“Great. That’s just great. That doesn’t help me at all.”
“Sorry, that’s all I got. Guess you’ll have to do the best you can.” The kid held his hand out.
“Really?”
“Deal’s a deal,” he said and tapped his palm with his finger.
Meira slapped the card down in his palm. He looked at it and squinted his eyes.
“You have to load the balance on the card first.”
“Sorry, that’s all I got. Guess you’ll just have to do the best you can.”
Meira ran out and hopped in the truck. Shit, this is going nowhere, she thought. Surely, Riley would know better than to run off with some boy…Red Orc or whatever the hell his name is. Her phone chirped and she jumped. She grabbed it in a frenzy and touched the screen. It showed a message had come through.
“Oh, thank you sweet Jesus,” she said but then her excitement was crushed when she saw it was from Troy…not Riley. The message was short and odd.
-You got any good recipes for crab?
What the hell?
-Sorry not a good time.
-My bad, no worries. Catch you after work?
She typed out a non-committal response and then deleted it.
-I need to see you now.
-Ok, well, I’m at the store. You can drop by if you want.
-On my way.
-I get it. Just couldn’t wait to see me again?
She would have smiled, but she was still too worried about Riley. She didn’t answer. Instead, she turned the truck south and headed to the Austin Seafood Company.
Barry Olsen Barron sat on the counter watching Troy dump all manner of strange spices and ingredients into the pot of…crabmeat. He almost couldn’t help but laugh as the man kept taking spoonfuls of the mix and sipping it, licking his lips thoughtfully and licking them again. The poor bastard had no way of knowing he was crafting a soup made with ten percent crab meat and ninety percent headless girl meat.
“Man, there’s no way you’re ever gonna get that to taste good.” He sniffed as he said it.
The man in the straw cowboy hat held up a finger to shush him. “Watch and learn, sonny boy.”
That pissed him off a little because his dad used to call him sonny boy. But he’d punched that son of a bitch in the face the last time he did and that had taken care of that. Troy held out a spoon of the soupy mix urging Barry to try it.
“Not a chance,” he grunted. “That shit ain’t goin’ in my mouth.”
“Seriously,” Troy shrugged. “I need another opinion. It’s not half bad really.”
Barry eyed the spoon. It didn’t look like there was any meat on it, just the creamy stew. He inhaled slowly and took the spoon. He put it to his lips and took the tiniest sip. He thought his immediate reaction would be to spew it out, but he didn’t…
“Holy shit, dude,” he looked up at Troy. He was grinning under his beard. “It ain’t too nasty. Hell, it tastes like chicken.”
Troy laughed and slapped Barry on the back. Barry almost smacked him upside the head with the ladle of crab-human soup, but he calmed himself before he did.
“I told ya so.” He crossed his arms over his apron and leaned back on the stainless steel counter. “Sometimes back in Afghanistan, we had to make do with dirt and water. You’d be surprised what the right mix will do to fill yer belly.”
Barry felt his jaw drop in surprise. “You were a Stanner?”
He watched as the man’s jovial smile became a tight line between his lips. “I think the word you’re lookin’ for is Ganner. And yes, I was.”
“Whoa, man, I had no idea. How many of those bastards did you kill?”
He hadn’t expected Troy’s jaw to clench and unclench so many times. The man had become a face of stone.
“It’s not somethin’ I talk about.”
“Hey, it’s cool with me. I’m not gonna hate on you for murderin’ those pieces of shi—”
Barry was surprised how fast Troy had moved. He’d grabbed his shirt and slammed him up against the cooler door before Barry could finish his sentence.
“I said…it’s not somethin’ I talk about.”
Barry felt his vision go red. Nobody talks to Tryon the Tyrannical that way, his mind growled. He put his hands on Troy’s shoulders, prepared to throw the man off him, but he was disappointed that even though he felt like an Orc warlord, he certainly wasn’t one in real life. His eyes twitched to the counter beside them and he saw his knife. Not his special mail order Dadao, but a scaling knife. It’ll gut the man just the same, he thought. He was about to reach for it when he heard the bell on the front door tinkle. Someone was here. He felt Troy’s grasp ease on his shoulders and he felt his feet touch the ground again. Holy shit, had that guy been holding me up off the ground? He made a mental note not to be taken by surprise again.
“Hello?” a voice called from the front of the store.
Troy sniffed and nodded toward the sound. “I’ll just um…check it out…see who’s here. Okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Barry rolled his shoulders back. “Cool, bro.”
When Troy got to the doorway he turned back. “I’m sorry, kid…I just…sometimes…it’s not my fondest memory.”
“No worries,” he said and gave him a single thumbs up.
But when Troy walked out to the front, Barry tucked the filet knife into his pocket…just in case that asshat tried anything like that again. He heard a woman’s voice say hello to Troy and he peeked through the swinging doors out front. She was pretty, but she was old, like Troy…and she was frantic about something.
Troy was surprised to see Meira Carr in the front of the store. He shook off the confrontation with Barry, held out his arms, and smiled.
“What’s happenin’, babe?” he asked.
“She’s gone, Troy. I don’t know where she is. She’s not home. She didn’t go to school. I can’t find her.”
She was hysterical nearly to the point of tears.
“Whoa, now.” Troy put his hands gently on her arms and pulled her close.
When he did, the floodgates opened and she began to sob.
“You have to help me, Troy,” she said. “I don’t know where else to look. I’ve been driving all over town trying to figure out where she could be.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Didn’t Duffy say he saw her at school?”
“He did. But I went over there and I spoke to her teacher. She never showed up in the morning and she wasn’t there at the end of the day either. She’s gone. Oh, God, what’s happened to her, Troy?”
He took a deep breath. This was bad…really bad. Some freak was killing girls in town about Riley’s age and she was missing without a trace. Not good at all, he thought.
“Okay, just slow down and tell me where you’ve been.”
She shuddered a few times, wiped her eyes on her sleeve and sniffed back her tears.
“Well, I went home and she wasn’t there. Her alarm clock was going off, so she wasn’t there to turn it off this morning.”
“Could she have forgotten it and maybe hit the snooze or somethin’?”
“Not Riley.” She shook her head. “I don’t think she’s ever used the snooze button in her life. She’s a morning person—not like me.”
Troy nodded.
“And then I went to the school. She didn’t check into homeroom in the morning and she wasn’t there in study hall at the end of the day.”
“So, no chance she could’ve missed just those two classes?”
She shrugged. “I mean, I guess it’s possible, but…”
“Right,” Troy agreed.
“Oh, and then I went down to the game store.”
“Game store?”
“She likes video games, board games, role-playing stuff. I don’t know much about it, but they seemed to know her. Said she’d been down there with some boy…Red Orc or something…whatever the hell that means.”
“Red Orc? Is that some kind of screen name or character name?”
“So,” Troy said and scratched his chin. “We need to find this kid, right?”
“I’m not even sure how to do that,” she groaned. “And he’s got my baby.”
The sobs came back and Troy put his arms around her.
“Maybe we can play the game using her password and whatnot and see if we can track him down?”
She leaned back and blinked the tears from her eyes. “Shit, Troy! That’s genius!”
She pulled out of his arms and ran to the door. He was startled by it and took two steps toward her.
“Wait, Meira,” he called.
She looked back as she pushed the door open. “Don’t worry, Troy. I’m just heading home. Come over when you’re off work.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going orc hunting,” she said through gritted teeth.
The door whooshed shut behind her and Troy exhaled. He wasn’t sure what to do. He was supposed to finish up the stew and deliver it, but he felt like he should go with her. He pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen and opened his mouth to ask Barry if he could cover.
His voice caught in his throat as he realized the kitchen was empty. Barry was gone. Dang kid, he thought. Bailed out on me again. He sighed and took his apron off. He picked out a piece of the meat and bit into it. Not bad. Definitely tasted like chicken. He poured the huge pot of stew into a plastic tub and sealed it. Then he stuck it in the cooler and called for a taxi.
“Kid owes me one for this,” he muttered as he started to clean up the kitchen.
Barry leaned against the back of the building just outside the door. He struggled to slow his pulse, but his heart threatened to beat out of his chest. They’re onto me, he thought as he finally slowed his breathing. Gotta figure this thing out. He slunk out to his car in the shadows.
Barry started his car and pulled out of the lot. Time to call in a favor from old pops. He didn’t turn on his lights in the coming dusk until he was a mile away from the Austin Seafood Company.
18
I’m On A Boat
Riley Carr woke in a daze. Her first thought was that she was blind. She couldn’t see anything at all. Then came the pain. Her head cried out with a sharp pain on the top of her skull. It felt as if someone had nailed a spike into her brain. She sobbed as she touched it and felt something crusty in her hair—probably blood. The second thought that came to her when she heard the clinking of a chain and felt the weight of some kind of bracelet around her wrist. I’m chained, she thought, like some kind of prisoner. A moan escaped her lips as she realized she wore similar clasps around both wrists and both ankles. She was sitting on a floor that felt like metal under several inches of water. She was soaked and freezing.
“Hello?” she said into the darkness. “Is anyone there?”
She waited, but no one answered. As she sat there in her daze, she began to realize that she could see…but just barely. The faintest trickle of blue light seeped through a crack above her. She strained to see the room around her, but the details were hard to make out. There were no windows of any kind and the walls seemed to be just beyond what she could see in the dim light. She pulled herself up to her knees and crawled slowly along, tracing the chains that held her back to a massive metal loop hanging on the wall. She grasped the chains on her arms and pulled as hard as she could to no avail. The metal held fast.
She slumped down to the floor and leaned back against the wall. Her head began to swim as she tried to think back to the last thing she could remember. She rocked back and forth with vertigo, but then realized the water beneath her was sloshing back and forth, too.
“A boat,” she muttered. “I’m on a boat.”
How in the hell did I get here, she thought and gently pressed her fingers to her temples. She massaged her head and her memories began to emerge from the fog. Barry. She’d been with Barry. His trailer, I went to his trailer. And then…
That’s where the path through her mind went black. She simply couldn’t remember what had happened. And then the voices came…muffled and low from above her. She held as still as she could and strained to listen, but they were distant—too far away for her to make out the words. From the sound of it, the people talking were arguing. And then it was quiet again. She leaned her head back on the side of the boat and started to cry.
“Are you freakin’ stupid, boy?”
Barry hung his head as his father yelled at him.
“I done got you outta this kind of thing once before and now you damn well gone and done it again?”
Barry shrugged his shoulders. His father didn’t understand. He didn’t know what the itch felt like. He didn’t feel the burning desire to control and ultimately to decide the fate of another human being.
“I didn’t mean to,” he whined. “It just kinda happened. And they had it comin’ too. Hell, the blonde one—”
He was interrupted by a hard backhand to the left side of his face. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d felt his cheekbone crack.
“Yer just as stupid as yer whore mother, do you know that, boy?”
Barry lay on the floor in a fetal position cradling his face. He knew better than to get up or to protest. Any such outburst would bring another, harder blow from his father.
“I shoulda known leavin’ you with her would make a sniveling idiot outta you. God knows I tried, but that wench didn’t leave me no choice. Screwin’ around town. Hell, when I left, there wasn’t no one in town she hadn’t banged. Stupid woman.”
Barry almost defended his mother, but she was gone now. What was the use? And he’d just get hit again. So, he waited.
A boot hit him just below his ribs lifting him up over on his back. He lay there looking at the ceiling trying not to let the tears come. Tyron the Tyrannical did not cry.
His father leaned over him. He was an ugly man. Damn gray braids hanging down from under a tie-dyed bandana framed his dark-tan face. His eyes were the pale blue of a cataract sufferer and his belly bulged over his belt. Why didn’t the man ever wear a damn shirt?
“Get yer ass up, boy.”
Barry inhaled and a sharp pain stung his side. Probably a broken rib. He pushed himself up on his elbows and to his surprise his father reached out a hand to help him up. Barry glared at it and curled up to a sitting position without taking his hand. Eventually, he was able to stand. He was shorter than his dad by a couple of inches, but his old man was a strong guy. He toyed with the idea of tackling and overpowering him…throwing him overboard…but quickly abandoned the thought. He’d probably just get a worse beating out of the failed attempt.
“Sit,” his dad said, pointing to a small table near the front of the boat.
Barry slumped into the bench seat and leaned forward over the table holding his stomach. His father went to a cabinet nearby. He pulled out a couple of paper cups and an unmarked bottle of dark liquid. He sat the cups on the edge of the table and poured some of the liquid into each one. He picked one up and slid the other over to Barry.
“Drink it.” He jutted his chin out and slurped his down in one gulp.
“What is it?” Barry asked without reaching for the cup.
“Just drink it, ya puss,” his dad grunted and filled his own cup again.
Barry picked up the cup and took a small sip. The liquor burned his lips, tongue, and throat. It felt like a hot brick when it hit his stomach. It threatened to come back up, but Barry clenched his throat closed. He almost put his hand over the top of his cup to stop his father from filling it again.
“It’s just rum, ya baby. Drink another one and it’ll start to taste better.”
For one time in his life, his father was right. The second drink went down a little smoother, and the pain in Barry’s face and ribs slowly began to go numb.
“Now start from the beginning. Don’t skimp on the details. If I’m gonna get you outta this, I need to know what I�
�m freakin’ dealin’ with.”
Barry recounted the night that he’d become Tyron the Tyrannical, the mighty orc, in real life. Those bitches had laughed at him for the last time. By the time they’d left Fish Heads that night, they were so damn drunk. He told them he was a cab driver and they had climbed into his car without blinking. They passed out for the ride, so Barry was able to get them out to his trailer without a struggle. And that’s when Kim had woken up and started screaming. She hollered for Troy to come save her, that asshat.
He had to cut her throat to keep her from waking the neighbors and the damn blade had gone all the way through her neck in one clean sweep. He hadn’t intended to cut her head off, but it was so cool he had to try it again. Dana never woke up before she lost her head. By that time, he was in full warrior mode and he needed more blood. He dragged their bodies into the cooler out back, but he’d kept the heads with him in a garbage bag for trophies. He tossed them into his car and headed out to find Troy and take his damn head too. But when he’d finally gotten the damn rowboat out to Troy’s cutter, the jerk wasn’t there. Probably still at the bar.
And a plan began to form in his mind. A plan to take him down. He’d plant the girl’s heads somewhere on the boat. At first, he’d laid them on the pillows in the bedroom with blood splashed all over…but then he decided to get creative. And that’s when he’d pulled the lobster trap up and flung them inside. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
“So, what’s the problem then?” his father asked when he’d heard the story.
Barry licked his lips and held up his cup. His dad poured more of the liquor in it and waited. Barry took a sip and sat the cup on the table.
“There’s another girl.”
His father raised his hand and Barry flinched and threw up his arms to block the blow…but it never came.
“Are you that stupid? You’re thinkin’ about killing another girl? This ain’t happenin’. Whatever you’re thinkin’ of doing—”
“She knows,” Barry interrupted his dad’s tirade. “She knows about the bodies. She knows everything.”
The Complete Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Collection Page 103