Cherry Bomb

by J. A. Konrath

  Phin grabbed the water.

  “I got it,” I told him.

  He spread out his hands and backed up. As he should have. I didn’t need him. I didn’t need anyone. I was perfectly capable of carry ing a few lousy items. I crammed the bag of chips under my other arm, grabbed the salsa in one hand, the water in the other, and gave Phin a look that said he better not try to hold open the goddamn door for me. He didn’t, giving me a wide berth, and I shuffled past and bumped the door with my hip, and the salsa slipped and broke on the floor like a gunshot, splattering red.

  Phin didn’t say anything. Neither did Smirking Boy. I continued out the door, piled everything onto the hood of the Bronco, and began stuffing it into the backseat. Then I sat down and waited for Phin.

  He climbed into the driver’s seat without comment and we got back on the expressway, and I tried to focus on the case instead of my personal life.

  Big Z, small d. Big Z, small d. What the hell did that mean? Why did Alex burn that into David Strang’s chest?

  No ideas came. And the harder I tried to think, the more my mind kept drifting back to the pregnancy test in my purse, which I clutched in both hands like a life preserver on a sinking ship.

  CHAPTER 26

  ALEX DREAMS.

  She’s ten years old, in a cornfield in Indiana, in the center of a wide circle that she made with Charles. They stomped down all of the dry stalks around them and are sitting Indian style, face-to-face, knees touching. The corn is taller than they are, so no one can see them from the road or from the farm house. This is their private spot. Their special spot. No one can hurt them here. Not bullies. Not Father. Not anyone.

  A wind blows through the corn, making a rustling sound. All around them, the corn ripples like a golden sea. Alex smells fresh earth and clean air. The sun is shining, bright overhead, and she turns up to feel it on her face.

  But she doesn’t feel it. All she feels is cold.

  She looks at Charles, wondering if he’s cold too. His eyes are closed.

  “I love you,” she says.

  He doesn’t answer. She reaches up, touches him. It’s like touching ice.

  He’s dead. Charles is dead.

  Then his jaw falls open.

  “You’re ugly, Alex,” Charles says. “Scarred and ugly.”

  It’s isn’t his voice. It’s Jack’s.

  Charles becomes Jack, his features cracking and twisting, and then she’s standing over Alex with angry black eyes, pointing down at her like a vengeful god.

  Alex reaches up, feels her own face, feels the scars.

  And she’s afraid.

  The pleasant field smell sours, becoming the acrid odor of sweat and fear. The gentle breeze goes rotten. The sun shines black.

  Alex runs. Into the corn.

  The corn grabs at her, tries to stop her. But Alex has a knife, and she cuts and slashes, and the corn cries out and bleeds, bright red arterial jets that sting like acid. Stalks morph into severed arms and legs, and Alex climbs up the bodies of the slaughtered, climbs up an ever-growing pile of people she has killed.

  At the top of the mound is a face. Her face. Unscarred. It beckons her on.

  Behind her, Jack grows to monstrous proportions, reaching out an enormous hand to pluck Alex away from her goal. Alex dodges, stabs at Jack’s huge thumb, then launches herself upward, hands outstretched and yearning.

  Alex’s face is atop a pedestal, and she snatches it up and presses the perfect mask of flesh against her scars. It glows warm, then burning hot, shooting out rays that blind the Jack creature and cause her to tumble down the mountain.

  And Alex smiles. Not a half smile. A full smile, all the muscles working, lips doing what they are supposed to, wide and bright and beautiful.

  Then Alex begins to grow. Bigger than Jack. Bigger and stronger and almighty. She crushes the squealing lieutenant underfoot, her rib cage cracking like a bird’s nest.

  For miles around Alex, the corn trembles and begs for mercy.

  Alex’s blade stretches and curves, becoming a scythe.

  As the world screams, Alex reaps.

  CHAPTER 27

  “I GOT NOTHING, SIS.”

  I rubbed my eyes, which felt like I had sand under the lids. We were parked in an all-night diner lot, which was half-full even at five in the morning. I’d gone in earlier, not to eat but to borrow a phone book. Now I wished I’d eaten. The salsa-less tortilla chips and five sticks of jerky hadn’t done much to satisfy my hunger.

  “Try searching for motel plus Zd plus Wisconsin,” I told Harry.

  “I tried that. I’ve tried every possible Boolean search combination, and I don’t even know what Boolean means. Plus I’m exhausted. The only thing keeping me awake is this case of SuperMax Energy Drink I got at the discount store. What the hell is taurine anyway?”

  “We’re all tired, McGlade. Try pinching yourself.”

  “Does that work?”

  “No. But it will amuse me.”

  “Funny, Jackie. We’ve got half an hour left. Maybe the Milwaukee PD has found him already.”

  “Milwaukee cops find him?” I asked Phin.

  Phin shook his head. Naturally, Phin owned a police scanner. He was using an earpiece to listen in so the radio chatter didn’t interfere with my phone call. I was using Alex’s cell, because it was pretty much trace-proof. No doubt the Feebies were tracking my personal cell.

  I yawned. “Did you try another search engine?”

  “I’m using an aggregator that searches all the top search engines, including foreign ones. I’ve found some pretty horrible things, Jackie. Do you know what a brass clown is?”

  “No. And have no desire to find out.”

  “It’s this sex thing. But it isn’t really sexual, unless you’re some sort of sicko nutjob. You take a cup. Guess what you do with the cup?”

  “I don’t want to know what you do with the cup, and if you try to tell me I’ll hang up on you.”

  “I wish I could do a system restore on my brain and go back to a time before I saw it. There are certain foods I can no longer eat.”

  For the fiftieth time I fought the temptation to drive to the nearest motel and start randomly searching rooms. With several hundred hotels within ten square miles, the odds weren’t with us. Much better to stay centrally located and be ready to move when we got some information.

  The problem was, we had no information. And I held out little hope that Alex would call back with a last-minute hint. The next time she called, it would be to send pictures of David Strang with his head blown off.

  “Think Alex fucked him?” Harry asked.

  “Not sure if it matters, McGlade.”

  “Maybe it does. What if there was some sixty-nine action going on?”

  “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

  “A lot. If she was on top, she could have written the letters upside-down.”

  I accessed the picture on the cell phone, then rotated it one hundred and eighty degrees.

  How about that?

  “I bow to your deviant mind, Harry. Try all the searches again using PZ.”

  “Way ahead of you, Jackie. Got twenty-seven million hits. Some scientist named PZ. A punjabi site. An ID3 tag editor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It helps you catalog your music collection if you appropriate MP3 files on the Internet.”

  “Appropriate? You mean stealing.”

  “File sharing isn’t stealing. If I stole your bike, you lost property. That’s theft. But if I copied your bike, you still have the bike.”

  “Then I’ve lost my right to sell the bike. How can I sell the bike if everyone is copying it?”

  I bet myself twenty bucks McGlade was rolling his eyes.

  “What if I already have the music on vinyl? Can’t I download an MP3 of a song I already own?”

  “Downloading music for free is illegal, Harry.”

  “No it isn’t. Ask Phin.”

  “I’m
not asking Phin.”

  “Ask Phin what?” Phin asked.

  I sighed. “This really isn’t something we need to discuss right now. Or ever.”

  I hit the button for speaker phone anyway and repeated Harry’s question.

  “It’s illegal,” Phin said. “You’re taking money away from the artist. That’s what intellectual property laws are for.”

  “So downloading an out-of-print album is bad, but it’s okay to rob a bank?”

  “That’s illegal too,” Phin said.

  “We need to stick to finding Lance,” I said.

  “Phin, you ever see that brass clown video?”

  “Yeah. It was horrible.”

  “Lance,” I said, holding up the picture. “He’s going to die soon. Remember him?”

  “Remember that cup scene?” Harry said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t eat corn anymore because of that.”

  “I had to give up Greek food for a while.”

  “Why Greek? Oh…oh yeah. You know, the last Greek I ate was a sorority girl.”

  I was going to tell them, more forcibly this time, to stay on task, but the word Greek stuck in my head and bounced around like a pinball. I looked at the PZ again.

  “Harry, do a search for Greek alphabet.”

  “She was a physical therapy major, Phin. Had an incredibly strong grip. I used to fake injuries.”

  “Harry! The search!”

  “Okay! Sure! Greek alphabet! Done! You happy?”

  “What do P and Z stand for?”

  “P is rho. Z is zeta. Rho zeta?”

  “Row zayta. Row zeta. Rosetta?”

  I flipped the Yellow Pages open to Motels and searched the Rs. No Rosetta Motel, or anything even close.

  Harry chuckled softly. “Damn, Alex is smart.”

  “You got something?”

  “I did a search for Rosetta plus Milwaukee plus lodging. First hit is for the Rosetta Stone—that old rock with all the languages on it. But farther down the page is the Old Stone Inn. If PZ is Greek for Rosetta, the Rosetta Stone was certainly an old stone. And the Old Stone Inn is near the Milwaukee airport.”

  I checked my watch. Lance had less than fifteen minutes to live. The clues fit, but that might have been because we were tired and hopeless and wanted them to fit.

  “Where’s the address?” I asked Harry.

  “It’s on Whitnall.”

  Phin started the truck. “Ten minutes, if we push it.”

  I didn’t see we had any choice.

  “Push it,” I told him.

  We peeled out of the parking lot.

  CHAPTER 28

  ALEX WAKES to the ringing of the hotel phone and the homey smell of copper pennies. She gives the receiver a quick up and down, stretches, and pads over to the bathroom. Apparently Cyn had more life left in her than Alex thought, because she managed to pull herself out of the bathtub to curl up and die under the sink. There’s a good amount of blood browning on the floor, and Alex watches where she steps—it’s not wise leaving bloody footprints up and down the hotel hallway.

  After using the facilities, Alex puts on a pair of fresh pan ties from Cyn’s suitcase, and also liberates some sweatpants and a Hootie and the Blowfish tee. Cyn’s shoes are too small, and the cop’s black leather shoes look stupid with sweats, so Alex heads out the door in only socks.

  Sunrise is still over an hour away, and outside it’s cool and crisp with a wind that threatens winter. Alex digs her laptop out of the Hyundai and takes it back to the lobby, where complimentary continental breakfast is being served. Even this early there are three people milling about, reading papers, drinking coffee, pouring milk into bowls of cereal. Alex keeps her head down, bangs covering her face, and snatches a bagel and a small container of cream cheese without being acknowledged.

  Back in the room she sets up at the desk and accesses the hotel’s WiFi, charging it to Cyn’s account. Then she activates the cell phone program and enlarges the window to the size of the laptop screen, which shows a live view of Lance at the Old Stone Inn.

  Poor Lance is sleeping. He’s made quite a mess of the bed—even in the close-up Alex can see the mattress is off-kilter and the sheets under him have twisted around. She zooms the camera out, and sees the duct tape is still holding him tight, but it has bunched up on itself so it looks like gnarled gray rope. The secret to binding someone with tape is to make it as tight as possible; it stretches, and sweat and blood work against the adhesive. Lance has more than a little blood around his wrists. He fought hard. Alex feels strangely proud of him.

  She zooms out farther, and sees that the rest of Lance hasn’t held up so well.

  “Ouch.”

  The rubber band has transformed Lance’s once proud manhood into something resembling a rotten banana, all brown and droopy. If Jack arrives in time, it’s unlikely that part of him can be saved.

  Alex smiles with half of her face, using her finger to apply cream cheese to half the bagel, imagining macho Lance living out the rest of his days as a chaste monk in some Tibetan monastery. Certainly his wife wouldn’t keep him around. Infidelity can be forgiven. Having no dick would put an unrealistic strain on even the healthiest of marriages.

  She zooms in, getting a close-up of the Greek letters burned into Lance’s chest, and uses her screen capture to save a JPG. Then she checks the time. Twenty minutes after five. Lance has thirteen minutes to live.

  Alex transfers the picture to her cell, then sends it to Jack Daniels. At this late stage in the game, it’s unlikely Jack knows where Lance is. But there’s one clue left to give, and Alex wants to make sure Jack has every possible opportunity to figure it out and save him, so she feels even worse when she fails. Alex texts:

  STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN.

  Simple. Clever. Elegant. After entering the message she tucks her legs under her in the desk chair, licks cream cheese off her fingers, and waits for the big bang.

  CHAPTER 29

  “HOW’S OUR TIME?” Phin asked.

  I checked my watch. The pigstick was set to go off at 5:33 a.m. It was 5:24.

  “Not good. How close are we?”

  “I’m not sure. A few miles.”

  My eyes locked on the speedometer. We were already doing sixty mph in a thirty mph zone, and I stopped counting all the red lights we’d blown through.

  “Go faster.”

  Phin nodded. The veins on the backs of his hands bulged out from holding the wheel so hard, and I noticed my legs were braced and my fingers had death grips on the armrests. As if that would help if we crashed.

  The cell phone rang, and I pried off a hand long enough to answer it. Another picture of Lance, apparently asleep. The burns on his chest had scabbed over, becoming almost black. A message accompanied the photo.

  “Got another text. Stairway to heaven.” I wrinkled my nose. “What does that mean?”

  “That Lance is about to die.”

  The truck crept closer to seventy, which seemed a lot faster on the narrow street we were on. Each pothole we hit felt like a thunderclap.

  “No…I mean—yes—that’s part of it. But I think it’s a clue. She’s telling us something about his location.”

  “What does Led Zeppelin have to do with rho and zeta?”

  I chewed the inside of my cheek. An earlier call to the Old Stone Inn hadn’t given us much to work with. The front desk had confirmed the motel was full, all twenty-six rooms occupied. This was one of those single-floor, park next to your room motels. I asked about a woman with scars checking in, or anything out of the ordinary, but English wasn’t the clerk’s first language, or at least he pretended it wasn’t, and I couldn’t get anything out of him.

  I had also dialed 911, explaining the situation and telling them a kidnapping and murder of one of their own was being committed there. I was sure they’d send a car, but had no idea of their response time or their procedure. Even if they got there before us, it’s unlikely they’d get any more help from the clerk
than I did. And no cop I ever met would kick in twenty-six doors without a warrant. Exigent circumstances and probable cause were weighty terms, but not as weighty as lawsuit and disciplinary action.

  “What were the band members’ names?” I asked Phin.

  He took a corner so fast the tires cried out. “Robert Plant…John Paul Jones…Jimmy Page…”

  “Which one died?”

  “The drummer. John Bonham. Died in his sleep. Choked on vomit.”

  My heart rate jumped up even higher. “Did he die in a motel room?”

  “Page’s house. Drank too much.”

  Phin tapped the brakes and just missed clipping a Volvo, who laid on the horn to show his disapproval. I tried to swallow, but had no spit left.

  “How about something in the lyrics?” I forced myself to focus, not the easiest thing to do when I predicted a car accident in the immediate future. “Any mention of rooms or motels?”

  “It’s about a woman who thinks she can get what ever she wants.”

  Phin swerved and climbed the curb, causing my body to rise up against the seat belt. I readied myself for the passenger-side air bag, but it didn’t deploy.

  “We’re on the sidewalk.” I tried to sound calm, but my voice came out squeaky.

  “Motel,” Phin said, eyes glancing right. I followed his gaze, saw the large Old Stone Inn sign a block ahead. A light illuminated its $49.95 a Night rates, but the i in Night was missing.

  We came upon the parking lot fast—too fast—and Phin hit the brakes and still slammed into the rear of a parked SUV. Still no airbag. I wondered if the truck even had them.

  I checked my watch. Five thirty.

  The motel was laid out in an L shape, ground-level rooms stretching off in two perpendicular directions. Thirteen on each arm. With three minutes left, not enough time to check them all.

  Phin and I ran for the lobby, at the center of the L. There was a Milwaukee police cruiser parked in front, and through the window I saw two uniforms talking to the desk clerk, who was shrugging and shaking his head.