Blood Tattoo (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 5)

by Jude Hardin

  He still won’t talk much about the time he spent down in Key West. Every time I bring it up, his eyes glaze over and he gets really quiet. The serial killer they called The Zombie was killed in an explosion down there, and I wondered if Nicholas had anything to do with that. It happened right before he came home. He won’t talk about it. As far as I know, he’s never talked to anyone about it. He just waves me off and says The Zombie wasn’t the reason he went down there. I know that The Zombie wasn’t the reason, but something has definitely changed since Nicholas came back. Something.

  I called my sister Abby the other day. Nicholas was home, right in the next room, but Abby and I usually speak Tagalog when we talk on the phone. It’s nice, sometimes. We can discuss things without having to worry about our husbands listening in. Not that we’re keeping secrets from them, usually. It’s just girl talk. Usually. Things men aren’t supposed to hear. Plus, we’re just naturally comfortable speaking in our native tongue. But lately I’ve been really worried about Nicholas, and Abby is the only person I can talk openly with. I can talk to Abby about anything, and sometimes it’s better if Nicholas doesn’t understand what we’re saying.

  “He’s been drinking a lot,” I said. “More than usual.”

  “But I thought you said he was happy. He has the studio, and how many students?”

  “Twenty-nine. Yeah, he seems happy when he leaves to go to the studio, but when he’s home he sulks around like a depressed teenager. He says he loves me, but he won’t come to bed with me. He just stays up and drinks.”

  “Everything OK with Brittney?” Abby said.

  “Fine. That’s the only time I see him smile, when he’s talking to Brittney. Or about her. We were at a restaurant last week and he told the waitress all about his wonderful daughter who is finishing up her sophomore year at the University of Florida. He’s very proud that she is going to be a lawyer someday.”

  “You say he’s drinking a lot. He never gets abusive, huh?”

  “Oh, no. You mean does he ever hit me or anything?”

  “It happens.”

  I laughed. “I would kill him. I would wait until he passed out drunk and then slit his throat. Not really. But no, nothing like that. We have arguments sometimes, but he would never hit me. I know that for sure.”

  “Maybe things will get better soon,” she said. “Just give it some time.”

  Abby and I talked a while longer, and then we said goodbye.

  On a happier note, Jet seems to be doing better. Jet is my patient. I signed with a home health agency a while back, when Nicholas wasn’t working much, before the studio and all, to help make ends meet. For a while I was picking up work on most of my days off from the hospital. With both jobs, I was working at least six days a week. We don’t need the money as much anymore, so I’ve cut back to almost nothing, but Jet is the one patient I won’t give up. I just love her. When I’m with Jet, I almost forget about the problems Nicholas and I are having.

  Jet’s dressings have to be changed every day, and my days are Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Another nurse takes care of her the other four days. Jet also has physical therapy twice a week and psychological counseling once a week. Of course, I try to help with that end of it as well. The mental part. I think talking helps a lot, and that’s what Jet and I do. We talk. She probably doesn’t realize it, but our conversations help me as much as they help her. The dressing changes don’t take long. The agency only pays me for the thirty minutes, but I’m usually there at least an hour. Sometimes two.

  Jet is twenty-two years old, and she lives alone. I worry about her there by herself so much. The man who did this to her is in jail, but I still worry.

  Di said she would be in touch.

  That evening, Juliet and I sat on the couch eating popcorn and watching 60 Minutes. Naturally, she was curious about my new student.

  “Why was she in such a hurry to have her first lesson?” she said.

  “I don’t know, really. But I figured it was worth skipping breakfast for two hundred bucks.”

  “She paid you in cash?”

  “Yep.”

  “Give it to me, and I’ll deposit it tomorrow on my way to work.”

  “I already spent it,” I said.

  “You already spent two hundred dollars today? On what?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “For me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is it anything like the last surprise you gave me?” she said. “The new fishing pole?”

  I laughed. “You didn’t like your new rod and reel?”

  “Maybe I would like it, if I ever got a chance to use it.”

  “It’s all right. I’ve been testing it for you. It’s a nice rig.”

  She punched my arm playfully. “I’m serious. We never do anything together anymore. When will you take me fishing with you?”

  “Soon,” I said. “We’ll go real soon.”

  I got up and walked into the kitchen and fixed myself an Old Fitz on the rocks. I asked Juliet if she wanted anything, and she chose a Dr Pepper. After 60 Minutes, she started channel surfing. I hated it when she did that. It gave me a headache. I wished she would just pick something and watch it.

  Finally, she stopped on an old Tarzan movie. Johnny Weissmuller was underwater, wrestling a croc the size of a city bus.

  “He was an Olympic swimmer,” I said.

  “He was?”

  “Yeah. Even won a few gold medals. They just don’t make them like Johnny anymore. You never see Mark Spitz wrestling crocodiles, do you?”

  “Who?”

  I shook my head. It wasn’t worth trying to explain Mark Spitz to someone who had grown up in a completely different culture. I went to the kitchen and made another drink. When I got back, Juliet was watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians. I didn’t feel like trying to explain Bruce Jenner either.

  “I thought we were watching Tarzan,” I said.

  “It was boring after the alligator.”

  “It wasn’t an alligator. It was a crocodile.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know. There aren’t any alligators in Africa, for one thing.”

  “OK, then. It was boring after the crocodile.”

  “You didn’t give it a chance. I get tired of all this flipping around, Jules. Just find a channel and leave it there.”

  She got up and tossed the remote in my lap. “Watch whatever you want. I’m going to bed.”

  She walked into the bedroom and slammed the door. It didn’t surprise me, or worry me much. It had practically become a habit these days. I switched the television back to the Tarzan film. Cheeta was jumping up and down and screaming about something, apparently having a mood swing of his own.

  With Juliet out of the room now, I started thinking about everything that had happened earlier. I found a hand mirror and a flashlight and tried to find the spot between my toes, the blood tattoo, as Diana called it, but I couldn’t see anything or feel anything under my skin. It was there. I’d seen it with the special light. But it certainly wasn’t detectable by any normal means. It freaked me out that the government could invade my body like that without my consent. I didn’t like it, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.

  I sat there for a while and drank my drink and watched the movie. It was violent as hell. The killings weren’t as graphic as you see in modern cinema, but there were plenty of them. I remembered watching the old Johnny Weissmuller pictures on TV when I was a kid. They didn’t scare me back then, not that I remembered, but they should have. If I had a young kid, I wouldn’t let him or her watch a Tarzan movie.

  Brittney was nineteen, way past the age for me to tell her what to watch or not to watch anymore, but she was still a kid in a lot of ways. She still needed some fatherly advice from time to time, whether she asked for it or not.

  I decided to give her a call. We talked for a few minutes, about nothing mostly. No big news on either end. Her classes were going fine, a
nd I was getting along OK with the teaching studio. She had been studying for a test when I called, so I was about to let her get back to it when she brought up the subject of moving out of the dormitory and into an apartment in town.

  “We’ve already been through this,” I said. “We can’t afford to rent you an apartment. You need to forget about that.”

  “I’ll have two roommates, Dad. It won’t cost any more than living in the dorm.”

  “What if one of the roommates bails on you. Or both of them?”

  “They won’t. All of our names will be on the lease, so—”

  “And there are a lot of expenses when you live out on your own,” I said. “Rent is only one of them.”

  “Then I’ll get a job.”

  “I want you to spend at least one more year in the dorm. We’ll talk about this apartment thing when you’re a senior. How about that?”

  “You’re impossible, Dad. I have to go. Bye.”

  She hung up. I tried to call her back, but she wouldn’t answer.

  Brittney had been through some extremely traumatic events before we adopted her at the age of sixteen. She had lived on the streets for a while, and she’d been abducted by a neo-Nazi cult that intended to use her for a human sacrifice. I saved her minutes before she would have been burned at the stake. She was still seeing a counselor once a week and seemed to be getting better, yet she remained emotionally fragile at times. But then all nineteen-year-olds are emotionally fragile at times, so I tried not to worry about it too much. I just didn’t like the idea of her living off campus. Not yet. The cost was only part of it. I was concerned about her safety more than anything.

  I watched Tarzan some more. There was a lot of shouting and screaming and general chaos, and it kept reminding me of the jungle Brittney seemed determined to venture out into, and all the potential pitfalls that awaited her.

  The noise started getting on my nerves. I turned the volume down and fixed myself another drink, opened my laptop and did a few searches. There were over a million people in the United States named Diana Dawkins, and none named Kaliope Pendergrass. I figured all of her aliases were like that, either too ordinary or too unusual to be of any use. I found a website for a company called Aero-Fleck Audio in Orange Park, but the home page said CURRENTLY UNDER CONSTRUCTION. No help there. I clicked on a few of the conspiracy theory sites, but there was no mention anywhere of a secret government agency known as the Circle. I did learn some things about the extraterrestrial aliens hidden at Area 51, so my Internet browsing session wasn’t a complete waste of time.

  A few minutes after nine I thought I heard something outside. A clanging noise, like someone rattling a box of pie tins. I got up and looked out the window, but I didn’t see anything. I stepped out on the porch. It had rained, and the temperature had dropped considerably. It felt more like spring than it had earlier. I took a deep breath of the fresh, fragrant air. When I turned to walk back inside, a hand came from nowhere and covered my mouth.

  I felt the cold edge of a knife blade against my neck.

  “Don’t say a word.”

  It was Di. I recognized her whisper, and her scent.

  “We’re going to take your car,” she said. “Walk that way. You lead, and I’ll follow.”

  I felt my pockets to make sure I had my keys and my wallet. I did. I stepped off the porch, heard Di’s footsteps fall in behind me as we traversed the sidewalk to the driveway.

  I unlocked the driver’s side door and took a seat behind the wheel. Slid the key into the ignition. Instead of sitting in the passenger’s seat beside me, Di climbed in back. I could see her in the rearview mirror. She was dressed in all black again, this time with wraparound sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt. Unabomber chic. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, and there was a small backpack strapped to her shoulders.

  “Where to?” I said.

  “Just start the car and go.”

  “I’ve had a couple of drinks, so maybe—”

  “Just start the car and go.”

  I started the car and backed out of the driveway.

  “Why the knife?” I said.

  “It got your attention, didn’t it?”

  “I guess you could say that. But I thought we were a team now. I thought I made it clear—”

  “Sorry, Nicholas. In my business, you learn to trust nobody. And I mean nobody. If I ever seem doubtful about your sincerity, it’s because I am.”

  “So how are we going to work together if we can’t trust each other?”

  “That’s what I’m going to show you now.”

  She gave me directions as we went. All back roads, no streetlights, no businesses. We made a series of disorienting turns, and before long I started to doubt my ability to get back home on my own.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” I said.

  “Of course. Take a left up here.”

  I took a left. A couple of minutes later, I noticed a set of headlights behind us. Maybe fifty yards.

  “Son of a bitch needs to turn his brights off,” I said.

  Di turned around and looked out the back window. “It’s them. Speed up.”

  “What?”

  “Go faster. Now!”

  My GMC Jimmy has over two hundred thousand miles on it. Faded silver paint, missing hubcaps, bubbled tint. It’s not much to look at, but I keep good rubber on it and all the moving parts are well maintained. On any given day, if the occasion arose, I wouldn’t hesitate to jump in it and fire it up and drive it from Florida to California. It has a big engine and four-wheel drive and it will flat-out move. When I stomped on the pedal, all of the one hundred and ninety horses bottled up in the 4.3L Vortec reared their heads and lurched forward. The sudden acceleration pinned me to my seat, and the speedometer needle shot to a dollar in about four seconds.

  “They’re gaining on us,” Di said. “Go faster.”

  “What do you want me to do? I’ve got it floored.”

  But she was right. The headlights behind us were getting closer.

  Di was holding the same pistol she’d pointed at me earlier. She jacked a round into the chamber.

  “Do you have a gun in the car?” she said.

  I reached over and pulled my .45 out of the glove box.

  “Who are they?” I said.

  “Don’t worry about who they are. Just know that we’re in grave danger. If they catch us, we’re dead.”

  “If I’m going to shoot someone, I’d kind of like to know why.”

  “They are the enemy. That’s all you need to know.”

  I’ve always found car chases kind of boring in the movies and on TV. I mean, how many hairpin turns can Starsky and Hutch come squealing and smoking out of before you start thinking about what you need at the grocery store? Unless you’re watching Steve McQueen or Mannix, the whole thing starts getting mundane after a while. Not so in real life. When you’re really traveling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, and you’re not sure how much road you have left, your breathing gets shallow and your blood pressure skyrockets and every muscle in your body is tight as a fiddle string.

  Despite the whiskey I’d consumed earlier, I was operating at a high level of alertness. There was a prizefighter in my chest pummeling a speed bag, and the steady surge of adrenaline coursing through me had burned off any residual alcohol that might have been in its way.

  We were on a two-lane in a rural area. No moon, and just enough starlight to see the blue-gray countryside whizzing by in a blur.

  The car behind us crept closer and closer.

  “Does this thing have four-wheel drive?” Di said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Pull off into that field over there.”

  “Through the ditch? The car has four-wheel drive, but it doesn’t have a roll bar.”

  “Slow down and take it at an angle. It’s our only chance.”

  I slowed down and switched on the four-wheel drive. I veered into the roadside drainage ditch, which was mushy fro
m the rain earlier. We tilted up on two wheels, and I thought for sure we were going to roll. But we didn’t. At some point, Di had scooted to the driver’s side. She was sitting directly behind me now, and the balance tipped in our favor.

  The Jimmy leveled out and plowed on through to the muddy field.

  And that’s where we got stuck.

  I gunned the engine in first gear and in reverse, trying to climb out of the mush, but it was no use. I couldn’t even get the truck to rock. The tires just spun in place.

  I looked back up to the road. The car that had been following us slowed down and then skidded to a stop. It was a black Mustang. One of the new Cobras. The driver eased forward, repositioning the car so that it was facing us. The blindingly bright headlights switched off. Two guys climbed out. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust, but then I could see their silhouettes. They wore overcoats and fedoras, and they were holding what appeared to be automatic weapons. Maybe the Jimmy had rolled over after all. Maybe we had died and gone to 1930s gangster hell.

  Before I had a chance to say anything, I saw the muzzle flashes and heard the rat-a-tat-tats of their machine guns.

  “Get out,” Di said.

  I climbed over the center console and exited through the passenger’s side door. Di came out that side as well. She crouched behind the rear tires, and I did the same behind the front. We used the Jimmy for a shield, intermittently reaching around the fenders and returning fire with our pistols.

  The bad guys had opened the doors to the Mustang and were standing behind them. I expected to hear at least some of our bullets pinging off the metal, but I never did. It might have had something to do with the fact that I was half-deaf from my own gunfire.

  More muzzle flash from the road, followed instantaneously by bullets thudding into the soggy ground in front of us.

  “It’s a good thing they can’t aim worth a shit,” I said.

  “It’s dark,” Di said. “And the Uzis aren’t very accurate from that distance.”

  “How do you know they’re Uzis?”

  “I can tell from the report. It’s a distinctive pop.”