Cruel

by Jacob Stone

  Morris put his chopsticks down as he appraised his wife.

  She was just so instinctive.

  He asked, “Has there been anything on TV about the approaching anniversary of those killings?”

  “No, nothing. But no other murders ever tore you up like those did.”

  “That’s true,” he agreed.

  There shouldn’t have been anyone in the media sniffing around about the Nightmare Man killings. They were never told the significance of the number seventeen to the killer, nor did they know that the killings restarted on the anniversary of the Nightmare Man’s first murder. In 2001 they didn’t find the body until five days after the murder had taken place, and they didn’t bother to correct the media’s misunderstanding about the date of when the killing had happened.

  “Nat, I’ve got no reason to believe this killer is still alive, or that he’s coming back. It’s just a feeling I can’t shake. I tried calling Hadley to remind him of what might be coming, and he blew me off. Worse, actually. He threatened to shut down MBI if I made any noise to the media or anyone else about it.”

  Her expression became pensive. “But you’re not giving up that easily,” she said.

  “No, I’m not,” he admitted.

  Chapter 7

  Vincent Scalise and Frank Colgan were sitting in Vincent’s new Lincoln sedan with its lights off and the engine running. Scalise’s nickname among his colleagues was “Dapper Vince,” which made sense since he always dressed stylishly in a suit, although the wide ties and Italian oxfords he wore bordered on a mafia chic look. Colgan usually dressed for work in a suit and tie also, but on his lumpy body, his suits never looked stylish, only rumpled. He was given the nickname “Irish,” which made sense in a way because of his red hair and beefy red face that always looked as if he’d been drinking whiskey, but he seldom drank alcohol and didn’t have any Irish blood in him. His old man’s family were Italian, and they shortened their surname from Colganatti to Colgan when they arrived on Ellis Island a hundred years earlier, and his mom was a large German woman.

  Colgan took two sandwiches out of a paper bag and handed one to Scalise. “Roast beef,” he said. Scalise unwrapped the sandwich and couldn’t help sneering at it. Supermarket-bought white bread. Irish couldn’t even have the imagination to stop at a bakery and buy a loaf of sourdough or ciabatta! He took a bite, and no surprise the bread had been smeared with a thick layer of mayonnaise. They’d known each other over ten years, and Scalise must’ve told Colgan dozens of times that he preferred mustard on his roast beef sandwiches, but the guy refused to listen. Scalise made a disgusted face but didn’t bother this time to complain about the mayonnaise and instead continued to eat. It was well past midnight, and they could have a long night ahead of them. The tip they had was that Alvin Rothman would be rousted sometime over the next few hours by a phone call, which would send the deadbeat fleeing from one of the apartment buildings lining the street. If they knew which building Rothman was holed up in, they’d already be kicking down doors.

  It turned out they didn’t have to wait hours. They were still working on their sandwiches when a pear-shaped man emerged from a vestibule door three buildings away. The man stood frozen, looking in both directions as if he were unsure whether it was safe. He then scurried down the steps and onto the sidewalk.

  “I think that’s our scumbag,” Colgan said.

  Scalise tossed what was left of his sandwich out the window. He left the lights off as he pulled away from the curb and followed the man. A Prius might have been quieter, but the Lincoln barely made a purr, and that was why Scalise was able to get close enough to make sure it was Rothman without Rothman realizing he had company. Only after Scalise gunned the engine and jumped the curb did Rothman look behind his shoulder, and by then it was too late. The Lincoln clipped him and sent him tumbling onto the sidewalk. By the time he picked himself up, Colgan had exited the vehicle and was standing behind him. A punch to the kidneys dropped Rothman to his knees. Scalise popped the trunk and left the engine running, first checking the front right bumper for any damage, then rubbing a small area above the bumper on his pride and joy with a handkerchief to make sure there wasn’t a dent before joining Rothman and Colgan.

  Scalise bent low so he could whisper into Rothman’s ear. “You’re lucky your fat scumbag ass didn’t put a dent in my car.”

  Rothman’s face was a frozen rictus, his body seized up by pain. He gasped out, “You broke my leg.”

  “You think I broke his leg?” Scalise asked his partner.

  Colgan said, “Not the way he got up after being knocked down.”

  “There you go again,” Scalise said to Rothman. “Lying to me, just like you’ve been lying to me for weeks. But don’t worry. After tonight I’ll be doing more than just breaking your legs.”

  Scalise winked at Colgan, and they lifted Rothman by his elbows to his feet and rushed him toward the back of the car.

  “Wait,” Rothman pleaded. “I got something big I can trade you.”

  Colgan snorted out an angry laugh. “This guy never stops, does he?”

  “I swear this is huge!”

  Scalise signaled his partner to slow down. “What do you got?”

  “We have a deal then? If I tell you, you’ll let me go tonight?”

  Scalise pulled a switchblade from his pocket and flicked the five-inch blade open.

  “You tell me what you got right now or I’ll cut out your heart and leave it right where you’re standing. I swear to God.”

  Rothman’s skin paled to the color of milk, and his eyes ping-ponged first to the blade and then to Scalise’s face. “It’s about Melanie Penza,” he forced out, his voice a squeak.

  “What about Mrs. Penza?”

  “She’s cheating on the old man.” Rothman tried smiling, but it came out as something sickly. “It’s what you should expect if you marry a young thing who looks like she does.”

  Scalise gave Colgan a questioning look.

  “I think he’s a lying scumbag.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Scalise said. “You can’t trust a word out of his mouth.”

  They started moving Rothman toward the back of the Lincoln again.

  “I’m not lying, I swear,” Rothman insisted, his voice rapid-fire and in a high pitch. “The guy she’s seeing is big. If you knew who he was, you’d know how much money this is worth. Three times what I owe. Easy.”

  Scalise closed up his knife with his thumb and put it away. This wasn’t worth getting blood on his clothing. Instead, he cuffed Rothman on the ear.

  “Then how about you tell me while you’re still breathing,” he growled.

  Rothman gave them a name. Scalise shot Colgan another questioning look, because if Rothman was telling the truth it was every bit as big as he claimed. Colgan shrugged, indicating he was undecided about the veracity of Rothman’s revelation.

  Scalise asked, “Why should I believe a word out of your mouth?”

  “Because I took photos on my phone.”

  Scalise snapped his fingers and held his hand out, palm up. Rothman, his large fleshy face folding into a dejected frown, pulled a cell phone from his pants pocket. After unlocking it with the password, he handed it over. As Scalise scrolled through the photos, Rothman’s expression only grew more miserable. It was the look of someone whose winning lottery ticket had been set on fire and all he could do was watch it burn.

  Scalise whistled softly as he found the first photo showing Melanie Penza walking into a bungalow with the guy Rothman had told them about. This was every bit as big as Rothman had said it was. Bigger, actually.

  “Where was this taken?” he asked.

  As morose as any human being could look, Rothman said, “Santa Monica.”

  Scalise cuffed him again on the ear. “Quit being wise. Give me an address.”

  Rothman gave him an
address.

  Scalise exchanged a look with Colgan, and each man took hold of one of Rothman’s elbows, rushed him over to the open car trunk, and threw him in headfirst. Rothman was actually surprised by this, squeaking out several times that they had a deal. He tried to turn himself around and scramble out of the trunk, but Colgan had gotten the jumper cables. He wrapped them around Rothman’s neck and pulled them tight. Rothman clawed at his throat, but it didn’t do him any good. Soon his eyes were bugging out and his face turning a deep purple, and then his body fell limp back into the trunk.

  The plan that night had been only to rough Rothman up and scare him into paying some of the forty grand he owed, but Rothman gambled trying to escape a beating, and like all the other bets he’d been making lately, he lost badly. What he told them was too big to let him live. He should’ve expected what happened.

  An hour and a half later, Scalise and Colgan were digging a grave in the Santa Monica Mountains. The temperature had dropped to fifty degrees, but even so both men were soon drenched in sweat. They took turns digging. This wasn’t going to be a shallow grave. They couldn’t afford to have an animal dig up the body or have the body rise out of the grave because of flooding. Joe Penza was eating a forty-grand loss because of this, and once Rothman was buried he needed to stay buried. At that moment it was Colgan’s turn to dig.

  “This is dynamite,” Colgan murmured to himself, shaking his head as if he were in awe.

  He’d already said this at least a dozen times since they had left downtown Los Angeles. Scalise took a drag on a cigarette and blew the smoke out of his nose. He noticed that the cigarette had burnt down to the filter, and he flicked the stub into the hole. Colgan continued to dig for several more minutes while Scalise stood silently watching.

  Colgan tossed the shovel out of the grave. “Four feet should be enough,” he grunted. He held out his hand to Scalise to pull him out. Instead of taking the hand, Scalise reached inside his jacket and pulled a .40-caliber pistol from a shoulder holster. Colgan looked on in disbelief before asking Scalise what he was doing.

  “Only what I have to.”

  “After all the years we’ve known each other, you’re going to do something like this?” Colgan asked, aggrieved.

  Scalise swallowed back a crack about how anyone who insisted on putting mayonnaise on roast beef deserved to be shot in the chest and decided to be magnanimous about it. The fact was he liked Colgan, and so he showed regret in his eyes and a rare moment of honesty. “I feel terrible about it. But you’ve been saying it yourself. This is dynamite.”

  Colgan froze as if he were deciding whether to try escaping or go after Scalise. Before he made a decision, Scalise shot him in the chest, the hollow-point bullet punching a fist-sized hole out of his back. Colgan fell dead.

  The photo Rothman had taken had to be worth at least a hundred grand if handled right. It could also get whoever had the photo killed. Even if Scalise could’ve trusted Colgan not to screw things up, he wasn’t about to share a hundred grand with him, which meant Colgan had to die that night no matter what Scalise might’ve thought about him.

  Scalise didn’t mind the rough stuff he did for Big Joe Penza, which included robbing banks, extortion, collections, and hijacking the occasional truck. The truth was, he enjoyed it, but what had it gotten him? After fifteen years of working for Penza, he had a closet full of tailored suits, a new Lincoln, and twenty grand stashed away. That was it. He was never going to get rich doing this shit. Three weeks ago he had met a Russian who told him how he could make millions by embracing new technologies, namely something called ransomware. The way he explained it to Scalise, this was a computer virus that would screw up someone’s computer unless they paid money to make the virus go away. They’d only charge each victim two hundred dollars, but if the virus spread to hundreds of thousands of computers, it would add up. This Russian had a team of computer experts in one of those former Soviet republics with a name that was impossible to pronounce, and he promised Scalise he could get a ransomware concern off the ground with a seventy-five grand investment, and they’d be fifty-fifty partners. Scalise believed him, which meant the moment Rothman showed them his photo, Colgan was a dead man.

  Scalise said a silent prayer for the soul of his ex-partner, then rolled Rothman’s corpse into the grave.

  He first filled up the hole, then layered stones, leaves, and other debris on top to hide the freshly dug grave. While he did this, he thought about the story he was going to give Big Joe Penza about Rothman’s disappearance, and Colgan’s also. By the time he was done, he was satisfied with what he had come up with.

  During his drive back to Los Angeles, Scalise thought only about how he was going to use the dynamite Rothman had given him.

  Chapter 8

  Over the last three days Lucky had gotten used to people knocking on Lori’s office door, and when her boss, Alice Green, stuck her head in, the oversized Rottweiler-Doberman mix barely budged.

  Alice, who was a slender and attractive woman in her early fifties, grinned and asked how the big galoot was doing. That had been her nickname for Lucky from the start, and even though Lori didn’t know at the time what it meant, the nickname sounded so right that she started calling Lucky it also. When she later looked the term up online, she couldn’t help smiling thinking how perfectly it fit the big guy.

  Lucky lifted his enormous head from the floor, fixed his yellowish-reddish eyes on Alice, and let out a deep-throated moan before dropping his head with a thud back to the floor. Since his skull was probably harder than concrete, it was doubtful he felt the impact.

  Alice shifted her gaze to Lori and asked how the Cheswick assignment was coming. “Do you think you’ll have it done by five?”

  “Faster than that. I should have it finished up within the hour. Do you want a sneak preview?”

  “Sure.”

  Alice came around Lori’s desk and positioned herself so she could get a look at the computer monitor and the graphics Lori had been designing. “Excellent,” she said, beaming. “You made a good decision adopting that big galoot.” Somewhat maternally, she added, “You’ve been so much more relaxed and at peace since doing that, and it’s showing in your work.” Before turning to leave the office, she gave Lori’s shoulder a friendly squeeze.

  Lori wiped away some moisture from her eyes. “Thanks again, Alice, for letting me bring him to work.”

  “I’m happy I did.” Alice was still beaming. “He adds a nice presence here. I have to admit, I didn’t think that would be the case when I first saw him.”

  That was an understatement. When Lori brought Lucky to the office that first morning, he certainly raised some eyebrows. She had discussed with Alice about her wanting to get a dog and bringing him to work, and she even confided in her boss her reason why, although she lied when she told Alice she knew her fear was unreasonable. Her fear was the opposite of that, even though the idea of it was insane. But she knew in her heart he was out there and she knew he was waiting to do terrible things to her, even though she didn’t have any idea who he was. At the time Alice gave her blessing, but that first morning Lori could see concern flooding Alice’s eyes when she saw what she was getting with Lucky, and that she was on the verge of changing her mind and banning the dog from the office. But Jerry Harrison in accounting, bless him, fearlessly approached the dog, and Lucky proved to be a gentle soul, even with his big galoot appearance. After that others in the office approached him, including Alice, and he ended up winning over the office.

  Looks could be deceiving. Lucky turned out to be a big softy even though he looked like he could scare the bejesus out of the demon dog from The Omen. Still, Lori had no doubt that when the time came, the dog would save her from him. She knew that this man existed in the real world and not just in her nightmares. She also knew he would be coming for her soon. He’d wait until late at night when she would be alone in bed and helpless.
She couldn’t say how she knew this, but she did and with the same certainty as the knowledge that she needed to breathe to live. And she knew that when he came for her, Lucky would become every bit as ferocious as he appeared. And because of that, she felt safe.

  She focused her attention back on her work so she could finish the assignment within the hour as promised.

  Chapter 9

  Morris was running late, and it didn’t help that he had to park three blocks away from where he was meeting Charlie Bogle. He half jogged to his destination, and by the time he reached the front door of the Bottom Shelf his neck was damp and sweat dotted his forehead. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was twenty past eight. Yeah, he was going to get grief for this.

  The basement-level watering hole was a block from the Wilcox Avenue precinct, and for the past three decades it had served principally as a hangout for cops. It didn’t surprise him that at that hour on a Friday night the place was packed. Almost any night after eight the Bottom Shelf was full with brothers and sisters in blue. He squeezed his way through the crowd, trading handshakes and small talk with officers he knew. He spotted Bogle sitting alone at a table in the back nursing a beer. When Bogle saw him approaching, he showed nothing in his expression. Morris took the seat across from him.

  Morris said, “Yeah, I’m late. Sorry.”

  “Never mind that. Where’s your twin?” Bogle deadpanned.

  Morris smiled thinly. His hair, which was cropped close to the scalp, was still mostly dark brown with only some gray at the temples, while Parker’s fur was white, but with his short, compact body, spindly legs, thick long nose, and big ears, he and Parker proved the old adage of an owner resembling his dog. Given his somewhat comical looks, it made it all the more remarkable that he had ended up with a dark-haired beauty like Natalie.