It might have made me a little sick if I wasn’t thinking about the man that murdered my family… but I was… about them and about Keisha. So I let Max work on him for a few seconds before calling him off and having him go back into a quiet guard. The terrified gangbanger had been reduced, once again, to a whimpering puddle on the floor.
“So,” I said, “I think that should end any question about my being a cop. This might be a good time to answer my questions.” I paused for dramatic affect and looked back at Max. “Not as good as it would have been a minute or so ago of course, but I promise you, way better than a minute or two from now if you don’t.”
The punk started to quiver as he moaned, but he shook his head again and said, “I… can’t… they’ll kill me.”
“So will my dog,” I said, “only it will be a lot more painful.”
“You… you can’t kill me,” he stammered.
I hunched down on my haunches about six inches from him and clucked my tongue. “Really? I thought I’d proven the whole ‘I’m not a cop’ deal to you.”
“Doesn’t… matter… you kill me you’ll never find out nothing… you have to keep me alive…”
“Actually,” I grinned, and it wasn’t a nice grin, “I don’t. You see your two buddies lying around? Forget about them, did you? Well the truth is, that when I wake them up and they see parts of your body scattered all over this room here, I have a feeling they’ll talk pretty fast quick.” I stood back up, giving him my best Major Payne command presence and I have to admit, I was impressed by his hesitation. It spoke volumes to his courage, if not his smarts. But he talked, oh yes, he talked.
11
I tied up and gagged all three of the Bloods and left them bleeding in the living room while I searched the house. Keisha’s room was cute, with pink curtains and mermaid pillows. An overfilled toy box loaded with dolls and stuffed animals and other girly toys took up one section of wall while a plastic makeup vanity filled the rest. The remainder of the house was pretty sparse. Jerome’s room had a bed and a few clothes hanging in the closet. No dresser or night stand. A few toys littered the floor in here too, as well as a half-dressed Barbie Doll lying on the unmade covers which made me think Keisha probably slept in here most of the time.
In the bathroom, I found a small first-aid kit under the sink and pulled it out. A lot of it had been used up, but I confiscated the remaining bandages and band aids and went to work on my cuts and bruises. I stripped off both of my shirts and turned the cold water on full blast. My ribs, shoulder and chest were red and already starting to show blue and green beneath the skin. Somehow the puckered wound on my chest, from being shot, had managed to stay closed, but the skin around it swelled red and hot. The water felt good on my face, cold and crisp and clean. The cut on my cheek went to the bone and should probably warrant a few stitches, but who had time for that? I felt the lump of swollen flesh and thought my cheek was probably not broken. I hoped not. I’d seen plenty of orbital fractures, caused my share of them too, and would prefer not to deal with the hassle just now. My knuckles were cut and felt thick and sluggish. I soaked them in the water, letting the red turn to pink and finally almost clear before drying them and going to work with the peroxide and crisscrossing Band-Aids over my left cheek and eyebrow.
I found several bandages in the trash can with dried blood on them. Jerome had been injured recently and fixed himself up in the same bathroom I was using right now.
Going through the house, I found about thirty wallets with differing IDs and nine guns, as well as an assortment of knives, brass knuckles, nun-chucks and other weapons. Several of the IDs had been doctored with Jerome’s picture laid over the original. Who was this guy? Jason Bourne?
And then pay-dirt! Under his mattress, a folder with check stubs from a company called Atlas Construction, with its address and phone number printed right there. The local head office was in Castle Rock, not far really, about a half hour drive depending on traffic, and on a Saturday, that shouldn’t be bad. In some states, I suppose, they might not be working on a Saturday, but in Colorado, construction stops for nothing but time itself. Don’t believe me? Just drive down any road. Speaking of time I looked at my watch and saw it was after three. I made a quick call and found there would be people at Atlas Construction till five. I made another quick call to Senator Marsh who, surprisingly, answered on the first ring. I told him what happened, gave him the vehicle’s description and license plate, and told him I would call Aurora PD to clean up the mess. I gave him a brief rundown on what the Blood had told me about this being a gang matter of revenge on account of Jerome offing some Blood called Lil’ Grill and his homie.
After hanging up with him, I put out a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) to surrounding agencies.
Marsh vetoed contacting APD, (need to know and all that secret squirrel stuff) and said he’d send a squad over to take care of the mess and that I should concentrate on finding the girl and Jerome and nothing else. Couldn’t argue with that. Besides, I was too tired and sore to argue about much of anything.
The SUVs were pulling up out front as I started my car. I saw the Mountain step out of the lead car and look over at me, but I was in no mood for congeniality just now. I had work to do, so I just drove off.
Max had cleaned most of the thug’s blood from his coat and looked way less psychotic than he had a half hour ago. I called Jared Darling on my way to Castle Rock, and despite Marsh’s orders, had him put out the BOLO for the vehicle. I said to consider Jerome armed and dangerous and in possession of a kidnapped girl. I gave him their descriptions and vitals and told him I couldn’t say any more. He wasn’t real happy, but he went with it.
My guess was that Jerome would want to get out of the state fast as possible. But to do that he’d need money, and his job would be where he would have to go to get it. They had a pretty good head start on me so I had to hope for two things. First, that Jerome would be smart enough not to draw attention to himself by speeding, and second, that I’d miss all the State Troopers between here and there while I drove like my Escalade was a DeLorean trying to reach the 1.21 gigawatts threshold. Not that my car had a plutonium-powered nuclear reactor, but she was pretty fast and could do well over the standard 88 mph without even trying. Of course I know a lot of the troopers. Some of them even still like me.
By the time I passed C-470 on I-25, I was zipping in and out of the light traffic at a steady hundred and twenty. Who knows, maybe at this rate I wouldn’t have to go back in time after all.
12
Jerome made five turns then stopped the car and strapped Clair into her car seat.
“Daddy, you’re bleeding,” said Clair. Jerome had changed her name from the beginning, knowing that they would be looking for her. Clair seemed the logical choice to him. “That bad man hurt you.”
“Ain’t nothing, little one. He’s gone now.” He closed the door, went to the trunk and sorted through several stolen license plates, finally deciding on the newest. Unscrewing the old one with a flat tip he always kept in a gym bag for just this reason, he quickly replaced it with the new one.
His shirt stuck to him, wet and cold. It would look to anyone who saw him like he’d been through a massacre. Most of the bleeding had stopped, but the stab wound to his thigh still leaked. He’d have to attend to it before approaching his boss. If they saw him like this they would call the police and he couldn’t have that now. The gym bag held four shirts, a hoodie, two pair of pants and a pair of shorts, as well as two different licenses and a spare gun with two magazines. Jerome kept a separate bag for Clair with a lot more supplies, including a doll and a coloring book and crayons.
Jerome took the gym bag and got back in. He started driving, heading for the interstate, his mind plodding along at the same calm, calculating pace that it always operated. Jerome never felt excited. He didn’t get scared or worried. He almost never got mad. The only time he ever got mad was when it concerned Clair’s safety. Whatever damage had been done to him becau
se of his mother’s addiction didn’t completely work where it concerned Clair. She was different. She made him feel different. He didn’t know why exactly and he didn’t care. It was enough that she did. But even though he didn’t feel things like most people, he could see that other people did. Sometimes it seemed to help people, but usually it made them do stupid things. Things that made them vulnerable and easy to take control of. The man at the house had been different. Even when Jerome had hit him his hardest, something that would usually break people, the man had kept calm and kept on coming. Also, the man had somehow made Jerome angry just by saying that he had come to get Clair. Again, the fact that it made him angry didn’t scare Jerome, but it made him think about how to handle this strange man if they met in the future. Jerome decided it would be best to shoot him as quickly as he could. Yes, he would shoot him. And not just once. He would shoot him a lot.
“I want to go home, daddy,” said Clair from the back.
“We have to go to a new home,” said Jerome. Jerome never lied to her.
“I don’t want to go to a new home,” said Clair and in the rearview mirror he could see her scrunch her face up like a tiny fist.
“I know,” said Jerome.
“I want my toys.”
“I’ll get you new toys.”
“I want my old toys.”
“I know.”
She pouted for a while.
“Daddy, can I have a new doll?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“Will I have my own room again?”
“Yes.”
She thought for a second.
“I want to sleep with you. I’m scared of under the bed.”
“Okay.”
“But I want my own room for toys.”
“Okay.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“I didn’t get to finish my sandwich.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want to eat?”
She thought again and in the mirror he saw the little lines that always creased her forehead when she thought really hard.
“French fries.”
“Okay.”
“And nuggets.”
“Okay.”
“And a shake.”
“Okay.”
Jerome would have preferred a more out of the way place, but he had to change before reaching Castle Rock, so he pulled in at a McDonalds at the outlets and tugged the hoodie over his blood soaked shirt. In the glovebox he found a package of Baby Wipes with a few inside that were still moist and used them to wipe off most of the blood on his face. The cut over his eye oozed a little, but at least he didn’t look like he was set for Halloween. His nose felt broken and his lips were badly swollen. He took a last look in the mirror and dragged the hoodie up over his head and down over his face as far as he could. After unstrapping Clair from her seat, he hoisted her up in his huge arms and carried her back to the bathroom. He locked them inside the handicap stall and stripped off his shirt and pants. Clair played with the doll he brought in from the car, while sitting on the fold out changing station inside the stall.
The stab wounds didn’t feel very deep, but they left nasty punctures that he couldn’t get to stop seeping blood. He had to rip one of the other shirts into sections and wad them up and shove them into the holes before wrapping them with longer strips and tying them off. He told himself he should have had a First-Aid Kit in the gym bag and Clair giggled when she heard him talking to himself. Jerome repeated the actions on his thigh wound then slipped on a new pair of pants and exited the stall to look in the mirror.
He looked bad. The darkness of his skin helped hide it a little, but not enough. The wound over his eye had started bleeding again and he wouldn’t be able to get away with shoving anything into it to get it to stop without looking even weirder than he already did. He dug through the bag, but he couldn’t find any Vaseline or even toothpaste to jam in there, so he tried five minutes of direct pressure with a paper towel and then scooped up Clair and took her back to the car. He ordered from the drive through, keeping his face averted as much as possible, and then parked in the lot so Clair could get out of the seat to eat. As soon as she finished, he strapped her back in and drove to his job site.
His foreman was a Hispanic guy named Tony, but he wasn’t in so he talked with the site supervisor, a white man named Steve Hollow. Steve was big, taller than Jerome, but with a gut and a heavy beard. His forearms were like steel pillars.
Jerome left Clair in the car while he went up the steps of the work trailer and opened the door. He made eye contact with Steve, who took one look at Jerome and indicated with a nod of his head they should talk outside.
“Man you look like you been through a meat grinder,” he said to Jerome.
“No, not a meat grinder,” said Jerome. “I need my pay.”
“You quitting?”
“Have to,” said Jerome.
Steve looked toward the car and Clair.
“That your little girl?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty.”
“I need my pay.”
Steve had been through this more times than he could count. Drifters, migrants, regular guys that drank a little too much. Construction was hard work and it took hard men to live the life and hard men tend to live and play as hard as they work.
Steve nodded. “Hate to lose you, Jer. You’re a good worker.”
Jerome didn’t say anything.
“I suppose you’d prefer cash to a check?”
“Yes,” said Jerome.
“I’ll get it.” He went back into the trailer and came out a few minutes later. He counted out seven hundred dollars and handed it to Jerome, who he knew as Jerry Jefferson. “I tossed in a fifty as a bonus. Hope you make it back this way, I can always use a strong hand.”
Jerome took the money.
Steve held up a finger. “Anybody looking for you I should know about?”
“Looking for me?”
“Yeah, like the law, maybe? I know how custody battles go. I’ve got two exes of my own.”
“Maybe,” said Jerome.
“Okay,” said Steve. “I haven’t seen you since Friday.”
Jerome nodded then walked back to the car.
As they drove away, Steve, the site supervisor, shook his head. Hate to lose a good man.
13
The construction site looked pretty much like most. Big dirt area with temporary metal fencing. Twenty-foot high mounds of fill dirt and deep-laid pits, crisscrossed with rebar and bordered by thick cement foundation walls. Large yellow machines dotted the landscape; bull dozers, cranes, generators, forklifts, squatting like giant bugs ready for work. Near the entrance sat a series of work trailers. Basically construction mobile homes used as offices. A few cars littered a makeshift parking lot just east of the trailers. Jerome’s car was nowhere in sight, so I parked near the other cars and started out to the main trailer. A big man, with a thick beard and the traditional hardhat, opened the door and gave me a look like he expected me and wasn’t happy about it. He walked down the wood-slatted walkway and came up to me.
“Whatever you’re selling, we ain’t buying.”
“You the boss?” I asked. My whole body felt like a bruise and I wasn’t in the mood for jerky.
“Site Manager,” said the big man. “And it’s ‘bout quitting time. So like I said…”
I pulled out the Secret Service badge Senator Marsh had bestowed on me, figuring it would hold more weight than my PI credentials.
“Has Jerome Larkin been here?”
He gave me stupid; like he didn’t know who or what I was talking about.
“Jerome Larkin, Jerry Jefferson.” I held out one of the check stubs from under the mattress and a picture of Larkin. “This guy.”
“Oh, Jer. Yeah, he works here.”
“I know he works here,” I said. “That’s not wh
at I asked.”
He gave me a once-over. “Looks like maybe you already ran into him.”
“Well that tells me you’ve seen him today, otherwise you wouldn’t know that he’d been in a fight. So how long are we talking since he left?”
That shook him a little. The great detective showing off his deductive reasoning skills. Poof…like magic.
“I ain’t telling you nothing…” he started.
I didn’t have time for tough-guy games, so I stopped him cold. “He has a kidnapped little girl with him and he murdered her mother, along with a couple of other people. You really want to obstruct a federal investigation involving these types of crimes for a guy that you barely know?”
All the blood drained from his face and I thought he might faint. “Oh Lord. He kidnapped that little girl?”
“That’s right,” I said. “How long ago did he leave and did he say anything about where they were going?”
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” said the big man. “I even gave him a bonus; cash.”
“How long have they been gone?”
“Twenty, maybe twenty-five minutes. And no, he didn’t say nothin’ about where they was going. Ah, I’m gonna be sick.”
“Which way did they go?”
He shook his head, his face still bone white. He pointed north. “Back to the interstate, toward Denver.”
Toward Denver? “You sure, north toward Denver?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I watched him go. He was a good worker, ya know?”
“What was he driving?”
“Same as always, the brown Malibu.”
“Did you happen to see the license plate?”
“No…no why would I? Ah, man I feel sick.”
I wrote my name and number on a pocket steno pad I keep on me and handed it to him. Ordinarily, I would have given him one of my coins, but I figured it would diminish the secret agent charisma I had so carefully crafted here.
Hair of the Dog Page 5