Last Call - A Thriller (Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels Mysteries Book 10) (4 page)

“Can we stick with Katie?” Phin almost said
stay on Katie
but caught himself in time. No need to toss McGlade any easy lobs.

“No family. No friends, either. Dunno why she even has a cell. Other than taxis, the last call she made was ordering a pizza. Who still uses the phone to order a pizza? Haven’t people heard of the Internet? You can order anything online these days. I found this escort on the net named Sinnamon. Spelled with an
S
. I don’t think that’s her real name, by the way…”

Phin interrupted. “What kind of surname is Glente? It’s not common.”

“I looked it up. It’s Danish. Means
bird of prey
. Pretty coolpants. So, anyway, I took Sinnamon to Cracker Barrel—true story—and in the middle of lunch rush she gives me a handy under the table. Totally worth the three hundred bucks an hour. Plus, she barely touched her chicken fried steak, so I took that home with me. It’s always a bonus when you don’t have to feed the escort. Kinda like getting free undercoat protection at the car wash.”

Phin tuned him out and pictured Katie’s face. Weren’t many Danes with black hair, but that could have been dyed. And those with Nordic ancestry weren’t known for their ability to tan, but Katie had an Arizona glow to her skin. Perhaps the name was a fake.

“Did you see that YouTube video?” Phin asked, cutting off a Harry story about how he once had sex in the car wash, but he didn’t really count it on his tally sheet because it was with an inflatable doll.

“Yeah. Major yuckypants.”

Phin had watched it several times after Katie had left. “Do you think it’s Luther?”

“How should I know? Blurry as hell, only lasted a few seconds.”

“If you had to guess?”

“Seems like the kind of sick shit Luther Kite would do. Plus he had that ghoul next to him.”

“Ghoul?”

“That scarred chick. Skinny little serial psycho. Lucy. After Michigan, I put together quite a little dossier on her and her buddy, Donaldson.”

“Can you even spell
dossier
?”

“Yeah. It starts with an F and ends with a U. Why do you have to be an asspants and mock all of my dope detecting skills?”

“What is up with you adding the word
pants
to the end of everything?”

“Oh. I’ve got an anonymous blog. It’s called The Mansplainer. So I did that pants thing once—I called a commenter
dickpants
—and it started trending on Twitter. Hashtag dickpants. Now it’s become my signature.”

“People actually follow you?”

“Hell yeahpants.”

“Okay then, Harrypants—”

“Blog is anonymous. No one knows it’s me.”

“Okay then, assholepants—”

“That’s pretty meanpants, Phin.”

“Can you just make your point about Lucy, without saying pants again?”

“I can’t make that promisepants. As for Lucy, she’s one for the true crime books. Ran away from home when she was a kid, started hitchhiking and killing anyone who picked her up. Same MO as the video; she would drag them behind the car on a chain, pulling them down the street until their clothes scraped off, stopping every few hundred meters to spritz their skinned bodies with lemon juice. So she meets up with Donaldson—he’s yet another
psycho from Jack’s past
. He likes to pick up hitchhikers and torture them to death. Donaldson and Lucy hurt each other real bad. We’re talking
major league freak show disfigurement here
. And somehow they bond from the experience,” Harry said. “Pants.”

Lemon juice. That must have been what was in the spritz bottle on the video. When she squirted that poor bastard, he thrashed around like he was being electrocuted.

“So you think that’s Luther in the video?”

“Tough to say. He’s got that hood on. He’s all scarred up. But I think it is. The clincher is the knife. For someone who has killed as many people as Luther Kite is supposed to have killed, there isn’t a lot of information on him. But all sources agree that he favors a Spyderco Harpy.”

Phin was familiar with the Spyderco brand. He paused the video, then used his browser to enlarge the picture. The silver knife being used to carve trenches into the screaming man’s back had a curved blade, like the beak of a hawk.

“So what’s the planpants?” Harry asked.

Phin didn’t have to think about it for more than a few seconds before he made his decision. If that really was Luther, and Lucy, Phin wasn’t going to wait around for them to eventually come calling. Jack and Sam shouldn’t be forced to live in constant paranoia. Better to nip it in the bud.

If that really was Luther and Lucy, Phin would fix it so they’d never bother his family, or anyone else, ever again.

“I’m going to check it out. Don’t tell Jack where I went.”

“How can I? I don’t even know where the hell you’re going.”

“Just stay quiet, McGlade.”

“Want me to go with you? We could make a road trip out of it. Hey! I could invite Sinnamon! You’d have to pitch in for her hourly rate, though. It’s okay; getting a handy isn’t like cheating. It’s more like a rigorous, joyful greeting. Think of it as saying hello, in the nicest way possible. Jack lets you greet people, right? Or if that doesn’t work for you, I can bring my inflatable doll. We’d probably need some wet wipes or something if we take turns.”

Phin hung up on him before he could say
pants
again.

Then he watched the YouTube video once more and tried to prepare himself for what he needed to do.

S
creaming filled her radio earpiece.

The video. That would be Phin’s sixth viewing.

Katie wanted to ask him about it. Wanted to get his opinion. She had her suspicions about its origin, but her skillset didn’t include detective work. When she’d met with that idiot, McGlade, she’d gone there to hire him and Jack to help her track Luther down. But McGlade didn’t actually inspire confidence. All he really inspired was a desire to bathe.

Jack Daniels, however, was another story. If anyone could find Luther, it was Jack.

Which was why Katie watched Phin drive away, a duffle bag in hand, and didn’t follow him.

Maybe Phin would find Luther. Maybe he wouldn’t.

But once Jack knew Phin was gone, she’d go looking for him. And Jack would lead Katie to Luther Kite.

Katie made her way deeper in the woods, past the property lines, into some undeveloped land alongside a creek. Trees, bushes, years of fallen leaves, and an occasional dirt-covered beer bottle with its label obliterated by the seasons. No one came back there.

She stood beneath a large elm, removed a foldable pruning saw from her pack, and spent an hour clearing a line of sight to Jack’s front yard. Then she set up her scope on a small tripod, settled in, and waited for the retired cop to come home.

T
he voices outside the door had been raised for several minutes now, and the argument was escalating.

Standing by the window, she stared through the iron bars as snow fell onto the street six stories below. For a moment, she touched her fingers to the freezing glass, the closest she could come to experiencing the world outside. Right now, it was cold. In the summer, it would be hot. Because of the orientation of the building she occupied, she hadn’t actually seen the sun in over two years.

This room was her world.

She ate here.

Slept here.

Lived in a heroin-laced fog here.

And in between all the forced horror, she escaped into the worlds of her paperbacks and old magazines whenever she had a moment to herself. That was the best thing about her life by leaps and bounds. Once a week, a green-eyed man named Winston would come bearing an armful of tattered, yellow-paged paperbacks from a nearby thrift store.

If business had been good, he’d bring her five, plus a magazine or two.

If it had been a slow week, two or three.

If she’d broken a single rule: none.

But she hadn’t broken any rules. Not in a long time. No escape attempts. No suicide attempts. And they didn’t even have to beat her anymore. The worst thing they could do was deny her reading material. Deny her that escape. As far as punishments went, she’d have opted for a ruthless beating over no new books or magazines, any day. Pain went away. Pain could be forgotten. But without the escape of her stories, her thoughts inevitably drifted back to all that had been taken from her.

Those thoughts were unbearable.

But the printed word took away the pain, even more than the drug needle.

Ann Rule, Joel McGinniss, Vincent Bugliosi, F. Paul Wilson, John D. MacDonald, Agatha Christie: these writers were her saviors. Without them, she’d have surely wasted away to nothing.

She turned from the window, from the snowy city whose name she did not know, and moved across the one-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t much. A gas stove. An ancient refrigerator that hummed constantly like a diesel engine. A couch that had clearly been pulled off the side of some disgusting curb and still smelled like someone else’s trash.

Stopping at the door, she put her ear to the wood.

When she’d heard the footsteps coming down the corridor, she’d assumed it was time to go to work.

But something else was happening out there that sounded like trouble.

Two of the voices she immediately recognized.

She couldn’t forget them if she’d wanted to. They would haunt her always.

The third…

Sounded familiar.

Low, gravely, with a touch of psychotic mirth.

Yes, she knew that voice. He’d been here many times to see her.

Donaldson.

A heavyset man who wore a paper-thin veneer of good ‘ol boy conviviality over something ugly. Even uglier than the men who kept her here.

It was his voice she heard bleeding through the door: “I don’t know! File it in your
shit happens
folder. It ain’t my problem, gentlemen.”

“It is actually,” one of her captors said—the short one with massive thighs she knew as Ben. “You were supposed to use a rubber. House rules.”

“Really?” Donaldson snorted. “You two want to lecture me about rules?”

“You come here, we have an agreement on how to do things. You can slap the girls around, use them however you want. But you gotta use a rubber.”

“Not my problem,” Donaldson said. “She’s not my property. She’s yours. I just rent her. How do I even know I’m to blame?”

“Because everyone else,” Winston said, “uses a goddamn rubber.”

“I don’t even remember the last time I was here. I only blow through town every few months.”

“And that’s how far along she is. Bottom line; we want three hundred bucks to make this right.”

“Bullshit!” Donaldson began to laugh. “You shooting up what you’ve been pushing, Winston? I’m not paying to fix your whore’s condition. It’s an occupational hazard.”

She took a step back from the door. Through the receding heroin fog, she reached down, put her hands on her belly, realizing for the first time:
it’s a bump.
A small one, to be sure, but a bump nonetheless. She’d noticed it last time she was in the shower, but had written it off as bloating.

What if…

“We’re all reasonable men,” Winston said. “We don’t want this to get ugly.”

Donaldson’s voice got low. “You have no idea how ugly this can get.”

“Is that how you want to play it, friend? Two against one? Is that risk worth a few hundred bucks to you?”

“I came here to get laid, and I get a shake down. This how you treat all your longtime customers?”

“We just want to make this right. And we’ll even throw in a freebie.”

There was a long pause. “Fine. You want me to take care of this?”

“That’s all we’re asking.”

“I’ve got some equipment down in my trunk that should do it. I’ll be right back up. We’ll get this done right now.”

“Hold up. You’re not qualified to do this.”

“It ain’t rocket science. It’s just—”

“We aren’t going to trust the well-being of our property to you and your toolbox.”

Another pause.

“Fine,” Donaldson said. “But if I’m paying, I should get to watch.”

“You serious?” Ben asked.

“It’s my baby. And I’ve never seen an abortion before. Could be fun.”