by Tim McGregor
“You can’t go in there alone.”
He flashed his cockiest grin at her. “You haven’t seen your uncle Johnny in action, have you?”
“I’ve seen you get your ass kicked by a ghost.”
“Not the same thing,” he dismissed. “These arseholes are still breathing. Piece of cake.”
“Gantry, wait.”
“Toodles, Billie!” Gantry hollered back as he yanked open the door and disappeared inside.
“Idiot,” Billie fumed, stranded in the gravel lot.
~
Billie didn’t see the man watching her. She wasn’t supposed to. If there was one talent Tapeworm possessed, it was sticking to the shadows. Hunkered behind a low fence, he had observed the whole exchange with interest. His cell phone was a crappy relic but it worked. He dialled through to the police officer that he occasionally traded information with.
“Odinbeck,” came the reply from the phone.
It wasn’t the voice that Tapeworm expected to hear. “Where’s Mockler?”
“Busy. What can I help you with?”
“I need to speak to him,” Tapeworm hissed. “Something he’ll want to know.”
“You can talk to me,” said the man who identified himself as Odinbeck. “I’m his partner.”
“But I don’t know you.”
“The name’s Odinbeck. I vote Conservative but I dress left. There, now you know me. Talk.”
Tapeworm frowned. “I got tabs on someone Mockler’s after. An English fucker named Gantry.”
There was a pause on the other end. Then, “Don’t move. Give me your twenty. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“But—” the police informant protested.
“I’ll make it worth your while, don’t worry,” Detective Odinbeck barked. “Just stay put.”
~
The club was a riot of noise, voices shouting to be heard over the drone of death metal, but then the chatter began to die down. Like a wave rolling across the crowd, a hush fell over the room as tongues stopped wagging and jaws dropped open as John Gantry made his way through the thick of it.
He snatched someone’s beer from a table and stopped to guzzle it dry. Then he tossed the bottle away, smiled at all the snarling faces before him and stole someone else’s beer and carried on. The club-goers groused and sneered but no one stood in his way, the crowd parting before him in some monstrous imitation of the Red Sea before Moses. The crowd sidled this way and stepped that way until a cleared path led Gantry to the man he was looking for. Someone inside the club had the foresight to cut the music.
Crypto Death Machine sat sprawled on some poor man’s version of a throne, his leg thrown casually over one arm of it while women in face-paint knelt at his feet. The whole lurid diorama, thought Gantry, resembled a Frazetta painting come to life.
The death metal star tilted his head to one side at the sight of the newcomer, like a dog hearing a strange sound. Then he leaned forward, propping one muscled arm on his knee like some debauched king. Whether the man was smiling or scowling was impossible to discern. The gauze dressing over his face hid his features like a mask and muffled his baritone voice.
“John. Fucking. Gantry.”
“Hullo Stanley,” smiled Gantry. “You’ve got some explaining to do, mate.”
“We’ve been looking high and low for you,” Crypto rumbled. “And here you just waltz in to my house. I guess that’s meant to intimidate me?”
“Nah. Just cutting to the chase.” Gantry nodded at the painted goons surrounding him. “Your clowns have been running wild. I just want to know why before I send your sorry arse to Hell.”
Crypto waved a hand before him. “For this very reason. To flush you out of hiding. So you can be punished for your betrayal and attempt to kill me.”
Gantry sighed, his patience blown in. “Let’s stick with cutting to the chase, yeah? What are you on about?”
“The gun you sold me. The one you rigged to explode when used.” Crypto rose from his makeshift throne and peeled back the gauze from his face. “Your attempt to kill me failed. But you did this.”
The dressing fell to the floor. A few gasps could be heard at the sight of the man’s face. The skin had been shredded from the jaw to the left eye, a raw slash where the muscles shone wetly. Half of his lips had been destroyed, leaving only the man’s teeth and gums exposed to the elements. Jags of shredded skin flapped loose and wet. It was ghastly. The silence in the room deepened as all took in the catastrophe that was Crypto Death Machine’s face.
Gantry burst with laughter. “The gun? You stupid twat! You tried to shoot someone with it, didn’t you?”
“Don’t,” Crypto warned, “Fucking. Laugh.”
Gantry’s laughter echoed through the room. No one else in the room saw the humour in it. “What did you expect, you fucking prat? Pulling the trigger on a haunted gun?”
The weapon in question was a standard issue Browning 1911 pistol, used once by the Reverend Jim Jones to deliver a bullet into his own head after orchestrating the largest mass suicide in history. To say the gun was haunted was putting it mildly.
“You rigged it to explode,” the musician snarled. “You destroyed my face.”
“I’m surprised it didn’t take your head clean off,” Gantry said. “No matter. I’ve come to finish the job.”
“Big talk for one skinny Englishman.” Crypto spat onto the floor and reached for something on his belt. A large knife. “We’re just gonna even things up here a little. A nip and a tuck with the blade, and you’ll look just like me.”
The legion of Crypto fans had closed in, surrounding Gantry. When their idol nodded, they sprang.
Chapter 26
STANDING IN THE GRAVEL lot, Billie cursed Gantry’s name.
She had meant to walk away, to leave the braggart to his own foolish end but found herself lingering in the alley all the same. What did he hope to accomplish by walking into a room full of enemies? Realizing she couldn’t just leave him, she cursed his name a second time and fretted over what to do. It wasn’t like she would be much help against a club full of crazed Crypto fans.
She scanned the lot around her. “Hey,” she said. “Are you still here?”
The young man with the gunshot wound to his face emerged from behind a dumpster. It was difficult to pinpoint his age with his face destroyed but he looked barely out of his teens. His flannel shirt was stained black with blood and his one remaining eye watched her.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
He told her his name. Daniel.
“My friend, the idiot?” she said. “He just walked into trouble and I don’t know how to get him out. Will you help me?”
A ruined flap of tissue twitched near his mouth. Gory to behold but Billie realized the young man was trying to smile. She took that for a yes and marched for the door. “Come on.”
She felt a tingling chill on her fingers. Looking down, she saw that Daniel was trying to hold her hand. She wondered if the dead boy thought they were on a date. Then she wondered if life could get any stranger than it already was.
Slipping through the door, she was assaulted by a din of voices shouting and cursing and pleading. There were bodies collapsed everywhere, moaning and rolling around as if thrown about the room. Down in the dance floor was a mosh pit of more writhing bodies, the painted faces of the worshippers all struggling and pushing and fighting like a rugby scrum.
And Gantry caught in the middle of it all, his face bruised and his knuckles bloodied. Had she expected anything different?
Billie turned to the boy named Daniel. “Can you help him?”
The boy’s ruined face twitched once in what passed for a grin before he marched into the thick of the scrum. The goons folded like cards, dropping to the floor as the dead boy cut through them all.
Crypto roared out a primal cry as he watched his worshippers tumble away, cut down by some force invisible to him. Raising the heavy blade over his head, he dove at John Gantry,
tackling him to the ground.
Billie lost sight of both men in the tangle of bodies on the floor. She charged in as the gunshot ghost continued to mow down the goons one after another. The painted faces cried out in horror and they curled into tight balls as the marrow in their spines was frozen by an unearthly chill. Billie had to step over them to find Gantry, calling out his name as she waded into the fray.
The Englishman sprang up from the mayhem and staggered back. His left hand had been slashed badly and blood dribbled freely from his fingertips. He didn’t respond to her bellowing his name. Gasping heavily, his eyes were locked on something at his feet.
Crypto Death Machine lay on the floor, rolling back and forth and mewling in agony. The knife he’d meant to carve Gantry’s face with was skewered into his crotch and his jeans were turning dark with blood loss.
A few last worshippers were still upright and one of these rushed to his idol’s side. Gantry snatched the young man by the collar and hurled him away. “Leave him!” he snarled, rabid with adrenalin. “Let the fucker bleed out!”
“Gantry,” Billie barked, grabbing him by the arm. “We have to get out of here!”
He snapped and pushed her away. The manic fever in his eyes softened when he saw who he shoved aside. “Billie?”
“Come on!”
There was some fight left in the ragged mob, a few howls of rage at their downed idol as he twisted and whimpered, holding his bleeding tackle in both hands. A chair swung overhead and crashed over Gantry’s head. Billie scrambled to him but something close to a freight train slammed her sideways and hurled her across the floor.
Tumbling hard into the wall, she rose up on one elbow but her vision was blurry from the impact. There were new sounds raising a racket inside the dark club. A door bursting open and voices barking two simple statements over and over again.
Police. Get down.
The chaos had become general. The police rushing in, the few worshippers able to run doing just that. Billie scrambled away, hoping to leg it fast just like the others. She caught sight of one plainclothes officer and recognized him as Mockler’s partner, Detective Odinbeck.
Odinbeck barked something she couldn’t make out as he rushed one particular body among all the rest on the floor around him. She watched helplessly as the portly detective slapped handcuffs over the wrists of an unconscious John Gantry.
Scrambling into the darkness to find a way out, she heard Odinbeck give out a holler at one of the other officers on the scene. “Somebody call Mockler! He ain’t gonna believe who we scooped up!”
~
Signing a vehicle out of the motor pool the day before, Mockler had gotten lucky and nabbed one of the few unmarked Chargers left. With the Hemi V8 roaring under the hood, he gunned the vehicle back to Hamilton in record time. It was dangerous not only because of the speed but because his mind was not on the road. He was still trying to comprehend Odinbeck’s call.
How the hell did Gantry get arrested? Odinbeck’s info was straightforward. A tip came in from their slimy little friend Tapeworm, Odinbeck led a small unit to an underground club where they found what looked like a war zone and there among the fallen bodies was one John Herod Gantry, murder suspect. The suspect was still unconscious and yet to be questioned.
He had started to worry when he couldn’t get Billie on the phone. After his fourth attempt, a text popped up from her, stating that she would meet him at his place. It did little to quell his worries and his foot pressed down on the accelerator.
She was sitting on his front porch when he rumbled into his driveway. Her bike was leaning up against the rail, Billie herself sitting on the broken wicker chair under the bare bulb of porch light. She didn’t look well.
Scrambling out of the car, he expected her to rise and meet him halfway in an embrace or at least a quick peck but neither came. Billie remained hunched forward with her elbows on her knees, staring into the dying grass of his lawn.
“Hey.” He spoke softly and approached warily. “Look at me.”
Her eyes wheeled up slowly, glassy and rimmed red.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Do you know that Gantry was arrested?”
“Yes. I saw it.”
“What happened?”
“Do you believe in bad luck?”
“No,” he said.
Her gaze broke from his and drifted back to the dead grass. “Someone told me once that I was a jinx. I’m starting to believe them. So, maybe you should get out now before something bad happens to you too.”
He tilted back a little, as if too near-sighted to see her properly. “Who told you that?”
She didn’t answer.
“It was your mom, wasn’t it?”
Again she didn’t answer but her twitch gave her away. A car drove past, its headlights arcing and fading back into the night.
“Don’t do that to yourself,” he said. “Gantry’s arrest had nothing to do with you.”
“It’s not just Gantry,” she rejoined, a bite to her tone. “Jen got hurt. Her shop was destroyed.”
“I heard. Listen to me. Gantry was arrested because he’s a suspect in two murders. The goons who trashed your friend’s place were looking for him. None of that was your fault.”
Billie’s shoulders drooped, as if suddenly overcome with fatigue. “I couldn’t help Jen. Or Gantry. I just ran. Like a scared little kid.”
“Getting arrested along with Gantry wouldn’t help anyone.” Mockler got to his feet and took her by the hand. “Come on inside. Tell me how it happened.”
They sat in the kitchen. The house was half-emptied and left in a shambles like he’d been robbed. Billie warmed her hands around a mug of tea as she unpacked the details of the last twelve hours. Mockler sat quiet, interrupting only to clarify a point here and there. When she finished her tale, he smirked and said, “I take it back. You are a jinx after all.”
She kicked his foot. “Shut up.” She set her mug down on the floor and rubbed her eyes. “Can you get Gantry out?”
“He’s still a murder suspect.”
“But he didn’t kill those women,” she said. “I thought you believed him?”
“We put aside our differences to find your mom’s remains. But I’ve been after him for almost two years now on a murder charge. I need to hear it from him.”
Billie stewed over it. “What if he can’t prove he didn’t do it? What happens to him then?”
“Then he’s going to jail pending trial, like everybody else. I can’t just spring him out of there.” Mockler exhaled at the predicament. “Maybe he knows a good lawyer.”
They rose slowly to their feet. Mockler gathered the mugs and placed them in the sink. “I need to get to the station. Do you want a lift home?”
“I have my bike.”
“You’re welcome to stay here if you want.”
Billie looked over the bare kitchen. “It’s kind of depressing.”
“I know,” he agreed.
The clock on the wall ticked loudly in the spartan room. Billie leaned her hip against the counter. “We haven’t even talked about, well, you know.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re referring to.”
She punched his arm. “Stop it.”
He smirked and then she did the same.
“You’re mean.”
His hands went up in mock surrender. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
She blinked. “I have no idea. I guess I just want to acknowledge it.” She felt herself chewing her lip again and stopped. “Was it just a fluke, what happened? Or…”
“It wasn’t a fluke,” he said. “Not for me anyway.”
“Good. Me neither.” Her eyes darted up to his. “Can we stop talking for a bit?”
“Yes.”
Billie’s grin went wide and she took hold of the lapel of his jacket and pulled him close.
~
The fact that Detective Odinbeck was being congratulated
for taking down a wanted criminal irked Mockler to no end when he arrived at the homicide bullpen inside Division One. It was petty of him and he knew that but it stung all the same. It should have been his bust, plain and simple. Billie’s words about bad luck drifted back momentarily. Maybe it was just Gantry. The man reeked of bad luck. He seemed to have a knack for deflecting it from himself and onto others.
Odinbeck, thumped on the back by yet another officer, looked pleased as punch with himself. Mockler swallowed his pride and shook his hand. “Nice work, Odin.”
“Hey man,” Odinbeck said. “That was dumb luck on my part. That was meant to be your bust.”
“Doesn’t matter. You nailed him, that’s the important thing.”
Odinbeck shrugged. “Maybe. Tapeworm called for you. If you’d been here, you woulda caught it.”
“Where is he?”
“In the box.” Odinbeck led the way down the corridor to the row of interview rooms. A bank of monitors were set up, only one of which was live. On the screen, Mockler saw the video image of a lanky man hunched over a chair. He appeared to be sleeping.
“Have you questioned him yet?”
“I tried,” Odinbeck said. “He said he’d only talk to you.”
Mockler squinted at the grainy image. “Is he banged up?”
“He took a beating in that club, that’s for sure.”
“What about the rock musician guy with the make-up? What was his name?”
Odinbeck consulted his notebook. “Stanley Gottferb, AKA Crypto Death Machine.”
“Ah. And where’s Crypto now?”
“The morgue.”
“Let’s hope mister Death Machine is comfortable there.” Mockler stepped toward the door and reached for the knob. He took a breath. “Okay. Here goes nothing.”
The room was small, containing only a table and two chairs. The white walls and fluorescent lighting gave the room a sterile institutional feel that worked to numb a suspect into compliance after a few hours of stewing alone within it. It was difficult to tell if it was working on its current occupant. John Gantry sat sprawled over the table with his head down, as if asleep.
