The Midtown Murderer

by David Carlisle

  All his focus was in front of him, all his resources aimed at the here and now as he steered his Ducati down the road. He felt the beautiful balance of his weight over the tires as he rounded an onramp onto I-285. Minutes later he was lost in traffic.

  Chapter 66

  Trent couldn’t believe it was already Christmas night. Time flies when you’re adding up all the gangsters and crooked cops you’ve murdered, he thought, snuggling into a sleeping bag that he had purchased at Goodwill. He was tucked in a deep depression between the giant roots of two Magnolia trees in Piedmont Park. His toes were numb and his teeth chattered as he positioned his duffle bag full of cash behind his head as a pillow. He was trying to be invisible until midnight when his bus pulled out. He figured that he was so wanted that no cop would ever think that he had stuck around Atlanta.

  It was then that his prepaid Boost phone rang. It was Rikki’s number. He flipped the phone open. “Rikki?”

  A man was screaming. Then a gunshot thundered through the connection. A muffled crying sob-a gagged woman screaming-then grunts, a gasp. Rikki came on the line. “P-p-please, Trent, give the Kings the key.” The voice shaky and faint. “G-give it to them . . .” Trent could hear spittle pop against the mouthpiece. The fact that it was Rikki meant Chief Clay was dead. You don’t put the woman on the line to make a point with the man. You kill the man so the woman understands.

  A raspy voice came through the line. “We cross paths again, Mr. Palmer. It’s Huero Largo. I need those Stingers. Get them to me or I’m gonna start on her with a blowtorch. Toes first as I work my way up. I’ll give you a little demonstration . . .”

  Trent slowly closed the phone. I should have protected her, he said to himself. It’s all over. I failed. Well, he thought wearily, so goes it. Fatigue and cold had invaded him completely as he staggered to a drugstore store on Tenth Street where he purchased a bottle of vodka from a broad-beamed, middle-age proprietor who whistled to himself.

  Not only was he was suffering from the intense fear of the last week that his body had delayed and delayed, but now Rikki was probably dead and her image and Sylvia’s image kept blurring into an image of Mother Maria weeping profusely, and his guilt and anxiety were urging him toward death and non-being.

  On his way back to the park, he stopped under a street light near a fragile-looking old man wearing a tattered great coat. Ice crystals were snared in his hair like windy snowflakes whirled there as he rummaged through a trash bin.

  Trent pulled the prescription of Percs from his pocket and swallowed them one by one, washing them down with the vodka, unaware that the old man had stopped to watch him.

  He tossed the pill container in the snow and thought objectively about his impending death and that of Plato’s ancient dualism: body separated from soul. He thought of the body ending abruptly as Sylvia’s had, and her soul, like a baby bird out of its nest to fly elsewhere. She could only continue to exist if God existed. Let it be true, gentle Jesus, he thought, to be reborn again, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead says. Because Sylvia and I can meet again. In a newer and clearer and more long-lasting place.

  He had difficulty breathing each time he drew air into his lungs; he felt his heart laboring and sensed the concrete slab that had situated itself on his chest. My gravestone, he thought, crossing the street and pausing under a street light to examine a newspaper in a rack.

  The bold headline read: ATLANTA WAR ZONE! The front page consisted of two colorful photos: The top one was of the inferno at the landfill. Through the flames he could clearly see the shattered tail section of the Boeing sticking out of the mounds garbage. It reminded him of Shamu’s giant tail sticking out of the icy water at his SeaWorld home as the killer whale sliced back into its pool. Love you, Shamu. You’re fucking awesome.

  The lower photo was of the fiery tornado rising from the crater that was once Lynn’s animal clinic. Oh god, he said to himself, running a hand across his streaked face as he thought about Radcliff and their burgeoning friendship and how badly it had ended.

  He shivered frantically as he shuffled through the twirling snow across the street into the park. Halting there, he gazed down the ivory hillside, trying to make out the bottom of the hill. Trying to determine how far away his grave was, how many steps he had left.

  He crept snail-like through the snow, exerting himself as sparingly as possible in an attempt to preserve his remaining energy. This could be the greatest descent in the history of mankind, he thought. I am so trivial. So small.

  With both arms grasping the trees, he dragged himself down the hill in an agonizing expenditure of himself. How long have I been in the park? he wondered. No way for him to tell. His power was nearly bankrupt; his bones seemed to quake as the weight on him grew. He felt his body heat slipping away. Death is overtaking me, he realized. This is the destiny of all mankind. At least I won’t be alone.

  He shut his eyes and wheezed in the rarified air, unaware that he was being followed. Snow crashed off the crown of a tree and hit him squarely in the head. He hardly noticed as he stumbled, then crept shakily toward the two magnolia trees that were flanked by egg-shell swells of snow.

  My reward, he thought, panting for each breath as he slipped into his sleeping bag like a mummy and shut out the violence. There was no icy wind. The ground was motionless. It was frigid and silent in his tomb. He’d read that freezing to death was comfortable, warm in the end. The pills would put him out and the cold would do the rest. The proper time had come. He would die now. Sorry Sylvia. Sorry Rikki. I miss you, mom. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Good luck with that one.

  He thought of Superman flying in reverse around the world, going faster and faster, making time spin backwards so he could save Louis Lane. How he wished he could go back in time to save Sylvia and Rikki.

  The last minutes of my life he thought, closing his eyes. Suddenly he saw a pretty Latin girl, barefoot, with dark hair pulled up in a bun, wearing an unbuttoned sweater over her blouse, a bright yellow skirt, and holding a pair of slingback high heels. She seemed to be window-shopping.

  “Sylvia! Sylvia!” he yelled.

  She turned, regarding him with warm, intelligent, brown eyes.

  “It’s me, Trent!”

  Her eyes widened and she smiled. She laughed and ran to him. “Of course it’s Trent; I’ve been waiting for you day and night!”

  “Oh, Sylvia,” he said, leaning toward her and kissing her on the cheek; she smelled of jasmine and lilac, her lips seemed ripe and full of life. “I love you so very much.”

  “Trent, my honey for life,” she said stroking his cheek, “how I have missed-”

  He opened his eyes. Someone was sticking something in his mouth all the way back to his throat. Was it the barrel of Butler’s gun? Whatever it was he was gagging on it. He threw up in his sleeping bag. Someone pulled him into a sitting position and pushed his head between his legs so he could vomit. And then the thing was back in his throat and he threw up again. And again. Trent fell back on his sleeping bag gagging.

  A homeless man held a cup of steaming coffee to Trent’s lips and said in a soft voice, “Drink this.”

  Trent took a swallow and coughed.

  “Drink more.”

  A voice he knew. Anima!

  Anima leaned over and flashed his bic lighter to examine Trent’s pile of quickly-freezing puke. The dim light illuminated his shiny forehead and watery blue eyes. “How many pills did you swallow?”

  “Thirteen.”

  Anima pushed the vomit around with a stick and said, “They are all here. That’s very good.”

  “I want to die!” he said, wrapping his arms across his chest in an attempt to ward off the cold.

  “No. You need to live.”

  “Sylvia’s dead! Rikki’s dead!”

  “Not your fault, Trent,” Amima said, helping him to his feet. “How do you feel?”

  “Terrible,” he said, dry heaving into the snow.

  “Befor
e the cold kills us,” Anima said, taking Trent’s black duffle bag and guiding him by the arm, “we need to get out of the park and find someplace warm.”

  “And then what?”

  Anima prodded Trent ahead of him and said, “You think about your future and leave the past alone.”

  #

  Three month later, Trent walked through a narrow doorway and down a staircase lit with orange-colored lights and into a small jazz club on Mission Street in San Francisco. It was a small, intimate club with redbrick walls that were illuminated by crystal wall scones. The parquet reflected the light like a mirror. It was early evening, and a pianist played Latin jazz unobtrusively.

  Like any normal person he was still shocked and horrified by the whole awful, ugly, rat-trap experience in Atlanta, but he knew the importance of being able to move on with his life, no matter what had happened. And it wasn’t just talk with Trent. He had loved Sylvia, and she had died the most horrible death imaginable. After her death his therapist had taught him to ‘compartmentalize,’ and to ‘stuff it into a box.’ He chuckled when he thought of the all the gangsters and crooked cops stuffed into the box that had exploded beneath Lynn’s veterinary clinic.

  He seated himself on a barstool and ordered a bottle of Guinness from a white-coated bartender with thick black glasses. He took a sip of the heavy bitter-tasting brew and thought it was very good. In the bar mirror he could see his reflection. He was dressed in a black pinstripe Italian suit with a beautiful pink tie. A hairstylist had dyed his hair blond and cut it short. He wore black glasses and sported a gold earring in his left ear. He had put on weight and looked nothing like his Christmas mug shot.

  He was rooting through his black duffle bag for some small bills when he found the upside down five-pointed gold star he had taken from the Latino’s body. He was sipping the black beer and wondering what the satanic symbols meant when a special report detailing the horrific rapes and murders of two sisters championing woman’s rights in Ciudad Juarez came on the muted big-screen TV to his right.

  Trent wiped froth from his lips and followed the closed-captioned report. The story reveled in awful detail how the activists had been bound with belts and their mouths stuffed with wads of aluminum foil. Trent’s mood worsened with nausea as the story unfolded. Bite marks on the foil indicate that Sally and Gabby were alive when their mouths had been stuffed and that they were raped repeatedly afterwards. Each woman was then shot through the vagina with a .45 caliber handgun and left to bleed to death. The women, according to the reporter, had “writhed like snakes on the earthen floor.”

  And then there were school pictures of the women. Sally, the older, had light, straight hair, braces on her teeth, and square shoulders that made her look like an athlete. Gabby also had blond hair and white teeth and smiled so wide she looked like a young actor in a tooth-whitening commercial.

  It was then that Huero Largo’s picture flashed on the screen. It jerked Trent half around, as if with an electric shock. Largo’s shark-slit mouth was frozen into an evil smile that continued to stare from the TV. An iPhone video of the murders was recovered that showed Largo wedging his pistol into Gabby’s outspread legs and pulling the trigger. According to the reporter, “blood glistened on her thighs as bold as roses.”

  By the time the story concluded, Trent could hear the harsh rasp of his own breathing. The image of Largo had been burned into his brain so severely that he could hardly focus on anything else. Never in his life had he felt such hatred, such loathing for anyone. He had a million dollars and he’d spend every fucking penny of it searching for the bastard. Then he’d kill him if it was the last thing he ever did.

  The Midtown Murderer is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents and events are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used factiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2012 by David Carlisle

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-615-70869-0

  Cover design: Bryan Nieblas at Shatteredimages.net

  Cover illustration: based on a photograph by Bryan Nieblas

  David Carlisle is a professional pilot and an award-winning aerospace journalist. He is the author of the Falling Eagle thriller series that introduces Dace Diamond to the reader. A native of Florida, Carlisle lives in Pompano Beach, where he is at work on his next Trent Palmer thriller.

  David Carlisle is available for select readings and lectures. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact him at drcexcel@gmail.com