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

by Doug Richardson

  Once dry, Cat found herself jonesing for a run.

  But you just showered, bitch.

  Cat didn’t care a lick about water consumption. After all, she pretty much was the DWP. She could take as many tepid showers as she desired without any concern whatsoever about any goddamn water shortage or rationing.

  The drive from her hilltop house to Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Stadium took a matter of minutes. She parked under a blazing vapor lamp. Against the flat expanse of the venue’s southernmost parking lot, her fire-engine red Audi convertible appeared no bigger then a wingless ladybug, entirely alone against the hulking vine-crept concrete of the old coliseum.

  She began her run when the sky was still black, a full hour and a half before her normal run time of 5:30 when the Arroyo Seco would turn from dark to dawning gray. The ancient watershed, long ago settled as a cozy West Pasadena enclave, boasted the famed Rose Bowl as a centerpiece. Two public golf courses surrounded the vintage stadium. And ringing the acres of manicured grass and sand bunkers was a popular loop perfect for biking, walking, and jogging.

  For Cat, running early and on weekdays had a secondary purpose. If she didn’t start with the early risers, she could barely finish the 5K course without some middle-aged, testosterone-ingesting warrior stalking her from behind, ogling her poppin’ ass for a quarter to half mile before accelerating up next to her. The horny men would start the conversation with lame icebreakers like, “How far you runnin’ today?” or “You like the way those Sauconys feel?”

  The 4:00 A.M. start was something new for Cat. And not until she’d parked, lightly stretched, plugged in her earphones, and begun her trot up Rosemount Avenue, did it actually dawn on her that any hint of daylight was still more than an hour in the making. Her counter-clockwise habit began on a northward heading, making easy work of the initial mile of incline before button-hooking over the top of the golf course and picking up speed as she covered the long gentle downhill grade.

  A mist clogged the arroyo. No matter the time of year or the weather—or even when the Southland was suffering under a record heat—that canyon bottom was a trap for moisture. The heavy air would hang in suspended relief, leaving all streetlamps and porch lights as eerie, glowing orbs.

  On a normal morning run, Cat would marvel at the sense of peacefulness the southbound stretch instilled—usually only passing a clockwise runner or two, maybe a cyclist, or a local resident walking a dog by the time she’d reach mile three. Yet twenty-five minutes into this unusually early run, she hadn’t crossed paths with a soul nor was the promise of breaking day anywhere in sight.

  A shadow slipped ahead and to her right. Forty-five feet away. Tracking alongside Cat through the brush. She heard a crash of branches. Dry leaves crunching underfoot. She instinctively slowed instead of speeding ahead toward the next deco-styled torch lamp. Bursting from a flowerless Oleander, came the shadow and then the form of a fearless coyote. Large. Healthy fur. Well-fed, thought Cat as she eased back on her pace. Probably fattened from a diet of kittens and all those pedigreed lap dogs that were the rage. She hated seeing those Westside, plastic-surgery-addicted bitches lugging their miniature canines like they were designer handbags.

  “Good for you,” she uttered aloud. Where Cat was concerned, one less pint-sized pet made for one less asshole owner.

  Instead of taking flight, the coyote oddly braked, straddling the avenue’s center stripe and staring back at Cat.

  “Wanna race?” she jibed at the animal.

  She was about to gesture with waving arms and wiggly jazz fingers when the coyote’s attention jerked ten degrees left. What followed was a slight but audible car brake squeaking. As the coyote bolted, Cat unconsciously pivoted toward the sound. All she could see was the slow curve of the road under the glow of two distant streetlamps. The space in between fell off into complete darkness—impenetrable under the pre-daylight conditions.

  But I heard what I heard.

  Cat strained to see though the black, cursing herself for not biting the bullet and getting Lasik surgery. She was, after all five years from forty. Her body might’ve been bangin’ enough to compete with women in their early twenties. But her damned eyes were her damned eyes.

  Without overthinking, Cat returned to her run. Between breaths and her size-five running shoes gently spanking the asphalt, she tuned her ears for footsteps. Hoping, praying, for another early runner to enter the void. She imagined she heard car tires chewing the pavement. A glance back over her shoulder revealed nothing but the same—streetlamps and the opaqueness between. Cat upped her pace and scanned for landmarks, recognizing a large green letter M hanging from a twelve-foot-tall cyclone gate defending the golf course from unwanted intruders.

  M means what? Halfway, Cat? Two and a half miles to go?

  Cat picked out a pair of headlights slipping from a side street before aiming in her direction. Fear gripped her chest. As if her Lycra running wear was shrinking about her. Her instinct screamed for her to flag down the oncoming vehicle. But her rational brain fought back. Why? What are you scared of, bitch? The dark?

  Nobody but nobody is following me…

  The headlights approached, the driver flashing high beams to let Cat know he was closing.

  You paranoid little twat.

  Cat acknowledged with a wave, but retracted her arm. Intellect had won out. And why shouldn’t it? Cat Rincon was whip smart. Reason and wits had delivered her from a shit-box existence, growing up the youngest of seven kids in a two-bedroom rental house on the west side of Albuquerque. Neither her parents, brothers, sisters, teachers, nor school chums had, in Cat’s razor opinion, contributed to her meteoric success from academia to Los Angeles politics.

  That and the liberal yet selective utilization of my platinum-lined vagina.

  The approaching car, a tiny gray Fiat, puttered north and beyond Cat. Normally, she’d have jogged on, checking her heart rate against her pace to insure she was in her optimal cardio zone. But doing so would have been moot. Cat could feel her heart pounding—elevated in response to autonomic fear.

  Cat slowed and turned.

  As the Fiat trailed away, its headlights swept the road and scraped past a navy blue Chevy Malibu parked in the shadows between the streetlamps. The Malibu was illegally parked and in a spot where Cat had seen no cars whatsoever as she’d run past.

  And something else the Fiat’s lights caught?

  A man seated low behind the Malibu’s wheel. Black. Wide-set eyes. Yellow and feral. Staring back at her.

  Cat stopped and glared at the man in the Malibu. More accurately, at where she’d seen him in the Fiat’s headlights. From Cat’s perspective, the hundred and fifty yards between streetlamps had again fallen off into a light scale unreadable by the human eye. Or at least, her eyes. It was a blank space. A black hole. Yet stare at it she did, as if in her mind’s eye, she could still read the sun-eaten paint plaguing the roof and hood of the vehicle.

  Stare at the motherfucker. Let him know that you see him.

  Cat recalled her self-defense training—a six-week-long Impact course she’d attended with two girlfriends from the mayor’s office. The instructions were to stop and stare at a potential attacker. Reduce the moment to its most primal. Let the predator know that you recognize him and are not afraid.

  The fear wouldn’t subside. If anything, her heart rate had kicked up a notch, sending vibrations up her esophagus and into her molars.

  Then the Malibu’s engine revved with an ugly, unmistakable belt-slip squeal. High-pitched. The headlights remained extinguished while the sound of the car pushed toward Cat.

  Time to find a way out.

  She moved at a firm knife-angled left toward the fence separating the running path from the golf course. Swift and fleet. Cat was, after all, in the best shape of her life, barely clearing a hundred pounds soaking wet.

  But faster than a wheezing Chevy accelerating downhill? The engine squeal muted as the Malibu’s engine found second gear. How close? C
at didn’t turn to see. She homed in on that tall gate marked with an M. It was double-chained and padlocked. A gap, though, between the gate and gravel. Could she slip through?

  I have to fit!

  Cat slid head first—a verboten move when she was sixteen and played fastpitch softball. Her body bounced off the gravel. She reached through with her right arm, slipped her shoulder into the gap, then her head and pulled at the rest of herself. The padlock rattled and rang, sending a panic of sound ripples down the fence line.

  Headlights erupted. The Malibu’s lamps switched on in a high-beam blast of white. That’s when Cat twisted her view and clocked the distance. Fifty yards and gaining. She rotated her hips and nearly cursed her maximized gluteus. Her running shorts snagged and ripped without a lick of care. She continued to kick her way through until she was free of the gap, but her right running shoe caught at the laces. It stopped Cat dead until, with a desperate yank, she dropped the sneaker and left it behind.

  Cat righted herself, retreating backwards into the dark and keeping the fence between her and the street. She watched the Chevy Malibu swing back to the middle of the road. The man shadowed behind the wheel was clearly eyeballing that impossible gap under the fence through which she’d escaped.

  She stood frozen until the Malibu was out of sight. If it hurt to jog, she was assisted by adrenalin. Ignoring whatever scrapes or bruising she had suffered, she kicked off her remaining running sneaker, then barefooted the remainder of the distance across the golf course grass using the dim lights of the old stadium for navigation.

  The sky was still black. Daylight was an hour from its appointed arrival. The trek across the greens and fairways gave her time to attempt some calculation on what the hell had just happened. Failing to do so, she faced one more obstacle, which, for the ten minutes she’d paused at the edge of the parking lot, felt equally as frightening as her escape through the gate’s gap. It was her Audi convertible. Parked under that vapor lamp, her prized ladybug was a hundred-yard walk across the vacant, semi-lit parking lot. Before approaching in her stocking feet, Cat scoured the landscape for the man in the Malibu. At last, she hurried, ignoring the sting of every loose gravel chip that probed the soles of her feet.

  When Cat climbed behind the wheel she noticed the paper pinned underneath her front windshield wiper. It was folded and glued to the glass from the predawn mist. She reached over the top, felt the flimsy newsprint, and gingerly unfolded it while returning to her bucket seat. What she saw sent waves of icy cold down her neck and arms.

  Oh. My. God.

  Gripped with a need for flight, Cat punched the ignition button and sped away in no particular direction—as if putting some speed under her would prevent Hal Solomon’s ghost from gripping her any harder that it already was.

  20

  Compton. 5:28 A.M.

  Lucky knew there’d be no automatic overtime if Shia was slow in completing their written reports. He’d showered again, slipped on a t-shirt and jeans, and waited out his trainee while seated in the driver’s seat of his primer gray ’99. The driver’s door was half-open, his legs were crossed, boots propped up in the open window. The car radio was semi-quietly tuned to an alternative station that crunched rock music from the grungy nineties.

  Still in her uniform, Shia approached with a handful of forms.

  “That was fast,” remarked Lucky.

  “I’m a little hung up on this one thing,” replied Shia.

  “Show me.”

  “The gun arrest. You said check the glove box for the registration.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I opened the glove box, some cans ’n’ stuff fell out. I found the registration. But it was when I got on the floor to pick up this Coke bottle I saw the first weapon.”

  “It wasn’t in plain sight?”

  “When I was on the floor it was. But not when I was going for the registration.”

  “That’s a problem.”

  “Really?”

  “Did you have p.c. for guns?” asked Lucky, referring to the probable cause required before police officers can search any property.

  Shia rewound the tape in her brain and replayed the sequence of before and after the arrest. The memories included the back slaps and accolades she’d received from her fellow deputies as well as the proud watch commander.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was ordered to get the registration. If I wasn’t cleaning up some stuff from the floorboard… I wasn’t looking for guns.”

  “If you’d just grabbed the registration and left the shit on the floor,” clarified Lucky, “would you have seen the guns?”

  “No,” she answered flatly.

  “Then all seven bad boys walk,” shrugged Lucky. “On your way home, might as well stop by the jail and unhook ’em yourself.”

  “Shit,” griped Shia, wanting to flog herself.

  “I could go with you. Hold your hand.”

  “I don’t want ’em to walk!”

  “Why?”

  “Are you joking?” angered Shia. “Those assholes were looking to put a kill on somebody.”

  “No doubt.”

  “And so they walk?”

  “Depends on you.”

  “How me?”

  “You said shit fell out of the glove box.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What if—included with the shit that fell onto the floorboard—was the registration?”

  “Because that would be untrue....”

  “Untrue?” asked Lucky. “I asked you to fetch the registration. In the course of fetching the registration you discovered the guns.”

  “So you think that’s how I should write it?”

  “You want those bad boys to walk?”

  Shia made a slow-to-acknowledge nod before her about-face and march back into the station house. Lucky resumed his former pose. On his phone he composed a text for Gonzo as to his expected time of arrival. It wasn’t a demand that he check in. Lucky just knew she’d appreciate the simple gesture and, for appearance’s sake, it might earn him points for maintaining the relationship. He was about to press send when he realized the time. The morning was just beginning to reveal itself. Gonzo would surely still be sleeping. Lucky canceled the text and sent the message as an email, finishing the note off with a pair of uncharacteristic X’s and O’s. Perhaps because he was looking forward to sharing with her the tales of his obnoxious ride-along and the resulting “screen test.”

  Shia returned and, after handing off the completed and signed shift report, placed her hands on her hips and momentarily gazed at the renewing sky. Instead of passing the papers back for Shia to file, Lucky exhumed himself from his car and stood over her.

  “What?” she asked. “Something wrong?”

  “I got the rest,” said Lucky. “I’ll file.”

  “No you won’t,” she insisted. “You’re showered and dressed. Go home. I got this.”

  “No,” said Lucky firmly. “I got this. Same way I got you.”

  Shia screwed up her face while trying to figure out just what Lucky was implying.

  “I got you,” he repeated, gently waving the fistful of paper. “You signed shift and arrest reports that you know to be false. That’s perjury. Nice work for your second night on the job.”

  Lucky watched as the wind expelled from his trainee’s lungs. Behind that layer of defeminizing body armor, he could see her chest sink, her eyes wide and shocked reservoirs of what the hell just happened to me?

  “But you suggested…” she searched.

  “And you signed.”

  “To keep it a good arrest.”

  “Perjury all the same,” said Lucky, knowing that Shia knew—as would any self-respecting deputy fresh from the Academy—that perjury of any shade was a silver bullet to a cop’s career.

  “Why?” she asked, her delicate eyebrows beginning to angrily pinch the bridge of her nose.

  “Trust,” answered Lucky. “Now I know you have my back. Same goes for every other
deputy you partner with. They will trust that you are there for them.”

  “Wait wait wait wait,” she stammered. “You sayin’ every trainee—”

  “Sayin’ that outside those walls is a grid with no rules. Bad guys don’t play by rules. That means the day-to-day shit which is you ’n’ me in a black-and-white might demand more than following policy and procedure. You get me?”

  Lucky couldn’t gauge what had penetrated. Some of it would have to sink in later. He’d said his awful piece and now it was Shia’s to either swallow or reject.

  “Go home. Sleep on it,” said Lucky. “And when you show up for shift, know that I will have your back from today to the grave.”

  “And if I choose to protest?”

  “You can. But you won’t,” said Lucky. “Welcome to the Circle of Trust.”

  He left Shia looking like a complicated tumult of heartbreak, random victimization, and unexpressed rage. Lucky didn’t know for sure what kind of trainee he’d find once their July Fourth shift resumed at 9:00 P.M. After he made digital copies of the shift reports, he filed them, returned to his ’99 Crown Vic, and rolled out into the dawning day, steering out of the motor yard and pointing himself north.

  Because of the holiday, Lucky anticipated minimal traffic on his commute home to Altadena. As he figured it, he had between Compton and Altadena to hogtie his feelings of guilt and stuff them into the vault where he kept all his other indiscretions—Reaper and otherwise.

  Sixteen years earlier, young Deputy Lucky Dey had been inducted into the Circle of Trust by his own training officer, “Flip” Bledsoe. Lucky could argue that what he’d passed down to Shia was for her own good as much as the good of the LA Sheriffs as a whole. At no other time in recent history were cops under such a microscope. To do the job demanded faith in one’s partner as much as faith in the Department as a whole. Otherwise that thin blue line would crumble and the bad guys would use their newfound upper-hand to cause even more urban chaos.

  Then Lucky wondered if his own young face had looked as stung as Shia’s when Bledsoe had dropped the perjury hammer on him.