Key Death (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 4)

by Jude Hardin

  Since I was in Fort Lauderdale already, I decided to drive by Pamela Wade’s place. I doubted it would lead to anything, but I really didn’t know where else to turn. I was baffled. Stumped. I found her address in my computer, used the GPS to point me in the right direction. I didn’t have the energy to pull an all-night stakeout, but I figured I could watch her house for a while and see what happened. If nothing else, it would give me some time to think.

  I made a couple of turns, and it didn’t take long for me to realize I was heading into a bad part of town. There were several two-story concrete-block apartment complexes, their landscapes neglected and their faded pink-and-turquoise facades heavily marked with graffiti. Laundry drying on the balcony railings. Plastic kiddie toys abandoned in the dirt. There were basketball hoops with no nets, and swing sets with no swings. There were businesses with security bars over the doors and windows, and foreclosed homes boarded up with plywood. It was depressing as hell. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood you wanted to get lost in at night. Or any time of the day, for that matter.

  Pamela Wade lived on one of the nicer streets. Apparently the residents were actually making an effort toward improvement. The yards were tidy, and some of the houses looked as though they’d recently been given a fresh coat of paint. I drove past Pamela’s, turned around, pulled to the curb across the street.

  It was almost eleven o’clock, and everything was quiet. I’d forgotten what day it was. I had to think about it for a minute. Thursday. It had been a long day. I let my seat back and sat there and rested for a while and watched the house. I didn’t expect anything to happen, and nothing did. I sat there for over an hour, just trying to stay awake.

  Stakeouts are the most boring part of being a private investigator, even a bogus one with no credentials. Stakeouts and paperwork. I hadn’t started working on the detailed hourly reports for Wanda Taylor yet. I was dreading it.

  I turned the radio on low and listened to some jazz on NPR. I needed coffee. There was a convenience store not far away, and I decided to drive over there and get some. Then I decided to call Juliet first. It was late, but I hadn’t talked to her in a while.

  She answered on the second ring.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Nicholas, I’ve been worried sick. Are you all right?”

  “I’m OK.”

  “You sound tired,” she said.

  “I’m OK. How is everything there?”

  “I want you to come home.”

  “I know.”

  “Well?”

  “I told Wanda Taylor I would try to find her father’s killer. So that’s what I aim to do.”

  “Are you having any luck?”

  “Only bad. I’m sitting across the street from his widow’s house right now. Maybe that’ll turn into something.”

  “You’ll come home for Thanksgiving, won’t you?”

  “I don’t know. When is it?”

  “It’s next Thursday, goofy. Brittney’s coming home for the whole four-day weekend.”

  “I might still be working on the case,” I said.

  “You couldn’t take a couple of days off, to be with your family?”

  “Wanda’s dying. If I take a couple of days off, she might never find out what she wants to know.”

  Silence. I kept expecting umpteen kinds of hell again, but Juliet kept her cool this time.

  “I heard The Zombie struck again,” she said. “Just last night.”

  “He’s on a roll,” I said. “But they’ll catch him soon.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’s starting to go to the well too often. Eventually he’s going to screw up. Most serial killers do. They get cocky, and then they get careless. All it takes is one mistake.”

  “I just hope you’re not making a mistake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. It’s late. I need to go. I have to get up early in the—”

  “I’ve been thinking about something,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I met a guy down here, a lounge singer. I went to his apartment one night and showed him some guitar licks.”

  “You were playing the guitar?”

  “Not very well. The thing is, he said I would make a really good teacher.”

  “And you’re thinking about that?”

  “I called a music store yesterday, asked how much they charged for guitar lessons. Thirty-five bucks for half an hour. Can you believe that?”

  “You would go to work for a music store?”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of doing it on my own, maybe renting a little teaching studio somewhere. Anyway, it’s something to think about.”

  “I think it sounds great. Anything that’ll keep you here at home.”

  “Sure. So we’ll talk about it when I get back.”

  “OK.”

  I still had no intention of ever teaching the guitar, but pretending to consider it seemed to be a healthy relationship remedy at the moment.

  “I love you,” I said. At least that part was the truth.

  “I love you too, Nicholas.”

  We hung up, and I drove to the gas station to get a cup of coffee.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I was still wearing the sweaty mechanic getup, so I went to the restroom and freshened up a bit and changed clothes. When I came out, I asked the clerk if he would mind making some fresh coffee.

  “You got money?” he said.

  “Of course I have money. How else am I going to buy a cup of coffee?”

  “There’s half a pot on the burner over there. Go ahead and get yourself a cup. Free.”

  I glanced over at the coffee setup. There was half a pot of what looked like tar.

  The clerk had seen me go into the restroom. He’d seen me stay in there awhile and come out with clean clothes and a shaved face. He thought I was some kind of hobo. He thought I lived like that all the time. I pulled a twenty out of my pocket and slapped it on the counter.

  “I want some fresh fucking coffee,” I said. “And I don’t have all night. You want to make it for me, or you want me to make it myself? If I have to make it myself, you’re not going to have a job tomorrow.”

  He pushed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose, got up from the wooden stool his fat ass had been parked on, and waddled over and started building a pot of coffee. While it was brewing, I flipped through the latest edition of People magazine. It reminded me how much I didn’t miss the limelight.

  Fame can suck. I’ve been there, so I know. You can end up sacrificing a good bit of your sanity in exchange for some money and adulation, and it’s never worth the trade. I’ve seen too many casualties through the years. It can eat you alive, especially if you start buying into the hype. If you ever start believing your own press, good or bad, you’re done.

  I stood there and pitied the beautiful people until the fat, rude clerk said, “The coffee’s ready.”

  I grabbed the largest size cup from a stack and filled it and put a lid on it. Walked to the counter, paid for the coffee and a 3 Musketeers bar, and left the store. The clerk didn’t say anything to me, and I didn’t say anything to him.

  I drove back to Pamela Wade’s house and parked in the same spot across the street. There was a white van parked in front of the house next door to Pamela’s. It hadn’t been there before. It was blocking a fire hydrant, so I figured whoever owned it didn’t plan on leaving it there for long. I jotted down the tag number.

  The clock rolled over to 12:01. It was Friday now. Less than a week until Thanksgiving. I sat there and sipped on my extremely large cup of coffee and listened to NPR some more. The jazz program had ended, and they were replaying an interview with an author named Laura Lippman. She lived in New Orleans part of the time, reminding me I needed to get down there one of these days and visit some old friends. And eat some crawfish. You just can’t get it anywhere else.

  Thinking about Ne
w Orleans made me hungry. I was starving. I unwrapped my candy and took a bite. It tasted good with the coffee. I took another bite, and a guy came out of Pamela Wade’s front door and walked toward the white van. He wore bell-bottom jeans and a muscle shirt and flip-flops. Long curly blond hair and a mustache. He looked to be from a decade I’d tried to forget a long time ago. I wondered if the back of his van had been fitted with velour couches and an eight-track tape deck and a minibar.

  Maybe this guy was a drug dealer. I would have bet dollars to 3 Musketeers bars he was selling something. Pamela had admitted to occasional marijuana use, so maybe it was that. Or maybe something harder. Cocaine or heroin. Or maybe he was just a friend, stopping by for a casual midnight blow job or something.

  I was thinking about following him, but he didn’t leave. Not then. He opened the passenger’s side door and got something from under the seat and stuffed whatever it was into one of his front pockets. He slammed the door shut and walked back into the house.

  I decided to take a chance. I called myself on the prepaid cell phone, and left the line open. I tore about eight inches of duct tape from the roll I’d bought at Kmart and stuck it to the side of my shirt. I climbed out of my car, looked around, trotted over to the van. I opened the same door hippie boy had opened. It hadn’t been locked when he opened it, and it wasn’t locked now. I smelled marijuana and just a hint of a woman’s perfume. I felt under the seat, but he had taken all of whatever had been hidden there. The back of the van was just a metal shell. No couches. No strobe lights or disco balls or anything. I peeled the duct tape off my shirt and used it to secure the prepaid phone to a little crevice between the seats. Now I could use my regular phone to listen in on whatever happened inside the van.

  I crept back to the Ford Focus and sat there and took some deep breaths. My heart was trying to punch its way out of my chest. I tried to relax. I ate the rest of my chocolate and drank my coffee and listened to NPR. An hour later, the seventies poster child came back out, and this time Pamela Wade was with him. I assumed it was her. I’d never seen a photograph of her, but the age was right. Mid to late forties, a little younger than me. She wore a white peasant blouse and tight cutoff shorts. She was barefoot. The hippie guy was a lot younger than her. For a minute I thought maybe he was her son, but when they got to the curb they leaned against the van and embraced and kissed. It wasn’t the kind of kiss a mother gives a son. It was a lover’s kiss, long and passionate. When it finally ended, they hugged some more and then the guy got into the van and started it. Pamela stood there and waved as he drove away, and then she walked back inside.

  Just because they were lovers didn’t mean he wasn’t a drug dealer, and it didn’t mean he wasn’t involved in Phineas Carter’s death. I started my engine. I let him get to the end of the block, and then I pulled out and followed him. I figured Pamela was in for the night now, and I didn’t think there would be any more activity at the house. Whatever Pamela Wade had wanted—sex, drugs, rock and roll, maybe all of the above—Van Man had delivered it.

  He drove over to A1A and headed north along the coastline. The Atlantic Ocean was to our right. I could hear it through the bullet holes in my passenger’s side window. Hotels lined the street to our left. Nice places with specialty restaurants and valet parking.

  I allowed two or three cars to stay between us at all times. I didn’t want Van Man to think he was being followed. Of course, he might have thought that anyway, depending on what type of drugs he was into. He might have thought government agents were watching him all day every day.

  He pulled to the ocean side of the highway and braked to a stop beside a parking meter. I drove on by. If I had stopped, he would have made me for sure. I took a left on Seventeenth, turned into an alley, and waited there for a couple of minutes. I turned around, went back out to A1A, and took a right. I drove south about a quarter of a mile, made a U-turn, and pulled to the beachside curb. Now there was a good distance between us. I could see the white van clearly, but I doubted he would notice the black Ford Focus.

  I took a sip of my coffee. It was cold, but it still had the caffeine I needed. A pack of smokes would have been nice. I could remember lighting one after another and guzzling what seemed like gallons of coffee in an effort to stay alert on nights like this. It worked, but it was a slow form of suicide. The cigarettes, anyway. I read somewhere that coffee is actually good for you. I took another bitter, lukewarm drink, hoping it was true.

  I opened my netbook. All the hotels along the strip had Wi-Fi, so it was easy to pick up a signal. I ran the van’s tags and saw that a man named Daniel Chard owned the vehicle.

  Dan the Van Man, I thought.

  He was thirty-five years old. Never married, no financial stuff, no arrests. He had a clean record, but for some reason I couldn’t imagine this guy teaching Sunday school. I figured he was into something. He’d just never gotten caught.

  I closed the computer, and a few minutes later a blue SUV pulled to the curb in front of Dan’s van. The driver got out. He was short and fat, and he wore a dark suit with a shirt and tie and sunglasses. Dark hair, dark skin. He walked around to the passenger’s side and opened the back door. A very attractive young woman climbed out. She also had dark hair and dark skin. She looked young, maybe not even eighteen. She wore tight jeans and a nylon windbreaker, and her silky black hair hung to her waist.

  The guy took her by the arm and escorted her to the white van. He opened the passenger’s side door for her, and she climbed in. He walked around to the driver’s side and talked to Dan through the window. I took my camera out of the bag and snapped some pictures, and I listened to their conversation with my makeshift cell-phone bug.

  “I thought you said there were two of them,” Dan said.

  “The other one backed out at the last minute,” the dark guy said.

  “Fuck. Then I’m only paying half.”

  “Whatever. You got the money?”

  “Yeah.”

  Thirty seconds or so ticked off, and then Dan handed the dark guy an envelope.

  “Have a good night,” the dark guy said.

  “Later.”

  The dark guy walked to his SUV, climbed in, and drove away. Dan’s taillights came on, but the van didn’t move.

  “What’s your name?” Dan said.

  “Veronica,” the girl said.

  “Let me see your driver’s license.”

  “Why?”

  “To make sure you’re old enough,” Dan said.

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “No.”

  I heard some shuffling, and then Veronica said, “There. Now do you believe me?”

  “Cool. You ready to do this thing?”

  “I’m ready. This is exciting. This is, like, my dream, you know? I’m so nervous.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dan said. “You’ll do fine.”

  The van pulled away from the curb.

  I followed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I tailed the van to a neighborhood several miles away. Once we were off the highway, I killed my headlights and followed at a distance. There was nothing but dead air on my cell phone. Dan and Veronica weren’t talking.

  The van pulled into a driveway, and a garage door opened remotely as I second-geared it past the house. There was a playground across the street. I eased to the curb and parked in front of it, hoping Dan hadn’t seen me in his side-view mirror. He steered the van into the garage, and a few seconds later the motorized door came back down and mated flush with the concrete pavement.

  On my phone, I heard the rumble of the van’s engine stop abruptly.

  “You smoke weed?” Dan said.

  “Sure.”

  “I have some killer shit a friend brought me from Hawaii. I think it might help you loosen up a little.”

  “OK.”

  I heard the van’s doors open, and then slam shut. Dan and Veronica were going inside. Now my little makeshift audio bug was useless. It was in the va
n, and the people I wanted to hear were in the house.

  A light came on in the front room. I wanted to know what was going on behind those doors. I wanted to be a fly on the wall, but it wasn’t going to happen. The only way for me to possibly watch them was to sneak around the outside of the residence and hope they were stupid enough to be in a room with a naked window. It didn’t seem likely, not likely enough for me to risk getting caught creeping the place.

  I shut my engine off. Locked the doors and cracked the windows. I was exhausted. Occasionally, a bright light would explode in my peripheral vision. Like a camera flash. It was a hallucination, brought on by sleep deprivation. I’d experienced it before. Nobody really knows why you need sleep, only that you do. To go without it for very long is detrimental to your mental and physical health. I put my seat back and closed my eyes. Just ten minutes, I told myself.

  In my dream I walked into a convenience store to get a cup of coffee.

  “We don’t serve bums here,” the clerk said.

  “I’m not a bum. I have money.”

  “You’re a loser. You’re an alcoholic and a heroin addict. You lost your investigator’s license, and you can’t even play the guitar anymore.”

  “I’m working,” I said. “I have ten thousand dollars in the bank.”

  “All you do is watch TV and drink beer and eat pork rinds. You’re a total waste of a human being.”

  “Are you going to make some fresh coffee, or am I going to have to make it myself? If I have to make it myself, I’m going to saw the top of your head off and scoop your brain out.”

  I got dizzy and fell backward and started falling, falling, falling, into a bottomless pit of cold, black tar.

  “You’re a loser,” the clerk said.

  I was still in the store, but the store had morphed into a diner and the clerk had morphed into Rex from Time Traveling Zombie Bikers from Darkest Hell.

  “Where’s Charlie?” I said.

  “Charlie don’t work here anymore.”

  Rex turned and flipped something with a spatula. Six other guys, all of them appearing to be sleep-deprived and deathly ill, were sitting at the counter staring at me. I looked down at myself, and I was naked. I was naked except for the silver sheriff’s badge pinned to my left nipple.