J.A. Konrath / Jack Kilborn Trilogy - Three Scary Thriller Novels (Origin, The List, Haunted House)

by J. A. Konrath

  “Come on, man. You’re part of this. You have to contribute.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You gonna pay for your plane ticket with a Luny Frog?”

  “I have some cash. It’ll be fine.”

  They didn’t push it.

  The cab stopped at a 24 hour department store, and Tom went in and bought a portable laptop, extra batteries, and a Wifi card. He also got a fireproof lock box, and a replacement inflatable donut for Roy. As they drove to the airport, Tom used a credit card to activate a new wireless Internet account. A few moments later, he was surfing the Cook County database.

  “Dammit. I don’t have my birth certificate on me. I need the birth number.”

  “Got mine.” Bert reached into his pocket and took out a blue piece of paper. Tom clicked on SEARCH and typed in 112-72-0040705. Bert’s info came onscreen. Since Bert was number 6, and Jessup was 5, Tom typed in the same number minus two— 112-72-0040703.

  “William Masterton. I’m guessing this is Shakespeare.”

  “Who’s next?”

  Tom checked out number 3. “Joan DeVilliers. Joan of Arc.”

  The person right before her was Robert Mitchell—Robert E. Lee, the cop who was impaled last year in Nashville. A damn shame. They sure could have used him right now.

  “Who’s number 1?”

  “Abraham Wilkens. Lincoln. Okay, those are the good guys. Let’s see about the enemy.”

  Tom used the same trick, counting up instead of down, and found out Vlad the Impaler was number 8 and really named Victor Pignosky. Arthur Kilpatrick came next, and then Jack Smythe, the Ripper.

  All of the players now had names. It was just a question of finding them.

  Roy frowned. “I think my donut has a hole in it.”

  “Duh. Every donut has a hole in it.”

  “Ha ha, Einstein. I mean I’m leaking air.”

  “You probably don’t have the nozzle in right. Let me see it.”

  Roy passed it to Bert, and Tom went back to the lap top. He started with Joan. Harold had mentioned she was a Hollywood producer. Tom tried the online Yellow Pages for LA and found over thirty listings for DeVilliers.

  Switching tactics, he got on an engine that searched magazines, limiting his field to ENTERTAINMENT. He discovered an article in Variety that mentioned Joan DeVilliers and her company, JDP. Back to the Yellow Pages, and he had a phone number. Tom saved the page.

  Next up was Abe. Harold had said he was a used car salesman in Nebraska. Tom tried a meta-search engine this time, using the words USED+CARS+ABE+NEBRASKA.

  The first hit was Honest Abe’s Used Autos. It was located in Lincoln, of all places. There was a large, captioned picture of Abe Wilkens, complete with beard and stovepipe hat, standing in the middle of a car lot. Did the guy know, or was he just playing up the obvious resemblance? Tom saved the info.

  Shakespeare was problematic. Tom knew that he wrote ad copy, and that he got good grades in college, but that was it. Without a state or town, it would require some thinking to track him down.

  “You have to push the nozzle all the way in, so it’s flush.”

  Bert handed the donut back and Roy took a minute to adjust it to the proper position.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  How about that? Tom grinned. Actual civility.

  “Next time push the nozzle in.”

  “I pushed the damn nozzle in.”

  “All the way.”

  “Maybe I should push your fat head into your neck, all the way.”

  “Don’t get mad at me because you’re too dumb to blow up a stupid tube. The instructions must have been killer: step one—blow it up, step two—push the nozzle in.”

  The cabbie was all too happy to spit them out at the ABQ Sunport. Tom tipped the driver exceptionally well. The group spent a good twenty minutes checking various terminals before finding a flight back to O’Hare. Before boarding, they commandeered a nice quiet table at a deserted cafe and tore into Bert’s luggage.

  “Easy! Please!”

  Bert played the frantic mother hen, gingerly putting the bubble wrap around each lure as fast as Roy and Tom could open them up.

  “Hey, Bert.” Roy tossed him a feathered lure with the colorings of a mallard. “Duck!”

  “Can we be mature about this, please? This all represents a rather large investment on my part.”

  “Okay, let’s talk street value. How much is all this crap worth?”

  “Current price guides put the collection at slightly over five hundred.”

  “Not how many—how much?”

  “That is how much.”

  “Five hundred dollars?”

  “Five hundred thousand dollars.”

  Roy and Tom looked at each other, then back at Bert.

  “You got a half a million in these two suitcases?” Roy’s voice was loud and squeaky.

  Bert continued to wrap. “Yes. So please be gentle with them.”

  “Hold on. Time out.” Roy made a T with his hands. “You got to tell us how you wound up with half a mil in old hooks.”

  Bert sighed, looking annoyed. “When I got out of college, my dad gave me a check for fifty grand. I made some investments. In a few years, I was worth somewhere in the area of eight million dollars.”

  Roy whistled. “That’s a nice area.”

  “I had a big place, some cars. But all of my money was tied up in the market. It’s not like I had eight million in a bank account someplace. Turns out, that’s what I should have done. On October 27th, 1997, the market dropped 554.26 points. A 7.2% drop.”

  “That’s not too bad. Seven percent.”

  “That’s not quite how it works, Roy. It was the biggest crash in history. I lost everything.”

  “Everything? How?”

  “Most traders diversify—they put money in a little bit of everything to hedge their bets. If gold drops, corn will protect them. But I didn’t do that. I wasn’t an investor. I was a niche trader. At that time, I had everything in technologies. They took the first hit, and dropped like crazy. I refused to sell, believing I could weather it. But there’s a stampede effect. One person gets scared, the rest jump on the bandwagon. In a few hours, every one of my stocks became practically worthless. By the time they shut the market down, I had about fifty grand to my name. The next day I lost that, along with the house and the cars.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I had to borrow money from my father. I think it delighted him. Ever since I was a kid, he was trying to force me to be a scientist like him. When I decided to become a trader rather than a physics professor, it royally cheesed him off. It cheesed him off even more that I was so successful. I borrowed the money from him on the condition that I enroll in the graduate physics program at NYU. Instead, I took it and ran.”

  “And the lures?”

  “I wound up in Wisconsin. After finding an apartment and getting a cheap car, I only had about twenty grand left. I didn’t want to go back to the Market, so I did a little antique buying and selling to make ends meet. The biggest profits I made were on lures. You could find a Creek Chub Injured Minnow, new in the box, at an old bait shop for five bucks, then sell it for forty on the internet. As I made money, I bought more expensive lures. And now here I am, in a New Mexican airport, winding bubble wrap around my net worth while you two make fun of me.”

  “And your dad?” Tom asked.

  “I repaid the loan, but haven’t talked to him in two years.”

  They finished sorting though the first bag and began on the second. Tom had no idea what a tracer looked like or how big it was. While Roy continued to unwrap lures, Tom went through Bert’s toiletry bag. He found a toothbrush, a soap case, toothpaste, deodorant, another deodorant…

  “Sweating problem?”

  “Hmm? That one’s not mine.”

  Tom popped the cap. A green stick stared up at him, smelling of pine. He tried to turn the dial on the bottom, but it didn’t budge. Usin
g his fingernails, Tom pulled out the sliver of green and peered underneath, finding an electronic gizmo.

  “Unless antiperspirants have become very high-tech, I think we found our tracer.”

  He shook the contents onto his palm. It was a small bundle of wires attached to a circuit board.

  “So that little thing can be tracked by satellite?”

  “It’s like a mini cell phone. Probably transmits its location every couple of minutes.”

  “Why didn’t the Foxhound pick it up?”

  “The Foxhound scans from fifty megahertz up. Cell phones transmit below fifty megahertz. I thought everyone knew that.”

  “Smart ass. So now what? Want to slip it in the pocket of some tourist going to Germany?”

  Tom pulled the lead terminal from the lithium battery, effectively shutting the device off.

  “I think I’ll save it. You never know.”

  Tom and Roy helped Bert close up his suitcases. They took one more quick tour around the airport to make sure they hadn’t been followed, and then went into the men’s room. In the last stall, Tom wrapped his and Roy’s revolvers in toilet paper and locked them in the fire box he’d bought at the department store. He wasn’t sure if it was X-ray proof or not, anymore than he was sure if luggage was X-rayed at all. He figured he had a 50/50 chance of it getting on the plane. The only other choice was ditching the guns, and after the last few days Tom didn’t want to be unarmed for any longer than necessary.

  They went to the front desk and checked Bert’s luggage and the box without incident. The steward announced their flight was boarding, and when Tom finally got in his seat he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

  “Hey, Tom.”

  He peeked at Bert with his left eye. “What?”

  “What do you think will happen to all of those ostriches, now that Harold’s gone?”

  “I have no idea. The state will do something with them. A zoo. Sell them. Have a cookout. I don’t know.”

  “Poor things.”

  Tom closed his eyes again. Funny that Bert should be worried about the birds. Especially when there were so many other things he ought to be worried about.

  Tom cracked open a window, even though the weather was too cold for it. They’d cleaned up as best they could when they arrived at O’Hare, but they had no change of clothing and the last time any of them showered was Roy’s place two days ago. Even with a liberal application of Bert’s deodorant, Tom was feeling a bit rank.

  They were on I-55, headed for Springfield and former Senator Phillip Stang. The trip was long and boring—there was nothing in the way of scenery but flat, featureless cornfields, and the radio was off limits because of an earlier Roy and Bert power struggle for control.

  The only good thing that happened within the past 48 hours was avoiding arrest for smuggling the guns onto the plane. That little trick went off without a hitch, and Tom felt a lot safer with the Smith and Wesson in his shoulder holster.

  “How much further?” Bert asked. He’d asked that no less than fifty times.

  “How many times you gonna ask that?” That had been Roy’s answer for each of the fifty.

  “About as many times as you complain about your ass hurting.”

  “Springfield is coming up, next exit.”

  Three hours in the car and Tom’s ribs were screaming at him, but that wasn’t nearly as bad as the mental anguish he’d suffered, driving with Bert and Roy.

  Stang didn’t live in Springfield itself. His place was along Rt. 29, on the outskirts. They had to go through the town to reach it, and Tom was surprised to see how little it had changed in fifteen years.

  Springfield was the resting place of Abe Lincoln, a status that led to its prosperity in the middle of nowhere and its being declared the state capitol. Like a mini Washington DC, the town was packed with monuments and historic sites, and a field trip staple for just about every Jr. High School in Illinois.

  Tom remembered his trip fondly—not for the boring visits to Lincoln’s tomb or the State Capitol, but because he’d gotten to second base with Shirley Valezquez when they strayed away from the tour group.

  He ran into Shirley a few years ago. Married, kids, successful. Like so many of his peers. Tom could add a poor social life to his list of inadequacies. Perhaps after he went into politics he would find the right woman. He snickered, wondering which was the more realistic of the two.

  Tom pulled the rental car into a fast food place. After filling their stomachs with grease, they climbed in the car again—Bert in front, having called shotgun—and headed for the Stang Estate, unannounced.

  It looked like another Springfield monument, columns and carefully trimmed bushes and marble sculptures and fountains, visible from a mile away due to the flat terrain and lack of trees. As expected, there was a gate blocking the driveway. The small brick guardhouse wasn’t occupied. Tom blew the horn.

  A groundskeeper, complete with pruning shears, walked down the driveway and peered at them through the wrought iron.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re here to see Mr. Stang.”

  “He isn’t seeing anyone.”

  “Tell him it’s Mankowski and Blumberg.”

  “Mankoberg and…?”

  “Just say Jefferson and Einstein.”

  The man nodded and walked off. Minutes passed. Tom became increasingly uncomfortable. The mansion had two floors and a dozen windows facing the driveway. If Jack were waiting in one of those rooms with a rifle…

  The gate made a clanging sound and began to roll backwards. Tom recovered from the brief shock and drove up to the house, parking in front of a six car garage.

  “Is anyone else a little intimidated?” Bert asked.

  They didn’t answer. The front doors were cathedral style, double height, surrounded by ornate bay windows. They opened before Tom could knock.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen.” A man, young and big-shouldered, wearing a trendy black suit. He had a broad, dark face, and a flat nose. American Indian, Tom guessed. “I’m Mr. Stang’s assistant, Jerome. He’s waiting for you in the drawing room. This way, please.”

  Jerome trotted through the gigantic foyer, past a wall-sized aquarium, and up the grand spiral staircase that seemed to be a standard in every mansion. They followed, feet sinking inch-deep into expensive carpet, large, dramatic paintings of battle scenes facing them on the stairway wall. Tom could take or leave art, but he found these repellant. They depicted ancient war atrocities—French revolution beheadings, Indian massacres, feudal disemboweling. One particularly offensive wood cutting reveled in a landscape of impaled bodies, some long dead and some still struggling on the stake.

  “All originals.” Jerome smiled mildly at Tom’s distaste. “That particular piece dates back to the fifteenth century.”

  “It’s adorable.”

  They strolled down a long hallway, coming to a halt at an intricately carved door. Jerome held it open for them.

  Phillip Stang was in a king-sized bed, sitting up against a massive wooden headboard shaped like a setting sun. To his left were several large pieces of medical equipment, tubes extending to each of his arms. The machines chugged away with a faint, locomotive sound.

  “Is there anything else, sir?”

  “Thank you, Jerome.”

  The door closed behind them.

  “Welcome to the drawing room, gentlemen. I hope none of you are put off by the pun. I’d prefer to see you under normal circumstances, but my poor, overworked kidney needs a weekly dialysis boost. Come closer.”

  Tom moved to the side of the bed, regarding the old man. He was like a white raisin—small, bald, wrinkled. Late seventies, Tom guessed. A gnarled hand picked up a remote control and turned off the big screen television playing across the room.

  “Amazing.” Stang had small, blue eyes, and they darted over Tom’s whole body, taking everything in. “This is the first time I’ve seen you as an adult. You announced yourself as Jefferson, so you must know. What do yo
u think? Pretty impressive work, I may say.”

  “We just visited Harold. He told us a lot.”

  “Harold? How is the old workhorse?”

  Tom watched his face closely. “He’s dead.”

  Stang smiled. “He lived a long life. These things happen.”

  “You’re the one that killed him.” Bert pushed Tom aside and got in Stang’s face. So much for playing it subtle.

  “Ah, Albert. I’ve followed your life with semi-interest. Shame about the stock market. What is it you’re doing now, selling old worms and such? A disappointment. But let’s try to be civil, shall we?”

  “When did murder become civil?”

  “You must be Detective Lewis. Oh, pardon me, you’re not currently a detective, are you? I believe you’ve been suspended. Tell me, is your mother still working at that grocery store on Clark? She walks home, right? Even after the late shift? Dangerous, at night.”

  Tom had to hold Roy back. Stang’s thin mouth twisted into a small smile.

  “Let’s come to an understanding here, gentlemen. You’ve apparently put two and two together, but I have no idea what you thought you’d accomplish visiting me. You two aren’t even cops anymore.”

  Tom made sure Roy was calm before he approached Stang again. “We wanted to know why.”

  “Why, what? Why I did what I did, and am doing what I’m doing? Let’s say that at one point in time you were necessary to me, and now you’ve become a liability.”

  Roy made a fist. “Right now I’m liable to knock you upside your bald head.”

  “I’d sue you for threatening me, but for some reason I don’t think you will be around for the trial.”

  Bert’s face became angry. “Are you threatening us?”

  Stang smiled again, his dull eyes twinkling. “Mr. Einstein gets a gold star. I was worried I hadn’t been obvious enough. Now is there anything else, gentlemen? I’m growing tired of you.”

  Tom tried to collect himself. He hadn’t expected it to go like this. Stang had openly admitted he was going to kill them, and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it.

  “Whatever your little plan is, we’re going to stop it.”