Hands cuffed behind his back, Ron looked away.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said.
“Got some buddies in Vice would love to hear about this,” Hank said.
Nick lined up the stacks of cash with the tip of the pen. Mostly tens and twenties.
“Hey, Ron, maybe you can expedite my paperwork. How much cash should I report we’re confiscating today?”
Ron shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know,” he said softly, after swallowing several times with the effort to disavow ownership of the money. “Never saw it before.”
Nick crossed the garage area to retrieve his sidearm from under the tire changer. He picked up a rag that looked as if it may have been laundered within the last calendar month, folded it twice and pressed it against his scalp to help stem the bleeding.
“Controlled substances are the least of your worries, Ron,” Nick said. “We don’t mind throwing Vice a bone. They can have this haul. We don’t care. Because we’re homicide detectives.”
“What?” Ron asked, for the first time worried.
“Bad move,” Hank said, shaking his head dramatically. “Burying the bodies across the street from your place of business.”
“Vacant lot right there,” Nick said. “Gotta be convenient.”
“I got nothing to do with murders,” Ron protested. “Not one damn thing.”
“You can tell us all about it back at the precinct.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
On the way to the precinct, the detectives changed plans. Instead of taking Ron Swartley in for questioning together, Hank drove the Land Cruiser and, after insisting his Grimm partner have the scalp laceration treated, dropped Nick off at the emergency room. While Nick waited for a doctor, Hank would continue to the precinct to interrogate the suspect alone.
Sitting in an uncomfortable chair in the ER, Nick pressed a wad of clean medical gauze to his wound, having traded in the unhygienic rag to a solicitous nurse shortly after his arrival. To kill some time, he reviewed the events leading up to his injury, Ray’s escape and the confiscation of the pills and cash.
Even though the brothers were Wesen and criminals, Nick had begun to doubt either of them was the bare bones killer. Ron’s suspicious behavior around a large police presence could be explained by the stash of drugs and money he had on the premises. Ray’s unwarranted sneak attack raised the suspicion bar a little higher but, again, Nick thought the brothers were probably acting out of fear of the discovery of their side business.
Of course, given enough time, Nick could make the case the other way. Maybe the murder victims were involved in drug deals gone awry. Or maybe the brothers took their money and killed them. With luck, Hank would get Ron to talk, offer him a deal—assuming the prosecuting attorney cooperated—and let Ray, who had abandoned him, take the fall.
The ER nurse eventually returned and led him to a private area where a doctor could sew up his scalp. She warned him the doctor would probably advise overnight observation at the hospital.
Nick had no intention of staying overnight. True, he’d had some momentary dizziness, but he’d had no other concussion symptoms. His only concern was the injury itself, a lacerated and bleeding scalp. He’d trust in his Grimm abilities to get him through a minor head injury.
By the time the doctor saw him, Nick sensed the laceration was smaller than it had been back at the garage. Or maybe he’d imagined the improvement. Regardless, he only needed eight stitches and, once the nurse had cleaned blood off his face and hands, his injury was barely visible. His shirt and trousers, however, told a different story. The copious bloodstains made him look like an extra on the set of a zombie apocalypse movie.
Hank had contacted Juliette to apprise her of Nick’s injury and ER visit. When she called Nick to tell him she was on her way, he asked her to bring a fresh shirt. As soon as she came through the emergency room, she voiced a dozen concerned questions, all of which he deferred until he had a chance to put on the fresh shirt in the nearest restroom and stuff the bloodied one in a plastic bag. Feeling a bit more human, he asked her to give him a ride home.
“Nick, you probably have a concussion,” Juliette said. “Listen to your doctor. Stay here overnight.”
“Juliette, I’m fine,” Nick assured her. Then, in a lower voice, “I’m a Grimm.”
“And Gr—they don’t get concussions?”
“Hard heads,” Nick said. “One of the perks.”
Lips pressed together, Juliette stared at him for several moments, a mixture of admonishment and concern, before deciding she couldn’t change his mind.
“Well, you’re staying with me,” she insisted. “I’ll observe you at home. And wake you every few hours. To make sure your head is as hard as you claim.”
“It’s a deal.”
As they crossed the parking lot, Nick’s phone rang. Hank.
“Have to take this,” he said. “Hank, what have you got?”
“First,” Hank said. “How’s your head?”
“Stitched up,” Nick said. “Sore, but no more bleeding.”
“Okay, otherwise?”
“Under the watchful care of Dr. Silverton,” Nick said, smiling at Juliette. Her return smile was far more fleeting. As a medical professional, she obviously disapproved of his ignoring medical advice. “Squeeze anything from Ron?”
“Had my doubts about that pair,” Hank said, independently echoing Nick’s early assessment. “Ron’s not talking. Won’t give up Ray. So I pulled phone records from the shop. Turns out the brothers made a lot of calls to one Dr. Harold Filbert. Looked into him. Doc’s getting up there in years. Lost the bulk of his retirement fund when the market tanked a few years back. And his practice has been struggling for a while.”
“Sounds like someone in need of a quick cash infusion.”
“That’s what I thought,” Hank said. “Short on cash and options, Filbert turns his practice into a pill mill. The Swartleys run fake patients with fake problems through his office. Doc writes up a bunch of scripts. Then the Swartleys deal the oxy on the street for ten times its value.”
“Splitting the proceeds with the not-so-good doctor,” Nick concluded. “But as far as the murders…?”
“Right,” Hank said in a deflated tone. “Put out a BOLO on Ray. Those two had easy access to the disposal site, but otherwise… nothing solid.”
As Nick suspected, the Wesen were criminals, drug dealers, but had probably not committed the murders.
“Anything new at the vacant lot?”
“Got an update from Wu,” Hank said. “So far, four bodies at the second site. Six, combined from both sites.”
Six and counting, Nick thought. Once the GPR teams scoured both sites, Nick expected the number of victims to rise.
And they were no closer to solving the murders.
* * *
Farley, the Wesen butcher, had orders from the host to pick up the pace of food processing. With three days left, the Empty Chair period was in play and the number of meals had increased. Chef had decided on various fusion cuisines to meet demand while retaining some semblance of thematic integrity.
Today had been a southwestern Tex-Mex combination. Tomorrow’s menu would feature an Asian fusion. Farley would have preferred more time to dry-age the meat in his cooler, but with limited storage space and a higher than expected turnover, he had to make compromises in quality.
The true connoisseurs scheduled their visits for the early weeks in the month. By month’s end, refinement gave way to a “last call” type of gluttony. Old World tradition dictated last night for the tight chain meal for a good reason. On the surface, a day to celebrate excess. But beneath that indulgence, desperation played a part. Many years stood between the participants and the next feasting month. And for some, this represented their last Silver Plate.
His father had been Butcher last time and his father before him. Farley’s father trained him for this privilege during his adolescence, so Bruno could take over the family tradition w
hen he died. A secret Farley could tell none of his classmates. A secret he had guarded, waiting for his time to come.
Six months ago, the host had called him and told him to sharpen his knives.
Farley had no son of his own yet, but he still had time to keep their tradition alive. Even without a son to take over, health willing, he’d be around to resume the role of butcher one more time. If not, he had a nephew with the right type of glint in his eye to assume the mantle. More than one way to keep the family tradition rolling.
Grabbing the old iron key ring from a top shelf, he walked down the hallway to the basement pen. As soon as he unlocked the steel door, he heard their panic spark. Crying, wailing, and whispered prayers, while others mumbled frantically around gags. These sounds, to him, were no more profound than the lowing of cows, the bleating of sheep, or the clucking of chickens.
This trip into the livestock pen, he’d left behind his hood. Early in the month, awash in the secrecy and caution that surrounded the event, he kept his human face hidden from them. The rough cloth mask had served its purpose, stoking their fear to a fever pitch that paralyzed them. Some of them thought that to survive they must simply endure the unpleasantness, like gripping the arms of the dentist’s chair through a series of root canals. Eventually the discomfort and anxiety would pass. But now, he wanted to disabuse them of that notion. Survival was not an option. They must realize they had no hope. Before he descended the stairs, he woged for them to see what would not be endured.
The horned face of a Dickfellig.
As he walked among them, their chains rattled as they scurried away, huddling against the wall. A few became still as death, even holding their breath through the fateful moments of his selection.
One of the women, Alice, finally noticed his Wesen appearance and screamed, pointing. A few whispered, “Mask!” and one of those who had prayed softly, now whispered, “Demon!”
He stood in the middle of the basement, hunched over a bit to avoid bumping into the exposed joists with his head, fists clenched as he let his eyes adjust to the dim room.
“Good news,” he told them. “Your suffering ends soon.”
All had fallen quiet, save a prayerful few. By now, those who had been chained more than a few days knew not to trust him, expecting a trick. The recent additions remained cautious, understandably distrustful. But he hadn’t lied. Their suffering would end soon. But not in the way they wanted. His vision had adjusted sufficiently to locate his selections.
“For some of you,” he said, turning his gaze to a chosen one, “your confinement ends now.”
“No, don’t do this,” the Korean woman said, staring down at her hands clasped in her lap. “Please don’t do this.”
He stared at an Indian boy huddled behind her, no more than twelve years old, avoiding eye contact.
Noticing his attention shift, the woman cried out.
“No!” She raised her hand, partially shielding the Indian. “He’s just a boy.”
Farley reached into the front pocket of his blood-stained apron and removed the lead-shot sap. With a quick backhand strike, he whacked the Chinese man sitting opposite the woman. Another woman shrieked. The blow caught the middle-aged man across the temple. Groaning, the Chinese man tumbled over, his limbs unhinged.
Quickly, Farley unlocked the dazed man’s iron collar. Then, grabbing the chain between the man’s wrist manacles, he dragged him out of the room, down the hall and strung him up with the winch. With a practiced motion, he slit the man’s throat and let him bleed out on the floor. By now, the others would wonder why he hadn’t locked the door when he left them.
Some of them knew the answer.
Farley returned with his sap and the keys.
This time, the bleating of the sheep became shrill.
Once again, he stood before the Korean woman.
“Choose,” he asked her. “You or the boy?”
“No,” she said, crying softly.
“Choose!”
She sobbed quietly, offering no response.
“Fine,” he said. “You, then.”
She screamed and thrashed violently as he unlocked her collar, but he outweighed her by over a hundred-and-fifty pounds. He wrapped an arm around her waist and flung her at the cement wall, knocking the wind from her.
As she coughed and sputtered, he grabbed her wrist chains and pulled her down the hallway, bare feet trailing behind her. Once again, he left the basement door open.
Inside the slaughter room, he lowered the Chinese man and carried his lifeless body across the room, skirting the river of blood that had flowed down to the metal drain. He dropped the man on the table for gutting. But first he must drain the Korean woman.
Some of the fire had returned to her eyes. She scrambled on all fours toward the open doorway, but not fast enough. A moderate blow to the back of the head with the sap took the fight out of her mind and the flight out of her limbs. By the time she had recovered her senses, she hung upside down in midair, and he stood aside so she could see past the open doorway down the hall to the other open doorway.
Her gaze shifted to him, terror in her eyes as she beheld his inhuman countenance. She overcame her terror long enough to gasp, “Why?”
“Because I’m not done.”
“No.”
“I’m going back again.”
“Oh, no, please no, don’t, no.”
He crouched beside her, so his Wesen face loomed over hers—all the more strange to her for being inverted. “Yes.”
“No, you bastard! You filthy bastard!”
“For the boy.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and screamed at him—
And then the tip of his blade sliced into her throat.
Her eyes snapped open in shock. But her screaming had stopped. Her voice reduced to a string of coughing gurgles and gasps. Then, finally, her bleating stopped.
As she bled out, he strode down the hall and retrieved the boy.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nick would have had a restful night’s sleep, but Juliette kept her word and woke him at regular intervals during the night, to make sure he could be roused, basically. His head injury meant he was at risk of internal bleeding and swelling around the brain. Dire stuff. Except, Nick had been confident in his recovery. He’d had no more than soreness around his stitched scalp, not even a headache really—other than the fact that his head ached because his scalp had been ripped open and subsequently stitched back together.
Despite his interrupted sleep, Nick was touched by Juliette’s concern. For so long, she had been ambivalent about him. And “ambivalent” was, at times, putting it kindly. Her memory issues had created havoc in their relationship—Adalind Schade’s intention, naturally—so the change in their status was a balm, almost intoxicating.
He’d proposed to her once, but she’d sensed that he kept secrets from her and had turned him down. How could she marry a man she didn’t know and therefore couldn’t trust? But her recovery had stripped away the secrets that separated them. Their relationship had a much better foundation now than it had had before. So he was grateful for that, and grateful for her concern.
In the morning they shared coffee and toast, heavy on the coffee to compensate for the lack of sleep. Nick pressed his fingers gently against his stitched scalp and felt no swelling at all. The soreness was nothing more than tenderness now. He felt good.
“I think you should take the day off,” Juliette said as she rinsed her mug in the sink.
“That’s not necessary.”
“Nick, somebody whacked you over the head with a crowbar,” she said. “You should take it easy.”
“It was more of a glancing blow.”
“With a crowbar!”
“I can take it easy down at the precinct,” he said and took the last bite of his toast. He carried his mug over to the sink, where she stood with her arms crossed over her chest. Placing his hands on her hips, he leaned forward and whispered in her ear, “I�
�m okay.”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see,” she said.
“What?” he asked. “My head?”
She nodded.
He tucked his chin to his chest so she could inspect his scalp. A few seconds passed with the light touch of her fingers on his scalp, parting his hair around the stitched area.
“Hmm… you can hardly tell it needed stitches,” she said.
“Looked worse than it is,” Nick said. “Or it’s healing fast.”
“Okay, I’ll drive you to the precinct,” she said. “But remember, if you have any headaches, nausea or vision problems—”
“Right. I’ll see a doctor.”
* * *
Hank had left Nick’s Land Cruiser at the precinct, so Juliette had agreed to drop Nick off at work. But he wanted to change his clothes, so he asked her to drop him off at Monroe’s house. Because they were taking things slowly since she recovered her memories, he hadn’t moved back home yet. But soon, he hoped.
Juliette waited in her Subaru Outback while Nick ran into Monroe’s house and almost crashed into Monroe and Bud, the Eisbiber refrigerator repairman and one of the few Wesen to have woged for Juliette.
“Sorry,” Nick said awkwardly, not expecting Monroe to have a visitor so early.
“Oh, hi, Nick,” Bud said. “No problem. I dropped by to pick up my great grandfather’s old pocket watch.” He held up the reassembled antique.
“That 1887 Elgin is a real beauty,” Monroe said. “Runs like new now.”
“Thanks again, Monroe,” Bud said, and nodded deferentially to Nick on his way out. “Good day to you, Nick.”
“Thanks, Bud,” Nick said, and, belatedly, “same to you.”
“Hey, Nick,” Monroe said. “How’s the noggin?”
“You know about that?”
“Juliette mentioned it to Rosalee and, well, naturally Rosalee—just in passing, you know, not that we were gossiping about—”
Nick held up a hand. “That’s all right, Monroe. I’m here for a change of clothes, that’s all. Juliette’s waiting in the car. She’s driving me to the precinct.”
Grimm: The Chopping Block Page 11