The Slowest Death

by Rick Reed

“He’s hurt real bad,” Dayton said. “Please, mister. Please help us.” There was no response. “Are you there?”

  She heard a grunt, and scraping sounds, the door by the bathroom opened, scraping sounds again, and the door closed. A car engine started. She could hear the crunch of tires fading.

  Chapter 38

  Judy Mangold, the chief’s secretary, stood in the doorway of Jack and Liddell’s office. She was holding a thick sheaf of papers in front of her.

  “Who uses a fax anymore?” she asked, as if this was akin to an alien spaceship landing in her office.

  Jack took the papers from her. She turned and walked away without another word.

  Jack glanced at the top sheet. “It’s the stuff from Detective Yankowski.” He handed pages to Liddell as he read them. He had only read a few pages when the phone on his desk rang.

  “Murphy,” he said.

  “Don’t you have your cell phone?” the police dispatcher asked.

  “Sorry,” he said. “What’s up?” He’d left his phone in the car again.

  “Deputy Findlay is trying to reach you.”

  Jack borrowed Liddell’s cell phone and called Findlay. “What have you got?”

  Findlay said, “Mr. Crispino came to and remembered something. He has a GPS tracker in his Jeep. You probably already know that. He said he put a device on Sully’s car. If you find the Jeep, you’ll find Sully if you’re within a couple of miles. Have you found the Jeep?”

  “Not yet,” Jack said. “You put the BOLO on all of this out in Henderson, right?”

  “Yeah. And Crispino said he was pretty sure it wasn’t Sully who clocked him.”

  “Does he have any idea who it was?” Jack asked.

  “No. But he said something else you might want to know. He asked if he could go into witness protection. He said he could name names if we could promise him that.”

  “Witness protection. Did he say the names were in reference to our murders?” Jack asked.

  “He wouldn’t say. He will only talk to a Federal Officer, and only if he gets a written guarantee signed by a U.S. District Attorney. He said he doesn’t like the deals you make.”

  “I just happen to be working with a Fed on these murders,” Jack said. “Special Agent Frank Tunney might be contacting you. I’ll give him your number.”

  Jack found Tunney’s number in Liddell’s contacts and called. It rang several times and was picked up by voice mail. Jack left a message to call as soon as possible.

  “He’s not answering. I guess we’d better call Captain Franklin and fill him in on Crispino,” Jack said, and handed the phone back to Liddell.

  * * * *

  Sully woke slowly. His throat was swollen and he couldn’t swallow. He felt like his neck had been broken. He hurt everywhere. He tried to move his arms and discovered they were bound tightly behind his back. His chest felt tight, like it was being crushed, and bolts of pain shot from his shoulders to the tips of his fingers. He heard gravel crunching and tried to turn in the direction of the noise, but all that turned was his head, causing bolts of pain behind his eyes and more pain in his shoulders. He blinked. His eyes were open, but he could barely make out shapes in the darkness that surrounded him.

  Suddenly a bright light flashed into his eyes. He squeezed them shut against the pain the light was causing. The light went out and he could see intermittent dots and flashes. He didn’t know where he was. How he’d gotten here.

  The crunching-gravel sound stopped and he heard a continuous rustling sound in the distance, like tires on pavement. He cut his eyes that direction and saw tiny dots moving. Headlights. A truck. A tractor-trailer. The pain behind his eyes receded. His senses worked again. He could smell mildew. No. The odor was dry, thick. Maybe he was in a farm field. He could smell oil mixed with the other. He heard something close. Off to his left.

  “Who’s there?” Sully asked.

  “Is this going to be a knock-knock joke?” A man’s voice startled him.

  Sully struggled to turn toward the voice, but there was still that tightness across his chest. “Who are you? What is this? What the hell do you want from me?”

  “Funny you should mention Hell, Sully.”

  The voice was coming from directly in front now.

  “Where am I?” Sully asked. “What are you going to do to me?”

  The voice now came from his other side. The man was moving around him. Like a predator sizing up his prey.

  “Who the hell are you?” Sully demanded, but the panic growing in his gut told him who it was.

  “Don’t you know?”

  Sully’s mouth went dry. “You’re crazy. That’s who you are. A crazy man. Let me down from here. Let me down and face me like a man.”

  “A man? Is that what you think you are? No. You’re not a man. You’re the shit I wipe off my shoe in the grass. You’re worse than Sonny was. He at least had someone to care for, and to care for him. But you? What do you have? What makes your life worth anything?”

  Sully said nothing. He wouldn’t beg.

  “Remember Little Bobby?”

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with Little Bobby,” Sully said. “If Big Bobby sent you, he’s got the wrong guy. You must be Crispino. The Machine. I heard of you. You and me—we got something in common.”

  “Oh. What is that?”

  “We both clean up Big Bobby’s messes. Sonny, the judge, you—me. He uses us like hand wipes. We don’t count for squat. He’ll do to you what he told you to do me. You know that, don’t you? We should work together. You and me.”

  “You and me,” the voice repeated Sully’s words.

  Sully thought he heard interest in that voice, and a tiny glimmer of hope danced in his mind. “Yeah. You and me. We’ve got something Big Bobby needs. We’ve got skills, and the capacity to carry things to the end. You got rid of Sonny and the judge—even Little Bobby. That took some skill. You caught me out, big time. I gotta give you that. But it don’t mean it’s got to end this way.”

  The voice asked, “Doesn’t it?”

  Sully was on a roll, like a train with no brakes. “Hell no, it don’t. You let me go and we’ll work together. I’ve got almost half a million of Big Bobby’s money. I can get that much more in jewelry. It’s ours for the taking.”

  “If I wanted the money I could have taken it, Sully. But what you say interests me. Big Bobby does seem to attract people like us, doesn’t he?”

  Sully lifted his face even though it caused more pain. Sully was determined to get out of this. And when he did he was going to take this peckerwood’s head off his shoulders. No. He’d bury this asshole and tell Big Bobby where he could dig him up. Maybe Big Bobby would be satisfied. Sully could be a hero.

  “He does. He’ll use you to get me, and he’ll send someone to take you out. Let me down from here and we’ll make a plan. I think we should eliminate Big Bobby first,” Sully said.

  “I agree with you, Sully. Big Bobby needs to die.”

  “Cut me down,” Sully said, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice.

  The click of a switchblade opening next to his face startled Sully and his head jerked away from the sound. “Hey. No. Wait,” he said.

  “I took this from you. That was bad of me. Here, I’ll give it back.” The blade drove deep into Sully’s groin.

  “Oh shit! Oh shit!” Sully said. His words melded into the mewling hoarse whisper of impending death.

  “You’re not dying. Suck it up, Sully. I would say be a man, but you’ve wet yourself.”

  A wet stain bloomed across Sully’s crotch.

  “Okay, that might be blood. Come on, Sully. Convince me not to kill you. You can do better than tell me what I’m going to do next. You always were the planner in the bunch, weren’t you?”

  Sully’s head hung forward. He lifted his face and sc
reamed at the top of his lungs. “Help! Help!”

  “Sonny was good at following orders. He didn’t start out a greedy, corrupt cop. You made him that way. Bit by bit, you lured him into the slime of your world until it was too late to get free. I felt a little sorry for him, in fact. Left to his own means he might have led a boring little cop’s life. Making runs, making arrests, writing citations. But that was never good enough for you, was it?”

  “Someone will come. The cops will come,” Sully said.

  “No one can hear you except me. Well, maybe the squirrels or birds. No one is coming to help you, Sully. You’re going to die like you lived. Alone.”

  Sully gritted his teeth. “You’re him. You’re the one Big Bobby wants dead.”

  The man put his face inches from Sully’s, but there was no light of recognition in Sully’s eyes.

  “Listen to me. I don’t know you,” Sully said. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t beg, but the next words that came from his mouth echoed the pleas he’d heard many times and ignored. “You can let me go and I won’t say anything. I’ll tell you where the money is. The jewelry. You can have it all.”

  “I can take anything I want.”

  The switchblade was yanked from Sully’s groin and slashed across Sully’s nose and cheek. Sully whipped his face side to side, trying to avoid the blade, but it came at him again and again, slicing flesh, scraping across teeth and bone until his face was a crisscross of bloody, gaping cuts. Screams filled the void his mind had retreated to.

  The cutting stopped. Every beat of his heart pumped blood from his injuries. Blood poured down his throat, gagged him, and dribbled down his destroyed lips and chin.

  “Your own mother wouldn’t recognize you, Sully. You’re a mess.”

  Sully couldn’t speak. He just hung there, bleeding.

  The man held a small, pale object close to Sully’s eyes. “I’m sure you’ve heard the tale of the wise monkeys.”

  Sully recognized the voice. This was the man who had been calling him with the information on the investigation. The whole time the man was setting him up, driving him like a mouse into a trap.

  He was beyond caring. He knew he was going into shock. His body was shutting down to preserve basic functions like breathing. He’d been taught at the police academy that shock could be temporarily countered by a burst of adrenaline. He had to get angry to hang on.

  He spit blood through torn lips. “Kill me. I must have hurt you more than you’ve hurt me. I made you crazy.” Sully tried to laugh but nothing came.

  “We’ll see,” the man said. He bent over, then held a red plastic container high over Sully’s head. The gasoline splashed down Sully’s head, into his eyes, into the cuts, causing a burning pain beyond belief. A gloved hand grabbed Sully by the throat, shoving his head up and back, and squeezed until Sully’s mouth popped open involuntarily. Something small, hard, was shoved past his teeth, past his tongue and deep into his throat.”

  Sully tried desperately to breathe, to expel the foreign item, to live. The last thing he saw on this earth was a flame that burst into life. It was him.

  Chapter 39

  It was fully dark out. A dusting of white flakes blew across the parking lot. Jack pulled his coat tight and went back inside. The cold air helped to clear his head, but what he really wanted was to clear this case. That, or four fingers of Scotch, neat.

  Jack went back to the office and found Liddell leaned back in a chair in the corner, legs spread out in front of him, eyes shut. Jack stepped over Liddell’s legs to get to his desk, and one of Liddell’s eyes cracked open.

  “I’m awake. Just thinking,” Liddell said.

  “Well, go back to sleep. I’ll kick you if something breaks.”

  Liddell straightened in his chair. “I was thinking, pod’na. I do that sometimes, you know.”

  Captain Franklin came into their office.

  “Nothing yet, Captain,” Jack said. “Some interesting ideas, but we’re pretty much waiting for our net to catch Vincent Sullis and/or Sonny’s girlfriend, Mindy.”

  “Has Tunney been able to help?”

  “He’s helped a bunch,” Liddell said.

  “There’s not much we can do until we catch up with Sully and Mindy,” Jack said.

  “You figure Mindy for the killings?” Captain Franklin asked.

  “No,” Jack said. “She’s not capable of thinking this up, according to everyone that knows her.”

  “Don’t discount her just because she’s a woman, Jack. I’ve known some very devious people that put on a good front of being stupid.”

  “Yeah. Liddell, for instance,” Jack said.

  “Hey!” Bigfoot said. “I resemble that remark.”

  “Walker said he found some poisonous plant material at her house,” Captain Franklin said.

  “We were acting on information Dr. John gave us concerning the toxicology report on Sonny,” Jack said. “Dr. John said the poison wasn’t the cause of death, but if the level had increased in his system it could have killed him. I don’t make Mindy for the botanist type, Captain. We had Walker seize her computer to see if she was cruising poison sites, but that’s a long shot. Tunney thinks it’s possible Mindy and Sully are an item, and she might be acting under his direction.”

  “What you’re saying is that when the poison wasn’t working fast enough, Sully came to help things along?” Captain Franklin asked.

  “Something along those lines,” Jack said. “Tunney thinks it might be for love…and money.”

  “Or the love of money,” the captain said.

  “Yeah.” Liddell said. “When we talked to Mindy the first time, she said she suspected Sonny was cheating on her.”

  “I think that was a slip,” Jack said. “She didn’t stay on the script Sully wrote for her. He would know that would make her a suspect in the murder. He didn’t want her to talk to us in the first place.”

  “It’s odd that she just happened to have her attorney/family friend with her when her significant other is murdered,” Captain Franklin said. “It’s like they were waiting for the police to show up.”

  Captain Franklin stood in the office doorway, thinking. He said, “And you say Martin Crispino is in the hospital asking for the Witness Protection Program?”

  “We’ve not ruled him out for Sonny’s death. He was talking to us when the call came in about Judge Knight. Maybe to establish some kind of alibi.”

  “So he couldn’t have killed Knight,” Liddell said.

  “I don’t think he did that, but he may be working with someone else,” Jack said.

  “And they turned on each other? Maybe that’s what sent Uncle Marty to the hospital, and he’s not giving up his partner’s name, waiting to take care of this himself?” Captain Franklin suggested.

  “Possible,” Jack said. “We’ll know more when we pick up Sully and Mindy.”

  Captain Franklin said, “I hear the two juveniles that found Sonny’s body are missing again? Is that involved?”

  Jack wanted to get back to the stack of faxed papers from Detective Yankowski, go through them for the third time. But when your boss asks questions—at least if you respect him—you answer the questions. Captain Franklin was a man Jack definitely respected. Trusted? Sometimes. The man did have the hots for Jack’s ex-wife, Katie, but hey, who wouldn’t.

  Jack said, “Woehler put an Amber Alert out on the missing kids. The boy, Zack, could be missing and no one would notice. The girl is a straight-A student from a good family, lots of friends, and up until she ran away she had a plan for her future.”

  “Ahh. Young love,” Captain Franklin said. “You two have to catch this psycho. You’re my best guys. Get it done. That’s an order.” He left.

  “My best guys? Did he say that?” Liddell asked.

  The phone rang. Jack picked up.

  “J
ack, you’d better get over here,” Sergeant Mattingly said.

  Chapter 40

  The police officer working the ER desk at Deaconess Hospital was tired. He’d already put in a full shift, dealing with drunks and intervening in he-said she-said domestic squabbles. He came straight to his off-duty job at Deaconess, where he had to put up with another eight hours of the same. He didn’t need what the ambulance had brought in on top of his already shitty day. When Jack and Liddell came through the ER doors, he led the way to the treatment rooms.

  “The girl’s in there. The doctor’s with her.”

  The treatment rooms were aluminum and tempered-glass cubicles with curtains all around the inside. Four of these rooms lined one side of the hallway. Two of them had the curtains pulled closed. Jack could hear the doctor inside.

  “How’s the boy?” Jack asked. He could hear the girl, Dayton, answering the doctor’s questions. She didn’t sound too bad.

  The officer said, “He’s heavily sedated. I heard the ambulance crew say he had a gunshot wound and cuts, and took a world-class beating.”

  “Are any family members here?” Jack asked.

  “They’ve been notified, as far as I know. One of the nurses said they can’t find anyone for the boy.”

  The door to that room had been left open, and Jack walked down, slipped the curtain wide enough to peek in and saw a heavily bandaged and unmoving figure lying on the bed. He realized he really didn’t like Zack. Apparently, someone else felt stronger about it than Jack.

  “What about the girl?” Jack asked.

  “AMR crew brought him in on a stretcher, but she was walking. She was a little hysterical. She’s calmed down now.”

  Jack wondered how someone could be just “a little hysterical.”

  “Is Sergeant Mattingly coming?” Jack asked.

  “Right here, Jack.” Mattingly was coming down the hallway.

  Mattingly had told them the kids were found at The Peaks Inn on the northwest outskirts of town. Jack knew the place. Cheap rooms, no Continental breakfast, but the bedbugs were free.