Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense

by Fynn Perry

  It was clear to John that some time would now pass before Lazlo’s friend would be able to take a look at the bodies. The appointed medical examiner would first have to perform the official autopsy and it was a Saturday, so there would be travel time, too.

  As he considered what to do in the meantime, his thoughts turned to Jennifer. He couldn’t risk visiting her, but he could, if he was careful enough, get a message to her. A message that would help ease her and her father’s anxiety. The news of El Gordito’s nightclubs being shut down, the immigrant workforce being detained, and possibly a double homicide being pinned on El Gordito should give them hope that things were moving in the right direction.

  He just had to come up with a way to get the message to them without actually going anywhere near the apartment where they were staying.

  It had taken John two hours to set in motion a process that, he hoped, would get his message delivered to Jennifer. When he returned to the brownstone, he found Lazlo still on the couch, now asleep. He guessed that Lazlo’s friend Tom Stevens still hadn’t called him back with the information he’d been waiting for.

  To avoid being seen by other spirits, John had possessed multiple hosts on his way to Kingston Residences and the rental where Jennifer and her father were staying, all the while checking spirit faces for signs of aggression, and mortal faces for signs of possession. Opportunities to discreetly switch hosts had not always presented themselves at just the right location and so, like a hitchhiker, some of the legs of his journey had taken him temporarily in the wrong direction before he could get back on track.

  It wasn’t until he had reached Brooklyn Heights that he had finally figured out how to get his message delivered. He had exited one of his hosts on Piedmont Street, in front of another condo building two doors away from the Kingston Residences building. The doorman had caught his host, a young woman, as she fainted upon John’s departure, and John had slipped into the lobby where he had found all he needed in reception to write a note and seal it in an envelope. He had left it on the reception desk with the full address of the rental. He hoped that the receptionist, who was pre-occupied with catching up on social media on her phone, would eventually find the envelope and have it forwarded to the correct building. The message gave a brief update and was signed with a heart and a ‘J.’ To avoid using her real name on the envelope, John had marked it for the attention of Miss Holly Gibney––a reference to a character that Jennifer had liked in a series of novels by Stephen King. It seemed fitting––the heroine frequently encountered the supernatural and was involved in crime fighting.

  Now, John was having a well-earned rest at Lazlo’s brownstone. It was a few minutes after eight in the evening when the detective was awoken by a text on his phone. Tom Stevens had written that he had just left the morgue and was on his way. He would be outside Lazlo’s house, waiting in his car, in twenty-five minutes.

  When Stevens’ gray Camaro arrived, Lazlo went out to the street and got into the passenger seat. John sat in one of the rear seats, listening in as Stevens gave the details of his examination. In his opinion, the bruising on the bodies of both chefs was consistent with them being bound and force-fed. In addition, the body of Ignacio Felix had the edge of one of his front teeth broken. The break had caused a fissure along the length of the tooth, within which Stevens had found a sample of blood together with a small piece of latex. Stevens theorized that at some point, the sharp edge of the tooth had cut through the glove and skin of one of the assailants’ hands. Blood had been drawn, and the fissure had caught a sample of both blood and glove. Despite the presence of stomach bile in the mouth, he explained that it did not appear to have compromised the blood sample. Probably because it was so tightly packed in, with the latex acting like a seal. Stevens admitted that the sample wasn’t a lot to work with, but there was now a chance of identifying the killer’s DNA.

  “Here’s the address of my lab guy in Queens, Richard Genna,” Lazlo said, giving him a business card. “Leave him the samples, and he’ll rush it for Monday morning. This is it, Tom. At last we are going to nail this son of a bitch, or at least one of his men, for murder,” Lazlo enthused.

  “OK, let’s say the test comes back conclusive. How are you going to make it admissible? It was obtained outside normal process. It will get thrown out by El Gordito’s defense.”

  “Don’t worry about that. You leave it to me,” Lazlo said.

  The look on Stevens’ face showed that his mind was most definitely not at rest.

  John could understand his concern. This would be difficult.

  “I’ve already texted Genna, and he’s expecting you,” Lazlo clarified as he got out of the car. “Once you’ve given him the sample, get back to the wife and kids.”

  Lazlo then made his way back into his house. John could tell he wasn’t finished for the day. He looked as if he had something else planned.

  Inside his bedroom, the detective opened one of the four doors to his closet. He took out a full set of clothes—every item was black. John gave him some privacy and waited in the living room. A few minutes later, the detective came downstairs dressed from the neck down in black combat gear and boots. He had a long black duffel bag with him, which he let drop to the floor before heading for his hidden war room. He returned immediately with a handful of small black boxes and an automatic rifle fitted with a scope.

  Holy Shit! thought John when he saw the rifle. He also sneaked a look at the boxes in the bag before it was zipped closed. Miniature surveillance cameras. The next step in the plan had been to take a look at the storage facility by the Red Hook port where the containers full of bodies were being kept, and Lazlo looked as if he was well prepared to do just that.

  Lazlo took out his phone and sent a group text. John could see it was addressed to three names: Cochrane, Levine, and Brown. The message simply read:

  IT’S ON!

  He finished dressing with a black baseball cap and a windbreaker that covered his bulletproof vest. None of his clothes identified Lazlo as a police officer. He left the brownstone.

  John decided he would sit this one out. That was a serious piece of weaponry, and although he couldn’t actually get shot, to witness the mission he would have to possess one of the team which could compromise their effectiveness, not to mention that if his host was killed, it would be extremely traumatic.

  Twenty-Three

  Lazlo arrived at a lock-up garage in a backstreet in Queens. The door rolled up after he flashed his headlights three times. He drove in. There were two other cars and a black panel van inside. Three guys stood waiting: Phil Cochrane and Joe Levine, both NYPD SWAT, and Greg Brown, FDNY and a former Navy Seal. They were dressed the same as Lazlo and shared the same sense of entitlement to personally profit from every lowlife they protected the public from. This usually meant taking a cut of drug money or drugs before an official seizure. Lazlo had told them that tonight was to be one of those occasions—an unapproved ‘sneak and peek,’ and there would be a large stash of the new Spider’s Bite pills to skim from.

  It suited Lazlo just fine to steal from El Gordito. These guys wouldn’t leave any trace of entry, and the drug lord would suspect his own men. The detective just hoped he was right about the bodies containing drugs. These guys didn’t like not getting paid.

  Three of them got into the van. It was a plain, unmarked SWAT vehicle which, according to official records, was in the repair shop with, among other faults, a damaged GPS––all of which was bogus except the GPS, which had been deliberately sabotaged. It wasn’t just any van. It was a surveillance van with three monitor screens and equipment capable of picking up camera feeds from a distance of up to a hundred and fifty yards. Cochrane drove the van out and picked up Brown, who had closed the shutter door on the lockup.

  By the time they arrived at the storage facility in Red Hook, it was dark, as planned. They stopped about twenty yards away so they could scope out the building. Levine had got hold of some plans from the county clerk
’s office, but they were out of date. The storage building was an old, brick-built warehouse of around ten thousand square feet facing onto both Seabreeze and Kendle streets, about a mile from the Red Hook container terminal. The only lighting on the outside was from low-power sodium lights, which looked just as old as the warehouse. The other elevations of the building were back to back with neighboring buildings—meaning they would have to go in from the front.

  Cochrane moved the van and turned the corner from Seabreeze onto Kendle. The Kendle elevation had the roller shutter door that Lazlo had seen before. A personnel entrance door, next to it, would be their point of entry. Lazlo had no idea what the schedule of deliveries was, but he figured that Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at the club would yield the most bodies in the week. It was, therefore, a safe bet that any container used for storing the bodies would be near full by Sunday evening ready for shipping out on Monday. Lazlo also hoped that the guard he had seen before was only present during deliveries, not 24/7.

  Cochrane, Brown, and Lazlo donned balaclavas and helmets fitted with intercoms and flip-down night-vision equipment. They slid out of the van. Levine stayed behind. He would check the feeds from the cameras.

  Lazlo and his team made their way along the elevation on Kendle Street. Cochrane stood ready with his assault rifle pointed at the personnel door while Brown pushed a flexible camera tube slowly underneath it.

  “The lights are out. Looks like nobody stays to guard this place,” Brown said, looking at the screen attached to the probe and immediately switching it to night vision. The screen turned to a green and slightly fuzzy monochrome. “Single large space with two cargo containers and a truck. Wait—there!” he said suddenly, pointing at the screen. “A tripwire. That’s the guard. Let me pull the camera up to view the back of the door in case there are any more surprises.”

  Cochrane and Lazlo waited a couple of beats until Brown confirmed that there were not. Then Brown pulled out the camera tube and placed it in his backpack. He took out his tool roll.

  “Quick, I can hear a car coming,” Cochrane said.

  Brown took out two picks from a set in his tool roll and placed them in the cylinder. A few manipulations of the lock and the door clicked open. The car Cochrane had heard seemed to stop briefly on Seabreeze, but was now approaching again. Any second, it could turn the corner onto Kendle. Brown swung the door open. He took a few steps inside and immediately illuminated with his flashlight the almost invisible, thin wire that spanned the floor, six inches above it, and about a yard away. “Wire!” he cautioned through his helmet’s microphone as Lazlo followed him in. Lastly, Cochrane entered, closing the door behind him just as the headlights of the turning vehicle lit up the elevation of the building opposite.

  It took a couple of seconds for their eyes to become accustomed to their night-vision goggles. Brown inspected the tripwire. It was connected to a micro-switch, which in turn was connected by wires that ran across the floor to the rear of two huge, metal shipping containers. Next to the containers was the tilt-bed truck that Lazlo had seen earlier.

  As the group drew closer, they could see that the wires disappeared behind the first container. Brown went ahead to check it out.

  “Barrels of ammonium nitrate mixed with oil, each with a detonator cap. There’s enough here to take out the whole street,” he advised moments later through the helmet intercom.

  Lazlo and Cochrane hustled up to take a look at the plastic barrels, and detonator caps hidden below the container. “Fuck!” Lazlo whispered.

  There was another set of wires coming out of each detonator cap and passing around the second container. Brown had already traced it. “Second tripwire by the shutter,” he said. “These guys can’t afford to be forgetful,” he joked.

  Cochrane mounted a tiny battery-powered camera high up in each corner of the space, with the help of the collapsible aluminum ladder he had carried in strapped to his back. At the same time, Lazlo and Brown opened the door to one of the steel containers by sliding the locking bolt upward.

  “No padlock?” inquired Lazlo skeptically.

  “No need. They weren’t counting on anyone getting this far,” smiled Brown.

  As the heavy panel swung open, a refrigerated mist seeped out like dry ice at a concert. The inside was automatically illuminated by bright fluorescent lights.

  “Goggles up!” shouted Lazlo as he and Brown were momentarily blinded by the night-vision equipment magnifying the intensity of the light from the inside of the container.

  Once their eyes re-adjusted, they could see the container was fitted with shelves on three sides and that nearly every shelf was occupied by a body bag. There were four shelves of six bodies on each side and four bodies on the far wall, making fifty-two bodies in total. Ten spaces had not been filled.

  Lazlo had briefed the team that the pills were most likely hidden in cadavers, but even so, the sight of so many body bags caused one of them to gasp––a sound that the intercom picked up and relayed with its usual preceding crackle.

  Lazlo unzipped one of the bags. It was the body of a woman in her twenties. She had vertical sutures along her chest and horizontal ones across her stomach and abdomen in the area where her kidneys and liver would normally be located.

  “Goddam it! They’re all like her, just kids!” exclaimed Cochrane after unzipping other bags and finding more bodies.

  “And all these bodies are filled with drugs?” Brown asked.

  “Only one way to find out.” Lazlo swapped his reinforced leather gloves for latex ones and took out a pocket knife. He picked at the woman’s suture stitches, which frayed and broke on the razor-sharp edge. Trying to keep the last meal he ate where it belonged, he placed his hand into the re-opened cut. Dark, rancid-smelling liquid oozed out as he extracted a clear plastic bag and wiped it clean with his fingers.

  Lazlo gave a sigh of relief that he hadn’t called out the team for nothing. As expected, the bag was full of pills. It looked as though it contained about a hundred of them. Every one bore the Spider’s Bite logo. He called over to Brown, asking him to hold open a large evidence bag and then dropped as many bags of pills as he could fit into it, each one smearing the insides with putrefying liquid.

  “I say we clean out all the bodies of the drugs and make a run for it! There must be at least five million’s worth here,” Brown muttered.

  “Keep to the plan, Brown. We skim off the top—not take the lot. It’s safer that way, and nobody suspects it’s us!” shouted Cochrane, grabbing Brown by his arms.

  “I’m sick of letting millions go through my fingers,” Brown answered, slamming his fists down hard on Cochrane’s arms.

  “What the fuck is going on?” came a voice over the intercom.

  “Nothing,” answered Lazlo. He turned to Brown. “Cochrane’s right, and you’ll never move that much product. Think about it. It’ll ring alarm bells—El Gordito will come after you. There are five bags in here with your name on them. That’s five hundred pills, or ten easy grand at dealer price, and we get to put El Gordito in a shitstorm with his buyer when he finds he’s been sold short. Now stick to the fucking plan!”

  After a beat, Brown seemed to acquiesce.

  Lazlo stripped off the latex gloves and placed them in another evidence bag for burning later. He stood for a second looking at the body. At least when she had been stitched together, she still had some modicum of dignity. Now she looked ripped open, plundered, even savaged. He had neither the skills or time to sew her back up, to restore the respect she deserved.

  He got his phone out and took a few photos, ensuring he had the remaining bags in the body cavity in frame. Then he zipped the cadaver back up in the bag.

  The three of them exited the container. The light extinguished automatically, like the ones in household fridges. The second container clearly hadn’t been used yet. Inside, it had the same setup with shelves for more bodies, but the refrigeration and lighting hadn’t been switched on.

  “
Looks like they’re expecting an upturn in business,” sighed Cochrane as all three snapped their night-vision goggles back on and quickly exited the building, carefully stepping over the tripwire and re-locking the door.

  Back in the van, Levine showed them the feeds from the cameras. They were all working perfectly in night-vision mode.

  Fifteen minutes later, as they kept watch, the feed from a camera on the roof of the van showed two sets of headlights approaching along Kendle. A black sedan and a blue van pulled up in front of the building. A guard dressed in black stepped out of the sedan and unlocked the personnel door to the building, entering and closing the door behind him.

  “He remembered about the tripwire,” said Cochrane, smiling.

  They watched the feed from the cameras inside. The lights were switched on, and the cameras blinked from night-vision to normal view just in time for them to see the guard disconnecting the tripwire. He then opened the large shutter over the vehicle entrance.

  “These guys aren’t the usual drug muscle—the explosives, and the way the way they’re set up shows they’ve got military experience,” said Levine.

  “We wouldn’t be this close if I had any doubts,” said Cochrane. “That place is rigged to blow the whole street to hell!”

  The blue van now backed in through the opened shutter. The occupant or occupants waited for the shutter to close before exiting the van. Just one person came out— another guard with a gun holstered across his chest.

  “Heckler & Koch MP7s with a suppressor,” commented Brown.

  “Recognize anyone?” asked Cochrane.

  “No, but I’ll run it through image enhancement,” replied Lazlo.

  They watched the delivery of eight more bodies, then the van exited the storage facility and drove away.