I think I nod.
“Hands in the air!” he screams at the perp.
The perp continues to moan. He doesn't raise his hands.
“Put your hands in the air now!”
The sob becomes a howl, and the perp reaches into his trench coat.
Herb and I empty our guns into him. I aim at his face.
My aim his true.
The perp slumps over, streaking the wall with red. Herb rushes up, pats down the corpse.
“He's clean,” Herb says. “No weapons.”
I can hear the sirens now. I manage to lower my gun as the paramedics storm the stairs. Kids flood out of the classroom, teachers hurrying them down the hall, telling them not to look.
Many of them look anyway.
I feel my vision narrow, my shoulders quake. I'm suddenly very cold.
“Are you hurt?” Herb asks, squatting down next to me. I'm covered with the blood of too many people.
I shake my head.
“I found the car,” Herb says. “Registered to a William Phillip Martingale, Buffalo Grove Illinois. He left a suicide note on the windshield. It said, 'Life no longer matters.'”
“Priors?” I ask, my voice someone else's.
“No.”
And something clicks. Some long ago memory from before I was a cop, before I was even an adult.
“I think I know him,” I say.
William Phillip Martingale. Billy Martingale. In my fifth grade class at George Washington Elementary School.
“When we were kids. He asked me to the Valentine's Day dance.” The words feel like stale bread crust stuck in my throat. “I turned him down. I already had a date.”
“Jesus,” Herb says.
But there was more. No one liked Billy. He had a bad front tooth, dark gray. Talked kind of slow. Everyone teased him. Everyone including me.
I crawl past the paramedics, over to the perp, probing the ruin of his face, finding that bad tooth he'd never bothered to get fixed.
The first body is wheeled out of the classroom, the body bag no larger than a pillow.
I begin to cry, and I don't think I'll ever be able to stop.
Suffer
Another Phin story. Phin comes from a long tradition of anti-heroes, and was influenced by Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, Max Allan Collins' Quarry, and Richard Stark's Parker. But he's mostly a direct descendant of F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack, with decidedly less humanity. I wrote this story at the request of the editor for the anthology Chicago Noir. He rejected it. So I sold it to EQMM and wrote another Phin story for him, Epitaph. He rejected that as well, and I sold that to James Patterson for the ITW Thriller anthology. I'm happy how things worked out.
“I want you to kill my wife.”
The man sitting across from me, Lyle Tibbits, stared into my eyes like a dog stares at the steak you're eating. He was mid to late thirties, a few inches taller than my six feet, wearing jeans and a button down shirt that pinched his thick wrists.
I sipped some coffee and asked why he wanted his wife dead.
“Do you care?” he asked.
I shrugged. “No. As long as I get paid.”
Lyle smiled, exposing gray smoker's teeth.
“I didn't think it mattered. When I called you, I heard you did anything for money.”
I rubbed my nose. My nostrils were sore from all the coke I'd been snorting lately, and I'd been getting nosebleeds.
“Any particular way you want it done?”
He looked around Maxie's Coffee Shop—his choice for the meeting place—and leaned forward on his forearms, causing the table to shift and the cheap silverware to rattle.
“You break into my house, discover her home alone, then rape and kill her.”
Jaded as I was, this made me raise an eyebrow.
“Rape her?”
“The husband is always a suspect when the wife dies. Either he did it, or he hired someone to do it. The rape will throw the police off. Plus, I figured, with your condition, you won't care about leaving evidence.”
He made a point of glancing at my bald head.
“Who gave you my number?” I asked.
“I don't want to say.”
I thought about the Glock nestled between my belt and my spine, knew I could get him to tell me if I needed to. We were on Damon and Diversey in Wicker Park, which wasn't the nicest part of Chicago. I could follow him out of the diner and put the hurt to him right there on the sidewalk, and chances were good we'd be ignored.
But truth be told, I didn't really care where he got my number, or that he knew I was dying of cancer. I was out of money, which meant I was out of cocaine. The line I'd done earlier was wearing off, and the pain would return soon.
“I get half up front, half when it's done. The heat will be on you after the job, and you won't have a chance to get the money to me. So you'll put the second half in a locker at the train station, hide the key someplace public, and then give me the info when I'm done. Call from a payphone so the number isn't traced. You fuck me, and I'll find you.”
“You can trust me.”
Like your wife trusts you? I thought. Instead I said, “How would you like me to do it?”
“Messy. The messier the better. I want her to suffer, and suffer for a long time.”
“You've obviously been living in marital bliss.”
“You have to hurt her, or else we don't have a deal.”
I made a show of thinking it over, even though I'd already made my decision. I assumed this was a way to cash in on life insurance, but what life insurance policy paid extra for torture and rape?
“You have the money on you?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Pass it under the table.”
He hesitated. “Trust goes both ways, you know.”
“I could just walk away.”
Like hell I could. I needed a snort worse than Wimpy needed his daily hamburger. But I'm a pretty decent bluffer.
Lyle handed me the paper bag he'd brought with him. I set it on the booth next to me and peeked inside. The cash was rubber-banded in stacks of tens and twenties. I stuck my fingers in and did a quick count.
Six grand, to take a human life.
Not bad for a few hours work.
“When?” I asked.
“Tomorrow night, after 10pm. I'll be out, and she'll be home alone. I'll leave the front door open for you. I'm at 3626 North Christiana, off of Addison. Remember, rape and pain.”
He seemed to be waiting for a reply so I said, “Sure.”
“And Mr. Troutt...” Lyle smiled again, flashing gray. “Have fun with it.”
#
After the diner meeting, I called a guy about securing some fake ID. Then I called my dealer and scored enough coke to keep me high for a while. I also bought some tequila and refilled my codeine prescription.
Back at my ratty apartment, Earl and I had a party.
Earl is what I call the tumor growing on my pancreas. Giving my killer a name makes it a little easier to deal
