Dead On My Feet - A Thriller (Phineas Troutt Mysteries Book 1)

by J. A. Konrath

  I was out of oxycodone and Xanax, Harry had my coke, the Hydro and morphine were under my floorboards in Chinatown, and the tramadol had burned in the car with the Picasso and my tool belt. I made do with some of the pilfered gauze and medical tape, creating an irregular bandage which helped me appear less like a zombie and more like a victim of some horrible accident.

  Then I found another Walmart—they seemed to be everywhere—to get a fresh change of clothes. This time I bought in bulk. Three pairs of pants. Six tee shirts. A bag of socks. Two flannels. A few of the tools I lost (though they didn’t sell Halligan bars or shove knives). Then I hit the pharmacy department and bought every over-the-counter painkiller available. Ibuprofen. Aspirin. Acetaminophen. Naproxen. Aloe Vera burn gel with lidocaine. To fight off the oncoming withdrawal symptoms, some dimenhydrinate and cimetidine. And to keep me frosty, pseudoephedrine hydrochloride and caffeine pills.

  Back in the car I choked down a few of everything with half a jug of water. Then I headed for the clinic.

  This time, I paid attention to my surroundings. Before parking, I circled the block twice, checking for tails and for spotters. There were five protestors out front, waving signs and yelling at McGlade, who had shed his serious demeanor and was back to his usual bemused self. As I parked, I watched him take something from his pocket and point it at the small crowd. Within thirty seconds, they’d all run off.

  I walked over to Harry. “Pepper spray?”

  “Liquid Ass.”

  “Say that again.”

  “I spilled my super soaker ammo, so I filled a little spray bottle with Liquid Ass.”

  Had to ask. “What is Liquid Ass?”

  “It’s liquid,” McGlade said, “that smells like ass.”

  “And they sell this?”

  “Wherever fine pranks and gags are sold. Want to smell some?”

  I did not want to smell some. But, c’mon. Wouldn’t you?

  McGlade held the bottle to my nose. It did, indeed, smell like ass. Sweaty, shitty, gag-inducing swamp ass.

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “And pricey. But for small groups of protestors, it works just as well as asparagus pee.” McGlade gave me a quick once over. “You look better, but your pupils are dilated.”

  “Legal,” I said. “Caffeine and decongestant.”

  He nodded. “Ain’t it great our government knows what’s best for us?”

  “It’s peachy.”

  “Come on. Got an old friend who’s waiting to see you.”

  I followed McGlade into the clinic, and saw a familiar figure sitting at the receptionist’s desk. She was running a brush through the barrel of her .38 Colt Detective Special.

  “Hi, Jack. Been a while.”

  Jacqueline Daniels was about ten years my senior, a Homicide Lieutenant in the Chicago Police Department. Trim, fit, brunette, not traditionally pretty, but certainly attractive.

  She glanced up at me, her expression neutral. “Hi, Phin. You’re looking… awful.”

  “I got stabbed in the face,” I said. “And set on fire.”

  She didn’t seem impressed. “The cancer is back,” she stated.

  “We tried to split up. It didn’t work out.”

  “That why I haven’t seen you at Joe’s?”

  Joe’s was a pool hall that had good beer and flat slate. Jack and I had been playing, on and off, for a few years.

  “It was getting embarrassing,” I said, “creaming you at nine ball all the time.”

  “I’m up two games.”

  “I threw those games. Out of pity.”

  Our relationship had never evolved beyond friendly rivalry and harmless flirting. We both knew we had a chemistry, despite our age differences, and our preferences for opposite sides of the law. But, like Pasha, she was out of my league. Jack Daniels was a decent person. I was not. Plus, she had a boyfriend. Some regular schmo named Latham. Probably couldn’t throw a punch to save his life, but some chicks were into the sensitive types.

  “Are you getting treatment? Besides the self-medication?”

  I glanced at Harry. He shrugged. “I’m a sharer. I share.”

  “Who has the time for treatment,” I answered Jack.

  “Are you stoned right now?”

  “Not very.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I hadn’t pegged you as a guy who gives up.”

  “Then maybe you’re not as good at pegging people as you think.”

  Jack closed the cylinder on her revolver, then tucked it inside her blazer, into a shoulder holster. “I don’t do pep talks, psychoanalysis, or tough love,” she said. “So I’ll just say this: Get treatment. I’d like to see you around for a few more years. You’re one of the few people I can stand to be around.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  “No you won’t,” Jack said. “Because you’re just as big an idiot as the idiot standing next to you.”

  “It’s like a Hallmark card in here,” Harry said. “I may start weeping.”

  “What happened to your cheek?” Pasha entered the room and practically launched herself at me in an effort to prod at my poor bandaging job.

  “I got stabbed in the face. And set on fire.”

  She didn’t seem impressed, either. Tough crowd.

  “Does that go all the way through?”

  I considered showing off by poking my tongue through the wound, but that would have been juvenile. So I just nodded.

  “You need stitches. We need to get you to a doctor.”

  “You’re a doctor.”

  “I’m not a plastic surgeon. You’ll have a scar.”

  “No insurance.”

  “How can you not have insurance? How do you pay for your cancer treatment?”

  I shot a quick look at Jack, and noticed the corners of her mouth turn down ever so slightly.

  “Would you mind doing the honors?” I asked Pasha. “I’m not worried about a scar.”

  “Let’s go into an examination room.”

  Pasha took me by the hand. If Jack was jealous of Pasha fussing over me, her way of showing it involved keeping her expression neutral.

  “Thanks for helping out,” I told her as I was pulled past.

  “I owed jackass a favor,” Jack said.

  “You owe me five favors.” Harry held up his prosthetic hand. “And you’re to address me as Mr. Jackass. Or Daddy. Which is what your fat partner, Herb, calls me. Does he still weigh six hundred pounds?”

  Once upon a time, Harry and Jack were partners on the force. But he screwed that up, because he was Harry.

  Jack sighed like a babysitter sick of the problem child in her care. “Herb doesn’t weigh six hundred pounds.”

  Harry’s eyes widened. “He got even fatter? I should start calling him Jabba Two Huts.”

  “Hate to interrupt the witty banter,” I said, “but use your space phone to look up a company. Slobeco.” I spelled it for McGlade.

  “And here I was thinking you got your ass kicked twice and didn’t come up with any clues.”

  He whipped out his iPhone, and Pasha took me into Exam Room 1 and sat me up on the padded table, the kind that had a paper roll on it so no patient had to sit where another patient had. Her expression was all business.

  “How much does it hurt?”

  “I numbed it with lidocaine.”

  She snapped on some latex gloves and poked the wound. “Can you feel that?”

  “No.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe that her concern for my well-being, coupled with guilt, would lead to some hot examination room sex.

  That didn’t happen. What did happen was four stitches on my cheek, and three more inside my mouth.

  Didn’t hurt. But it didn’t arouse me, either.

  “So, how do you know Lieutenant Daniels?”

  Not even the tracest hint of jealousy in her question. I determined I was repulsive to all women.

  “She arrested me.”

  “Seriously? What happe
ned?”

  I’d been beating the shit out of some triad teenagers who were trying the protection racket on for size, and wound up needing protection themselves. But smacking around delinquent youths probably wasn’t something Pasha wanted to hear about, so I shortened it to, “I was in a fight with a street gang. Jack showed up near the end.”

  “Did you go to jail?”

  “No. Jack brought me in, but there were no charges.”

  “She seems very competent.”

  “She is.”

  “Probably isn’t easy being a female cop in Chicago. I bet she can kick ass.”

  “She can.”

  I’d seen Jack in action. She had a black belt, and knew how to use it. She’d also won a few awards for marksmanship. Markswomanship?

  Damn, English was sexist.

  “What’s the status on the clinic?” I asked.

  Pasha sighed. “They need to replace the carpeting, baseboards, and drywall. We’ll be closed until Monday.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe… I should take their offer.”

  I stared at her. If she was waiting for me to disagree, she’d be waiting a long time.

  “They called again,” Pasha continued. “While you were gone. Harry hooked up a recorder to my phone. Want to hear it?”

  “Sure.” After all, that was part of my job.

  Pasha lifted up something square and electronic that seemed too small for a recorder, until I remembered that we lived in a digital world. She pressed a button, and it played.

  Pasha’s Voice: Hearst Clinic.

  Bad Guy’s Voice: Last chance. Take the offer. You know what will happen if you don’t.”

  It sounded like my old buddy, Bruiser. He’d been smart enough not to make any overt threats, guessing correctly that he might be recorded.

  “Did McGlade use any of his expensive gizmos to find out where the call came from?”

  Pasha nodded. “They used a TracFone. Basically a disposable cell phone that can be used without any contract.”

  “So it’s anonymous.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they ever tell you how they’d pay you? Meet you somewhere?”

  “No meetings. They said they’d give me fifty grand in cash.”

  “No way to ambush them. No paper trail.”

  “So they’re smart?”

  “Not that smart. If they were smart…” My voice trailed off.

  “They’d kill me.”

  I nodded. It didn’t make sense. Why try to frighten her away? There were plenty of pros who would kill for a lot less than fifty large.

  This was a clue. And there had been other clues. From Mulrooni. From Griffith’s house. But they didn’t seem to add up. They were more than willing to kill me in Oldridge, and again at the Flutesburg forest preserve, as long as it looked like an accident. But they were only trying to scare Pasha, not murder her. Why?

  “We’re missing something. I don’t want to pry into your personal finances, but am I right to assume you aren’t getting rich practicing medicine at a suburban women’s clinic?”

  “Your assumption is correct. After student debt, insurance, and business expenses, I still do okay, but I’m not driving a BMW.”

  She drove a Volkswagen Beetle. And I’d been to her apartment. No Picassos hanging on the walls.

  But Griffith had one. And a new Caddy.

  Pasha seemed to appraise me. “So… what’s the plan?”

  I had no plan. I’d been flying by the seat of my pants, and my attempts to figure out why Pasha was being strong-armed had all been catastrophic failures. The mob was involved. I didn’t know why. So unless I wanted to break into Jimmy Mulrooni’s house and beat some answers out of him—which didn’t seem like a good idea because mob bosses usually took precautions to discourage that kind of activity—all I could do was try to keep Pasha safe.

  I know; not much of a problem solver. Reacting rather than acting. There was a time, pre-Earl, when I actually took a warped kind of pride in my work. Helping the preyed upon. Thinning out the predators. A brass knuckled Robin Hood.

  But nowadays I worked for drugs to hide from a rapidly shortening life.

  I’d never been a hero. But somewhere on the journey I’d become a lot closer to being the villain. Though I hadn’t met many villains who were as into self-pity and navel-gazing as I’d been lately.

  “Are there any clinics that perform abortions in nearby suburbs?” I asked.

  “One a few miles to the south, in Carlington. Two of them north of here, in Prairie Estates.”

  “Can you call them, see if they’ve been getting threats? It would carry more weight coming from you than from me.”

  She nodded and picked up the phone. There was a knock at the open door, and I saw McGlade standing there. I walked over to him, leaning in for him to give me the skinny.

  “Slobeco Marketing is a dummy company front for Mitchell Incorporated, which is owned by a charity called Feel Good. They do diabetes research. Now Feel Good is part of a larger charity called EcoFriends, which has something to do with fighting pollution. Maybe you’ve seen the EcoFriends boxes in convenience stores. They’ve got pictures of garbage dumps on them with the tag line ‘Let’s not leave this for our kids.’”

  “I’m with you so far.”

  “EcoFriends does something that can be deemed unethical; they lease their boxes. That means any bozo can rent a charity box, put it in a store, and only has to give two bucks a month to the charity, keeping the rest of the haul for himself.”

  “You’re getting to a point, right?”

  “This is where things get interesting. I found out Mitchell Incorporated is leasing a large number of EcoFriends boxes, somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand of them. So the company is basically leasing boxes to itself, and keeping the profits. “

  Harry beamed like a kid after his first kiss.

  “This is all tremendously fascinating,” I told him, “but what has it got to do with buying abortion clinics?”

  “I have no idea. But I did find out who the major stockholder in Mitchell Inc. is, thereby owning both EcoFriends and Slobeco Marketing.”

  “Who?”

  Harry grinned wide as a zebra’s ass. “Dennis LaBeck.”

  “Why does that name sound familiar?” I finally had to ask.

  “Dennis LaBeck is the mayor of Flutesburg.”

  His words hung in the air like a crooked painting.

  The mayor of Flutesburg was pressuring Pasha into closing. That could mean a few things.

  First, he was probably owned by the mob.

  Second, that was why the police didn’t help control the rioting demonstrators at the clinic.

  Third, he could possibly be implicated in Dr. Griffith’s murder, if the body was ever found.

  But why try to get rid of Flutesburg’s abortion clinics?

  “Can we cause trouble for LaBeck by going public with this charity scam?” I proposed.

  “As long as EcoFriends gives a certain amount to its cause, it’s allowed to make a profit and still function as a charity organization. There is no law against leasing out charity boxes, even to yourself. I haven’t seen LaBeck’s income tax records, but I’d bet he’s got his ass covered on every angle, even if he is getting rich.”

  “You got all of this on your space phone?”

  “My space phone, and a few calls to friends.”

  “Nice.”

  “What’s the next step? Pay His Honor a visit?”

  I nodded. “I’ll go with Jack. Stay here and protect Pasha.”

  McGlade nudged me. “Are you tapping that?”

  “Pasha?”

  “She doesn’t respond to my romantic overtures. I think it’s because she’s got a thing for you.”

  “Maybe she just finds you repulsive.”

  “Impossible,” McGlade said. Then he belched and left.

  “Your friend, Harry McGlade, is a fascinating man,” Pasha said, coming up beh
ind me.

  I recalled Harry’s words in the parking lot. “We’re not exactly friends.”

  “Really? He’s helping you.”

  “I’m paying him.”

  “But he doesn’t need the money. He told me about Fatal Autonomy.”

  Fatal Autonomy. The TV series based on Harry. It was about as unrealistic as television could get. On the show, the character of Harry was a good looking genius, and everyone around him was an idiot. A mirror-parody of real life.

  “Don’t be surprised if he asks you to sign a release form. You’ll probably be portrayed by a blonde singer who does pop Top 40.”

  Pasha frowned. “That’s disappointing. I was hoping to be a real Indian stereotype; working at a donut chain, wearing a Bindi, worshipping a cow.”

  I hadn’t had an easy life. But I’d never experienced racism or sexism.

  “Probably isn’t easy,” I said, “being a female Indian American doctor in the suburbs.”

  “Nothing worth doing is easy.”

  “Good point. What did the other clinics say?”

  “No other threats. No protests lately, either.”

  “Do you happen to know the mayor?”

  “What mayor? Of Flutesburg? No.”

  We shared a comfortable silence. I’d come down from the tramadol, and the pill buffet in my stomach was no substitute for dealing with pain.

  “You’re hurting,” she noticed.

  “I can manage.”

  “I could prescribe something for the pain. But Harry said…”

  “I’m an addict.”

  She nodded.

  “He’s right.”

  “Were you addicted to drugs before your cancer diagnosis?”

  I considered it. “I’d used drugs. But I wasn’t addicted.”

  “So is cancer the reason for your addiction? Or is it an excuse for your addiction?”

  That’s a damn good question, Earl said.

  “I’ve…” I searched for the right words. “I’ve been in pain. A lot. Even before the cancer. Lately, I’ve been relying on drugs as my primary coping mechanism.”

  “How is that working out for you?”

  Another damn good question. She’s got your number, buddy.