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

by Doug Richardson

  Lucky excused the tall man with a tacit nod and took a step and a half rearward in order to get out of Herm’s way. He waited, though. And watched as Herm started his car, dropped it into drive, and carefully eased out of the parking lot.

  Bad guy, repeated the voice yet again.

  Whether the voice was accurate or not, the man in the SUV forgot to switch on his headlights until his front wheels had rolled onto the asphalt of the side street that fed back onto Franklin. When those headlights flared and swept the row of vehicles against the opposite curb, the figure of a man appeared in the space between a Honda CRV and a white panel van. Automatically filling out the report in his head, Lucky described the man as early to mid-thirties, under six feet, dark hair and maybe bearded, denim pants, navy blue or black pea coat, hands in his pockets.

  And staring right back at Lucky.

  As the headlights disappeared along with Herm’s SUV, Lucky had to readjust his focus to compensate for the dark. It was in that instant that the man in the pea coat appeared to have vanished as quickly as he had appeared.

  It’s just Hollywood, Lucky. Up to its nose hairs in oddballs.

  32

  9:23 P.M.

  It had to be a world record hangover. In her short but somewhat experienced fifteen years, Karrie had been high or drunk or imbibed enough to have experienced the after effects of all kinds of binges. Yet before she even lifted her eyelids, she knew she had landed the granddaddy of ’em all. It felt as if her brain had swelled and was straining at the walls of her skull for any kind of exit. That and with every labored inhale, her sinuses felt fuzzy and arid. Her lips chapped and her tongue seemed swollen, unable to leave even the slightest slick of saliva behind on her soft palate.

  Sheezus Karrie.

  The teen tried to shock her mind into rewinding to the previous evening. She could easily recall the walk on the beach, the ocean, the conditioned sweet smell of Gabe’s soft beard when they danced…

  All memories seemed to stall right then and there. The music. The slow moving against the fast beating of Gabe’s racing heart. The rest had to be a dreamless sleep. Which, in Karrie’s wisdom, meant drugs were involved.

  When she moved the slightest inch, her body ached. Stiff. Her joints sore as if she’d played a week’s worth of field hockey matches. And what the hell was that smell? Dry as her sinus cavity felt, there was an ugly funk in the air. Was it her? Christ, she wondered. If she reeked that bad, what would Gabe think? She reached across the mattress to get a bearing and felt nothing and nobody. Not even a duvet cover. It was then she realized her eyes were open and yet her retinas could still only read blackness. Dense. A place utterly absent of light. What time was it? Sometime before dawn? Gabe must have some kind of blackout curtains in his bedroom. Because it was the most stifling dark she could ever recall.

  Karrie slowly rolled to her left, ignoring both the pain in her head and joints in hopes of catching even the slightest of bearings. Anything for a clue, be it a crack of light from a window, the glow-green numbers of a digital clock radio, or even the slight red ember on a ten-dollar smoke detector.

  Instead, at the end of a left-hand rollover, her wrist landed with a metallic clunk against some sort of vertical barrier. The sound echoed. Or was that just in the teenager’s aching head? Karrie turned herself again, pushing up on all fours. Her fingers stretched wide against a mattress that felt rough, without even a sheet for protection. It was then that she could smell the urine. A putrid mash of ammonia mixed with—what was that—mildew?

  “Gabe?” asked Karrie aloud, practically choking out the words across her bone-dry teeth, then hearing her own slight voice reverberate back to her. “Gabe?” she nearly cried again, louder and with some diaphragm to push more air over her tongue.

  Without a returned answer, the fifteen-year-old felt her way down to the edge of the bed. Only to discover it wasn’t a bed at all. But a rather thin mattress lying atop what felt like a splintery slab of plywood. She rapped her knuckles against it, hearing back a dull connection with wood.

  “Gabe!” shouted Karrie, realizing that as trashed and hungover as she felt, better than half her foreboding feelings weren’t in her head or abused body. Something about the situation was oh-so-terribly wrong. For a moment she had wondered if she had passed out and been cruelly pranked, left to sleep it off in some kind of basement. Yet as she found her feet, stretched out her arms and eased forward in the blackness to find out just where the hell she was, her fingertips eventually came to find another vertical span. This time a wall. Rough and flaking. And when she rapped on it, it channeled the sound with even more metal, the reverberations surrounding her, but giving a sense of depth and space. The ceiling was low. The walls were close.

  Panicked, Karrie pounded on the wall.

  “GABE!” she shrieked at the top of her lungs. The adrenaline coursed within her salving the loudness of her own voice. “GABE? WHERE THE FUCK AM I? GAAAAAABE!”

  “Shut up!” yelled the voice from beyond, female, not so distant, equally metallic yet still muffled so the words blended into almost a garble.

  “WHERE’S GABE?” screamed Karrie.

  “I said shut up! I just wanna sleep, you bitch!”

  “BUT WHERE AM I?”

  “How the fuck should I know? I’m locked in a box, just like you’re locked in a box. And I was sleeping until you started the shit fit so just stop, okay?”

  “BUT I NEED GABE, OKAY?”

  “I don’t know nobody named Gabe. But my bet’s he’s the one who put you here so SHUT THE FUCK UP.”

  “WHAT IS THIS?” Karrie started to cry.

  “Just shut up please and go back to sleep!”

  “BUT I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE.”

  “Like anybody’s supposed to? Just shut it, okay?”

  Karrie’s words evaporated into gasping sobs of freakish fright.

  “What’s happening?” she shuddered. “What’s going on with me?”

  Her fingers finally traced the fourth wall, confirming she had somehow found herself imprisoned in a metal box of sorts.

  Metal box. Mattress on a plywood floor. Am I in prison?

  Karrie slid down the wall to the floor, heaving and so wrought with uncontrolled sobs she thought madness had somehow overtaken her. Her entire body shook, followed by a cold sweat which sprang from every petrified pore.

  “Gabe?” she squeaked again, barely forming the words on her lips. “Please. Where are you?”

  33

  “Gabriel Christopher,” shouted the voice in his head.

  It was his mother’s voice. Clean, without modulation, and piercing through the back of his neck as if he didn’t require ears to hear. The tiny woman, all of ninety-five pounds, and a hellion mix of Greek and Italian blood could scare any Christian soul from whatever sin he was about to perform and send him directly to the confessional. When Gabe’s mother was alive, she was his conscience. Now, when he heard the voice calling his God-given name, it was his shame that appeared to have roused her ire. As if she still was living somewhere amongst his molecular self. Always there. Omnipresent and ready to crack his skull with her big, wooden spoon.

  He had heard the voice the instant he had switched the little yellow Oxycontin pill for a blue tablet, placing it on the back of the girl’s willing tongue. She had said her name was Valeriana. But Gabe knew it was made-up. Pretty much like everything else in Los Angeles. Fake. Like a prop or a bit of staged scenery. Only his mom knew different. Dead as she was, she still knew the game Gabe was playing was part of the real world.

  And, for that matter, a crime.

  She had called his name again after he had bundled the unconscious girl in an old stitched blanket, shouldered her down the back steps of his apartment and gently placed her in the trunk of a rented blue Nissan. The trunk was vacuumed so clean it might have just been installed at the factory. He had heard the voice again as the trunk lid snapped shut with a thin and metallic click.

  Gabriel Chri
stopher!

  His mother’s voice rang again—berating him when he accepted the tight bundle of cash in exchange for following the instructions. He had parked the car on some dark, industrial street in the Valley and walked three long blocks west to a designated bus stop. It was when the city bus pulled away that the fear hit him. That somehow in the course of driving from Santa Monica to the Valley the drugged-out girl in the rental car’s wheel well had somehow shifted positions and unconsciously smothered herself to death.

  Gabriel Christopher!

  As the day wore on, his mother’s voice eased to a nagging whisper, not unlike a lousy top forty tune that would sometimes stick in his head, the harmonized hook playing over and over and over. The money also added some sound padding. A five-thousand-dollar stack of hundred-dollar bills could do a lot to ease his suffering headshot business. He could catch up on some back rent and utility bills. He had broken out the first uncirculated hundred at a Santa Monica Union 76 station with a Circle K mini-mart. It paid for a tank of gas, two AriZona iced teas, and a fistful of Slim Jims. That was going to be his dinner until his cell phone rattled the loose change in the front pocket of his khakis. The voice on the other end was unfamiliar. The same went for the number, which he would have left unanswered had he not suddenly concerned himself that it had something to do with the blue Nissan rental car and what he had left in the trunk.

  The man had identified himself as Herm, a sort of office neighbor from The Casting Place. An overnight delivery addressed to Gabe Roth had been mistakenly delivered to him. Ordinarily Gabe would have requested for the box or package or whatever it was to be left on Queenie’s desk. Only it was after hours, the office was closed, and something he hadn’t been expecting had been overnighted to him.

  In the end, it was the gas tank, full to the stem that made the decision for him. With a belly full of chemicals and caffeine and sticks of spicy Slim Jims looking like a floral array sprouting from his spare cup holder, Gabe found it easy to say why not? So he agreed to meet the kind man called Herm at The Casting Place as soon as he could get there.

  Gabe never quite cared for The Casting Place’s rear lot. The spaces were tight and after his car had suffered multiple body dings, delivered—he was positive—by narcissistic actors who cared not a glimmer about property that wasn’t their own, Gabe preferred street parking. In the dim light that was left from the day, he’d shoe-horned his eleven-year-old Honda into a metered space, fed a single quarter into it, then practically skipped his way toward the wrought iron gate which guarded the rear entrance.

  There. Precisely there, across the side-street blacktop is where he put the brakes on all forward momentum. Sixty yards from him, standing in the nearly empty parking lot, were two men. One he instantly recognized as Herm, his tall and distinguished office neighbor. The other was a man unknown. White with a shaved head and a boom to his voice that socked of authority. He measured the space between the men as twenty or so yards, then keenly watched the unknown man cover the distance to the taller gent in a way that appeared to leave Herm defenseless. What—as if it were any of Gabe’s business—they were discussing was as unrecognizable as the thicker man. Yet there was Gabe, feet stuck to the concrete as if he’d been bolted to the sidewalk, staring dead ahead at the unknowable conversation as if it mattered.

  That is when his mother’s voice, relegated to an obnoxious hit tune loop, broke through yet again.

  Gabriel Christopher!

  Why that pair of conversing men in the parking lot had a rat’s ass to do with his mama’s shaming voice Gabe didn’t know or much care. It was, though, some kind of warning. A mother’s warning that demanded to be heard and heeded. Gabe stood on the sidewalk for maybe a minute longer, motionless in the camouflage of dusk, watching the man named Herm climb into his SUV and drive away. That’s precisely when Gabe’s legs beat their hasty retreat.

  34

  Silver Lake. 10:45 P.M.

  Having grown up in Southern California, Lucky recalled Silver Lake wasn’t called Silver Lake unless one lived in Silver Lake. By most locals, it was known as the neighborhood north of Echo Park. West of downtown. Or the easternmost end of Sunset Strip. In the seventies, it was briefly famous for its gay S&M bars, attracting international men seeking like-minded gents in black leather and metal studs. But by the turn of the millennium, the landscape had turned trendy with coffeehouses, alt rock clubs, and art galleries to go along with the south-facing hillsides chockablock with turn of the century bungalows, each ripe for renovation and a real estate killing.

  Still, to Lucky and so many other Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputies, Silver Lake was LAPD-land and the zip code known for short cuts into Dodger Stadium.

  The navigation on Lucky’s phone pointed him to an address on North Benton and a four-unit stucco apartment building, circa 1947. Overgrown and with large clay pots spilling over in fountains of unrestrained greenery, there were two downstairs apartments and two upstairs, divided by stairs angling in a V from the extremely weathered, concrete walkway.

  Lucky had taken the one empty space in front of a city fire hydrant, relatively certain there would be no conflagration or that he would be ticketed by some enterprising night-owl of a parking Nazi before he had left with his one client. No sooner had he stepped on the sidewalk than he’d heard a shriek, quickly followed by that unmistakable whiskey voice.

  “GET THE FUCK OUT!” screeched Cherry Pie.

  Instantly, appearing under the one yellowed upstairs porch light, Andrew backed out of a low doorway better suited for a hobbit. His hands shoulder high in the ubiquitous sign of surrender.

  “But you asked me for money!” insisted Andrew.

  “You called me a whore!” blasted Cherry, her slight silhouette prepared to slam the entry shut.

  “I said prostitute,” defended Andrew. “Not whore.”

  “Like there’s a difference?”

  “Might wanna hold it down,” throated Lucky, noting the downstairs lights flicking on.

  “Get him the hell offa my steps,” demanded Cherry.

  “Awright, you heard her,” calmed Lucky. “Let’s say good night.”

  “I didn’t call her a whore,” insisted Andrew. Nonetheless, he heeded Lucky’s advice and pointed his shoulders downhill. He passed Lucky at the bottom of the steps. Lucky was glad to see that Andrew was shouldering Karrie’s backpack.

  “Got just a couple of questions for her and we’re out,” promised Lucky ever-so-quietly.

  Cherry was lingering just beyond her threshold as if to make absolutely certain the bruised, gingerbread millionaire was off her property. Lucky kept a wise distance, stopping at the top landing.

  “So what happened?” asked Lucky. “My man get creepy on ya?”

  “Nothing I didn’t already handle,” said Cherry, freshly showered with a short pink terry-cloth robe wrapped around her. “I dance. That’s it. No tricks.”

  “So he propositioned you?”

  “Him? Hell no.” Water droplets spilled as she shook her head. “No. Probably just a misunderstanding.”

  “Weird guy, right?”

  “No shit.”

  “Anything inside our teenage girlfriend left behind?”

  “Phone,” said Cherry. “Gave it back to her old man. Other than that, everything else was in her backpack. He’s got that, too.”

  “Sure you’re okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Gonna leave you my number,” said Lucky. “She makes contact with you. Or that guy.”

  “Gabe.”

  “You’re gonna call me right?”

  Cherry mustered a nod. She shivered unreservedly. The goose bumps on her legs looked like a colony of mosquito bites.

  “Good night,” said Lucky. “And thanks. Really.”

  35

  “I didn’t call her a whore!” insisted Andrew, his face so flush and rosy it nearly erased the black and blue.

  Lucky was steering the Crown Vic through a series of darkened side streets th
at traversed the low-slung hills just south of Chavez Ravine. He was thinking if Andrew had been a Sheriff’s trainee, he might have suggested he stick his red face out the window and make siren sounds, allowing for cross-town travel in full Code 3 mode.

  “I didn’t ask if you did or didn’t,” reminded Lucky.

  “I hate it when people put words in my mouth,” Andrew continued to grind. “That’s not at all where I was going…Or what I was implying.”

  “So you didn’t ask if she was a prostitute?”

  “…I did, but not,” explained Andrew. “She dances naked, right?”

  “Since when does stripper equal hooker?”

  “I’m the father of a missing GD fifteen-year-old! I think I have a right to know just what kind of—women—she was shacking up with!” exploded Andrew, his voice conquering the Crown Vic’s eight cylinders. “After I found out if she was a prostitute I was gonna ask about drugs. You think I’da been out of line to ask that?”

  Lucky swiveled his neck, dropping his eyeballs squarely on the diminutive dad. And there it was again. Pulsing across Andrew’s forehead. That zigzag vein. Bulging it seemed this time with as much venom as blood. The man was off the chain. The brow above his nose crimped and his front lips lifted to reveal every millimeter of those yellowing fangs.

  “Crap salad!” slammed Andrew. “You’re not her father. How the heck are you supposed to know what it’s like to lose a child?”

  “She’s missing. Not dead,” low-toned Lucky in an attempt to lower the level of sudden rancor.

  “How would you know?” accused Andrew. “Did you stumble over a new clue tonight?”

  “We’re close. We know where she’s been, who she’s been with—”

  “GD stripper!” Andrew hammer-fisted the dash with a thump. “My baby girl is only fifteen!”