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

by Doug Richardson

  Lil Rod might have had more to say. His lips and tongue were already forming a soliloquy of excuses he hoped would find the ears of Julius—excuses which would have to wait as a tattooed forearm swung into his periphery and struck him across his right ear. Lil Rod saw blue sky and little more before he blacked out.

  24

  Julius Colón didn’t see himself as a Robin Hood or criminal savior to the poor and disenfranchised. He just hated waste—especially when it involved his own pocketbook. Example. After Julius purchased Pizza King, which served and delivered until 4:00 A.M., he’d discovered that between the mistakes in the kitchen and phantom phone orders, the garbage cans would be choked with uneaten food by night’s end. With improved workplace rules in place plus some organizational changes, Julius was able to cut waste by sixty-five percent. A win for some, but not so for Julius. He obsessed on the overages. Then came an early morning in April. He and Big Otis stood in the kitchen, staring down at a leftover assembly of seven uneaten pizzas, six pounds of cooked wings, and three boxes of mojo-roasted potatoes.

  “Put ’em in the truck,” Julius had ordered.

  Thus had begun an almost daily habit of what Julius labeled Dawn Patrol. By reheating the leftovers and placing them into hot-boxes loaded in the back of the Suburban, Julius and Big Otis would cruise the streets handing out warm food to random vagrants. After only a month, the neighborhood’s homeless population became less random and more familiar. Some even called Julius by name and would attempt to flag down his gray Suburban from distances of a block or more.

  “Bes’ part of my day, boss,” remarked Big Otis in a rare non-sequitur. He spun the steering wheel into a right turn while flipping down his visor to cut off the glare of morning sun.

  “I feel ya,” was all a weary Julius said.

  The boss was less jovial than his normal morning self. Julius had been shoring his workouts with fresh injections of human grown hormone and hourly bumps of cocaine. Exhaustion was kept in abeyance.

  “Stop the car!” barked Julius.

  Otis applied the brakes, stalling the Suburban in the middle of the street.

  “Back up, back up!” Julius’s eyes zeroed out his passenger seat window.

  Ever the obedient bodyguard, Big Otis reversed the big SUV until it was perpendicular to the point where Julius sounded.

  “Hey!” shouted Julius before his window was half rolled down. “HEY, I SAID! WHAT YOU DOIN’ WITH MY NIGGA’S DOGS?”

  Dogs were to Lucky what Kryptonite was to Superman. Over his entire life he’d suffered a special connection with dogs. But for the two vicious animals who’d bitten him during the course of duty, most dogs had loved Lucky right back. If only the deputy hadn’t been cursed with a Goddamn allergy. If he so much as touched a dog, he’d have to wash, douse his hands with cleanser, or seek out medicine or medical attention. Otherwise his throat would swell until his larynx was crushed.

  Danger aside, Lucky wrangled two dogs per arm, hoping lead dog Oprah would guide him to their missing master. The mutts had turned him up an alleyway, only to be interested in a pair of garbage cans that smelled like last night’s fried chicken.

  Lucky checked his watch. By his count, he had less than sixty minutes before he’d need to walk into an ER and beg for a shot of epinephrine or find the nearest CVS where he could gargle a bottle of Benadryl. It was when he was urging the dogs into a U-turn that he heard shouts in his direction.

  “HEY! WHAT YOU DOIN’ WITH MY NIGGA’S DOGS?”

  At the opposite end of the alley was a gray Chevy Suburban. Though Lucky didn’t recognize the scowling man framed by the passenger window, Oprah and Hank clearly did, the latter woofing excitedly while the older, lead dog let loose an anticipatory howl. The animals tugged and it was all Lucky could do to follow without being yanked face first to the ground.

  The Suburban’s driver turned the SUV’s front wheels into the alley and closed the distance. Before braking to a full stop, the passenger door flung open to reveal a fireplug of a man yoked inside an undersized compression shirt with a Stars and Stripes UFC logo.

  The dog team surged and ripped the harness from Lucky’s grip. He relented, pleased at least to see that instead of running off, the sled crew bunched around the SUV’s passenger.

  Julius gave each of the pups a familiar rub while keeping his gaze on Lucky.

  “Good,” said Lucky. “They know you.”

  “Didn’t answer my question,” said Julius. “Where’s their daddy?”

  “Mush Man? We’re lookin’ for him.”

  “Where’d he get off to?”

  “Found ’em on Alameda. No Mush. Draggin’ that shopping cart Mush calls his sled.”

  “Yeah?” said Julius. “How you know him?”

  “Just bein’ ’round,” said Lucky. “Way back before he got pushed out of Lennox. You know he’s under psych care at the VA?”

  “That so?”

  “Thinkin’ he mighta had a seizure.” Then Lucky segued. “Dogs seem to know you pretty good.”

  “Not so much me,” said Julius, thumb-gesturing to Big Otis. “It’s what I give ’em.”

  Lucky flashed to Otis as the big man lumbered from the driver’s seat to the back of the Suburban. The pieces were coming together. Pimped SUV. The ex-footballer doubling as driver and bodyguard. The easy math allowed Lucky to profile Julius as either a hip-hop styled celebrity or Compton crime impresario. Lucky was leaning towards O.G.—Original Gangster. Only the criminal in question bore none of the usual, visible and distinguishing tattoos that might connect him to a local set or affiliation. The man bore no features that labeled him either African-American or Hispanic. Racially neutral, thought Lucky. Not necessarily the best DNA combo for a criminal in Compton, a swath of real estate where color lines were best appreciated when they were easily recognized as black, brown, or Sheriffs’ khaki and green.

  Big Otis reappeared with an extra-large pizza box. The mutts swarmed, jockeying for position. The big man belly laughed like an eighth grader.

  “Lemme,” demanded Julius, flipping open the box and distributing the slices by name. “Oprah first. Big Hank. Whoa, whoa. Wait your turn. Thurgood. Rosa.” As the dogs wolfed down the cheese pizza, Julius crouched amidst them. “Now, where’s your daddy? Huh? What happened to Little Man Mush?”

  Lucky scratched his forearm, recognizing the signal of an oncoming allergic siege.

  “They safe with you?” Lucky asked.

  “Yeah, yeah,” replied Julius. “I find a place for ’em till Mush crawls outta wherever he be.”

  “Good,” agreed Lucky, fishing into his wallet. “I’m gonna keep lookin’ for our boy. But you hear from him first maybe you could call me?”

  Lucky produced one of his vellum LA Sheriff’s business cards and offered it with two fingers.

  “Back atcha,” said Julius with a double-snap of his fingers. Big Otis slipped his fat fingers into his shirt pocket and dug until he came up with one of his boss’s cards—slick black, red, and embossed blue.

  Lucky read the name two points underneath the company’s moniker, Pizza Wing Enterprises.

  “Julius,” read Lucky. “Good to meetcha.”

  “Lucas Dey of LA Sheriffs,” read back Big O before passing Lucky’s card over to Julius.

  Lucky squatted in front of Oprah. The black-and-white lead dog was licking her pink chops after devouring the pizza slice.

  “We’ll find your ol’ man,” assured Lucky. With his fingers he rubbed the scruff behind her floppy ears. Then unconsciously, with his left hand, he reached below his jeans’ cuff and scratched at the itchy skin on his left calf.

  Julius Colón, a man prideful about his knack for detail, noted the deputy sheriff’s posture as he pet the dog with one hand while relieving his itch with the other. As the pants leg lifted further, he recognized the bottom of Lucky’s Reaper tattoo. The ink was only partially visible, but instantly identified.

  Mother. Fucking. Reaper.

  “So you
call me or I call you,” agreed Julius, his tone betraying his surge of venom.

  “Thanks,” said Lucky, returning to his feet and thrusting forward a parting hand. Julius grasped it with a strong fit.

  Lucky’s intuitions always kicked in when he turned his back to walk away. Where some cops trusted the hairs on the back of their necks or a gooey sense of heebie-jeebies when encountering evil, Lucky would rely on one of two tests. He’d either read the subject’s pupils during a basic Q and A or, upon turning his back on the creature, he’d tap his gut as to whether or not he expected a blistering bullet expelled in his direction.

  As Lucky strode from the dogs, Big Otis, the Chevy Suburban, and the enigmatic Julius Colón, he listened to the chain of muscles knotting his back. Without asking, the fibers between his shoulder blades clenched with certainty and expectation. As if the sinews themselves could read the thoughts of the man left behind. Definitive.

  Julius Colón equals…bad guy.

  When Lucky landed in his ’99 Ford, his eyes were already beginning to itch and water. If he didn’t attend to the allergic reaction soon, he might get to that ugly point where he’d consider using a Brillo pad to relieve the discomfort in his eyes.

  Righted next to his car was Mush Man’s shopping cart-cum-urban-dog-sled. Lucky considered leaving it on the sidewalk. But odds were it wouldn’t last the day, let alone the time for Mush Man to resurface. So Lucky popped his trunk, loaded what he could of the cart, then strapped the trunk lid on top of it using remnants of Mush Man’s make-shift harness.

  Now all I need are meds.

  His natural bearings informed him that he was roughly equidistant from the nearest drug store and emergency room. Choosing a bottle of Benadryl over the hassle of walking into a local ER, Lucky keyed the engine and dropped the ’99 into gear. It was 8:02 A.M. and already eighty-five degrees. The holiday ahead was promising to be a steamer.

  Lucky prepped to make a left onto East Compton when a semi-tractor rig towing a mobile investigation trailer rumbled past. The white paint with a single, blue stripe indicated the familiar markings of the Los Angeles County Coroner.

  Lucky’s curiosity was piqued.

  A twenty-four-hour CVS and a bottle of chemical relief was just a turn to the left and an easy half-mile away. Despite the pull, Lucky swung the ’99 right, effectively tailing the coroner’s truck. Considering the time of day, he tried to convince himself that the crime-scene team was headed back to the barn. He decided to give his little chase ten blocks before peeling off to seek attention for his allergy. After all, he was off-duty and feeling like shit. Yet there he was, off the clock and tailing a coroner crew without a clue other than the magnetic pit in his stomach.

  At Poinsettia, the coroner’s truck indicated a right turn, slowing, starting its wheels left to make a clean arc onto the tight residential track. A tingle spread across Lucky’s scalp, producing a cool slick of perspiration. He negotiated his own turn onto Poinsettia—already recognizing that it was the precise block where he and his trainee had been nearly swallowed alive in that water main blowout. His mind ticked off the number of emergency units already on the scene. Two fire trucks, a ladder and an EMT. Four Sheriff’s black-and-whites. As well as two more unmarked units with radio arrays. Closer to the hole was the hulking machinery of heavy DWP equipment, including an oversized backhoe. A fresh ribbon of crime-scene tape was being strung out by a pair of uniformed deputies.

  Either because of Lucky’s Sheriff’s shield fixed to his belt or his experienced swagger, nobody thought twice to check whether he had business at the scene. As he snaked through the ring of cops, firemen, and DWP workers, he saw a scattering of Big-Gulp-sized yellow cones—each with a different black number—placed around the eastern rim of the hole. These, Lucky recognized, were to record where spent bullet casings were discarded. From Lucky’s glance it appeared no fewer than twenty rounds had been expelled.

  A fire ladder had been lowered so the crime scene techs could scramble in and out of the hole. Lucky eased ever closer, his ears keyed on a testy exchange between a pair of Sheriff’s detectives and a barrel-chested DWP foreman.

  “I’m sayin’ I can’t take responsibility for any shit that happens down there,” pressed the foreman.

  “It’s a crime scene,” replied a familiar-looking detective. He appeared thirty-ish despite having already lost half his flame-red hair. “That means we gotta do our thing no matter.”

  “Just don’t say you weren’t warned,” said the foreman, hands up in surrender. “I get called in as witness to your work-comp claim, I’m testifying you guys didn’t allow none of my people to secure the hole.”

  “So warned,” said the other detective, a wan-looking sort with sallow eyes, a gin-blossomed nose and sagging khakis beneath a generous belly. “Now mind corralling your crew somewhere over thataway?”

  Lucky arrived at the edge of the hole, heart pounding in his chest. He could feel the adrenalin beating back the allergens. Fear, thought Lucky. That was the only explanation for the thumping. As he gazed downward, it was hard to make out any specifics as the six-man crime scene team decked out in disposable blue Pyrolon coveralls scoured and marked whatever evidence they could.

  “Whatcha got?” Lucky found himself asking the red-haired detective.

  In return he received a requisite who-the-hell-are-you once-over from the detective along with the expected authoritarian follow-up.

  “Who are you?” the detective asked.

  “Lucky Dey. Compton Station.”

  “Someone send you to look over my shoulder?”

  “I’m the cop asshole this hole almost ate,” said Lucky.

  “So that was you?” gaped the detective, both admiringly and amused while accepting Lucky’s hand. “Jeff Lowe. Homicide Bureau.”

  At the drop of the detective’s job description, Lucky instantly imagined the Irish-looking pug at one of those messy desks that made up the LA County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau. The unit—which gamely referred to itself as The Bulldogs—was housed in a nondescript office building oddly located in the nearby City of Commerce.

  “Got a relative flying whirly-birds for LAPD?” asked Lucky.

  “That’d be my little brother, Mike. You know him?”

  “Works with my girlfriend.”

  “Small-ass world,” deadpanned Lowe. “And this is the big-ass hole you fell in.”

  “You got a theory what happened here?”

  “With the crime scene? All we know is there was a lotta lead in the air and one unarmed victim.”

  “ID?”

  “Got a uniform somewhere around here,” said Lowe, glancing around. “Recognized him as a local homeless dude. Said he was last seen ridin’ around in a shopping cart pulled by his dogs.”

  There came a plunge inside Lucky. It felt like his heart had been hooked and pulled into his spleen. His eyes were already slits, near-shuttered by his allergic reaction. Yet through them he was able to track a pair of coroner techs as they climbed into the hole and unfurled a yellow mesh body bag designed for water recoveries. The team slipped into the muck and, only as they worked their rubber-gloved hands below the surface of the water, was the body finally revealed.

  A face bobbed to the surface—the attached dreadlocks barely floated, limp and uncoiling.

  Mush Man.

  There was a tightening in Lucky’s throat, as if the devil himself had wrapped a claw around his neck and begun to strangulate him. The allergic reaction had gone from a tickling to full-bloom. His airways were under attack. Without immediate medical attention, Lucky might choke or black out or even die.

  He pivoted and turned toward where he recalled seeing the paramedics’ vehicle. He made a beeline while keeping his shoulders back and chin slightly elevated to lengthen and open his trachea. A puffy, baby-faced EMT appearing no older than sixteen sat outside the one open door to the emergency cabin. Lucky unhooked his shield from his belt and was lifting it to identify himself when an enormously lo
ud hum came from behind him. What followed was a cacophony of screams, men shouting, and involuntary curses. The baby-faced EMT switched from looking at Lucky’s shield to rushing toward the developing emergency.

  Lucky’s ear canals were swelling.

  Everything to his rear sounded as if underwater. Instinct demanded he ignore the distress behind him and continue into the vehicle’s cabin. He climbed, feeling his equilibrium failing, his need for air proclaimed in a gagging cough. Recalling his brief training as a fireman before getting accepted to the Sheriff’s Academy, Lucky began releasing overhead bins from right to left. He dug at each, spilling everything from packaged hypodermics to gauze to decompression supplies. A handful of plastic-wrapped cylinders the size of tampons tumbled from the fourth box. Without having to read the contents, Lucky snatched one, stripped off the wrapper and revealed a colorful, epinephrine auto-injector—also called an EpiPen. He twisted off the protective cap with the gusto of a man dying of thirst and jammed the needle through his denim jeans into his right thigh.

  Lucky dropped, sat, and waited. When relief didn’t come as expected, he began to fumble for a second EpiPen. He was ready to jam another dose into his leg when he tasted metal in his mouth—a side effect of the drug and proof that it had found his bloodstream. He tipped his head back and rested while listening to the blitzkrieg of his ever-elevating heart rate.

  It’s working. Relax. Let it happen.

  Lucky’s ears began to clear. Satan’s hand around his throat eased into a malignant, but livable touch. He could breathe again.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” barked the baby-faced EMT, swinging the second door wide. Behind him were his paramedic partner and, between them, an unconscious crime scene tech on a collapsible ambulance stretcher. Half-crouched, Lucky expertly assisted, pulling the forward end of the litter. The stretcher’s legs folded, allowing it to glide into the cabin. Lucky’s assessment of the female victim—a heavyweight girl of Asian extraction—was that she was dead on arrival. Her eyes were fixed. Her right arm was badly burned with an electrical crease moving diagonally across her chest, the vinyl of her disposable jump suit melted away as if she’d been slashed with a welder’s torch.