The End Time Saga Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Greene, Daniel

  Westman turned the wheel, taking them down another city block.

  Dispatch flared up again. “Units, we are having calls of an assault in progress at Spectrum.”

  The radio crackled. “Unit 1802, we’re on our way.”

  “Unit 1606 is about 4 mikes out.”

  Westman put his hand on the radio.

  Bill’s insides twisted, a gravitation of years of experience mixed with the weariness of a man near the end of his career and wanting to live long enough to see it. “No, Westman. Let’s get her back to the station. See if we can’t piece together something about this murder.”

  Westman stared at Bill. “They might need help.”

  “They can handle it. I can’t put my finger on it, but I feel like this is all connected.”

  “You’re in charge, Clinty,” Westman mocked.

  Tess chimed in. “Hell of a lot more handsome than you.”

  “Got some daddy issues?” He glanced at her in the mirror.

  “Makes two of us.”

  Westman clamped his mouth shut and pulled them into a station parking lot alongside of the concrete three-story building that used to be a department store until the late 80s. He put the Charger into park and sat for a moment as if he could sense Bill’s uneasiness. “You all right, Bill?”

  He shook his head. “It’s just strange.” His mind plodded along, thinking about all the events. He couldn’t discern anything but chaos. His belly fluttered with unease as if it knew the Titanic was steaming full force for the iceberg, but the ship was unsinkable, right? He dismissed his intuition. “Something in the air. Everyone must be getting it out before it really starts to cool off.”

  Tess leaned closer. “Are you sure? Sounds a lot like early this morning.”

  Bill glanced back at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Sounds like that guy.” She gestured toward the outside. “That guy in the park.”

  Westman spoke back at her. “Are you suggesting that the same murderer is responsible for all of this?”

  She shrugged. “Who said it was just one?”

  “Like some sort of cult thing? Manson family?”

  Tess became mocking again. “I dunno, Deputy Bucky. Isn’t that your job?”

  Westman pulled hard on his handle. “I’m telling you, Bill, I might be a millennial, but this new generation has zero respect for authority.”

  Bill sighed. He snapped the door handle and stepped out with a cautious glance at his city and a finger tap on the butt of his gun. He tugged on her door and helped her out of the car. “Come on.”

  THE DETECTIVE

  Grand Rapids, MI

  Bill walked Tess inside the lobby of the police station. It was a large foyer reminiscent of a department of motor vehicles. It doubled as a county building where one could request records and any number of administrative services offered to the public.

  The police department shared office space with both State of Michigan offices and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Western Michigan. The atrium stretched upward over three stories. All offices encircling the lobby let the people above see the people waiting below. The police station stretched away from the foyer.

  Ten plus people sat in bolted-down chairs waiting to be called by tellers to glass windows. A defeated look along with miscellaneous papers were both requirements for those waiting.

  A man in police blue stood behind a thick bulletproof glass-enclosed desk. The portly sergeant looked up through Coke-bottle glasses as they entered.

  “Hey, Rodney. Any word on the officers injured near Crescent Park?”

  The desk sergeant blinked. “Yeah, it was Zimmer.”

  Bill scrunched his brow up. “What happened to the kid?”

  “Some tweaker tried to bite him. Clawed his face pretty good. They took him over to Spectrum for the AIDs cocktail to make sure he doesn’t catch anything. He’ll be okay. I think Amborski had a hard-on the entire time.”

  Bill gave a short laugh. “That’ll go away when he sees the pile of paperwork waiting for him.”

  Rodney chuckled and the two senior law enforcement officers shared a laugh. Anytime they went hands on or used their weapons, the paperwork and job scrutiny went through the roof. Always better to talk them down than beat them down. Almost always.

  “Good to hear it wasn’t bad.”

  Rodney shook his head, staring at the stack of papers on his desk. “Been a crazy morning. Full moon last night?” he asked, with a laugh.

  “Something.” Bill leaned on the counter. “I got one from county lock-up for interrogation. A Ms. Tess.”

  Tess waved at Rodney, her hands still in cuffs, puckering up for a phantom kiss.

  Rodney cleared his throat in irritation at her lack of respect. “Does Ms. Tess have an ID?”

  “No,” she muttered.

  Rodney wrote something on a log. “I got her down.” He pressed a button on his desk and the door to their left clicked as the locking mechanism disengaged.

  Westman held open the door. Bill caught himself before walking through.

  “Any word on that Jane Doe in Crescent Park?”

  Rodney tapped his mouse and scrolled through a few pages, his eyes reading left to right. “Nothing here, Bill.”

  “Nothing? Goddamn coroners.” He tapped a knuckle on the glass. “Thanks, Rod.” The three went inside the station. They walked down a plain off-white corridor. Pictures of Grand Rapids police doing community outreach, training, and standing in front of cruisers lined the walls. They passed the bullpen filled with desks and computers. A lone detective stared at his screen and four officers in blue patrol uniforms sat jaw-jacking.

  One tried to flag them down. “Hey, old-timer!”

  Bill kept walking. “Bill!”

  The officer turned to the others. “Old fuck can’t hear shit.”

  Bill stopped. “What’s that?”

  “You been here the longest. You ever see a domestic where the wife took a chunk right out of her husband’s cheek?”

  Bill thought back, eyes darting upward. “Can’t say I have.”

  “Add it to your list. Both Dykstra and I had one early this morning. Took ’em over to Spectrum for evaluation. Ain’t that some crazy shit?”

  He let the information settle. “Yeah, it is.” Wives biting husbands. Husbands attacking wives. Dead girl with bite marks in the park. Tweaker savaging Zimmer. It was too much. They must be related. Everything seemed too coincidental to him. His gut screamed they were related. His cop’s intuition that made a good cop great and a poor cop good told him they were linked, but there was no linchpin, the common thread that tied everything together in a nice little bow.

  There was no sequence. They all appeared as random events. The victims weren’t related. They didn’t go to the same church. They didn’t work at the same insurance company. None of the pieces fit together, but they were part of the same wrong ill-fitting puzzle.

  Bill turned back to Westman and pointed. “Room 2.” His partner nodded and looked through a small square window of a dark room before opening the door and flicking on the light.

  “After you, sweetheart.” Westman gave her a mock bow.

  “Blow me,” she said on her way inside. She swaggered like a professional fighter mixed with a runway model.

  “Age before beauty.”

  Bill shook his head in disgust and followed, his mind still distracted as it tried to subconsciously solve the riddle of the crimes at hand.

  “You’re anything but.”

  “You have no idea, old-timer.”

  The room was devoid of all character like a blank slate designed to be peppered with confession. The tiny room was meant to engender feelings of isolation, exposure, and unfamiliarity in the suspect. Just being inside this room long enough had brought about confessions. Sometimes you just had to be patient and they would break from the pressure. The truth always wants to come out.

  “But I do. When I was your age, things were different.”

&nbs
p; Westman held up a hand, cutting him off. “I’ll save you the trouble. Walked uphill both ways to work? Went down to the soda shop to meet your girl?”

  Bill frowned. “I’m not that old. Jesus, I wasn’t even alive in the fifties.”

  Westman closed the door behind them. The room was simple. A table sat in the center. A lone chair sat on one side and two teamed up against it on the other. Interviewing a witness called for different tactics than interviewing a suspect, but the rooms were used for either activity. Bill just hadn’t decided on what this tiny twig of a woman was yet.

  They held a little more over the witness because she was also in trouble with the law. They could detain her longer if need be. Bill had taken a liking to this slender, no shits given woman. If he’d been twenty years younger, he might have asked her out for a beer, but he wasn’t. The reality was he had a dead body in the middle of a city apparently deciding to implode on itself in a rapid series of assaults and murder on this Thursday morning.

  Bill tossed her paperwork on the tabletop and hiked the legs of his suit up as he sat down. Westman removed his sport jacket, throwing it over his chair before he jerked the chair to the side of the table and took a seat. It was a standard interrogation technique meant to unsettle the interviewee. It gave him an angle to observe body language for deception as did the taller than average table, leaving a guilty person’s lower extremities to bounce and squirm to relieve the pressures of questioning.

  The seating arrangement effectively blocked her inside the room. This played a psychological trick on the person, making them feel trapped, and the only way out was through them. Essentially, it created dependence upon the detectives. Confessions included. Confession always let you out of the room and into a cell.

  Bill cleared his throat. “All right, so it’s three thirty, and you’ve had enough drinks to feel a bit out of control. You’re walking down the street and come across a bearded white male attacking a woman.”

  Tess’s eyes narrowed. “I said it was two thirty. I wasn’t out of control, but it was dark. You know, Clint, I expected more out of you. I’m trying to help your little investigation, not get duped into a confession.”

  Bill sat back in his chair. “I don’t want a confession. I want to catch whoever did this.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Okay, Clint. Can you take these off me?” She held out the handcuffs linking her together at the wrists. “Make me feel like I’m not some sort of degenerate?” She smiled as if she was the only one who knew the joke’s punch line. “Less of a degenerate.”

  “Of course.”

  He stood and jingled his pocket. Coins rattled along with his cuff key. His fingers fumbled around and he dug out all of it. He opened his palm, fingering through the metal. When he found it, he shoved the rest back into his pants.

  “Here it is.”

  She held out her hands expectantly. He slipped the key inside the lock and twisted his fingers, releasing one wrist and then the other. He reset his cuffs. Each tooth along the cuff arm clicked as he adjusted it back into its proper partially engaged position. This way, they had a shorter distance to swing around before locking themselves again. It allowed them to be placed back on a perpetrator with ease.

  Like every piece of equipment they carried, they were stored in a manner so that muscle memory would provide them with the quickest and most efficient use on the streets. He flipped his jacket out and sat back down.

  Tess rubbed her wrists as if she’d been in shackles for years.

  “Better?” He gave her a smile. Honey over vinegar until it was time to be vinegar.

  “Can I go?” She pointed at the door. “Am I free to leave? You have to tell me my rights, right?”

  Bill studied his papers. “You aren’t quite free to leave unless you want to hop back over to the jail and finish out your processing. Then Westman and I are going to head back over to your place later to ask more questions.” He shook his head in slight disagreement. “Just easier to get this out of the way now.” He shifted his chair a few inches closer to her. “But we will waste our time driving you back if that’s what you want.”

  She understood his meaning. Her dark eyes told him so without speaking. “I’ll stay.” She turned away in discomfort. “Get this over with.”

  “Won’t be long. We just want to catch this guy. Give this woman’s family justice.”

  She sighed, throwing her hands back. “Ask away then.”

  “All right, two thirty, Crescent Park, man and woman, woman dead. If you saw this happening, why didn’t you call the police or help?”

  “I wasn’t exactly sober.”

  “Alcohol?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drugs?”

  Her mouth clamped shut. “No.”

  Westman chimed in. “This woman’s life was in your hands and you fled.” His harsh brown eyes judged her with a level of disgust. “What do you do for a living?”

  “I brew beer.”

  “And what were you doing downtown?”

  “Drinking.”

  Westman raised his eyebrows. “If I was to search your place, what would I find?”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Warrant. I’m in. Pretty easy if you’re a murder suspect. Judge will slide that right thru, no questions asked.”

  “I thought I wasn’t a suspect!”

  “You’re not, but I’m guessing you were doing a bit more than drinking.”

  Her mouth formed an angry frown.

  Bill gave him a glance. She wasn’t responding well at all to Westman. Sometimes Westman wielded his badge like a double-edged Scottish claymore instead of a scalpel. He’d chop you in half to find a violation of the law instead of using the law like a scalpel to cut out the most malignant criminal cancerous tumor. The fact remained people didn’t respond well to the respect me because of my badge attitude. They responded well knowing they were treated with respect and an understanding that the cops weren’t looking to crucify them for every violation of the law but wanted the real bad guys, the rapists, the psychopaths, and the drug kingpins.

  Bill knew Westman would calm over the years and wield his authority in a more subdued manner. It was kind of one of those speak softly but carry a big stick mantras that garnered the most success. The criminal understood it wasn’t a personal vendetta; it was the law. They were out to catch the criminal not the person, and at the end of the day, they were just people.

  Tess’s face twisted under stress. “I’d smoked some weed earlier. I wasn’t sure if what I saw was real. Or maybe accurate is the better word?”

  “You have a medical marijuana card?” Westman asked.

  Bill gave him a disappointed look. Always let the interviewee talk. That’s when the truth came out. They weren’t interested in an unprovable marijuana charge. He wanted to catch whatever animal committed the murder.

  “No. What the hell is that?”

  “Just continue, Tess.”

  “I walked on. After I got to Beefy Tacos, I thought better of it. I started getting paranoid. What if that man really was attacking that woman? What if I could get in trouble for not reporting it? So I called the police.” Her eyes grew angry. “When your pals showed up, they hooked me up.”

  “According to that report, you were belligerent.”

  “You get in the way of a girl and her late-night tacos, and you got a fight on your hands, Pinky.”

  Bill held up a hand. “All right.”

  Westman eyed her. “That girl died and all you could think about was tacos?”

  “Enough,” Bill said. Westman’s low tact and high road wasn’t helping the situation. “Do you know who she was?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Okay. And there was no one else who might have seen this? Were you with friends?”

  Tess’s head wavered as she thought. “I was by myself.”

  Fireworks erupted somewhere in the building, cutting the silence as if the Fourth of July had decided to repeat itself. Bill turned
his head to the side listening.

  Westman peered at the door. “What the hell was that?”

  Bill held up a hand. I wasn’t hearing things. Singular firecracker pops snuck underneath the door. Westman stood, trailed by Bill. His hand went instinctively to his Colt .45 in his shoulder harness. Angry shouts could be heard followed by the bangs of more gunshots.

  Metal scraped along leather as both detectives drew their firearms. Westman laid his hand on the door handle, holding his Glock close to his body and pointed at the door. Determination set in Westman’s eyes. He was a fighter. He would do as he was trained. The man shouldn’t be so damned excited by it.

  “What’s going on?” Tess asked.

  Bill waved her back into her seat. “Stay here.”

  He locked eyes with Westman and nodded. Westman gripped the knob and turned.

  THE DETECTIVE

  Grand Rapids, MI

  The two detectives bolted into the hallway. Bill chanced a look toward their six o’clock as they left the room. Nobody. He turned forward trying to catch Westman. He stayed to his rear right flank. Westman’s shoulders hunched in a way to make him more compact while also making his neck and traps look more muscular, a man ready to do battle.

  At the far end of the hall, the secure door to the lobby was held open. A body lay in the doorway preventing it from automatically closing. Men and women walked uneasily over the fallen form, their feet treading on top of it.

  Their movement set Bill’s heart racing. They were awkwardly malevolent as though unstably hunting prey, not like men hunting deer but like rabid animals wearing the skins of men.

  “Halt!” Westman screamed at them. He punched out his Glock 17, his arms fully extended, his muscles flexing in excited stress of an impending fight.

  The people rushed for him. Bill tried to read their eyes, but nothing was there. They all held blank, dead stares. His gut screamed, wrong, wrong, wrong! He pointed his weapon at them too.

  Bill was long past his door-kicking days, but they trained in rapidly evolving active shooter scenarios as required. School shootings were a dime a dozen across the country. It was only a matter of time before one came to a school near you. The entire department prepared for it because you never knew where you’d be when it happened.