Key Death (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 4)

by Jude Hardin

  “It’s hard,” he said. “I’ve always been mostly a rhythm player.”

  I pointed at the poster. “Did you play in that band?”

  “Yeah, for a few years. We were based in Atlanta, played all up and down the East Coast. The lead guitar player never wanted to show me anything, though. It was like he guarded that shit. Like a magician with his tricks or something.”

  “I invented some of those riffs I just showed you,” I said. “But they’re really not that difficult once you learn a few scales and learn how to fingerpick a little.”

  “You’re a good teacher, Nicholas. I appreciate it.”

  We played some more and I drank a few of cups of coffee and he drank a couple of beers. The coffee was extraordinary. Wesley said it was something called Kona, shipped all the way from Hawaii. He had a bottle of Jack Daniels that hadn’t been opened yet, and I was tempted to let him crack the seal and pour me a big glass. But I knew alcohol would make me sleepy, and I had some late-night work to do. So I stuck with coffee. I ate some ham and cheese and celery sticks from the tray on the coffee table, along with some sort of meat pâté that you spread on fancy little crackers with a fancy little knife. It wasn’t foie gras, but something like that. The salty crackers irritated the blisters on my fingertips. I tried wiping them with one of the burgundy cloth napkins folded elegantly there beside the tray of hors d’oeuvres, but it didn’t help much.

  “I need to be running along,” I said. “My fingers feel like someone burned them with matches. But this was fun. Thanks for having me over.”

  “Any time, Nicholas. You should think about teaching guitar for a living. You’re really good at it.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You know what I always wanted to learn?”

  “What’s that?”

  “The lead solo to that song y’all did called ‘Dead Ringer.’”

  It was one of Colt .45’s biggest hits. The studio version was layered with overdubs, but I’d written a solo for the stage shows that sounded almost as good.

  “Another night,” I said. “That’s a really complicated part. It’s going to take some time to teach it to you.”

  “But you’ll come over again sometime and show me?”

  “Sure.”

  “You promise?”

  I laughed. “I promise, Wes.”

  “You really should think about teaching professionally. No shit.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  I was once considered one of the best guitarists in the world. I was one of the best, but I couldn’t play at that level anymore because of my ruined hand. So fuck it. I didn’t want anything to do with the guitar. And I sure as hell didn’t want to sit around in some closet with carpet on the walls and show pimply-faced kids how to play Metallica on their Les Paul knockoffs. Wasn’t going to happen.

  “I’ll be at the lounge again Sunday and Monday night,” Wesley said. “If you’re still there.”

  “I’ll probably still be there. I’ll come down and check you out. Hell, if I get drunk enough, I might even play one with you this time.”

  That wasn’t going to happen either.

  Before I stood up to go, I lifted Wesley’s copy of Guns Magazine from the coffee table and started flipping through it. It was the latest edition, and I hadn’t seen it yet.

  “You like to shoot?” Wesley said.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Check this out.”

  He walked to the bedroom and came back holding a Colt M1911 .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol. He handed it to me.

  I looked it over. “A classic,” I said. “Very nice.”

  “Vietnam era. I found it at a gun show in South Carolina.”

  “Want to sell it?”

  He stared at the wall for a second, and then looked back at me. “You looking to buy a gun?”

  “I’m always looking,” I said.

  “I’ll give you five hundred for it. Two now, and three more when I see you at the bar Sunday night.”

  “I’ll take six,” he said.

  The gun wasn’t worth six hundred, but I didn’t feel like dickering. I needed a weapon. Someone had tried to kill me yesterday, and I didn’t know why. And I had a criminal record, so it wasn’t like I could just walk into a pawnshop and buy a piece anymore.

  “Deal,” I said. I pulled two hundred dollars out of my pocket and handed it to him. “I’ll give you the rest Sunday.”

  “I have some other Vietnam memorabilia if you’re interested,” he said.

  I was interested. Intrigued, at least. I still didn’t know how the Jim Ballard situation was going to play out, and I didn’t want to come up short on firepower if I ended up going head-to-head with him.

  “Let’s see what you have,” I said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It was almost midnight when I left Wesley’s apartment. I wondered if Jim Ballard was at the club, telling everyone about the horrible accident earlier, about me falling off his boat and drowning. I imagined it was on all the local news channels.

  Which was fine with me. At some point during my visit with Wesley West, while I was watching those thick concrete fingers of his fumble through the lead runs I was showing him, it occurred to me that it might be best to roll over and play dead for a while. The Coast Guard probably wouldn’t spend more than a couple of million dollars looking for me. They could send Jim Ballard the bill.

  Wesley had shown me some souvenirs from a war we were both too young to have fought in, some of which weren’t exactly legal. He had that stuff, and I was going to roll with being dead for a while. We had an understanding. Wesley said he would ignore the news reports of my little boating incident. My secret was safe with him, he said, as long as his secrets were safe with me.

  I tried calling Juliet. She wasn’t answering her phone, so I left her a message.

  At 12:16 I drove by Jake’s Key West Saloon. My GMC Jimmy was still parked where I’d left it. The police hadn’t come to tow it away yet. I pulled in behind it, indiscreetly opened the driver’s side door, grabbed my netbook and my camera bag. I shut the door and got back into the Focus and drove around for a while. Jake’s Escalade was in the parking lot, as was the Porsche I’d seen earlier. 2FAST4U. Jim Ballard’s Audi wasn’t there. The rest of the cars were regular old heaps anyone might drive. I didn’t figure any of them belonged to a wealthy guy like Jim. The band was playing, which meant they’d found a substitute for Robbie Asbury. From what I could hear, they sounded pretty good.

  I didn’t think anyone had seen me come or go at the hotel earlier. I decided to leave all my things there and check in at another place. That way everyone in Key West could go on thinking I was at the bottom of the ocean.

  I withdrew some more cash. I bought a bottle of rum and a quart of grapefruit juice at a liquor store, and I bought some clothes and shoes and a cheap suitcase and some other things at Kmart. I checked into a dump called Reefer’s Inn under the name Douglas Gibson. I told the lady at the counter that my friends call me Doug. She was speeding on something, and looked about as interested as a squirrel with a math book.

  I went to my room and turned on the television. They were talking about the financial crisis in Europe, but it didn’t take long for the news to cycle back to the story about me. According to Jim Ballard, I had been drinking heavily and had decided to go for a dip. Then I just disappeared. The Coast Guard was still looking for me, and would continue their efforts into tomorrow, the reporter said.

  I kept hoping they would cut to a shot of Jim Ballard’s yacht, and I hoped there would be a big sign somewhere showing the name of the marina. That’s what I wanted to know. I wanted to know where to find the son of a bitch. But they never showed a sign, and they didn’t say where the boat was docked.

  I opened my netbook. I’d memorized the tag number to Jim’s Audi, so I planned on using it to find his home address. I doubted he would be there, but it was worth a try.

  Unfortunately, Reefer’s Inn didn’t have a W
i-Fi signal, so I mixed myself a rum and grapefruit juice and drank until I passed out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The zombies have abandoned their motorcycles. They’re on horses now, riding along the dusty road to Dodge at a slow pace. They’re all dressed like cowboys, some with tie-dyed headbands and peace-sign necklaces and puffy-sleeved shirts, incongruously leftover from their previous hippie attire. One of them has a Spanish guitar slung over his shoulder. There’s blood and chunks of flesh dripping from their chins, indicating they have dined recently.

  “How much farther to Dodge?” Boomer says.

  “A few more miles, I reckon,” says Rex.

  “You reckon? What kind of talk is that?”

  “Everyone in the Old West talks like that, dumbfuck. When in Rome.”

  “We ain’t nowhere near Rome, I can tell you that.”

  “Shut up, Boomer. Hey, guys, lookee yonder.”

  Rex points, and the camera pans to a small wooden cabin in the distance.

  “Let’s check it out,” Grady says.

  They gallop toward the house. When they get there, a woman wearing a long dress is standing on the porch with a double-barreled shotgun.

  “Howdy, ma’am,” Rex says.

  The woman points the gun at him. “You boys ride along now,” she says.

  “Well that’s not very hospitable,” Rex says. “All we want is a drink of water, and some water for our horses.”

  “I said ride along!”

  One of the zombies dismounts his horse and starts walking toward the woman. She aims the gun and fires and the unnamed goon’s head explodes. He falls to the ground.

  Rex cringes, wipes the spray of blood from his face and forehead with a red bandana. All the zombies start dismounting now. The woman only has one more shot left, and by the time she pulls the trigger, one of the zombies has already grabbed the barrel and directed it skyward. Rex knocks the woman to the ground, and the zombies descend on her like a flock of vultures. As the scene dissolves, you can hear them slurping and sucking and chewing…

  At ten-thirty Thursday morning the maid pounded on the door and startled me out of my zombie nightmare. I got up and peeked out and told her to come back later. I was still sleepy. I’d only gotten about five hours. I thought about going back to bed, but I didn’t.

  The rum bottle was nearly empty, but there was still plenty of grapefruit juice. I uncapped it and took a big swig. It was warm and sour and felt like battery acid when it hit my stomach. I chased it with a cool glass of water from the sink.

  I looked in the mirror. My eyes were almost as red as my nose. They were still sore and itchy from the saltwater, and I wished I’d bought some eye drops with my other supplies.

  Along with some new duds, I’d purchased a set of hair clippers and some shaving gear and a pair of black-framed wayfarer reading glasses. I’d decided to cut off my hair and beard so nobody would recognize me. So nobody would come up to me and say, Hey, I thought you were dead. The disguise had worked for me once before, a few years ago when I infiltrated a white supremacist cult called the Chain of Light. I figured it would work for me again.

  I sheared the hair on my face and head down to stubble. I thought about lathering up and shaving it all clean with the razor, but I finally decided to stick with jailhouse chic. I put the eyeglasses on. I looked like a cross between Bruce Willis and Clark Kent. I was a new man.

  I checked out of the motel. I didn’t want to stay in the same place more than one night while I was incognito. I figured I would be less likely to be identified if I kept moving. Anyway, Reefer’s Inn sucked. The room was damp, and it smelled like stale potato chips.

  I drove my rental car to the Key West office, told them I’d be needing it for a few more days. The guy at the counter tried to talk me into something bigger and more luxurious, but I liked the little Ford. It said, Not a former licensed investigator illegally working on a murder case, and that was the statement I wanted to make.

  I went to McDonald’s and bought a cup of coffee. I sat at a table in the back and used their Wi-Fi signal to get on the Internet. I did some research on Jim Ballard. I was able to find his home address and phone number through the DMV. Luckily, it was a real address and not a post office box. I only hoped it was current.

  Jim had never been married. No bankruptcies. He’d been arrested several times, all misdemeanors. He’d bought a house a couple of years ago, and I saw that he had owned a BMW before the Audi. The BMW was an antique, a 1968 2800 CS. Several months ago the title on it had been transferred to a man named Drake Upton, who lived in Fort Lauderdale. It had sold for thirty-two thousand dollars.

  I got an Egg McMuffin to go, and headed toward Jim Ballard’s address. On the way, I stopped at the T-Mobile store and a bought a replacement for my cell phone. They let me keep the same number.

  I thought about calling Detective Craig Sullivan and telling him that Jim Ballard had tried to kill me. That’s what I had planned to do last night, but it would have been a mistake. Jim claimed my disappearance was an accident, and I had no way to prove otherwise. It was my word against his. I doubted Lucille the dolphin would be a very good witness. And while Jim was denying everything I said, he would undoubtedly spill the beans about my illicit investigative activities. When all was said and done, I would be the one going to jail. Not Jim Ballard.

  So I needed to find something on Jim myself. I had a hunch he’d killed Alison Palmer. I had a hunch he’d killed her and made it look like the work of The Zombie. He could have anesthetized her, maybe with the same stuff he’d knocked me out with, and then he could have used a small circular saw to cut the top of her head off.

  Step three: Reach in, scoop out brain.

  Step four: Reattach skull with Krazy Glue…

  It was a simple procedure, when you got down to it. It didn’t require a lot of skill. Some of the analysts on CNN were speculating that The Zombie might be some kind of neurosurgeon, but I didn’t think that was necessarily the case. You didn’t need a lot of training to cut people open if you didn’t want them to recover afterward.

  Jim was the jealous ex-boyfriend. Insanely jealous, if what Darcy Clermont told me was true. He had a motive to kill Alison, whereas Robbie Asbury, to my knowledge, did not. I needed to find some evidence against Jim and then call it in anonymously. After that, I could show up alive and claim amnesia or something. That way Jim would be behind bars, and I would walk free. It was the only way the legal system was going to work for me, the only way for justice to be administered within the constraints of the law.

  And if justice couldn’t be administered within the constraints of the law, there was always plan B. Plan B involved procuring some of Wesley West’s toys from the Vietnam War.

  I cruised by Jim’s house. His Audi wasn’t in the driveway, but it might have been in the garage. Impossible to tell from the road. Jim lived in a nice neighborhood. Lots of two-story brick, lots of palm trees. Manicured lawns, privacy fences, expensive outdoor lighting fixtures.

  I parked half a block away, in front of a property that was for sale. I called the number on the real estate sign, and the lady who answered said the house was currently vacant. She said it was in move-in condition, and that the owners were asking one-point-five.

  Million.

  Dollars.

  She asked me if I would like to look at it. I told her yes.

  I laid it on thick, made it sound as though I was very rich and very interested. I was neither, of course, but it gave me an excuse to park there on Jim’s street for a while.

  One and a half million dollars was a ton of dough, but it was less than Jim had paid for his place. Apparently the values had gone down over the past couple of years. I guessed they had gone down everywhere, even in ritzy neighborhoods like this.

  I tried Jim’s phone number, the one on record at the DMV. I didn’t know if it was a landline or a cell, but whatever it was, it went to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message. I didn’t want him to know I was
alive. I wanted it to be a surprise. If he had answered, I was going to block my number from his caller ID and pretend to be a telemarketer. I just wanted to know if he was home or not, and I figured I might be able to tell from the background noise. If there weren’t any engines purring or glasses clinking or drunks jabbering, maybe he was at the house. But he didn’t answer, so I still had no idea.

  I sat there for a while and kept an eye on his front door. I was close enough to watch the place without making it obvious. At 1:24 someone pulled into the drive. It wasn’t Jim. It was the Porsche I’d seen in Jake’s parking lot. 2FAST4U. I tried to remember the name of the guy who owned it. Cale something or another. Meade. That was it. Cale Meade. He got out and walked to the entranceway and rang the bell. Stood there for a minute. Rang the bell again. Knocked. Looked at his watch and walked back to his car.

  Before he drove away, I called the number I’d written on the back of Detective Sullivan’s business card.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  I said it deep and flat, the way Jim Ballard talked.

  “Jim?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You buy a new phone or something?”

  “I don’t use the same one all the time,” I said. “You know that.”

  “Where the hell are you, man? I’m at your house. You said to be here at one-thirty, and I’m here.”

  “I said one-thirty?”

  Anyone who’d ever dealt with Jim Ballard knew that he was a drunkard prone to blackouts. I was counting on Cale buying into the total memory lapse, and he did.

  “This shit’s getting old, Jim.”

  “Sorry. To tell you the truth, I can’t even remember why you were coming over.”

  “You’re joking, right? You wanted me to get rid of that Beemer you sold a while back.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right.”

  “So you still want me to do it, or what? Like I told you before, I’m going to need the cash up front.”

  “I still want you to do it,” I said. “Just wait there at my house. I’ll be there in a little while.”