Chapter 1
I looked at the wall of my apartment, the little curl of peeling wallpaper in one corner, the discolored rectangles where previous tenants hung pictures, and the lines marked off by the side of the door, each line about three inches apart and tagged with a name—Justin—and the birthday each line referred to.
The whole apartment was a pit, cheap and definitely not cheerful.
Eight lines in all, from his second birthday up. Another line, tagged Mom, was about eight inches higher up the wall from the last of the kid’s marks.
I wondered if Justin and his mom were still around and how much taller the kid would be now. He’d be around fifteen now.
Almost a man.
I found myself hoping he was okay.
In my line of work, I’d come across a lot of fifteen-year-olds. Some of them gangbangers, too goddamn stupid to realize that being part of a gang was an almost certain way of taking up a drawer in the local morgue while whoever was pulling your strings lived the high life with a fancy house and car and wouldn’t even remember your name.
Others were victims, just as much as the gangbangers were victims of their stupidity. Victims of opioids or other drugs that left them incapable of functioning as a human being. Victims of abuse, both sexual and physical. Victims of just being a crazy-assed teenager who thought he was invincible and found out too late that he was just as mortal as the next guy who came along.
For ten years, that next guy had been me.
I’d turn up in my ambulance, scrape up whatever was left from the sidewalk, and transport them to the hospital. Not just kids, all kinds of people, but it was always the kids that hurt the worst. Even in the worst cases, a kid’s eyes still held a hint of the innocence of the child in them, and seeing that fade away to nothing while I worked on them made those days the worst days.
A rattling noise broke through my reverie. Goddamn AC was on the fritz again. It looked and sounded about as old as I felt, even though I was only forty. I just hoped I wasn’t going to be imitating its death rattle anytime soon.
If I had a TV, the AC would be drowning it out now as it journeyed on the way to AC heaven, by the sound of it, with only a day or so to live. It barely worked, anyway. The apartment was hotter than Hades, even though it was coming up on nine at night. The humidity in the air must have been at least a hundred and fifty percent.
Is that even a possibility?
I could feel sweat trickling down my back under my button-down shirt, pooling in the small of my back as I sat on my threadbare couch.
The rest of the furnishings were equally ancient and equally worn out.
Just like me.
Why in God’s name do I live in this dump?
I asked myself that question often. I could afford a better place. My PI practice meant I made a heck of a lot better money than I did as an EMT. It wasn’t quite the quiet life I’d expected it to be when I quit as an EMT, exhausted and scared, when I was thirty after seeing a car full of teenagers burn in front of me after a crash no more than a minute from the ambulance house.
They were still screaming when I got there.
The things I took to the morgue were unrecognizable, charred, their mouths open wide in a rictus of horror, stinking of roasted flesh and singed hair.
Even after all this time, I see that scene in my head almost every night. I hear the screams. I smell the tainted air.
The only time I don’t see, smell, or hear them is when I’m busy.
Or when I’m drunk.
I eyed the bottle of whisky on the coffee table in front of me. The idea that with a few slugs of that, I could drift off to sleep and not hear the screams was tempting, but I couldn’t. It didn’t stop me from sliding the bottle over, unscrewing the top, and taking a deep sniff of the earthy, peaty aroma.
I screwed the top back on and slid the bottle away. Not yet. It would have to wait.
My life as a PI for the last ten years had been one of extremes. Unrelenting boredom a lot of the time. Stakeouts, in particular, when I couldn’t do anything to stop my mind from moving back in time, were something I didn’t think I would ever get used to. Sometimes, there was more action. Once, I’d even fired the Glock that I had a license to concealed carry.
I hit the person I shot at in the leg, but he survived. I can’t even remember why I shot him now without having to think hard.
Oh, yes, he was threatening to shoot me, so I went all man-of-action on him and shot his ass first.
He didn’t even have a gun. He had a starter pistol.
I wonder what became of him?
I wonder if the wife he was cheating on took him back.
That I couldn’t get used to, and I don’t think I ever would. Why would a woman spend substantial amounts of her hard-earned cash to hire me to prove their husband was cheating on them, then let the creep back in?
I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand the cheating. I could never do that to someone I loved. I would never do that, and hearing some of the pathetic excuses philandering guys came up with made me realize that mostly, they were just weak. Weak-willed. No moral fiber and uncaring about the hurt they caused.
I stood up from the couch and headed to the window. Although the sun was down, there was still enough light to see outside, so I was stuck here for a while longer.
The streets in my neighborhood were quiet, at least the ones I could see. Just a couple of homeless people drifting around near the convenience store where I used to feed my own personal habit. They had even started stocking a couple of lines of more expensive whisky just for me. Great service, and they smiled when they took my money. The American Dream right there, folks.
I also couldn’t understand why the women who paid me to track down their cheating husbands didn’t just flush them out on the street like the turds they really were.
How could they trust them again? How could they ever let them out of their sight without constantly worrying whether they were feeling up another woman’s boobs while she was putting junior to bed and being the house frau?
I’d tried putting myself in their boots, but it always ended the same way in my mind. They would be out on the street, preferably in the gutter and with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Call me harsh, but it’s just the way I feel about it. Cheating should be a no-no, and that should be a given.
It leaves me a little conflicted about taking the money to prove it, but I have to make a living, and if it stops one person from doing it if they think they might get caught, then that would be a good result.
As I stood looking at what little part of the Miami skyline I could see, my phone beeped with an incoming message.
I slipped it out of my pocket to see if it was the message I was expecting, but it wasn’t.
It was Caroline.
How the hell I had managed to get involved with her was nothing short of incredible.
With my jobs, my social life has always taken a bit of a back seat, and I’d be the first to admit that my confidence level when it came to interactions of a romantic nature with members of the opposite sex were little short of zero.
But somehow, I’d managed to snag Caroline and I couldn’t be happier. I looked back at the lines on the wall. Maybe, one day, John Godwin, Jr. could be having his own lines drawn on the wall. I shook my head. It was early days, way too early for those kinds of thoughts, but I couldn’t stop them from invading my brain, much as I couldn’t stop any others.
I sent her a quick message to say hi and not a lot more other than that I was about to go out on a job and I’d see her the next day.
A few seconds later, she replied, telling me to take care.
I would.
I had a reason to now.
It worried me.
What if I were faced with a situation like before when I shot the guy in the leg? What if next time, the gun were real and not an overblown popgun?
Would I react the way I did, or would the thought of Caroline make me act differently?
Truth was, I didn’t know, and I honestly hoped I wouldn’t have to find out.
I looked at the bottle again.
Maybe just a quick one?
No. I turned back to the window. If I was driving, I wasn’t drinking, even though the urge was almost overwhelming.
I’m not an alcoholic. I don’t need booze to function, but I think if I were being brutally honest with myself, months ago, I was getting close.
I had good reason to, trying to keep horrible memories from screwing up my head even more than they already were.
That’s when I started dating Caroline.
Since then, I’ve been trying to cut back, to control the amount I drink. I don’t drink before I go see her. I don’t want to turn up at her place reeking of booze.
I want to give the relationship a chance, and drinking wasn’t going to help.
I looked back at the bottle again.
No. I don’t need it.
My phone buzzed again.
This time, it was what I’d been waiting for. I turned down the blinds in the window and switched on a small table lamp. I hated coming home to a dark house. Call me paranoid if you like, but if someone is upset with me, I at least want to see who it is before they try to knock me out, or worse.
The message was from Zeke.
Zeke Green. My contact at Miami PD.
Detective Zeke Green, to give him his full title.
I’d met him when I was working as an EMT, and although we were like chalk and cheese, somehow, we clicked. When I left and started as a PI, he pushed some of the work the cops weren’t able or willing to follow up on my way. In return, I could do certain things for Zeke that maybe weren’t strictly in line with departmental practice.
Zeke said it was ‘plausible deniability’.
I said it was righteous action to keep bad guys off the street.
That was what was on tonight.
I grabbed my keys and was out the door within minutes with my bag of tricks and with all thoughts of hitting the bottle, Justin and his mom, Caroline, and the screams of dying teenagers pushed back into the little box in my head where all the shit things and some of the nicer ones were pushed when I was working.
This is what I liked. Being on the move. In action. Actually doing something, not sitting around waiting.
I took the elevator down to street level and exited into the open-air parking lot that was behind the building. I flipped the keys in my hand and blinked when the lights flashed on my car.
It was slightly less threadbare than the apartment, and again, I could have afforded a lot better, but the neighborhood was sketchy at best, and seeing some swanky hunk of shining metal in the parking lot might have been just too much of a temptation for the local crooks who enjoyed hotwiring and selling off your car before you knew it was missing. The rust patches were like the car’s camo suit.
The important thing was the engine was good, and by the time my buddy Frank had tweaked the engine at his auto shop, it moved at a decent speed. It was no Ferrari, but on the mean streets of Miami, it could keep pace with any other car and then some.
Tonight, there was no need for speed.
Zeke was working a case of a possible serial killer. So far, just one young woman, another fifteen-year-old, had died, but Zeke had a strong suspicion about whodunnit and why. Trouble was, he had no just cause for bringing him in or charging him. He had an alibi that had held up to initial scrutiny and the department had dropped him as a suspect.
Zeke was convinced he was the murderer and was trying everything he knew to build a case, but the guy was slippery as an eel with a hotshot lawyer in tow too.
From what little I’d been told, the guy—his name was Gary Crosby—was a known peeping Tom but had also been in contact with the victim online. Nobody could prove what had happened, but Zeke wanted to know where the guy was and what he was doing because Crosby had been in contact with several other girls as well as the victim. The only way he was going to prove it was Crosby and get him off the street was to catch him actively contacting another one of the girls and stop him before he acted again.
Miami PD wouldn’t countenance any surveillance action against the guy, so that was where I came in.
My job was to plant a tracker on Crosby’s van, and the message was from Zeke to say the guy was at home right then. Once the tracker was fitted, I then had to let Zeke know when the van moved and where it was heading. How Zeke knew Crosby was home, I didn’t have a clue and wasn’t interested. All I was interested in was helping my buddy out to get the creep in jail where he belonged.
Even though it was late in the evening, the streets were still busy with traffic. but I was heading away from the city, out into the suburbs, so it slowly thinned out the closer I got to where the asshole lived.
Eventually, I turned the last corner, rolled my car down the street, and pulled to a halt a hundred yards along from the address Zeke had given me.
Now for the tricky part.
The street was typical for this part of town. Small houses, all separated by chain-link fences, scruffy gardens with kids’ bikes lying around where they had been dropped, and street lighting that only provided drops of light among the dark. There was nobody outside, which was good, although most of the houses had lights glaring out of the windows, which added another opportunity for me to be spotted.
I reached over to my bag and pulled out the tracking device I’d bought. I activated it and double-checked it was tracking on my smartphone. It was.
It was a relatively simple system, but I couldn’t fit anything more sophisticated with a simple walk-by so this was it. I had used this type of tracker several times before when I just needed a general direction of travel rather than a location down to ten feet, and Zeke had the addresses of who he thought were likely to be Crosby’s next victims.
All he needed to know was where he was headed.
This baby would serve that purpose perfectly.
I took a minute to roll my car a little closer to where Crosby’s van was parked on the street then sat for a minute, waiting for whatever neighbor was going to go out and fetch the dog in or water the grass in the cool of the night or whatever. Someone always did, and I figured I was better off waiting for that moment to pass.
Nothing happened.
I knew that the longer I waited, the more chance there was of a neighbor spotting me, or worse, Crosby himself.
I opened the driver’s door as quietly as I could, stepped out of my car, and closed the door equally quietly, then I turned and headed toward the van.
As I approached, the exterior light on Crosby’s house came on. I was only five feet away from the wheel arch, so I kept going, hoping he didn’t walk out before I reached it.
The three steps it took for me to get to the van seemed to go so slowly while I watched the front door of his house, then, just as I leaned down and heard the strong magnets clamp the tracker onto the van, the door opened.
I stood up quickly, dropped my head and shoved my hands in my pockets, then kept walking in the same direction I was going. Nothing was more suspicious than a rapid about-face.
The rough voice I heard behind me yelled something back into the house. It didn’t sound like a cheerful goodbye—more like a ‘get off my back’—but I couldn’t hear clearly because of the blood pounding in my ears.
I was maybe fifty yards along the street when I heard the van engine start up and another twenty before it rumbled past me, its headlights brightly illuminating the road and its one working taillight giving the sidewalk a dim red tinge as it passed by.
It wasn’t until it was a distant red dot that I turned around and jogged back to the car.
The tracker app on my phone was working perfectly. While I watched it, I sent Zeke a message to tell him it was working and that Crosby was on the move.
I pulled my car out from the curb and headed along the street. I could go home now and let Zeke know from the comfort—or not—of my apartment while I sipped on a glass of whisky and slept the sleep of the righteous.
A right turn at the next intersection would take me on that journey.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
