DIRTY BLOND

by Mark Terry

  DIRTY BLOND

  By

  Mark Terry

  Mark Terry

  OROX Books

  Mark Terry, 2018 (Sandy Beach edition)

  Mark Terry, 2016 (Original edition)

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

  1

  The Peterbilt flatbed loaded with explosive-filled Porta Potties roared through the park in Skokie. Behind the wheel, private eye Guy LeClare struggled with the clutch. His right arm was a prosthetic, and he had peeled off the flesh-colored rubber earlier and was now steering with the metal claw.

  Riding shotgun, Chicago homicide detective Lieutenant Sandra Beach worked the gearshift, because LeClare couldn’t handle it with his prosthetic.

  Thousands of people filled the park. It was PoliceFest, forty-thousand cops and their families all out having a good time, unaware that a madman dubbed the Chemist had filled thirty-six Porta Potties with ANFO that were going to explode and kill them all in less than fifteen minutes.

  It was that kind of a day.

  LeClare fired off the air horn. In their path, an old man in a wheelchair struggled to push himself out of their way.

  “Watch out for the disabled guy,” Sandra shouted.

  “I see him.”

  But the guy in the wheelchair was struggling on the grass, not moving fast enough.

  “You’re heading right for him!”

  “He needs to move.”

  LeClare hauled on the horn again.

  “GUY!”

  The bumper of the Peterbilt clipped the guy, who went spinning away.

  “Jesus, LeClare! You hit him!”

  “He should have moved faster.”

  “He was handicapped!”

  “It’s not like I did anything to make his life any worse. He already couldn’t walk.”

  Twenty different kinds of asshole, she thought. LeClare, you really are twenty different kinds of asshole.

  #

  The Ronin watched the footage later on TV from his hotel room. All the local shows covered it, it made CNN, even Fox News, although Fox seemed to get some of the information wrong. Fox said the woman was a cop named Harriet McCade and the man was a Lieutenant Jeff Beach. One of their pundits kept referring to her as Dirty Harriet.

  The Ronin had not completed his entire assignment. The first three had been fortuitous and relatively straightforward for a man of his experience and skills. When the Chemist started killing people using Botulinum toxin, it was an easy adaptation.

  In his suite overlooking Lake Michigan, the Ronin turned away from the drama on TV and opened his laptop computer, scanned his thumb and plugged in his password. Once in, he went online and pulled up the file on his fourth target.

  This would be very hard indeed.

  #

  As Guy steered the Peterbilt out of the park, Sandy noticed a fingerprint on the rearview mirror. The Chemist had been so careful, so brilliant, so devastatingly evil—had he really screwed up this late in the game?

  Rolling down the window, she used the eye shadow from her purse to dab at the print. It wasn’t perfect, but not bad, considering she was pretending to be a fingerprint specialist while trundling along at twenty-five miles per hour in a Peterbilt flatbed truck loaded with enough ANFO to blow up a square mile of Chicago suburb.

  Her phone buzzed. “Beach.”

  “Jim Cataline told me to call you. I’m Dalton Briggs from Eagleside Treatment. You’re bringing a bomb to my plant?”

  “That’s the idea, Dalton.”

  She argued with him for a minute, demanded the relevant information, got it and clicked off. She returned to the fingerprint.

  BWWWAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNN!

  The damned air horn again, followed by a high-pitched shriek. It was an old woman, leaping as nimbly as a gazelle away from their path.

  A wounded gazelle.

  “Old lady,” Guy said. “I think I missed her. Mostly.”

  “LeClare, you need to—“

  “Turning onto Pratt. It’s going to be tight. Hold on.”

  The truck ricocheted off two parked cars, ramped up over the curb, squealing onto the pavement, and careening toward an office building.

  “Well, crap on a crispy cracker,” LeClare shouted, battling the steering wheel. The flatbed brushed a brick wall, veered past, straightened.

  Sandy Beach wondered briefly how much vibration and impact the Porta Potty bombs could take before she and LeClare became greasy smears on the streets of Skokie. Screw it, she thought, and went back to work on the mirror.

  LeClare needed help shifting. She locked her hands on the knob. “Say when.”

  “Okay, gas … clutch … neutral … shit!”

  Hamlin was clogged with cars.

  LeClare stood up on the brakes. Rubber shrieked on pavement. The truck vibrated, but didn’t seem to slow one damn bit.

  “Hand brake!” LeClare shouted.

  Through the window Sandy saw the rear of the trailer sliding, jackknifing. She thought, Oh shit, we’re going to die.

  Followed instantly with, Dammit, I hope the rearview mirror doesn’t get knocked off.

  “Put it in gear!” LeClare screamed, his voice sounding like a little girl’s.

  Sandy jammed the shifter, the truck shook, then lurched forward. The trailer rocked, tilted, straightened.

  Heart hammering, she stared at the cars blocking their route. “Guy!” she pointed.

  LeClare steered the rolling bomb onto the beautifully manicured lawn of an office complex, sod shooting up beneath the wheels, sprinkler heads crunching. Straight for a fence.

  “LeClare…”

  “Don’t worry. I do this all the time in Grand Theft Auto.”

  The truck exploded through the fence, tore through a loading area. They shifted down, took a sharp turn.

  Sandy stared at the countdown clock. Minutes. They would never make it.

  #

  The Ronin used the El, got out of the blueline station on Monroe, walked up the steps. There it was, four blocks away, the Makatashi Building, thirty-five stories of blue glass and steel. The Makatashi Corporation’s American headquarters. Thirty-three billion dollars (U.S.) in revenue annually. It had its tentacles in heavy manufacturing, computer hardware, software, biotechnology, agribusiness and dozens of others. In Japan it was one of the major military hardware contractors.

  The Chief Executive Officer, Ichiro Makatashi. Sixty-two years old. A business genius. Married with three children and four grandchildren. He split his time between the U.S. and Tokyo.

  For the next three days, Ichiro Makatashi would be doing business from his penthouse apartment on the top floor of the Makatashi Corporation building.

  The clock was ticking.

  #

  Guy said, “I have an idea.”

  Sandy thought, Never a good thing.

  LeClare roared the truck left and ran parallel to a set of train tracks, crunching along the gravel, a cloud of dust kicking up behind them.

  They shifted to second, then third, then fourth.

  The truck rumbled and roared and rocked, already listing at a five percent grade like a drunken sailor.

  LeClare started humming. It took Sandy a second to recognize it. “Convoy” by CW McCall.

  Really? Really, LeClare?

  She asked for his phone.

/>   “My new one? Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  “It’s in my right pants pocket. Help yourself.”

  Sandy started to dip into his pocket, then realized that, one, he was a pervert, and two, he wasn’t going to keep a phone in his right-hand pants pocket when he had a right prosthetic hand.

  “It’s at the bottom. Reach around for it.”

  “How could you put anything in your right pocket with a mechanical hand?”

  “Caught me. It’s in my jacket.”

  “Asshole.” She found the smartphone. “How do I use the camera?”

  They wrangled back and forth about the phone. Finally, LeClare took back the phone … and simultaneously steered the truck up onto the tracks. The vibrations of the wheels on railroad ties sent up temblors through the truck.

  Sandy felt she was having her teeth drilled with a jackhammer.

  “Downshift!” LeClare screamed.

  But their timing was off. The engine stalled out with a chugging cough.

  Sandy glanced at the clock. They’d never make it.

  And then they saw the train coming.

  Of course, Sandy thought.

  #

  With every second counting, LeClare tried to re-hotwire the truck.

  Sandy fumbled LeClare’s phone, brought up the camera menu, and framed the fingerprint.

  The train blew its whistle. Wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

  “Are we in second gear?” LeClare said.

  Sandy snapped the picture and accessed the phone’s email.

  “Sandy! Put it in second!”

  Sandy glanced up, saw the train was a Metra, a commuter, people crammed like so many pickles in a jar. All of whom were going to die in less than thirty seconds. Pureed pickle people, all over Skokie.

  She grabbed the shifter.

  “The clutch, LeClare!”

  He popped the clutch, Sandy jammed it into second, and the truck sprang to life with a throaty dragon bellow.

  The train engineer hit the brakes, metal on metal screaming as tons of train tried to stop on a dime.

  LeClare revved the engine, slammed it into first, rolled that bastard off the tracks, down the incline and into the street.

  The train hurricaned past.

  LeClare plowed onto St. Louis, nearly empty of cars. It was wide open from here to the sewage treatment plant.

  Sandy picked up the phone, typed in the email of her crime scene guy, White, and off sped the fingerprint with a single word: Chemist.

  Since she had the phone, she dialed her partner, Orville, and got a “currently unavailable” message. She tried it again.

  And again.

  What the hell?

  Orville was their ride out.

  Ditch the truck. Jump into Orville’s car. Get at least a mile away before the Porta Potties went boom.

  Sandy checked the clock. Two minutes left.

  They’d never get away.

  “You need to get out, LeClare.”

  “Get out of what?”

  “The truck. I can’t get in touch with Orville. If all the streets are as backed up as Hamlin, he’s not going to be there on time.”

  Guy shot her a withering look, or as withering as a one-armed dumbass pervert with a mechanical hand could manage.

  “So we just leave the truck here, in the street?”

  “No. I’m taking it to the plant by myself.”

  “Gotcha. Nice knowing you, Sandy.”

  He swung open his door.

  #

  Of course, he didn’t.

  “Remember the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?” Guy said. “Where they both run out of the building to face the entire Bolivian army, and then the movie freeze-frames because you know they’re both going to die?”

  “Yeah,” Sandy said.

  “Wasn’t that the coolest?”

  #

  The Eagleside sewage treatment complex was a sprawling mass of concrete, brick buildings, and filtration ponds.

  Trees had been planted to beautify it, if that was the right word, but they didn’t hide the smell.

  Giant vats of Chanel No. 5 couldn’t hide the smell.

  They raced down the access road toward eight settling tanks. “There?”

  “There,” Sandy pointed. It was a rectangular manmade lake. Turds and other delights floated on the surface like frogs on lily pads.

  “What should we do?” LeClare asked. “Jump out and let the truck coast in?”

  “That’s probably the best way.”

  “Should I slow down?”

  “Why bother? If we hurt ourselves, we won’t feel it for long.”

  LeClare steered the Peterbilt at the sludge-filled water. They pushed their doors open. The truck was rolling along about twenty miles per hour, fast enough to grind you into rolling bits of human sausage.

  “If there’s an afterlife,” LeClare said, “you owe me some sex.”

  “Un-fucking-likely,” Sandy said, and jumped.

  The truck rolled on.

  Sandy rolled too, cartwheeling along the pavement. Her ankle howled in protest. Her left hand scraped along the pavement, leaving skin behind.

  She sat up, her body hurting in a million new and creative ways. Her head hurt. Her ankle hurt. Her knees hurt. Her hand hurt.

  Oh hell, everything hurt.

  Off to her left, LeClare, screaming, came up out of the filtration pond like the Creature from the Gross Lagoon.

  Only seconds to go. Nobody would die when the truck exploded.

  Nobody but the two of them.

  And then the helicopter appeared overhead.

  2

  Sandy

  Two days later.

  Here’s the thing. I headed a hundred-plus member task force to bring down the poisoner who was terrorizing Chicago, the one who called himself the Chemist. Hundreds of people died from botulin poisoning. An entire SWAT team was wiped out. My partner was murdered in the process, my fiancé ended up in the hospital in a coma, I survived several attacks on my life, including a bomb that would have killed thousands of people.

  But I still had to do paperwork.

  Strictly speaking, even as a lieutenant, I could have foisted some of the reams of reports that needed to be written, collated and filed onto some underling.

  So I did.

  But ultimately I had to go through all of it and write my own reports.

  Realistically speaking, I was on administrative leave while the aftermath of, well, everything, was documented. But my captain and Superintendent Barry Kaughman had made it quite clear that although I was behind a desk or at home and not on the street, I had to make sure the Chemist task force was wrapped up with a bow, all the i’s dotted, t’s crossed, and whatever clichés the brass could come up with to say, “Lieutenant Sandra Beach, chain yourself to the computer and file paper until your eyeballs bleed.”

  The glamorous life of a hotshot homicide detective.

  I was currently in a conference room with thirteen boxes of paperwork. Big boxes. Really big boxes. Many dead trees. A lot of this was in the computer system, but I still needed to go over the notes from various members of the task force and make sure everything was in order before they all got filed, distributed, and the inevitable civil lawsuits, complaints, and finger-pointing commenced. The sewage treatment center seemed quite intent on suing the CPD for blowing a big hole in their facility.

  So I welcomed the polite knock at the door.

  The guy there stood a smidge over six feet, had thick wavy brown hair, electric blue eyes, and managed to look both wiry and strong. He was good looking in a beat-up sort of way. He wore court shoes, blue jeans and a tight black T-shirt with U.S. Army Marathon written on it. He wore a handgun in a holster off his right hip. I noticed that the T-shirt fit him very well.

  “Can I help you?” I sa
id.

  He smiled and it was a great smile, one that made his rough-around-the-edges look all the more appealing. “I hope so. You’re Lieutenant Sandra Beach?”

  “Guilty.”

  “Did your mother have a sense of humor or is that a married name?”

  “Both. You are?”

  He handed me a badge folder. It said Dr. Derek Stillwater, Department of Homeland Security.

  Handing it back to him, I said, “You’re late to the party, Doctor. We’ve already solved the case.”

  “Ah. Well, actually, I’ve been here the whole time. I came in with the FBI’s HMRU, but we decided Nick Bailey would be the liaison with the CPD.”

  I flushed. FBI Special Agent Nick Bailey, part of the Hazardous Materials Response Unit, was what one could euphemistically call “as hot as a supernova.” He knew it, and I knew it, and we almost consummated it on my desk. Stillwater caught the flush, cocked his head and suppressed a little grin.

  Bastard.

  “What do you want, Doctor?”

  “Overall, I think you did a great job—“

  “You came in here to congratulate me?”

  He sighed. “I’m not here to criticize you, if that’s the second part of what you’re thinking. But I’ve been working closely with the CDC on this case. As you know, they were collecting all the patient lab results and interviewing survivors and family members to help locate the epicenters of the poisoning.”

  Stillwater still stood in the doorway, very close to me. I stepped out of his orbit, frowning.

  “Yes, okay, fine. Why are you here?”

  Stillwater took a deep breath. He glanced at a rugged-looking black watch on his wrist. At the same time, I noticed black beads he wore around his neck and a silver metal chain that disappeared beneath his shirt. The beads were a little different for a Fed and I wondered what they were all about. “Look, it’s almost noon. Why don’t I take you out to lunch and explain what’s going on. At the very least you can take a break from all the paperwork.” He gestured at the table.

  “It has to be done.”