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  I drive an uppercut between his legs, my knuckles bouncing off a plastic supporter, then I’m being pushed away and he’s leaping for the door.

  My jacket is twisted up, and I can’t find my pocket even though I feel the weight of the gun, and finally my hand slips in and I tug a Beretta free and bury three shots into his legs as he runs into the hallway.

  I chance a quick look at the children, see several have been hit, see blood on the wall covering two dozen construction paper jack-o-lantern pictures, then I crawl after the perp with the gun raised.

  He’s waiting for me in the hall, sitting against the wall, bleeding from both knees. I hear him sobbing.

  “You weren’t supposed to drop your gun,” he says.

  My breath is coming quick, and I blow it out through my mouth. I’m shaking so bad I can’t even keep a bead on him. I blink away tears and repeat over and over, “he’s-unarmed-don’t-shoot-he’s-unarmed-don’t shoot-he’s-unarmed-don’t shoot…”

  Movement to my left.

  Herb, barreling down the hall. He stops and aims.

  “You okay?” Herb asks.

  I think I nod.

  “Hands in the air!” he screams at the perp.

  The perp continues to moan. He doesn’t raise his hands.

  “Put your hands in the air now!”

  The sob becomes a howl, and the perp reaches into his trench coat.

  Herb and I empty our guns into him. I aim at his face.

  My aim his true.

  The perp slumps over, streaking the wall with red. Herb rushes up, pats down the corpse.

  “He’s clean,” Herb says. “No weapons.”

  I can hear the sirens now. I manage to lower my gun as the paramedics storm the stairs. Kids flood out of the classroom, teachers hurrying them down the hall, telling them not to look.

  Many of them look anyway.

  I feel my vision narrow, my shoulders quake. I’m suddenly very cold.

  “Are you hurt?” Herb asks, squatting down next to me. I’m covered with the blood of too many people.

  I shake my head.

  “I found the car,” Herb says. “Registered to a William Phillip Martingale, Buffalo Grove Illinois. He left a suicide note on the windshield. It said, ‘Life no longer matters.’”

  “Priors?” I ask, my voice someone else’s.

  “No.”

  And something clicks. Some long ago memory from before I was a cop, before I was even an adult.

  “I think I know him,” I say.

  William Phillip Martingale. Billy Martingale. In my fifth grade class at George Washington Elementary School.

  “When we were kids. He asked me to the Valentine’s Day dance.” The words feel like stale bread crust stuck in my throat. “I turned him down. I already had a date.”

  “Jesus,” Herb says.

  But there was more. No one liked Billy. He had a bad front tooth, dark gray. Talked kind of slow. Everyone teased him. Everyone including me.

  I crawl past the paramedics, over to the perp, probing the ruin of his face, finding that bad tooth he’d never bothered to get fixed.

  The first body is wheeled out of the classroom, the body bag no larger than a pillow.

  I begin to cry, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop.

  Suffer

  Another Phin story. Phin comes from a long tradition of anti-heroes, and was influenced by Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Max Allan Collins’ Quarry, and Richard Stark’s Parker. But he’s mostly a direct descendant of F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack, with decidedly less humanity. I wrote this story at the request of the editor for the anthology Chicago Noir. He rejected it. So I sold it to EQMM and wrote another Phin story for him, Epitaph. He rejected that as well, and I sold that to James Patterson for the ITW Thriller anthology. I’m happy how things worked out.

  “I want you to kill my wife.”

  The man sitting across from me, Lyle Tibbits, stared into my eyes like a dog stares at the steak you’re eating. He was mid to late thirties, a few inches taller than my six feet, wearing jeans and a button down shirt that pinched his thick wrists.

  I sipped some coffee and asked why he wanted his wife dead.

  “Do you care?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “No. As long as I get paid.”

  Lyle smiled, exposing gray smoker’s teeth.

  “I didn’t think it mattered. When I called you, I heard you did anything for money.”

  I rubbed my nose. My nostrils were sore from all the coke I’d been snorting lately, and I’d been getting nosebleeds.

  “Any particular way you want it done?”

  He looked around Maxie’s Coffee Shop—his choice for the meeting place—and leaned forward on his forearms, causing the table to shift and the cheap silverware to rattle.

  “You break into my house, discover her home alone, then rape and kill her.”

  Jaded as I was, this made me raise an eyebrow.

  “Rape her?”

  “The husband is always a suspect when the wife dies. Either he did it, or he hired someone to do it. The rape will throw the police off. Plus, I figured, with your condition, you won’t care about leaving evidence.”

  He made a point of glancing at my bald head.

  “Who gave you my number?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to say.”

  I thought about the Glock nestled between my belt and my spine, knew I could get him to tell me if I needed to. We were on Damon and Diversey in Wicker Park, which wasn’t the nicest part of Chicago. I could follow him out of the diner and put the hurt to him right there on the sidewalk, and chances were good we’d be ignored.

  But truth be told, I didn’t really care where he got my number, or that he knew I was dying of cancer. I was out of money, which meant I was out of cocaine. The line I’d done earlier was wearing off, and the pain would return soon.

  “I get half up front, half when it’s done. The heat will be on you after the job, and you won’t have a chance to get the money to me. So you’ll put the second half in a locker at the train station, hide the key someplace public, and then give me the info when I’m done. Call from a payphone so the number isn’t traced. You fuck me, and I’ll find you.”

  “You can trust me.”

  Like your wife trusts you? I thought. Instead I said, “How would you like me to do it?”

  “Messy. The messier the better. I want her to suffer, and suffer for a long time.”

  “You’ve obviously been living in marital bliss.”

  “You have to hurt her, or else we don’t have a deal.”

  I made a show of thinking it over, even though I’d already made my decision. I assumed this was a way to cash in on life insurance, but what life insurance policy paid extra for torture and rape?

  “You have the money on you?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Pass it under the table.”

  He hesitated. “Trust goes both ways, you know.”

  “I could just walk away.”

  Like hell I could. I needed a snort worse than Wimpy needed his daily hamburger. But I’m a pretty decent bluffer.

  Lyle handed me the paper bag he’d brought with him. I set it on the booth next to me and peeked inside. The cash was rubber-banded in stacks of tens and twenties. I stuck my fingers in and did a quick count.

  Six grand, to take a human life.

  Not bad for a few hours work.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow night, after 10pm. I’ll be out, and she’ll be home alone. I’ll leave the front door open for you. I’m at 3626 North Christiana, off of Addison. Remember, rape and pain.”

  He seemed to be waiting for a reply so I said, “Sure.”

  “And Mr. Troutt…” Lyle smiled again, flashing gray. “Have fun with it.”

  After the diner meeting, I called a guy about securing some fake ID. Then I called my dealer and scored enough coke to keep me high for a while. I also bought some tequila and refill
ed my codeine prescription.

  Back at my ratty apartment, Earl and I had a party.

  Earl is what I call the tumor growing on my pancreas. Giving my killer a name makes it a little easier to deal with. Each day, Earl eats a little more of my body. Each day, I try to prevent Earl from doing that. There’s chemo, and radiation, and occasional surgery. And in the off-times, there’s illegal drugs, pharmaceuticals, and alcohol.

  Earl was winning.

  Luckily, being a drug abuser has some excellent side benefits, such as not caring about anything, erasing all emotion, and helping to forget the past.

  Just a few months ago I had a well paying job in the suburbs, a beautiful fiancée, and a life most would be envious of. Earl changed all that. Now, not even the roaches in my tenement building were envious of me.

  I drank, and popped, and snorted, until the pain was gone. Until reality was gone. Until consciousness was gone.

  Earl woke me up the next morning, gnawing at my left side with jagged, rabid teeth.

  I peeled myself from the floor, stripped off the jeans and underwear I’d soiled, and climbed into a shower slick with mildew. I turned the water as hot as it would go, and the first blast came out rusty and stung my eyes. I had no soap, so I used shampoo to scrub my body. I didn’t eat well, if I remembered to eat at all, and I could count the ribs on my hairless chest. I made a note to eat something today. Who would hire a thug that weighed ninety pounds?

  After the shower I found some fresh jeans and a white t-shirt. I did a line, choked down three painkillers, and dug out an old Chicago phone book.

  “Walker Insurance.”

  “I had a couple questions about life insurance.”

  “I’ll transfer you to one of our agents.”

  I took my cell over the fridge and listened to a Musak version of Guns N Roses while rummaging through the ice box. Nothing in there but frost.

  “This is Brad, can I help you?”

  “I’m thinking of taking out a life insurance policy on my wife. We live in a nice neighborhood, but she has this unrealistic fear—call it a phobia—of being raped and killed. I’m sure that would never happen, but do you have policies that cover that?”

  “Accidental death includes murder, but not suicide.”

  “And rape?”

  “Well, I’ve heard of some countries like India and Africa that offer rape insurance, but there’s nothing like that in the US. But if she’s afraid of being attacked, a good life insurance policy can help bring some peace of mind.”

  “What if she doesn’t like the idea of insurance? Could I insure her without her knowing it?”

  “For certain types of insurance, the person covered doesn’t need to sign the policy. You can insure anyone you want. Would you like to schedule an appointment to talk about this further?”

  I thought about asking him if he covered people dying of cancer, but I resisted and hung up. My next call was to the 26th District of the Chicago Police Department.

  “Daniels.”

  “Hi, Jack. It’s Phineas Troutt.”

  “Haven’t seen you at the pool hall lately. What’s up?”

  “I need a favor. I’m looking for paper on a guy named Lyle Tibbits.”

  “And I should help you because?”

  “Because you’re a friend. And because he owes me money. And because I probably won’t live to see Christmas.”

  Jack arrested me a few years back, but she’d been cool about it, and we had an on-again-off-again eight ball game on Monday nights. I’d missed a few lately, too stoned to leave my apartment. But I’d helped Jack out a few times, and she owed me, and she knew it.

  “Let’s see what Mr. Computer has to say. Lyle Tibbits. Prior arrest for—it looks like trafficking kiddie porn. Did a nickel’s worth at Joliet. Paroled last year.”

  “Anything about a wife or kids?”

  “Nope.”

  “Address?”

  “Roscoe Village, on Belmont.”

  She gave me the numbers, and I wrote them down.

  “Nothing on Addison?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can you give me his vitals?”

  Jack ran through his birth date, social security number, mother’s maiden name, and some other choice info cops are privy to.

  “You coming this Monday?” she asked when the litany ended. “I finally bought my own cue.”

  “A Balabushka?”

  “A custom stick on my salary? More like Wal-Mart.”

  “I’ll try to make it. Thanks, Jack.”

  “Take care, Phin.”

  I tucked the Glock into my pants, pocketed my set of master keys and a pair of S & W handcuffs, and hit the street. It was cool for July, in the low seventies, the sun screened by clouds or smog or both. I grabbed some sweet and sour chicken at a local shop, and then spent an hour at a place on Cermak filling out paperwork. When I finished, I hopped in a cab and took it to Roscoe Village.

  Lyle’s apartment had a security door, which I opened on the fourth try. One of my first acts as a criminal had been to rob a locksmith, earning me a set of sixty master keys. They opened ninety percent of the locks in the US. It was much easier than learning how to use picks and tension wrenches, which is something I didn’t have the time to learn anyway.

  The halls were empty, befitting midday. I found Lyle’s apartment number and knocked twice, holding my pistol behind my back.

  No answer.

  I got through this door on the second try, set the security chain so no one could pop in on me, and began my search.

  In the living room were six double DVD recorders, all which seemed to be running. In a box next to the TV were a hundred plastic clamshell boxes, and a spindle of blank recordable DVD-Rs. In the corner of the room were three digital camcorders and a PC. I powered up the computer, spent ten minutes trying to get his password, then gave up and turned it off.

  The kitchen revealed a smorgasbord of junk food—he had enough sugar in here to put an elephant into a diabetic coma. On the counter, next to the phone, was a receipt for a glazier, the total more than five hundred bucks. Stuck to the fridge with a banana-shaped magnet was a picture of Lyle drinking a beer. I put the picture in my pocket.

  In the bedroom, I found an extensive collection of porno DVDs. Bondage, watersports, S/M, D/s, extreme spanking, and even a kink new to me; latex vacuum mummification. All legal.

  I found his illegal stuff in a padlocked trunk, in the back of the bedroom closet. The lock opened with the seventh key I tried.

  Child porn. Movies with titles like “See Billy Cry” and “Maxie’s Birthday Surprise.” Some of the covers had pictures.

  I tried not to look.

  There were also a few other illegal movies, along with a bag full of cash. Over twenty grand worth.

  I took the money, locked the trunk back up, and left the apartment.

  Satisfied that I knew who I was dealing with, I bided my time until 10pm.

  Then I could finish the job.

  As promised, Lyle had left the door open for me.

  The house was dark and quiet, just like the neighborhood. I walked down Christiana and up the porch stairs without encountering a soul. Once inside, I locked the door behind me and held my breath, listening for sounds of life.

  Nothing.

  The lights were on in the living room, and I held my Glock before me and did a quick search of the first floor. The furnishings leaned towards the feminine side; pink drapes and flower patterns on the couch. On the end table, copies of Glamour and Cosmo. In the kitchen, a half-eaten container of lowfat yogurt sat on the counter, a spoon alongside it. I checked the back door, found it locked, and then crept over to the staircase.

  The stairs were carpeted, but they squeaked with my weight. I paused after every two steps, ears open. I didn’t hear a damn thing.

  The second floor revealed an empty bathroom, an empty guest room, and a bedroom.

  The bedroom was occupied.

  A woman was tied to the b
ed, naked and spread-eagled. She was white, late twenties, her blond hair tangled up in the red leather ball gag buckled around her mouth. Leather straps around her ankles and wrists twisted around the four bedposts. Her eyes were wide with terror, and she screamed when she saw me, the sound lost in her throat.

  There was a note next to her head.

  Give it to her. And leave the gag in, or she’ll wake the neighbors.

  The room was unusually well-lit. Besides the ceiling light, there were lamps on either side of the bed, one in the corner next to the mirrored closet, and an extra work-light—the portable kind that clips to things—attached to the bed canopy.

  “Hello,” I said to the woman.

  She screamed again.

  “Shh. I’ll be with you in just a minute.”

  I took two steps backwards, toward the closet, and then spun around, facing the mirrored sliding door. My free hand pulled back the handle while my business hand jammed the Glock into the closet, into the chest of Lyle Tibbits.

  Lyle yelped, dropping the camcorder and trying to push me away. I brought the gun up and clipped him in the teeth with the butt.

  He fell forward, spitting blood and enamel. I gave him another chop on the back of the head, and he ate the floor.

  “Dontkillmedontkillme!”

  I put my foot on his neck and applied some weight, glancing back to check the rest of the closet. Empty. The mirror was one-way, and I could see the bed through the door’s glass. The original mirror rested against the rear wall.

  “Who is she, Lyle?”

  He yelled something, the carpet muffling his words. I eased up some of the pressure from my foot.

  “I just met her last week!”

  “She’s not your wife.”

  “No! She’s just some chick I’m dating!”

  “And you hired me to rape and kill her so you could videotape it. I saw the other films back at your apartment. Does snuff sell for more than kiddie porn?”

  Lyle wiggled, trying to crane his neck around to look at me.

  “It’s worth a fortune! I’ll cut you in, man! It’s enough money for both of us!”

  I glanced at the woman, tied up on the bed.

  “How much money?” I asked.

  “I’ve got over half a mil in advance orders! We’ll be rich, man!”