by Ethan Cross
“Yes, I do. But it’s kind of a moot point. Homeless winos have more class than you do. It makes this whole ‘Great Caruso’ shtick even funnier.” Marcus stood and added, “Come on, Maggie. I knew this was a waste of—”
She snapped, “Sit your ass down. I didn’t come all this way to watch you throw a tantrum.”
Marcus looked as if he’d been slapped.
Turning to Eddie, she said, “You want to prove you’re better than him. Here’s your chance. Forget about the past, whatever happened between the two of you, and be the bigger person. We both know Marcus isn’t capable of that.”
Maggie would have to deal with some backlash later for her comments, but right now, the best way to acquire Eddie’s help was appealing to his ego by using his dislike of Marcus to their advantage. She hoped Marcus would see that later, after they’d enlisted Eddie’s help.
Eddie leaned back and steepled his fingers. “I’m always happy to help officers of the law. When possible.”
“We have a mass murderer with a connection to a San Francisco crime boss they call Mr. King.”
“I’ve heard of him. Supposedly very reclusive and ruthless. But I don’t know King or anything about his activities.”
“That’s not what we need from you. We just want to use you as a reference to get close to him. A simple testimonial kind of thing.”
“And what are you supposed to have done for me?”
“Contract killing.”
Eddie chuckled. “Why on earth would I need a contract killer?”
Taking a deep breath, Maggie said, “Let’s not chase our tails here. You run a powerful criminal organization with your hands in everything from drugs to money laundering. Mr. King has similar interests on the opposite coast. We hear he’s not a very trusting man, and we don’t have the luxury of time. If you were to vouch for our undercover agents, it would help us at least get our feet in the door.”
Eddie shook his head. “I have a reputation to uphold. I don’t know your friend, Mr. King, but we could possibly do business with some of the same people. I don’t know. Hypothetically, if I was involved in anything like what you mentioned, which I’m not, I couldn’t go around helping the feds. It would be bad for business, and from what I’ve heard about King, he would hold a serious grudge.”
“We understand that. The thing is, we’re not after King. We’re after someone who works for him. We’re only trying to get a lead about our killer. King will never know we’re not who we say we are or that you vouched for the other side.”
“And why would I stick my neck out? Sounds like a lot could go wrong in that scenario. What’s in it for me?”
Marcus said, “How about the satisfaction of, for the first time in your life, not being a worthless sack of monkey—”
Ignoring him, Maggie interrupted with, “The Shepherd Organization has pull with pretty much every government agency. We would owe you.”
“What? I never agreed to—” Marcus started, but again Maggie intercepted his comments.
“Our Director asked me to extend this offer to you. We could be a powerful ally, or we could make sure that you’re on the radar of agencies like the FBI and the IRS.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No, I’m just trying to explain that it’s better to be our friend. Our Director has the Attorney General on speed dial. I think that would be the kind of relationship a man like yourself would find valuable.”
She looked over at Marcus. His eyes were on fire, and his jaw was clenched. He had never been happy with the lengths to which the Director would go to stop a killer. Marcus didn’t have a problem bending a few rules, but when it came down to it, he had his own code of righteousness that often didn’t fit within the SO’s shades of gray.
“If I were to provide you with this reference,” Eddie said, “that favor would have to be a damn big one.”
“I can’t offer you a get-out-of-jail-free card, but the Director can move a lot of mountains under the right circumstances.”
“Fair enough, but I have another minor stipulation. I’m going to need Marcus to admit that his father, Detective John Williams, was a dirty cop who liked to plant evidence.”
Marcus balled his fists. In a whisper, he said, “My father was a man of integrity. Something you’d know nothing about.”
Eddie’s calm demeanor toppled like a house of cards. He slammed a hand on his desktop and screamed, “I treated you like family, and you betrayed me. You squealed like a good little piggy. Went running right to your daddy. But when he didn’t have an actual case, he decided to make one. Except your filthy pig father got caught.”
Marcus shot to his feet, knocking over the leather chair, and before Maggie could intervene, he vaulted over the top of Eddie’s desk.
Grabbing the crime boss by the lapel of his tuxedo, Marcus lifted Eddie from the chair as if he weighed nothing. Then Marcus drove his former friend back against the large window that occupied the space behind the desk.
Using leverage, Marcus wrenched Eddie’s arm up behind his back, soliciting a crack of tendons and a cry of pain.
Marcus whispered, “I know what kind of man you are. The same one you’ve always been. Weak and afraid. You’re all talk and no action. You see that rod iron fence down there. I bet I could throw you through this window hard enough to make you land on that. I want you to imagine being impaled on that fence while I tell you the way things are going to be. Now, you’re going to take our deal, and you’ll get your all-important favor from on high. I’m going to let you go, and we’re going to have a nice ride back to the airport in your limo. But if you call me or my father a pig one more time or even try to act like the tough guy I know you’re not, then you’re either going to sprout wings or become intimately acquainted with the top of that fence.”
41
The past…
Junior hadn’t been kidding about losing his way in the warren of secret passageways. Marcus had to crawl through some, and sometimes he had to slide down or climb up. He thought he was close behind the other boys, but sound carried strangely in the dark skeleton of the house. Within two minutes, he realized he had taken a wrong turn. But even after trying to correct his error, he quickly lost the sound of Eddie’s and Junior’s voices completely.
“Great,” Marcus said to himself. “I’m going to get trapped in here and have to live on rats and cockroaches. I’ll become like the Phantom of the Opera, only inside the walls. The Ghost in the Walls. Sounds like a scary movie.”
By the end of his little speech to himself, his voice had begun to tremble with fear.
Darkness terrified him more than anything else. So much so that he carried a flashlight with him everywhere he went. But even under the protection of the miniature Maglite’s warm glow, the darkness was always creeping up behind him. The shadows seemed to pulsate with unseen dangers. The darkness seemed to reach for him. Something about the unknown. He couldn’t fight what he couldn’t see.
He told himself he was being stupid.
Sometimes he would get angry about being scared and chase the shadows into the basement with his fists in the air, ready for a fight. Of course, he had no idea what really would’ve happened if he found anything down there in the dark. He suspected it would involve a lot of screaming and a little pee in his pants.
He summoned all his courage to keep moving. He turned around, trying to trace his steps, but that had merely gotten him lost in the other direction.
And then his flashlight flickered and went out.
He slapped the Maglite over and over and was rewarded with a few flickers of illumination. But with every flash, his mind’s eye saw something moving toward him through the darkness.
The beam came on just long enough for him to see that there was nothing there. Then the light was gone, and his world became pitch black.
Marcus tried to remain calm as the input from his other senses threatened to overwhelm him. Every small sound seemed amplified. The dark corridors smelled o
f mold and mouse urine. He could taste the dust in the air. His hands shook. He felt what he hoped were imaginary spiders crawling over his body.
But then he realized that his real fear should have been the rats. The giant subway rats lived just across the water from Jersey. Rats could swim. And New York had some of the biggest damn rats anybody had ever seen.
Spiders couldn’t kill and eat him. It wasn’t as if there were tarantulas in Jersey.
Stories that other kids had told him popped to the forefront of his mind. Stories of rats eating babies and gnawing off children’s legs in the night. He had often imagined the rats crawling up under his covers and slowly devouring him. He often imagined their whiskers touching his feet. Often so vividly that Marcus would pull back the covers to check.
Getting to sleep was an incredible chore for him that sometimes took hours.
Then he heard voices ahead and stumbled his way forward. As he grew closer, he realized the sound wasn’t voices but whimpering.
Or was it squeaking? His mind projected images of a mountain of rats flowing toward him like a tidal wave.
Forcing himself to move, he crawled forward on his hands and knees, feeling his way through the space between the walls. He stopped every few feet to examine the walls for a way out. Repeating the same procedure for what felt like miles, he worked his way through the house, but the only things he found were peepholes and entrances sealed off well enough to require tools to open them again.
And along the whole journey, tiny pinpricks of sensory input made him feel the spiders crawling over him, the rats gnawing at him.
Marcus yanked his hand back as his fingertips brushed against something sharp and cold covering the floor of the passageway. Something metal. He cautiously probed the surface and discovered the inwardly spiked ribs of a vent. It felt like a giant upside down cheese grater. Testing the metal to make sure it would hold his weight without slicing his hands and knees to shreds, he cautiously inched out over the metal barrier, and then he heard the squeaking sound again.
No, not squeaking.
Now that he was closer to the source, he recognized the sound of a woman sobbing.
42
Baxter Kincaid sat atop his black-and-red 1947 Harley-Davidson Knucklehead parked in front of the almost fluorescent-colored facade of Amoeba Music. He checked the time on his phone. Jenny was either working over or enjoying making him wait. It seemed that, although he was technically her boss at Baxtercorp—the actual name printed on his business cards—she delighted in antagonizing, insulting, and discouraging him. Although, technically, he supposed she wasn’t an employee, since he didn’t pay her anything.
It was more that they were independent contractors providing a mutual service to one another. Jenny used her accounting degree to keep his books up to date along with a few other office-related tasks that would have never been completed if the job had been left up to him. And, in exchange, he agreed to let her tag along in her down time and learn the art of investigation. Why she wanted to learn had remained a mystery. She never mentioned getting her PI license or showed an interest in working on her own as an investigator. He suspected that boredom played a role, which was likely the same reason Jenny had abandoned a cushy CPA job, dyed her hair black, pierced her body, and tattooed over so much of her flawless skin.
As if summoned by his thoughts, Jenny appeared at the front window, cocked her head to the side, and winked—while flipping him a middle finger that had happy-face tattoos climbing up to a nail adorned with a winking emoji.
In that moment, Baxter could have cared less about the lessons for the night and her reasons for wanting them. All he cared about was the fact that, for the next three to four hours, he had her all to himself. If the rest of the world didn’t envy him for that, then they had never met Jennifer Vasillo.
He had little doubt that she understood his attraction to her, but she always seemed to let their relationship teeter on the edge of flirtation and consummation.
A new addition caught his eye as she walked, fresh ink on her wrist surrounded by red tissue. He could only see a small, black shape in that brief glimpse, but he made a mental note to ask her about it later. Her skin was the artificial white of cocaine. Her black hair was short and spiky with pink highlights. Her lips bright as strawberries. She wore jeans and a bright, red-leather jacket, the kind that Michael Jackson wore back in the Thriller days, the one with all the zippers. Tattoos climbed her neck, and a round nose ring looped around the bottom of her right nostril.
He wondered, not for the first time, what it would take to love a woman who disguised her true self with so many layers.
He said, “I brought an extra helmet, just in case you decided to live free on the back of the bike.”
With a shake of her head and a roll of her eyes, she said, “I prefer to keep my internal organs right where they are, instead of squished up against a guardrail like a bug to a windshield. I’ll drive. As usual.”
He shrugged. “I’m an infinite optimist.”
“You’re optimistic that I’ll decide it’s a good idea to have my insides on the outside?”
“Merely hoping that you’ll see the light. That you’ll choose to live with the wind in your hair and nothing above you but blue skies.”
“The wind wouldn’t be in your hair. California has a helmet law.”
“I was speaking metaphysically.”
“You mean metaphorically.”
“Whichever you prefer.”
“So what are we investigating tonight?”
Baxter chuckled and shook his head. “I honestly don’t recall at this point.”
43
Ackerman had wanted to rouse the whole group of task force investigators and hold the briefing that night. He had certainly seen investigators called out of bed when they were tracking him. But Emily Morgan had spouted some nonsense about not being ready and respecting the families of the officers.
Ackerman finally said, “Fine. But you tell that FBI agent’s kid—”
Emily snapped, “Agent Fuller doesn’t have any children, but you wouldn’t know that because you’ve forgotten who it is we’re trying to save.”
“Nonsense.” The little dog yapped and scratched at his leg. “Don’t you start, you grubby little hobo. As I was saying, Dr. Morgan, since we can’t bother the task force with this tonight, what avenues of exploration and investigation do you propose for this evening?”
Yawning, she said, “Your brother will be coming back on the first flight. We’ll get some sleep and be fresh in the morning.”
“But I’m not tired.”
“Not everything revolves around you, Frank. You may not require sleep, but I do. You’re a big boy, and you can decide on your own when you want to rest. But I’m going to my room to lie down for a few hours.”
“This is preposterous. Computer Man? Are you in agreement with this?”
From the screen of Emily’s laptop, the tattooed tech genius said, “You don’t actually remember my name either, do you, Mr. Ackerman?”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course I remember your name.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s … Stan … Stan Macallan.”
The agoraphobe seemed almost touched that he had remembered. But it was merely out of professional and operational reasons that he knew the man’s name. He found it strange how such small gestures of respect could serve to brighten a person’s day.
He said, “Stan, you’re on my side, right? We must press on. Once more into the breach. And so on and so forth.”
“Well, I’m pretty wiped myself …”
Ackerman focused his laser-beam gaze on the computer screen’s camera lens.
Stan said, “But I suppose I could stay up for a few more minutes.”
Emily sighed and checked her watch, “We can work on the case here in the conference room for a few more minutes, but I might pass out on you.”
Ackerman wondered if this was what it felt like for a n
ormal when his or her parents said they could stay up late. Such sensations were entirely foreign to him. His childhood was less slumber parties and sleeping bags and more acetylene torches and melting flesh.
He said, “Let’s discuss Mr. King. He’s a total recluse, possibly even agoraphobic. Only a few distant photographs of him on the balcony of his mansion are in existence. How are we going to gain access to him, with Eddie Caruso’s help or not?”
“We actually aren’t hoping to gain access to the man himself as much as his personal network,” Stan said.
“Can’t you just hack in from the outside?”
“No, it’s very secure. Like NSA level secure. The only way inside is to actually get into the building. If you can get a phone or hidden device within range of a computer with admin access, then I could hijack a Wi-Fi signal and—”
Ackerman said, “I get the idea. But the question remains, how do we arrange a meeting in the office of one of King’s high-ranking men?”
Emily stretched her arms and yawned, her movements almost feline. She said, “I think they want Eddie Caruso to help with that, but I’m sure Marcus has alternate plans as well.”
“I have some ideas of my own.”
Emily rolled her eyes. “There’s not enough coffee in the world to keep me awake through one of your ideas right now.”
“Sticks and stones, my dear. I was merely going to suggest that we send a one-way message.”
Stan said, “That sounds terrifying, especially coming from you, Mr. Ackerman. No offense.”
“None taken, obviously, but I’m simply proposing that we find someone who is believed to do a great deal of business with King’s organization. Then we make an impression on that individual and use them to send a message to King…a one-way message. King’s response would be showing up at a designated place or time or perhaps even as simple as adding us to his schedule at a certain time and we go to him. We show up. Chances are that we don’t actually meet with the boss, but if the message is sent correctly, he definitely feels inclined to at least charge a competent lieutenant with handling the matter.”