Dying Breath

by J. A. Konrath

I suppose Earl was real, in a way. The cancer was real.

  Probably didn’t have a mouth, though.

  “Got the addy,” Mac said. “You ready?”

  He gave me an address in Green Birch, a town about twenty kilometers south of the Wisconsin border. I started the car and headed north.

  # # #

  The village of Green Birch was notable for absolutely nothing. It was too far away from Chicago to be considered a suburb, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the neighborhoods, shopping centers, and strip malls. Land was cheaper, so the houses had more land, but most were cheap, pre-fab houses from the 1950s, mass produced and nearly identical in everything but color.

  The drive took an hour, which felt longer because Earl began to whisper to me about stopping for cocaine, and the whisper eventually became nonstop droning.

  Earl’s reasoning was sound. I had a glove compartment full of cash, courtesy of Scadder, I was about to dump the woman I loved, and I was in pain and dying of cancer.

  I had no good reason to keep searching for a runaway, and every reason to get high as hell.

  But I didn’t. I stayed on the case. And I could only come up with one compelling reason why I chose acting like a responsible adult over partying like I’ll die tomorrow; to piss off Earl.

  He wanted the coke. Denying him that gave me masochistic pleasure.

  I’d give in. Eventually.

  But for the moment, I’d keep looking for Amy Scadder, if only because it infuriated Earl.

  I take my victories wherever I can.

  There was an old game called Risk, where the board was a map of the world, and you invaded neighboring territories with your little plastic armies, trying to conquer it all.

  That’s what cancer felt like. Each day a little more of me died. Each day Earl reached out his tentacles a little farther, taking over more cells, more organs, more me. Each day the pain got a little harder to take.

  Each day I began to look more and more like the walking dead.

  But the worst part wasn’t knowing that I was dying. The worst part wasn’t the realization that in a year I would no longer exist. The worst part wasn’t even all of my pain, present and future.

  The thing that hurt the most didn’t happen too often. Just every once in a while; sometimes only two or three times a week. But it still continued to happen.

  Every so often, I forgot that I was dying. I forgot that my life was almost over. My mind would wander like it did before I got sick, when my worries were few, when my future had no boundaries.

  Then I would remember again, and it would crush me like a flower in a fist.

  I saw the ramp for Green Birch and managed to quit navel-gazing and Earl-bashing long enough to exit the expressway. A nagging suspicion told me that Tucker was the key to all of this. The same suspicion told me he wasn’t going to be as cooperative as Sharon Pulowski. But I was no stranger to persuasion techniques. I pulled into a gas station and suited up for war.

  Smith & Wesson 9mm in my belt, snug against my spine.

  Switchblade, front pocket.

  Brass knuckles, back pocket.

  AMT .380, boot heel.

  If none of that worked, I could always bite him.

  His house was a large, two story affair that was off center in an acre of partially wooded land. Even though there were several houses close by, all of the large pine trees on his property gave him ample privacy. I drove past and parked four blocks away, in the back lot of a twenty-four hour pharmacy. It was a nice day, about sixty, and when I got out of the Bronco I was hit with a stiff, cold breeze; winter not totally down for the count.

  I put my cell phone and wallet in the glove compartment, locked the truck, and went for a walk.

  I got a better look at Tucker’s place as I approached. Brownish brick, punctuated by bits of dark stained wood, and a roof missing some shingles. The windows had wrought iron bars over them. A driveway snaked its way around to the back of the house, through the pines.

  I walked the perimeter of the grounds, looking for open windows, a car, movement, listening for voices or a TV or radio.

  Someone might have been home, but they weren’t announcing it.

  The garage was its own separate little building, sitting in the middle of the backyard. It had no windows, and the door was locked, so it was anyone’s guess if it contained a car or not. I zig-zagged my way to the house, using the trees as cover, and came to the closest window. Peering inside revealed an empty living room.

  Two more windows gave me views of equally empty rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom.

  I walked around to the front of the house and to the front door. I pressed the buzzer next to the intercom unit. Waited. Pressed it again. Waited.

  There was a dormer on the roof on the west side of the house. It was the only window without bars on it. If I could get up there...

  The door opened.

  The man from the photograph, Tucker Shears, squinting at me. His goatee was still there, his hair a little longer, and the eyes were even deader in real life. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  He was also a little taller than I was. Wearing jeans, a tucked-in polo shirt, gym shoes. Didn’t seem to be armed. If you have a gun in your pants, you untuck your shirt. Like I did.

  “I have some questions about Amy Scadder.”

  He appeared to think about it. “You’re not a cop,” he eventually said.

  “Private.”

  “Who hired you?”

  I waited.

  We stared at each other.

  I expected him to slam the door. He didn’t. I could maybe talk my way in, or force my way in, or come back later.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  Or I could just follow him in.

  We walked through a foyer into a living room and he plopped down on a leather couch, legs open, hands on his knees, looking completely neutral. No fear, no anger, no worry, no curiosity.

  Just unblinking, dead eyes.

  The only place to sit while facing him was a deep reclining chair, and if I sat in that I wouldn’t be able to get to my feet quick if I needed to. So I stood over him.

  “How long did you date Amy?”

  “Date? Shit, she was just a piece of ass I’d tap.”

  “How long did you tap her ass, then?”

  “Couple months. I haven’t seen the bitch in years. She just stopped calling me. Don’t know where she is.”

  I didn’t say anything. Most people didn’t like long pauses in conversations. They would talk, out of nervousness.

  “Her father hired you to find her, didn’t he? That guy is a real asshole.”

  I chose my next words carefully. “I didn’t say she was missing.”

  Tucker’s eyes narrowed, just a little.

  Physically, I didn’t think he would be too much of a problem for me. I thought about where I was going to hit him first.

  “Her mom called me up,” he said. “Told me she ran away.”

  “Phyllis told you that?”

  He shrugged. “Old lady had a thing for me.”

  “Phyllis told me different.”

  “Did she? What she say?”

  “That you killed her daughter,” I said. “And that you have a really small dick.”

  Tucker blinked, and then fast as a whip he had a funny-looking pistol in his hand. He had pulled it out from under the cushion between his legs.

  I’d missed it completely.

  I looked at the gun, then at his face. His expression was still dead.

  “Dumb shit,” he said, though I didn’t know if he meant me or Amy’s mother.

  I could have reacted right then. I had a moment. In that instant I could have dove to the side and pulled my own gun, giving me at least a chance.

  Or I could have jumped him; he was only three feet away.

  Or kicked the gun from his hand.

  Or tried to talk my way out of it.

  But I didn’t.

  I didn’t do anything. />
  I just stood there, and untensed my muscles as best I could, and felt Earl squirming inside me, and let out a deep sigh that was my goodbye to the world.

  Our eyes locked. His finger tensed.

  “Do it,” I told him.

  He pulled the trigger and shot me in the chest.

  I fell backwards into the La-Z-Boy, my world spinning, unable to take a breath. My consciousness faded, like a giant black circle closing around me.

  I saw Pasha, and we were sitting under a tree, an apple tree, and we were laughing, and I gave Pasha a hug and told her that I loved her and she smiled and said she loved me too.

  And then I was gone.

  JACK

  Sleep and I failed to find one another.

  Christ knows I looked hard enough. I wound up finally crapping out at the usual hour of four in the morning, only to have to get up at seven to go to work.

  I forced my way through morning exercises, trying to beat the weariness out of my body by making it even more weary.

  Blood pooling.

  I skipped the sit-ups and went to the shower, stared at my belly when I took off Latham’s T-shirt, and came back out to do the sit-ups. Since I started my morning exercise routine a few years back, I’d yet to see any vast improvements in my physique. But it hadn’t gotten too much worse either.

  It was a struggle to maintain mediocrity.

  But ‘tis a worthy struggle. If I quit, I might balloon like Herb Benedict, who has tracked down his share of missing persons but who will never be able to find his own lap.

  Steel factory.

  I hopped back into the shower, my sloth guilt abated, and then assembled my public persona; clothes, face, hair, shoes. I had no more dry-clean-fresh clothes at Latham’s place, but I found a blouse and skirt in the hamper that passed the sniff test, and matched them with my blazer and shoes from yesterday.

  My Nova needed three squirts of starter fluid into the carburetor, plus several bouts of encouragement, before it decided to turn over. If I had any sort of good credit rating, I would have bought or leased a new car years ago. But the only way a bank would give me money is if I went in with a ski mask and my .38. And even then I’d still be charged 20% over prime rate.

  As I was cranking the engine, a tow truck stopped next to me.

  Tow truck.

  “Need help lady?”

  The lady needed help with a lot of things. But she could handle starting her own car.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Got a real classic there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give you a hundred bucks for it.”

  I actually considered it for a moment.

  “Cash,” he said.

  “Thanks. I’m gonna keep it.”

  He shrugged and pulled away.

  After the morning start-the-car ritual, I checked out the atmosphere and decided it was going to be a crappy day. The sky was that ugly, overcast grey that only appeared in cities with smog problems. A drizzly, damp, depressing day, if I may alliterate, with little hope of improving.

  Let’s hope the case didn’t go the same way.

  Swarf.

  My subconscious was really working today. On what, I had no idea.

  Traffic wasn’t too terrible, and I got to the station at my usual quarter after nine. Benedict was already in my office, leafing through a copy of the latest coroner’s report. He was wearing that awful orange and green tie, the one that looked like someone murdered Kermit the Frog and tied him around Herb’s neck. I wondered yet again what happened to that tie I bought him for his birthday.

  “Morning, Herb.”

  “Morning, Jack.”

  “Whatever happened to that tie I bought you?”

  “What tie?”

  “For your birthday. The silk one.”

  “Oh. That one. You want some coffee?” He gestured to the Mr. Coffee now sitting on the corner of my desk. “I brought it from home,” he told me. “It’s Columbian dark roast.”

  “Smells great.”

  I usually drank out of paper cups, but I had a mug in my file drawer and after dumping out the pens it was holding I had Herb fill me up.

  It smelled good enough to drink. I took a sip and let the bitter taste tease my tongue.

  “It’s great,” I told him. And it was. I should have brought a coffee maker in years ago, and wondered why I never had. I took another sip and the phone rang.

  “Daniels.”

  “Bains. You and Benedict in my office.”

  I hung up, relayed the news to Herb, and off we went.

  Someone must have finally found the guts to talk to the chief about his appearance, because when we walked into his office I immediately noticed that his mustache and his hairpiece finally matched. But instead of adding grey to his hair, as he should have, he went the other way and dyed the mustache. Now they we matching bottle-brown, making his fifty plus years of wrinkles stand out like some cruel joke.

  “I’m getting shit all over, and I want to make sure it trickles down,” he said. “Your report didn’t mention the media.” His voice finger-pointed in my direction.

  “The Mount Cisco cops had the scene tight. Reporters were cordoned off.”

  He handed over the paper on his desk, letting me see the photo. It was today’s Tribune, and the headline read “Motel Mauler Claims Third.” The photo was a sickening color shot of the inside of that truck.

  “Telephoto lens,” I said. “He must have been hiding someplace far off.”

  “And how did they connect this to the motel case?”

  “Are you saying that we told them? Captain, the Mount Cisco police called us. We didn’t say anything.”

  He flipped the page, and there was an above-crease unflattering picture of me, talking with Captain Francis T. Butchman. I read the caption.

  They spelled my name Jaclyn, like Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith. Should have been Jaqueline with a Q.

  “Interrogating local law enforcement isn’t talking to the media,” I said.

  He pointed to an inch of column, which read, Butchman confirmed with CPD ‘it looks like our guy’.

  Oops.

  “They spelled my name wrong,” I said, defensively.

  Bains stared at me like I’d sprouted a second nose. “I don’t give a shit. I’m getting my ass reamed so many times I need Do Not Enter printed on my underwear. The mayor, the governor, the police commissioner, they’re all being assaulted with calls by concerned taxpayers demanding to know what we’re doing to protect them. It made national coverage, and CNN wants to do a story about modern serial killers, using this city as a backdrop. Now tell me you’ve got some sort of scrap I can throw to the wolves, or the scrap I throw will be you.”

  It was as tough a threat as Bains had ever given me, and while I didn’t fear for my job, I wouldn’t doubt he’d pull me off the case if the soup got too thick to swallow. Scapegoat detail wasn’t fun.

  And then my subconscious proved that it was worth something

  “I think I know where those chips in the tires came from,” I said.

  Herb raised an eyebrow, wondering why I hadn’t shared this revelation with him. That was because I’d only made the connection right at that moment.

  “No keys in the truck,” I said. “Automatic transmission, left in neutral, but the parking brake wasn’t set.”

  Bains said, “So? They abandoned it. Who cares about the gear it was in, or if the brakes were set?”

  “Do you drive stick or auto?” I asked the Captain.

  “Both.”

  “Do you always set the parking brake on your manual vehicle? And always put it in park on your automatic? And why wasn’t there a padlock on the back? Why make discovering the victim even easier? If you’re the killers, you wouldn’t do that. You would have locked it up.”

  “Where are you going with this, Jack?” Bains said.

  I folded my arms across my chest, convinced that my hunch was correct. “The blood in the rental truck only p
ooled in back, but it was found on level ground.”

  I waited for one of them to get it. They didn’t.

  “It was towed there,” I finally revealed.

  After a moment, Bains asked, “Why? Why not drive it?”

  “Because the killers had the keys, and the killers didn’t take it there.”

  “Who did?”

  “The rental truck,” I said, probably looking every bit as smug as I felt, “was stolen.”

  Herb nodded. “Makes sense. Someone jacked it, cut the lock, saw what was in the back, and dumped it.”

  Bains didn’t look impressed. “With a tow truck?”

  “I just talked to a motorist yesterday,” I said, recalling the guy with the Mini Cooper who sniped my parking spot. “His car was stolen, by a tow truck. You know the jump in stolen vehicles these last few months? What if they’re riding around in a tow truck, grabbing whatever they want?”

  “No one would question a tow truck,” Herb added. “You could steal a car right in the middle of a crowded parking lot, and no one would even notice it.”

  “Did you confer with Property Crimes?”

  “Not yet.” Because I just thought of it a minute ago. “But they can tell us if any stolen vehicles have been recovered with metal shavings embedded in the tires.”

  “If the chop shop is in an old factory, or machine shop, the cars would pick up swarf,” Herb said.

  Bains said, “Swarf?”

  “The metal is called swarf,” I said. “If we can find the factory, and bust the car thieves, we can find out where they stole the truck.”

  Bains stroked his brown mustache. A moment later he was on the phone with the task force, asking them to get a list of every place in Chicago where metal was shaved.

  “Swarf,” he said into the phone for the fourth time. “S-W-A—” he glanced at me.

  “R-F,” said Herb.

  “R-F. I want that list within the hour.”

  Then he got on the horn with the head guy in Property Crimes and set up an appointment for Benedict and me to chat with him after lunch. After that he dismissed us, and started calling all of the higher ups, asking them to constipate themselves because we had a lead.

  Herb and I went back to my office.

  The coffee machine was gone.

  We spent the better part of half an hour searching the precinct for it, yelling like banshees at every cop we came across. All roads led to bullshit.