Dark Passages Box Set Page 11

  I folded my arms across my chest, nodding my head, content that I would fix my mistake. I’d meet with Lou and stop the whole thing. It was a settled matter.

  The meeting was set for three days from my arrival back in Florida. Lou said he had some other business to take care of in the greater Miami area first, and he could pass through Ft. Lauderdale on his way back to Pittsburgh. We agreed to meet in the parking lot of Stoney’s tavern on Canal Street, next to the Hilton. There’d be lots of cars coming and going from a place like that, so nobody would suspect that two cars sitting next to each other were scheduling a murder. Or unscheduling one, as it were.

  Gotta keep that straight. No going back. Think of Avery, even though the crag had been pushing all my buttons again with that gardening club crap. Her new project was sabal palms. Less maintenance, she said. Forget the fact that I’m allergic to palm tree pollen and spend half the year in Florida with a Kleenex up my nose. Bet she got some brochures on them, too.

  Stop! Focus!

  Meet with Lou, file for divorce the next morning, then tell Marcie.

  Three days. It might seem like forever, but I could last that long. It had to be done.

  I hadn’t even called a divorce attorney yet. I would have, but if anything went off track, it’d look awfully suspicious if I was scheduling a divorce while a hit man was killing my wife. Call one a few days later? No problem. But not before. Everything had to appear normal.

  I waited out the days as best I could, working late and staying busy. I even went to one of Avery’s ball games. He didn’t get a hit, and might have actually fallen asleep playing right field during the third inning—on his feet, no less, the lunkhead. And they overcooked the hot dogs at the concession stand, too. Another reason not to go to his games.

  The day finally arrived. I was a nervous wreck. I shouldn’t have been; I was doing the right thing, letting the crag live after all the years of suffering that wench had put me through—the nonstop complaining and indifference to things that mattered to me.

  But all that was about to be in the past.

  I drove to Stoney’s tavern and parked in the rear. It was kind of dark, but that was probably a good thing. Less details to be seen by passers-by.

  I wondered how Chopper Lou was going to find me. We hadn’t discussed what I’d be driving, and—

  There was a knock on my passenger window. I about jumped out of my skin. A short, fat man with a dark suit stood outside, peering in.

  I stared at him and he stared at me.

  He tapped the window again and pointed downward.

  Lowering the window, I found my voice. “Um, you must be Chopper—I mean, Lou.”

  “Mind if I get in the car?” Lou said.

  “Oh! Sure!” I fumbled for the door lock. “Sorry. Force of habit. I always keep my doors locked at night because you never know who might be a crazy murderer or some—nothing. Never mind.”

  Lou got into the car, placing a briefcase at his feet. His eyes were dark and unfeeling. “We talked on the phone. And at work, the name is just Chopper.”

  The words came out of his mouth flat and deadpan, the sure mark of a stone-cold killer.

  “You wanted a job done,” he said. “First things first—you have something for me?”

  I nodded and pulled out an envelope, handing it to him with trembling fingers. “It’s all there. Seven thousand dollars. You can count it.”

  Chopper Lou chuckled. “I’m sure it is. Nobody ever shorts me.”

  I stifled a gasp at his icy tone. “Why, because if they do, you—you . . . They, they end up . . .”

  “How do you want it done?” Lou stuffed the envelope into his jacket pocket.

  My voice wavered. “Well, actually, uh, Lou—I mean Chopper—that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. See—”

  “I like a staged suicide.” Chopper smiled. “We wait for the person drive to a place they’d usually go, like the grocery store or something. Then, before they get out of the car, I jump in. While they’re confused, I take my gun, put it in their mouth—”

  “Um, see, Lou—”

  “And BLAMMO!” He swept his hands out. “Blow their brains out all over their car.”

  “Ha! That’s—that’s great.” My stomach did flip flops. I had a real-life mafia hit man in my car and I was about to say something that might really make him mad.

  Chopper leaned back in the seat. “The other thing I like is a fake drug deal. It’s my specialty. First, I pop ‘em in the head two times, and drop a baggie of white powder in the car. Then, I take a sharp hatchet and chop ‘em up like firewood and leave ‘em in the trunk. Messy as hell, but when the cops come, they don’t look too far beyond what it looks like—a psycho crazy drug deal gone horribly bad. The blood, that’s what really sells it. The Columbian drug runners are into chopping folks up, so it works.” He shrugged. “I can go whichever way you want. Same price.”

  I swallowed hard. The name “Chopper” took on a whole new meaning now. “L-l-lou, when we-we talked, you, uh, you said that we’d meet—like we are right now—we’d meet and that, um, I had to finalize the . . . the . . . the thing.”

  He smiled. “The murder.”

  “Yeah!” I bobbed my head frantically. “That. Yes. The-the-the . . . the murder.”

  “Yeah. That’s what we said.”

  I was finding it hard to breathe. “Well, the thing is, Lou—and, please, this is in no way reflective on you. I’m sure you are a top-notch professional of the highest caliber. But, well, I uh, I kinda . . .”

  He stared at me.

  “I, uh, I . . . I need to call it off. Keep the money! That’s—you, you’ve gone out of your way to accommodate me, and I appreciate that. But, but, but . . . there’s no—there’s no job. No thing. Hit. No hit. For you. To do. I changed my mind.”

  “You changed your mind.”

  Geez, the sinister words that came out of his mouth! I nodded again. “I, yes. I changed my mind. Sir.”

  Lou’s face could have been on Mount Rushmore. He didn’t even flinch. “Let me get this straight. I flew all the way down here to meet with you and you don’t want me to do the job you hired me to do.”

  “That’s right.” I finally was able to inhale. “Well, you did say you had other business here in Florida, so it wasn’t like you came all the way to see me.”

  “You some kinda wise guy?”

  “No. Oh, no. I’m not wise, Lou. Chopper. I’m . . . I’m dumb as a brick. I am. So stupid. Just ask the cra—my wife. Ask her, big fella. Ha, she will tell you how completely not wise I am. Me. As a person.”

  “So, you got no job for me.”

  The man was dense. No wonder he had to kill people for a living. “I’m so sorry, Lou. I can tell you were really looking forward to it.”

  He sighed. “Well, it’s your money. Or was, because job or no job, the money is mine now.”

  “Of course!” I smiled, waving my hands. “I think that’s what we all want. That, and for you not to do the job I allegedly hired you to do. Just so we’re both crystal clear on that.”

  My boy would still have his mother, and I would still have my separation from the crag. And I’d have Marcie. All was good.

  “Oh, we are definitely crystal clear. You don’t want a job done.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a gun. It looked huge in the tiny space of my car.

  “So . . .” I stared at the weapon, my heart racing. “You won’t be needing that, because . . .”

  “Because you don’t want your wife killed.”

  I nodded. “Right.”

  “No problem.” He smiled, placing his hands on his knees. “Whether I do a job or not, I want my customers happy.”

  My heart settled back into my chest. The message had been delivered through the thick skull of this Cro-Magnon.

  “But the thing is, it turns out your wife remembered Ginnie, too. She called two weeks before you did.” He pointed the gun at me and dropped a small plastic bag of white powder
on the front seat. Inside the briefcase, the sharp edge of a small hatchet glimmered in the light. “So like you said, I was already coming down to Florida on business.”

  THE END

  Volume 3: DARK THOUGHTS

  The Monster And The Maintenance Man

  A Number One Bestselling Author

  The Seer

  The Monster And The Maintenance Man

  A monster ain’t some big, green, dead man that’s been brought back to life and rises up out of the graveyard. It’s not a mummy in a pyramid and it’s not a vampire. It’s not a shape-shifting beast that starts out looking like a frail old man and morphs into a twelve-foot-tall dragon-beast with giant claws that rips its victims to shreds while enjoying their screams.

  That’s not a monster.

  I know what all of those things are, and they ain’t no monsters.

  A monster is a human being. A real, live, air-breathing, blood-flowing human being—who does terrible, awful things to other human beings. That’s a monster.

  But a monster is more than that, too. A monster—a real monster—is much more than that. It’s a real, live human being who does terrible things to other human beings, but does not feel any particular way about it. A person who doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong. A demon from Hell, put into human flesh, who goes around killing little girls and chopping them up and putting them in crab traps and then saying he never did anything to anybody, he didn’t do anything wrong.

  That’s a monster.

  He never said he didn’t kill the little girl, he said he never did anything wrong.

  In a certain world, killing little kids and chopping them up for crab bait… isn’t wrong.

  That’s a monster’s world.

  You don’t want to live in that world.

  Now, I will grant you, I served a long prison sentence for murder. I was broke and living on the street, had nowhere to go and nothing to eat. When a man caught me stealing food out of his store, he got rough. He dragged me out back and liked to beat me to death. I was trying to defend myself. I was trying to run away. But old boss, he wouldn’t let go, and when I pulled my hand away and pushed him back, he fell and landed funny against the dumpster. It’s as simple as that. His head hit the corner of that blue steel box with a bang, and he laid on the ground twitching and quivering, foaming at the mouth, his eyes rolling back in his head… I didn’t know what to do. So I ran. But a lot of people saw, and when they caught me, nobody was gonna listen to anything I had to say. Nobody cared that I was starving. All they saw was, well, a monster. A man who would kill another man over a mouthful of food.

  Like I told you, that’s not a monster.

  So I did my time at Starke prison—twenty-five years. And it was a hard stretch, too. Summers are hot in Florida, and there’s no breeze at the Starke Federal Penitentiary. None. The basketball court gets so hot you could fry eggs right on the surface. I should know. When I made trustee, we tried it. Sure enough, in five minutes flat, we had us some eggs over easy. The guards could scarcely believe it.

  They don’t call them guards now. They call them prison attendants or corrections officers. But back then, they was guards, and eventually when I made trustee, they let me call them what they called themselves: the boys. Like, “The boys is goin’ down to Gainesville for the game Friday, Leon.” Or, “You wanna come to the poker game Tuesday and help fetch the boys drinks and sandwiches? Get ya three extra credits.”

  Credits is life in Starke, man. Trade them credits for cigarettes or extra snacks at the commissary. I don’t smoke, so I used my credits for peanut M&Ms. Even early in my stretch, I could usually get enough credits for one pack of M&Ms on movie night each week. That was Fridays, unless it was a holiday weekend and the boys was taking Friday off. Then we’d do movie night on Thursday.

  And since I didn’t have a lot of friends by the time I got out—I wasn’t exactly a young man when I went in—I didn’t have nowhere to go. The Governor said I done my time and I was released, but he never explained how I was supposed to take care of myself at that point. I mean, the reason I was in prison was because I was starving to death and didn’t have a place to live. There wasn’t one waiting for me when I came out.

  So I stayed on.

  First, as a trustee, and then as a certified rehabilitated former felon. The boys all knew me and didn’t think of me as much of a killer anyway. A few even said they wasn’t sure I deserved the sentence I got. Could’ve got a better lawyer. Maybe a different judge. I didn’t see how it mattered at that point, me being locked up in prison by then and all, but I took it the way they meant it, as a way of saying I was okay by them.

  Now, while for most folks, being in prison is a punishment. For me, it was a big help. I learned how to get over my troubles, become patient—even learned to weld a little bit, in one of the classes they taught—and I got pretty decent dental care. Even got a free root canal, complements of the fine people of the state of Florida, thank you very much.

  Couple of fillings, too, because I have a weakness for peanut M&Ms and didn’t usually brush my teeth after the late movie on Friday, so…

  But the boys was pretty good to me. Every once in a while, they’d sneak me a pack of peanut M&Ms on a Wednesday. Stuff like that means when you ask to be made a trustee, the boys will speak on your behalf—and they did. So after a few years, I made trustee and was able to access parts of the prison usually reserved for contractors and guards. When it was nearly time for me to get out, I mentioned to the boys that I didn’t really have a place to go. They were all sorts of helpful.

  Come to find out, the prison computer system was able to link up with the state unemployment office and show me what jobs were out there waiting to be filled by a person who learned all kinds of good skills like I learned over the prior twenty-five years. Welding, small engine repair, electrical wiring. Which is just what Starke needed for when… well, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up a bit.

  See, Starke federal prison had a need of somebody to maintain Old Sparky.

  Now, you probably know they don’t use Old Sparky anymore, but let me explain. Back then, Old Sparky was the name they gave to Florida’s electric chair, whereupon many a monster met his maker. Sparky’s real name is Special Electrical Device, and more than one monster has pissed his pants before meeting his maker on it, I don’t mind saying. Maybe you heard of some of them—like Ted Bundy, or that guy who killed the pregnant woman and then shot her teenage daughter in the face and killed her, too. And he murdered the younger daughter by beating her to death. We fried that guy. It was in all the papers.

  But Sparky was a machine that was part electrical and part mechanical, so they needed to have a maintenance contract on the machine—which meant they needed a maintenance man for the maintenance contract. Now, the contract for Special Electrical Devices was set up a million years ago by a good ol’ boy in the Florida state senate who wanted a job for his brother in law, but the brother in law didn’t know much about maintenance, so he was allowed to contract it out. Both of those fellas eventually moved on, but like a lot of the laws that come out of Tallahassee, that contract stayed on the books long after its usefulness had pretty much left the room. Florida stopped using the electric chair for more than ten years because it kept catching guys on fire or shooting sparks out of a fella’s head, but nobody took the contract for Special Electrical Devices out of the budget, so Old Sparky got rolled out of the closet and serviced every week. After a ten-year vacation, Sparky came roaring back, so to speak. Randy Barclay got the job first—he was a trustee and I was his assistant—and when he rotated out, I took over until my release date.

  And they used Sparky. A lot. On a lot of nights when the power would dim a little, inmates knew someone was getting fried up extra toasty.

  Then, like I said, when it was near my time to leave, the boys set me up on the state unemployment office computer link, and it showed me that this particular job opportunity of maintenance contractor
for Special Electrical Devices was a pretty good match for the skills I had learned inside, mainly since I’d already been doing it for a few years. So the day after I was released from prison as a free man, I was back at Starke and back with all the old boys, just wearing a slightly different outfit. I went from an orange jump suit to a light gray one, and I got to live in an apartment that one of the guards leased out. It was basically a room over his garage, but it had an air conditioner in the window and it had a television set that got two channels, plus a VCR that played movies. The bed was lumpy, and it might’ve been one of the ones they threw out from the prison, but it didn’t matter to me. I had a home and I had a job and I had a new lease on life. I intended to make the most of it.

  Now what I didn’t tell you was, there’s a number of things a man does in prison that maybe he’s not too proud of later. Of course, there’s bad things and there’s worse things, but there’s also… opportunities. A person can see a chance to make a difference, and if he’s the right sort, he takes that opportunity.

  I told you, prison taught me patience, but when two fellas tried to get rough with me in the shower, I had to do what I had to do. When the guards came, nobody could believe that I freaked out so bad with fear that I slipped on the wet tile and dragged the biggest guy down with me. I told them, he hit his thick noggin so hard on the corner of the stall, he busted the cinder block in two. I told them, I grabbed a piece and stuck it in the other fella’s neck, but only because he was fixing to lay into me something good. I told them like I’m telling you—but it was early on, and nobody knew for sure what I was about back then. They came to see me as a good man, a solid person, and someone they could trust. Patient. There to do my time.

  Eventually, they understood the shower was an isolated incident. Nothing like that involving me ever happened again.

  Which is why, later, I got to be an inmate trustee. I was still a prisoner, but I had a lot more access to the prison than the hard-core fellows did. And as a result, I was able to make friends with the prison pharmacist and the prison dentist, the food vendors, some of the cooks…