Dead Reckoning

by Linda Castillo

  “How bad is the damage?” she asked.

  “I don’t think it’s too bad.”

  Kate walked to the rear of her mom’s car, careful to keep her distance, and looked at the bumper. He’d left his headlights on, and she could see that there was a dent in the shiny chrome. Shit, she thought, and felt a small flare of anger. That anger was smothered by something else when a second man got out of the car. This guy was big, and he didn’t look nearly as nice as the first man.

  “I figure we can just exchange insurance information and get on down the road,” the first man said. “What’s your name?”

  “Katie,” she said without thinking.

  “Well, Katie, don’t you worry. I got good insurance that’ll pay for everything.”

  He didn’t look like he’d have very good insurance.

  “Good,” Kate said, but she was watching the large man walk toward the passenger-side door where Kirsten sat. Kate’s parents had taught her to be careful around strangers, and she was starting to get an uneasy sensation.

  “We’re kind of in a hurry,” she said. “Let me get my purse.”

  She was aware of the second man standing at the passenger-side window, bent at the hip and talking to Kirsten. Kate didn’t know why, but she didn’t want him there. She wanted him someplace where she could keep an eye on him.

  She walked back to the driver’s-side door and spoke to Kirsten through the open window. “Hand me my purse, will you?”

  “Sure.” Kirsten turned and grabbed the bag from the back seat. When she handed Kate her bag, Kate could see that her sister was nervous. “Hurry,” Kirsten whispered, leaning close. “This guy is creeping me out.”

  “What are you girls doing out this late?” The fat man straightened and looked at Kate over the roof of the car.

  “We’re going to a—” Kirsten began, but Kate cut her off.

  “We’re meeting our parents.” Kate gave him her toughest look. “And we’re late.”

  “Is that so?”

  She jolted when the other man’s voice sounded directly behind her. She hadn’t seen him approach. For the first time it dawned on her that there wasn’t a soul around. That they were totally alone with two strangers in a desolate part of town and nobody knew where they were. In that instant Kate began to tremble inside. She knew something was wrong. She sensed danger. And she knew something bad was going to happen.

  She turned to face the scraggly-haired man behind her. The initial fingers of adrenaline ripped through her when she realized he was standing too close. That he was looking at her funny. The way men did sometimes. A way that excited her and scared her at once. And suddenly sneaking out of the house to go to this party seemed like a very bad idea.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, but her voice was breathless with fear.

  The man laughed. “We’re going to have us a little party, Kay-tee.”

  “We have to go.” Kate went with her instincts. Whirling, she grabbed for the door handle. But two strong hands wrapped around her and jerked her violently back. She started to scream, but the next thing she knew she was slammed against the car door hard enough to dent it. Pain radiated up her spine. Then the man with the scraggly hair was against her, pushing and grunting. She smelled body odor and cigarettes and breath that was tinged with alcohol. She felt the slick dampness of sweat against her skin.

  Vaguely she was aware of the fat man pulling Kirsten from the car. Kirsten screaming. They can’t do this, she thought and screamed. “Run!”

  The man tried to put his hands beneath her shirt. Wiry fingers tearing at her bra. Outrage and terror exploded inside her. Kate lashed out with both fists, hitting him on the head and shoulders.

  The first blow hit her squarely in the forehead. Her head snapped back and hit the roof of the car. White light exploded behind her eyes. Another blow just above her left ear shocked her system. Like a stick of dynamite going off inside her head.

  She must have blacked out then because the next thing she knew she was lying facedown on the ground. Her mouth was open and full of dirt and grass. She spat mud and tried to roll over, but his knee was in the small of her back. She saw the bandanna in his hand and then he was using it to tie her hands behind her.

  This isn’t happening, she thought. No. No. No!

  “No!”

  Kate woke to her own scream. For an instant she was seventeen years old and so filled with horror and revulsion that she wanted to die. Sweat slicked her body and dampened her pajamas, but she was shivering with cold. A cold that came from a place inside her that knew of unspeakable horrors.

  It had been a long time since she’d had the nightmare. She didn’t know why it had come rushing back tonight. Maybe the pressures of her caseload were taking more of a toll than she’d thought. Kate tried hard to keep her past out of the cases she tried, but she wasn’t always successful. She knew that for better or worse, she would always be a product of her past.

  Throwing back the down comforter, she got out of bed, pulled off her damp pajamas, and wrapped herself in her robe. A glance at the clock told her it was almost one A.M. Even though she was exhausted, she knew sleep wouldn’t come again. In the bathroom she opened the medicine cabinet and picked up the bottle of prescription sleeping pills. It had been over a year since she’d taken one. She didn’t want to take one now, and slid the bottle back onto the shelf.

  But she could still feel the dark press of the nightmare, hanging on like a leech, sucking the lifeblood from her. Eleven years had passed since that terrible night. But some wounds never healed. The key, she’d realized, was learning to live with them.

  The truth of the matter was she was lucky to be alive, but some days Kate didn’t feel lucky. She felt damaged and tainted. She thought of Kirsten lying in her bed in her overdecorated room at the Turtle Creek Convalescent Home and felt the old pain slash her with spindly claws. Her sister hadn’t deserved to have her life taken away.

  Goddamn those sons of bitches who did this to us, she thought with a vicious anger she was all too familiar with.

  Giving up on the hope of going back to sleep, Kate crossed to her closet, pulled out a pair of jeans and a navy turtleneck sweater. Quickly she dressed and stepped into her boots. She ran her fingers through her hair, shrugged into her leather jacket, and grabbed her keys. She may not be able to sleep, but that didn’t mean she had to stay home and bounce off the walls.

  There was plenty she could do tonight.

  For what she had in mind, the wee hours of morning were the perfect time to do it.

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 1:56 A.M.

  The wipers slapped rain mixed with sleet from the windshield as Kate parked on a narrow side street in a nasty part of South Dallas. Not bothering with her umbrella, she opened the door and stepped into the cold night. She took the cracked sidewalk to a three-story brick building bedecked with gang graffiti. A single bullet hole marred the storefront window of the long vacant furniture shop next door. She was keenly aware of a car idling slowly down the street and knew the driver was eyeballing her, wondering what a nice white lady was doing in that part of town at two in the morning.

  If only he knew.

  The wooden door creaked like old bones when she opened it and stepped into the dark foyer. Her boots thudded in perfect time with her heart as she crossed to the narrow wooden staircase. She took the steps two at a time. The second level smelled of garbage, marijuana, and vomit. Down the hall and to her right, a wino sat slumped against a wall, a bottle of rotgut in his hand, his bloodshot eyes glaring. A mangy cat looked at her from behind a garbage can, a dead rat hanging from its mouth.

  Frowning, Kate continued on to the third level and took the darkened hall to a wooden door with an etched glass window. Like a Philip Marlow movie from the 1940s, a printed sign on the glass read: “Jack Gamble, Private Detective.” She almost smiled every time she saw it. Almost.

  The light was on inside, but Kate didn’t need the light to know he was working. Jack Gamble
was a night bird. By the time he opened his office for business, most folks were at home and tucked into bed. But then, she supposed Jack’s kind of work required the cover of night. That was precisely the reason she’d hired him.

  She opened the door to find him sitting behind his desk. He looked up when she entered. Simultaneously his right shoulder moved slightly, and Kate knew he’d put his hand on the gun he had mounted on the underside of his desk. She’d asked him about it once, and in his quiet way he’d told her he’d mounted it there just in case some shady character came calling in the middle of the night. Kate knew all about shady characters, and she didn’t begrudge him the gun. She had a legal concealed handgun license herself. But she knew that even in South Dallas, an economically depressed area rife with gangs and crime, nobody fucked with Jack Gamble.

  “Kate. What’s a pretty lady like you doin’ up at this hour?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” she said, crossing to his desk.

  “Well, this ain’t no place for no prosecutor. ’Specially after dark.”

  He’d been saying the same thing every week for the last year. Kate always answered the same way. They were both creatures of habits. Some of them good. Some not so good. But the one thing they both knew was that when she walked into Jack Gamble’s office, she was not a Dallas County assistant district attorney. She was a woman on a mission and the only reason she was there was because he could help her reach her goal.

  Smiling, she stopped adjacent his desk. “I just can’t seem to get through the week without seeing you.”

  A deep chuckle rumbled up from his barrel chest. “And you got a weakness for ugly stray dogs, too.” A man of impeccable Southern manners, he rolled his wheelchair out from behind the desk and motioned to one of two wooden rail-back chairs in front of his desk. “Sit down.”

  Kate settled into the chair and contemplated the man across from her. In his late forties, he was the size of a woolly mammoth and as black as the west Texas night. But while he might appear to be overweight at first glance, Kate knew the bulk in his upper body was mostly muscle. He was not a handsome man. Once a Dallas narcotics officer, he’d been shot four times during a sting. The first shot had severed his spinal cord just below his waist. The second had hit him in the chest. The third in the stomach. The fourth in the face. The doctors had done what they could, but they hadn’t been able to put his face back together the way it had been before the shooting. His forehead was slightly concave on one side. His right eye was higher than his left and slightly sunken. A scar as deep as a man’s finger had dug a groove through his right cheekbone.

  But his was an interesting face nonetheless. A strong face that spoke of character and intelligence and the kind of courage that was rare and ran deep. He’d come highly recommended by a former ADA who’d used him on a personal matter she’d wanted kept discreet. Within the first five minutes of the initial interview, Kate had known he was the man for the job.

  Kate had done her homework before hiring him. She knew he was married with at least seven grown children from two different women, one of whom he’d been married to for the last twelve years. She knew he’d been a good cop with three commendations. She knew he’d been a private detective since leaving the department some six years earlier and that his endeavor into the private sector had been successful and financially rewarding. Above all else, Kate knew Jack Gamble was discreet. That had been the deciding factor for choosing him.

  “You must be a mind reader,” he said after a moment.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I was going to call you in the morning.”

  Kate sat up straighter. “Did you find something?”

  “I been digging around for you going on a year now. ’Bout time I did, don’t you think?” Her pulse quickened when he pulled out a tattered brown folder and opened it. “I got a name.”

  Her heart went into a free fall, like a plane with a stalled engine. She stared at him, and suddenly it was as if she was seeing him at the end of a long tunnel. A name. She couldn’t believe it. After eleven unbearable years she would finally have a name.

  “Danny Lee Perkins.” He passed her the folder.

  Kate’s hand was shaking when she reached for it. It seemed as if she’d been waiting for this moment her entire life. She took the folder, opened it, found herself staring at a five-by-seven photograph of a middle-aged man with thinning brown hair, pale blue eyes, and a pocked complexion.

  Facedown in the grass. Dirt in her mouth. Horror exploding in her brain. Pain ripping through her body. Her innocence shattered. Her life changed forever . . .

  She ran her tongue over the bridge where her broken front tooth had been repaired. The old hurt mingled with a fresh wave of hatred. She stared at the photograph, aware that her mouth had gone dry. Her heart was pounding. Eleven years gone. He would be older. Heavier. But she knew he would be the same in one aspect. . . .

  Her eyes sought his right cheek, and she had to make a conscious effort to choke back the sound that tried to squeeze from her throat. The birthmark was one of the few details she remembered about his face. Eleven years ago, from her hospital bed, she had described it to the police as a “red mark on his cheek.” Later, when she could bear to think of it, when she could force herself to recall his face, she’d realized the man who’d attacked her had had either a port-wine stain or cherry hemangioma birthmark.

  This man had the mark.

  Slowly she raised her eyes to Jack Gamble. The big man was leaning back in his wheelchair, watching her with eyes that saw more than she wanted him to.

  Kate’s hand was steady when she set the folder on the desk. “It’s him.”

  “I thought so.”

  “What do you have on him?”

  “Eleven years ago he moved from Houston to Louisville, Kentucky, to live with his aunt. Worked at an auto body shop for the next two years. Kept his nose relatively clean. Then he moved to Knoxville, Tennessee.” He flipped the page. “He got into a fight at a bar and did nine months on an assault charge. Two years ago he got busted with a syringe and some crystal meth. Did four months. Kept his nose clean while he was on probation.” Scratching his temple, he scanned the file. “Moved back to Texas seven years ago. Lived in Beaumont. Houston. Bay City.” He looked up at Kate. “He moved to Ft. Worth last year. That’s where I lost track of him.”

  Kate could feel herself coming apart inside. Staring across the span of desk at a man she’d known for the last year—a man who’d proven himself far too astute—she wondered if he could see the turmoil inside her. The statute of limitations for sexual assault in the state of Texas was seven years. There was an exception for DNA evidence, but eleven years ago that exception hadn’t been in place. Which meant the man who’d hurt her so brutally, the man who’d ruined her sister’s life, would never be forced to pay for what he did.

  Kate was going to make sure he did.

  “What about the other man?” she asked, referring to the man who’d nearly killed her sister.

  “I have a couple of names. Eddie Calhoun. Ricky Steiner. Ronny Stein. Rick Steinle. He’s used a lot of aliases over the years. I’m following up on a couple of leads. Last I heard, he was in federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, on a murder one charge. I’m going to make some more inquiries when the offices open in a few hours.”

  Kate thought prison was too good for the man who’d beaten her sister so brutally she’d suffered irreparable brain damage. Kate wanted him in hell where he belonged. She wanted to be the one to put him there. “How much more time do you need?”

  He rolled a shoulder. “Hard to tell at this point. The man sitting pretty in Club Fed might not be our man.”

  “If it’s not him, I want you to keep looking.” Digging into her bag, Kate removed a plain white envelope. “There’s another five thousand in there.”

  “Kate . . .”

  “I want you to find them, Jack. Both of them.” She glanced at the folder on the desk, picked it up. “His last known a
ddress in here?” She gave him a pointed look. “I need his last known address.”

  “I’ll have it for you in a couple of days.” He gazed levelly at her. “Leave the looking to me, Kate. You hear?”

  For the first time since she’d known him, Kate got the impression he hadn’t given her everything he had. Maybe because Jack was a good man and had a pretty good idea what she was going to do with the information. But she didn’t need a good man. She didn’t even need a friend. She needed a PI with a don’t-ask-don’t-tell philosophy.

  She’d made the mistake of letting him see too much over the last year. As unlikely as their friendship seemed, she knew he cared for her. To be perfectly honest, she cared for him, too. But she wouldn’t let that deter her from her goal.

  He was looking at her as if he thought she might do something rash. But Kate Megason never did anything rash. Sooner or later she would get those two men. Even if it took another year, she would see to it that Danny Lee Perkins and his son-of-a-bitch sidekick paid for what they did.

  Rising, she dug into her bag for her keys.

  “I’ll see you out,” Jack said.

  He always asked, and Kate’s answer was invariably the same. “I can handle it, Jack.” Smiling, she patted her Chanel bag where she kept her .22 mini-magnum revolver. “Let me know when you get an address on Danny Lee Perkins.”

  “Will do.”

  She started toward the door. “Keep me posted on the other guy.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  Kate walked through the door without looking back.

  EIGHT

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 9:31 A.M.

  “Why don’t we have video?”

  Kate looked across her desk at David Perrine, who sat in one of two visitor chairs, nursing a double cappuccino. They were in Kate’s office because the conference room was being used by another attorney who evidently had more clout than she did.

  “Detective Bates said the police interview room camera wasn’t working. We’re going to have to make do with audio,” David said.