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

by Doug Richardson

  Fortuity for Karrie came in the form of a good-looking dude with a red coffee mug. Even funnier, she later recalled, it was the damned mug she had noticed before his sexy rake of dark chocolate hair and trimmed week-long growth of beard. An audition room door at the end of the thin corridor had squeaked open and out had stepped the man. Maybe five foot ten. Faded t-shirt and jeans. And carrying that blood red mug.

  “Hey,” asked Karrie. “You wouldn’t know where I could get a clean cup? You know. For the cooler?”

  “Wouldn’t have a clue,” said the swell looker with the red mug. “Brought this with me.”

  Karrie allowed her butt to return to the seat. She couldn’t help but look disappointed.

  “But if you’re really thirsty, you can borrow mine,” said the looker.

  “That’s okay.”

  “Seriously. Haven’t even used it yet. Right out of the dishwasher.”

  Through Karrie’s fifteen-year-old filter, the looker’s face revealed little threat. In fact, everything about the man down to his vintage Chuck Taylors appeared malice free. That and how many deadly germs could a dumb coffee mug carry?

  “Thanks,” said Karrie. “My throat’s all scratchy and stuff.”

  The man with the mug approached the cooler, kindly filled the cup and handed it to her.

  “Thanks,” she said, sipping the water before letting it openly flow and comfort her esophagus.

  “Gabe Roth.” The dude introduced himself, offering a soft hand.

  “Oh hey. Thanks,” said Karrie, wiping her mouth with her sleeve before accepting the handshake. “I’m Karrie…er…I mean, Val.”

  Gabe’s head cocked in curiosity.

  “Shit,” said Karrie.

  “I don’t need to know your name,” said Gabe, letting her off the hook. “Glad to share my mug.”

  “Really appreciate it.”

  “Auditioning?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you here for casting?” asked Gabe with a gesture toward the door across from her.

  “Oh, no,” said Karrie. “My friend. Just came with her. I’m just waiting.”

  “So you’re not an actress?”

  “No. Well, not yet,” she said. “I’m a dancer, though.”

  “No shit?”

  “I really am.” This is where Karrie clocked Gabe’s knowing smirk. “Oh…right. Of course, I’m like something, right? Actress or a model or something.”

  “You’re sorta in the Mecca of it.”

  Mecca?

  Karrie’s face was all too quick to reveal that she didn’t get the reference. The word wasn’t yet, nor might it ever be, part of the teenager’s somewhat limited vocabulary.

  “Los Angeles,” clarified Gabe. “Showbiz capitol of the universe.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Wisconsin.”

  “And you’ve been here…”

  “Like ten weeks is all,” admitted Karrie. “Still learning my way around things.”

  “Found anywhere to dance yet?”

  “You mean, like, classes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Haven’t got that far yet.”

  “I know some pretty good studios,” offered Gabe. “Lotta girls get cast out of ’em for videos and stuff.”

  “Wow, cool,” said Karrie, uncertain if the looker was merely being conversational, trying to actually help her, or laying the plumbing for some kind of seduction routine.

  “Photographer,” said Gabe. “Freelance. Do a lotta headshots and whatever. I know the dance stuff cuz they hire me sometimes to shoot their shows or help with updated shots on their websites. Actually, setting up for some actor headshots down the hall.”

  “Oh really?”

  “You have any headshots yet?”

  “Never had any,” said Karrie.

  “Seriously? With a face like yours?”

  “I mean, I’ve had pictures taken. For sure.” Karrie realized she needed to step up her game and sound more mature. Otherwise, she’d never pass for a young eighteen. “Just nothing official.”

  “Like a headshot.”

  “Like that. Yeah.”

  What followed was the slightly awkward silence that peppers most first conversations. Neither Gabe nor Karrie knew each other well enough to establish a flow. One of her few Twitter posts flashed in her mind.

  Oh, how I hate awkward silences.

  This was usually where Karrie would resort to girlish flirting. Instead, Gabe let her off the hook with:

  “Gonna need my mug back.”

  “Oh, right,” giggled Karrie. “Really appreciate the loan.”

  “So how long’s your friend gonna be?”

  Karrie could only shrug.

  “Well,” continued Gabe. “I’m set up in there and I got like twenty or so minutes before my first session shows. Wanna give it a try?”

  “Give what a try?”

  “Some pictures. Official ones. You can be my test dummy.”

  “Test dummy.” Karrie laughed.

  “Got a high-def monitor set up,” said Gabe. “You can see what you look like under a really flattering light rig. Very soft.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “Don’t headshots cost money?”

  “Headshots, yeah. Test shots. No. Anyway, maybe you owe me for borrowing my mug.”

  “Oh. I owe you now?” asked Karrie, officially in flirtation mode.

  “Not really,” answered Gabe. “But what you got to lose?”

  Gabe gestured for her to follow. Karrie, in return, paused a beat, but only to instinctively add to the sexual tension. She smiled, rose to her feet, and followed Gabe twenty paces down the corridor to the inviting soundproof door of his rented unit.

  No sooner had Gabe’s door shut than Herm’s swung open to release Cherry Pie back to the world. The faux casting director tried not to appear so terribly disappointed upon discovering that the young strawberry blonde—over whom he’d so silently obsessed—was no longer seated and waiting on that folding chair. Cherry looked equally flummoxed.

  “You’re missing your friend?” asked Herm.

  “She was supposed…” began Cherry. “Probably in the ladies’ room.”

  “On the first floor,” said Herm. “Think she’s there?”

  “She better if she wants a ride.”

  “Roommates?”

  “Letting her crash with me. Seeing how it feels.”

  “Okay,” said Herm, faking a smile. “Nice work. I have your information so I’ll call you.”

  “You will?”

  “Depending on what the clients say,” cautioned Herm. “I have all your contact stuff.”

  “Sure do,” smiled Cherry, encouraged as hell.

  “Have a nice day,” said Herm, shaking her hand before slipping back into his closet-like interview space and clicking the door shut. Then once he was alone again, he double-checked to make certain he’d kept Cherry’s details. Wrong as she was for his flesh-commerce purposes, Cherry had indicated that her friend was, in fact, a roommate of sorts. If Herm was ever going to get next to that strawberry-blonde ray of light again, he’d need to devise some kind of casting callback for the chirpy little Cherry Pie.

  No problem, he thought. No problem at all.

  13

  Downtown. 6:39 P.M.

  “C’mon in,” invited Andrew, dressed and pressed in denim and a matching long-sleeved chambray shirt. His neat attire and hair were utterly betrayed by a face creased by worry and insomnia. “Just about done with my homework.”

  Not unlike the man, Andrew’s suite at the Biltmore was designer simple—old-school, elegant, and neat to a fault. Yet it wasn’t the crispness of the space that struck Lucky. It was the sheer square footage. To his trained eye, the corner digs must have covered eleven hundred square feet. A larger footprint than Gonzo’s Pasadena duplex, not to mention the tiny San Fernando bungalow where Lucky first shared a room with his
younger brother, Tony. That was before, in a fit of womanly rage, the boys’ mother had put a match to the rental home and torched it to the cinder-block pilings.

  “Home away from home, huh?” coined Lucky.

  “Comfortable enough,” said Andrew. “Altogether different view though. At least what I’m used to.”

  Andrew needn’t have frenetically gestured like a man cranked on caffeine. The view from the hotel was east-facing and favoring the train yards and industry of old Los Angeles, framed by diffused light, classic hotel art, and hand-embroidered draperies.

  “Got my notes right here,” pointed Andrew, cutting over to a round conference table burnished to such a high polish that it mirrored the mica lamp overhead. He gathered up three legal pads, each meticulously scrawled in blue and red pen.

  “Read ’em to me on the way,” suggested Lucky. “We got more litter to hand out.”

  “Oh, right. Flyers,” remarked Andrew, huffing and stuffing his notes into a kid leather backpack, then spinning counterclockwise to find his jacket. “Bedroom. Wait. Be right back.”

  Lucky felt a ping of regret, wondering if he should have allowed Andrew to deal himself into the investigation. Sure, the Midwestern dad was banking the operation. But the man appeared to be surviving on little more than hope and coffee grounds. A potential liability. Lucky briefly considered offering a few of his precious Percocets along with the suggestion that Andrew nap for the next forty-eight hours.

  To his immediate left, Lucky spotted the gourmet kitchenette, replete with spotless cookware that to his eye had never had a flame under them. He did, though, crack open the fridge stocked with bottled beer, soda, and water along with fresh fruit and milk. On a separate shelf was at least three dozen cans of Red Bull, packed in place like ammo. Silver bullets of certain stimulation. No wonder Andrew appeared as if he had been jacked into an electrical outlet.

  “Mind if I grab a soda?” shouted Lucky.

  “Whatever you need,” called back Andrew.

  Lucky chose a couple of Dr. Peppers, depositing one of the cans in his jacket pocket, then just before closing the fridge shut, stopped as he noticed a plastic baggy stuffed full of disposable syringes. Next to that were a pair of medications stacked one on top of the other in the door rack.

  Velosulin.

  Alprostadil.

  The initial med Lucky easily recognized as one of the many brands of injectable insulin. That’s because in his years as a cop, he’d encountered nearly as many diabetic needles as heroin. The second prescription he’d never heard of. Though he guessed, based on the name, it was prostate related, making Lucky wonder if Andrew was suffering from the dreaded male cancer curse. If so, it was hardly a front burner issue compared to finding a beloved and only child.

  “Talk to me,” cued Lucky, popping open a Dr. Pepper with one hand and holding the door with the other.

  “Okay,” said Andrew. “How far we going back? One week? Two weeks?”

  “Gimme three days before she ran away.”

  “From Chenaqua?”

  “From home.”

  “Right, right,” said Andrew, flipping the pages on one of his legal pads while backing into the Biltmore’s fifth-floor elevator. “The very last night she slept in her bed was—”

  “Which bed?” interrupted Lucky, remembering that Andrew and his wife were in the middle of an ugly split while sharing custody of their teenager.

  “The bedroom at my house in Chenaqua. She didn’t like staying at her mom’s in the city.”

  “City?”

  “Milwaukee. The Queen Wench is renting a penthouse downtown.”

  “Queen Wench?”

  “My ex…” explained Andrew, realizing it didn’t quite require an explanation. “You should hear what she calls me.”

  “And your ex, where is she with all this runaway stuff?”

  “Happy to let me do the footwork. Called me just about every hour for the first week. Now I just text her updates.”

  “Did she ever want to give an assist?”

  “Elise reserves the right to blame and complain.”

  “But we’re talking about her daughter, too.”

  “How’s this? Next time she phones, I’ll put her on with you.”

  Andrew’s tone said so much more than his words. Resentment commingled with the resignation of a relationship that had long ago turned malignant. Lucky had seen plenty of that in his first five years on patrol, answering the seemingly never-ending domestic violence calls.

  “Go with what you got,” said Lucky, suppressing a belch after polishing off the Dr. Pepper.

  “October seventeenth. Thursday. Saw her for breakfast. Dropped her at school—”

  “Anything unusual?”

  “Not that I could tell,” confessed Andrew. “Must’ve replayed that morning a thousand times. Looking for some kinda clue. Not that we talked much that day. She always had her headphones on in the car cuz she didn’t like that I listened to my talk radio.”

  “Your talk radio?”

  “‘My car. My sounds,’ I used to always say.” Andrew bit his lip with regret. “Shoulda let her play her stuff. Maybe she woulda thought she could talk to me. Maybe I woulda known more.”

  “Or maybe you woulda been held hostage listening to a lot of crap music,” forgave Lucky, hoping to add some much-needed levity. “But keep goin’.”

  As the duo cut out of the lobby to the parking valet, encountering a middling rain that had slicked up the city streets, Andrew kept up a fervent recitation of the revelations he’d gleaned from phoning every number he could shake out of what friends of Karrie he actually knew.

  “She cut school that Friday around lunch,” recounted Andrew. “Was in her biology class but was showed absent for world history… Her middle school best friend Jamie remembered seeing her at Dairy Queen with a group she called ‘burners’. That’s supposed to mean they smoked a lot of weed…Yeah, I knew about the pot. Smelled it sometimes when I’d come home. She always denied it and I didn’t wanna push cuz, well, her Mom smokes it. And not every once in a while. She wakes and she bakes. I never minded that she did it. After awhile, figured it made her easier to live with.

  “Karrie left a message on my voicemail, saying she was sleeping over at Megan’s. Gotta admit she slept over there almost as much as she did at home. Said they did homework together. But when I talked to Megan’s mom, she told me Karrie hadn’t slept over in months. So guess I was more than out of the loop. Seems I wasn’t even in the same universe. Anyway, she got Megs to ask around. Found out Karrie had been hitting up this club on East Mason. Had a fake ID which I suppose tells us she was drinking…’Kay. Talked to the owner and one of the bartenders. Says there was a girl who called herself Sunny or Sandy who matched my daughter’s description. I’ve asked one of my lawyers at corporate to see about getting a look at any security camera stuff…But nothin’ about who she went home with, where she was sleeping.

  “Last person I could find in Wisconsin to see her was an old babysitter of hers who called me to say she’d seen Karrie on Monday morning at the DMV. I mean, the DMV? What the heck? She’s fifteen. Doesn’t even drive but she’s in line. Woman swears it was Karrie, too. But didn’t try and talk to her. Just wondered if she had Karrie’s age wrong. Said she just stood there in another line, staring at my daughter, counting on her fingers how many years it had been since she sat for us.”

  The thermostat in the Crown Vic seemed to have decided on its own that the floor temp was sub-freezing and blew a sudden wash of heat at Lucky’s feet. As his calves began to sweat, Lucky reached for the window controls, cracking both driver and passenger side windows. A rush of Santa Monica, sea-infused air, wet and cold, flooded the upper half of the cabin. Only then did Lucky show concern for the comfort of his passenger. He glanced over at Andrew, who seemed hardly conscious of the abrupt change in air pressure. Andrew’s face was the picture of fatherly regret, wan and gray with a pair of leaky eyes unable to stem the tears.

/>   “Lord Jesus, what’d I do?” stammered Andrew. “What made her so GD unhappy that she’d want to leave everyone who loved her behind?” The man’s jaw quivered along with the words. Bereft. “For cryin’ out loud, she’s fifteen! I know being a teenager is hard but fifteen? Running off to some California septic hole?”

  “Watch yourself,” said Lucky, “I grew up in this septic hole.”

  “…You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Shitty age.”

  “What the heck were you doing at fifteen?” asked Andrew. “I remember what I was doing and it sure as hockey sticks wasn’t anything close to this.”

  “Jacked my first car when I was fifteen,” offered Lucky, earning him a sideways look from his morose client. “Seriously. Was on a bet from Joey Capponera’s older brother that I couldn’t. Eighty-one El Camino. All I had to do was jump it, drive it three blocks, collect a case of cold ones.”

  “You stole a car for a case of beer?”

  “Hell yeah,” confirmed Lucky. “But at fifteen, I’d probably have done it on a dare. Case of brew was just the icing.”

  “What about drugs?”

  Lucky took a mental moment to ponder. He knew the question was about his teen years. But the conversational query time-warped to present day and Lucky’s present obsession with managing his pain. The Percs. A prescription-sized bottle of which could be easily outlined in the front pocket of his denims. He wondered if Andrew would be trusting him with finding his precious child if Lucky’s secret addiction weren’t such a precious secret.

  “Did I do drugs?” Lucky answered. “Here and there. Teenage shit. But mostly it was booze and chasing tail.”

  “Girls.” Andrew silently nodded, remembering.

  “What makes teenage boys go round and round.”

  “Some things never change.”

  “Back on point,” said Lucky. “What about your girl...and boys?”

  “Right, yeah…”

  “Or are we talkin’ ’bout men?”

  “What?”

  “Gotta ask. Some men are into younger girls as well as some girls are…” Lucky let the inference hang.