Bad Karma

by Dave Zeltserman

  Shannon called Susan, read her the phone number Maguire had given him for his wife, and asked if she could get on the computer and do a reverse phone number lookup. Her tone had been icy when she first answered, but worry melted away whatever frost had been in her voice. She asked him what he wanted the number for.

  “I think I’ve got this figured out,” he told her. “Christ, the guy just about told me why he killed them. He uses a baseball bat and I’m too dense to make the connection. I’ve got a question about Medhorrinum types. Can you tell me more about their tempers?”

  “The thing with Medhorrinums is intense passion. They can have that in their tempers also.”

  “So they can just fly off the handle and go into a blind rage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Susie, call me back after you look up that phone number.”

  She told him she would, her voice tense. “Bill,” she added. “If you suspect something maybe you should call the police?”

  “I will. I just need a little more information first.”

  Susan called him back five minutes later. The phone number was registered to a Mary Connor in Medford, Massachusetts. Shannon called the number. The same woman who had told him she was Nancy Maguire days earlier answered.

  “Is this Mary, Mary Connor?”

  “Yeah, who’s calling?”

  “Bill Shannon. I’m the investigator from Colorado who you pretended to be Nancy Maguire with.”

  There was a long hesitation, then she said, “Look, I was trying to help Mike out, that’s all. He said you needed to talk to Nancy and he didn’t know where she was.”

  “How about you? Do you know where she is?”“

  “He told me she took off a couple of months ago. That’s all I know.”

  The phone went dead. Shannon started the DVD again, turned the volume up, then left the apartment and knocked on Maguire’s door. After a minute or so, Maguire answered, his face very pale, his mouth and eyes not quite right. “Hey, buddy,” he said, “what’s going on in there?”

  “Remember lesson three?”

  Maguire shook his head.

  “Never be satisfied until the case is closed.”

  “Fuck, you’ve got a good memory. But I don’t getcha? This case is closed. I saw on the news they arrested that Indian dude and charged him with the murders.”

  “They arrested the wrong guy.”

  Shannon picked up on the slight hitch in Maguire’s mouth, but Maguire caught himself, forced a smile and shook his head. “I don’t know, buddy, it sounds like they got the right guy. But if you want to come up and talk about it, maybe we can come up with some ideas.”

  “Sure.”

  Shannon followed Maguire up the stairs. Maguire headed straight to the kitchen and took a beer from his fridge. He asked Shannon if he wanted one.

  “Nah, I’ll skip it this time. The construction’s not as good here as I would’ve thought. That DVD sounds almost as if it’s playing right here instead of in your neighbors’ apartment.”

  Maguire opened the beer bottle and took a healthy swig. “You could turn it off if you want.”

  “I’ll leave it on. You play softball, don’t you, Mike?”

  Maguire forced a smile. “Why, you looking to join a team?”

  “Not really. I was just wondering, that’s all. I’m not going to ask to see your bat. I don’t want to give you any excuses to get your hands on it. But I bet you if I did I’d see one that you bought three months ago. The one you had before that you had to throw out, right?”

  Another slight hitch showed around Maguire’s mouth. “Come on, quit joking around. This isn’t funny.”

  “I’m not joking. We both know you killed your neighbors downstairs. Wait—don’t bother arguing. You’re not going to change my mind, and besides, my problem is I can’t prove it. I have no real evidence. I wish I did, but you’re probably going to skate on those murders.”

  “Buddy, you’re not making any sense,” Maguire said softly, his voice strained. “You know I was at work until three in the morning the night they were killed.”

  “That couldn’t have been too hard for you to get around. You borrowed someone else’s badge… No, that wasn’t it? Maybe you got lucky and left with a coworker your first time so you didn’t have to use your badge, then after killing those two kids you went back to work, waited until someone else was leaving so you could slip in again without it being recorded, and then hung around until three in the morning to give yourself an alibi.”

  Maguire’s eyes shifted enough to tell Shannon that his second guess was what happened. Maguire realized it too and looked away.

  “What kept bugging me,” Shannon said. “Was that of the three cult members you supposedly saw hanging around with Carver and Gibson, only one of them showed up on those DVDs. I kept wondering why that was, but the reason was pretty simple. You didn’t see any of them here. You told me that only to throw me off track, and it was only more dumb luck on your part that it ended up pointing the blame towards Paveeth. I’ve got to give you credit, you’ve had an amazing streak of dumb luck so far—especially not being picked up on that videotape. How am I doing so far?”

  Shannon waited for Maguire to say something. When he didn’t, Shannon went on, “Your reason for wanting to tag along was to keep tabs on me, see how close I was getting, and of course, try to screw me up given the chance, maybe kill me if I got too close.”

  Maguire took a long drink of his beer and drained it. When he faced Shannon again any resemblance to his former goofy self was gone. His face had become a hard white, his eyes as lifeless as a mannequins. “What’s the point of talking about this,” he said. “As you said, you have no evidence and the police have that cult leader. Why don’t you let this drop?”

  “Why? Because you’re my good buddy from Massachusetts? Sorry, not a good enough reason. While I can’t prove you killed those two kids, I don’t think I’ll have any trouble proving you murdered your wife.”

  Maguire’s eyes shifted up to meet Shannon’s. He lowered his beer bottle in his hand, holding it like it was a club. “You’re nuts. I didn’t kill Nancy.”

  “Of course you did. I talked to Mary Connor. She told me how you asked her to impersonate your wife. I saw your apartment before. It hadn’t been cleaned in months. You probably didn’t clean it once since killing Nancy—at least not until a couple of days ago when I commented about it. What happened, Mike? She wouldn’t keep quiet about you being a double-murderer?”

  Shannon waited for an answer. When he didn’t get one, he went on. “I’m sure when the police look into it they’ll find forensic evidence here. And they’ll find out about your wife disappearing off the face of the earth two months ago while you kept up the appearance that she was still living here. It’s more than enough to convict you of first degree murder.”

  Maguire edged closer, the beer bottle held at his side. “You should let this drop,” he said.

  Shannon laughed. “You’re going to attack me now? Mike, not a smart move on your part.”

  Maguire crept closer, his face cautious as he moved. Shannon let himself be walked back into the living room. There was more room to maneuver there. He braced himself. Maguire swung out with the beer bottle and Shannon stepped away from it and kicked Maguire on the back of his knee with a solid roundhouse. Maguire fell to the floor, his knee collapsing under him. With the kick Shannon felt something rip in his shoulder. He also felt a warm stickiness start to spread down his arm and knew something was very wrong with his surgically reconstructed shoulder.

  Maguire tried to get to his feet, couldn’t. A siren could be heard off in the distance. Shannon knew it was heading their way—that Susan must’ve called the police. Maguire heard the siren also and knew where it was heading. He looked up at Shannon. “They were killing me,” he said, his voice coming out a mile a minute as he tried to beat the police sirens. “Every night it was like that DVD you’re playing now. I was working twelve plus hour days
and then I couldn’t even sleep at night because of their bullshit. I’d try asking Carver to turn it down, and he’d just turn the music louder and make more noise down there. Sometimes it would go on all night. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Work’s killing me, my wife’s killing me by moping around like a zombie twenty-four hours a day, and they’re killing me by not letting me have a second’s peace. I couldn’t sell the place. I didn’t have the money to get out from under the mortgage. So what the fuck was I supposed to do? What the fuck would you’ve done?”

  “Something other than beating them to death with a baseball bat. And even if you flipped out with them and couldn’t help yourself, you were rational when you decided to kill your wife.”

  The sirens were loud now. Shannon heard car doors slamming, then a police radio going on and officers talking. Someone pounded on the front door. Maguire turned from the noise back to Shannon. “Come on,” he pleaded. “Give me this one break. We could make such a great fucking team!”

  Shannon left Maguire to go answer the door.

  ***

  Shannon was admitted to the hospital later that evening and the next morning underwent surgery to repair his reconstructed shoulder. The following Tuesday he took a codeine tablet and accompanied Susan to Les Hasherford’s funeral. There were more people there than Shannon would’ve expected. After a while he realized that most of the mourners were the parents and other relatives of the children Hasherford had helped save. He recognized the parents of the boy who’d been rescued recently in Colorado Springs. At the grave site when the minister gave Hasherford’s eulogy and talked about the gift he had and how he used it so unselfishly, Susan wept. Shannon put his left arm around her and held her tight to his side. He knew why that got to Susan as much as it did. She knew as he did that it was far more than being unselfish, that he had sacrificed himself to save that last child.

  After the funeral, Susan took him back to the hospital and he stayed two weeks before his doctor released him. He didn’t put up any resistance during that time—one look from Susan told him he’d better not even think about it. Eli visited him a lot, so did Eddie to play chess. Daniels came by once.

  Whatever distance he had briefly felt with Susan had vanished. As she drove him back from the hospital, she turned the wrong way on Pearl Street and headed towards the Boulder mall instead of their apartment.

  Shannon raised an eyebrow at her. “And where are we going?”

  She showed him a sly smile but didn’t answer until she pulled into the Boulderado Hotel parking lot. “Last time we were here you didn’t get a chance to enjoy it. Besides, we have some unfinished business.”

  Susan had arranged for the same suite they had before. After they checked in and were alone, Susan opened her bag and took a couple of pom-poms from it. Shannon tried replicating Eli’s deadpan stare, knew he was failing miserably with it. “And where’d you get those?”

  Susan couldn’t keep the smile from her face. “These were nothing. Wait ’til you see the cheerleader outfit!”

  The next couple of days Shannon spent part of the time reading the Zane Grey collection, and the rest of it with Susan and her pom-poms.

  The End

  About the Author

  Dave Zeltserman:

  I was born in Boston and have lived in the Boston area my whole life except for five years when I was at the University of Colorado in Boulder working on my B.S. in Applied Math and Computer Science.

  I spent a lot of hours as a kid watching old movies with Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, and film noir being my favorite, especially The Roaring Twenties, The Third Man and The Maltese Falcon. I also always read a lot, everything from comic books, Mad Magazine, pulps (Robert E. Howard was my favorite), and science fiction. When I was 15 and spending a few weeks during the summer at my uncle's house in Maine, I picked up a dog-eared copy of I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane, and from that point on was hooked on crime fiction. From Spillane, I moved on to Hammett, Chandler, Rex Stout, Ross Macdonald, and lots of other crime writers before eventually discovering Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford in the early 90s. Thompson, in particular, had a big impact on my writing, not only in the way he got into the heads of broken psychopaths and had you rooting for them, but in the way he took chances in his writing. For years before I read my first Jim Thompson novel, Hell of a Woman, I was trying to write what amounted to bad Ross Macdonald. Once I started reading Thompson, it opened my eyes to how I could break every rule I wanted to as long as I could make it work, and this led me to finding my own voice. My first book, Fast Lane, was probably equally inspired by Macdonald and Thompson--it had the sins of the father theme that Macdonald did so well, but written from the unreliable narrator and mind of the killer that Thompson excelled at. Years after writing Fast Lane, I read about Macdonald's last unfinished Lew Archer novel, and was amazed to find that it had a major plot-point in common with Fast Lane.

  After I graduated college I got a job developing data communication software, and over the years have worked at some of the world's leading networking and computer companies, including Motorola, DEC, Nokia, Lucent and Cisco Corporation. Off and on over the years I would be drawn to writing, usually dark crime fiction, but it always seemed more of a lark than anything real. I was a math and computer science guy, and outside of one creative writing course in college, and books I read on the subject, I never had any formal training in it--I was writing mostly at an instinctive and gut level. But a kind of crazy creative fever took over while I was working on Fast Lane, and when I was done I had something that I knew could be published someday, as well as a book that crime noir readers would enjoy. It turned out that day was 12 years after I wrote it, and I first sold the Italian rights to Meridiano Zero before Point Blank Press published it. During those 12 years I had a lot of ups and downs, mostly downs where I'd quit writing to focus on my software engineering career. It's been a long road but things are now looking up. I've had stories published in a lot of places, including Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as a 3-book 'man just out of prison' noir series that is being published by the prestigious UK publisher, Serpent's Tail (Small Crimes, Pariah, Killer), as well as books Fast Lane, Bad Thoughts and Bad Karma (Five Star Mysteries). And while it took a while, I know from the letters I get from noir fans who discover Fast Lane that I was right about it. These days I'm spending my time writing crime fiction and studying martial arts (I hold a black belt in Tiger-Crane style of Kung Fu), and enjoying every minute of it.

  http://www.davezeltserman.com

  Table of Contents

  Title page

  Praise for Blood Crimes, Book One:

  Other Books by Dave Zeltserman

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  About the Author