Fatal Game

by Linda Ladd

  “Aw, shoot. We were having so much fun. Before you go, know that there’s no way in hell you’re getting your hands on my file unless you go through my sheriff. Our jurisdiction, our case. You got that, Wood? Don’t even try it without official documentation.”

  He gave her a quick yet arrogant smile. “I’ll contact you again, and maybe we can both be more professional next time.” He was waxing serious now, but his sober expression was telling her that either he was a super serious guy behind those weapon eyes and that smartass talk, or he was a damn good actor. She watched him walk swiftly across the lobby, avoiding the two men that he’d seemed so interested in. He was talking on his phone again as he pushed out through Black’s bejeweled front doors and into a dark and snowy night. Good riddance. Maybe Bud was sparring verbally with Wood’s partner and she had sent Wood an SOS. If so, Claire’s money was on Bud any day of the week―unless his partner was a tall, willowy blonde with a Scandinavian accent. If that was the case, Bud was a goner from minute one. He had a type.

  Black joined her about five seconds later. They turned and walked together toward the elevator. “Well?” he said. “Who is that guy, really?”

  “Well, I think I just met next year’s Sexiest Man Alive. At least in his own mind. Unfortunately, he’s also the Most Obnoxious Man Alive.”

  “He can have the title right now. I sure as hell don’t want it. Why was he trying to offend me?”

  Entering the elevator, Claire waited for the door to slide closed behind them. She looked up at him. “Why did you let him get to you? He’s an idiot.”

  “Because he interrupted something very special that I’d been looking forward to all day.”

  Claire laughed. “But that’s still on the agenda, right? You haven’t lost your urge?”

  “Damn straight. I haven’t lost the urge since I first laid eyes on you the day we met. Oh, and by the way, I snapped a picture of your friend down there. Thought you might want to check him out on a facial recognition database. If he’s an FBI agent, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “You are just so accommodating and brilliant, now aren’t you?”

  “You haven’t seen accommodating yet. But you will, as soon as we get in bed.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Once they hit the penthouse, they headed for their bedroom and let Black’s accommodations begin, all of which were quite entertaining and long lasting. It was definitely the fun kind of accommodation. The kind Claire liked the most.

  Play Time

  One night after Lucky had moved all his meager possessions out of the YMCA and into his own room in Junior’s plush Beverly Hills estate, they sat downstairs in the game room. For the first time, Junior was playing his dad’s music for Lucky. Lucky kept nodding his head and smiling, thinking his dad’s hard rock sound was as cool as hell. Secretly, Junior did, too, and he loved it when his BFF said that Junior looked a little bit like his dad. Still, he outright hated his father for leaving him alone with his monster mother all those years ago, so he always insisted to Lucky that his dad was just a drunken jerk.

  After they got tired of listening to music, they decided to play a game called Detection, and this time, they made bets and played for money. Junior had told his attorneys that he’d hired Lucky as his personal assistant and security guard, and he instructed them to pay Lucky a huge salary every month so his best friend wouldn’t have to work or resent having to ask Junior for spending money. Sometimes Lucky acted mad about being so broke, and Junior wanted to make things easier for him.

  Detection had become one of their favorite pastimes because it dealt with murder. Whoever guessed the right killer and the right weapon and the right room where the murder had been committed won a thousand dollars for each right answer. They were really going through his inheritance at a rapid rate, enjoying month-long spending sprees where they bought themselves expensive clothes and luxury cars and lengthy trips to Europe and Japan for wild, exciting adventures. But the money was endless and just kept building back up, thanks in part to interest but mostly to Junior’s dad’s world tours, which kept on filling up Junior’s coffers. They had worlds of fun and remained exhilarated most of the time.

  After a while, though, all the hedonistic fun and excitement started to wear thin, especially for Junior, because he’d had pretty much everything he’d ever wanted his entire life, especially when he was little and his mother liked to show him off and brag about his father’s fame. Tonight, they were both in terribly foul moods, pretty damn sick of hanging out exclusively with each other, and of just about everything else in their lives.

  So they sniped at each other, and drank too much beer and whiskey and threw dice, and argued about silly stuff. Lucky was winning most of the time, and Junior really hated that. It annoyed the absolute hell out of him. He was smarter and nicer and more grounded, yet Lucky won everything. He stared at the poster he’d tacked up on the opposite wall. It depicted the cruelties performed in his favorite torture porn movie. He smiled to himself and felt a little shiver wriggle its way up his spine. That movie was so scary and gruesome that it had turned him on and grossed him out at the same time. But now, sitting there, gazing at that poster, he began to get the most intriguing idea. Junior and Lucky had watched the movie together, over and over, and then they put on the second one, and then the third. They loved everything about those movies, especially the utter inhumanity. They reveled in each act of torture and each drop of blood. The films were morbidly fascinating.

  Recently, Junior had been spending a lot of time reflecting on the way the two of them had banded together to commit murder. They had worked together so well, and so unexpectedly, and they had been a team when they held his mother under the water. It had been deliciously easy, really, downright comfortable, with both of them pitching in and acting toward one goal. More important, they had gotten away with it, and as slick as warm gut, too. He liked the feeling. Such power. Strength. Omnipotence. He loved it even more every single time he relived it, and he was beginning to think about it nearly all the time. Most often, though, it was when he was in bed at night, all alone with his dark needs and thoughts and desires.

  “Know what, Lucky?”

  Lucky glanced up from his cards and took a quick swig of beer. He was scowling. He was in a mean mood. “What?”

  “I want to kill somebody.”

  “Well, you better not mess with me. I’m not in the mood, and I’ve got a big bowie knife on my belt. I’ll carve you up good.”

  “Not you, you idiot.” Junior had to laugh at the idea. “Don’t be so stupid. You’re my bro. I’d never hurt you.”

  “Who then? Those moron lawyers of yours?”

  “Can’t kill them. I need them. They make sure I get my money. All I have to do is snap my fingers.” Junior picked up the dice and tossed them onto the board. “Besides them, I don’t care who dies. That’s not the point. The point is we are getting bored messing with each other, you know, arguing and getting on each other’s nerves, because killing Mom was the biggest high we’ve ever had and nothing else equates with that day. Go ahead, Lucky, tell me I’m wrong.”

  A familiar expression slowly overtook Lucky’s face. He looked pleased. “You’re not wrong there. Nothing else gives us that kind of thrill, does it now? But we can’t just go around killing people for sport, now can we?”

  Junior raised a brow. “Why ever not?”

  “Because we’ll get caught if we make a mistake, that’s why ever not. And then we’ll end up on death row.”

  “Not if we play it smart and do it right. You know, plan it out down to the very last detail. Make sure there’s no way we can get caught. We are both smarter than anybody else. We can take our time, figure out the perfect crimes, and commit them.”

  “Still might get caught. You know it, too. We watch CSI and all those kinds of shows. We know all about DNA and that kind of stuff.”

 
“That’s exactly my point. We know what not to do. And we can find out more. We can study up before we do the first one. We can take classes, or hell, we can sign up for the police academy or the FBI. That would be the smartest thing to do: live two lives. Work inside the system against the system. Exemplary and evil. The two Es.”

  “All that’s true, I guess.” Lucky shrugged it off and shook his head. “Whatever. If you want me to kill somebody, just say the word. I’m game. I do like the idea of training ourselves in law enforcement so we can fool everyone.”

  Junior was pleased, but sometimes Junior felt as if he liked Lucky a lot more than Lucky liked him. Lucky still kept some other friends down in south L.A., maybe even had a girlfriend down there. Junior suspected he did. He went off sometimes and hung around with them and left Junior to his own devices. At times, Junior liked that―he needed some time alone―but sometimes he felt lonely and resentful. Junior didn’t have anybody to be with but Lucky. He had pretty much cut off every other person he knew. Occasionally, he went to chess and math tournaments but he didn’t let anybody get too close to him. Didn’t say much to anybody, and certainly didn’t say much about his past and what he was doing at present. Sometimes he worried that Lucky might get drunk and his tongue might get loose and blab their secret to his other friends. It really upset Junior to think that way.

  “This game’s stupid, and no fun,” Junior growled suddenly, pushing the Detection board away and knocking over the tokens. “I don’t like any of these games anymore. They’re too simple for people like us. We need a game that’ll make us think.”

  Lucky leaned back, drained his bottle, and stared at him. Then he belched and didn’t cover his mouth. “Okay, let’s play a video game. Which one would you like?”

  Junior smiled. “None of them. We’ve played them all a million times. There’s no challenge anymore. I’ve been thinking: I want us to make up our own game. A killing game. We can call it ‘Live or Die.’”

  “Live or Die?” Lucky stared at him, but Junior saw a little glimmer show up in his eyes. Lucky had these real expressive eyes that Junior could read pretty well. Lucky was interested, all right. He liked the sound of Junior’s idea. Junior grinned, inordinately pleased.

  “What kind of killing game?” Lucky asked. “Some torture porn thing, I bet, since those are your favorite movies. If so, count me in.”

  “Well, yeah, sometimes we could do that, I guess. But those kinds of murders are really complicated and require intricate lairs that would be really hard to set up. And they create lots of unwelcome attention in the press. We need to do our own version of those movies. You know, just like the evil one always says, ‘Play time. Murder time. Who’s game?’ Remember that? We need a catchphrase like that. Something we always say to the victim right before we kill them. You know. ‘Live or die?’ Get it?”

  “Yeah, that’s so freakin’ cool, Junior.” Lucky thought a moment. “Or how about sayin’ ‘Game on’ when we’ve got them captured and under our control?”

  “Maybe. But I was thinking about something a little more, well, you know, terrifying. We need to say something that will scare the hell out of our victim right before we kill them.”

  “How about something like this: ‘You, my friend, are gonna be dead in exactly one minute,’ and then we start a stopwatch!” He laughed, and then he said, “You know, so they have to watch the last seconds of their lives tick down to zero.” Lucky’s eyes were shining with humor. Junior loved it when Lucky was this happy. “That ought to make them wet their pants. We could even use one of those timers with a bell that dings so they could hear their own personal death knell.”

  “Now you are definitely getting the picture, Lucky, my man.”

  Junior glanced down at the Detection board. He picked up the little metal game piece between his thumb and forefinger. “Know what, Luck? We could use the Detection format as the basis of our own game. Maybe we could use the same game board, and designate these little game tokens to pick our murder weapon, but get this: we’ll use the real things instead. Let’s see, that would give us lots of stuff to kill our victims with. We could always add more weapons later if we get tired of using the same ones over and over.”

  “Over and over? God, how many people do you want to kill?”

  “As many as we can. I’ve decided I like to kill people.”

  Lucky threw back his head and laughed. “You are something else, Junior. I thought I had a warped mind, but you, hell, you just take the cake. You are a true-blue born killer, bloodthirsty as hell. I knew I liked you better than anyone else for a reason.”

  Junior was extremely pleased by Lucky’s compliment, but he tried not to show how much it meant to him. “So, looks like we got ourselves this candlestick, and there’s a tire iron, and a sword and a rope garrote. See where I’m going with this? The Detection weapons will give us variety so we don’t get bored. Shooting somebody’s pretty damn quick and easy. The fun doesn’t last long enough.”

  “Awesome, man. That gives us lots of bloody options. But how do we choose? Whatever catches our fancy in the moment?”

  The two young men looked at each other, and it was clear that both of them were getting really excited. Now, this is going to be fun, Junior thought. All they had to do was figure out the details and pick out some victims. He couldn’t wait to get started.

  Chapter 9

  The next morning, around eight-thirty, Claire and Black sat across from each other in the breakfast nook. As usual, Black was dressed immaculately, in a navy suit and red tie and the usual crisp white shirt with his triple monogram on the cuff. He looked good, too, in a sexy, rich, corporate sort of way. Claire still liked him better in his T-shirts and jeans. She, on the other hand, still had on her flannel pajamas and matching robe, and hadn’t bothered to comb her bed hair. She wasn’t a morning person like he was: never had been, never would be. Yes, that was one more glaring difference between their personalities that didn’t matter in the least. She was only up with him because she woke at the crack of dawn worrying about the Heather Cantrell case and the total lack of concrete evidence to point Claire in any pertinent direction. That is, if the unsavory Fed from the night before had even given her the girl’s real name.

  Black had ordered up bacon and eggs and biscuits from the restaurant, along with a selection of flaky pastries, and Claire poured two glasses of orange juice and made them both a cup of coffee. Black always chose the kind of brew that resembled black and completely undrinkable mud, no doubt because he grew to manhood in New Orleans, where chicory was the name of the game, as unpalatable as it was. Claire had a tendency to go for normal stuff, certainly no lattes, cappuccinos, or diet this-or-that, and definitely no non-fat anything. She drank coffee for the caffeine, for the pep to get going in the morning. Hell, if she wanted to lose weight, she’d add another couple of miles to her daily run. But she never cared about that. Black liked her the way she was, and ditto for her opinion of him.

  Glancing at Black, she unfolded her napkin and grabbed the biggest jelly donut from under the silver dome. “I’m still trying to figure out what that guy was trying to prove last night,” she told him, taking a sip of the fresh-squeezed orange juice. It tasted good, icy cold and sweet.

  “Got me,” Black answered. “What we probably should do is check out his credentials, because I don’t think he’s FBI or anything close to it. I think he’s probably some crackpot reporter who wanted to get close to you for a story.”

  Claire contemplated him. “Or to you. I think he was after you the whole time. He was definitely baiting you, trying to make you angry. If he could get you to take a swing at him, they could sell one bombshell photo to the tabloids.”

  “He didn’t take his eyes off you the whole time. And I had to sit there and watch it. It was not something I enjoyed.”

  “Well, after you didn’t bite on his jabs, I think he tried to intimidate me. Nothing he sai
d made much sense. It was like he was just playing around with me. Saying whatever came into his head. It was strange, and I was glad when he took off, believe me. I texted Laurie Dale last night and asked her to run a check through the Bureau databases and see if he’s a real agent. She’s calling me back today.”

  “Are she and Scott up at the farm?”

  “No, they’re still down in Springfield. She’s working some important case down there.”

  “Maybe it’s related to yours.”

  “Maybe. I didn’t ask her. I’m anxious for her to call me back. That guy was downright irritating.”

  “So, tell me about your case. See if we can find any connection to the guy last night. We didn’t get to talk much after we went to bed.”

  “Yeah, no joke. Your mouth was way too busy to say much.”

  “Talking in bed is highly overrated. I can think of better things to do with you than have a damn chat.” His dimples showed up and wowed her, as usual. “And I wasn’t in that big of a hurry, if you’ll recall.”

  Claire remembered, all right. She smiled her gratitude for all those lovely pleasures. He smiled back, promising more. Okay by her. “Trust me, I’m not complaining. But to answer your question, that jerk—and for the record, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that he’s legit, either—told me our victim was in the Bureau’s witness protection program. He said she disappeared, and that she ended up at the lake, dead at the top of that Christmas tree.”

  Black placed his cup down on the saucer and gave her his full concentration. “That changes things. What else did Wood say last night? When he wasn’t undressing you with his eyes.”

  “I thought once we got hitched you’d stop with that jealousy thing.”

  “That’s true, but that guy was about as blatant as he could get, and I just had to just sit there and watch it go down.”