Blank Slate (A Kyle Jackle Thriller)

by Hamric, Zack

  I needed a place to stay for the night. Off the main drag, a low-key kind of place where cash talked and the management didn’t. I continued down Ocean and took a right on 5th Ave to cut back over to the main street. It somehow reminded me of New Orleans-don’t know why that came to mind, because I didn’t have any specific memories of having ever been there. I went from a busy, bustling street filled with tourists to a dark narrow street lined with broken streetlights and dumpsters within the space of a few steps.

  My internal radar started screaming-loudly…I rolled up to the balls of my feet and sharpened my senses to react to the slightest sound. No surprise to me when a couple of guys stepped out from the shadow of a dumpster and fanned out to either side of me. A quick glance behind me confirmed that a third man was closing the trap from the rear. I should have been scared or nervous, but nothing. Just a quick measuring of angles and distance between us.

  The leader was about a half step ahead and squared up in front of me. Started to say something to me, maybe “Got a light” or “What’s in the bag?” or “Have a nice night”. Didn’t wait for that-I threw the bag in his buddy’s face, took two steps forward and drove into a punch that lifted his feet off the ground. Pivoted and followed up with an elbow to the left side of his face. He hit the asphalt with a sound like a wet bag of cement hitting the floor. I took a quick stutter step to the side and drove my foot through the other guy’s knee. I seem to remember some doctor telling me once that four ligaments support the human knee-judging from the popping sound and the screams that erupted from this guy, I tore at least three of them. One more to go-I let my momentum carry me around and was greeted with the sight of the remaining would-be mugger running as if his life depended on it.

  I picked the ripped remains of the bag up from the gutter. No real damage here. Other than a few dented and stained corners on the box; the computer seemed to have survived unscathed. Dusted off my clothes, took a last look at the punks still lying squirming in the street and started walking down the middle of the street. A minute later, I’m back on Collins and surrounded by tourists oblivious to the danger that waited just yards away. The high of the adrenalin rush has disappeared leaving me drained and lightheaded. Every bone in my body aches.

  A yellow cab cruising down the street trolling for late night fares hesitates as it passes me. I nod to him and get in when the squealing brakes finally bring the cab to a halt. “lleveme a un hote, por favor,” I ask the Cuban cab driver. Two minutes later we arrive at the Beach Plaza Hotel further down Collins.

  This is exactly what I was looking for. Small, funky, and ignored by the masses. And the cops. And apparently almost everyone else-the place is almost completely deserted. I walked in and headed straight to the De Carlos Bar. This place looks like it’s been here forever-old chipped marble from the 30’s and art deco columns that somehow escaped being ripped out by the interior designers during several rounds of remodeling over the decades. A few dusty glass hookahs indifferently scattered around apparently to try to give it a more exotic feel-someone wasted their time on that touch. The best part-a bartender who takes one glance at my battered face and silently sets a bottle of good single malt Scotch on the well-worn bar between us.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was well after midnight when Rivera finally left the hospital. He was completely exhausted, and still concerned about leaving Jean alone. The doctors had run a CAT scan to check for head injuries, but she seemed to be just fine physically. Just as a precaution, they decided to keep her overnight for observation. The emotional damage was a different story.

  She seemed in a distant daze from the stress and trauma of the past few hours. Every time he tried to touch her, she tensed and pulled away from him-he tried to avoid reading anything into that. Any effort to talk to her was met with nothing more than monosyllabic responses. No eye contact. The detectives from the CIU had tried to interview her, but got nothing. They promised to return in the morning to take a complete statement.

  Rivera couldn’t put the facts together in any coherent framework. He expected his world to make sense most of the time. He might not like the senseless brutality that he saw all too often, but he usually could at least understand it. The John Doe had obviously been a victim of some crime. The murder of the woman in the dumpster had to be related in some way. And who was this guy to attract the attention of someone who was obviously a professional killer? Normal people were killed everyday in a number of tragically senseless ways, but nobody was targeted by a hitman without there being a damn good reason for it. And how did a guy who was in a coma suddenly wake up and not only defend himself, but manage to kill his attacker?

  Jeez, too much information for one night. He popped the top off a cold beer with his thumb and took a long slow swallow that half emptied the can. Tired of the late night TV offerings, he stripped down to his wrinkled boxers and laid on top of the sheets sweating in the humidity that the struggling window air conditioner couldn’t quite push aside.

  The mechanical drone of the air conditioner was finally overwhelmed by another sound as the first glimmers of the sun painted the Atlantic with pale golden streaks of color. Rivera groaned as the energetic flock of colorful Monk parrots began their noisy morning serenade to the dawning of a new day. He hated the filthy little beasts. There was a flock of around fifty birds that insisted on living in the tall palm tree just outside his condo, crapping on his car every day, and just raising holy hell every morning. He idly wondered how much trouble he would be in if he accidentally discharged his shotgun into the middle of the little feathered rats.

  After a couple of minutes of trying to ignore the racket, he gave up any hope of getting back to sleep. He tried to stretch out all the creaky parts of his body that had been abused over the past forty years, first in college football and then later by the normal wear and tear he faced every day in his job. Staggered into the kitchen and poured the first cup of coffee for the day and chased it with a handful of ibuprofen. Probably best to go by the office first and then see Jean later in the hospital after the docs had finished with her.

  He stepped out his front door and locked the dead bolt behind him. When he turned to the parking lot, he unleashed a torrent of profanity as he saw the damage that had been done to his LeBaron convertible by the parrots. Thank God he hadn’t been completely hammered last night when he came in. He made the mistake of leaving his top down one night after a few rounds of drinks with friends and spent the entire next day cleaning up bird shit while suffering from a wicked hangover. Rivera dropped heavily into the well-worn driver’s seat with its saggy springs, pushed a old CD of Stevie Ray Vaughan in the stereo, cranked it loud and let it wail. Twenty minutes later, he was fighting the traffic and cursing the maniac machismo of the Miami drivers as he drove into parking lot for the headquarters of the Miami Beach Police Department.

  The twin banks of elevators in the main lobby were always crowded this time of morning with stragglers who had been tied up in traffic. Rivera squeezed into the last remaining place in the first car and pushed the glowing button for the fourth floor. “Manny, how you doin’ this morning!” The booming voice belonged to none other than the South District Captain, Steve Causey who was wedged uncomfortably into the back corner of the elevator.

  “Not bad Cap,” replied Rivera as they strode off the elevator together. “How’s your day looking?”

  “Damn busy late last night on the south end. Couple of our local bad boys damn near beat to death by some guy off Fifth between Ocean and Collins,” shrugged Causey. “They probably had it coming-these guys had a long list of priors over the past few years. Word on the street is that they’re the ones who’ve been jackin’ tourists in the past few months. They’ll be drawing unemployment for a while-got a busted jaw on one and a leg flopping like a fish on the other one.”

  “I wish my world was that friggin’ simple,” muttered Rivera as he walked out of the elevator and over to his desk. The Police Department had moved to its gleaming ne
w offices near the convention center only a couple of years before. It was a beautiful building with air conditioning and plumbing that actually worked most days, unlike the old offices where they used to collect a jar of the palmetto bugs that infested the building and bet on bug races held in the squad room-Rivera had damn near lost an entire paycheck on more than a couple of occasions. Rivera had never felt comfortable in the new building. He leaned back and surveyed the contemporary low fabric dividers separating the cubicles that some dumbass thought would encourage collaboration and the flow of ideas. “What horse shit,” he muttered thinking how much he preferred the old precinct with the nicotine stained bullpen and his old oak desk scarred by generations of coffee spills and cigarette burns.

  No time for reminiscing. As soon as he logged in to his workstation, he began reviewing the reports from the scenes of mayhem at the hospital the night before. It was amazing how many reports had appeared on the system in just the last eight hours. He started scanning through the volume of reports from the Crime Scene Squad that had been processed and saw four more appear in the queue while he was reading. You could tell this was going to be a high profile case-everyone wanted to put his or her own personal stamp on it. He grudgingly admitted there were some advantages to the new offices-he had almost real time access to information instead of waiting days for crucial evidence to come back from the lab.

  Thank God for AFIS he thought as he checked the reports on fingerprints that had been gathered from the scene the night before. The prints had already been scanned, processed, uploaded and then compared against all the records in the database. The Automated Fingerprint Identification System provided national fingerprint records for fifty-five million people in the US who had background checks or some kind of criminal record. Or, as was the case with the dead guy with the tattoos, if you ever arrived at a major US port of entry, you would be scanned by the US-VISIT system. The fact that the only record available was a two print record from his entry flagged him as arriving in the country sometime before 2007. Boris Kirov-his country of origin, the Ukraine. Had a current visa and was supposedly running an import business. Right, he thought. The one thing the dopers, girl smugglers, and general scumbags had in common was that they all seemed to own an import-export business.

  “Hey Zapata,” Rivera yelled over the top of the divider. “Can you get your ass over here so we can collaborate.”

  “Manny, you’re always busting my friggin’ balls,” grumbled Zapata as he walked around the edge of the office cubicle divider and flopped into the scarred wooden chair that was the one surviving piece of furniture Rivera had rescued from his old office before they donated everything else to Goodwill. Zapata was a striking contrast to Rivera; he could have been on the recruiting poster for the academy. Tall, dark hair and olive skin with an easy confidence that came with experience and being damned good at his job. Since starting with the Department as a patrolman ten years before, he had risen rapidly through the ranks. He was now was the lead investigator for the burgeoning problem with the Russian Mafia that had first shown up in Miami during the early nineties and since then had grown to epidemic proportions.

  “So what’s up with you?”

  “Not sure,” Rivera said as he fanned out the pictures from the coroner’s report on the table. He pointed at the picture the coroner had taken prior to beginning the autopsy. “This guy shows up at the hospital, tries to kill a John Doe lying in a coma, and ends up getting his head bashed in by the same John Doe who then mysteriously disappears into thin air-makes perfect sense to me.”

  “One obvious thing,” said Zapata as he picked up the eight by ten photo and examined it closely. “He is definitely Russian mob.”

  “You must be a friggin’ genius,” snarled Rivera. “Was it the bad Eastern European dental work or the crappy jailhouse tats covering damn near every inch of skin that tipped you off? I had that figured out before you got here. And his last name was Kirov and he’s from the Ukraine,” Rivera said, sliding the rest of the report in front of Zapata. “I don’t need a name, I need his story.”

  “OK, let’s take a look,” Zapata said as he adjusted the angle of the goose-necked lamp to better see the closeups of the tattoos. “Nothing too unusual about any of these. The big crucifix dominating the design on the chest is pretty old school-tells everyone that he is a Prince of Thieves-a very honorable tattoo among that crowd. A bull on the shoulder-usually reserved for pimps-probably sold his baby sister for a fifth of vodka. The big tattoo on the back with the three cathedral spires tells you that he’s either been in jail three times or spent three years in jail-hard to tell. And the Madonna and baby Jesus in front of the cathedrals means our boy has been a thief since he was sucking at his mother’s saggy tit. Looks like he’s just muscle, a brodyagi- if he was anybody, he’d have stars tattooed on either his chest or knees.”

  “I’m impressed,” Rivera acknowledged almost in spite of himself. “You actually believe any of that bullshit you’re feeding me or you just make it up as you go along?”

  “Hey Rivera, deadly serious stuff here. Every tattoo on this guy’s body he earned the hard way-you ever get a Russian mob guy who puts on a tat without doing the time or the crime, his fellow brothers will either burn it off or scrape it off with a knife. It ain’t pretty. Making any progress on the other guy-the John Doe?”

  “Mmm….” said Rivera as he turned back to the monitor. “This is strange,” he said as he squinted at the email that had just popped up in his message box. The AFIS system contained records including criminals, law enforcement, military, and insurance agents, in short, good guys, bad guys-almost everyone who needed to have positive identification on file. “Zapata, this John Doe apparently has a record somewhere in the system, but it keeps coming up with a restricted flag. I’ve never seen that-what do you figure that means?”

  “Beats the hell out of me. Even if the guy worked for the FBI or DEA, the basic identity record should still show somewhere on our system.”

  CHAPTER 8

  I spent most of the next day holed up in my hotel trying to find out some answers-starting with the guy who tried to kill me. Checked the guy’s wallet first. I took everything out of his wallet and spread it out on the bed. Not much there that was out of the ordinary. One Visa with the letters almost worn off, a Mastercard, a VIP Pass to The Platinum Club in Lauderdale-judging by the glittering babe on the front of the card, must be an upscale strip club. Most important to me, this guy had what appeared to be a genuine Florida driver’s license and an address that was near the Miami airport. Checked several of the messages left on his cell phone. Didn’t do me much good, seemed like most of the callers were speaking in Russian. I just picked up a few words here and there-sounded like his boss trying to figure out why he hadn’t checked in last night. Several calls came in from this same guy-each one a little more agitated than the one before. The last message, the guy was practically screaming into the phone. Hit a homerun on that one. I actually was able to understand most of what he said on that call-it told me that the few phrases I do know in Russian all seem to be related to descriptive sex acts with female relatives and some insults that don’t even translate very well to English. I somehow doubted he learned them sitting in a Russian tearoom.

  Pulled out the iPad and started looking up the phone numbers online-mixed results there, most of them were unlisted and the ones I called went to phones with no voice message set up. I only ended up with hits on two numbers-one a call he made to the strip joint in Fort Lauderdale. The incoming call came from the address listed on his driver’s license.

  It went on like that for most of the day. Searching, chasing one dead end after another through the online jungle. Took a break for lunch when I ordered a pizza. That was a nice surprise, a New York style pizza with the works. The smell of pepperoni, garlic and hot Italian sausage with olive oil floating on top put my taste buds into overdrive. I dove in like a man possessed and finished it within minutes. Satisfied and almost feeling
normal again, I leaned back to sort out the events of the past few days.

  My thoughts were interrupted just after dark by the insistent ringing of the dead guy’s cell phone. The number on the phone showed BLOCKED. A moments hesitation…flipped open the phone…and then with my best Russian mob accent, “Yeah.”

  “Where da fuck you been?” screamed the voice on the other end of the phone. “You supposed to call me last night…and nothing. I’m supposed to baby sit your ass?”

  “Sorry, had a little problem,” I mumbled. “Can’t talk on the phone-gotta meet somewhere.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line for a second and then he launched into an absolute torrent of Russian – I couldn’t understand a damn word he was saying, but could tell from the tone, none of it was good. Not really sure if he was suspicious and trying to test me or whether he just preferred to do his cursing in Russian, but I knew I was completely screwed.

  I thought for a second and then gave what I believed was a reasonable reply under the circumstances. “Ёб твою мать,” and with that, hung up the phone with the sound of him screaming echoing through the earpiece as I flipped the phone closed. Not sure why, but curses involving sexual acts with a guy’s mother seem to have an amazing ability to royally piss people off in any language. I didn’t know who this guy was, but I definitely figured I would have to deal with him one day.

  I looked around the room for the tenth time that day. Nothing special, just a lumpy queen-sized mattress and a chipped formica topped desk that looked like it had been there since the hotel was built in the thirties. The view wasn’t much to write home about either-one small window that looked like it hadn’t been washed in years looking out at the side of a tall, stuccoed hotel that had blocked out the tropical sun for the better part of the day. Not that it really mattered-for most people in South Beach, hotels were places where you crashed for three or four hours sleep before starting the party all over again the next day. The moldy, musty smell that seemed to permeate every building near the ocean was beginning to irritate the hell out of me. In short, time to get out on the street and go for a walk.