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

by Doug Richardson

  That’s when Herm decided to put a stalk on the Crown Victoria and its three occupants. It had led him to that dated little apartment in Silver Lake. And yet upon arrival, he’d only been able to visually mark the cop fellah and the purple-haired spinner. Where the hell had Father Unicorn gone to? Unless he was still in the car. Sleeping? Or even dead?

  After an hour spent chewing on the possibilities, Herm dared himself to get out of his SUV and give the situation a look-see. It was raining again and water ran past his SUV as if he was parked in the middle of a stream. He grabbed a large, golf-sized umbrella from the backseat, popped open the canopy, and started walking toward the apartment building. He kept the umbrella low for cover. The Crown Victoria was ahead, windows oddly cracked given the lousy weather. Then it struck him. The windows were cracked because Father Unicorn was still in the car.

  But Herm wouldn’t find out just yet. Because the moment he neared the left front bumper, he heard voices from the apartment’s upper landing. He dared not lift the umbrella and reveal himself. Instead, he kept his course. He heard man-sized footfalls splashing down the fifties era concrete and steel steps. At any moment, Herm expected the cop fellah would jump the curb and round the corner of his Crown Victoria, putting the two men face to face once again. Herm lowered the umbrella further and his eyes to the pavement. This is when he noticed his shoes. His not-so-clean running sneakers, finely speckled with Gabe’s blood and now, in the wet air, the red was dissolving into a pale pink.

  The cop fellah was big. But Herm was bigger. And he had an umbrella that, if tilted forward he could use as a battering ram. If recognized, Herm imagined charging with the umbrella, pushing the cop fellah off his feet before turning and running back to his SUV.

  It was a half-assed plan. And Herm cursed himself for getting out of the car.

  Only the cop fellah never appeared in front of him. The footfalls turned and cut behind Herm, interrupted only by the chirp of a car being unlocked. Herm twisted in time to see the weary man with the buzz cut waving back to the purple-haired spinner on the landing before ducking into an unmanly, red VW Jetta. Still walking, Herm returned his eyes forward just in time to glimpse Father Unicorn’s red-headed mop. Daddykins was supine in the backseat of the Crown Vic. Herm could hear the snores escaping the cracked windows as he splashed his way past.

  That is precisely when Herm felt the stab. A dilemma had been established and he was already feeling the horns. The trio was splitting. The cop fellah was about to drive off in a very, non-cop-like car, leaving Father Unicorn to continue his respite in the big sedan’s backseat.

  Who the hell do I follow?

  Who the hell indeed? After the cop fellah in the Jetta quickly U-turned and sped the car downhill past Herm, the casting man did an about-face and hustled back to the SUV. Sharp horns or otherwise, Herm knew he only had between where he stood and the driver’s seat of his car to make his decision.

  58

  Sunland. 6:29 P.M.

  On Google Maps, 8643 Tujunga was the address to a cement plant. In all directions, the terrain was industrial. Construction suppliers, gravel wholesalers. There were no streetlamps. The only illumination came from beyond the razor wire security fences and the ambient reflection provided by the omnipresent, low-flying cloud ceiling.

  Lucky parked the rented Nissan and switched off the lights. He sat for a few minutes, scanning the landscape. He could see the pathway west. He wondered how many flesh traders had hoofed it until they had landed at the bus stop. He was also curious if there were eyes on him already, waiting for him to slip from the car and walk the walk. At least, that’s what he would have done. It was a heartbeat shy of 6:30, making Lucky a full thirty minutes early. His initial plan had been to park, leave the car, stride west just far enough to slip from sight and then double back to some kind of dark corner where he could lie in wait for whoever might come to collect the vehicle. It would be no less than a pair of confederates. At least one to drive to the drop, the other to operate the blue Nissan out of the industrial area to its final destination.

  But where to hide? Lucky’s three-hundred-sixty-degree accounting left him with the simple conclusion that there would be no place where he could properly conceal himself. At least no place close enough where he could surprise and hold two suspects.

  Crap-sandwich!

  He clearly hadn’t calculated far enough ahead. Yet there he was, ass glued to the seat of a rented target. And a pair of someones would be arriving shortly to fetch the damn thing. Would they be checking the trunk? If so, they’d be sure to find it disappointingly empty.

  Unless…

  Lucky landed on his answer and moved without a second thought. He fought the pain in his back and extracted himself from the Nissan quickly enough, circling to the dirt sidewalk side of the car. After a last once-over of the landscape, he popped the trunk and climbed inside. The pain was excruciating. Yet he found his knees, reached upward and pulled the lid closed on top of himself. The locking mechanism sounded with a distinctive click.

  Darkness overtook him. He felt for and produced both his cell phone and pistol, made certain one was set to silent and the other ready to rock and roll. He angled himself so that if and when the trunk was opened, he would merely need to extend and elevate both arms to be guaranteed the very first shot. But the position created a secondary problem. He was unable to unfold his six-foot frame into a position that offered any kind of relief to his herniated back.

  “Fuck!” cursed Lucky. His voice reverberated hollow and hard.

  Lucky wriggled his torso until he seemed to find the least painful pose, then checked the clock on the phone. It was 6:36. In the sustaining quiet, he could hear the rain tapping on the Nissan’s trunk lid. He swore his nostrils were picking up traces of cosmetics. Women’s lipstick or maybe a deodorant stick. Was it Karrie Kaarlsen’s? Had she been the last girl to occupy the trunk?

  Was she even still alive?

  To battle the pain, Lucky shut his eyes and attempted a meditation. He’d never actually practiced the craft. But during his last stay in the hospital, a practitioner in the art of mental pain management had stopped by to give him a half-hour primer. He remembered that it began with slow breathing—in through the nose and out through the mouth—and a simple visualization. He had been asked to mine his memory for a moment of tranquility. He’d easily chosen the only image he could recall—a trip when he was twelve and Tony was eight. They were visiting distant cousins who owned a farm somewhere in Northern California. It was summer. Dry and hot. And there was an open field behind the ranch house that sloped to a slight peak. The grass was thigh-high and as pale as ripe wheat. At the highest point stood a lone oak tree. Old and gnarled, its branches spreading up and out against a cloudless, blue sky. Lucky and Tony had climbed up there, sat under the tree, chewed straw, and imagined their lives if they could move there. The sheer pleasantness of the moment had been tattooed to Lucky ever since.

  The memory proved so profound that Lucky’s meditation lasted barely sixty seconds. The pain, too, had been blunted just enough for sleep to overtake him. It was an unexpected lights-out for Lucky. Then as suddenly and seamlessly as he’d tripped off into slumber, he was awakened by what first felt like an earth tremor. A shift in equilibrium. His eyes popped open and before he could ascertain exactly where he was, let alone how long he’d been asleep, he both heard and felt the vibration of the Nissan’s engine smoothly turning over.

  Instantly the car was moving forward. Driving away with the surprise cargo in the trunk.

  59

  When Andrew finally woke from his backseat nap, the sun had already dropped and disappeared. It was the lightning blue light of a streetlamp blasting through the rain-streaked windows that was forcing him to squint and think it was still daytime. Immediately uncomfortable, his first cogent thought was how he craved the bed in his posh hotel room. That brought back the images of Romeo—the hoodlum bound and left bleeding for the police on the suite’s marble floo
r. The idea of returning to the hotel repulsed Andrew. So before he even sat up, he dialed his assistant’s mobile number, caring little at all if he interrupted anything important, and demanded she book a new suite in a new hotel, then have all his personal items delivered before his return. Oh, and he added. Make sure the suite has two bedrooms. He was somehow optimistic that soon he would be reunited with his daughter.

  As Andrew shook his grogginess, it slowly dawned on him that the day had been extinguished and he was in fact surrounded by darkness. How long had he been sleeping? Where the hell was Lucky and what the GD had transpired in the past few hours? Only after he had wrenched himself from the backseat did he recognize just where he was. Silver Spur or Silver Lake or some stupid LA locale. Outside that Cherry girl’s apartment. Lucky Dey must be doing what? It was still less than twenty-four hours since he had fired the former cop. Much had transpired since then. Ground had been gained. Yet it was all without a formal sit-down and discussion as to where to the men stood. Maybe now was the time.

  He knocked at the door of Cherry’s apartment. And while he waited for an answer, his stomach churned with an instinctive distrust. As he knocked again, this time with his fist for a louder, more resounding thump thump thump, he could feel the reflux gathering to singe the bottom of his esophagus.

  “Lucky!” Andrew barked through the door. “How long were you gonna let me sleep?”

  He thumped the door again, harder and lower for maximum acoustic resonance. Loud enough to announce himself to the other three apartment units.

  “It’s open,” shouted a woman’s voice from well beyond the door.

  Andrew pushed into the tiny apartment, warmly lit with candles and a hanging Chinese paper lamp courtesy of Pier One Imports.

  “I’ll be right out,” said Cherry from behind what Andrew surmised was the bathroom door.

  The last time he had been there she had kicked him out for implying she was a whore. He hadn’t gotten past the threshold—a strong disappointment because he had wanted to glimpse where his daughter had been crashing. His eyes landed on the corduroy couch.

  “Where’s Lucky?”

  “Following up a lead,” Cherry called back.

  “Without me, of course,” Andrew groused. He could feel the elevating burn from his stomach.

  “We figured out this really cool shortcut,” claimed Cherry.

  “Shortcut?”

  “Yeah. We, uh…Well, he pretty much did most of it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Texted the Armenian guy.”

  Andrew listened. Beyond the door, amongst the rushes of water and the sound of the squeaking tap, Cherry recounted the events that Andrew had missed during his afternoon slumber. The texts. The faked photos. The simple sleuthing that had led to the car rental company and the meeting spot across from the San Fernando Valley cement plant.

  With every little factoid, Andrew’s muscles clenched. Once again, he had been left behind by the man who had agreed to side him all the way to the payoff. He felt like a preteen ditched by his older, more powerful sibling. A rube, ripe for the mocking.

  “What the crapola am I paying for?” spat Andrew.

  “He said you weren’t paying him,” corrected Cherry from the other side of the door. “Did you really fire him?”

  “We had an understanding,” insisted Andrew. “For criminy sakes! She’s my GD daughter.”

  “Dontcha just want her back safe and sound?” asked Cherry, her voice upticking in frequency as she swung the door open.

  Andrew turned toward her, a half-formed thought frozen in his mouth as his eyes widened. Cherry was wearing a short neon green robe. She was rubbing a towel against her wet, now strawberry blonde hair.

  “Oh,” said Cherry. “The hair, right? Was planning on a change but then I thought, hey. No time like the present.”

  What followed was a frozen and awkward beat. Andrew’s strange stare unnerved her.

  “Maybe it was the picture, you know?” she continued. “Didn’t want some Armenian gang to come lookin’ for the girl with the purple hair.”

  “But it’s…” began Andrew. “That’s Karrie’s hair.”

  “The color? Then I got it right,” she smiled. “First thing I noticed about your daughter was her hair. Such an amazing color. And all natural. I was like, wow. Gotta do me that hair sometime.”

  “Wow,” repeated Andrew with a sad mutter.

  “She’s coming home,” salved Cherry. “To you. Don’t ask me how, but I can feel it. Lucky’s gonna do it. Lucky’s gonna bring your baby back to you.”

  “I should get to my hotel.”

  “And I’m going to drive you,” Cherry insisted, after noting that Andrew had a slight wobble in his equilibrium. “What did the doctors give you, anyway?”

  “Vicodin,” admitted Andrew. “I can take a cab.”

  Cherry picked up and shook Lucky’s keychain.

  “Lucky left me with instructions,” said Cherry. “Plus I’d kinda like to be there when he brings Val…Jeez, I keep…Sorry. I mean, brings Karrie home.”

  “Home is Wisconsin,” reminded Andrew.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do, yes,” said Andrew. “I really do.”

  60

  Goddamn Christmas carols.

  If ever there was a time when Lucky didn’t want to hear the seasonal sounds of jingling bells intermingled with melodies strung into happy harmonies, it was while he was an unwitting passenger in the trunk of a cobalt blue Nissan Altima. Yet the unknown driver had gone right for the radio before shoving the transmission into drive. The channels must have already been preprogrammed. Either that or the driver just wanted noise, immediately settling on a station playing an around-the-clock stream of candy-coated sounds of the season.

  The pain had returned with a vengeance. And somehow, when Lucky tried to shift his awkward position, his low back appeared to have locked up. Frozen. Not cooperating without causing something excruciating.

  What made it worse was the friggin’ potholes. The many times Lucky had cursed the LA city government for failing on one of its most primary responsibilities—paving and maintaining the roads—didn’t matter. The shock-inducing condition of the industrial areas was far worse due to lousy drainage and the metric tonnage of heavy equipment which frequented the North Valley. Every sickening displacement of axle and tire sent shockwaves across the trunk floor, the bumps and chunks across the road inflicting even more stabs of pain into the addict without his Percocet.

  Great day to go cold turkey, moron.

  The rear-mounted speakers made Lucky feel like he was curled up inside a kick-drum. If he had thought of calling out, the warble of sound was so overwhelming, no one would have heard him. Instead, he sent a group text to his old Lennox pals Bledsoe and Lopes:

  if no txt in 2 hrs geolocate my phone n hope i’m not dead

  He braced his arm up against the trunk lid, trying in vain to protect himself from further bumps in the road. Then nearly as quickly as the drive had begun, the pavement underneath him seemed miraculously smooth. Lucky quickly calculated that he couldn’t have driven far enough to have left Los Angeles’ vast city limits. There had been no high-speed travel. No freeways or obvious changes in elevation. The Nissan had also slowed, Lucky guessed, to under twenty-five miles per hour. There came a series of low-speed turns and even more braking, then the final hundred feet felt as if the car had left the asphalt and was driving on smooth concrete.

  The car stopped. Lucky felt the weight shift as the driver stepped from the vehicle, yet the engine was still running as were the Christmas songs. Lucky felt the car door slam, a shift back into drive, then a very slow roll and long, arcing sweep to the right. He pressed his ear to the mat and over the music, thought he could hear the tires squeaking as if against a slickened surface.

  Oh shit. I’m here.

  Wherever the mystery destination, Lucky quickly realized he had arrived. Now what? Any moment, he expected, the trunk w
ould most surely be lifted. The lid would spring up. And some person—or persons—would get his first look at the surprise cargo. They would expect to see an unconscious—or even semi-conscious—young woman. Purple hair. No more than a hundred pounds. Just like in the photos. Instead, they were sure to be shocked.

  And then what?

  Lucky planned to draw down on them. Shock them into submission with the gaping muzzle of his .45 auto. But without his lower extremities cooperating, springing out, planting his feet firmly on the ground and taking command of whatever situation he was facing would be difficult, if not impossible.

  Idiot! You have no plan.

  In the short seconds in which he prepared, Lucky tried to run the options through his mind. Yet none came. His back was locked. He was half crippled, supine in a cramped trunk, with his singular defense—let alone offense—being the large bore pistol.

  The Nissan’s engine was switched off. The radio blare silenced. Lucky heard chains moving then the rumble of a large, warehouse-styled door rolling downward. Next came a single set of footsteps at an unhurried pace, beginning from Lucky’s left and rotating counterclockwise toward the rear of the car. He gripped his pistol in his left hand, arm outstretched, the edge of the muzzle barely touching the fabric on the underside of the trunk lid.

  Lucky would later recall the release of the mechanical latch sounding as loud as a cannon and the near immediate report from his .45, virtually silent.

  The springs engaged. The trunk lid elevated like the jaws of a hungry crocodile. A silhouette stood before Lucky. Skinny, slight. Male. Wearing baggy jeans and a black leather jacket over a vintage rock ’n’ roll t-shirt. Before any kind of recognition, before Lucky could even register on the young man’s eyeballs—he instinctively leveled the pistol at the man’s right shoulder and let loose a single, two-hundred-and-thirty-grain copper-jacketed missile. The bullet struck leather, then cotton, before beginning its deformation once it penetrated skin. By the time it exited just north of the young man’s right shoulder blade, it had fully mushroomed and nearly doubled in diameter.