The Prettiest One: A Thriller

by James Hankins

  He needn’t have asked. The looks on their faces said it all. He had to admit that he was looking forward to leaving this place for good, too. There was the smell, of course. But for Bix, it was more the fact that people kept dying here. It was time to put the Bookermans behind them. And with Daddy Darryl in prison for the next ten years and his son dead for eternity, Bix figured they should be able to do just that, at least until the cops started interrogating them.

  Chops knew he would have to go back to Mikey’s house and clean things up before he flew back to LA, but at the moment he had other work to do. The woman could decide to run at any moment.

  He cruised down Jasmine Street. Desmond Bixby’s building looked quiet—no lights on that Chops could see in either Bixby’s first-floor place or the upstairs residence—but there was a cop in an unmarked car down the block, which might have meant that Bixby and the girl were inside and the cops wanted to keep an eye on them in case they left. Maybe the police thought they would lead them to someone else or something. Another option, though, was that Bixby and the girl weren’t inside, and the cop was watching the place in case they returned home.

  Chops turned left at the next corner and then left again. He drove halfway down the block until he could see the back of Bixby’s building on the next street over. He pulled to the curb and thought about how to play this. The girl had to die, that was certain. She’d killed Mikey, and even though he and Mikey weren’t close, they were brothers. So she was a dead woman. The question was, how to go about it? Only a sliver of a moon tonight with clouds occasionally obscuring even that, so Chops thought he could break into the place from the back without being seen. If the girl and Bixby were home, he’d kill them. If they weren’t, he’d wait for them inside and kill them when they got home. He wouldn’t have long to act. The cops might knock as soon as the couple closed the door. The problem would be if the cops nabbed them before they entered the house, which was a possibility. But Chops had spied only one car out there, so the cop inside was probably just surveilling the place and would report in if the suspects made an appearance.

  Chops slipped through the shadows of the yard abutting Bixby’s backyard, quietly scaled a short and rusted chain-link fence, and moved quickly to a window on the back of the building that someone had conveniently left open for him. Even more conveniently, someone had left a lawn chair under the window, perfect for using to climb into the apartment. Strange. But it was too weird and obvious to be a trap of some kind, so Chops stepped onto the chair and pulled himself into the apartment.

  He slipped a knife out of a sheath in his boot and walked quietly through the dark rooms, hoping to find someone to kill. He realized soon that he was alone. On a bedside table he found a photograph of a pretty redhead. And he recognized her. It was the same woman from the picture tacked to the bulletin board in his brother’s house. Different hair but the same face.

  Very interesting.

  He had been planning to kill his brother’s murderer, but now that he knew who she was, things were different.

  Where were they now? Before he died, the one-eyed guy had said he had spoken with them not long before, so they hadn’t gone on the run or into hiding by that time, despite the fact that the girl had killed Mike two days ago. Had they finally done so only in the last two hours?

  With nothing else to do but wait for now, Chops went to the kitchen. He was thirsty. He wanted to look for a beer but worried that someone would see the refrigerator light, so he decided to drink water right from the tap. That’s when he saw the phone book with the missing page.

  He took a few moments and used his cell phone to snap pictures from photographs in frames around the apartment, photos of the redhead and the guy she lived with here. Two minutes later, Chops was on the street where he’d left his car. He strode up the nearest front walk and pushed a door buzzer. He pushed it again. It was late. The occupants would be home. He leaned into the button and heard a constant buzz inside. Finally, the curtains in the window beside the door parted, and a round, cautious face peeked out at him. Chops released the buzzer. He didn’t expect the man to open the door. Who would be that stupid these days? But he smiled and said, “I know, I’m a scary-looking guy. And to be honest, I’m armed.”

  At that, the man’s eyes widened.

  “But I need to be quick here,” Chops said. “You see this phone book?”

  He held up the directory he’d taken from Bixby’s apartment. The man in the window nodded.

  “I’m betting you have the same one, right? And don’t lie, okay?”

  The man nodded again.

  “I need you to get it for me. And don’t call the cops, all right? If you take more than one minute, I’m coming through this door and gutting you like a deer, you got me?”

  The man looked like he was about to cry.

  “All I want is your phone book, you understand?”

  Finally, the man spoke in a shaky voice. “But you already have the same phone book.”

  “Yes, but I want yours,” Chops said. “And I want it now. You can just hand it to me through the window if you want. Better yet, I’ll stand back and you can toss it out. Sound good?”

  The man was obviously confused, perhaps wondering if he’d read anything in the papers lately about a phone-book bandit.

  “I need to get going here, buddy,” Chops said. “What’s it gonna be? You going to get me the phone book, or am I coming in to get it myself?”

  “I’ll get it,” the man said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Chops looked at his watch. Thirty-nine seconds later, the man was at the window again, too soon to have called the cops. Chops took two steps back, and the man opened the window two and a half inches and shoved the two-inch-thick book out and onto the porch. The window shut quickly and the man watched Chops from behind the glass.

  “Thanks,” Chops said as he picked up the book and walked away.

  In his car, he turned to page 118, the page missing from Bixby’s phone book. Chops took a moment to study the list of hotels and motels. He’d ignore hotels completely and start with the closest motels. He’d drive to the nearest one and call others on the way. In his experience, the average person wasn’t above taking a bribe, even if it meant screwing someone over. And people were more likely to screw over someone they didn’t know. And motel clerks were among those most willing to pocket some cash in exchange for information. Equipped with his list of motels and a couple of photographs of the redhead and Bixby, Chops began making calls and visits, offers and threats.

  Bix paid for two rooms at the Eagle Inn Motel. A perky young woman with a ponytail smiled brightly as she took his cash and handed him two keys on rings with big plastic tags displaying the room numbers. Then Bix went back out to his SUV, which was one of only eight vehicles in the lot. He wished there were more.

  “All done?” Bix asked.

  Josh nodded and handed him the screwdriver Bix had given him from his trunk. He’d advised Caitlin to keep her increasingly familiar-looking face in the car while Josh found a set of license plates to steal from another car and put on Bix’s Explorer. It wasn’t much of a trick, especially when the plates came from a car parked in the same lot, but at least it was something.

  They walked up exterior stairs to the second level and stopped outside room 206.

  “This is your room, Josh,” Bix said, handing him the key. “Caitlin and I will be right next door in 207 if you need us.”

  “Funny,” Josh said. He unlocked the door and they all went inside, as they had planned to do. Bix locked the door behind them. He would spend the night next door, but for now, there was something they had to do. No one was particularly eager to do it, especially not Caitlin, but they had to . . . especially Caitlin.

  Bix placed a box on the bed and sat beside it. It was the box the video camera had come in. He flipped open a little screen on the side of the camera and found the power button. The screen stayed dark for a moment, then the word Sony appeared before soon bei
ng replaced by an image of the motel room.

  Bix said, “If it was recording when Caitlin got there, it should have kept recording until the tape was full, right? So we’ll have to rewind.”

  “It looks like that camera has a hard drive,” Josh said.

  Bix looked at him.

  “So no tape,” Josh said. “It records right onto an internal drive. Here, let me see.”

  Josh sat on the other side of the bed and Bix handed him the camera.

  “Looks like there’s not a lot of battery left,” Josh said. He peered into the box and pulled out a black power cord. Then he removed another cord with several wires attached.

  “This should make it easier to see what’s on here,” he said, taking the cord over to the television on the dresser. He pulled the TV away from the wall and fiddled around behind it. Then, he plugged one end of the power cord into the camera and the other into a wall outlet. Using a remote, he turned on the TV and scrolled through input settings until they saw some kind of menu on the screen.

  “That’s the camera’s menu,” Josh said. Using buttons on the camera itself, he navigated through it. “There are several files on here, but we’re only interested in the last one, if it’s the one we think it might be. Hmm,” he said. “Okay, looks like the . . . uh, the prostitute . . . Evangeline . . . she might have been right that Bookerman had turned on the camera before Caitlin got there the other night.”

  “How can you tell?” Caitlin asked as she sat on the bed beside Bix, facing the TV.

  “The size of the last file is a lot bigger than any of the other files.”

  “As though the camera was left running for a long time,” Caitlin said, “after I . . .”

  Bix reached over and held her hand.

  “You ready?” Josh asked.

  “Not really,” Caitlin said, “but play it anyway.”

  Josh hit the “Play” button and joined the others on the bed. Bix figured he would object to another man holding Caitlin’s hand—especially Bix—but instead, Josh sat on the other side of her and held her other hand.

  The video began to play.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE SCREEN ON THE TELEVISION in the motel room faded up from black to an extreme close-up of Mike Bookerman’s face—eyes dead and black and too far apart, like his father’s, the skin the same sickly white. Caitlin gasped. It was the Bogeyman’s face, or close enough, and it wasn’t some nightmare vision or half-buried memory. It was alive this time, or at least alive in the video . . . though his eyes somehow still looked dead.

  The face disappeared from the screen, and the view swung around a room, went dark for a moment, and then the point of view changed to what was obviously from the camera’s hidden position in the closet, looking through the large peephole. In the center of the screen was the pullout sofa, on which lay a naked woman wearing only a handcuff on one wrist. The angle of the camera allowed a view beyond the sofa; in the background was the doorway to the den, where the front door to the house was.

  “Why does he bother hiding the camera if he drugs the women?” Josh asked.

  “Maybe he doesn’t always drug them,” Bix said. “Maybe some go back to his house willingly for whatever reason and have sex with him, and he tapes them without them knowing.”

  On the TV, a shirtless Bookerman walked back into view, his pale, thin, hairless upper body on full display. He took a swig from the bottle of beer in his hand.

  “Is that blood on his arm, just below his shoulder?” Josh asked.

  “Looks like it,” Bix said.

  “He’d already been shot in the arm, then,” Caitlin said. “I must have only shot him in the stomach,” she added, though a tiny little hope flickered inside her that maybe, just maybe, she hadn’t fired the fatal bullet, either.

  Bookerman’s voice came from the TV’s speakers. It chilled Caitlin. “Did you miss me?” he asked the girl on the bed, who was looking at him through glazed eyes under heavy lids. To Caitlin, she looked mostly out of it, thankfully. Caitlin wanted to close her own eyes but couldn’t. She had to see this. They all did. But did they have to watch everything? As if reading her mind, Bix said, “Maybe we can skip ahead, huh?”

  Josh hurried to the camera, hit a button, and the screen jumped and flickered as the action moved quickly. Caitlin didn’t want to see more than she had to, so she looked away from the screen. She saw Josh position his body in front of it as he fast-forwarded. Soon, though, he said, “Whoa, wait a second. Here we go. Looks like he didn’t have time to . . . do anything to her before . . . Let me back up a bit . . . Okay, here we go.”

  He returned to the bed. Caitlin looked back at the TV and saw the action moving at normal speed.

  On the screen . . .

  Bookerman said, “No? You don’t want to watch a quick video of me with another of my girlfriends?” He waited and the woman on the bed said nothing. “How about one of you and me from this morning? No? You must want to get right down to it, I guess. Well, that works for me. I’ve had a hell of a night, and my arm hurts like a sonofabitch, so I’m fine with just moving things along.”

  Bookerman took a gulp of his beer, then reached down to place the bottle on the table in the foreground, wincing suddenly as he did. He looked at the short, angry red track along the outside of his arm, just below the shoulder joint—a little furrow obviously left by a bullet. He tipped the bottle up and poured beer onto the wound, wincing again. Then he put the beer on the table and sat on the mattress beside the woman. He reached out and touched her thigh. She barely moved. Her eyes were half-closed.

  In the doorway in the background, Caitlin appeared, wearing jeans and a tight, low-cut maroon sweater. She was holding a gun. Bookerman stood quickly.

  Caitlin squeezed Josh’s hand. “That’s the gun I brought home the other night,” she said.

  Bookerman said, “Who the hell are you?”

  Caitlin said nothing.

  “Is that my gun?”

  “Found it on a table near the front door,” Caitlin said.

  Bookerman took a step toward her and Caitlin fired a bullet past him.

  “Holy shit, are you crazy?”

  “Maybe. But I’m not a great shot. It was lucky I didn’t put that right through you. Take another step and you may not be so lucky.”

  Listening to her voice on the TV, Caitlin barely recognized it. It was strong and clear, but that wasn’t what made it seem different to her. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was; it was just . . . different, almost like that of a tough TV cop.

  “I’ll ask you again,” Bookerman said. “Who the hell are you?”

  Again, Caitlin said nothing.

  “All right, then, what do you want?” he asked.

  “Let her go.”

  He looked at the naked woman handcuffed to his sofa.

  “No. Shoot me.”

  Caitlin seemed to be considering it. Instead, she took a cell phone out of her back pocket.

  “I’m calling the police.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you would have already done it if you were going to. I know who you are now.”

  “Yeah? Who am I?” Caitlin asked.

  “You’re the girl from the warehouse tonight. You’re the reason everything went to shit. Why the hell were you there, anyway?”

  After a hesitation, Caitlin said, “I followed you from the fight club.”

  “Why? Who am I to you?”

  “You’re nobody.”

  After a moment, he said, “All right, then who are you?”

  “The one holding the gun. So you’re saying I’m the reason things happened the way they did at the warehouse. It was my fault?”

  “Sure,” Bookerman said. “I got shot because of you. You were hiding and watching and you made a noise. When I turned, that scumbag pulled a piece and shot me.”

  “You already had a gun on him,” Caitlin said. “You were going to kill him.”

&n
bsp; “Yeah, but if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have gotten shot, too.”

  “Why were you going to kill him?”

  “Because he tried to sell me fake hands. Fake hands, for Christ’s sake.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What do you care? And anyway, you were there.”

  Without warning, Caitlin fired another bullet past him.

  “Jesus Christ! Stop that.”

  “Answer my questions, then. Why were you going to kill that guy?”

  “Okay. No more shooting, all right? Shit. So the guy comes from out of town. Martin says he knows him or his family or something. He tells Martin that he has a crate of stolen smartphones to sell. Martin brings him to the warehouse and he doesn’t have any goddamn smartphones. Says he had them but found a higher bidder this morning. But he wants to sell us what he’s got, which is—now get this—a bag of fake hands.”

  “Fake hands?”

  “Seriously. Fake human hands. Says they’re robotic or something. He read online that they can sell for ten thousand bucks each, maybe more. He had six in his bag. Why the hell he had them in a bag and not in whatever boxes they probably came in is beyond me. Anyway, he says that’s at least sixty grand, but he’s willing to give them to us for the five grand we were gonna pay him for the phones.”

  “So you decided to kill him?”

  “Smartphones I can sell. What the hell am I gonna do with fake hands? Got the bag right over there.” He nodded his head toward a black canvas bag on a table near the sofa. “No idea what I can do with the things. I’ll probably just dump them. Anyway, the idiot tried to put one over on me. Of course I was gonna kill him. Wouldn’t have mattered. He was from out of town, didn’t know anybody here except other lowlifes like him and me, and people like us, we don’t care if one of us disappears. Nobody would miss him. Then you made noise or something from wherever you were hiding and watching, I turned, and the sonofabitch pulled a gun and shot me in the shoulder, goddamn it. So, shit yeah, I shot him.”