anything. I walked down the stairs and over to my car. I leaned on the hood with my face in my hands. I had the shakes. Like an alcoholic. I couldn’t control it. The ghastly image of Alison Palmer’s brainless corpse had been indelibly etched into my consciousness, like a burn scar from a branding iron. I tried to think about something else, but I couldn’t. It was going to be with me for a long, long time.

  The Zombie.

  I joked around sometimes, but terrifying nightmares plagued me for months after watching Time Traveling Zombie Bikers from Darkest Hell. I would wake up in a panic, wanting to run but paralyzed with fear, certain that one of those clammy fuckers was under my bed. Certain that one of them was going to crack my skull like a walnut and feast on my twelve-year-old brain.

  I joked around sometimes to help relieve my own anxiety.

  I still have the nightmares occasionally, and to this day I refuse to watch any movie or television show that deals with zombies. Even the ones that are supposed to be funny. I can’t watch them. They do something to me. It’s almost like my Kryptonite or something.

  There’s a word for my condition. Kinemortophobia. The fear of zombies. I looked it up one time. As phobias go, it’s a pretty ridiculous one. I know that.

  I’ve never admitted my irrational fear of the walking dead to anyone. I’m sure they would just laugh. It’s like saying you’re afraid of ghosts or vampires or something. Those things aren’t real. Zombies aren’t real. At least the pop culture ones aren’t. Apparently the myth evolved from some sort of Haitian and West African voodoo practices, where a variety of chemicals throw victims into a perpetual dazed state. But the creatures we normally think of as zombies, the shambling dullards in movies like Night of the Living Dead and Flesh Eating Mothers, are about as real as Donald Duck.

  Yet they strike a fear in me that is palpable.

  Of course, I knew the serial killer terrorizing the southeastern United States from the Keys to Savannah wasn’t really a zombie. I knew he was just some sick, depraved asshole with a flare for the dramatic. The brains were just trophies for him. Like some serial killers take a piece of jewelry from their victims or an article of clothing or some other memento. Something to remember the occasion by, something to get off on again and again in the future. The Zombie probably kept his victims’ brains in Ziploc bags in the freezer. Or maybe he immortalized them in blocks of Lucite. Whatever. I knew the motherfucker wasn’t a real zombie.

  But seeing Alison Palmer lying there with that incision across her forehead did something to me. It shook me somewhere deep. It rattled me at the core.

  I’m not sure how much time elapsed, but when I looked up, there was a police cruiser
parked at the sidewalk in front of Alison’s building. Blue lights flashing. There was one officer, still in the driver’s seat. I walked over there as he was getting out. He saw me coming.

  “Did someone call nine-one-one?” he said.

  “I did. There’s a dead woman up on the second floor.”

  “You found her?”

  “Her husband found her,” I said. “Then I went in and saw her.”

  “Are you one of their neighbors?”

  “Just a concerned citizen.”

  “You want to walk up there with me?” the officer said.

  “I’d just as soon wait down here. Her husband can show you in.”

  “That your Chevy Blazer over there?”

  “It’s a GMC Jimmy. Yeah, it’s mine.”

  He pulled out a notepad and wrote down the tag number. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said. “We’re going to want to talk to you.”

  He put the notepad back in his pocket and followed the sidewalk to the stairs. I took a deep breath, walked back to my car, sat inside and waited.

  An ambulance came and the EMS guys bolted up the stairwell carrying nylon cases that said TRAUMA ONE. A few minutes later two more police cars came and two more uniformed officers climbed to the second floor.

  I called Juliet, but got voice mail. I looked at my watch. 3:47. She was at work. I called the number to her unit at the hospital. The clerk said Juliet was busy with a patient, but if I wanted to hold she could probably talk to me in a few minutes. I said I would try back later. I needed to talk to someone. I needed to talk to Joe Crawford, my best friend since sixth grade. But I couldn’t. A little over a year ago, an insane billionaire sadist named Malden Zephauser had used real live human beings in a demented version of the video game Snuff Tag 9, and Joe had gotten sucked into it because of me. I couldn’t call my best friend since sixth grade because my best friend since sixth grade was dead.

  A few minutes after four, an unmarked Camaro rolled in and parked behind the three police cruisers. The car looked brand new. It was a convertible, but the top was up. Heavy tint on the windows. A man wearing gray pants and a white dress shirt got out. He had a shiny gold badge hooked to the front of his belt and a flat black Glock holstered to the side. Slicked-back hair, wraparound shades. He was slim and trim, and he moved with the slow, nonchalant grace and confidence of a tiger on the prowl. He followed the same path the others had taken to the second level.

  I tried Juliet again. This time she was at the nurses’ station, and the clerk transferred the call to her desk.

  “Hi there,” she said. “How’s it going?”

  “Not good,” I said. “Not good at all.”

  I told her about everything that had happened.

  “You should come home now, Nicholas. It’s just not worth it.”

  “I told Wanda I would try to find out who killed her father, so that’s what I’m going to do. I can’t just give up after one day.”

  “You can, and you should. You don’t owe that woman anything. Give her back the ten thousand dollars and be done with it. She can find somebody else to look for her father’s killer.”

  It was tempting, especially with my phobia gnawing its way deeper and deeper into my head. But quitting just felt like the wrong thing to do. Like a giant backward leap into the infernal regions of uselessness.

  “I’m going to keep working on it, Jules. At least for a few more days. That is, if I don’t get arrested.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I walked into Alison Palmer’s apartment and saw her lying on the floor dead. The police want to talk to me. They’re going to want to know what I was doing here in the first place. If I tell them the truth, they’re going to want to see my PI license.”

  “And you don’t have a PI license.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you’re on probation.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what are you going to tell them?”

  “I don’t know. I—”

  I stopped talking mid-sentence, because I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  There was short pause, and then Juliet said, “Nicholas?”

  “I’m here. I think I just found a way out of this. I’ll call you back in a little while.”

  We said good-bye, and I climbed out of my car and rushed over to the other side of the parking lot.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  While I was talking to my wife, Wesley West had steered his old Taurus station wagon into the lot. Wesley West was the guy who’d been singing and playing acoustic guitar at the hotel lounge last night. The one with the beret and the dark glasses. The one who wasn’t very good.

  He was carrying half a gallon of ice cream in a translucent plastic grocery bag. Breyers. I couldn’t make out the flavor. He squinted as I approached him, and then smiled when he recognized me.

  “Nicholas Colt. Hey, man. What brings you out this way?”

  “I came to see you,” I said.

  “How did you know where I live?”

  “You told me. Remember?”

  Wesley and I had talked last night during his breaks, and I had bought him several beers and several shots of tequila. At four o’clock when the place closed, he was at least as drunk as I was.

  He tugged on his goatee. “If you say so,” he said.

  “Yeah, I was going to show you some things on the guitar. I can’t believe you don’t remember.”

  “Well, my memory’s not what it used to be. Especially after a tequila night. Come on up and we’ll pick a little.”

  Score. My lucky day.

  “As it turns out, I’m going to have to take a rain check,” I said.

  I told him about what had happened, about Alison Palmer being murdered. I told him about the incision across her forehead.

  He stared in the direction of Alison’s building. “Great God almighty,” he said. “Are you sure it was The Zombie? Here?”

  “It looks that way,” I said. “Listen, if the cops ask, I came to the complex to see you. OK?”

  “Sure, Nicholas. Sure. Damn. I can’t believe this shit, man. The fucking Zombie. Right here in my backyard.”

  “I’ll let you go before your ice cream melts,” I said. “You playing at the lounge again tonight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll probably see you there.”

  “OK.”

  He walked away shaking his head.

  I walked back to the Jimmy, and a few minutes later the detective who’d driven up in the Camaro came over and asked if I would mind answering a few questions.

  “I wouldn’t mind at all,” I said. “I’d be happy to help in any way I can.”

  “Let’s walk over to my car,” he said.

  “OK.”

  He introduced himself. Detective Craig P. Sullivan, Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, Homicide Investigations Unit. I remembered the name Sullivan from Kenny at the granola chess café. His friends called him Sully. Nobody told me that. It was a guess. Almost every cop in the universe named Sullivan had friends who shortened it to Sully. It was practically a rule. We walked over to his car. He opened the passenger’s side door for me, and I climbed in. He shut the door, walked around, took a seat behind the wheel.

  “Nice ride,” I said.

  “Thanks. For the record, your name is Nicholas Colt. Is that correct?”

  “That’s right. How did you know my name?”

  I’d told Robbie Asbury my name and my purpose for being there, but I was hoping that all of the emotional trauma he was going through had shaken it out of him.

  “One of the patrolmen ran your tags,” Sullivan said. “Can I see your driver’s license, please?”

  I handed him my license.

  “Clay County,” he said. “What brings you down to Key West?”

  “I’m on vacation.”

  “You’re also on probation. Want to tell me about that?”

  “Possession of heroin,” I said. “I had a problem with it, but I’ve been clean for
over a year.”

  He handed my license back. “So what was the nature of your business with Ms. Palmer this afternoon?”

  “I didn’t have any business with her,” I said. “I was here to see someone else.”

  He looked at his notes. “I talked to a man who claims to be her husband, a Mr. Robert Asbury. Different last names, but a lot of women are doing that these days. He was under the impression that you had come here to see her.”

  “Then he was under the wrong impression. He must have misunderstood.”

  “I see. So you were here to visit someone else, but you were knocking on Ms. Palmer’s door. Out of all the doors in this condominium complex, you picked the one with a dead person behind it. That’s really an amazing coincidence, Mr. Colt. For some reason, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around that.”

  “It happens,” I said.

  He looked doubtful. He wrote something in his notebook.

  “I was here to see a man named Wesley West,” I said. “I just met him last night. I must have written down the wrong apartment number.”

  “What apartment does Wesley West live in?”

  “I don’t know. I never made it there.”

  “We’ll check up on that,” Sullivan said.

  “OK.”

  “So tell me exactly what happened, Mr. Colt. Tell me exactly how it came to be that you walked into Alison Palmer’s apartment and found her dead on the floor.”

  It took about ten minutes for me to go through it all. He wrote everything down.

  “Can I go now?” I said.

  “Did you know we’ve been dealing with a serial killer down here, Mr. Colt?”

  “The Zombie,” I said. “I’ve heard about it.”

  “Pretty creepy, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah. Creepy as hell.”

  Detective Sullivan took his sunglasses off. His eyes were blue and bloodshot. “Where are you staying?” he said.

  I told him the name of the hotel and the room number.

  “Plan on being there a few more days?” he said.

  “Yeah.”