Phineas Troutt Series - Three Thriller Novels (Dead On My Feet #1, Dying Breath #2, Everybody Dies #3)

by J. A. Konrath

  “Phin, I’m serious. You’re really bleeding.”

  “Okay. I got a plan.”

  At the gas station, Jack filled the truck, minding the security cameras, and I went into the shop and bought what I needed.

  “Super glue?” She appeared dubious when she took it out of the bag.

  “Just squirt it in the wound and press the edges together. Doctors use it all the time.”

  I took off my shirt, and pulled off the bandage. Jack wiped away the blood with some moist towelettes I had in the glove compartment, and then squirted on the glue.

  Maybe I flexed my muscles a little. To make sure the glue was holding, not to show off or anything.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “When I hit your shoulder, you didn’t even flinch.”

  “Pain and me, we go way back.”

  “How…” her voice trailed off.

  We were dangerously close to pity, but I knew what she was asking.

  “How long do I have?”

  Jack nodded.

  “I’m starting another round of chemo and radiation. If it works, I could outlive you.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then we should exchange our Christmas cards early.”

  I meant it as a joke. Jack and I didn’t exchange Christmas cards. Neither of us were the type. But instead of getting a smile, I saw her eyes get glassy.

  “How about some antibiotic?” I said, quickly changing the subject.

  Jack smeared on some antibiotic ointment, and slapped on a new bandage. Maybe she sniffled. Maybe I pretended not to hear it.

  “Good as new,” I said.

  Jack’s phone rang, and she picked it up while I put my shirt back on. After only speaking a few words, she hung up, her face no longer sad. It was more like stunned.

  “On his way to the oral surgeon, your brother killed two police officers and two paramedics, and escaped.”

  He’s unstoppable, Earl said.

  “Did you know them?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Good men. They had families.”

  He’s coming for you. He’s coming for you, Phin. There’s nothing you can do.

  I ignored Earl. Jack appeared to be wrestling with something, and I guessed where this was going. “Did they call you back to Chicago?”

  “Yes. With Kenny Jen Bang Ko just a few days ago, the press is calling Hugo a serial killer.”

  “And that’s your thing.”

  Another nod.

  A moment earlier, I was feeling strong. I credited Jack for that. Something about her company made me feel more than the sum of our parts.

  Now, once again, I was scared. A little boy, scrambling to hide under the bed, knowing it wouldn’t do any good.

  “I need to stay,” I told her, “find Pasha.”

  “Of course. And I’ll help.”

  “How long before you have to leave?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “If we don’t find her by then…”

  “I know. You’re staying. I’ll find another way back to Chicago. Phin… I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t ask what she was sorry for because her apology covered a whole range of topics.

  “Let’s just focus on getting my girlfriend back.”

  After ten more minutes of awkward silence, I asked, “What was with that Mr. Ayak business back at Murray’s?”

  “Ayak is an acronym of Are You A Klansman?. Hector answered back mentioning Mr. Akia, A Klansman I Am. A simple, silly way for KKK members to identify each other. Learned it as a rookie, but never knew if it was for shit or not. I guess it wasn’t.”

  The Ku Klux Klan. An American institution that predated Nazis by over sixty years. I could understand hating your fellow man. I did my share of hating. But I earned that hatred, from personally being hurt. To hate a group of people, impersonally hate them because of their skin color or religion or gender or language, was disgusting.

  I wondered, for the millionth time, what the hell was wrong with people. Must be a genetic defect of humanity, the will to do others harm. I know I had the gene as well, because I wanted to bust open the heads of every last one of these Nazi morons.

  And here I was, dragging poor Jack onto the warpath with me. A year ago I never would have asked this of her, and if I had, she probably wouldn’t have agreed. I guess we both recognized the last act of a desperate man when we saw it.

  It was a good a time as any to clear the air.

  “I know,” I said, turning to face her, “that I’ve been acting like an ass.”

  “It’s understandable. You’re worried about Pasha.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I know this isn’t how you do things, and that it’s taking a lot for you to be here, and I owe you for that, a debt I probably won’t ever be able to return.”

  “You’re not forcing me to do this. We already had that conversation. You couldn’t force me if you tried.”

  “I…” How could I put this? “I don’t have friends.”

  “You don’t consider me a friend?”

  “We play pool. Occasionally we do each other favors. But we don’t call each other up. We don’t see movies. We don’t grab a bite.” I glanced at her. “We don’t exchange Christmas cards.”

  “That’s the second time you mentioned that. I didn’t think you were the Christmas card type.”

  I shrugged. “Wouldn’t know. Never got one.”

  Jack stared out her window. It had gotten dark, and in the middle of the Great Plains there wasn’t anything to see. No lights. No buildings. No trees. Just acres and acres of nothing.

  “When I was a little girl, I was lonely. Latch key kid, my mother was a cop and working all the time. I tried to make friends at school, but girls are pretty cruel to one another, and there was a lot of name calling and gossiping. Mom told me they weren’t my friends. Sure, we saw movies together, and went to the mall, and had sleepovers. But it was always about being accepted. Not about supporting one another.”

  Jack looked at me, her face as determined as I’d ever seen it. “Friendship doesn’t make you feel weak. It makes you feel strong. Find the person you want by your side when the shit goes down, my mother said. If they want to be there as much as you want them there, that’s a true friend.”

  Somewhere in the night a coyote howled. The howl was brief.

  Like everything else.

  “Thanks for being my friend, Jack.”

  “Right back at you, Phin.”

  Then I slammed on the brakes.

  Accident, on the road right in front of us, and I’d been focusing on the conversation rather than my driving. We skidded to a stop less than a meter away from the van taking up half the lane.

  “There!” Jack pointed along the side of the road, and tires tracks led to a Dodge Ram, facing the wrong direction. There was a large man, with a gun, pointing it at someone who was obscured by the vehicle.

  Jack apparently had no more concerns about jurisdiction because she had her Colt in hand and was out of the truck before I could even get my seatbelt off.

  “Drop the weapon!” Jack yelled.

  The guy turned and looked at us. My headlights made him appear washed-out, so I couldn’t see his features, but he was a big guy. Bodybuilder big.

  Hugo?

  “Ease up there, Clit Eastwood. He’s with me.”

  Jack lowered her .38, then stared at Harry McGlade, who was standing next to the van.

  “Did you just call me Clit Eastwood?”

  “If you want to, you can call me Cock Hudson.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Jack told him. Then she glared at me. “You called him.”

  “Don’t get pissed. We needed back-up. And he caught the guy.”

  I put on my hazard lights and walked to the side of the road. The bodybuilder was a guy I knew, a Persian-American named Parviz who worked for another Persian-American named Kahdem, whom I did a job for a while back. Parviz had a stainless steel 1911 poi
nted at none other than Gruppenführer Hector Packer, who was on his knees with his hands over his head.

  “How about we take this party off road?” I suggested, seeing headlights in the distance.

  Parviz holstered his cannon and hauled Packer to his feet, dragging him to the van. Harry got in the driver’s seat, and pulled off the road, into a cornfield. Jack got into the Bronco with me and we followed.

  “You know that guy with Harry?” Jack asked.

  “His name is Parviz. Remember the trouble Pasha had, a few months ago? He and his boss helped out.”

  “That guy is ripped.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  “I mean, he’s almost unreal. He looks like he should be on the cover of romance novels.”

  “He knows his way around a gym.”

  Apparently Jack hadn’t been impressed by my biceps flexing when I had my shirt off.

  McGlade parked, and we got out of the truck and into his van. It was a cargo van, a two seater with storage in back. It was currently empty, except for Packer, on his knees with his hands cuffed behind him, and an enormous backpack, the kind meant to take on a three week hike through Alaska.

  “General Pecker, we have a few questions,” Harry said.

  “It’s Packer.”

  “Really?” McGlade raised his eyebrows and took out his iPhone. “Nope, I’ve got it right here. Hector Julius Pecker. Born in Springfield, Illinois, June 13, 1957, to parents Norma and William. Had a 1.9 GPA at Eisenhower High School. No wonder you didn’t go to college. What is that, a D plus? So you joined the Army in ’79… and left the Army in ’80. OTH Discharge. What’s that?”

  “How did you find all of this?”

  “Computers, Pecker. Welcome to the twenty-first century. All your shit is online, if you know where to look. Oh, here we go. OTH is a Less Than Honorable Discharge. Let’s see what your court martial said. Huh. Malingering. Isn’t that where you fake being ill to get out of duty?”

  “I had health issues,” he said.

  “Hmmm. Nope, you had a clean bill of health. This clearly says malingering. But I’m sure your seven months in the Army were a huge benefit to our country, when you weren’t shirking your duties. Let’s see what heights you reached after that. There was a series of dead end jobs after Uncle Sam booted you, never making more than minimum wage. Then you met the missus in ’86. A nurse. Wow, she was making triple your shitty income. I bet that bugged you.”

  “Keep my wife out of this.”

  Harry shrugged. “Let’s skip ahead. You’re currently teaching gym at the local junior high school. How did you get a teaching job without going to college, Pecker? Falsified some credentials, I bet. Easy enough to do. But let’s get down to it. We have questions. If you don’t answer these questions, you’ll force me to get nasty. And trust me; I’m one of the nastiest people on the planet.”

  “I’m not telling you shit,” he said. Then he spat on the floor of the van.

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” McGlade crouched down next to his backpack, unzipped the top, and began to remove items.

  First thing out was a large, silver plastic bag.

  “You know what this is, don’t you, Pecker?”

  “A faraday bag,” he stated.

  “Right. If they drop the big one, the electromagnetic pulse won’t fry my two thousand dollar laptop.”

  McGlade took out said laptop, turned it on, and set it next to him. Then he removed a tent, a first aid kit, a gas mask, a camera bag, binoculars, a flashlight, some glowsticks, a metal asp, a hunting knife, a fishing tackle box, duct tape, several boxes of bullets…

  “What is all this?” Jack asked. “Are you packing for World War Three?”

  “Exactly,” McGlade pointed at her. “I’m a prepper. This is my bug-out bag. Everything you need to survive any state of emergency. Floods, fires, dirty bombs, earthquakes, riots; you name it, I’m prepared for it. I’m also prepared to interrogate someone, if the need arises.” He winked at Packer. “And the need has arisen.”

  “Harry…” Jack warned.

  McGlade beckoned her over, and whispered in her ear for a moment. Jack’s face contorted in utter disgust, and she said, “I can’t be a part of this,” and left the van.

  That was all I needed. I squatted next to Packer and smiled mean. “The only thing saving you from unimaginable pain is telling me where she is.”

  “Where who is?” he countered, eyes defiant.

  I raised my fist, and Harry grabbed my hand. “I got this, buddy. Trust me. Parviz? Would you mind helping Pecker remove his shirt?”

  Parviz tore off the garment like it was made of paper towels.

  Then McGlade reached into his backpack—

  —and removed a can of rice pudding.

  “I know I’ve got a spork in here somewhere,” he said, rooting around in the bag. “Here we go. Parviz, will you do the honors?”

  Harry began to snap pictures with his fancy digital camera. Parviz opened up the can, and then used the spork to flick pudding on Packer’s face, neck, and chest.

  “What in the hell are you idiots doing?” Packer said, turning bright red. “What the hell is this?”

  Harry took one last pic, then removed the SD card from his camera. “It’s been proven, time and again, that torture doesn’t work. People will say anything and everything to make the pain stop. It doesn’t result in reliable intel, and it pretty much is bad for humanity in general. I’ve found that extortion, and blackmail, are far more effective.”

  He pushed the card into a slot on his laptop, and then hummed tunelessly to himself as he uploaded the pictures he took.

  “The trick,” McGlade said, “is getting the size right. Then you have to do some blending, correct for hue and contrast, add some fake lighting effects. I already made the templates, and I know the angles to shoot to match, so this is pretty easy for me. I don’t want to downplay my art, here. I’m just saying the final versions will look even better. But here’s the basic idea.”

  Parviz laughed over Harry’s shoulder. McGlade turned the laptop around so we could see what he’d been doing. On the screen was a naked man’s lower body, in what would be called a state of full arousal. And next to his erection, his mouth open in what looked like a state of passion, was Packer’s face.

  “That’s disgusting!” the Nazi said.

  “Looks real though, doesn’t it? Or maybe this one.”

  Harry pressed a key, and it showed a pic of Packer, on his knees, surrounded by some naked African American men who were actively showing how attractive they found him to be.

  “The rice pudding really stands out in this one,” Harry marveled.

  Packer turned even redder. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I know. Your head doesn’t quite match your body on that one. I’ll play with the diffuse glow filter. Here’s one that shows you can give as well as you take.”

  This time, Packer’s face was superimposed over a man having sex with another man. Packer was also wearing a yarmulke, with Jewish sidelocks.

  “I can stick a Torah under your arm, too,” Harry said. “Or would that look silly?”

  “You think you can scare me by showing me these fag pictures?”

  “First of all, Parviz is queer. Do you take offense at that, Parviz?”

  He shrugged. “Not at all. We fags call each other fag all the time.”

  “Good to know. Second, I’m not trying to scare you, Pecker. I’m trying to blackmail you. See, once I make the images a bit more realistic, I’m going to send them to your wife. Then to every member on staff at the school where you work.”

  Packer looked devastated. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I’m nasty, remember? We went through this earlier. Then I’m sending them to your church mailing list. You attend the First Presbyterian on Mountain View Road, correct? Won’t Pastor Rob be surprised? Well, maybe not. But the choir probably will. And that’s just the first salvo. My main target will be the
Internet. Every white nationalist website. Every racist message board. Every KKK Grand Dragon and Grand Wizard. And on the sites that don’t accept pornography, I’ll post other pictures. You at a gay rights march. You lighting a menorah during Hanukkah. And, of course, you in full Nazi regalia, something you’ve been very careful to keep private.”

  “That would… ruin me,” Packer said.

  “Ruin?” McGlade laughed. “That’s the least of it. What do you think Phin’s brother will do to you when he sees these?”

  Packer was silent. He’d broken out in a severe case of the flop sweats.

  “Are you an honorable man, Hector?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “I give you my word that I won’t release any of these offensive—yet intriguingly erotic—pictures. But if you don’t tell us everything we want to know, I guarantee that you can kiss your job, your marriage, your racist little hobby, and your life, goodbye. Do we understand each other?”

  Packer gave a small nod.

  “Good,” said Harry McGlade. “Let’s start with where Pasha is.”

  PASHA

  Pasha sat on the inflatable float that served as a bed in her makeshift prison, thinking about the outdoors. By her calculation she’d been captive for three days. Being without a clock or a window to watch the rising and setting of the sun, she’d made her assumption based on her meals. Her captors regularly alternated pancakes and sausage with turkey sandwiches. She’d been served both entrees three times, and reasoned that she was being fed twice a day.

  At first she lived in constant fear. While not physically harmed since her last encounter with Hugo—it had been horrible setting her broken finger herself without any anesthetic and using only the masking tape she’d been given—her idle time was filled with the dread that the giant would soon return. Gradually, as the hours passed, her fear became tedium, and then anger at her predicament.

  She was pissed off.

  Not only by her imprisonment, but by the humiliations and indignities she suffered. Pasha had no toilet or water in her cell. She went to the bathroom in a bucket, and another bucket was given to her once a day with soapy water and a rag to wash up. They’d refused her request for a toothbrush, or a comb, and she’d been in the same clothing since her kidnapping; clothing that was getting funky. Hygiene played a bigger part in self-respect than she’d ever thought before.