Last Call - A Thriller (Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels Mysteries Book 10) (26 page)

A
fter the guards brought an unconscious Hanover into the playroom and shackled his arms and legs to the rack, Lucy held a bottle of ammonia under his nose until he began to thrash his head back and forth.

“Who are you?” she asked him.

He passed out again. She considered tightening the chains. People were more eager to answer questions when their shoulders and hips were dislocated. But then she noticed the odor. It was one of the death stenches that yucked her out.

Rot.

She traced it to Hanover’s blood-caked shirt, and peeled it back.

Ugh. How could he stand to smell himself?

Lucy put on one of the ill-fitting rubber gloves she kept in the playroom for occasions such as this, and gave the infected wound a poke.

Hanover yelped.

“You awake, tough guy?” She jabbed him again, making sure her face was turned away from the stench. “I have some things to ask you.”

Lucy stuck her finger under one of his swollen stitches, and he went all fainty again.

More ammonia. More fluttering eyelids. This guy didn’t even know where he was.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I came…”

“Yeah?”

“Kill… Luther…”

Lucy sighed, hard as her lungs allowed. “I know that. Luther and I dragged someone you know to death, blah blah blah. I’m not buying. What’s the real reason?”

“Kill… Luther Kite… pro…”

“Pro? Pro what? Pro basketball? Pro-choice? Prohibition?”

“Pro… tect… fam…”

He zoned out again. Freakin’ irritating.

“Fam? What’s fam?”

Lucy stuck her finger in up to the first knuckle and his whole body jerked.

“Family!”

Protect family?
That wasn’t the revenge scenario he’d spun when they’d first met.

Vengeance was a decent motivator. But it didn’t have the same oomph as trying to save the ones you loved. People were willing to die for that shit.

Lucy had seen it, firsthand. Parents willing to fight harder for their children than they would for their own lives. That could have explained Hanover’s continued success in the arena. Maybe he wasn’t a cop with specialized training or some law enforcement agenda. Maybe he was just doing this for his family.

“So it isn’t revenge?” she clarified.

A head shake.

“It’s to save people you care about.”

A nod.

Finger still inside him, Lucy leaned over until she was close to his ear. “If you were alone with Luther, could you kill him?”

Nod.

“Would you try to do it even if it killed you?”

Emphatic nod.

Interesting.

“Mr. Hanover, I do believe it may be worth keeping you around a little while longer.”

Lucy removed her finger, then gave him a friendly slap on the belly, prompting a gorgeous, full-body scream. Then she trotted off, to go root through the garbage bin.

There would be maggots there. And that was exactly what Mr. Hanover needed to help him focus.

F
ingers glued to his empty eye socket, barely conscious because of all the pills he’d taken, Donaldson drove down Boulevard Lázaro Cárdenas at ten miles per hour below the speed limit, looking for someone to drag to death. His only criteria was that the person be sleeping soundly, or small enough to handle.

It had taken him almost an hour to tie a slipknot on the end of the clothesline still attached to the bumper, partly because he could only use one hand, partly because his fluffy-blurry-woozy-codeine-alprazolam-zolpidem-fentanyl drug haze made Donaldson repeatedly forget what he was doing, along with where he was, his own name, and why for some crazy reason his hand was stuck to his face.

It had been a process.

Then came a seemingly endless search for a victim. Groups of men. Groups of women. Couples. Tall guys. Big ladies. Some clown dressed up as a clown. A giant fish (though that last one might have been a hallucination.)

After hours of scoping out unsuitable targets, he finally spotted a decent possibility on the street, walking alone.

A kid.

Donaldson wasn’t good with ages—this little snot couldn’t have been more than eight or nine—but he was small, and he seemed oblivious to his surroundings, focusing intently on a cup-and-ball, which had to be the stupidest toy ever made. A wooden cup on a stick, attached to a sizeable wooden ball on a string. Swing the ball and catch it in the cup. Then repeat over and over and over and over again until the realization of how horrible life is finally set in.

Welcome to the constant, ongoing disappointment known as
existence,
kid. I almost envy the fact that you’re about to die.

Almost.

Donaldson pulled onto the street in front of the boy, then awkwardly put the car into park. After much fumbling, including a fifteen second period where Donaldson was immobile because his sleeve had gotten caught on the gearshift, he finally managed to open the door and step outside. Balancing his hip against the side of the hot car, he reached over to the passenger seat and grabbed his last Gansitos cake.

“Hey, little boy… you want a snack?”

The boy stopped and stared.

Donaldson took a wobbly step forward.

“C’mon, you little punk piece of shit. Take the snack cake from the nice man who wants to drag you to death behind his car.”

The boy reached out his hand.

“That’s right, dummy. Your mother never warned you about strangers, and now you’re about to become a newspaper headline. Stupid Boy Dies Horrible—”

The wooden ball hit Donaldson on the head with the force of a brick. As the world lost all focus, the child twirled the ball over his head like a medieval mace, then struck Donaldson in the knee.

Donaldson crumpled like a demoed building. The kid bent over, and swiped the Gansitos cake Donaldson had dropped.

Then the little bastard hopped into Donaldson’s Cadillac and drove off.

F
light delays were an interesting study of human nature.

This was the computer/satellite/GPS age, where we can see almost fourteen billion years into deep space. There was no possible way an airline didn’t know the exact time one of their planes would be ready to take off.

The airlines knew. But they didn’t share the info with their passengers.

Because of human nature. If Tequila and I had been told our flight to Mexicali would be delayed by nine hours, we wouldn’t have waited around the airport. We would have rented a car, or checked into a hotel, or even killed time at the airport bar.

But instead, the airline lied. It knew exactly how long takeoff was being pushed back, but it only revealed that information a tiny piece at a time.

Post an hour delay, people are irritated, but delays are expected.

Push it back another half hour, no big deal.

Forty more minutes? Already been waiting for ninety, so at this point it doesn’t matter.

And so on. And so on. Until you realize you’ve wasted nine hours of your life sitting in an airport.

Human beings are incapable of making big decisions when they are being crippled by numerous little decisions. It was why people stayed employed at soul-crushing jobs, because they only had to handle it on a day by day basis, rather than think of it as a forty year wasted chunk of their lives.

I was as guilty as anyone else. I sat there, enduring the delays, much like I’d spent over two decades chasing murderers. It was bearable, because I was spoon-fed it over a long period of time. But looking back on it as a whole, it was easy to count the regrets.

Which I had plenty of time to do, waiting for that goddamn plane. And it wasn’t as if Tequila was the perfect guy to get delayed with, skilled as he was in the art of conversation. He killed the time with an endless, annoying routine.

Do push-ups.

Eat.

Nap.

Repeat twenty times.

As breakfast turned to lunch turned to dinner and the flight kept being pushed back by infuriatingly small increments, I got an
UNKNOWN
call on my cell.

“This is Jack,” I answered.

“Your flight will be delayed for two and a half more hours,” Chandler said. Or maybe it was Fleming.

I almost asked how she knew where I was and what I was doing, but I would have just sounded naïve. All sufficiently advanced technology appeared as magic to luddites.

“I’m chasing lost time. Already put in six hours. If I quit now, those hours would be wasted.”

“That mentality is how Las Vegas stays wealthy,” she said. “We found the arena.”

“It’s true?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I’ve seen some…
unfortunate
aspects of human nature. This one is near the top of the list.”

“And is Lu—” I stopped myself from saying his name. “Is the man my husband was chasing at the arena?”

My phone buzzed. I held it at arm’s length and watched a grainy, blurred picture show up on my texting screen. But the details were good enough to reveal a desiccated, black-haired maniac in a purple robe, sitting next to an equally scarred and hideous woman.

Luther and Lucy, looking as if they were presiding over a Mardis Gras parade.

“And my husband?” I asked.

A pause. Then, “Yes. He’s there.”

“You’re sure?”

Another pic appeared on my phone. This one with better resolution.

A man on the ground, bloody, being beating by six guards.

Even steeling myself for the worst, it felt like being slapped.

“That was taken eighteen hours ago. A moment earlier, he shot a man in the arena. Satellite caught him being dragged back inside the compound. No sight of him since.”

“So we don’t know if he’s still…”

“The subject matter aside, this is a gambling facility. These prisoners are assets, and they represent significant investments with dollar values attached. Odds are they haven’t killed him.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Jack… this place has a lot more security than we thought.”

“How much?”

“It’s going to be comparable to breaking into a military base.”

“That bad?”

“Breaking in a military base during wartime. It’s doable, but we’re going to need all hands on deck. You have to keep your head in the game, Jack, and compartmentalize your personal feelings. If you have a breakdown in the field, it could compromise the mission.” She added, “And the personnel.”

“Who is this? Chandler or Fleming?”

“Again with the codenames?”

“Who?”

“It’s Chandler.”

“Remember when your sister was being held at that
black site
?”

A short pause, and then, “Yes.”

“How did you do it?” I asked, my hand starting to shake. “How could you function knowing what they were doing to her? How did you compartmentalize your feelings?”

“I didn’t,” Chandler said. “But I’d had enough training that I could fake it.”

I thought about Phin, swallowing the sob that was creeping up. “I can do that.”

“We’ll call you when your flight arrives. “

She hung up.

Tequila was doing push-ups. Again. He halted long enough to raise an eyebrow at me.

“Looks like your plan is a go,” I said. “Can I ask a question?”

“You want to ask how I compartmentalize my feelings,” Tequila said.

“And you’re going to tell me you don’t have to, because you don’t have feelings.”

“No.” Tequila hopped to his feet, then set his bulk in the seat next to mine. “Emotions are like injuries. You can learn to separate them from yourself. Sort of like they’re a mosquito, buzzing around, that you can ignore.”

“How can you ignore part of yourself?”

“Give me your hand.”

I did. Tequila’s hands were as hard and stiff as two by fours.

“Tell me when this hurts,” he said, gripping my index and middle finger and crushing them together.

My first reaction was to yelp and try to pull away. But my digits might as well have been trapped in a vice.

“You feel the pain.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s just pain. It’s not killing you. You’re not being injured. You’re not in danger. It’s a sensation that we’ve learned to associate with negative emotions. But it’s like walking into a room with a bad odor. After a few minutes, you get used to it and can’t smell it anymore. That’s why garbage men aren’t constantly throwing up.”