To celebrate this collection of Turner Hahn and Frank Morales coming out soon, I thought I'd tickle your fancy with one of the stories found in the collection. There's twenty-one short stories in it. Twenty-one stories written over a three year period. Some good. Some average. Several, I think, very, very good.
Here's one which, in my not so humble opinion, is one of the best of the lot. It's call Prove It. About a cop going over the deep end. I think you're gonna like it.
I've talked about Turner and Frank before. About how close they are to me. About wanting to write hardboiled stories that featured 'buddies' working, backing each other up, in the dark alleys of Mankind's darker side of humanity.
It is quite possible these guys will never be a popular as I think they should be. Too bad. They're really two unique characters.
So here's Prove It. Hope you like it.
By the way, the collection should be out by the middle of this month (September.)
Prove It
We
were the first on the scene.
A
hot night, just after a major thunderstorm, the streets wet with steam rising
off the parking lot like malevolent wraiths.
The
car was parked in a glazed and glistening empty ten acres of wet asphalt. The
only car parked in this flat pool table of loneliness. A metallic island in a sea of black. Pulling up behind the Caddy de Ville we got
out, unbuttoned our sport coats and walked to the car slowly, each of us
gripping our weapon just in case. At
three in the morning you expect anything.
Especially if you’re a cop and you get a phone call that said something
about screeching tires, shouting voices, and gunfire.
She
was sprawled on the front seat of the caddy with half her head missing. Most of it was a dark smear across the right
side passenger door and window. A big
caliber gun held just in front of her left ear had done the trick.
Efficient. But messy.
She
was in her early forties. A blond with a
skimpy summer dress of black with white poke dots. A dress that was way too tight but one that
nicely expressed the trim compactness of her frame. Lying on the floorboard in front of the
slumped over body was a big purse of black plastic. Between the purse and her, lying on the
bloody leather seat, was a blood stained business card. Looking up at my partner I grunted and
pointed to the card.
“Can
you read it from your side?”
Frank
grunted and bent down to look through the passenger side window. Think ‘thug’ when you think of Frank. Or misanthrope. Maybe Neanderthal would be better. Big, ugly, with stringy red hair and a nose
about the size of a Goodyear blimp. But
don’t voice your thoughts. There are
some things best kept to your self.
“Can’t,”
he said, standing up and shaking his head. “Too much shit on the window and not
enough light. Let me get a flashlight
and maybe you can read it on your side.”
“Right,”
I nodded, looking up and at the back of the big man as he walked back to our
car. “Run the license plate while you’re at it. I think I know this car. I’ve seen it before.”
I
pulled out my cell phone, flipped it open, and called for an ambulance and
forensics team. In the middle of my talk
I heard footsteps behind me. Turning,
Frank stood staring at me. The look on
his face told me I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear.
“Turn,
the car belongs to Grace McKenzie. She’s
Dave McKenzie’s wife.”
Sonofabitch.
Dave
McKenzie was Officer David McKenzie. One
of our own. A patrol officer stationed
in the South Side Division. He was
downstairs in the patrol divisions. We
were upstairs in the detective division. We knew the guy. Knew him for years. Knew how much in love he was with his
unfaithful wife. Knew how much of a hot
head he could be if anyone started making smart-ass remarks about her. And when he became angry it was a mean,
brutal anger.
Mean
enough to murder.
“Can
you see the card now?”
Frank
lifted the flashlight and shot a white-hot beam through the driver’s side
window. Bending down he squinted and grunted
before standing and clicking the light off.
“Ruby’s
Irish pub,” he said. “And someone’s written a phone number and what looks like
a motel room number across the front of it.”
Ruby’s
was a decent little place to catch a beer or a stiff drink across town. It was frequented by the young college types
who were professionals in some kind of high dollar tech or corporate job. Lots of women could be found there. Women who were looking for a good time with
someone who had money to burn.
“Turner,
we’d better find Dave and get him isolated.
If he finds out someone zipped his wife he’ll go ape shit.”
“Unless
he already has,” I nodded, staring down at the corpse.
Dave
worked the same shift we did. So by
rights he should be somewhere on our side of town sitting in his black and
white with his partner. He wasn’t. A couple of phone calls later confirmed
it. Dave came to work all right. But around nine
p.m. he got a phone call and had to go home. Family emergency, he told his patrol sergeant
when called in.
That
didn’t sound like Dave. Dave was like
clockwork when it came to his job. He
never got sick. He never was late. Always willing to pull a few more hours when
he could. That wasn’t Dave to suddenly
check out and go home.
We
drove over to Dave’s house. A big,
rambling old two story Victorian set in the middle of a block lined with old
elm trees. A house—a neighborhood—to
raise a family on. To see kids playing
in the front yard or riding bicycles down the sidewalks. But Dave and Grace never had kids. Only ten years of arguing and unfaithfulness;
with Dave being the workaholic, dedicated cop and Grace being . . . Grace.
The
house was big, black . . . and lifeless.
Even the detached garage, with its doors wide open and inviting, felt
dead.
Ruby’s
Irish Pub locked its doors at two in the morning. Glancing at my watch I noticed it was a
little past four. A couple of more hours
and the sun would be coming up.
In
silence we drove over to The Adirondacks Motel off the 456 exit on the north
side of town. The scribbled phone number
was from the motel. Driving into the
still pre-dawn parking lot of the hotel we got out of the car and stared up at
the room listed on the card. Around us
the still air was as silent as a morgue’s during after hours. Even the traffic up on the bypass just a
block away was eerily absent.
Glancing
at Frank I could see it in the set of his jaw muscles.
He
was getting bad vibes just like me.
Something
didn’t feel right.
It
didn’t take long to find it. The motel
door was splintered and partially open.
Frank used a gloved hand to push the door open gently as we both reached
for iron. We waited for a few second and
then slid into the blackness of the room half expecting gunfire to greet
us. No gunfire. But lying in the middle of a rumpled bed was
man dressed in slacks and a white shirt with stringy brown hair and large blue
eyes staring up at the ceiling. He
looked to be about forty. Arms had been
pulled behind him and layers of gray bound them tight. Over his head was a plastic bag sealed at the
neck with more duct tape. There were
bruises on the arm from someone powerful who had yanked the dead man’s arms
back to bind them. There were a lot of
bruises on his battered face from being slapped around a lot before the bag was
pulled over his head and sealed shut.
Whoever
wanted this guy dead wanted to extract a little pain from him first. The kind of pain that . . . say . . . a
jealous husband might want to extract.
As
we stood on either side of the body Frank was on his cell phone calling for
forensics my phone chimed up. Pulling it
out, I flipped it open and grunted.
“Turner,
this is Blake. I know where you can find
Dave.”
Blake
Gauge was a big black cop, the biggest I’d ever seen, and who had been Dave’s
patrol sergeant for years. He and Dave
were old friends. If anyone might have a
line on Dave’s whereabouts it would be Blake.
“When
he gets down in the dumps over something Grace's done he usually goes and hangs
out in a dive called Calypso’s down on Second.
Know the place?”
I
knew the place. An all night hole in the
wall filled with the blue haze of chain smoking hucksters and down on their
luck drifters drowning their sorrows in tall glasses of ice cold beer. The
place always had that dry smell of old urine and stale beer hanging faintly in
the air and the lights were always turned low.
A good place for a stranger to lose himself in a crowd if he wanted to.
We
found him sitting, alone, at the end of the bar. In front of him was a half consumed bottle of
cheap whiskey, an astray overflowing with dead butts, a pack of cigarettes on
the bar in front of him, and a bowl of shelled peanuts. In sat in the middle of a thick haze of
cigarette smoke which seemed to just hang in the air.
As Frank and I walked
into the place David shook a fresh cigarette out and lit it. Blowing smoke over his head he reached for
the book of whiskey and poured himself a drink just as Gus, the bartender on
duty this morning, strolled over to us.
“Boys,
get him outta here. Take him somewhere
and sober him up. He’s in a sour mood
and is scaring the hell out the customers.
I don’t want any trouble. And I
sure as hell don’t want this place busted up!”
“How
long has he been here?” Frank asked, his face turning hard and grim.
“Since
around one this morning. Came in here,
Bill told me, a little past one and went through the first bottle of whiskey
like it was bottled water. That’s the
third he’s working on now. He should
have passed out a long time ago. If he
doesn’t die of alcoholic poisoning his liver will kill him soon enough.”
We
nodded and moved past the wiry little bald bar tender and strolled down the bar
toward our friend. Both of us were
tense. Expecting anything. David was acting strange—not the loud,
grinning cop we normally saw. Not drunk
either. He seemed distant. Aloof.
Amazingly calm. But he looked
like hell. Red bleary eyes, disheveled,
sweaty brown hair—wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt which looked like it hadn’t
been washed in a week.
We’ve
seen this kind of change in personality before.
It
never turned out well.
We
slid up to the bar, bracketing our friend like two hulking bookends. Dave acted as if he hadn’t noticed. Exhaling a long pillar of cigarette smoke he
watched it for a moment or two dissolve into the cloud of smoke hanging over
him and then reached for his drink.
“Dave,”
I said softly but firmly. “You know why we’re here. We need to go downtown and talk. And then we need to get you some help.”
The
fleeting glimpse of a grin flashed across his gray lips just before taking a
drink. Lowering his glass he didn’t turn
to look at either of us.
“Ever
love someone, Turner? I mean, really
love someone. Love someone so much they
became a part of you. Like breathing. Like blood pulsing through your veins. Ever love someone like that?”
I
shook my head no and said nothing. Frank
said nothing but I saw him spread his feet out and clinch hands into fist. Coming off the bar I unbuttoned the sport
coat but made no other move. Behind me I
heard chairs sliding back hurriedly and feet pounding across the wooden floor
heading for the door. Even Gus seemed to
have disappeared.
“I
loved her, Turn. Grace. I loved her like no one could love her. Sure, she had a temper. We had our shouting matches. We had our fights. But never . . . never did she doubt that I
loved her. Never. Not even when she’d come home at odd times of
the night and day looking like she’d been sleeping in some back alley with a
dead wino.”
A rattling, half-sob of a sigh
came out of the man’s chest and eyes filled with tears. But with a steady hand he poured himself
another drink and sat the bottle down in a slow, deliberate fashion before
speaking.
“But
it never lasts, friend. You know. Love—it never lasts. One day something happens. One day you wake up and find her gone
again. She’s not in your bed. She’s not downstairs cooking breakfast. She’s nowhere around. So it just happens. Like catching the flu. One day something just . . . . snaps and you
realize you can’t take it any longer.
You realize she never loved you.
Realize you were nothing but a patsy—a lunch ticket—to her and nothing
else.”
“So
what happened, Dave? Who was the guy in
the motel?” I asked.
“Some
shit head for a traveling salesmen who would call her up every time he got into
town. From Pittsburg. An asshole with a nice wife and three kids. Didn’t give a damn about his wife or
kids. For the last five years . . . five
fucking years . . . the two of’em would go out on the town. Party . . . get shit faced drunk. . . screw
around. Five fucking years.”
I
nodded. I heard the pain and anger in
his voice. I was very familiar with this
tale. Scribble in different
names—different events. But the story
was disturbingly similar. And similarly,
potentially very dangerous.
With a smooth, calm effort Dave
slid off the bar stool and half turned toward Frank.
“Before
we go anywhere, Turn, I need to take a piss.”
“Hold
it,” I grunted in a hard voice.
Dave
half turned and faced me with an odd grin on face. But he didn’t stop. With a bang the flimsy wooden door slammed
shut and we heard the click of the lock from the inside.
“Sonofabitch!”
hissed Frank as he turned and started moving toward the head.
“He’s
gonna blow his fucking brains out, Turn!
He’s not gonna let us take him in alive.”
We
both jumped for the bathroom door—but stopped suddenly in our tracks when we
hard the toilet flush. The door banged open
and out stepped Dave drying hands off with a thick wad of paper towels and that
same strange—odd—grin on his lips.
“What? You think I was gonna try to escape? Run?
No? Oh, I know. You thought I’d
eat my on piece. Check out by painting
brain matter all over the bathroom walls.
Ha, that’ll be the day.”
Jesus.
That’s
when I got scared. I’ve seen all kinds
of strange things being a homicide detective.
I’ve seen just about every way a person can die. Naturally and unnaturally. Frank and I have
arrested bad people. Mean people. Innocent people who, in the heat of anger or
fear, made terrible decisions. But I’d
never encountered this. The guy who
walked into the head was David McKenzie.
The guy who walked out wasn’t.
Sure, he looked like the guy we used to know. He sounded like the guy we used to know. But he wasn’t Dave McKenzie. Somehow David McKenzie’s soul died in that
dirty, filthy bathroom and the person who came out was someone entirely
different. Different inside.
“So,”
the stranger grunted, his odd—evil—smile widening in pleasure. “Someone must
have iced Grace and shit head.
Wonderful.”
“You
did,” I said, pulling out handcuffs and stepping toward the stranger.
A
menacing laugh rolled out of the stranger’s chest. Dead eyes stared directly into mine. Dead eyes of a soulless creature. I still
remember the tone, the snarl of pure hate, in his voice as he replied.
“Prove
it.”
And—as
you might guessed—we didn’t. We never
found the murder weapon. There were no
fingerprints either on the Caddy or in the hotel room. There were no witnesses.
We
had nothing.
He
walked. Walked out of jail. Laughing. Laughing as moved down the stone steps of
downtown lockup and disappeared into the night,
