Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set

by Gordon Carroll

  The feeling had started after Max made a gift of the giant human by crippling him, only to have Gil let him live, even allowing him to accompany them. It grew when he let the other human, the one that smelled like rotting flesh and chemicals, come along as well. The urge had grown stronger as they drove hundreds of miles in close quarters to this strange smelling place with the near constant clamor of far off gunshots and screams and cars and noise. Noise, noise…always so much noise.

  Max missed the hills of Colorado. The climate was nothing like his native Germany, but the altitude and grandeur of the mountains did compare. He missed the freedom to roam and hunt and kill…always looking for the Gray Wolf, even though he had caught not the slightest hint of his spore. Still, there were others. There were the coyotes and the foxes. He’d even caught the scent of bear and cougar. There, at least, the hunt was always possible. There, he could continue to hone his skills until the day he finally met the Gray Wolf and destroyed him. But here…here there was nothing. He was trapped in this small room and was only allowed out to empty himself and sniff around for a bit. Here, there was only wasted time.

  And so he lay here, outwardly resting, but inwardly burning and burning. Because The Alpha was The Alpha only so long as he remained The Alpha. And after that, Max would be The Alpha.

  Ziggy made it back to the motel before Gil. He walked over to tell Jerome all he had learned, but Jerome wasn’t in his room. Gil had told him to keep put, that he surely had, Ziggy heard him say it himself, but that Jerome was a wild card for sure and Ziggy had his doubts about bringing him along.

  Ziggy had a key card for Gil’s room too. They all had each other’s cards, but Ziggy decided not to go in there alone. That dog scared him something fierce. The way he stared…he didn’t bark or growl…just stared, like he was looking for the exact right place to attack. Ziggy had seen plenty of bad men and bad animals. Very few had given him the creepies bad enough that he kept his distance, paying them their due respect, but none of them came close to the fear this dog inspired. So, instead of going to Gil’s room, he left the note on his desk where they would easily find it. He’d tried calling both of them with no luck. He doubted either had been as successful as he had in gaining info. This was his town after all, or at least it had been. He’d been away a long time, this was as true as could be, but some things never change. Things like knowing the right people and debts owed and paid. No sir, those things never changed. People were always people and greed was always greed. Playing the two correctly was the key to everything.

  Ziggy broke out his kit and tied off his arm. He’d long since given up on trying to hide the puncture marks. Ziggy knew what Ziggy was and he was at peace with it. He didn’t care that others knew. Their thoughts of him were their thoughts and they meant nothing to Ziggy. He could no more live without meth than a diabetic could live without insulin. And that was just fine with Ziggy, yes sir it surely was. Besides, the needles these days were free. He’d joined a needle exchange program and, just like that, good old Uncle Sam supplied all his needs except the drug itself. And the needles had come so far from the old days. They were so thin they hardly left a mark and almost never drew blood. His veins lasted way longer and most times the pain was not even there at the initial stick. Not like the old days, with them clunky big shafts that felt like you was shoving a pipe into your arm. Back then, the cops would shove up your sleeves soon as they made contact to see if you was usin’. So folks were apt to shoot up between their toes, around their nipples… other places. Ziggy tried that hisself a few times, but it weren’t for him. Too nasty. And hey, the Good Book says the law is the great teacher. If the law says it’s okay and fine and dandy for you to get free syringes and all the works, then it must be okay with somebody way up high, so who was little old Ziggy to argue.

  He melted the shards of ambrosia in the bowl of the spoon with the wonderful compact flame throwers they sold as lighters these days, careful not to let any boil away, and then filled the syringe, not losing a drop.

  The slender proboscis of tooled metal slid past the skin barrier and into his vein. He pulled back and pushed in on the plunger, a few drops of his own blood mixing with the melted narcotic before being forced into the freeway of his blood supply. He released the rubber tie off and felt the instant surge. Ziggy loved all forms of music and thought, as he often did these days, of the great Jonny Cash in his last prime, singing the song Hurt and how the needle left its stain. Oh, but what a wonderful stain. Even after all this time, that first instant, when the demon’s blood mixed with his own, there was that flash…that explosion…like a bolt of liquid lightning that melted his soul. It didn’t last. Not anymore. Not like when he first started using. But it was still there for that instant, that split second, and it was enough. It had to be. That and the semi-normalcy he felt for hours after.

  Ziggy put his kit away, wiping the spoon down and throwing the used syringe in the trashcan in the bathroom. Ziggy felt fine now. Yes sir, he certainly did. He only wished that the others were here to go with him. He would need more cash from Gil, but they’d probably be back in time and see his note and call him. Ziggy couldn’t chance being late and missing his meeting with Rockeeta.

  Once back at the motel, I let Max out and refilled his food and water bowl. Max wouldn’t eat dog food, so I plopped in a pound of raw steak. He still didn’t like it, he preferred his meat fresh… very fresh… like still warm and maybe even breathing fresh… yuck, but I wasn’t about to let him out to hunt on his own in downtown Chicago. Although it would probably decrease the crime rate by a few indexes.

  After that, I tried calling my two compatriots on their respective phones, but neither answered.

  After about fifteen minutes, Jerome opened my door and stepped inside. He gave Max a look because Max was giving him a look, and for a few seconds, it was anyone’s guess as to whether or not one or the other was going to jump. I didn’t feel froggy so I stepped between them.

  “You were supposed to stay inside your room and lay low,” I said.

  “I followed the Senator’s men to a rundown apartment building in the projects,” he said.

  Well, that was interesting.

  “Did you find anything out?”

  “They were hassling a pimp and a ho.”

  “But they didn’t see you, right?”

  He just looked at me.

  “Tell me they didn’t see you.”

  “I shot one of them, knocked another out and stole their car.”

  “Tell me you did all of that with none of them seeing you.”

  “They saw me,” he said.

  Well that complicated things. I scratched behind an ear and sat down on the chair by the desk. I looked at Max. Maybe I should let Max just finish him off.

  “Ok, so how do the pimp and the whor… the woman play into this?”

  “Don’t know,” said Jerome. “But they went there right after you went in to see the Senator.”

  “You followed me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was Ziggy with you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s go check his room.” I used the extra key card and opened his door. On his desk, I found a note with very exact and eloquent handwriting propped on the lamp. It said that he’d made contact with Keisha’s cousin and that they were meeting at an apartment complex in the projects tonight at six o’clock. The woman knew all about why Keisha’s mom was killed, that it had something to do with the kingpin of the Bloods in Chicago, someone powerful. She knew who it was and was willing to talk for the right price. He said we needed to meet them at the listed address beneath.

  “Sounds a little too perfect,” I said.

  Jerome tapped the bottom of the note with one long finger. “That’s where I saw your guy’s men with the pimp and ho earlier. Same address.”

  I nodded. “A trap.”

  “A trap,” Jerome echoed.

 
“And Ziggy’s already in it.”

  36

  Sarah Gallager pulled her car over into the dirt about fifty yards from Gil’s house and sat there with the engine idling. She watched and waited, just as Gil had told her to do. The little Smith and Wesson .380 Body Guard rested in her lap, its tiny laser light turned off for now, but ready to go at the tap of a finger.

  She didn’t see any cars near the house or the garage or on the way up. Everything looked perfectly quiet and peaceful, but Sarah knew all about Gil’s life and that there was very little peace and quiet involved.

  Not that it mattered, she loved him, loved him like no one she had ever known and would do anything for him. She would die for him. More than that, she would kill for him. After all, he’d killed for her.

  The thought brought back painful memories that she didn’t like revisiting. The Double Tap Rapist. A shiver worked its way down her back and she tasted bile at the rear of her throat.

  Today’s snowflake women were all about the hashtag Me Too movement. The whole thing made her sick. It was like calling spanking child abuse. The concept alone stole the real meaning of the words, making the actual crime seem so much less than it was. What that man had done to her. With true effort, she pushed the memories away before she did throw up.

  After a half hour, on the clock, just as she’d promised Gil, she got out of the car and made her way to the house. She checked for the small strip of scotch tape that stretched invisibly across the top edge of the doorframe and saw that it was undisturbed. Moving to the west, she systematically checked each door and window, finding them all securely protected by their strips of film.

  She’d tried to get Gil to update his security system to real time camera access through his cell phone, but would he listen? Instead, he relied on what? Scotch tape? She shook her head and made her way back to the front door.

  Sarah had forgone her usual high heels for a pair of light blue running shoes. Her running suit and headband matched, along with her fanny pack where she’d stowed the Body Guard with one extra magazine. She’d been caught once without a gun to match the strength, speed and ferocity of a bigger predator…never again. Gil had given her the gun after the incident. He’d taken her to the range thirty times and up here to his mountain, day after day, until she could shoot every target he placed, while on the move and from behind cover. Until she felt safe. Something she’d thought she would never feel again.

  The key slid smoothly into the lock and the door opened without a hitch. Inside lay darkness and silence. Sarah eased the little gun, with its little hollow point bullets, out of the fanny pack and into her hand. In the side pocket, she had four heat sealable plastic evidence bags and a pair of ultra-thin cotton gloves.

  For some reason, she decided to leave the lights off till she reached the kitchen, which she did without mishap, not knocking into a single piece of furniture. How many times had she imagined Gil lying, with her on the couch, watching TV, or just talking and talking, snug and secure in each others arms? She wanted him so badly. But she knew he still hurt and she could understand that. She did understand it. But he deserved happiness. She knew he didn’t believe that. Gil still blamed their deaths on himself. But it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault but that horrible man.

  In the trash container by the sink, she found what she was looking for right on top. Once she donned the cotton gloves, she placed the beer can into one of the bags and peeled the seam off and sealed the two edges together. Once she got to the lab, she would use her heat sealer to properly secure the plastic, but this would do to keep out contaminants for now.

  Turning, she looked back into the living room and at the couch, across from the fireplace. She took in a deep breath, smelling him. She closed her eyes and let out the breath. She stayed there for several minutes before turning off the kitchen light and reversing her course through the house and back to her car. She still had some driving ahead of her. First to Aurora Police Department and then to her lab in downtown Denver.

  37

  Ziggy’s stash was getting low. He’d given Rockeeta more than he intended earlier, sort of a down payment, but the woman drove a hard bargain. The quarter baggy would hold him over for tonight and maybe most of tomorrow, but he’d need to find a hookup somewhere here without going near the Bloods. And that might prove harder than one would expect. Ziggy was a little shocked at the level the Bloods had taken over this city. Back in the day, the sides were kept pretty much even between the Bloods and Crips by a combination of the cops and capitalism (meaning the laws of supply and demand and good old natural price wars) and the streets laws, the laws of Mr. Darwin’s natural selection… only the strongest survive. But now the Crips were nowhere to be seen. Neither were the 13ers, or practically any of the biker gangs. And that just didn’t make sense. There was always somebody or some gang trying to push out the old. All it really took was product, men and weapons. Ziggy hadn’t seen the like since after that bad deal between Gil and Majoqui Cabrera. And that man had been an evil genius; ruthless, with a whole lot of backing. MS13 had moved in hard and fast and knew exactly what they were doing, and in the end, even they couldn’t pull a coup off like what seemed to have happened here. And that was in puny, milquetoast Colorado. This here was Chicago. Gang central for close to a century. Home of Capone, the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the rise of the Mafia in America, long before the Government cracked down and made it possible for the new gangs to move in and start dicing up the territories like prime cuts of meat.

  None of this here made much sense to old Ziggy. No, sir it did not. The balance of power had shifted so strongly to one side that it just didn’t seem possible.

  The stairways were much darker now that the sun had disappeared behind the giant buildings of the city proper, and these welfare structures were nowhere near tall enough to reach the fading rays of racing light. By the third floor, Ziggy took notice of the lack of people in the hallways. Stairways like this always had passed-out junkies or bums or groups of dangerous teens looking to hit up anyone they could for a few bucks, food stamps, or EBT cards. But there was no one.

  In the old days, Ziggy’s radar would having been pinging at full strength and he would have hightailed it out fast as he could, but those days were long gone and his fine-tuned antenna had been blunted by decades of drugs and age itself. So instead of seeing the trap for exactly what it was, he passed it off to the time of day and the differences between the old and new, forgetting his guiding principle that people never really changed.

  Ziggy knocked on the door, thinking he should probably have waited in the stairwell long enough to shoot up one last time before going to her room, but he let that go, deciding he’d share the last of his stash if he had to, figuring she would be able to hook him up with the right people to get more.

  The door opened right away and Ziggy’s eyes hardly stretched at all when he saw Clyde standing there in his suit and tie, almost as if Ziggy knew all along he would be there. But he couldn’t quite get his brain to put the pieces together like it used too. And then the mountain of a man grabbed him by the throat and dragged him into the room.

  Sarah made good time and grabbed up everything she could get from Jared Darling at Aurora PD. She raced to her lab and went instantly to work on the samples. Normally, DNA testing had an average turnaround time of about six months on major felonies. But Sarah was in charge of the lab and what was the old saying? It’s not what you know, but who you know. And Gil knew Sarah.

  In order to sequence DNA, there are four main steps; extraction, quantitation, amplification, and capillary electrophoresis. The first, extraction, is basically breaking open the nucleus of the cell and releasing the DNA molecules into solution. It’s also the step where DNA molecules are separated from other cellular material and debris, like say in this case, beer or Oreo cookies. Contaminants like this can be inhibitors in later steps, so it’s best to bleed them off at the beginning. Saves work later and Sarah was all about sa
ving work and stopping bad results before they could get a foothold.

  Sarah submitted the two samples into the Maxwell 16 DNA Tissue Purification Kit, a breadbox-sized piece of equipment that cost about four hundred bucks and saved up to three hours from the older, manual, Phenol-Chloroform Organic Extraction method.

  Now came the waiting. She hated this part, but dissolving agents had to have time to do their stuff. Once it was done, she would move on to the quantitation step, basically assuring that the matter you were testing was human rather than from something else, like bacteria. It also assessed the quantity of DNA present in the submitted samples. Two different machines are used in this phase; the Quantifiler DNA Human Quantification Kit and the ABI PRISM 7500 Sequence Detection System.

  The setup alone took an hour for most people, but Sarah had it down to a cool twenty minutes. Unfortunately, another two hours of waiting were required to get the results. After that, she would move on to the amplification step, which is accomplished through the use of a technique known as Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR. A process in which millions of copies of a specific sequence of DNA can be made in a matter of only a few hours. This would be essential here, due to the small amount of actual DNA material she had to work with.

  And then, last but not least, came Capillary Electrophoresis. Here, the mixture of amplified DNA molecules are separated in order to distinguish the various molecules from one another. DNA molecules carry a negative charge, and when an electric current is applied to the sample, the molecules enter a very thin capillary, filled with a gel-like polymer. They then migrate towards the positive anode at the other end of the capillary. The PCR products are separated by size, because the smaller DNA molecules have an easier time migrating through the polymer than larger DNA molecules. The information from this process is collected, and then using sophisticated computer software, a DNA profile is made. In other words, another forty or so minutes of twiddling her thumbs.