The Lucky Dey Thriller Series: Books 1-3 (The Lucky Dey Series Boxset)

by Doug Richardson

  After a business meal, followed by a short, digesting nap, Lon had flipped open his laptop and logged into jumpfinder.com, a website dedicated to selling everything used from cars to furniture to secondhand electronics to local sex services. All anyone needed to do was register a username, click on the “escort” section, load in a few key words, then scroll through the individually posted banners.

  Jodi’s was especially enticing.

  ♥︎— SEXY — BUBBLY — U WON’T BELIEVE IM OLD ENUFF ♥︎

  And when Lon clicked on the post, the photos he found were conveniently cut off at the neck to legally conceal a young girl’s identity. A barely-there string bikini. Six images, each in a different pose. Reclined on a bed and on an apartment rug. In the shower… All awkwardly staged, but with a clear and illicit message that the pictured girl was probably close to fourteen or fifteen years of age.

  “So you like my pictures?” asked Jodi.

  “I do,” said Lon. “Who took ’em?”

  “Girlfriend.”

  “School friend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m kinda a photographer myself,” bragged the insurance man.

  “You are?” squeaked Jodi. “You wanna take my picture?”

  “You bet I do. How old are you?”

  “You read my JumpFinder ad. I’m old enough.”

  “I need to hear it.”

  “…Gonna be sixteen next week.”

  “Birthday this close to Christmas has to be a bummer.”

  “You can make it easier for me by singing Happy Birthday.”

  “Now? Over the phone?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Mayfair Hotel. Near downtown. You know it?”

  Lon began to sweat. Microscopic beads of excitement gathering on his neck into drops which eventually absorbed into his Geoffrey Beene shirt collar.

  “Hey, mister?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m savin’ up to buy my first car. If I come over, will you help me with a donation?”

  “I’d love to. How much?”

  “Two hundred dollars?”

  “Cash?”

  “Ooooooooooh. I like cash.”

  “I’ll make it rain for you.”

  By eleven, when Jodi called to say she was downstairs in the Mayfair Hotel lobby, Lon had already scrubbed himself raw, shaved all his body hair, and dressed in fresh underwear, khakis and a loose-cut chambray shirt. He gave the escort directions to his sixth-floor room then searched for his wallet. He wanted to have the cash folded and ready. The sooner the transaction was out of the way, the quicker he could jettison reality for some role-playing fantasy, the details of which he hadn’t yet decided. He’d first need to size up his underage date. See how game she would be.

  The knock at the door was weak. Two quick rapping knuckles that would have gone unnoticed if he’d had a movie playing on the Korean-built flat screen screwed into the top of the bureau. Lon pocketed his cash and swiveled the quick ten steps it took to cross into the tiny corridor that served as an entry. He unchained the door, pulled down the lever and took a step backward as he swung the door inward.

  “You Jodi?” smiled Lon.

  His first impression was that she wasn’t so much a real girl as she was somehow a human in miniature form. Not even five-feet tall. A tiny body hanging onto a denim jacket, a lemon-yellow tube top, and a faux leather skirt that hung so loosely the insurance packager wondered how her hips could possibly hold it up. As he instinctively scanned her up and down, he noted her feet were tucked into a pair of kiddie-sized suede Uggs and her head was somewhere underneath a floppy canvas rain hat.

  “You gonna lemme in?” asked Jodi.

  “Oh, yeah. Sure,” said Lon, momentarily thrown off. He hadn’t caught a look at her face yet. At six-foot-three inches tall, it was nearly impossible for him to catch any glimpse of her eyes under that obscene rain hat atop her head. “Raining outside?”

  “Cold ’n’ dry,” she said, slipping past him into the room. Off came both her denim jacket and the floppy hat, revealing bleached blonde hair falling on a single tattoo that stretched between her shoulder blades—five red-headed robins perched on a rose bush’s branch.

  Jodi’s face, though. It wasn’t nearly that of a girl approaching sixteen years old. It was world-weary and prematurely aged from smoking too much rock and meth.

  “You’re not fifteen,” announced Lon, releasing a little of the bass in his voice.

  “Pictures are me,” said Jodi. “And I still look good naked. Anyway, you didn’t tell me you were black.”

  “What’s that got to…” Lon found himself momentarily stuck, his words locked somewhere between his frontal lobe and subcortex. He had ordered an underage escort and less than an hour later, found himself standing face to face with a pint-sized, thirty-year-old crack whore. “Listen, there’s been a mistake so if you wouldn’t—”

  Mr. Londale Newton of Atlanta didn’t feel the blow to his head as much as he remembered how dark everything had turned in the blink of an eye. Lon was repositioning himself to show Jodi the way out as a matter of punctuating his disappointment. Somewhere between the whore sweeping into the room and removing that rain hat disguise from her head, the hotel room door hadn’t shut all the way. In had walked Jodi’s black, but not-too-genteel pimp. He had greeted the unsuspecting customer with a knotted tube sock full of lead birdshot. The left-handed pimp had struck his victim with a single swipe across the side of the face, sending the big man to the carpet. Before Lon could gather a coherent thought, the pimp had him rolled over, the other sock shoved into his maw as a way of a gag, and a razor-like box-cutter only inches from one of his eyes.

  “Nowshutthefuckupandlisten,” rattled the man Jodi called Romeo. “You gonna gimme yur wallet. Then for da second I’m gonna let you open yur mouth, yur gonna tell sweet bizness here your motherfuckin’ PIN numbers. Blink if ya unnerstand.”

  Lon blinked. His lids fluttered both rapidly and with terrified affirmation.

  7

  That floppy rain hat of Jodi’s was practically swept off her head from turbulence as she hurried down the sixth-floor corridor.

  Don’t run! Walk, you stupid crack ho.

  She hated the dirty hat. Thought it made her look like a drunken bass fisherman’s idea of a joke. But Romeo had insisted, robbing the hat from a homeless man’s shopping cart mere moments before they’d turned the corner to the hotel. She initially resisted, afraid of what microbial vermin the bum might be passing on. Lice, most likely. Romeo crushed it onto her head and spat that she should just shut the fuck up and keep her eyes low in order to prevent the Mayfair’s security cameras from getting a shot at her face. With that, the pimp pulled his own hoodie over his head and steered Jodi toward the hotel’s less-traveled side entrance.

  Armed with Lon’s wallet and a scrap of hotel room notepad paper on which she’d shakily scrawled his PIN, Jodi rode the elevator to the lobby. She crossed the expanse, no longer appearing as if in a race but still with a sense of purpose, then exited into the night for the two-block walk to Wilshire Boulevard and the nearest ATM. As per Romeo’s barked instructions, she kept the floppy hat brim between herself and the machine’s pinhole camera. After punching in the numbers, she was able to remove twelve hundred dollars from Lon’s debit card and his American Express.

  It was only minutes before midnight when Jodi slipped into the bar across the boulevard. There she asked for a glass of water. Not that she couldn’t have done with a belt of something eighty-proof and cheap. It might have settled her nerves and for a moment or two, delayed the craving for a hot pipe full of crystal meth. It was fear that kept the stolen cash in her shoulder bag and water flowing over her tongue. If Romeo so much as whiffed any booze on her he’d surely beat her into unconsciousness.

  Hate that motherfucker.

  But Miss Sweet Bizness, as Romeo would sometimes call her, was a thirty-two-year-old prostitute and drug addict. What looks she had left belonged
only to her tiny, low-gravity frame. Her face appeared prematurely aged by the years of chemical abuse. So cutting out on her own and selling herself to cash-carrying johns was a long shot at best. Jodi’s rationale was that her best chance at survival was to stay on Romeo’s leash. She owed him that. After all, it was his idea to pimp out her high school photos on pervy websites as a way for trolling for marks like Londale Newton.

  At five minutes after midnight, Jodi slipped out of the bar and headed back to the same ATM. Because it was a new calendar day, the bank allowed her to once again maximize the withdrawals on Lon’s cards. With nearly two and a half thousand dollars in twenty dollar bills stuffed into her purse, she hustled her way back to the Mayfair Hotel, eased through the desolate lobby and rode the old elevator back to the sixth floor.

  “All good,” announced Jodi as she let herself back into Lon’s room. This was the blind-second before every molecule in her body wanted to scream.

  The scene before her was splashed in red. A geyser of arterial spray had redecorated the room in bright swaths of oxygenated blood. Goo was dripping from the walls and ceiling in a Jackson Pollock nightmare of fresh crimson.

  “Shut up and close the goddamn door!” spat Romeo as he stripped off his clothes in the bathroom.

  “What the fuck!”

  “Motherfucker child raper. Deserve to die. You get da money?”

  Jodi’s face was frozen in horror; only her eyes continued to swerve from left to right and back again.

  “He was a pedophiler! Deserve what he get,” insisted Romeo. “Now you gonna help me clean this shit up so do likes I said and shuts the goddamn door.”

  8

  Lucky had set his phone alarm for midnight, racking up three hours of solid dozing before his planned hour to rise and shine. He was reclined with the seat of the borrowed Crown Vic at the maximum forty-five degrees, letting his eyes slowly adjust to his surroundings. The gray, streaky glow that hangs over Los Angeles at night filtered through the car windows. He recognized the parking structure where he’d backed into a corner space. To make certain he wouldn’t be disturbed by the security guard, he had left a note on the dash reading:

  DO NOT DISTURB

  POLICE OFFICER ON THE JOB

  VIOLATORS MAY BE SHOT

  The sign worked. In the twelve-odd years Lucky had been deploying his handwritten warning, he’d only been awakened once. In East Venice, a brave homeless man had politely rapped on his Sheriff’s radio car window until Lucky had reluctantly cracked one eye open. The scraggly peanut of a man was undaunted, mouthing the same word over and over again until Lucky lowered the window two inches. Toothless and through lips so chapped they resembled truck stop jerky, the homeless man had wanted to report a rape in progress. Lucky had gathered himself, investigated the homeless man’s cardboard village built in a dry storm channel and discovered a pair of meth-heads having their way with a schizophrenic bag lady of social security age. So disturbed by the sight, Lucky had drawn his pistol, barked at the sick pair and sent them pantless and scurrying. Lucky had plugged one of them in the right ass cheek and the other through both stems, then before calling for EMS, had made sure the scene was properly littered with a couple of throw-down revolvers with stolen serial numbers as a way to justify the officer-involved shooting.

  “Why din’t you kill ’em?” the homeless man had gummed, animated over his afternoon of excitement.

  “Find a shelter,” Lucky had suggested as his one and only reply before phoning up his pal and Reaper brother, Bledsoe.

  Lucky now tightened his aching abdominals, bracing for when he released the seat brake, hoping the weak spring would return the seat to its full and upright driving position. The pain at the base of his spine amped up to a six on the unhappy-to-happy-face-scale he recalled from the Spine Surgery Center. The Percocet, which had so dutifully aided his recent nap, was already at a rough ebb. Still, he couldn’t seem to shake off the grogginess.

  Christ, Luck. You were out.

  Narcotics had that kind of effect. Since his kamikaze dive through the windshield of an oncoming Volvo and subsequent year of rehab, the former, self-confessed Advil junkie had become functionally dependent on prescription meds. The stepped-down opiate kind. Otherwise, the bite from his injuries became so debilitating he had considered swallowing a bullet from his .45 caliber Model 1911 once or twice.

  The door to the Crown Vic popped open and out followed Lucky in an attempt to trick his body into a waking state. He moved rearward to the concrete bulwark that kept vehicles from spilling out of the parking structure and crushing pedestrians on the sidewalk below. The landscape that spread out before Lucky was lit up in a panoramic cliché. Over-photographed landmarks such as the Roosevelt Hotel and the electric-Christmas-tree-topped Capitol Records building sprouted out of the earth like all the other buildings on the porch step of the Hollywood Hills. So many lights, thought Lucky. Uncountable. If each light represented no less than one human being, identifying a singular teenage girl amongst so many appeared hellishly daunting.

  And that was just Hollywood.

  As an LA County Sheriff, he’d had the rare occasion to work the zip code, but never felt at all comfortable outside the confines his radio car. Hollywood and its surrounding areas were a tight mash-up of money, tourists, gay bars and drug-fueled showbiz lowlifes and elites. It was an absurdly unpredictable territory. Not at all like the triangle of division hubs where he had cut his teeth and thrived for the majority of his cop career. The corridor of Los Angeles badlands that stretched from Inglewood to Compton to Lynwood might have been painfully impoverished and prone to a tyranny of gang violence, but it was also predictable, rich in local color, and devoid of the annoying entitled elitist class that tended to plague the privileged neighborhoods.

  The air was cold enough for Lucky to see his breath, filling his lungs with moist coolness before exhaling it into the night. He could feel his synapses rekindling. Clarity returned and, at that moment, he was back on task.

  Opening the rear door of the Crown Vic, Lucky reacquainted himself with the boxes of color copies he’d assembled earlier in the evening at a strip mall copy shop. Two thousand sheets in all. Each identical and two-sided, bearing a photo of Andrew Kaarlsen’s missing fifteen-year-old daughter, Karrie. Boldly printed below was the question:

  HAVE YOU SEEN ME?

  It was followed by a number assigned to the pre-paid “burner” cell phone in Lucky’s coat pocket. He wasn’t keen on placing his personal mobile digits on the Xerox flyers he planned to paper throughout the Hollywood vicinity.

  That’s right, Lucky. You’re now a private eye.

  Lucky hadn’t had to think long about the offer. It might as well have been a yes the moment Andrew Kaarlsen served up the fifty-grand guarantee. Not that Lucky cared much for money sniffers. His life had never been about reaching for any kind of gilded ring. Otherwise, why the hell would he have taken the LA County Sheriff’s exam and signed up for training? Kaarlsen’s offer was nearly the very same number that had been ping-ponging inside Lucky’s head every time he wondered what he would need to bank to sustain himself until his reinstatement came through.

  The answer he had given Kaarlsen was a swift text message with a plan to reconnoiter with the Wisconsin business mogul at some juncture the following day. That would allow Lucky a head start on his investigation. He’d been informed by the besieged father that the more obvious chase channels had been run. And with some cursory follow-up, Lucky had found that Andrew Kaarlsen had done his fatherly diligence plus more. Just about every public and private agency associated with teens missing in Southern California had been contacted and followed up to the level of annoyance.

  Good man, thought Lucky. Wear the bureaucratic bastards down until they do their jobs just to get rid of you.

  The only additional work Lucky had been able to accomplish was some brief conversations with Sheriffs’ and LAPD detectives with whom he had active relationships. They were happy enough to take d
own the missing girl’s information and promised to run it up their divisions’ flagpoles to see if anybody took notice.

  With those reams of flyers racked like ammo on the Crown Vic’s passenger seat, Lucky rolled out of the parking structure and into the misty night. He had no fear that the weather would hamper his mission. It was a Tuesday eve in Hollywood, a zip code where every night was Saturday. Scores of partyers were sure to be clubbing wherever the liquor and designer drugs were flowing. Lucky’s plan was to stick the cheap copy paper into as many hands as he could. He had no illusions that he would actually hit pay dirt and pass off the flyer to somebody with an inkling as to where the missing girl was. He fully expected most of Xeroxes to be barely glanced at and dropped to the sidewalk within mere moments, thus turning the plaintive missive about a runaway teen to litter in a matter of seconds—illegal as hell if Lucky were to spill paper all by himself. He’d be subject to arrest and fines. But if he handed each and every flyer to separate individuals, each of them would become the liable, littering lawbreaker.

  And so, the bureaucratically-sabbaticaled sheriff’s detective began a night of crisscrossing the streets of Hollywood on either foot or by wheels, gifting out those flyers to every possible passerby. He was betting that by dawn the damp sidewalks and gutters behind him would be glued with eight-and-a-half-by-eleven rectangles of missing Karrie Kaarlsen. Cleanup wouldn’t happen for days. And the streets of Hollywood would serve as one giant billboard for his search campaign.

  Just shy of 2 A.M. the burner rang for the very first time. The trill was high-pitched and might have been confused for a whistle had it not also vibrated in Lucky’s jeans pocket. The initial call of many, Lucky reckoned. Most would be cranks or dead alleys. Still, each and every incomer would need to be logged on a legal pad.

  “Hello,” answered Lucky, leaning against the fender of the Crown Vic and zipping up his bomber jacket.