Karma

by Grant McKenzie

  OTHER WORKS BY THE AUTHOR

  Writing as Grant McKenzie

  Port of Sorrow (Famous Books)

  Switch (Bantam UK, Penguin Canada, Heyne Germany)

  No Cry For Help (Bantam UK & Heyne Germany)

  Writing as m.c. grant

  Angel With A Bullet (Midnight Ink – Sept., 2012)

  Devil With A Gun (Midnight Ink – Sept., 2013

  Find Grant McKenzie at: http://grantmckenzie.net

  This is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  K.A.R.M.A

  Copyright © 2011 by Grant McKenzie

  http://grantmckenzie.net

  All rights reserved.

  A Famous Book

  Victoria, BC

  First E-Edition: September 2011

  K.A.R.M.A.

  By Grant McKenzie

  There are wolves

  too gentle

  to live among men

  - with apologies to James Kavanaugh

  Chapter 1

  The boy closed the cubicle door and dropped to his knees. The floor was cold and slick like a slab of mortuary marble.

  In front of him, a man loosened his tie and lowered the lid on the discolored plastic oval. The man’s eyes drifted into puffy slits as he bent his knees and rested his back against the water tank. A familiar cool dampness eased the tense muscles in his shoulders and back.

  The man’s trousers, subtle pinstripe with a shiny, over-ironed crease, and accompanying baby blue boxers dropped around his ankles with practiced ease. The silver buckle of his belt pinged against the side of the porcelain bowl with the gentle peal of a Christmas bell.

  With greedy anticipation, the man inhaled deeply and curled his lips into a cruel smile.

  The boy leaned forward, his timid gaze never rising above the man’s waist. Excited fingers slid through his hair and a quick glance skyward revealed the man’s eyes closed tight in ecstasy at the first gentle touch. A sharp, delicious tingle electrified the man’s body in a noticeable wave until his mind abruptly registered pain.

  “What the fuck!”

  The man attempted to jump to his feet, but two more sharp slices of agony opened rivers in his inner thighs to drop him back onto the toilet seat. His eyes widened as the boy stood up, slivers of glistening metal in his hands.

  The twin razor blades slashed out again — this time to the throat.

  The man’s jugular withstood two deep slashes in the shape of a V before bursting. A fountain of crimson liquid erupted in a high arc that splattered the cubicle wall. Another slice of the blades opened the skin and soft muscle of his throat to form the yawn of a second mouth. The man’s heart raced, every beat pumping more of his lifeblood onto the filthy cubicle floor.

  The boy stood back now and leaned his weight on the metal door. Peeking over his shoulder, someone had scratched a quote from Gandhi into the drab, institutional blue paint: You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

  Beside it, someone of a less philosophical nature had scratched: I Luv Cock.

  The boy studied the blood. It pooled around the man’s feet before following the gentle slope of the floor into the next stall. That was good. The boy had worn his lucky sneakers and was reluctant to throw them away.

  The man clutched at his torn throat, desperately trying to close the wounds, but the cuts were too large and too deep. Blood squirted between fat, soft, useless fingers. He looked at the boy with pleading eyes, his bubbling mouths unable to form words.

  Then, recognition.

  The boy parted his lips to show perfect white teeth.

  “Took long enough, Bob. Guess I meant a lot to you, huh?”

  Bob had difficulty breathing. Blood was filling his throat and flooding his lungs.

  “Does your wife know?” the boy asked, his voice flat. “Do the girls?”

  Bob’s hands dropped from the wound, blood still escaping in spasmodic spurts that kept rhythm with the atrophy of his heart.

  “Because they will,” the boy continued. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  Bob’s chin flopped onto his chest. His breathing became ragged. The muscles in his face slackened.

  He looked, of all things, sad.

  “And if I find out they knew what you were,” said the boy in the same detached tone, “I’ll kill them, too.”

  The boy walked out of the cubicle and into one upstream of the blood. There, he wrapped the razor blades in toilet paper, dropped them in the bowl and flushed. He watched the soggy wad disappear before making his way to a row of sinks. Spatters of blood speckled the side of his face and the collar of his denim jacket. The skin of his right hand, however, was a crimson glove. The warm blood reached to his elbow and splashed across the rolled-up sleeve. The jacket would need to be burned.

  Pity.

  The boy scrubbed his hands and face, wiped his jacket as best he could with wet paper towel, then pulled a small plastic bottle of pink, bubble-gum-flavored mouthwash from an inside pocket. He gargled and spat.

  Refreshed, he swapped the mouthwash for a small plastic bag and a pair of rubber-tipped tweezers. He returned to the urinals where he had first stood, studying the elongated bowl where Bob had taken his last piss before hurrying the eager boy into a private stall. He used the tweezers to lift two dark and one gray pubic hairs off the porcelain lip. He dropped them in the bag and tucked it safely inside his pocket.

  Before walking outside, he dropped a plain white business card on the floor. It was blank except for five, laser-printed letters: K.A.R.M.A.

  It was raining outside, a daily event for this time of year, and his soppy cardboard Closed for Cleaning sign was dangling by one corner, the smudged words barely legible.

  Anyone could have walked in, but the boy didn’t care. What could the police do to him anyway?

  Chapter 2

  Tom Hackett grinned wickedly as he tapped the keyboard and watched his inflammatory words appear in the chatroom window.

  Fats was quick to rise to the challenge.

  FATS: Hey! I may not have the experience, but I’ve seen all the anime shorts

  Hackett burst out laughing and quickly typed his reply of ROTFLMFAO, Net-speak for Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Fucking Ass Off.

  SXYLADY: Play nice, boys

  HACK: Only if we can play with U, Sexy ;-)

  SXYLADY: You comin all the way to Brooklyn, rain boy, or you all mouth?

  FATS: Talk dirty to me, Sexy. Hack’ll spend too much time looking up words in the dictionary

  HACK: Hey! Isn’t that how this conversation got off track in the 1st place?

  FATS: LOL

  MOEFLY: Can we get on topic, guys? Besides, I’m sure Sexy prefers a real angler like me

  SXYLADY: In your Princess Leia dreams, Moe

  Hackett leaned back in his chair, bare feet resting atop an ink-jet printer, and admired the shiny black polish that adorned his toenails. Both big toes had hand-painted yellow smiley faces courtesy of his girlfriend, Chandra.

  It was a muggy afternoon and the glow of his computer monitor added to the heat. His reflection showed the subtle aging of a face that had once sent shivers into the hearts of suburban parents whenever he showed up to escort their virginal daughters to a movie. He had never been sure what they disliked the most: his interlocking eyebrow rings, pierced nose or hazard-warning orange hair interfused with streaks of toxic green.

  The lone tattoo — a Celtic knot pattern intertwined with barbed wire — running around his bicep was only a few years old, a statement made after he moved away from the girlish laughter of high-school girls. His hair had evolved to a nearly normal inky black, though he still streaked it wit
h rebellious strands of Pierre Le Pew white. The nose stud was gone also, but the eyebrow rings remained — for luck, he told himself.

  A smaller, secondary monitor to his left displayed the ESPN highlights of the previous night’s hockey games, closed-captioning of the commentary scrolling silently across the bottom of the screen. The captions enabled him to catch the goals without distracting from the chatter of the police scanner that continuously searched the emergency channels for portents of breaking news.

  With the wireless keyboard on his lap, a bag of microwave popcorn against his thigh, and an icy Classic Coke snuggled into a neoprene holder within easy reach, Hackett was the epitome of relaxed.

  MOEFLY: So guys. You prefer wacky worming or finesse?

  HACK: What kinda sex manuals you reading there, Moe?

  MOE: Ummm, I don’t mean sex

  FATS: He’s talking Bass fishing

  HACK: Is this a fishing chat?

  FATS: Appears so

  SXYLADY: I can’t remember the last time anyone talked fish here

  MOEFLY: You guys don’t fish?

  Hackett poised his fingers over the keyboard, mind racing with a smartass comment, when the scanner locked on to an urgent tone. A patrol car was relaying a Code 10-79 — notify the coroner. The location was a public washroom in Volunteer Park.

  Playtime was over.

  HACK: Fats, U monitoring police channel?

  FATS: BRB

  FATS: Just tapped MDT command. Looks good. They’re scrambling cars to Capitol Hill. You heading down?

  With Fats’ unique ability to access the command center that issued on-screen instructions to cruisers outfitted with Mobile Data Terminals, Hackett didn’t have to wait for the dispatcher to break radio silence.

  HACK: 10-4

  SXYLADY: What’s going on, guys?

  FATS: Body found in a park with a sordid rep

  MOEFLY: Sounds like your kind of place, Fats

  Instantly, Moe’s handle vanished from the screen and Hackett knew Fats had reached across cyberspace to crash the offender’s computer with the same ease as picking his nose.

  HACK: Play nice, Fats. I’m sure Moe didn’t realize how sensitive U R

  FATS: Don’t go fishing if you can’t handle the catch

  HACK: LOL. L8R

  Hackett spun in his chair, eyes scanning the one-bedroom basement for the last resting place of his T-shirt. The compactness of the place was one of the reasons he had moved in, although he also appreciated that the building actually lived up to its Bayview name.

  Pickier tenants might have complained that you had to climb five stories to the roof and crane your neck around a crumbling brick chimney in order to actually see Elliot Bay - Seattle’s busy inner harbor - but to Hackett that glimmer of blue in the distance reassured him the owners were, by the skin of their teeth, honest. The reasonable rent didn’t hurt either.

  Hackett finally spotted a ball of black rumpled cotton behind the arm of his new-to-him sofa bed, courtesy of a garage sale three weeks earlier, and rushed to pull it on.

  Slipping his feet into a pair of green leather sandals, he swept a hard-sided backpack — containing a Canon digital SLR camera, assorted lenses, MacBook Pro laptop and several gigabytes worth of high-speed Secure Digital cards — and a green army surplus jacket onto his shoulder.

  As he rushed out, the spring-loaded door of his apartment shut behind him with a reassuring thunk. It was followed by a barely audible click as an electronic dead bolt automatically slid home.

  Facing the door, but nestled high in the cobwebbed shadows of the stairwell, a sleek golf-ball-sized camera zoomed in on Hackett’s face. Its programming satisfied, the motion-activated camera went back to sleep as Hackett dashed up the stairs and disappeared through the lobby doors.

  ON THE STREET, Hackett slid open the door to his partially restored ’67 DJ-5 Postal Jeep, a.k.a. The Beast, and placed his backpack in a secured cargo net on the metal floor. The rust, white and blue, four-cylinder monster had a three-speed manual transmission and British-style right-hand drive. This made it perfect for flirting with party girls at red lights, but a royal pain at drive-through bank machines, coffee shops and burger joints.

  Beyond the rectangular windshield of the Jeep, a light blanket of rain and fog wrapped the city in a protective cocoon. All the better to keep the fragile sun worshippers of California from discovering the beauty of Washington — or so the tourist brochures would have you believe. Personally, Hackett preferred the motto that adorned a sticker on the Beast’s hindquarters: Seattle — Fewer assholes to the dozen.

  The Beast coughed a sooty fur ball before purring to life. Instantly, the in-dash MP3 player began screeching out an old Joe Jackson number from his Beat Crazy days: a primal scream followed by the opening phrase, “Whadda you want? Blood!”

  Hackett killed the music and switched on his mobile scanner. The dispatcher had broken radio silence and was rerouting patrol cars into the vicinity of the park. By doing so, she had also alerted every media outlet in the city that something juicy was breaking.

  Hackett pressed the accelerator and shifted expertly through the gears. He had to get to the park before the cops sealed off access.

  Chapter 3

  Swerving through light traffic, Hackett kept his ear tuned to the police band in order to change course as patrol cars closed off streets that led into the park.

  Every city had an area like Capitol Hill where the DINKSS (double income, no kids, same sex) collected like a long-lost tribe to open art galleries, coffee shops, antique showrooms and bookstores rendered in walnut, oak and cherry.

  This community pride, coupled with healthy disposable incomes, tended to turn a run-down neighborhood into an inner-city paradise. But for all that hard work, it only took a few isolated incidents to make the Bible-thumping right-wingers pull out their irons and brand the entire neighborhood a habitat for perverted miscreants.

  Hackett swung onto Malden Avenue, spotted a police roadblock ahead and slid into an alley that cut across to Aloha Street and then up to Prospect. Another roadblock forced him to head north to East Highland, then sneak off-road to an empty green space behind the Asian Art Museum.

  With adrenaline flooding his bloodstream like atom-sized pop rocks, Hackett slipped on his jacket, hefted the backpack and headed into the park.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long to spot the curious crowd milling around the public washroom near the water reserve.

  Hackett was thankful for the crowd. The washroom had been built into the side of a small man-made hill in an effort to preserve the park’s unspoiled view. If you approached from the water, the doorway with its white silhouette of a man standing at ease — his hands unseen as though the artist had been inspired by the model busying himself — was easily noticeable. But approaching from the museum, it was easy to miss unless you caught a sparkle of sunshine reflecting off its metallic green roof and used your imagination to fill in the shape behind an overgrown barrier of thick foliage.

  Hackett jogged to the front of the building and squeezed through a semi-circle of restless bodies. A hastily constructed band of yellow crime-scene tape, its flimsy authority enforced by three patrol cops, stopped him. One of the cops was a familiar face.

  “Uncle Frank.” Hackett flashed his best smile. “What’s happening?”

  The beefy cop who turned to face him had the jowly mug of an English Bulldog with a brutish nose so riddled with tiny red capillary veins it practically glowed in the dark. It was that nose that used to arrive on his mother’s doorstep every Christmas Eve, face hidden behind a woolen beard and a sack of presents over his shoulder. When he turned eight, Hackett and the rest of his cousins started calling Frank, Uncle Rudolph. Strangely, Frank never once admitted to being the mystery Santa Claus and none of the kids had ever discovered just where he hid the red suit and horrible white beard.

  “Jesus, Tommy. What are you doing here?” Frank’s voice betrayed the stubborn remnants of an Irish lilt he had been
clinging to since emigrating forty years earlier at the difficult age of fourteen.

  “Paying rent. Any chance of a photo?”

  “Not on your life,” Frank answered sternly. “You have to earn this side of the tape. Besides—” He stopped and frowned.

  “Besides what?” Hackett asked. “Come on.”

  Frank drew him in closer and lowered his voice. “This here’s a homicide investigation.”

  Hackett laughed in relief. “Good to know. I can’t sell a snap of a constipated saddo whose heart gave out on the downward push, now can I?”

  Frank took a step back and his frown deepened, clearly annoyed.

  “Have you no respect? What would your mother say about you wanting to photograph this sort of thing? An’ don’t get me started on your Da. He must be rolling over.”

  Hackett looked away, hurt. “It was a joke.”

  “What? Your career.”

  “It’s called free enterprise.”

  “Aye, well, you’ll no be doing any enterprising on my shift. Now go on home, I’ve enough on my plate with the rest of this . . . mob.” That last word fell heavily off his tongue as though the noun itself was worth more than the people it represented.

  “Is this punk bothering you, Frank?” asked a skinny cop who sported close-cropped red hair, a ruddy complexion and muddy brown eyes that, like Frank’s, never seemed to remain in one place.

  “Naw, Eddie, this is my sister’s boy, Tommy.”

  Eddie’s eyes widened. “Calway’s son?”

  Hackett winced.

  Eddie’s face registered disbelief. “He’s Detective Hackett’s son?”

  “Aye,” said Frank. “Hard to believe. Apple fell a bit far . . .”

  “Thanks,” said Hackett.

  “Your father was a hero, son,” injected Eddie. “Frank wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for your old man.”