“She’s that Private Investigator’s assistant,” the man said. “Her name is Nikkie Armani.”
“Christ Almighty,” TJ said. “And you brought her here? Why in God’s name did you bring her here?”
“Are you kidding me? Did you not hear me? I told you she’s Derek Cole’s assistant, he’s the PI Louis Randall hired. Derek fucking Cole.”
TJ’s brow furrowed as he strained to put the dots together. TJ knew Louis Randall had hired a PI and that he had done so out of protest. From what TJ could remember Louis telling him during a phone call the two had a couple of days prior, Louis’s ex-wife worked for a PI and Louis was compelled to hire that PI. As he strained his mind, which was still cloudy from his earlier rip through his private reserve of La Salle’s wonderful mixture, the name “Derek Cole” slowly fell into clarity. “Wait a minute,” he said, his eyes growing wide and a continual flow of cognizance dispelled his mind-clouds, bringing intense worry along with clarity of thought. “I got it now. Cole is the guy Randall hired to run some BS investigation because Randall’s ex-wife works for the guy.”
“Dude,” the man said, “how much shit did you slam up your nose? Louis Randall’s ex-wife works for Derek Cole. She’s the bitch whose head one of our ‘house guests’ cracked with the shovel. Cole is the private eye who hired me as his per diem, Northeast Field Investigator. Are you putting all the pieces together yet?”
Alex Manner looked nervously between Nikkie, who was beginning to stir as she sat slumped in the passenger’s seat of Brendon Lull’s car, and TJ, who still seemed to be clouded over. When he had seen that the “hot ass chick,” as Brenden had described her, was Nikkie, he knew he had to take immediate and drastic measures or everything in his life would have quickly fallen apart. Though he had only met Nikkie a handful of times over the few months he had been working for Derek Cole, he saw the recognition in her eyes when, a few seconds after Brenden had parked his car next to his in the Rite Aid parking lot, Nikkie had glanced through the car window and looked directly at his face. He pulled out the loaded gun tucked beneath his leg, and put one 9 mm round into Brenden’s skull from a distance of eight inches. Knocking Nikkie out was his only logical next step, but what he needed to do after she was unconscious and he was behind the wheel of the recently departed Brenden Lull’s car, was a complete mystery to him.
He assumed Cole wouldn’t have left Nikkie alone and probably had seen what just went down. So as he sped away from the parking lot, he kept his attention divided between the task of driving and his rear view mirror. He breathed a single sigh of relief when, after several minutes, he hadn’t seen any car charging after him and figured that either Cole hadn’t seen what had happened or had lost visual contact with Lull’s car. But his sigh of relief, and the calming refresh it provided, was short lived. Not only had he killed a man and abducted a woman, the cut cocaine he had sold to ten residents of Ravenswood had proved to have some drastic, unknown and unexpected side effects. Things might eventually come back on him unless he found a way to clean things up.
Louis Randall told Alex that Derek Cole and his team would be in Ravenswood investigating the arson, so Alex knew he needed to keep a low profile while in town. He had considered leaving Ravenswood but there were too many clients and too many messes that his product had caused over the last several days.
What Louis didn’t know was that Alex had found a more profitable way to line his pockets and that he, Alex, was the person who had sold the devil’s snare laced cocaine to Bo Randall the night of the fire. Louis also was unaware that Alex had formed a partnership with TJ and had been selling Leonard’s cocaine formula to nose-hungry drug users throughout much of the Northeast.
For the better part of three decades, Louis Randall had been sending $12,500 each month to Victoria Crown in exchange for her silence regarding a martial indiscretion he and a Senator’s wife participated in. Each month, as he wrote his name on the signature line of the check, Louis Randall’s anger increased. He had tried, numerous times, to find something out about his ex-wife, something she wanted to keep quiet more than she wanted the checks to continue.
He had found nothing.
Though he had grown accustomed to paying the hush money and while his anger had been contracted down to a size that only filled the one minute it took him to write out the check, Louis continued searching for ways to end the charity train. When he learned about her new job, Louis began patiently plotting. And when he found out that Crown had convinced Derek Cole to hire more private investigators, his plan fell into place.
Using his considerable clout and calling in several favors, he created a background for Alex Manner, who had been employed by Randall’s law firm as an amateur investigator. The fictional background made Alex a candidate too irresistible for Cole to pass up. Alex accepted a job offer from Cole and Associates after insisting that he be allowed to work remotely. With his ability to access the Cole and Associates office whenever he wanted and with VPN access into the agency’s servers, Alex Manner was the perfect mole for Louis Randall.
But after nearly four months of monthly cash payments—each rolling up to $10,000—Randall’s mole had found nothing of value on Crown.
“You’re telling me that bitch of an ex-wife of mine has no skeletons in her closet?”
“None that I’ve found,” Alex had said. “But, there’s something about her. That much I know. I’ll find it but I don’t know how long it will take.” He didn’t have anything to chase down but didn’t want Randall to pull the plug on the arrangement. If the plug was pulled or even if Randall threatened to end the agreement, Alex was willing and able to turn the tables against Randall and blackmail him into continuing to make payments.
But as he stood behind the maintenance building on the grounds of La Salle Compounding Facility, speaking with a slightly strung out TJ Harris and with Nikkie slowly coming back to awareness, Alex Manner wasn’t thinking about his cash flow. The most recent triple kilo supply of cocaine he had received from TJ, who claimed it would bring millions of dollars to both their banks accounts, was making people do things they would normally never do. There had been murders, random acts of violence and, in the case of Bo Randall, arson. Alex was thankful that he had only sold one kilo of the three he had and that he only sold cuts from the jimsonweed supply to residents in Ravenswood. If Randall hadn’t told him to stick close to Ravenswood to keep a direct eye on Crown, the devil’s snare infused cocaine would have been snorted up noses all over the Northeast.
He was also thankful that the tainted coke delivered a surprising and useful benefit: When people were under its influences, they not only retained no memories of their actions but were easily controlled. This ability to control those under the influence, allowed Alex and TJ to use agents to clean up issues. Crown was an issue since she had brought Derek Cole and Nikkie to town. She was cleaned up by the hands of Herm Walker, who, after gratefully accepting and then using the four lines of coke Alex gave him, was easily convinced to deliver a message to Crown. Brian Mack was an issue as well. Since Mack had retired from his teaching career, he spent his time fighting the drug problem in Ravenswood. Mack was too aggressive in his battle against drugs and how the few drug dealers that called Ravenswood their office had extended their list of clients to the students at Ravenswood High, as well as to several middle school students. Mack was too smart to ever think that he could cut off the supply of drugs flowing through New York State, but he believed he could put a stranglehold on the dealers and drug supply in his hometown.
And Mack was getting close to doing exactly that.
Too close.
He needed to be quieted and Bo Randall seemed to be the perfect resource to do exactly that.
“Listen TJ,” Alex said, “I need you to concentrate here. You with me?”
“Yeah, yeah,” TJ said, shaking his head. “Sorry. I’m clear now.”
“We have two people drugged out of their freaking minds in that house over there,” Alex said w
hile pointing to one of the quaint homes a few hundred feet from where he and TJ were standing. “And, we have Nikkie Armani ready to wake up any second now. We need to make all three of these people go away, and there’s only way sure way to make that happen.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Fire burns away all sorts of clues.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“You’re going to get caught. You left your car in the parking lot. You think the police don’t already know who they’re looking for?” Nikkie’s head and face hurt an awful lot but not enough to keep her anger at Alex at bay. “Derek was watching from across the street. He knows it was you.”
“I highly doubt that since he hasn’t called me on my cell phone. And, I know he has my number on speed dial. If he was watching at all, he was too far away to recognize me. And as far as the car I was driving is concerned, it isn’t mine. I stole it from a drugged out loser in Newburgh. I do appreciate your concern, however.”
“What the hell are you up to?”
“Protecting my future. Unfortunately for you, you don’t fit into my future.”
Alex was pouring high octane fuel from a five gallon drum around the small bedroom while he and Nikkie were speaking. Nikkie, tied to the bed with thick bungee cords, wanted to delay whatever Alex was planning to do for as long as possible. She trusted Derek and believed, despite their shared confusion over the Bo Randall case, that his unique and seemingly unfailing ability to figure mysteries out in the final seconds wouldn’t fail him on this case. As she lay on the bed, her nose and lungs burning with the strong stench of gasoline stuffing the air in the small bedroom, she remembered telling Derek how all he needed was a white horse, some knight’s armor and a named sword to complete the picture.
“Yeah,” Derek had said, “that’s me. A fractured knight in shining armor.”
Alex continued dumping the can’s flammable contents onto the floor, then continued his pour into the hallway, onto the walls and into the living room. Nikkie heard him toss the empty can across the tiled kitchen floor. When Alex walked back into the bedroom, he was holding a white cloth over his mouth.
“Sure does stink in here,” he said. Though Nikkie couldn’t see his mouth behind the white cloth, she knew he was smiling.
“You’re a sick bastard, you know that?”
“Oh, I know. And soon, you’re going to be a crispy bitch. You know that?”
“So, why are you doing this? Do you at least have the balls to tell me why you’re about to kill me?”
“I’m not just killing you, my lovely co-worker; there’re two more tied up in the hallway closet. I’m killing three of you, not because I get off killing people, but because you, Cole and the two losers in the closet are a threat to me. To my freedom and to my future. You might be happy to know that one of the people you’ll be cooking with is the man who attacked Crown. Call what I’m doing his sentencing, if you like.
“I don’t have much time and I know you’re trying to delay my match strike, but I will tell you this much: You are going to be collateral damage. I don’t want to have to do this to you, but you were in that car with Lull and saw my face. Wrong place, wrong time and wrong person to try to buy cocaine from.”
Alex smiled, waved goodbye to Nikkie, then turned, shut the bedroom door and was gone from Nikkie’s sight.
ˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇ
Alex Manner walked the length of the house, through the kitchen and out onto the back porch. He took several deep breaths of the fresh, clean air, then pulled out a book of matches, struck one red phosphorus tip against the black strip of crushed glass on the back of the matchbook, shared the flame from the lit match to the other stiff paper matches in the book, then tossed the burning sticks onto the gas-soaked kitchen floor.
The fumes given off from the fuel erupted into heat and flames. The flames reached the kitchen’s ceiling and walls before the trail of fuel, which stretched the length of the house, followed suit and surrendered to the heat and flames. Before Alex finished climbing down the stairs and had reached the finely kept grass, the flames had raced across the hallway and were lustfully licking the bedroom door. Fortunately for Nikkie, the carpet installers used a thick pad beneath the bedroom carpet. The thickness and height of the carpet did two things that Nikkie, had she been in a less threatening position, would appreciate. First, the thick under-padding wicked much of the fuel away from the carpet, spread it out and limited the fuel’s off-gassing capabilities. Secondly, the height of the carpet was high enough to restrict the swing of the bedroom door. While the bottom of the door was far from air tight, the high carpet did retard the flame from quickly passing under the door and into the bedroom. The flame would breach the anemic defenses of the door soon, however. And Nikkie knew that.
Though her head and neck were still throbbing with white hot pain from the numerous punches Alex had delivered, her thinking was clear. The bungee cords on each wrist, ankles and across her midsection were more frustrating than if Alex had used thick rope or heavy-gauged wire to secure her to the bed, for the bungee cords allowed some movement. As she pulled and twisted her arm, the give of the bungee offered promise and hope. But both promise and hope were quickly snapped back into the dark world of imminent death. Still, Nikkie had seen bungee cords tearing apart under pressure and snapping when their held load’s force was too great for their tensile strength. She pulled and twisted her body against the elastic pull of the cords, desperate to free at least one hand. Above and slightly to the right of her head, was a window. And while Alex had certainly locked the sash and had pulled the bamboo blinds to a fully closed position, she knew the window was her only hope.
She needed, somehow, to reach the window.
She didn’t bother to think about the possibility that Alex had staged himself in view of the window and, should she make egress through it, that he would only reward her efforts with a bullet to her brain. No. She didn’t allow herself to think of anything but that the window promised rescue and freedom.
She paused only for a brief second when she heard the unison of screams coming from beyond the still closed, and still sealed door. She was not alone in the house; Alex had told her that much. And the screams of pain, of horror and of remorse did little to bolster her resolve. The screams cut into her soul, and filled the vacuum they created with absolute terror.
Whispers of smoke began to seep through the bedroom door and were quickly rising to the bedroom ceiling. As each stream of smoke entered the bedroom, the black, fetid smelling smoke pushed down, closer to her.
She began to feel prickly sweat erupting from each inch of her body and her eyes began to feel the sting of the superheated and toxic smoke that was now rolling in frantic swirls above her head. She shot a glance to the door and felt her soul sink when the door seemingly had morphed into an amorphous, black and grey colored void that looked more like a portal into Hell than it resembled a door. The smoke, that only seconds before was merely puffing through the knots and veins of the sold pine door, had now transformed her last bit of protection into a fuse, ready to allow a full breach.
The window.
That was her only hope. But Nikkie knew enough about fire to understand that if the window was breached, the fire may scream through the bedroom door, towards the fresh supply of oxygen, igniting the air around her and creating a flashover, frying her and locking whatever final words she wanted to express forever in her charred lungs. But this fire was still a young fire and certainly wasn’t even close to being starved of oxygen. Breaking or opening the window wouldn’t create a backdraft a flashover or any other terminal event; it would only represent her rescue. Or at least, a portal for what was left of her body to be shuttled through. The renewed force of her struggles against the bungee cords lasted only moments. The billowing, black, rolling smoke had pushed down against the ceiling and was less than a foot from her mouth. More movements, more struggles seemed futile.
She screamed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-S
IX
There were two hydrants on the La Salle Compounding Facility’s grounds: one wet hydrant—connected to the municipal water supply—near the gated entrance, and the second, a dry hydrant, which drew its water from the pond behind it, less than fifty yards from the maintenance shed. Ravenswood Emergency Service’s Engine 3 stopped near the dry hydrant, the two members, both wearing full turn-out gear, exited the back cab of the engine. One was carrying a large, cumbersome looking canvas bag and the other quickly made his way around to the back of the engine, climbed up using the engine’s rear bumper as a step, and pulled one end of a five-inch wide fire hose that was stacked atop the engine. He pulled the hose over to the hydrant, where his partner had already removed the coupling from the hydrant. Within seconds, the hose was connected to the hydrant and the engine was pulling away, dropping a trail of five-inch hose in its wake.
When the engine was within thirty feet of the burning structure, three more firefighters calmly exited the back cab of the engine, all dressed in turn-out gear and each with an air pack strapped to their backs, black helmets on their heads and alien looking masks covering their faces. The driver of the engine chocked the wheels, then climbed up onto the pump operator’s position, which was between the back of the cab and the long stretch of the rear of the engine. Another firefighter, who had arrived on-scene in his personal car, had grabbed a length of the five-inch hose, uncoupled it from the remaining hose still laying in the hose bed atop the engine, then connected the coupling to the side intake valve of the pumper.
He grabbed his radio after giving the thumbs up sign to the pump operator, and said, “Pump engaged,” into the radio. Within seconds, the hundred feet of five-inch hose that had been laid between the hydrant and the engine was charged with drawn pond water and was filling the five hundred gallon holding tank.
The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4) Page 23
