Key Death (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 4)

by Jude Hardin

  Now I was free to move around.

  I got busy.

  A couple of minutes went by before I heard Wesley’s voice again. “Then there’s nothing left for us to talk about,” he said. “The next call you’ll be getting will be from my attorney. Good-bye.”

  Silence.

  I watched as the doorknob slowly turned counterclockwise, listened as the bolting mechanism slid out of the latch hole and whispered past the strike plate.

  The door creaked open, and The Zombie walked in.

  The tool he held looked something like a dentist’s drill, but there was a serrated blade about the size of a quarter near its motorized tip. A power cord dangled from the other end, and the whole apparatus was dotted with what appeared to be dried blood.

  The first thing Wesley noticed was the smell. The entire can of acetone was on the floor, and the air was thick with its toxic fumes. He made a groaning sound as he hooded his nose with his free hand.

  His eyes darted left and right. “What the—”

  Before he could say fuck, I hobbled forward on one leg and smashed him in the face with the butt of Jim Ballard’s revolver. I’d checked, and there weren’t any bullets in the gun, but it made a fine blunt instrument. It was dirty and rusty and I would have been afraid to fire it anyway. It might have blown up in my hand.

  Wesley’s surgical saw went skittering across the floor, and Wesley fell to his knees. I’d clouted him pretty hard, but somehow he remained conscious.

  “I should crack your skull like an egg and feed your own brain to you,” I said. “Talk about a fucking swan song.”

  His eyes were crossed. Blood and drool dribbled from the corner of his mouth. “Do it,” he said. “Go ahead, kill me. Look at me. I’m helpless, so go ahead and finish the job.”

  He paused. He dropped to the floor confusedly and sat cross-legged.

  “But you won’t,” he said. “You don’t have it in you. You’re too much of a pussy.”

  I limped backward, nearly losing my balance, and sat on the edge of the bed. The adrenaline surge had momentarily taken the edge off the pain in my foot.

  “You know what the difference is between you and me?” I said. “Besides the fact that I’m a great guitar player and you suck donkey dicks? The difference between you and me is that you’re a murderer and I’m not. I’ve killed men before, Wesley, but never in cold blood. I’m the guy in the white hat. I’m the good guy. And motherfucker, the good guy always wins.”

  But even as the words left my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true.

  We see a close-up of Mack’s right hand, his fingers rock steady and only inches from the stag grips on his nickel-plated revolver.

  We see a close-up of Rex’s hand, his fingers twitching and only inches from the rosewood grips on his black steel revolver.

  Rex makes the first move, but Mack beats him to the draw. Mack fires three times in quick succession, and each bullet hits Rex like a sledgehammer. He staggers sideways, sweeps the top of the bar with his arm, and sends glasses and bottles crashing to the floor. He twists and flails and gyrates and coughs up bloody chunks of his last meal, and finally he crumples. He collapses on his back and stares at the ceiling with lifeless eyes. Rex is dead. Again.

  A whiff of smoke rises from the barrel of Mack’s gun. He blows on it, holsters the piece, and turns toward the other zombies.

  “There’s no need for any more bloodshed. Now get the fuck out of my town.”

  The zombies put their hats on. They saunter away, single file, through the swinging saloon doors. Off to wreak havoc in another time period.

  There’s a sense of relief as the concluding music starts to play, and as the final credits start to roll. Mack Chillin has saved the day. The town is safe now. Mack is a hero, and everything can go back to normal.

  If Joe Crawford’s dad had started the car then, if we had left the drive-in theater at that moment—as everyone except the teenagers making out in the back row did—then that’s what we would have thought. That the town was safe. That Mack was a hero.

  But Joe’s dad happened to be a film buff. He liked to know who the key grip was, and who designed the costumes. He liked to know who did the sound and the makeup and the editing. All that crap. So we sat there and waited, our bellies full of generic soda pop and cheese puffs, and our sleepy young minds full of gratuitous blood and gore.

  At least the good guy had won. That’s what we thought.

  But that’s not what happened. The credits were rolling, but the movie wasn’t over.

  Mack leaves the saloon, and walks back toward his office. Some of the townspeople come out from hiding and gradually start filling the dusty street. Everyone’s smiling, and some of the men and women walk up to Mack and pat him on the back. They congratulate him for a job well done. Now they can return to their mundane and laborious nineteenth-century lives. It’s back to business as usual in Dodge City, Kansas.

  But wait.

  The zombie known as Boomer swoops by on his horse and decapitates a pretty young woman with a Bowie knife. Her head tumbles from her shoulders and rolls away, leaving a bright red trail of blood in the dust.

  Mack goes for his gun, but the zombie named Grady lassos him and drags him to the ground. We see Mack lying in the street, struggling to get loose as the band of semi-dead cannibals descends on him.

  As the screen fades to black, we hear chomping and slurping and a final, “Yee haw!”

  The End.

  In hindsight, Mack Chillin should have shot every one of those brain-sucking sons of bitches while they were still inside the Short Twig Saloon. Mack had already unloaded three rounds on Rex. So, he should have picked three more of them off, reloaded, and kept firing until the whole bloodthirsty pack was exterminated. Mack should have killed them all when he had a chance. None of them was armed, except Rex, so Mack could have gone down the row and dropped every one of them like ducks in a shooting gallery. He should have sentenced them to death on the spot. It wasn’t like there was any hope for rehabilitation. Not with those motherfuckers.

  And not with Wesley West.

  Wesley had smothered thirteen people to death. He had sawed the tops of their skulls off and scooped their brains out. He had reattached the tops of said skulls with the same adhesive he’d used to glue me to the floor, and then he had eaten their brains. No amount of psychological counseling or vocational training was going to cure that.

  I decided it was time to take off my white hat.

  I grabbed the Fender Telecaster from its stand and used it for a cane. I shuffled over to the dresser, yanked open the drawer second from the bottom, reached in, and pulled out what I wanted.

  Wesley was babbling on incoherently about something. I tried to ignore him. I hobbled to the bedroom doorway, pulled the pin, and tossed the Vietnam-era fragment grenade onto his lap.

  I slammed the door shut and limped frantically for the exit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Fortunately for me, hand grenades don’t really blow whole buildings up like they do in the movies. There was a loud boom, followed by the sound of shrapnel hitting Sheetrock. And that was it. I waited in my car for a few minutes, but there was no indication that the blast had even started a fire. I figured Wesley’s body had absorbed most of it. The police would find the Krazy Glue and the acetone and the saw and the human brain pâté, and the Zombie mystery would be solved.

  For real this time.

  The next morning, I dropped the Ford Focus off at the rental car office and took a cab to the police station. I showed up at Detective Craig P. Sullivan’s office promptly at eight o’clock.

  “What happened to you?” Sullivan said.

  “I stepped on a shell at the beach.”

  From Wesley’s apartment I’d driven to Walgreens and purchased a pair of crutches and a surgical boot and the necessary supplies to dress my foot. I’d taken some Advil, but it still hurt like hell.

  “Have a seat, Colt.”

  Sullivan was at h
is desk. I sat in the padded seat across from him.

  “How long do you think this is going to take?” I said.

  “Not long. Actually, there’s been a major new development. Just overnight.”

  “Really? What’s that?”

  “I can’t talk about it. Let’s just say Robbie Asbury might not be The Zombie after all. We still want to cover all the bases, though. We still need a formal statement from you.”

  “I thought you were sure it was Robbie. A hundred percent.”

  “I might have been wrong. It happens. Not very often, but it happens.”

  “Did Robbie tell you what he was doing in Fort Lauderdale?” I said.

  “No. He’s all lawyered up now. He’s not telling us much of anything.”

  I handed Sullivan a slip of paper. “He was at this address, looking at a classic BMW that formerly belonged to Jim Ballard. You might want to check it out.”

  “All right. I will.”

  I had a hunch the car had been used to transport Roger Englehart’s body from St. Augustine to Brunswick. The blood flakes in my little screwdriver case might have been enough to confirm it, but I had collected them illegally. Robbie’s lawyer would have a field day if something like that was ever presented as evidence in court. Better to let the police check the car out and gather the evidence the right way. There was plenty more dried blood where mine had come from.

  “So there’s a new suspect in the Zombie case?” I said.

  “Listen to the news later. You’ll find out along with everyone else. Was there something else you wanted to tell me? You said there were a couple of things.”

  I handed him another slip of paper. Written on it was the tag number of the SUV that had delivered Veronica to Dan the Van Man.

  “I stumbled upon some kind of pornography ring,” I said. “They’re using runaways. Promising them stardom and all that shit. I imagine some of them are underage. I have some digital photographs too, taken at the drop point on A1A. Just give me your e-mail address and—”

  “You stumbled upon it, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, Colt, I’ve been on to you for a while now. It didn’t take a lot of research. I know you were a famous guitar player once upon a time, and I know you were a private investigator. I know you lost your license over a narcotics conviction. I could lock you up right now if I wanted to. So cut the bullshit, all right?”

  “If you knew, why did you let me—”

  “I thought you were dead, remember? Let’s start all over. Why did you come to Key West?”

  “I was hired to investigate the murder of a man named Phineas Carter,” I said.

  I told him everything, up to the point where I left the hotel last night and drove to Wesley West’s apartment. I left all that out. I figured he would arrest me for sure if he knew I’d blown Wesley up with a hand grenade. But I spilled my guts about everything else. Everything except the sexual assault. I fudged on the facts about that night. I told him I was watching Daniel Chard’s house when I heard shouting and gunshots, followed by utter silence.

  “I waited for a few minutes, and then walked over and peeked into a window,” I said. “It was total carnage in there. Blood everywhere. I thought maybe the girl was still alive, so I walked inside to make sure. But it was too late. She was dead. I found a pay phone after that and made an anonymous call to the police.”

  “And you think someone in this pornography ring was responsible for killing Phineas Carter?” he said.

  “Right.”

  I didn’t think that anymore, of course, but I couldn’t tell Sullivan what I knew. I couldn’t tell him that Jim Ballard was the one who had blown Phin’s brains out. I couldn’t tell him without revealing what had happened last night. I figured the cops would put it all together soon enough, once they sifted through the evidence in Wesley’s apartment. I figured they would be able to trace the rusty revolver back to Jim. It must have been registered. He wouldn’t have bothered burying it otherwise. I figured the cops would put it all together, and there really wasn’t any hurry. Jim Ballard wasn’t going anywhere. He was a brainless corpse in the morgue now.

  In the meantime, the cops could round up the scumbags making porn flicks with runaways.

  “I’ll get Vice to follow up on that SUV,” Sullivan said. “I appreciate the tip.”

  He wrote his e-mail address on a Post-it and handed it to me.

  I looked at my watch. “I’d really like to hit the road soon,” I said. “Can we get this over with?”

  “Sure. Let’s walk over to the interview room.”

  We walked over to the interview room, and Sullivan taped my statement regarding the day Alison Palmer was found dead in her apartment. After that, Sullivan talked to someone at the impound lot and convinced them to release the hold on my GMC Jimmy. I drove back to the hotel and loaded all my things and then stopped at the front desk to check out. The sign beside the hallway leading to the lounge still said Wesley West, Sunday and Monday night. I guessed they hadn’t gotten the memo.

  I grabbed a cup of coffee and a bagel from the free continental breakfast, climbed into my car, and began the long journey home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  I tried to call Wanda Taylor from the highway, but she didn’t answer her phone. I left a message, and an hour later Lonnie called me back.

  “She’s not doing very well,” he said. “I had to take her to the hospital last night.”

  “You’re still up in New York?” I said.

  “Yeah. She’s been kind of in and out all day. Sometimes she’s with it, other times she doesn’t even recognize me.”

  “Next time she’s with it, tell her a man named Jim Ballard killed her father.”

  “Let me write this down,” Lonnie said. “Jim Fowler?”

  “Ballard,” I said. I spelled it out for him. “He had been looking for his ex-girlfriend, who had subleased her apartment to Wanda’s biological father.”

  “Phineas Carter.”

  “Right. Jim Ballard and Phineas Carter didn’t even know each other. Phin just happened to get in the way during one of Ballard’s jealous fits of rage. Supposedly the shooting was an accident, but we’ll never know for sure.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because Jim Ballard is dead now too.”

  “I thought that name sounded familiar. He was one of The Zombie’s victims, right? One of the recent ones.”

  “Yeah. Listen, Lonnie, this is all confidential, OK? I don’t want you to tell anyone what I’ve told you. Except Wanda, of course.”

  “Sure, man. I understand.”

  “Tell her justice was served, in a way. I can’t condone The Zombie’s actions, of course, but Jim Ballard pretty much got what was coming to him.”

  We talked music for a few minutes, trying to take the edge off the woeful situation. I told him to give me a call if there was any change in Wanda’s condition. He knew what I meant.

  Sunday morning I woke up next to the most beautiful woman in the world. I snuggled in close behind her.

  “Is that a baseball bat, or you just glad to see me?” she said.

  “You know what I want.”

  “And I know what you’re not going to get. Not for the next few days, anyway.”

  “Just this once?”

  “No, Nicholas. That’s gross. We already had this discussion last night. Now leave me alone.”

  “I guess I’ll have to take matters into my own hands,” I said.

  “You do that. I’m going back to sleep.”

  She was being extremely difficult.

  “I thought you would be more excited to have me home,” I said.

  She turned around and kissed me. “I am excited to have you home. But you know how I feel about that. Anyway, I have a surprise for you. Actually, I have two surprises.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Big surprises or little surprises?”

  “Huge surprises,” she said.


  Juliet fell back to sleep, and a few minutes later I got up and took a shower and started a pot of coffee. I was getting around OK without the crutches, but I was still wearing the surgical boot. I was on my third cup of coffee when she finally came dragging into the kitchen.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Morning. You want me to fix you some breakfast?”

  “I want my surprises.”

  She laughed. “You’re such a little boy sometimes,” she said. “All right, I’ll get ready and then we’ll go.”

  “We have to go somewhere?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Juliet took a shower and got dressed. We took her car, and she drove. As we made our way along State Road 21, something occurred to me, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner. I’d had unprotected sex with a woman I knew absolutely nothing about. I wondered how many other men Veronica had been with in the previous weeks. Months. Years. There was no telling. The humiliation of being forced to have intercourse on camera must have traumatized that little issue right out of my mind.

  Thinking about it made me furious. I was angry that I had been put in a position where I had to worry about such a thing, and I was angry at myself for not thinking more clearly. If Juliet hadn’t been on her period, I would have put her at risk as well.

  She steered into a strip mall, and parked in front of H&R Block.

  “We’re having tax troubles?” I said. “That’s my surprise?”

  “No, silly. Look.”

  She pointed at the FOR LEASE sign in the window.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Come on.”

  We climbed out of the car. It was a nice November afternoon, sunny and crisp and seventy-some degrees, a picture-perfect example of what passes for fall in this part of the country. Juliet pulled a set of keys out of her purse and opened the door, and we walked into the long and narrow space that was once a tax preparer’s office.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  “It’s a vacant store. What am I supposed to think?”

  “We’ll fix it up. This can be your teaching studio.”