by Glen Frost
This man knew, Piotr realized…knew about him, and probably knew that he’d killed Anya. Which meant that the Denver cops had to know too.
Piotr had brought a roll of duct tape in with him. Tearing off a thick strip, he pressed it into place over the detective’s mouth. Looking around, he saw a slim grey laptop with an external hard drive connected to it. Disconnecting the three feet long USB cable, the pimp took Jeff’s unresisting wrists and bound them tightly together behind his back.
The detective looked around desperately for something, anything, that might spell his salvation, but all that he could focus on was the unwavering barrel of the Glock. Which meant that he missed the subtle nod that Piotr threw Marko’s way. Instantly, the big man took two steps to the side and kicked the cop’s legs out from under him. Jeff crashed to the ground hard, groaning through the duct tape that sealed his mouth tightly shut. His nostrils flared as he struggled to take in air.
As Forsberg rolled around on his left side, Piotr watched Marko bring the gun’s muzzle up to the side of his head and pull the trigger. The single shot, slowed to subsonic speeds by the Glock’s screwed-on silencer, punched a dime-sized hole above Forsberg’s ear and smashed his head down against the carpet, which began to soak through with blood. A bright red circle expanded slowly as more blood poured from the ruptured left side of his skull. The dead man’s eyes were wide open and already glazing over.
Looking down, Marko was satisfied to find out that he hadn’t gotten a single spot of blood on him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Detective Jim Daniels hated the job these days. Hated it, with a purple fucking passion which burned so brightly within him that he could barely convey it in words.
After thirty plus years on the Denver Police Department, rising in the ranks from lowly beat cop up to his current hallowed rank of detective on the homicide squad, Jim had pretty much seen it all: the very worst in human nature, every cruel, petty, and often downright brutal act of depravity that one human being could inflict on another.
Jim had seen it all.
"You're in serious danger of becoming a walking fucking cliche," Jim's friend and fellow cop Dan Flaherty had told him just last night. The pair had been enjoying a few brews at The Tilted Kilt, one of those downtown bars where the wait staff were all hot young women wearing kilts that in some cases were more comparable to belts. Predictably, they made great tips.
"Preaching to the choir, man." Jim took a long pull on his Fat Tire, straight from the bottle; none of that glass bullshit. "But what the fuck am I supposed to do? I'm on the wrong side of fifty. I come home to an empty home and an empty bed. Hell, I don't even have the fucking dog for company any more..."
If the truth be told, Jim had loved that dog, Buddy, more than he'd ever loved his wife. Jeannie had taken Buddy with her in the divorce, just one more vindictive little victory in a long string of them. When she'd left him, she'd ended up getting the house, one of the cars (the better of the two, naturally, leaving him with the piece of shit Chevy Blazer) and a good half of his paycheck. He'd be paying her to sit on her lazy ass for the next five years, unless she got her hooks into some other poor sucker and remarried.
Fat chance.
A cop's salary, even a detective's was thin enough as it was. With an ex-wife taking half, it was positively anorexic.
He'd couch-surfed for a good few weeks, relying on the goodwill of friends (most of them fellow cops) before getting his own place again. It was technically a double-wide trailer, if you were feeling charitable, but it would more honestly be described as a shithole. The trailer park was in one of Aurora's more run-down neighborhoods, the kind of place where you wanted to wipe your feet on the way out.
Gunshots and screams in the night were a regular part of the soundtrack. He barely noticed them any more.
Jim had taken out his phone and checked the time. It was just coming up on eleven-thirty. He really hadn't wanted to go back home just yet. The idea of trading in his seat at the bar and the constant stream of female hotbodies for an already half-empty bottle of Jack and an old DVD hadn't exactly appealed to him.
But it had been a shitty day, and Jim had needed two things, both of which were vital to him getting through the night and seeing the sunrise without putting the barrel of his automatic in his mouth and eating a bullet. One was booze, which he could have gotten either in the bar or at home. The other was distraction, and The Tilted Kilt beat his shitty trailer hands down where that was concerned.
So they'd kept drinking, and they both kept on bullshitting each other. Flaherty was a detective too. He worked vice, which meant he had a ton of good stories to tell; and by good, Jim really meant seedy.
Dan's latest anecdote was a real doozy. It promised to be a three-beer deal at the very least. Best of all, thanks to the fact that it centered around Denver's hookers and the johns that paid them, it was a story that was already plastered all over both the Internet and the nightly news.
"This guy turned up dead, what, two days ago?" It was a measure of just how drunk he was that Dan had needed to think about it for a second.
"That was the guy who got his dick cut off, right?"
"Nope." Dan shook his head slowly, taking another swallow of Guinness. "Not cut. Ripped. Ripped right the fuck off."
"Jesus."
"I know, right?"
"I mean, who the fuck does that?"
"Well, that's the problem. That's my problem. We've got no idea." Finishing his pint, Dan waved at their waitress. The gorgeous redhead (she can't be more than twenty-two, twenty-three tops, Jim thought with approval) caught his eye and nodded. She swung by their table, favored them both with a pearly-white smile that showed off immaculate dental work, and scooped up his pint glass. Both men had watched, transfixed, as her ridiculously firm ass headed off in the direction of the bar.
Based on the fact that they were on their eighth pint of the night and showed no signs of slowing down, Jim thought, she had probably figured that another round was a given. His own bottle was down to a third.
Jim remembered the story from when it had first appeared on 9-News. Down on one of the seedier parts of Colfax, Denver's longest avenue — and the street where most of the city's hookers hung out — was a motel called The Lucky Star. Although he'd never been inside, Jim knew of the place's reputation as a real shithole. It was one of those places that catered mostly to the whores and their johns, renting out rooms by the hour.
According to 9-News, the victim was a pastor from Fort Collins, a real fire and brimstone kind of guy who had preached the wrath of God upon the sinners from the lectern in his multi million-dollar mega-church on Sundays, then trolled Colfax for hookers in Denver when the mood struck him. It was a long-ass drive from Fort Collins south to Denver, Jim reflected, but this so-called man of the cloth had probably wanted to avoid members of his flock when he was out driving along Whore Central.
Jim had been interested enough to pull the report and crime scene photos on it. Homicide had assigned one of their rising stars, a college grad named Jeff Forsberg, to the case. Forsberg's report had been pretty solid, he had been forced to admit grudgingly. It sure as hell painted the picture, and that was before you go to the crime scene photos themselves, which were really fucking gnarly.
Yes, the dead man's junk was gone, which had drawn the media to this case like moths to a flame (or, Jim reflected angrily, vultures to a dead carcass) but that wasn't even the half of it. Somebody had turned the man inside out, opening his chest and abdomen up to the world and rummaging around inside it. The organs had been tossed haphazardly around the room, left for the cops to find like grisly Christmas decorations.
According to the narrative, the deceased pastor had been a regular customer of the Colfax working girls. To give him his due, Forsberg had at least put his boots on the ground (well, more like patent leather brogues) and gotten out there to talk to the hookers. Wherever he went and whoever he talked to, the homicide detec
tive always came away with the same story: the pastor had been heavily into S&M.
"The son of a bitch liked to be in control," Flaherty went on. "Liked to tie them up. Paid extra for the privilege, too. Then, when he had 'em where he wanted 'em, he wasn't so damned meek and mild any more."
More often than not, he explained, the sick fuck had paid for an hour at the Lucky Star. He preferred black girls, which apparently wasn't all that unusual for a white john, and his last day on Earth had been no exception.
"The ol' padre hired a hooker named Chastity White — Chastity. White. Oh, the fuckin' irony," Dan had rolled his eyes in exasperation. "We know from talking to the Colfax hookers that after he rented a girl once, they never, ever went back a second time...no matter how much money he was offering to sweeten the deal." Chastity, whose real name is Natasha Cook, should probably have known better.
"He one of those?" Jim made a sour face.
Flaherty nodded, grimacing in disgust. "Yep. One of those. All about the pain, not about getting his rocks off."
"So what did little Miss Chastity have to tell you?"
"Not a blessed thing. She's disappeared."
"Disappeared?"
"Yup. Into thin air," Flaherty confirmed, he demeanor suddenly grim. "She was the last one to see Pastor Pervert alive. We leaned on a couple of her working sisters, got them to admit that they saw her getting into his Toyota. Now she's gone."
"Could she be your killer?"
"Doubtful." The vice cop's tone was dismissive. "Not impossible, but His Highness the Prince of Forsberg doesn't think so. The motel room was dusted for prints. They found a few unidentified ones, but none of them match Chastity White's. She's been picked up before, so her prints were in the system already."
"How's Forsberg doing?" Jim asked, switching gears.
"He's going through the motions and saying all the right things." Dan sighed. "Not that it's making a damn bit of difference. We've got nobody on the hook for it right now."
"No suspects at all?"
"Nope. Zip. Zilch. Nada." Dan sounded disgusted. "Not for his murder, or any of the others that followed."
"Not that I'm an expert, you understand, but it's gotta take a lot of strength to rip off a dick. I mean, a lot." Jim had become vaguely aware that he was slurring his words, but he really didn't care. This shit was just too fascinating. "So it had to be a guy, right? No chick would be that strong."
"That's what you'd think," the Vice detective had agreed cautiously.
"But...?"
"But there was a red ring around the base of his dick. What was left of it, anyway."
Jim frowned, confused, and repeated, "Red ring? Like a...uh, cock ring?"
"No, nothing like that," Flaherty said, shaking his head. "Coroner said it looked like...well, red lipstick."
"No. Fucking. Way."
"You'd better believe it, brother. The thing is, it went all the way up from the base of his prick to the stump. Smeared. Could have been dried blood, I guess..."
It took a moment for the implications of that to sink in. When they finally did, Jim necked the remainder of his drink and ordered two more. "So your killer's a woman," he said at last, "and she was giving him head before she tore his dick off."
"Wrong on two counts." Flaherty let out a belch of epic proportions. His beer was down to the dregs, and he had starting looking anxiously around for the waitress who was supposed to be bringing its replacement.
"Wrong how?" Jim slurred. He was fucked up now. He knew it. But he'd be damned if he'd stop now, just when he was starting to get a taste for it.
Think about tomorrow morning, a cold, quiet voice in the back of his mind insisted. You've got shit to do, and you don't want to do it hung over and feeling like you got hit by a motherfucking truck.
But then another part of his brain supplanted it loudly, drowning it out with a simple Fuck it.
Tomorrow could look after itself.
"Well first," Flaherty ticked off on his left index finger, "This is the twenty-first century, Jimmy Boy. It's not just women that wear lipstick. We could be talking about that well-known phenomenon, the homo-cide. You know...chicks with dicks."
Jim had been forced to concede that he might be on to something there. "Alright, point. Your killer could be trans. What's number two?"
The waitress came back over and deposited a couple more drinks. Flaherty flashed her a grin and his best we're not worthy gesture. It earned him a smile that was maybe five percent genuine, if that, and the rest totally professional. She swept away their empties and took them away without looking back.
"Where the fuck were we?"
"Number two," Jim reminded him.
"'S' right. Number two." This time, Flaherty ticked off his middle finger. "Point two is that it might not have been ripped off at all."
"Not ripped off?" Jim had knuckled his forehead stupidly. His head was getting foggier by the second, and he had to fight to hold a coherent train of thought. "But you said—"
"I know what I said," the vice cop had slurred, cutting him off mid-sentence with a chop of the hand. "But see, here's the thing...I saw the edges of that thing. The stump. The stump that was the only thing left of his dick. It's ragged, Jimmy. Totally shredded.And do you know what?" The homicide detective just returned his stare, glassy-eyed. Waiting. "I reckon it wasn't torn off at all.
"I think it was fucking bitten."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tomorrow could look after itself.
Those words were coming back to haunt him now, in the bright light of the late morning sun. Back with a real vengeance. And what had last night's bravado gotten him?
The mother of all fucking hangovers, that's what.
Jim groaned miserably, cradling his temples with both hands. His head felt as though a team of construction workers had taken up residence in there. He knew because one of them had just switched on the jackhammer.
Cracking open one eye, he looked hopefully at the pair of small, fat glasses that were sitting on the bedside table. Then he had to squint in order to narrow the two of them down to the actual one that he knew was real. He reached out for it, noticed instantly that it felt depressingly light. But he needed a drink.
Not booze: That was the last thing on his mind right now. Soda would have done, but water was what his tortured, dehydrated cells craved the most. Jim's tongue was stuck firmly to the roof of his mouth, felt leathery and dried out. There was a very real danger of him needing to shave the damned thing before it would even think about working properly again.
Jim stuck out his furry tongue, upended the glass, and shook it violently: Once, twice, a third time. His reward made it seem hardly worth the effort. Three small drops of liquid were all that remained of his now-traditional glass of anti-hangover water, the one he somehow managed to always fill, no matter how shit-faced drunk he was at the time.
Mumbling a curse, he slammed the glass down violently. Predictably, part of it shattered, causing a jagged shard to break off and rattle around inside the fractured container. Murphy's Law appeared to be in full force, because he managed to slice open the tip of his right index finger on the gleaming edge.
"Motherfucker!"
A fat droplet of blood welled up from somewhere inside the lacerated fingertip, then coursed along the length of his finger, before forming a tiny pool in the web between finger and thumb. He sucked at it, annoyed, made the injured digit throb angrily in time with his pulse.
What a perfect start to the fucking day.
Miserably, Jim levered himself up into a sitting position. The springs on the old mattress creaked and moaned in protest. His old bones and joints did the same thing.
"Mmmmmf," protested the body lying prone in the bed next to him. A mop of tousled curly red hair covered her face, but even with borderline alcohol-induced amnesia to contend with, he would have recognized that pale, freckled skin anywhere. He groaned again at the sight of her, in the kn
owledge that he had just spent the equivalent of a full day's pay on a night of sex that he couldn't even begin to remember.
"Morning, Molly. How much will the damage be this time?"
One eye peeked out from beneath the mop of tangled red hair. "The usual for an overnight, Jimmy. Four hundred."
Jesus Christ. Four big ones and I can't even remember getting my pipes cleaned. Has it really come to this?
He got to his feet, swaying just enough that he needed to reach out a hand to steady himself. Then, satisfied that he wasn't going to fall flat on his face just yet, he padded over toward the battered old dresser. His pants were draped over the top of it. Jimmy fished around in the pockets until he came up with his wallet. It felt distressingly light.
Inside was thirty-two bucks and five credit cards. Fat lot of good that was going to do him. It was a rare hooker that took Visa or American Express. Not even for one of her regulars like Jim.
"Don't worry. You're already paid up."
"Huh?" He turned to face her, naked as the day he was born.
"We stopped at an ATM on the way back. You don't remember a thing about last night, do you?" Her tone wasn't accusatory, just plain matter of fact.
"Bits and pieces," he lied. "Happens when you get nearer to fifty than forty. The memory doesn't work as well as it used to. Hell, nothing works as well as it used to any more."
"Well, I can think of something that still works just fine," she grinned, teasing, letting her eyes drift down toward his flaccid cock.
Jim appreciated the gesture, but he knew full well that it was just Molly's effort at good customer service. The equivalent of the kid at the drive-thru telling him to 'have a nice day.'
Hookers really appreciated repeat business. So long as it was good business, at least.
