Rigged

by Jon Grilz

  “I’m gonna give you five seconds to step away from The Baker, or Greg and me are gonna start blasting. You got it?”

  “Put your guns down,” Charlie said.

  John almost smiled, but it was really more of a smirk. “One—”

  “It’s nice to see you know how to count, but you still have a chance to get out of this,” Charlie said.

  “Two—”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Before the man could move or say anything else, Kevin heard a pop, then just ringing as the frame around the front door blew out in some kind of strange explosion. At that point, it felt like he was standing outside of himself, watching everything happen at once, all in slow motion. John’s eyes widened at the sound, and Greg scurried out from behind him like a startled dog, but also disoriented from the blast. The door fell down, and two men moved in—almost slid in—armed with suppressed machine guns. They walked like ghosts; their heads didn’t bob, and their upper bodies were rigid and poised.

  Charlie looked back at them, then over Kevin’s shoulder at Greg and John and let out a quiet, “Shit.”

  John’s and Greg’s attention immediately turned to the two men at the door, and no one said another word, as no words seemed appropriate at the time.

  What happened next would be anyone’s guess. The yelling started, and Kevin felt a thud against his chest. Whether it was a punch or just a shove, it caused him to stumble back and away. He fell through the open back door just as he felt the warm spray of someone’s blood mist across his face.

  By the time the fire captain announced the all-clear, the outside of the dilapidated old building looked like Jackson Pollock had thrown buckets of soot around the scene. The primary concern hadn’t been the fire, according the captain, but another meth explosion, with potentially lethal gases wafting about. In his exact words, “It was an act of God that the explosion didn’t happen in a residential area, as people surely would have suffered from inhalation, and there probably would have been a few fatalities more than the two bodies we found inside.”

  Perez sat in the cab of his cruiser just outside the fire department barricade, impatiently drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “You okay, Boss?” Nikki asked, her hair pulled back in that all-business ponytail, her knockoff designer sunglasses resting on the bridge of her nose.

  “I’m fine,” Perez said.

  “Don’t play games. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Perez nodded. He appreciated Nikki cutting through the bull, especially because Elsa was like that with him too. “Does any of this seem right to you?”

  “It’s a meth explosion, Boss. What part of it is supposed to feel right?”

  “Before this week, how many meth labs went up in or around Bluff Falls over the last year?”

  “Seven. I looked it up.”

  “Seven explosions in a year, but now two in a week.”

  Nikki shook her head, her eyes still looking out over the dash, toward the firefighters. “Coincidence?”

  “Don’t use that word around me,” Perez said. His stance on coincidences was well known in the department, and he hated things being pawned off the chance. It led to sloppy police work, sloppy work anywhere. Elsa’s first doctor thought it was a coincidence that she’d had a fainting spell not long after a bout of pneumonia. “There are no coincidences, Sergeant.”

  Nikki looked down and cocked her head away from Perez, as if she was lost in a thought.

  “What is it?” Perez asked.

  “Well, to tell you the truth, I kind of thought it was a weird coincidence, but—”

  “But what?” Perez turned in his seat to face his partner.

  “A couple nights ago, the last time I saw Charlie Kelly, at the Daily Diner…well, remember how I told you he seemed like a calm dude, like the type who likes to stay in the background and not really get involved in anything? I mean, even with the background check, we don’t have anything concrete on him anyway, and—”

  “Spit it out, Nikki.”

  “Well, the other day, at the diner, we were looking through those Trivial Pursuit cards they keep on the counter, and there was this question about the dad on Diff’rent Strokes.”

  “Conrad Bain?” Perez said.

  Nikki looked over at him.

  “He just passed away. It was on the news not too long ago.”

  “Actually, the question was about the character name, Phillip Drummond.”

  Perez felt like he saw the connection that didn’t quite form in his mind. “And?”

  “Dina, the waitress, said the guy’s name reminded her of Drumlins’,” Nikki said, pointing out the windshield at the burnout building. “That used to be Drumlins’ Pharmacy.”

  Perez took a minute to let it all come together in his mind, but it still didn’t quite click. It seemed too much like coincidence, and he didn’t like that one bit. “Did Charlie mention Drumlins’?”

  “I don’t think so. Dina was the one who kept talking about it.” Nikki paused. “Wait..now that I think about it, Charlie might have guessed Drumlin instead of Drummond.”

  “Jesus,” Perez said as he swung his car door open and stepped out of the vehicle. He knew Nikki was right on his heels; he didn’t bother to turn, but he could hear her hustling to keep up with his beeline to the explosion site. “You’re telling me Charlie Kelly, the spook with the vendetta, mentions a specific location in town, and you didn’t think to look into it?”

  “Boss, it was a co—”

  Perez glared back at her and cut her, his glare daring her to finish the word.

  “Besides,” Nikki said, “this place is a dump. It’s been abandoned for years, and we’ve never been called here. How was I supposed to know that Charlie was going to draw a trivia card with a question he could link to this place?”

  Perez stopped and turned, taking two quick steps back toward his partner, who stopped dead in her tracks. They had drawn the attention of a few firefighters cleaning up equipment, but Perez didn’t care. “Did you see the card?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then how do you know that was really the question on there? This guy’s whole life is counterintelligence. His whole fucking life is a lie, regardless of what his file says about him always telling the damn truth.”

  Perez stomped past the barricade and into the burnt-out building. There were two sheets over bodies at the far end of the room. The explosion looked centralized, as if the debris and lab equipment had been pushed out from the center of the room. Perez walked over to the bodies and looked under the sheets; each dead man was still holding a gun.

  He heard Hamill walking up slowly from behind him as he squatted next to the charred remains of the bodies. He didn’t even know what he was looking for. He just thought that if he stared long enough, something would leap out, a clue or something, but nothing did.

  Perez and Nikki walked back outside. Just behind the grouping of police squad cars sat a familiar black Town Car. The same two men from the trailer park stood next to it with their arms crossed, staring at the warehouse.

  “Can I help you?” Perez called out and walked toward the car.

  Neither man moved as he approached.

  “This is a crime scene. You guys need to clear out.”

  One of the men, the one with a large, jagged scar that ran up into his shirt sleeve, took off his sunglasses and stared down at Perez. The veteran officer was no stranger to people trying to play the tough-guy routine on him, but this guy looked different, with the 1,000-yard stare of a veteran and no interest in moving.

  “You’re the spooks, aren’t you?” Hamill asked.

  Neither man spoke.

  “You guys looking for Charlie Kelly?” Perez said, not interested in beating around the bush.

  “Who?” the scarred man asked.

  “Charlie Burke,” Hamill said.

  The scarred man looked over at his associate and back at Hamill. “Never heard of him.” />
  Perez tried putting on a diplomatic smile. “Come on, guys. I think we’re looking for the same thing.”

  The scarred man looked coldly down at Perez. “You have no idea what you’re in the middle of, Officer,” he said. “Perhaps you should take your Keystone Kop show down the road. I thought I saw somebody speeding earlier, and I’m sure there are cats that need to be pulled down from trees.”

  “Maybe I should run you two in for interfering with a police investigation.”

  The scarred agent stared at Perez coldly. “You think you can do that?”

  “You think I can’t?” Perez asked.

  The standoff only lasted a minute before the two spooks got back into their car and drove away without another word.

  Perez wrote down their license plate number, though he didn’t expect it to yield anything.

  “Well? What do ya think now?” Nikki asked.

  Perez shook his head. “I don’t know, but if this was Charlie Kelly, things are escalating. I want this place torn apart, every inch of it combed. I need to know if these guys were alive before the explosion. If these tweekers were dead before the big bang, I need to know how they died.” Perez stood up and stared at his partner, then waved a couple uniforms in. “Fellas, this might appear like nothing more than a meth explosion, but we’re going to treat it like a Presidential assassination, you got that? No one talks to the press, everything gets tagged and photographed, and I don’t wanna hear one word of backtalk about resources. This is the second meth explosion in a week, and four people are dead so far. This stops here and now. Whoever is responsible for this is gonna be put in a cage, and we’d better cage him soon, before he blows this damn town apart. I’m sick of people dying on my watch, meth heads or not.”

  Chapter 18

  Sergeant Mark Perez sat in the lobby chair of the coroner’s office. His leg twitched impatiently as he waited for the coroner to come back from lunch. He did his best to remind himself that people had their own jobs and own lives, but at that moment, Perez really wanted the world to revolve around him, at least as far as the investigation was concerned.

  The coroner, Jerry Peterson, finally walked in the front door at nearly six in the evening. Jerry was a funny little man, round in the face with red cheeks. He had the kind of morbid sense of humor that came with cutting into dead bodies all day. He was also a talented coroner with decades of experience, unshakable on the witness stand.

  It had been almost twelve hours after Perez had been on the scene of the Drumlin’s explosion. Jerry carried the last couple bites of a hamburger in one hand and used the other hand to thumb through something on his Blackberry. “Hey, Mark,” Jerry greeted. “Come on. You’re gonna want to see this.”

  Perez followed Jerry into the autopsy room to the two tables that held the stitched-up, charred corpses the fire department had pulled out of the burnt remains of the old Drumlins’ Pharmacy.

  “Two explosions in under a week,” Jerry said, shaking his head. “I’m going to have to start asking for overtime for all the ASAP orders I’ve been getting lately. Been a busy week?”

  “You could say that,” Perez said. “What did the autopsies reveal?”

  “Which ones?” Jerry asked.

  It took Perez a second to remember that he’d requested autopsies on the bodies found in the trailer explosion too. “Why? There was something more to the two in the meth fire?”

  “You could say that,” Jerry said. “The big guy they found tied down with cord was dead well before the explosion. His chest had been caved in.”

  “Caved in? Did someone hit him with a hammer or something? He was a big guy.”

  Jerry shrugged. “I doubt it was anything that severe. It looks sloppy. Not that hitting someone with a hammer takes finesse, but if it had been a blunt object, he’d have to have been hit dozens of times, the sadistic son-of-a-bitch. I’m not really sure what caused it, but I think we can rule out a hammer or golf clubs or anything like that.”

  “Okay. Well, what about the two from Drumlins’?”

  Jerry walked over to the corner desk and pulled a clipboard off a stack of them. “I’ve got a few theories on those two.”

  “Theories?” Perez didn’t like the sound of that. “I’m guessing they didn’t die in the fire.”

  Jerry shook his head. “Nope. Gunshot wounds, both of them.”

  Perez really didn’t like the sound of that. It was bad enough that Charlie might have been starting fires all over the place, but adding a gun to his arsenal took things to a new level. “Did they find bullet casings at the scene?” Perez asked.

  “You’d have to double-check with scene investigators, but I don’t think so.”

  Perez realized that if there were no bullet casings, either the shells had been lost in the blast, or the shooter had been careful enough to take the casings with him, like a true professional—perhaps one trained by the feds. “Enlighten me on these theories of yours, Jerry,” Perez asked.

  Jerry looked at the clipboard and set it down. He walked over to charred bodies and pointed at small patches of pink flesh woven in with the burnt sections, flesh curled and rolled away from the bone. With the tip of his pen, he pointed to the face of one of the bodies. “Autopsy results revealed that both were killed with a single gunshot that passed through the Vermillion line.” Jerry traced a line from eye to eye and from brow to the ridge of the upper lip, forming a T. “They severed the spinal cord.”

  “And?”

  “And,” Jerry said, drawing it out for effect, “the forensics show that the shots came from two different directions. The bodies were found side by side, and they had guns in their hands, but they didn’t get off any shots.”

  Perez shook his head. “That doesn’t mean there were two shooters. It still could have been one guy.” He desperately wanted it to be only one guy, because two meant there had to be an accomplice, or worse, the two spooks were operating beyond just trying to track Charlie down. Perez couldn’t bear to think he’d just had a face-to-face confrontation for the two guys responsible for the shootings and had just let them drive off. He wanted to think it was someone else; he hoped they wouldn’t be so brazen as to come right back to the scene of their crime. If those two were involved, his real concern was that things had progressed far beyond what he, Nikki, or anyone else on the force could handle. For that reason, he prayed there was only one shooter.

  Jerry gave Perez a condescending glare. “I guess it could be one shooter, but come on, Mark.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Perez said, holding his hand up. He knew Jerry was right. The chances of one man making two perfect shots without even a single shot fired back were beyond improbable.

  “There’s more to it,” Jerry said. “This point of impact is called a catastrophic head shot, a CHS. The bullet severs the spin, and the body doesn’t have time to spasm. You just crumple and die.”

  “I’ve heard of CHS, but why is that weird?”

  “Who shoots like that?” Jerry asked. “No federal agencies train their guys to make shots like that. At best, it’s risky. Most agencies train for center mass shots, to aim for the heart or the torso for the greatest probability of stopping the suspect with the least amount of risk.”

  “How do you know all this?” Perez asked.

  “Vietnam. Add almost forty years of working for the state, and a man learns a few things about gunshot wounds.”

  “If it’s such a hard shot, why would anyone go for it?”

  “Best guess?” Jerry asked.

  “Best guess,” Perez said, nodding.

  “I’d say there was a finger on a trigger. A shot to the heart will kill, but there’s always a chance of a spasm. Maybe whoever did this wanted to make things as quiet as possible—you know, to avoid any unnecessary police intervention.”

  “Jerry, are you trying to say there are two gun-toting psychos running around in Bluff Falls? Two guys crazy enough to try and make those shots instead of aiming for the chest? They could be g
ang-bangers who just got lucky.”

  “Perhaps, but they both made the shot,” Jerry said.

  “Sniper-qualified psychos,” Perez amended. What was worse, Perez considered, they were sniper-qualified psychos who drove a black Town Car, wore special-agent sunglasses, and were chasing Charlie Kelly, the odd, whiskey-stealing spook in the porkpie hat.

  Chapter 19

  Damon was in rare form as he stomped around the room, ranting and yelling threats about the invisible man who kept fucking with his business. Rook did his best to stay out of it, taking position near the wall. Damon looked to be losing it all, one piece of a time, and Rook hoped to stay out of sight, out of mind. “Fifteen million dollars. Fifteen million,” Damon muttered over and over again, like a broken record, as if no one knew about the ton of meth he was about to sell. He yelled it so damn loud that if Rook hadn’t been as good about security as he was, the cops could have gotten within earshot at 100 feet away from the barn and heard everything they needed to hear to put them all away for a very, very long time. It was totally unprofessional, and it was pissing the big man off, making him long for his drill in a bad way.

  “Where’s The Baker? Where the hell is my shit,” Damon yelled, pounding his fist on the table, grabbing anyone who got within arm’s reach, shaking and trying to intimidate them, though he knew damn well not to try that with Rook. He tried to act like the big man on campus around the meth-heads, but both Damon and Rook knew the operation was nothing without Rook covering the angles. “And you,” Damon said, pointing at Rook, taking him by surprise. “You’d better get your black ass in gear and find out what the fuck is going on.”

  Rook didn’t say anything for a moment, Damon’s comment took him off guard, and that led to restrained rage. “I’m on it.”

  “You’d better be,” Damon said with a sneer, “or I’m gonna be on you.”