by B. L. Morgan
Joe Briggs handed the key to the cage to the undercover cop. “I think you two need to get better acquainted.” he told them.
* * *
Joe radioed the address of the stringy haired guy and had the building sealed off before we got there.
CHAPTER 23
I followed Joe in my car, and by the time we got to the stringy haired guys apartment, it was getting light outside. The snow was still coming down but the storm never turned into the blizzard it threatened to. The world was covered in a blanket of white, making it look clean and new and innocent.
Too bad the world just wasn’t that way.
The stringy haired guy’s apartment was in a run-down neighborhood. In the early morning light no one was on the street except for the two police cars out front of his building.
The police lights of the two cruisers were not flashing. This was a situation where the police didn’t want to attract very much attention. Joe wanted the extra cops there in case the stringy haired guy tried to run, but he didn’t want the media to get wind of this, in case we had to carry this guy away and work on him awhile.
As soon as we got there, Joe got the report from the other cops that no one had entered or left the apartment since they arrived.
It was a ground level apartment. The two of us went to the door.
He knocked.
No answer.
He knocked again.
“This is the police,” he said loudly enough for anyone inside to hear him. “Open the door!”
I reached past him and tried the door knob. It was unlocked. The door swung inward and all the way open.
Joe walked in.
I followed.
A TV was turned on. It was tuned to a station that had gone off the air. White noise filled the room.
Joe drew his service revolver.
I drew the snub-nosed .38 I had.
We scanned the room quickly. No one was in the front room or in the dining room that adjoined it.
We went from room to room, checking for anyone hidden. The bathroom was empty. So was his bedroom.
In a second bedroom, that was completely bare of furniture except for a turned over dining room chair against a wall, we found the stringy haired guy.
He was hanging from a light fixture.
The stringy haired guy’s face was purple. His eyes were blood shot and were bulging out. His tongue was lolling out of his mouth.
“He probably committed suicide,” I told Joe. “He knew I was coming for him.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Joe told me. “You’re not that scary. He was murdered.”
Joe pointed at the chair lying on its side against the wall. “There’s no way he kicked that over there. It’s too far away from him. Someone made him get up there then jerked the chair out from underneath him.”
“Shit!” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what we’ve got now,” Joe said. “He came back here and told someone about you and Johnny’s raid, and they didn’t like it.”
I finished for Joe. “So they got the hell out of here and didn’t want to leave anyone behind who knew who they were.”
“You got it,” Joe answered.
“So where are we now?” I asked Joe.
“Only thing we can do is find out who this William Po is. I’d bet anything he knows the man who cut Sherry’s throat.”
“That’s going to be my job,” I told Joe.
“Well, if he’s in that country you named, Tehan Setar,” Joe said, “Then he’s a long way outside of my jurisdiction.”
“There’s one thing I’ve gotta ask you,” I said. “I’ve always known you to be a by-the-book cop. For this you’ve been way outside the law. What gives?”
Joe smiled. It was the kind of smile that would make a criminal in a jail cell shit down both legs if he saw his jailer smiling like that.
“The laws were written to govern mankind. I am a by-the-book cop when I’m dealing with the human race. These things,” he pointed at the hanging stringy haired guy, “are freaks of nature. They need to be removed from the world however it can be done. They don’t deserve the protection of the law. They sure won’t get it from me.”
“What are we going to do with him?” I asked.
Joe said, “I’ll send the uniforms home then I’ll go through the place looking for names. I don’t expect to find anything. Then I’ll seal it up. Somebody will find him in a few weeks when he gets really ripe.”
CHAPTER 24
There was nothing more that I could do for now and it had been one very long night. I drove home and wondered about what Sherry told me.
I hadn’t told anyone about that.
I had thought that seeing Sherry, when I was knocked into that strange half dream state by the grenade blast, was just a type of wish fulfillment dream. I wanted to see her, so I did.
Now, I wasn’t so sure.
Sherry told me that, for now, I would be denied my revenge. That couldn’t be truer. I wanted to be the one to snuff out that stringy haired guy’s life but someone else beat me to it.
That was downright prophetic.
There’s no way I could have known in advance that we’d be finding that guy already dead, so my unconscious mind didn’t dream Sherry’s message up.
About the other part of Sherry’s message, “Save the children!” I didn’t have a clue what that meant. Yeah, I know I’d gotten those kids out of that basement but something inside me told me she wasn’t talking about them.
There was something bigger going on here that I didn’t know about.
Only time, and a lot more bloodshed, would reveal those secrets.
* * *
After taking a shower and catching some sleep I went by and checked on Johnny. They just patched his arm up, took some X-rays, and sent him home. The bullet he took in the arm passed clean on through and didn’t even touch a bone or a major artery. The arm would be sore as hell for a few weeks but it was nothing serious.
Johnny did manage to get the name and phone number from that cute Mexican EMT. Her name was Lola Martinez.
“You know how it is,” Johnny told me. “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets, as long as what she wants involves me feeding her my prime pork sausage.”
One thing’s for sure, Johnny would never change.
After I left Johnny’s I ate a few burgers and some onion rings at a Burger King then headed back home.
Sleeping that night was not easy. I wasn’t exhausted so I didn’t just fall out like I’d done that morning. No matter how I lay in my bed, the bed seemed far too big for just one person.
I had the need to reach out and touch my woman, to feel her beside me. But she was no longer there.
Having Tom sleep beside me just didn’t do the trick either. Around two in the morning I ended up back on the couch and fell asleep with the TV playing some old monster movie.
If the monsters I met in my dreams were no worse than the one’s in the movie then I’d be able to rest easy. The problem was the monsters on my mind were from the real world, and I couldn’t do away with them by just turning a flip of the switch.
CHAPTER 25
In the morning I cleaned up as much as I could, put on my best set of clothes, and went to Sherry’s funeral.
Before I left I took a good look in the mirror and realized that I looked like warmed over death. To hell with it, I thought. Today I wasn’t making an appearance in anybody’s fashion show. They could take me as I am or just get the fuck out of my way.
* * *
The funeral was a grim affair.
Aren’t they all?
All the guys were dressed in suits and ties. All the women were dressed in their finest dresses. After a preacher said a few words, not a one of which I can recall, all the people filed past Sherry in her casket.
It all seemed ludicrous to me.
I forced myself to go and take a look at Sherry in that box. The mortician had done a good job, maybe too good, or maybe just good enough.
It didn’t look like Sherry laying there. The thing in the casket looked like a wax replica of Sherry done from a photograph.
* * *
At the cemetery the priest was saying some more words before they lowered Sherry into the ground, and all that was going through my head was, Why the fuck can’t you just get this done? Just get it over with. That’s not the woman I love in that box. Don’t you understand that?
The preacher kept droning on.
Tension was building inside me. My head was getting hot. I felt like busting somebody upside the head, and the priest, who, if Sherry wasn’t dead already, would’ve bored her to death, was the only person I was seeing.
Johnny was at my side. He looked in my face.
“Come on,” he said, and dragged me away before I did something that would have been very fucking ignorant.
We walked off to the side and Jeanette came up beside us.
“I’m going to miss her,” I told them.
“I know Bro,” Johnny said, and as Jeanette held me I cried.
PART IV
TRAVEL PLANS
CHAPTER 26
The phone rang, and before I knew what I was doing, I had it in my hand.
“John Dark,” I said. My words were probably slurred because a bottle of Jack Daniels helped me sleep last night. I wasn’t used to the mornings after a drunk anymore, and the pain in my head was epic.
The night before was just a blur.
“It’s Nash Graham,” the voice on the other end came back. “I need to meet you somewhere as soon as you can get your ass in gear.”
“Any word about who William Po is?” I asked.
“Like I said,” he repeated, “I need to meet with you.”
“Give me a half hour,” I told Nash. “Be in the parking lot of Patty’s Kitten House.”
He hung up.
* * *
It was a few minutes after 11 AM when I arrived at Patty’s Kitten House, pulled through the gate, and drove into the parking lot. Nash Graham was already parked in a space near the far fence of the lot.
I pulled up beside him and got out.
He waved me around to his driver’s side door, so I walked around and got in.
It’s never ceased to amaze me how much Graham looks like your average middle-aged high school principle, when in actuality he’s one of the most heartless bastards that I’ve ever met. You don’t get to be the head of the DEA in the Midwest without being ruthless in the extreme.
To be a good hunter you have to be deadlier and cleverer than your prey. Nash Graham’s prey was the large drug dealers and traffickers in the Midwest. When he targeted one to take down it wasn’t even a contest.
I slid in beside Graham. “Did you find out who William Po is?” I asked.
He laughed under his breath. “You come right to the point don’t you,” Graham said.
“Ain’t either one of us here for socializing,” I told him.
“No, we’re not,” he agreed. “All right, this is what I’ve got. There’s a little country in Southeast Asia, about the size of Delaware, on the border that separates Laos and Thailand. It’s something like a principality. The country’s name is Tehan Setar.
“William Po is the name of the leader of a group of rebels that have been ambushing that country’s soldiers and blowing up things for years. They’ve been calling themselves freedom fighters.
“What the hell this could have to do with your girlfriend’s murder I don’t have any idea. But I do know that just my few inquiries got somebody mighty pissed off in our government.
“I went through official channels to get my info, and a direct order was sent down from the state department that I was to cease all inquiries in this region or I’d find myself unemployed.”
He saw my eyebrows rise.
“Yeah, it surprised the hell out of me, too,” Graham said. “Someone with enough clout to even think about having me fired has to be extremely high up in the government.
“I don’t like being threatened. I did some checking through some sources that can’t be traced. The man who tried to warn me off is a Senator named Jack Craven. He’s one of those holier than thou bastards who are always trying to push religious right based legislation through The House.
“He shouldn’t have any interest in a place like Tehan Setar, or anything that goes on over there. But he sure took interest in me when I asked a few questions.
“There’s something else,” Graham continued. “That country’s economics just don’t seem to add up. The only exports appear to be poppies and marijuana, and there’s far more money coming out of that country than there appears to be going in. This equation does not balance.”
I told Graham, “Looks like I’m going to have to take a trip to the Orient myself. I’m going to need to speak to this William Po.”
“The Tehan Setar military has been hunting him for years. They haven’t caught him yet,” Graham said, “Happy hunting.”
* * *
As Graham drove out of the parking lot, it occurred to me that I was going to be needing quite a bit of money if I was going to be traveling to Tehan Setar to track down the man who murdered Sherry. Plane tickets and hotel arrangements in obscure Oriental nations I’m sure don’t come cheap.
I had a little bit of money in the bank but not enough to even consider funding this trip.
My eyes settled on the Porsche Sherry gave me as a gift. It sat in the far corner of the parking lot covered by a blanket of snow.
I knew what I had to do.
* * *
Patty’s Kitten House was open for business–as-usual but the mood inside was very subdued. The DJ was playing slow songs and the girls on the stages were taking their clothes off in slow motion for the few customers in the place. No one complained about that.
Slow motion is a good speed for taking a good long look.
I’d left Ron Martin in charge and he was behind the bar getting somebody a beer when I walked in. He gave me a friendly wave and I waved back.
I went to the DJ and told him I’d need his mike for a few minutes. He got up and headed for the bar to refresh his own drink.
I sat in the DJ’s chair, took the mike in my hand, and pressed the button. A squelch of feedback came from the speakers for a moment. When it died down I spoke.
“This is John Dark,” I announced. “I’m the owner of the black Porsche in the corner of the parking lot. It’s now for sale for thirty thousand dollars. That Porsche runs like a striped assed ape and it’s worth a lot more than thirty thousand but I need the money. I’ll be hanging around for a little while so if you’re interested see me at the bar.”
I gave the chair back to the DJ and took a stool at the bar.
As soon as I sat down Ron Martin was beside me. “Man if you need money all you need to do is say so,” he told me.
“I need more than just a friendly loan,” I told him.
“This is about finding Sherry’s killer, ain’t it?” Ron told me.
“Yeah,” I answered. “I gotta leave the country for a while.”
“I need to talk to you about something,” Ron said and motioned for me to follow him.
I followed Ron through a door behind one of the stages to Sherry’s office. When we were inside he closed the door behind us.
He went and sat on the chair behind the desk and said, “Sherry was kind of like a sister to me man, or maybe in a way she was something like a mother. After I busted my leg and was out of the NFL I had more money than I knew what to do with. Hell, I still do. But I was kind of drifting. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Sherry was more than just a boss. A lot of times, we just talked. Actually I was the one that talked. She just listened.
“When I needed it she was there for me. When I found out that I liked men as well as women she was the one that told me it was all right, that I wasn’t less of a man, that I was just who I was and no different than I had always been.
“I don’t know what I would hav
e done if she hadn’t been there for me. If you know who killed Sherry then I’m going to help put them in the ground. I’m not going to take no for an answer either.”
I knew Ron was serious so I told him everything that had happened so far.
When I was done, Ron told me, “Get ready to pack some bags brother. We’re going to the Far East to bust some heads until we get some satisfaction. I’m funding this whole damn hunting party.”
“Are you sure you can afford this,” I asked him.
“Shit,” Ron answered with a grin. “The NFL paid me real good and I invested well. I got enough money for three lifetimes. Besides, at heart I’m just a big dumb country-boy. Heaven for me is a double-wide trailer, a big screen TV, a hot sex partner, and an icebox full of beer. I already got those covered.”
This was going to be an interesting trip.
CHAPTER 27
After we talked over what we had to take care of before we left, Ron called Lambert Airport and got us two tickets, leaving for Bangkok the next day at noon. When Ron got through with that call he phoned Candi Divine to let her know he was going to be gone for a while.
The voice coming from the other end of the phone line was loud enough for me to clearly hear, “What! You ain’t going nowhere without me!”
Ron’s conversation with Candi after that was short and to the point. After a few, “yes dears,” he was back on the phone calling the airline for another plane ticket.
* * *
I went to my apartment building and stopped by Rosa Delgado’s place. When Rosa answered the door her face lit up then went dark almost immediately.
“I’m so sorry about Sherry,” Rosa said, and gave me a strong hug.
“I can’t talk about Sherry or I’ll end up losing it,” I told Rosa.
“Sure, I understand,” Rosa said.
Rosa was a chunky middle-aged Mexican woman who I used to pay to clean my apartment once a week when I lived here before. She was a good friend, more like family than just somebody I knew.