The story so far: City homicide detective Ronnie Hurtler investigates the murder of billionaire CEO Ollie Caroon, and returns to duty just as the killer strikes again in an underground parking garage.
Meanwhile college student Veronika, who supports herself through a sexcam business, has made contact with Ronnie and is offering him ‘special services’, including help locating the late Caroon’s huge bitcoin stash.
But now Ronnie’s been taken to talk with the boss of the elite city police armed intervention squad, ‘Beyond’ Bill Simons. About the murders, or maybe…?
A charming rustic shed at the bottom of a suburban backyard, abutting a modest fence. The backyard garden planted with geraniums and gardenias, tidy parterres of primroses, pleasant but not showy. An apple tree, the sparrows on the branches chirping in a restrained and tasteful dawn chorus. And the house itself: solid and demure, the house of an accountant who keeps his head down.
But Ronnie’s not taken inside the house. The cadaverous agent leads him down a path and through a side gate. Into the deep green, sprinklers gushing clear crystalline water across the lawns. Up the garden path and into the spacious shed, lit this fine morning with skylights pouring radiant sunbeams about the dusty air.
And there’s Beyond Bill, the most feared chief in all of law enforcement, petting his lumpy black labradors. Standing there in his plaid slippers. Wearing a large loose gray cardigan, threadbare and with holes worn at the elbows, in sore need of those leather patches you might use for mending cherished old knitwear. His flannel shirt, his corduroy pants. His deep-lined face, so authoritative and grandfatherly. Only the tight, unwavering gaze shows any sign of the killer within.
Shelves around the open floor are stacked with potting supplies, fertilizers, seed packets. There are two worn armchairs in the center. The only incongruous touch is a laptop lying next to some orchids in a pot, its screen – and camera eye – facing the chairs. A short stretch of black tape has been discreetly placed over the little LED indicating whether the camera is live. So it’s live, thinks Ronnie. We’re on somebody’s record.
Bill Simons looks up from his adoring dogs and smiles invitingly at the newcomer. His long face is jowly, unshaven. His gunmetal hair is thinning. His eyes are cold steel. The escorting agent, undertaker or guide, has withdrawn unnoticed from the potting shed.
“Won’t you take a seat, Detective Hurtler?” says Simons, indicating an armchair right opposite the laptop’s eye. “I’d love for us to have a little chat together.”
Dust motes grace the sunlit air with their wanderings. Everything about this setup is so cosy – the plants, the panting dogs, the aged avuncular man in his slippers – everything except the stare that Simons trains on Ronnie as he sits.
No offers are made of drinks or other amenities. This, despite the appearance of a visit to a favorite uncle to chew over the latest sports gossip, is an interrogation. Some kind of a trial. You have the right to remain quite comfortable. You have the right to consult a horticulturalist.
“So, Ron… Do you mind if I call you Ron?” Simons has eased himself into the other armchair.
“My friends call me Ronnie. You can call me Detective Hurtler.”
“Cute, very.” An indulgent smile. “I love a little fencing bout to clear the air before the real stuff begins.” The old guy twiddles the ears of his labradors. He stretches out his slippered feet and crosses them. The dogs nestle their heads on his thighs. Like gargoyles adorning the gates of Hell.
“So, Ron, here’s the thing. There’s a certain amount of missing cash – excuse me, not cash, that’s just me showing my age – missing cryptocurrency, which younger folks inform me is just as good as cash. I tend to doubt that. Something about the feel and smell of the good ol’ greenback just can’t be bettered.”
“I tend to concur with you, Bill.”
“Good to know. So, Ronnie, do you know anything about the Caroon stash? The virtual hoard or whatever it is? There’s a good boy, who’s a good boy now?” This last spoken to the labrador with his head in Bill’s lap, or so Ronnie supposes. Could be spoken to him.
Ronnie goes bright, helpful: “Got my best people working on it, Bill. Feelers out, pulse of the streets, all that. Nothing as yet.”
“Should your best people, or indeed you yourself, discover anything, I’d appreciate a heads-up. In fact I’d consider it a great favor. With consequential effects indicating deep gratitude to follow. Equitable sharing arrangements. A tasty post on my unit for you, among other things.”
“That’s mighty tempting, Bill. I’ll bear it in mind.”
The kindly smile remains on Bill Simon’s face as his steel-gray eyes lock onto Ronnie’s. “I would hope you might consider it more than merely tempting.” The old gent is holding the snout of one of his labradors now, squeezing it with a vise-like grip. The dog starts to wheedle in distress, and its companion turns and skitters into the corner of the shed, whining in sympathy. “I was kinda banking on you taking it rather more seriously than that, Ronnie. Like more of a pledge of allegiance, than just a casual thing to bear in mind.”
Ronnie gets to his feet, ready to start swinging as the dog’s cries grow urgent. But Simons releases his grip on the labrador’s snout, and it shoots off to hide under the potting bench with its companion.
“I need to take a little time to consider your kind offer,” says Ronnie, his gaze still locked on the gray stare of the gently smiling old man in the comfy armchair. “Meanwhile, I can undertake to keep you updated on all developments in the matter of the crypto. I can promise it’s my top priority to open that thing up.”
Beyond Bill Simons seems satisfied with this concession, and beams like a grandpa getting a handmade piece of crafts handed to him by his favorite grandchild. The lines and furrows in his face soften, but never the gray metal eyes. He gets easily to his feet, much more lithe and supple than Ronnie had expected.
“Glad to hear it, partner,” he stretches out a hand to shake Ronnie’s, the same hand that’s just been inflicting pain on his devoted labrador. Ronnie stands there with his hands by his sides.
Bzz bzz. A cellphone buzzes in the pocket of Bill Simon’s old gray cardigan. He takes it out and looks at it.
“Looks like you’ll have to be going now, detective. So nice to have had this little chat. I’ll lend you Agent Howard as an escort, and he’ll take you Code Red to the scene.”
Ronnie’s puzzled: “What scene?”
Ronnie’s cellphone rings. Skipper Justine Jason: “Hurtler, come quick to the address I’m texting you now. Downtown, parking garage.”
“What is it, skip?”
“Pretty sure this is another one of those. Gravedigger. Different MO, but has all the hallmarks. Rich dude, nothing stolen, clean professional-style hit. Got another collateral casualty too, victim of the victim. A pretty fucked-up situation all told. Get your ass down here, code red.”
When Ronnie looks round, Beyond Bill Simons is already at the potting bench, transplanting geraniums from the propagator to the flowerpots and humming a carefree tune. The black labradors have come out from under the bench and are nuzzling at his knees. He gives a little backward farewell wave as undertaker Agent Howard opens the shed door from outside and lets the morning light stream in. As their bodies pass through the doorway, the dust motes swirl like tiny suns from the beginning of time.
Ronnie gazes into the vampiric neck hole and feels his own wound throb with recognition. Only this particular wound has a twin on the other side, left and right holes symmetrical and neat. Two holes for twice the bloodletting. The result of which was a sticky, panicked death, victim gasping for a breath of iron-tinged air that can’t quite be swallowed down.
This whole ungodly mess was complicated by the good samaritan who, upon hearing the flailing goose honking of the victim thrashing the car horn, rushed to the SUV and got her grubby little hands all over the crime scene. She’s sat on the trunk of her own car now with a blanket over her shoulders relaying once more to Justine Jason what she’d just told Ronnie:
When she opened the driver’s door and made some attempt to staunch the bleeding with her tiny palms, the victim made a grabby reach for her throat and began choking the one person come to save him, evidenced by the purplish bruises rung around her neck. The parking garage video confirmed this and more – the behoodied perp climbing into the SUV two hours prior to the murder, then fleeing moments after the victim climbed into the driver’s seat. Then this poor receptionist from a nearby office building clattering up and opening the door, reaching through only to get throttled by the dying man.
She’s got blood on her hands (but only in the literal sense), and on her crisp white blouse and pencil skirt. The rest of the blood is pooling and pungent at the foot of the driver’s seat and forming a squishy puddle beneath the dead guy’s butt. The victim’s head is tilted back and his body slumps limp. Ronnie can see that he was probably quite handsome, though certainly only through the work of much plastic replacing bone and flesh. His pearly white veneers came loose in the ordeal of dying and hang slightly crooked, giving the impression that he’s smirking.
The car was bricked, the automatic doorlocks hacked open, and all by the same illicit device. A thing the manufacturers had known about all along. A zero-day exploit, they call it. Not widely enough known to affect sales, not important enough to fix. So their cars go on, vulnerable to whoever might get hold of the dark tech. Convenient for the killer, thinks Ronnie. Convenient for plenty of others too.
When J.J. is done with the receptionist, she beckons Ronnie over, and they convene in her car so as to keep their conversation from echoing all up and down the concrete garage. There are crime scene techs and uniformed officers bustling up and down, and it’s hard enough to think, never mind converse. The skipper puts on the radio, mild melodic jazz drifting all around the interior. Enough sound to drown out any wire? Maybe so.
“Lay it on me,” Ronnie says.
“It’s not good, Hurtler.”
“Come on.”
“We’re fucked. The city’s gone bananas batshit.”
“Skipper, J.J., what are you – ”
“It’s another CEO.”
“I coulda guessed that much from the expensive car and impeccable plastic surgery, Justine.”
She’s wringing her hands in her lap. No wedding ring today. Must be exhausting, thinks Ronnie. At least when he and Francine were done, they made sure it was done. No on-again off-again, no we can make this work, no it was a one time thing, I’ll never have a coke-fueled orgy while you’re outta town ever again. It certainly wasn’t an amicable split, but it was frighteningly easy for the both of them. You take this and I’ll take that, well we gave it our best shot, see you in hell. To do it in cycles like the Captain – no wonder she’s pulling out gray hairs.
“So what?” Ronnie posits. “So this guy, this Gravedigger, killed two rich people. It’s not a pattern yet, and we can’t even be sure it’s the same perp.”
“Do you ever get outside, Ron? People have been screaming on the streets for years that there’s some fucking class war being waged every day in this city of ours. Up until now, it was all invisible. We could ignore it and, God bless us, we were better off that way. Now? This is a real war brewing. If we don’t suppress the living fuck out of this, like yesterday, it’s going to get real ugly real fast.”
Ronnie’s gripped by the urge to push back on this familiar logic. In fact the line of reasoning that arrives in his mind is something Veronika had shared with him in their last chat: You ever have a zit just building up under your skin, Ron? Irritant, reddened, itchy. Knowing that the best thing to happen would be for it to break right out as a great big pustule you could pop. That’s what this city is right now. Looking for the big pop. It has to happen.
Dermal logic. Dermatologic. Wants to explain it to the skipper. He bites his tongue in the end. She already knows how it’s going, her chat simply bravado.
Stick to the job, be professional. “Tell me about the CEO, Cap. Any link to Caroon?”
“Not on the surface.” She exhales, perhaps relieved to be grounded once more in the realm of facts and figures. Pulls out her notes.
“Name’s Jerry Perry. 38. CEO of SmoothRun LLC. They make those smart treadmills that give you AI-generated smoothie recipes. A few people have allegedly died from said recipes. Allergic reactions, inedible ingredients and the like.”
“I’ll stick to McFlurries, thanks,” says Ronnie. “Minding my health right now.”
“As you might guess, SmoothRun has never been found at fault for any of these deaths,” Jason continues. Now she smiles, amused despite herself at the ironies folding up over each other. “Perry’s supposed to be the first gay CEO to crack a billion – but it’s all optics. He’s a closeted straight guy, strictly faux gay for pay. In actual fact, he’s a habitual womanizer. Dozens of unclaimed children... allegedly.”
“Gotta make sure the right ones populate the world, skip.”
She grins crookedly, goes on: “As far as we can tell, Perry had no direct relationship to Caroon but we’ve already linked them as attendees at three separate conferences where it’s possible they might have had contact. It might not matter anyhow whether or not they ever met. ‘Cause there’s this much more damning link.”
“What’s that?”
“They use the same elite team of lawyers in all their various litigations, all of which they’ve won.”
“Huh.” Ronnie drums an arrhythmic beat on the car door. “I guess that’s not surprising. Very incestuous, these Fortune 500s.”
“You don’t think it’s important?” the Captain presses.
“Important? I dunno, skip. Is any of this important? It reeks of obviousness. What about the killer? It’s a totally different weapon, different approach to the killing. Not a stride-by shooting, a kind of ninja stakeout with hacker accoutrements. You telling me nobody was able to give us a better description this time around? That feels important to me.”
Captain Jason turns her head away. He’s struck a chord. “The receptionist saw only a blur in the stairwell–that’s what she called it. A blur. Not a lick of concrete description. The video is dark. There might be a face mask, but the cyber team is still working on getting us clearer footage. DNA doesn’t look promising.”
“This killer is smart,” Ronnie mutters.
“This killer is a major pain in my fucking ass, Detective Hurtler.” She groans, verging on a growl. “Ron, the goddamn mayor wants to meet with homicide officers about this. Or his team of aides does, at any rate. Fat chance that senile geezer understands any of what’s going on in this city.”
“Shit.”
Out across the parking garage, the receptionist is screaming at one of the beat cops, demanding something, and the patrolman is demanding something right back. Ultimatums are in play. There’s an escalation of hysteria, a climbing tone. Neither cops nor witness seems to quite understand what it is exactly they’re demanding. They’re in one another’s faces, about to get physical.
“Want me to come with you to see the mayor?” asks Ronnie.
Voices rise in the concrete space of the garage, and echoes angle off the walls as jagged curses and threats cut across each other like pelting rain in a coming storm.
Veronika steps gingerly over scattered piles of shit beneath the overpass. The dried turds glisten suspiciously in the sparse pink evening light – the clouds have dispersed just in time for the day’s departure and the ground is still damp. She’s approaching the lip of Alicia’s makeshift lean-to shelter when her friend’s arm comes waggling out from under the covering and releases a cloud of spray from some shaking canister.
“Girl, what the fuck!” Veronika stumbles backwards, coughing, narrowly avoiding the same piles of shit she’d just traversed.
Alicia’s head emerges from the box, hair wet and disheveled around her gaunt face. “Oh, it’s you, Vron. Sorry, queen.”
“What the fuck is that shit?” She regains her composure, spitting up the taste of the bitter gas from her tongue.
“Bear spray,” she says simply. “Keeps away the men. And the women. And the bears.”
“Girl, what? You’re in the financial district. What bears?”
Alicia settles back inside her box. “Stuff gets weird out here at night, V. There’s this hour, sometime between 2am and 3am where everything stretches out and all anyone wants to do is fucking kill you.”
Veronika hikes the hem of her skirt – it’s new, expensive – and crouches to observe her friend where she huddles in the claustrophobic dark. “That bear spray can’t be enough to keep you safe.”
“I have a bat, too.” She plucks from the recesses a baseball bat with thick nails poorly driven through its heft and wields it like a sword in the tiny space.
Veronika exhales and pivots her head side to side. All around the trash-ridden encampment the unhoused people linger at the threshold of their lean-tos, leering at one another in the depleting light. Even amongst these people and their shared plight is the growing sense that they might all begin brutally bludgeoning one another for no other reason than to release the paranoia through a misting of blood. Whatever thin threads were holding people together are fraying fast.
Across the way, where the road harshly divides this homeless encampment from the financial district, the evening news is lighting up on the side of a building. The day’s big headline: another dead CEO. Jerry Perry of SmoothRun.
Alicia giggles. “My aunt had a cousin who had a girlfriend who died because that guy’s AI treadmill told her to grind up a peach pit in her smoothie.” She laughs harder, doubling over. “Know what’s in peach pits, V?”
Veronika peers over her shoulder. Darker and darker by the minute. Even she, a city-walking pro, is growing concerned about those lurkers in the shadows. “Nu-unh, I don’t.”
“Cyanide!” Alicia cackles. “She died choking on her own vomit. The cousin sued the fuck out of the company but he was the one who ended up having to pay. For libel and slander.” The laughter peters out dry and withered, the humor gone to its final gallows.
From where they stand under the overpass, Perry’s grinning face glowers over them from 100 feet on high. Fine teeth, a round face. The news is struggling to find anything meaningful to say about him. The little tickers at the bottom of the screen show plummeting stocks and below that, in the tiniest print, reports of other less important strings of homicides across the city. A block burnt down. Bodies in the river drifting with the loose garbage. A group of protestors mowed down by a Meals on Wheels van.
“Ladies, a very good evening to yiz.” They turn to see a grizzled man in a wheelchair, his legs truncated at the knees. He’s old but maybe not so old, somewhere in that desperate wasteland of the middle-aged homeless male in which forty looks exactly the same as seventy. He sports a stubbly beard, red-faced and balding. He wears a green tank top with a yellow logo: a harp and the words ERIN GO BRAGH.
This man makes a little salute and then propels himself up the ramp beneath the overpass towards where Alicia’s shelter is situated, just under the ledge. His arms are thick, the most muscular that Veronika has ever seen, with faded inexpert tatts of stars and rifles and harps on them.
Alicia makes to present him: “This is my friend, the one I mentioned. Charlie McGurk. Charlie, my friend Veronika.”
He holds out a vast paw and squeezes her hand tenderly. “Charmed, young lady. Chuck McGuck at yer service.”
“I thought it was McGurk?”
“That too. I’m just funnin’ yer, like.”
They titter politely then look out across the darkening evening as if they were neighbors leaning across the fence in a suburban lane. A three-legged dog hobbles past below.
“Charlie was telling me about some gangster he used to work with, Vron. A guy with a pornstar name, what was it? Whiteman something…Big Bulge, like that.”
“Whitey Bulger,” says Charlie, “If you’d’ve told old Whitey he had a porno name, he’d a’ kneecapped yiz on the spot, so he would.”
“But really it does sound like that,” says Veronika. “Honky Bigboy. Cracker McGirth. It has a ring. I should know, I’m in the business, in a manner of speaking.”
“McGirth is good, sure enough,” says Charlie. “Sure, I should adopt that name for meself. So what is it ye do Veronika? Skin flicks, is it?”
“Self employed in adult entertainment,” says Veronika. “Exclusively for online patrons. My card.”
“Nah, thanks, but I haven’t a need for it, love” says Charlie. “Besides, I’d prefer to think of yerself and Alicia here just as friends.” He raises his gunshow arms in conceptual embrace, taking them both in.
A voice calls out from below. A whistle. Someone in the half-shadow has the three-legged dog by a string and beckons to Charlie.
“Well, I’ll love yiz and leave yiz,” he says. “Young Dermot wants me to go play catch with Gen’ral Santana. Take care now, girls.”
They watch him propel himself at frightening speed down the embankment. The night is coming in fast. “Alicia,” Veronika says. “You can’t do this anymore.”
Alicia cradles her bat like a dangerous baby. “Like I got another choice. Once you’re homeless you don’t get a home again. This is it for me, like, always.” She’s smiling but also weeping softly.
The streetlights come on, flickering and weak. It’s the witching hour, but when you’re homeless, every hour is the witching hour. Anything could emerge from the cracks and crevices of the city to gut a girl for fun or fear. Shat on and spat on, and raped and abused, so goes the song Charlie’s been singing of the old main drag.
Veronika sucks in through her teeth. “What if I said I could get a home? For both of us.”
The girl falters, not quite understanding. “That’s a sweet fuckin’ fantasy, baby V. We always used to dream of getting our own place when we were young dumb fucks. But the world don’t turn for us, hon.”
“I got some money,” Veronika says, and she has to say it with her eyes closed. “Enough to put down for a lease. Two bed. For both of us.”
This cuts a knife through Alicia’s stupor. “You serious?”
“I’m serious.”
“But you – I thought you were saving. For the surgery.”
She conjures up a grin and hopes Perry’s false smile isn’t still lit up behind her. “I was. But that can wait. This thing still makes me money, so…” she shrugs. And so a temporarily useful pecker gets an indefinite reprieve.
Alicia is crying but doesn’t seem to notice. “When?”
“I just came from the realtor’s office.” From her pocket she fishes a fresh set of keys on a carabiner. “Wanna sleep in a real bed tonight?”
There comes a moment of hesitation, a brief reluctance, but it soon passes. She scrambles from the box and throws her arms around her friend and even though she smells like shit and garbage, Veronika allows it.
“Why don’t you take the bat, too,” Veronika says. “Just to get us home.”
END OF CHAPTER 6 - unhomed -
Amateur Chapter 7 continues here…
Credits
Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash
Lyrics from “The Old Main Drag” by The Pogues
I’m so invested in these characters! Nothing bad better happen to Veronika or Alicia. *shakes fist*
Ok, a happier ending. The gallows-humor is top notch. Keep it comin