Four: Four Killer Stories Read online

  I had one shot to find her.

  They would want to take her out of there as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.

  I left the bodyguard trussed up, but with the knife close by so he could free himself. I ran out to the car, threw it in gear and rocketed out onto the highway, thinking they’d watched me watching the bodyguard, knew I was going to take him down while he was jogging. So they moved in, got her, and got out, leaving me to take the blame once what was left of her body washed up on shore somewhere, whatever the sharks decided not to eat. And they’re not known for being picky eaters.

  I used my cell phone to call the marina. The only marina in the area if you had serious money.

  I got the receptionist, named the law firm, and said I was a caterer needing to deliver a gourmet picnic basket for the law firm’s boating party.

  She checked her records.

  The firm had no boat at the marina.

  I swung onto 41 South.

  As I drove, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the cockroaches back in Detroit. They weren’t going to fly her out for the simple reason it’d be better to kill her down here. So if they were going to kill her here and dump her body someplace and they weren’t using a boat, they’d probably do it in one other place.

  The Everglades.

  I drove ninety miles an hour, approximately. I figured my odds weren’t that bad. According to my map, there was only one road to the Glades from here and I figured they had maybe a ten minute head start. But they wouldn’t want to speed and attraction attention.

  I notched it up to a hundred, as fast as the piece of shit rental car would go. And I caught up to them ten miles from Everglades City. The touching off point for any forays into the swamp. As soon as I pulled up to the gray Buick, I knew it was them. Two bullet-headed thugs in suits in the front seat. The top of someone’s frizzy hair against the bottom of the back window. She was probably unconscious and bound. Slumped in the back seat.

  I dropped back into traffic and followed them to a small, public marina. They parked in front of the public information area and one of the slabs of meat went into the little building.

  The other one went around to the trunk of the car.

  That’s when I shot him in the back of the neck with the tranquilizer gun. He took two steps and stumbled, luckily, on the side of the car not visible from the information shack. So when his partner came out, I shot him in the thigh. He took three steps and fell on the other side of the car.

  I hurried out and saw the girl in the backseat. She was trussed up with nylon ties and a gag. Here eyes were open. She didn’t look scared.

  I didn’t have much time. I loaded the two guys into the trunk of their car, undid the girl’s ties and walked her back to my car with my arm around her. I had no idea how many people were in the information building just how much they had seen. I backed out of the lot so my license plate wasn’t visible. It might buy me a little more time.

  Back on 41, I turned right and headed toward Miami.

  After a few minutes, she sat up a little straighter and looked at me.

  “Who are you?” she said. Her voice was firm and low. A lawyer’s voice.

  “A former employee of the same firm you worked for.”

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to take me back to them?”

  “That’s what I was hired to do,” I said.

  “And?”

  “And I don’t think I’ll be fulfilling my end of the bargain. I believe in lawyer’s terms it’s called misrepresentation.”

  “Are you the Garbage Collector?” she said.

  “I really hate that name. But yes.”

  “Your reputation precedes you,” she said. She glanced back over her shoulder. No one was behind us.

  After a beat, I said, “What do you have on them?”

  She let out a long sigh. “Money laundering,” she said. “For the mob and a big collection of drug dealers.”

  “Were you blackmailing them?”

  She smiled, a tired exercise. “You don’t blackmail these guys.”

  “So they tried to bring you in, you said no, then you had to get out. But they weren’t about to let you out.”

  “No one gets out.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the Feds?” I said.

  “I did,” she said, an eyebrow raised. “They had an agent guarding me but he left for his jog and then they came and got me.”

  “Oops,” I said.

  “Now what,” she said as much to herself as to me.

  I thought about it.

  “I have a buddy who makes people disappear,” I said. “He’s in Arizona.”

  “I don’t have much money,” she said.

  “I’ve got some money from the law firm. I don’t think they’ll be asking for its return.”

  She smiled just a little bit.

  “Consider it your severance package,” I said.

  She gave a slight nod and I turned the car around.

  Pointed it toward Arizona.

  THE END

  Hanging Curve

  Looking back, it really all began and ended with a photograph.

  As I stood and looked down at the black and white image of my brother, I sensed the irony immediately. You see, even though I was two years younger, we had looked almost exactly alike. Our build. The way we spoke. Our mannerisms.

  In fact, when we were growing up, people constantly got us mixed up with each other. Our friends and our teachers would call us by the other’s name. It was like we were twins. But there was one thing that was different between us, and it was dramatically different.

  It was the way we thought.

  People sometimes joked that the way to tell us apart was that I was the one with the brain. Now, looking at the crime scene photograph of my brother, the memory seemed to echo.

  Because someone had blown my brother’s head off.

  •

  “I really appreciate this, Mike,” I said.

  “Least I can do,” he said, and flopped my brother’s flimsy case file onto his battered metal desk. Detroit was down to nothing in terms of money for cops, and Mike Haverley’s corner of the world was a prime example. He looked at his shabby black desk chair, then back up at me.

  “I’m thirsty,” he said.

  We walked down to a cop bar a few blocks from the station house.

  “To Joe,” he said and held his bottle of Heineken up toward mine. We clinked, and he drank half of his in one long pull. Mike and my brother had been good friends growing up, often partners in crime until Joe had left to play ball. Mike had stayed.

  I looked up at the television toward the other end of the bar. The Tigers were playing the Brewers. Mike followed my gaze.

  “He was something else, wasn’t he?” he said. Mike smiled at the memory, and I took in the lines in his face, how was one of his teeth was cracked.

  “Effortless,” I said. Because I knew, without asking, that Mike was talking about my brother’s ability on the baseball field. Joe had been a star for East Detroit High School, had gotten a full-ride scholarship to a college in Ohio where he’d promptly been booted out a year later and wound up on the Tigers’ farm team. A year after that, he was playing in the pros.

  Mike slid a document out from the inside of his tan and coffee-stained JCPenney sportcoat.

  “Don’t read this now,” he said. “An ongoing investigation, a lot of press because of your brother’s…” He paused, looking for the right word.

  “I understand,” I said. Even though a bar is a great place to have a discreet conversation, it’s not foolproof.

  He drained the rest of his beer and I signaled the bartender for another, which she placed in front of Mike. My beer’s level was still visible above the label.

  “Can I ask you a question Tommy?” he said.

  I nodded, already knowing what was coming. The same question I’d been asked a million times as a kid, and later,
after Joe was playing ball for the Tigers.

  “It ever bother you?” Mike said. “How good he was?”

  “No,” I said. “I loved to watch him play.” And it was the truth. Joe Locker was the single most natural athlete I’d ever seen in my life.

  “Besides,” I said. “All of our coaches told me the same thing.”

  “What’s that,” Mike said. He looked at me, a little surprised at my honesty.

  “I think too much.”

  •

  A day later, Mike called and told me the investigation was over. They had the guy. About a year before my brother Joe’s murder, a homeless guy had been found in an abandoned lot south of the city with his head blown off. And according to the report, that wasn’t just an expression. Literally, the head was almost completely gone.

  Just like Joe’s.

  The coroner was able to dig double-aught buckshot out of the neck stump and guessed the shotgun was probably a 10 gauge, maybe even an antique 8 gauge, judging by the size of the shot.

  After the first homeless guy was found, every month or two another one was found around the city, usually in the poor sections. Unfortunately for Detroit, the poor sections constituted most of the city. The victims were all similar in that they were drunks, drug users, homeless, or all three.

  My brother was a drunk and a drug addict, but I had bought him an apartment years back so he was never homeless.

  Not that it mattered.

  The cops had done their work, and eventually with some tire tracks, a key eyewitness and an informant, they had followed the trail to a guy named Wayne DeVoss. An artist with a warehouse studio overrun with rats, crack pipes, some unusual paintings and a suitcase with nearly fifty grand in cash.

  At first, the suitcase got all the attention, but eventually, it lost favor to the canvases. Which soon revealed the heavy impasto and thick textures weren’t oil or acrylic, but blood and brain tissue.

  Maybe inspired by the urban legend of snuff films, Wayne DeVoss had been an artistic pioneer, opening up a whole new field of modern art.

  Death paintings he called them.

  •

  The funny thing about being labeled as an athlete who thought too much was that even back then, it didn’t offend me. Because I knew they were right. My brother could play deep shortstop, backhand a high bouncer, whirl and throw with a fully unconscious grace a “frozen rope” to first base. I was the opposite. I would charge a ball, sacrifice my body to knock it down and then throw it with a clenched fist and gritted teeth, holding onto the ball too long so that it scorched dirt at the first basemen’s feet.

  Thinking too much.

  Not a good trait for an athlete.

  So I turned to computers. While Joe was out every night, drinking, getting high, getting laid, I focused on the family computer. I studied it. Took it apart and put it back together again. I studied software, learned code and more importantly, what good code could do. Within six months I had hacked into our high school’s computer system. Another six months and I was browsing private files at the University of Michigan, General Motors and the Detroit Mayor’s office.

  But I never told anyone.

  Even back then, privacy was all I really wanted.

  Privacy.

  And time to think.

  •

  I didn’t attend any court appearances featuring Wayne DeVoss. The man meant nothing to me. Instead, I booked a room at a nondescript hotel in a suburb of Detroit and fell into a routine. Early in the morning, I would study deals, contracts and project files for my company. I had also added a bit of a venture capitalist arm to my original software business and the profits from those half-dozen deals had made me a very wealthy man.

  In a way, my success had eerily counterweighted Joe’s fall from grace.

  His rookie year for the Tigers would be his best. The big contract that followed at the end of that year opened up the gates to the Party Palace and kept them open until long after Joe, his booze, his drugs and his money were thoroughly exhausted.

  It happened quickly. After that first season, the steady diet of booze and drugs began to eat away at his reflexes. The errors occurred with greater regularity. His batting average, always high because of his instinctive hitting style, began to drop. At first, a few digits every month. And then double digits. During his sophomore season with the Tigers, he started using heroin in addition to cocaine and alcohol. And then, in a colossal blunder, he started sleeping with, and introducing drugs to, the 18-year-old daughter of the team’s owner, a billionaire businessman and entrepreneur named Nicholas Kuchin. The girl wound up overdosing and nearly dying, the tabloids went nuts, and at the end of the season, Joe was history in Detroit.

  •

  According to the Homicide Team’s notes and photographs, obtained for me by a subcontractor of my company who was an expert at illegally accessing government computers, DeVoss’s setup for his death paintings was somewhat ingenious.

  The subject was placed on a chair, in profile, in front of a large canvas on an easel.

  Directly in front of the subject was an old-fashioned still camera. The huge kind used by old portrait photographers, where the camera operator ducked under a black velvet shroud.

  What DeVoss had, though, was a double-barreled shotgun set up inside the contraption. A thin plate of mirrored glass prevented the models from seeing the working end of the double-barreled shotgun.

  DeVoss would no doubt tell the subject to remain still, then blow their heads off, splattering the canvas in the process.

  A one-take shot.

  •

  Despite my reputation as being somewhat cold, a rational man driven by logic, I felt the fury building inside me.

  So I did what I’ve always done best.

  I thought about it.

  The crux of the problem was that for the police, the victims of DeVoss were pretty much the same. They were drunks, drug addicts, homeless people, or some combination of the three.

  My brother fit perfectly into the victim profile DeVoss had followed.

  The cops thought so.

  And I did, too.

  Or, at least, I had initially.

  But then I thought about it. And thought some more.

  Eventually, I reached a decision.

  It came down to the blackballing. That was the thing that really set Joe back. It hadn’t just been his own torrid demise, as thorough and impressive as that had been. In addition to himself, he’d also practically brought down the entire organization. The owner’s daughter, Victoria Kuchin, wound up in drug rehab, having narrowly escaped death. Nicholas Kuchin, at the end of Joe’s sophomore season, had a massive brain aneurysm, some claimed brought on by the stress of his daughter’s problems. The team had their worst season in twenty years, and nearly everyone blamed Joe. It was hard enough trying to find a new team when you had botched your own season as a player. But when you’d practically brought down a franchise single-handedly, well, no one wanted you. Period.

  That summer I bought Joe a first-class ticket to the West Coast, and after I had badgered him enough, he finally relented and came to see me. And to get out of Detroit.

  I’ll never forget the look on his haggard face when we toured my headquarters, which at the time, was easily half the size it is now. But Joe was genuinely happy about his little brother’s success. And everyone at my place loved Joe, his easy humor, and graceful presence even apparent away from a baseball field. They didn’t see him as I did. To me, he was a drink and drug-addled shell of his former self. Even at half power, though, his personality and spirit were enough to win people over.

  That night, over broiled lobster and a few bottles of white wine on the balcony of my flat overlooking the Pacific, he let me get a glimpse.

  “I’m finished,” he said. “I let down the wrong people.”

  It was maybe the third time in my life I’d heard him say something negative.

  “Baseball is a huge community,” I said. “Even you coul
dn’t piss everyone off.”

  He took a deep drink of his wine.

  “No, not all of them,” he said. “Just the ones that matter.”

  •

  The more I thought about it, the more it came down to that suitcase of cash. My expertise had to do with computers. But that suitcase made me think. I went back to the police reports and read them front to back, back to front, and back again. I set the papers down and went to the wing chair in the corner of my hotel room, turned it toward the window and stared until the last of the sun began to fade behind the wall of brownish green suburban sprawl. When the truth hit me, it did so as it often does; like a fist to the belly accompanied by a streak of white-hot exquisite pain.