For the Sake of the Game

by Laurie R. King

  “Did you see where he ran? It’s important.”

  The woman shook her head. “He was hallucinating, I tell you.”

  Holmes stood still, watching the tent city. Hester did her best to tamp down her worry over Bruce. He was former military, after all, and had navigated Chicago street life safely for the past three years.

  “Give me a landmark close to here,” Holmes said. “And by that I mean within a two-block radius.”

  Hester shook her head. “I don’t know of any.” She took out her phone to search. “Google shows no murders.”

  “Expand the search beyond homicides to strange happenings, and the area to several miles. If I’m right, the people who took McPatrick just took your friend Bruce.”

  “Well, there’s the Biograph Theater, east of here, where Dillinger was shot down by the FBI. South, there’s the site of the old Iroquois Theater, with an alley said to be haunted by victims of the fire that burned it to the ground. Then there’s the Museum of Science and Industry—the ghost of Clarence Darrow sometimes appears on the bridge where his ashes were scattered into the lagoon.”

  Holmes snapped his fingers. “That’s it.”

  “Why that one?”

  But Holmes was running to the car and Hester took off after him. She hit the street again and fumed as they were caught at a red light.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Darrow. Famous lawyer of both Leopold and Loeb and defender of evolution in the Scopes trial. Who do you think would hate him the most?”

  The light turned and Hester hit the gas. Holmes placed a hand on the dashboard to brace himself. Hester placed her phone on speaker.

  “Call Drake,” she said. The phone system dialed and Drake answered immediately. “Get someone to the Museum of Science and Industry. We think another ghost sighting occurred there and we’re heading to intercept them.” Drake agreed and hung up.

  “Enter from the west, if you can,” Holmes said, studying his cell phone. “They’ll be heading back to the Virgin Mary viaduct by now with their projection equipment. There.” Holmes pointed to a battered van, its windows blacked out and REPENT drawn on its side. “Follow them. And call Drake back. Tell him to join us.”

  Within minutes, Drake’s car pulled up in the next lane, followed rapidly by three Chicago police cars. They cut off the van, flashing their lights to order it to pull over. Hester parked twenty feet behind and watched as the uniformed officers approached the vehicle with caution. After a moment the van’s front doors opened. Ezekiel and two of his followers stepped out, hands raised.

  An officer approached the van’s cargo doors, gun drawn. Two covered the first as he opened them. They shined their flashlights into the cargo bay and Hester saw McPatrick and Bruce, both tied up with gags in their mouths. Two other followers rode with their hostages, and equipment filled the rest of the cargo hold. Hester sighed in relief.

  “I should have known,” Hester said. “They targeted McPatrick and whipped up superstition with the ghost sightings. And Clarence Darrow must be their worst nightmare.”

  Someone tapped on her window, which sent her heart racing, but it was only Drake. She rolled down the glass. “You scared me to death!”

  “Excellent work, ‘Agent Percy.’”

  Hester laughed. “Thank Holmes. He figured it out.”

  “Mr. Holmes, we appreciate it. Either of you know the second victim there?”

  “His name is Bruce. He’s former military and living in the tent city under the viaduct near the Virgin Mary images.”

  Drake pointed at one of the followers, who was rocking back and forth in agitation and chattering to one of the officers.

  “That one is already trying to talk his way out. Says it was Ezekial who came up with the scheme to abduct a famous skeptic and force him to recant on camera. When they realized that we were holding back the ghost photos, they came up with the bombs.”

  “Were they connected to the two terrorists?”

  Drake shook his head. “I doubt it. Seems that was a completely unrelated scheme.

  “Looks like we solved two crimes in one night,” Hester said.

  “None of these guys look like the ghost that everyone’s been photographing. I wonder if we’ll find him among Ezekiel’s other followers?”

  But with that, Holmes reached across Hester to show them both his phone. On its screen was a grainy photo of the evil man, his hands outstretched and the hate pouring from him.

  “I asked Watson to research Ezekial, and he sent me this. It’s Ezekiel’s grandfather. Turns out he was an old tent preacher from the thirties who warned of the apocalypse. He handled snakes and died when one bit him during a session.”

  “If I were you I’d delete that link from my phone,” Drake said.

  Holmes smiled. “Superstitious?”

  “In this case? You bet. Keep the car. I’ll get it tomorrow.” He tapped on the hood and Hester rolled the window back up. She thought for a moment, and then turned to Holmes.

  “You up for a celebratory drink? I know a great late-night club.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Yes. Where?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Hester and Holmes sat at a table at a blues joint in Chicago and listened as a quartet tore the house down. Holmes stretched out his long legs and cradled his glass against his chest, eyes closed and a smile on his face. When the band took a break he sat up and turned to Hester.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She nodded and clinked her glass against his. “I should be thanking you. Where’s your next case?”

  “London. Watson notified me that there’s a missing tanker filled with a chemical that, if it falls into the wrong hands, could pollute the city’s drinking water beyond repair.”

  “Sounds like a job for an expert in biochemical weaponry.”

  “Do you know any who might be free to join me in a flight to London?”

  “Paid for in Bitcoin?”

  “Naturally,” Holmes said as he leaned in close.

  She smiled back at him and the next band began to play.

  TOUGH GUY BALLET

  by Duane Swierczynski

  LOS ANGELES

  DECEMBER 1987

  I was hungover the day my partner was killed. Yeah, that sounds lousy, but in my defense I had no idea Chuck would be going after the Multiple Maniac all by himself. We’d been partnered up for six years and the vast majority of the cases we solved were thanks to shit Chuck discovered on his own. Truth be told, he’d carried my ass since the beginning. Sure, he’d bring me in for the rough stuff—a shoot-out in Hollywood, a dockside brawl down in Long Beach. He’d look at me with that cock-eyed grin and give me his catchphrase, You want to get into some trouble? But none of it was stuff Chuck couldn’t handle on his own, I was sure of that. I don’t know, maybe he kept me around so he could lob his tennis balls of brilliance against my stupid wall head. And now Chadwick “Chuck” Ostrander, the smartest homicide detective who’d ever worn an LAPD badge, was no more. What hope do I have now? What hope do any of us have?

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. What I really want to talk about are the strange circumstances surrounding Chuck’s death . . .

  He’d left me a message on my answering machine, which he left God-knows-when but I only discovered around 4 A.M. on the way to the bathroom to vomit or take a piss or maybe both. I should have gone to the movies the night before. When I go to the movies I don’t drink. I sit back and sip diet soda and stuff salted popcorn into my mouth and let the images wash over me. Instead I got into a fight with my ex and engaged in some serious self-harm with my longtime nemesis, Mr. Jack Daniel’s.

  The light blinked red. It would not stop blinking red. Even if I were to blow my brains out right now, I’d be sent to an afterlife of nothing but that red light, blinking. So I pressed the button.

  “Howie, if you’re up, meet me downtown at the Promenade.”

  That was Chuck for you. Sure, Chuck, everybody’s up at
4 A.M.

  I took care of all three bodily functions, not in the best possible order, then brewed some weapons-grade coffee. I brought the whole carafe with me in the car. By the time I reached downtown I’d finished the whole thing and it hadn’t helped one bit, except now I was jittery and painfully aware how drunk I was. I also had no idea where this Promenade was. He’d said downtown, right?

  Well no, it turned out he meant this new apartment complex in beautiful downtown Burbank.

  By the time I figured it out and headed back up the 101, sunlight was crawling over the Verdugo Mountains and my brain was ready to explode. I pulled into the strelitzia-lined driveway that led to the interior of the complex. There was a a small roundabout. The name of the place was lit up next to a marble fountain that sprayed water with all of the gusto of an elderly man taking a leak. The apartment complex was only a year or two old and already out of style. Somebody built a series of wrapped wedding presents, stacked them haphazardly on top of each other, and called it “architecture.”

  Here’s the difference between me and Chuck: if Chuck had shown up here, he’d have pinpointed my location within a minute. He had a brain that worked like that. (Or maybe I was just predictable.) I, on the other hand, had no earthly idea where my partner was. Chuck could be in any of the five buildings that surrounded the pool. Underneath one of the buildings in the ground-level parking areas, maybe. On the roof. Lounging in the pool, doing calculus problems in his head.

  “Chuck!” I shouted, even though it wasn’t even 7 A.M. yet, and most of the good residents of the Promenade were probably sleeping in this fine Saturday morning. “CHUCK!”

  “Shut the fuck up, asshole!” someone yelled back from a window somewhere.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “CHUCK!”

  “Are you looking for Detective Ostrander?” a quiet voice said behind me.

  I turned around to see a girl, maybe fifteen, in a halter top and boots that went up to her knobby knees. She looked like she was dressed up as a whore for Halloween, only she’d missed the big day by a month and change.

  “Who are you supposed to be?” I asked.

  “You must be Detective Burton. We don’t have much time. Follow me.”

  I blinked. “Follow you? I don’t even know you.”

  “I’m Nikki. He’ll only come to you, so let’s get moving.”

  Nikki the fifteen-year-old pretend whore (she had too sweet a face to be in the life for real) walked toward a metal gate near building 2. I had no choice but to follow her. This was vintage Chuck, too—enlisting random weirdos in our investigations. He called it “pooling brains.” See, Chuck had a theory that everyone was useful in an investigation, even if they didn’t realize it. He especially loved working with whores and wayward kids and bums, all of whom spent more time on the streets than anybody.

  “Nikki, honey, why don’t you just tell me where he is and I’ll take it from here.”

  “Because I don’t know where he is.”

  “You just said he’d only come to me. So you must have talked to him.”

  A microsecond after the word “him” came out of my mouth Nikki was up and over the nine-foot gate like a gazelle. I’d never seen anyone move so fast, especially in whore boots. She stared back at me through the bars.

  “You coming?”

  “If I try to make it over this gate, whatever’s left in my stomach will take two very different exit routes, probably at the same time.”

  Nikki frowned, then turned the handle and popped open the door for me.

  “You’re disgusting.”

  Which struck me as funny, considering her career aspirations, but before I had time to craft a dazzling retort she was already moving into the complex. Which was a maze with open-air hallways and a nonsensical layout. I could barely keep up. After a few confusing turns, she stopped so abruptly I almost knocked her down.

  “Call out to him.”

  I sighed. “Chuck!”

  “No, not like that, you idiot!” Nikki hissed. “With your mind. He’ll sense you, and I’ll sense him.”

  Now, as an adult member of law enforcement, I should have bristled at being called an idiot. But something else she’d said tripped me up.

  “I’m sorry . . . did you say with my mind?”

  “Think about him!”

  And then she was off again. None of this made sense. Then again, nothing about the past few months made any sense.

  We were after a serial killer Chuck had dubbed “MM,” as in Multiple Maniac. MM struck all over L.A. using such wildly different methods people thought it was the work of at least a dozen different killers. Chuck was the one who figured out it was all the same guy. The way Chuck put it, there was a pattern to MM’s non-pattern, whatever the fuck that meant. And night after night, Chuck tried to figure out the next step in this non-pattern.

  There was serious pressure to catch this sick ticket. Single-handedly MM had already boosted the county homicide rate about 7 percentage points. And there was no sign he was slowing down. The Maniac killed every night, in neighborhoods rich and poor. L.A. was terrified. So was I. Because one of these days, I knew Chuck would call me up and say, You want to get into some trouble? And we’d have to face off against this nutjob.

  I turned a corner and almost bumped into Nikki again. She was standing in front of a door, ear to the wood.

  “What are you doing?”

  Nikki turned to put a finger to her lips and give me the bug-eyed death stare.

  “Enough of this shit, Nikki. Is he in there? CHUCK?”

  The door flew open and a guy came out waving a utility blade.

  Now I’m not the quickest thinker in the world—that was more Chuck’s department. But I had two thoughts straight away:

  Poor Nikki will probably never look the same

  and

  I need to blow this fucker away

  But I’m telling you, Nikki was a hundred times quicker. Before my left hand reached the butt of my gun, she had done a half-dozen extremely clever things.

  Best I can recall, and with God as my witness: she snapped her head back like she was doing the limbo. The blade missed. And when he came back hard on the return swing, she used her wrist to block his. Nikki booted the guy in the chest, bouncing him off the door frame. He slashed again and she captured his forearm with her hands, twisted, then jerked him forward so that her bony knee landed up in his rib cage. He fell to his knees, but slashed up at her again. She recaptured the arm and drove her knee up into his face this time. I heard a crunch like a celery stalk snapping in half. Then again. And again. And again. The utility blade fell out of his hand. The guy dropped.

  By which point I had my revolver in my hands and I was yelling, “Freeze!”

  Nikki just looked at me. Now you step in?

  My cheeks burned, so I focused on the guy. Khakis, untucked button-down shirt, barefoot, clean-cut yuppie prick. Was this supposed to be MM? If so, where was Chuck?

  “Chuck!” I shouted into the apartment.

  “He’s not going to hear you.”

  “Why’s that? CHUCK.”

  “Detective Burton.”

  “CHUCK! What?”

  “Your partner is dead.”

  Now it was my turn to move like a jackrabbit. I clumsily launched myself into the apartment, clearing corners and feigning sobriety like a champ.

  How did she know Chuck was dead? Nikki must have looked into the apartment, saw Chuck’s corpse, and knew it was too late. And you know, the strange thing is that I could just feel it, too—like the wattage powering the whole city had dimmed a little. Chuck was dead. My friend, my partner, my mentor, my lifeline. Chuck. Dead.

  And with every second that passed, I expected to find the most tragic crime scene I’d ever see. But there was no one inside. It was just an ordinary apartment. What the hell?

  Back out in the hallway, I pointed my revolver at the yuppie’s head. “Where is he?!”

  MM played possum. I kicked him in the rib
s. He moaned.

  “WHERE IS HE!?”

  “Detective Burton,” Nikki said, “stop it.”

  I gave him another rib-splitter. He started shrieking and sobbing. Some tough killer he was.

  “Detective Burton!”

  But I’d had it. For all I knew, Chuck was bleeding out somewhere, in dire need of an ER. This sick bastard needed to talk.

  I pointed my weapon a few inches to the side of his head and squeezed the trigger.

  Or tried to, anyway; my entire hand was immobilized. I looked down to find Nikki’s petite hand around my wrist, her fingers curled like she was making a G-chord on a fretboard.

  “Stop it,” she said, slowly and quietly. “This host body is innocent. The malevolent soul inside has already fled. Probably gone back to join the collective.”

  I tried to pull the trigger and swear to Christ I couldn’t. “What are you doing to my hand?”

  “You can’t shoot him. It would be murder.”

  “I wasn’t going to kill him. The bullet would have gone into the ground.”

  “Not at this angle it wouldn’t.”

  “You know what? Fuck you, Nikki.”

  “Check the angle.”

  “Who the hell are you anyway?”

  “Check it.”

  So I checked my sights. And at this angle, the bullet would have . . . traveled straight into his left eye.

  Which was blinking at us.

  “Who-the-fuck-are-you-people!?” he stammered. Even I, the big dummy, could tell this wasn’t MM.

  Nikki tucked the guy back inside his apartment, told him this was all a dream, and when he woke up everything would be the way it was. I watched this girl, this teenage kid, calm him down like she’d been on the job for a couple of decades. She was totally chill with this scumbag who just a few minutes before had tried to slice up her face like a slab of lunchmeat. I was impressed.

  But I also thought about what she’d said before she played my wrist like a guitar. The malevolent soul . . . back to join the collective. What the fuck was that about? Did she mean this guy had been possessed?