by David Grace
The single brown eye oscillated from Big Jim’s face to his badge and then back again. Finally, she closed the door, and after a second’s pause, removed the chain. The girl stood back against the wall and watched them enter her living room then quickly pushed the door shut and re-set the lock.
The walls were a faded gray and studded with scratches and holes. Posters of bands, none of whom either detective recognized, covered half the space. Picasso Shark? Aztecka Blue? A white-plastic crucifix with gold trim was nailed to the strip of wall between two grimy windows. A stuffed black and white dog with button eyes and a lolling, red tongue guarded one end of the orange couch.
“May we sit down?”
The girl nodded and then sat at the couch’s far end, the dog clutched protectively to her chest. She was brown and small and could have been any age between sixteen and twenty-five depending on how she dressed and the depth of her makeup. Chris figured that the pervs preferred the sixteen-year-old version.
“May I ask your name?”
The girl stared at Big Jim for a second then spoke.
“Fatima Contal.”
“Darja Novoriska is your roommate?”
“Novorska,” Fatima corrected him. Chris made a note in his pad.
“How long have you and Ms. Novorska been roommates?”
Fatima shrugged. “Six months?” She said it as a question more than an answer.
“Do you both work for Johnny-Boy Watkins.”
Fatima tensed up and looked away.
“We’re not from Vice. We don’t care about your job. We just need your help about Darja.”
“Why? Are you going to arrest her? Is that what this is all about?”
“No, we’re not going to arrest her. I’m sorry to have to tell you that Ms. Novorska is dead. She—”
Fatima’s mouth opened in a little “O” then she buried her head and began to sob into the stuffed-dog’s fur. They waited a few seconds and Chris looked at Big Jim for guidance. He knew that in situations like this they were supposed to give a person a moment but he never knew how long. Big Jim just sat there until Fatima finally sniffled and looked up on her own. Big Jim pulled a tissue from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.
“Someone hurt Darja, Ms. Contal, and it’s our duty to find that person and make them pay for what they did to her. Will you help us?”
“I don’t know anything about it. What do you expect me to do?”
“Who were Darja’s friends? Who knew her? We think that whoever hurt Darja may have known her.” Chris looked up from his pad. What? The evidence pointed to some freak John, or Johnny-Boy, not some boyfriend or whatever. Obviously, Big Jim was lying in the hope that they might learn something useful. Chris wasn’t comfortable with lying. Lies weren’t single things but rather were a part of a larger story, a component in a web of facts. When you shoved a lie into that web it warped everything else, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, and the more you lied the harder it became to hide the distortions.
Fatima tightened her stranglehold on the cloth dog and looked nervously around the room.
“Me, I was her friend, nobody else. Most of the time she worked. We have to pay our debt. The only people Darja knew were Johnny-Boy and her clients.”
Clients, Chris thought, but said nothing aloud.
“Were any of her clients giving her a hard time? Were any of them rough with her?”
“No, she didn’t go in for that. If a guy got rough she would tell Johnny-Boy and he would make them stop.”
“Take a moment and see if you can think of anyone who liked Darja too much. Maybe somebody who was obsessed with her or followed her but couldn’t afford to pay her.”
Fatima looked forlornly around the room and Chris followed her eyes. The furniture was cheap and well-worn but the apartment was clean, no dishes in the sink, no clothes on the floor. A small vase in the center of the kitchen table held three red, cloth roses on plastic stems. Fatima wore a clean, pink Hello Kitty t-shirt with short sleeves. Her arms had old track marks, like Darja’s, but nothing fresher than six months or so.
Fatima looked back at Big Jim and shook her head. “No, everybody liked Darja. She was a good person.” Chris couldn’t tell if she was lying or not.
“What about Johnny-Boy? He told us that the last time he saw Darja was around eight last night, that she was on her corner. Do you know if that’s right? Could he have seen her after that?”
Fatima blinked and for a moment seemed deep in thought, then shook her head. Jim was sure that something was off here but he couldn’t tell what.
“Did Darja have any problems with Johnny-Boy? Is there any reason that Johnny-Boy might have wanted to hurt her?”
“What happened to Darja? You said that she was in an accident. How did she die?”
Chris started to open his mouth but a quick glance from Big Jim silenced him and the words “wood chipper” died in his throat. An instant later Chris’ face reddened when he realized how stupid a response that would have been. I should stick to dealing with computers, Chris thought. They don’t have feelings.
“She was strangled,” Big Jim told Fatima in a soft voice.
“Someone choked her?”
“No. We think he used a rope or something like that.”
Fatima’s eyes lost their focus and she stared blindly past Big Jim’s head.
“It wasn’t Johnny-Boy,” she said a moment later, pursing her lips.
“Why not?”
“When Johnny-Boy wants to hurt one of us he uses a knife. He likes to cut.” Fatima pulled up the hem of her t-shirt halfway to her breasts and displayed a six-inch scar. “He said that this was because I was holding out on him and that he had to teach me a lesson.”
Big Jim stared at the scar and his face hardened. Gone were the twinkling blue eyes and merry smile, replaced in an instant with a soldier’s glare.
“It wasn’t true. That’s just what Johnny-Boy told people. He really cut me because I got Darja off the junk. I had stopped shooting up before we got together and I helped Darja get clean too. Johnny-Boy didn’t like that. Drugs are one of the ways he hangs on to us. He knew that if Darja got clean that she might get ideas about leaving.”
“But you got her clean anyway,” Big Jim said.
Fatima nodded then, silently, began to cry.
“Was Darja going to leave Johnny-Boy?” Big Jim asked softly.
Fatima sniffled and dried her cheeks with another of Big Jim’s tissues.
“We both were,” she said at last. “Darja talked to a counselor at the Freedom Woman’s Center. We were saving up so that we could get a place together where Johnny-Boy couldn’t find us. Fay, that’s the counselor, said we could stay at the Center for two weeks while we looked for another place, that they would help us find one and get moved in and help us get regular jobs. We were almost there!” Fatima said in a sob and Big Jim handed her another tissue. “Two more weeks, only two more weeks and we would have been gone!”
“Did Johnny-Boy know you were leaving?” Big Jim asked almost in a whisper.
Fatima shook her head. “No, no one knew, just Fay.”
Big Jim looked past Chris at the tiny kitchen then through the open doorway to the primly made double bed, then back to Fatima.
“Pack your stuff,” he ordered. “You’re leaving. Right now. We’ll take you to the Woman’s Center.”
“I can’t go alone, not without Darja.”
“You have to, for your own safety.”
Fatima sat frozen on the couch, the little dog crushed against her chest.
“What time are you supposed to show up for work?”
“I’ve got to be on my corner by six, to get the guys on their way home from work.”
Big Jim looked at his watch. “It’s two-thirty. We’ve got plenty of time. Start packing.”
“I, I can’t.”
“You can and you will,” Big Jim ordered and took hold of her shoulders and pulled her to her feet. “I’m not going
to have another dead girl on my hands. You’re done with Johnny-Boy! Get in there and start packing!”
Fatima slowly pulled her gaze from Big Jim’s pink face, then nodded and headed for the bedroom.
“How much money do you have?” Big Jim asked Chris.
Hunter leafed through his wallet. “One-hundred sixty-three dollars and, oh . . . .”
“Forget the change. Give me a hundred.” Big Jim pulled out his own money clip and peeled off 10 twenties.
“Do you know where this Freedom Woman’s Center is?” Chris asked.
“I wish I didn’t.”
“Why? Is it a scam or something?”
“We had a case there, my old partner Frank Pignataro and me, a counselor, Pamalee Rhoades. She had a husband and two kids. We found her naked, in a ditch, half a mile from her house, shot eight times — feet, knees, vagina, elbows, and head, in that order. Whoever did it wanted her to suffer. We could tell from the blood pools that he took his time and let her bleed out. The head shot was to make sure she was never going home. The rest he did for fun.”
“Did you get the guy?”
Big Jim shook his head. “We were sure it was some husband or pimp getting even for Pamalee helping a woman get away from him, but we could never nail it down. There were a dozen guys who looked good for it, but we couldn’t tie it to any of them. My partner, he never got over it. For him, catching that case was like getting cancer.”
At the thunk of two suitcases hitting the floor Big Jim and Chris turned toward the bedroom. Fatima stood in the doorway dwarfed between two large bags.
“I’m taking Darja’s clothes. They won’t fit me but . . . but it doesn’t feel right to just leave them here, like she never existed.”
“Sure,” Chris said. “That’s OK. We’ll carry them.”
Big Jim stared at the huge bags and suddenly remembered the five flights of stairs. Clutching her purse and the cloth dog, Fatima followed them out.
* * *
After they parked at the Woman’s Center Chris glanced at Big Jim’s drawn face and pulled both the bags from the trunk. Jim walked Fatima to the front door.
“Here’s three hundred dollars,” he said, stuffing the bills into her hand. “And my card. I may need to talk with you again about Darja. I’m going to need you to call us before you move out of the Center so that we’ll know where you are. Will you do that?”
“Will you tell me if you find him, the man who killed her?”
“You still think it wasn’t Johnny-Boy?”
“No, he would have cut her. It gets him off. He likes to watch women bleed.”
Big Jim frowned and wondered if she was right about Johnny-Boy not being the murderer. Killers change their weapons all the time. The one constant is that they continue to kill.
“I’ll let you know when we find him.”
“Thank you.”
“You know not to let anyone who knows Johnny-Boy see you?”
“You’re telling me not to get high because if I do the dealers will turn me in to him.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”
“Don’t worry. If I did that, then all this, Darja, me, everything, would all be for nothing. I can’t let it be for nothing.” Fatima turned toward the door, then paused and turned back to Big Jim. “I didn’t tell you everything,” she whispered and looked around as if afraid someone might overhear.
“That’s all right. You can tell me now.”
“Johnny-Boy lied to you, about Darja working a corner,” Fatima said nervously. “He’s got a computer in the back of the bar, a website thing. He ran Darja’s dates from there.”
“Johnny-Boy was running some kind of an Internet escort service? Darja was a call girl?”
“She was so pretty,” Fatima whispered, on the verge of tears. “Johnny-Boy said it would be a waste to put her out on the street with the fifty-dollar whores . . . like me.”
“If I could get my hands on Johnny-Boy’s computer, would it have a list of all her . . . clients?” Big Jim asked, thinking aloud.
“You don’t have to.” Fatima pulled a small, black notebook from her purse and held it out. “She kept a list of her dates in here.” For a moment she held it tightly then, reluctantly, let go. “I was keeping it because . . . .” Fatima looked down at her empty hands.
Because you thought we were going to abandon you to Johnny-Boy’s hellish life, Big Jim realized and wondered what would have happened if he had not shown his humanity by giving her that little pile of rumpled twenties.
That trick-book, for a little while at least, would have meant Fatima’s survival without Johnny-Boy. Set up in a new apartment she could have called the men on that list and offered her body directly. She knew she wasn’t as pretty as Darja. She was no longer “fresh,” but men were men. If only half of them became regular customers, clients, she could have made enough money not to have to walk the street like a common whore. To Fatima this was not a simple address book. It was Freedom. It was priceless. And she had given it to Big Jim, trusting him to keep his promise, to use it to find Darja’s murderer. Like a passenger on a foundering ship, Fatima had handed Big Jim her life preserver and now she faced the menacing sea naked and alone.
With a sagging smile, Fatima suddenly turned and ran inside, passing Chris on his way out. Hunter gave Big Jim a questioning look.
“I ran out of Kleenex,” Big Jim said and headed for the car.
— End Of Death Never Sleeps Excerpt —
For links to websites where you can buy Death Never Sleeps check out the Death Never Sleeps page on David Grace’s website by TAPPING OR CLICKING HERE.
Here’s an excerpt from the Shelf Unbound Magazine best small press/indie book of 2014, David Grace’s Death Never Lies.
DEATH NEVER LIES
CHAPTER ONE
The newspapers later said that they were high on meth or crack or some other drug with a name that sounded like a line from a movie. But none of that mattered. When Franco Herrera and Ricky Bazzel took over Sam’s Speedy Mart they were just two crazed gunmen waving assault rifles and screaming orders.
“Give me the money!”
“Don’t look at me!”
“Nobody move!”
“Open the safe!”
Franco thought that the woman in the red sweater was moving around too much so he sent a burst of fire into the shelf of dish soap a few inches above her head. Green, orange and purple goo splattered like greasy rain. Franco smiled and fired off an extra couple of shots just to see more stuff blow up.
Barely a hundred yards from the store, Detectives Greg Kane and Ralph Amoroso were on their way back to Robbery-Homicide when the All-Units call came in. Ralph glanced left just as the Speedy Mart’s front window exploded under another burst from Franco’s AR-15. Theoretically, the guns should have been restricted to single-shots but Ricky had paid an extra hundred each to convert them to fully automatic. The fifty shot clips had cost another hundred on top of that but as he watched the glass fly across the parking lot Ricky figured that it was all worth it. He loved the AR-15. It made exactly the right statement: Nobody better fuck with me.
Amoroso mashed on the brakes and the detectives’ Crown Vic screamed as it went into a sideways slide. Both men jumped out and turned toward the building before the car had stopped bouncing on its shocks. The store’s front door shattered to another burst and a second later Franco jumped through the empty frame. He paused for an instant at the edge of the parking lot and, wild-eyed, stared at the two cops in cheap suits who were aiming pistols at him in apparent slow motion.
“Fuck!” Franco screamed and pulled the trigger before he had even raised the muzzle. A stream of slugs skipped off the asphalt like stones across a pond. At the same instant Kane and Amoroso opened fire. With a bewildered look Franco suddenly paused then tumbled backward, emptying the rest of his clip into the sky.
“Ralphie, are you hurt?” Kane shouted.
A trickle of blood ran down Amoroso’s cheek.
The detective ran his hand across his face and stared at his palm.
“No, it’s just a scratch,” Ralph said then looked up into the face of death.
As if by magic Ricky Bazzel had materialized on the sidewalk, rifle raised. He held the trigger down and a line of slugs marched across Ralph Amoroso’s chest then crunched through the Crown Vic’s windshield toward Kane. From the corner of his eye, living in some odd universe where time had slowed down, Kane saw Amoroso fall and the bullets walk their way toward him — THUMP - THUMP - THUMP . . . .
In an instant Kane stopped thinking about ducking or running or curling into a ball underneath the car. Rage flared inside him like a spark hitting a mist of gasoline. Kane raised his gun straight out in front of him and ran toward his partner’s murderer, firing as fast as he could pull the trigger. As if buffeted by a sudden wind Bazzel staggered back, half turned, and fired one more round before collapsing. The last bullet hit the top of a cement parking-stop, skipped upward at a shallow angle and smashed into the side of Greg Kane’s head.
Kane stared at Bazzel’s body and the growing red-black pool creeping away from it then everything started spinning. While he was still trying to figure out what had gone wrong Greg Kane fell over and, with sirens screaming from someplace far away, he watched the world go black.
CHAPTER TWO
WASHINGTON D.C.
TWO YEARS LATER
A year ago Travis Sawyer had been the general manager of his father’s Chevy dealership but a promise to “Clean Up Washington,” a bland but clean-cut appearance, and a half-million dollar campaign contribution from his grandfather had turned him into “Congressman Sawyer.” Normally Frederick Immerson wouldn’t have wasted his time on a freshman congressman but the Chairman had asked him to give Sawyer the dog-and-pony-show and since the Department of Homeland Security was looking for a seven percent increase in their next appropriation Immerson was willing to oblige.