Gavin English Thrillers

by Ken Lindsey

  As soon as he rolled off, the load lightened enough for Beth to throw the busted door off of herself. She stood, favoring her left knee. She didn't think he broke it, but it hurt. A lot. She watched David writhe on the floor for a moment, but he was already steadying enough to get his feet under him.

  After a quick scan of the room, she found the rolling pin and picked it up. The thing had to weigh four pounds, all in the roller. She tested the grip on the wooden handle and figured it would do the trick.

  As soon as David came up to his knees, she raised the pin to shoulder level, and swung it one-handed at the back of his head.

  Chapter 17: Friend Zone

  I woke up in my office, with Kara tapping me on the shoulder, “Gavin. Wake up, Gavin,” she whispered.

  “Hmm, ugh furgher offee,” I replied as I opened my eyes and peeled Jody Dunn's statement from my cheek.

  “I got you a coffee already, Gavin. It's nine in the morning, what are you doing here?”

  I leaned back in my chair and stretched; my stomach rumbled loud enough for Kara to grimace at the sound. “I... no it... ugh, coffee first,” I said as I gratefully took the warm cardboard cup from her hand. I wished it was hotter, but it was fresh and strong enough to kick some of my brain cells back into gear. “Thanks, Kara. You're an angel.”

  “Yeah, I know. But that doesn't tell me why you slept at your desk last night.”

  I took another sip and then looked down at the file in front of me. I had circled Jody Dunn's name with a red pen. “I was working on the Julian Wells case last night. I think I got it figured out, I just need David to help with the bust. I had a couple drinks to celebrate and decided not to drive home.” I thought that sounded much better than, “I drank until I passed out in my chair.”

  “Oh, well, you don't have any appointments today. If you need to go home and shower or get fresh clothes, you'll be fine.” My lovely assistant: not so good with the subtlety.

  I attempted to stand, fully set on following her directions, but as soon as I was vertical, the room went horizontal. I fell back into my chair, “Damn it. Shit.”

  Kara laughed, “Just sit right there. I'll get the answering service to take the calls today and I'll drive you home myself.”

  It only took four tries for me to stand up without the room going all gonzo on me. After that, I could make it out of the office, and through the parking lot on my own. Kara led me to her car, a burnt-out Geo Prizm from back when they were a thing, and then we were on our way.

  “I'm driving you through for some fast food. How long has it been since you've eaten anything?”

  “Umm...” Good question. I decided to lie. “I had an early lunch yesterday.”

  “Well, your stomach is talking more than you are, so I'm buying you a breakfast sandwich. And you will eat every bite before we get to your place.”

  “Yes, Nurse Ratched.”

  “Funny.”

  The food tasted like heaven and I happily ate the second and third sandwiches she got for me. By the time she parked in front of my place, I felt content.

  “If you come up, I'll get a quick shower and then take you out to lunch for being so nice to me.”

  Her smile was all sympathy, “That's sweet, Gavin. But I've already told you...”

  “I know, I know. But I've been damn good lately, Kara. What you think of me means something, and I haven't been out to the Rail since before we went to the gym together.”

  “Really?” she asked, unbelieving.

  “Really. I know this probably won’t be anything, but I dig you and would like us to at least hang out. You know, outside of work.”

  She smiled again, this time it was real, “Sure.”

  “So, you'll come in, let me get cleaned up, and then we'll go get a nice lunch, yeah?”

  “Sounds good,” she answered.

  She followed me up and I showed her the TV, kitchen, and the extra restroom. Then I tried to call David before I hopped in the shower. He didn’t answer, so I sent off a text, just asking him to call me back.

  The water came out good and hot and I felt like a new man afterward. I found suitable clothes and tried David a couple more times, only to get the same result. Where the hell could he be? Didn't he know how important this was? This would give me something to rub this in Captain Meadows' face for a very long time.

  Oh, and we were helping an innocent man.

  Since my breakfast had been all grease, Kara insisted we get something made of real food for lunch, so we went for sushi. The nosh was good, and it gave us time to chat. She told me about her family; I did my best to share without getting into some murkier details of mine.

  After we ate, she took me to the restaurant from the night before so I could get the Jeep, and I gave her the rest of the day off. I had things to do that she couldn't really help me with, and there was no sense in her sitting in the office for no reason on such a beautiful day.

  Once she left the parking lot, I lit up a smoke and tried to call David again. This time it went straight to voicemail, “What the fuck, Dave? Where are you?” I grumbled and then slid the red bar to hang up.

  Screw it, I thought. If David won't come to me, I'll go to him.

  Chapter 18: Love Hurts

  When David came to, sun washed through the kitchen window and he found himself tied to one of his dining room chairs, bleeding rather profusely from his scalp. “Beth!” he yelled, bringing on a new wave of pain that sailed through his skull with every beat of his heart.

  “I'm right here, sweetie,” she replied, walking into the kitchen with a pronounced limp. “How are you feeling?”

  “Get me out of this fucking chair,” he ordered through gritted teeth.

  “No, I'm afraid not. I can’t let you screw everything up. What we've got is too good to let go. Once you realize that, we can talk about giving you some space to move around in.”

  David winced as a lightning bolt of pain shot through him. When it abated, he looked back up to find Beth staring at him, with a smile that was several times too large for her face. The effect was frightening, especially when he noticed his razor blade hanging loosely in her hand.

  “If you can't be good... if you can't let me fix things... Well, I don't want to have to start over again, but I will.”

  “You're fucking crazy.”

  Her eyes flashed with rage and her fair skin flushed from her neck to her forehead. “I'm not crazy. You are. Why else would you take the perfect, beautiful thing that we have, and try to spoil it by messing around with that frumpy witch?”

  “FUCK YOU!” he screamed. He felt the blood rush to his head til he thought it would burst, then it let up. First the pain faded, then the room did.

  Beth watched as his head slumped back down to his chest, “You'll feel better when you've had a few more hours' rest,” she said to his unconscious form.******

  When I pulled up to the building David lived in, there were lights on in his apartment, and his car was parked in its normal spot. Good, if he was home he could at least tell me what to do. Even if he didn’t want to go out and do the job himself yet, I figured he knew at least one other badge flipper that would help me.

  He lived on the top floor of a six-story building, so after chatting with one of his doormen for a couple of minutes, I hopped on the elevator and took the short trip upward. They decorated the hallway of the sixth floor with expensive paintings, each one labeled with a local artist's name and the cost of the piece. I didn't like any of them. No boobs or fat angel babies.

  Painted boobs are classy—that's what I learned from the 80's.

  I rushed down the hall and knocked three times as soon as I reached David's apartment. I waited a few seconds and got no response, so I knocked again and leaned my ear to the door. Only silence.

  I didn't want to risk waking Beth up if they were sleeping, so I pulled the spare key he had given me a couple years ago from my wallet and let myself in. What are friends for, if not to watch your place when you go
out of town, and order lots of porn on your pay-per-view?

  I closed the door behind me and stepped into the apartment. Something felt off. I couldn't figure out what it was, until Beth came bolting through the busted down kitchen door, waving a razor blade covered in blood, and screaming, “LEAVE US ALONE!”

  It would have been hilarious if it hadn't been so goddamn terrifying. My brain hadn’t quite caught up enough to make sense of the situation when I had to jump to my left to avoid the tiny woman trying to slit my throat.

  She threw her hands up and used them to spin herself off the door so she could keep running at me. I fell backwards over the couch as she swung that six-inch blade at my face, and had to roll backwards over my head so I could get my feet under me again.

  With a second to breathe, and a full-sized couch between us, I calmly asked Beth, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!”

  The nut job in front of me had completely changed from the pretty little thing I met the other night. Her eyes were wide and almost entirely black, and her hair frizzed out on all sides, like a diminutive Albert Einstein.

  She held the little razor blade out, swinging it back and forth every few seconds to keep me guessing. “You shouldn't be here. We're trying to work some things out right now!”

  “Calm down, Beth. Where is David?” Please don't let it be his blood, please don't let it be his blood, please don't let it be his blood.

  “He's in the kitchen, sleeping.”

  That didn't sound good. I was almost positive that “sleeping” meant “dead” in crazy people's language. I tried to keep my tone even, “Whose blood is that, Beth? Did you do something to David?”

  “No!” she screamed and then started laughing, her voice went up an octave with each chuckle. “This is my blood, dummy.” She lifted the back of her arm to me and I saw that there were dozens of cuts there. Some were faint pink lines, faded with age; others were thick, knotted scars. But there were two or three that were actively bleeding more than a bit. “I have to let it out, if I don't cut when people hurt me, it gets worse.”

  She was calming, her breathing became less frantic and her eyes were not so wide and searching as they were a minute ago. I felt okay with the couch between us, but I knew I couldn't relax until the razor blade was no longer in the picture.

  “I think you need medical attention, Beth. You're bleeding pretty damn bad.”

  “It stops. It always stops,” she replied, wiping her free hand along the back of her arm and smearing blood all over herself. “It always stops, even when I don't want it to.”

  I took a step back and stuck my hands in my pockets, hoping it made me look calm and in control while I tried to dial 9-1-1 without being able to see my phone. There was little to no chance of getting it right on a touch screen, but I had to try. “Beth,” I started after the phone gave a little shake, letting me know that it was dialing whatever numbers I had punched in, “you know that David is a Lieutenant with the Reno police department, don't you?”

  “Yes. And I know that we’re MEANT to be together, even if he has to leave that dangerous job so we can run away.”

  I spoke as loud and clear as I could, still hoping I may have gotten through to an emergency operator, without making her think I was trying something that would set her off, “I understand that, Beth. But you need to know that David Reeves is an important police officer here in Reno. I need to know that he's okay, so that his fellow officers don't come to his home wondering about him.”

  She gave me a blank look, which evolved to nervous, and then panicked. “What are you doing here? You need to leave. Right now, or I will kill you. You can't keep us apart!”

  “Beth,” I started, “I need...”

  “GAVIN!” David's voice cut me off as he yelled from the kitchen.

  Beth turned her head for a fraction of a second, and I took my chance. I kicked the foot of the couch as hard as I could, sending it crashing into Beth, who dropped the razor blade between the cushions and fell to her knees.

  David was my priority, so when she fell down, I spun past the couch and scarpered through the dining room, into the kitchen. Relief doesn’t express my feeling at finding David looking a little beat up, but not too bad for a hostage tied into a chair by his psychotic live-in girlfriend.

  “Fuck... Gavin... I can't...” he said as I untied his hands.

  “Just relax, man. Your head is pretty banged up so don't waste your energy.”

  “Gavin!” he yelled.

  I looked up as Beth shambled into the kitchen doorway. Her eyes were glazed and unfocused, but her smile shone like the sun. I jumped in front of David to stop her from getting to him before realizing what I was seeing.

  Rivers of blood pulsed from each of her wrists, puddling beneath her. I watched, stunned, as every bit of color drained from her face.

  “My Davy...” she whispered. “If you won't have me...”

  I lunged forward to catch her as her legs gave out, but too late. She was dead before she hit the floor.

  Chapter 19: Unhappy Endings

  Kara stood next to me in the courtroom as the judge sentenced Mrs. Dunn for the murder of Julian Wells. She confessed in the hot seat at the police station, pretty much as soon as they started with the questions. In court, she pleaded guilty early hoping to get a lighter sentence.

  Her husband sat there with their kids, behind her, offering silent support. His hand rested on her shoulder until the very moment the bailiff took her away. Julian's sister, Becky, was there as well, with her husband.

  I grieved for Julian's family. He really tried to clean up, get his life right, and then he wound up dead for someone else's mistake. I also felt bad for Rick and Judy, though, and their children. Maybe in another universe, where they never got together, they were both great people with healthy families. Who knows?

  David met up with us on the sidewalk outside the building; we both lit a cigarette.

  “You did good on this one, Gav,” he said, covering his eyes from the sun. “The Captain will have to give you props when he writes up the report. Tell people how your investigative skills led to the capture and conviction of a killer.”

  I laughed, even though his words were hollow. He wasn't even really there. Hell, he'd been pretty gone since he found out that the feds linked Beth to eight other murders throughout the Western states.

  It was gonna take serious time to get through something like that. I felt bad that I didn’t know how to help, but Kara told me to just be there with him, and for him, when he needed.

  I decided I would try to do just that, because she was smarter than me.

  The End

  ---BONUS SHORT STORY---

  GAVIN ENGLISH

  T here are almost three million people who live in Chicago, and every damn one of them was sitting on the Dwight D. Eisenhower expressway in an effort to ensure I never got out of my rental car sane.

  “Please continue east for five hundred feet and exit onto Congress Parkway,” said the cheerful bitch inside my navigation system. She had said the exact same thing at least six times before.

  Kara laughed as I ground my teeth down to dull nubs. Not for the first time since reaching Chicago, I imagined soaking us both in gasoline and lighting the inside of the car on fire. She was so spiteful she’d probably keep laughing, though. I settled for lighting another coffin nail.

  “If you would relax for five minutes, you might actually be enjoying yourself, Gavin.”

  “Sometimes I really miss the days when you called me “Mr. English.”

  “Yeah, well that was all over the first time you saw me naked.”

  I rolled up both of our windows and used the child lock so she couldn’t get hers back down.

  “Only half-naked. We were in a steam room, and you gave me zero warning that you would be topless.”

  “You could have looked away.”

  “I did. Eventually. Face it, you’re gorgeous. I’m human. It was unavoidable.” I inhaled some delicious, satisfyin
g carcinogens. “You would have looked if it was me.”

  “If I wanted to see your junk, all I’d need to do is ask. Can you open the window while you’re puffing away on that thing?”

  “No. I’m trying to kill us both with second hand smoke, so I don’t have to spend one more second in this goddamn unholy bumper-to-bumper nightmare from hell.”

  “Ugh,” Kara replied. “Five more minutes on the expressway isn’t the end of the world. Lighten up.”

  I took a long drag before replying, “All I see are brake lights and blood. This is how WWII started. Hitler got stuck in traffic too many times. Next thing the world knew, he was invading Poland.”

  Kara reached across my lap and unlocked the power windows. “There’s a pool at our hotel. Maybe watching me tan next to somebody’s husband will make you feel better.”

  She had me there. Watching guys, especially married guys, try their hardest not to stare at beautiful women always made me chuckle. Mostly because I never bothered to hide my own wandering eyes—I’m not married and I believe ogling is genetic to the male animal. Like road rage.

  I finished off my cigarette and ground the cherry into the faux-leather seat of the rental until it went out, leaving a singed round hole. It didn’t make me feel any better.

  “They’re going to keep your deposit for that,” Kara said.

  That made me feel even worse.

  “Maybe you could brighten my mood by taking off your top. My memory is fading.”

  “I’m sure you can find a strip club in Chicago.”

  “Maybe. If we ever get off this goddamn expressway.”

  Then a miracle happened; the saintly woman behind the navigation box said, “Please make a right turn and exit onto Congress Parkway.”

  JACK DANIELS

  T he baby doesn’t have to wake me up anymore. At one-fifteen, three o’clock, and four-thirty, my internal alarm rings and I know it’s time to get up and feed, change, snuggle, or generally worship Samantha until she falls back to sleep.