The Midtown Murderer Page 5

  “Excuse me?”

  “You have to make a choice; you can choose to run-to leave Atlanta-and who knows? Maybe you’ll manage to disappear. You can choose to spend the next few days searching for the object. If you’re successful, and you pop those lowlife cops, you have our word no harm will come to you. Or you can choose to do nothing and see how long your luck holds out; it’s up to you.”

  Trent was silent for a while. “Are you going to help me?”

  “Only to the extent that Elwood will be your wheelman. But there will be no redemption or second chances if you fail.”

  “And if I succeed, you’ll let me walk?”

  “We’re honorable men,” Jake said. “We’ll keep our word.”

  “Do we have a deal?” Elwood asked, popping the tops on the beers and passing them around.

  “We have a deal.”

  “Now take my business card, Mr. Peoplefinder,” Jake said, relief apparent in his tone. “You find the object, wherever it is, and you call us; and do it in a reasonable amount of time. OK?”

  “OK.”

  Elwood said, “This affair is most confidential, of course.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Be seeing you around, Trent,” Jake said, tipping his green bottle toward Trent as he slid onto the bench seat next to Elwood.

  Trent called after them, “Hey, how the fuck am I gonna get out of here?”

  “Open that blue container,” Jake said with a twisted smile, as Elwood stomped on the gas.

  Trent turned his head from the scattershot of spewed gravel and looked at the deckle-edged card in his hand: Jake, followed by a cell phone number. He downed his Heineken in one long swallow, then pulled on a rusted metal door which screeched like chalk on a blackboard.

  The air was cold and still and stank of blood and gore. Dead center and propped up on a folding chair was the cop with the black goatee who had bashed in his apartment door. The shot had collapsed his left cheek and gone out behind his ear; blood dripped from his nostrils and mouth. The concussion had distorted his skull and dislocated one eye which dangled from its pink socket; his clothes were saturated in blood.

  Trent could feel his heart pounding like a fist on a door. Even in the cold, sweat dripped from his face, and he barely noticed his gleaming red Ducati parked beside the corpse.

  #

  Trent stopped in Piedmont Park on his way home. The fucking purse, he thought, panicked and frightened. Get it and give it to McClure, he was thinking as he rooted through the trash bin, grateful that it had not been emptied. Because McClure doesn’t scare me half as much as Jake and Elwood who are clearly homicidal maniacs. Give it to McClure, then find Chloe quick and split this fucked up town . . .

  Fuck, he muttered, standing up straight. Fucking motherfucking fuck. The bloodied purse was gone.

  Chapter 14

  At half past nine in the morning Trent’s cell phone chimed. “Trent Palmer,” he said cautiously.

  “Atlanta Doors & Frame. Outside your apartment. I’m here to fix the broken door.”

  “OK,” Trent said, pulling the shattered door open. The confident looking man wore bib overalls and an Atlanta Doors & Frame cap worn backwards on his head. He had horns of gray hair that flicked above his ears. He set down a tool box and a length of lumber and shook hands with Trent.

  “Can you stiffen up the door and the frame and install an extra deadbolt?” Trent said, pulling several hundred-dollar bills from his wallet.

  “Sure,” the man said. “I can fortify it like the front door at Fort Knox if you want.”

  “Just make it strong,” Trent said, paying the man then wheeling his Ducati out of the parking lot.

  Forty-five minutes later he pulled onto a crushed gravel lot outside a dingy neighborhood bar in Lawrenceville. The gray sky looked heavy, the woods flanking the road lost in a fog of flurries. Battered pickups and Harley motorcycles were parked outside like horses tied to the post.

  Snow curled up the steps and over his boots. A pine wreath decorated a barred door. Trent wrapped his numb fingers around the handle. He pulled and the door came toward him; slipping inside, he closed it, shutting out the cold.

  His eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom. There was no foyer, and Trent found himself in a combination L-shaped bar/dance floor and band stage lit by weak lamps on bare concrete walls. The slow ticking of a double-pipe cast-iron radiator in the corner seemed the only activity. A strong smell of Pine-sol and stale cigarette smoke lodged in his throat.

  Trent felt pain as his ears and fingers came back to life. He imagined a late-night crowd of rednecks and bikers getting high on gallons of beer and shots. He was immensely glad he wouldn’t be there.

  Past the dance floor, green-shaded lights hung over several felt-covered tables.

  Two skinheads without a legible facial expression between themselves were leaning against a jukebox. The sleeves of their denim jackets were scissored off at the armpits, and the continuous and wildly colored tattoos that wrapped their arms looked like tight fitting sleeves.

  Security types, Trent thought. Hired to do the Apostles strong-arm business. He tried to swallow his fear. Up to this point, he had been riding high and feeling bold; now his confidence was ebbing.

  The only other occupants were playing pool. A skinny, black-eyed man with hollow cheeks and a pockmarked face was chalking his cue. His scraggly moustache was yellowed with nicotine; a red bandana with skull and crossbones was wrapped around his head.

  The billiard-playing man was big and muscular and swaggered around the pool table with a shot glass in his meaty hand. He had a baldhead and a faded-pink scar across his forehead; he wore a black leather vest and dirty blue jeans.

  After a moment of icy silence Trent asked, “Utah?”

  “Yeah,” the man said, downing the amber liquid in one gulp. He tossed the tiny glass to one of the skinheads then racked the pool balls. When he leaned over the table with his cue stick, Trent spotted the Apostles tattoo on his shoulder.

  “Hey, Winston,” Utah said, giving Trent a calculating look, “I think he’s iron.”

  “No doubt,” Winston said, twirling the end of his moustache.

  “I’m not a cop,” Trent said, deciding he could never stare down the skinheads. “My name is Trent Palmer; I find missing people.”

  Utah glanced up. Light gray eyes, cold as ice. “What do you want? Exactly?”

  “I’m looking to exchange information,” Trent said, browsing Utah’s landscape of crude jailhouse tattoos. “The guy who killed Jack Zimmer in Piedmont Park abducted a little girl. I’m trying to find her.”

  Utah didn’t reply. He took his time controlling the cue ball and sank all the stripes with a variety of touch and trick shots before sending the cue ball the length of the green where it reversed course and tapped the eight ball, almost sinking it into the corner pocket. His voice rose in impatience. “You packing?”

  “No,” Trent said. “Just give me what I need and I’ll go away.”

  “Why us?” Bandanna asked.

  “Someone cut down your buddy with a half-dozen nine-millimeter slugs. Guess I thought you’d care. If you do, I was hoping we could negotiate.”

  “Whaddya got to nee-go-she-ate?” Utah asked, leaning over the table to sink the eight ball.

  Trent glared at Utah so he would know he was dead serious. “For starters, the Outlaws are shutting down Garcia’s crystal-meth business and monopolizing it with a super pipeline. I’ve got insider information to help Garcia defend himself against the Outlaws and the Latin Kings.”

  Utah paused in mid stroke, frowning, then followed through.

  “I don’t like problems, Palmer. But I’m damn good at solving them,” he said, using his cue to push the balls around. “Are you going to be a problem for me?”

  “I hope not.”

  Utah racked the cue and nodded at the skinheads. “In the bathroom, Palmer,” he snorted, grabbing his cell phone and turning toward the back wall. “Winston
, keep an eye out.”

  “Sure, boss,” said Winston. “Head on back, dude. You better have something worthwhile to peddle.”

  Chapter 15

  Trent stepped into the men’s room with the skinheads in tow. Empty toilet stalls and cracked and grimy urinals stared back at him. He scanned for another exit, but there was none.

  Utah stood like a gunslinger in an old Western movie. “Toss me your wallet. Then put your hands up.”

  Trent did as he was told. Rough and calloused hands patted him down for a weapon or a wire.

  “What’s the name of your game, asshole?” Utah yelled.

  “Don’t have—”

  Right then a steel-toed combat boot smashed into the side of Trent’s knee. A lightning strike of white-hot agony coursed through his leg. He folded to the floor, and the skinheads jumped him like angry pit bulls tearing chunks from a side of beef.

  They kicked him repeatedly in the kidneys and balls. Trent saw blinking stars as he cupped his crotch and rolled in a red haze of pain. He drew his knees tight to his stomach, but his attackers weren’t deterred; a hard shot to the stomach brought up his lunch. He was face down on the tile floor when one of the thugs dropped a knee into his low back. He shrieked in pain as the other thug swung the barrel of a heavy revolver across his eyebrow.

  The knee was removed, and Trent rolled onto his back. He opened his eyes slowly and saw Utah talking on a cell phone.

  Utah snorted with satisfaction. “Hey, Palmer, my boss wants to talk to you.”

  Trent pried himself to his feet like a new-born colt. He’d about had it with being beat up. “The fucking phone . . . Hand it to me.”

  Utah tossed him the cell phone and Trent snatched it. In the periphery of his vision he spotted the closest skinhead. “Palmer,” he croaked.

  “This is Eddie Garcia,” a male voice said.

  Trent took a deep breath to control his shaking. “Mr. Garcia, hold on for a second . . .”

  He whirled on the closest skinhead and kicked him hard in the balls; the thug dropped like a piano tossed out the window. Trent jumped knees first on his back, ecstatic to hear bones snap.

  Trent grabbed a large revolver from the thug’s waistband, thumbed off the safety, and fired in Utah’s direction. The shot cracked like lightning and the slug exploded a toilet tank. “No more games,” Trent said, waving the gun at Utah and the remaining skinhead.

  “Jesus, Palmer!” Utah said, turning white as salt. Skinhead raised his hands high enough to touch the ceiling.

  Trent notched the hammer and jammed the still-warm barrel under Utah’s meaty chin. “Wait in the toilet stall. Now!”

  “Don’t shoot,” Utah said worriedly, backing into the stall with his hands up.

  “You too, white trash, in with your buddy.”

  The thug gave Trent a pained, twisted look and mumbled a profanity, but he kept his arms over his head and followed Utah into the stall.

  When Utah closed the door, Trent put the phone to his ear. “Palmer,” he said, hobbling and favoring his bum knee.

  “It is essential, and in your best interest, that you say nothing to anyone about this conversation, starting right now,”

  Garcia said tonelessly.

  “OK.”

  “You’re looking for the child.”

  “Can you help me get a line on her?”

  “Perhaps. What do you have to trade?”

  “A highly confidential Atlanta Police Department GID report. It’s current and chronicles their successes and failures against your organization, the Kings, and the Outlaws.”

  A sharp intake of breath. “If it’s authentic, it will be of great service to me. I have a lead for you, but you’ll have to perform a onetime errand for me.”

  “Which is?”

  Without changing the intonation of his voice Garcia said, “There’s a traitor in my organization; he’s working with someone at the Midtown Police Plaza to shut down my business. Find them by noon tomorrow.”

  “This may be hard to do.”

  “You have skills and stamina,” Garcia said. “Do it or you might end up in an ambulance that doesn’t make it to the hospital on time. Am I making sense?”

  “Yes.” McClure. Jake and Elwood. And now Garcia. Trent was thinking that he had a long couple of days ahead of him.

  When they had worked out the details, Trent moved in front of the stall and kicked the door open. Utah was sitting on the bowl, and the uninjured skinhead was standing beside him. Utah rocked on the seat and gave Trent a slight nod.

  Trent tossed him the phone. “I’ll be at the bar,” he said.

  On his way out Trent kicked the prone skinhead square in the face then slammed the door. He sat on a bar stool and patted a folded handkerchief against a deep cut over his left eye.

  A few minutes later Utah came around the corner and said, “Come along, Palmer. Mr. Garcia wants us to take you on a field trip.”

  Trent pointed the business end of the revolver at Utah. “If you ever fuck with me again-even in the slightest-it doesn’t matter how long it takes me, I’ll come back for you. And if you have any plans, like Trent-doesn’t-come-back-here plans? Not that you’re that type of guy, but Garcia might be? You got any ideas like that; my partner on the I-75 hits will waste you both.”

  Utah’s face flushed, and a vein pounded in Winston’s temple.

  Chapter 16

  Trent emerged from the bar as a thunderbolt ripped the dark sky apart with jagged blue lines. The crash of its thunder echoed along the street. Utah’s battered pickup truck, dusted with snow, was suddenly frozen by the flash of lightning.

  They had loaded his Ducati into the bed of the truck and were waiting in the cab; Utah sat behind the wheel and Winston was in the middle, having made room for him.

  Trent slid onto a ripped seat with wads of rust-stained foam poking out. He kept the revolver pointed at Winston’s ribs, worried that at any moment his companions might try to take his head off.

  Utah gunned the accelerator, and the truck’s knobby tires kicked up loose gravel that rattled under the fenders. He drove north, threading his way through twisting back roads that followed the contours of the rolling Georgia countryside toward Lake Lanier. The snow had whitened the rock-hard ridges of the empty land; there were crosshatched sections of landscape where thrashers, swifts, and cuckoos scavenged the land for insects and worms.

  An hour later Utah turned onto a graded clay road that paralleled a tributary of the Chattahoochee River. He parked outside an abandoned quarry. “Palmer,” he said, “this is where we say good-bye; Winston and I are gonna unload your bike.”

  Trent backed stiffly out of the truck. His gun came up. “You’re not coming?” he said, taking a two-handed stance and aiming alternately at the men. Now the sky was cloudless and clean. The sun had turned the horizon a bright orange as its light reflected off the snow and ice.

  “Our orders are to leave you here,” Winston said, his gold tooth catching a glint of sun.

  Utah’s attention was on the truck-bed floor where he’d bent over the side to retrieve something.

  “Stop. Or I’ll shoot,” Trent yelled. “Hands up, Winston. Killing two more pricks won’t bother me in the least.”

  Utah stood up straight. Winston raised his hands.

  Trent stepped carefully in a wide, quarter arc to the rear of the truck then backed off ten feet. “Utah, drop the tailgate.”

  Utah complied and Trent glanced in the bed. He nodded at Utah who leaned into the bed and grabbed a shovel.

  “Who was your partner on the highway hit?” Utah said, tossing the shovel onto the ground.

  “Wouldn’t be much of a threat if you knew who he was,” Trent said, listening to the cooling metal of the truck’s engine ticking like a time bomb.

  Utah pursed his lips. “But he helped you kill Triple’s brother?”

  Trent’s gun continued to swivel between the men. “That’s the rumor.”

  “Some rumor.”

>   “Best be leaving now,” Trent said, keeping the front gun sight hard on Utah’s chest. “I won’t miss from this distance.”

  “Be seeing you around, Palmer,” Winston said, crawling into the cab. Then Utah slammed the tailgate shut with a clattering of chains.

  Trent watched tensely as the mud-splattered truck bounced across the deeply rutted road. He heaved a sigh of relief when they were out of sight. Then he then rolled the cylinder from the revolver and released the bullets into the brush, wiped his prints, and buried the gun in the sand.

  Whittled gray clouds raced in from the north. The wind tore through him as he stepped over strands of rusting barbed wire and into a grove of pines. He used the shovel for a walking stick to favor his sore knee. Along the way he disrupted a fox chasing a rabbit. The fox hid behind a pine and glared angrily at Trent as the rabbit dashed away.

  Within minutes he found a heavily-wooded swamp that was the end of the tributary. Trent concentrated on why Garcia had agreed to help him. It wasn’t out of sympathy for the child, or because Trent had killed his chief adversary’s brother. It was because Trent had the GID report; and how Garcia wanted that report.

  Garcia swore that the Apostles did not have Chloe and on good faith had tipped Trent to a lead buried deep in the woods. Trent knew if he found the mystery he would be indebted to Garcia; he regretted the circumstances, but had no other options.

  He worked his way around thick trunks and gnarled and twisted branches that touched the sluggish water. Eventually he came upon a small clearing at a sharp bend in the slow-moving, muddy river.

  With his back to the trees, he kicked at some leaves and debris and concentrated on the red soil. This was where Garcia had told him to dig. With each fall of the shovel, he thought about his encounter with Garcia. If he reconsidered, quit, and called the police, he knew he’d be on the run from those thugs for eternity. Keep digging. This is for Chloe.

  Within minutes he had made a horrific find; he felt as though he would faint from the pain of the beating as he leaned against an oak branch and stared at a decomposing cadaver lying in a shallow grave.