beggar had wandered into the building. Unshaven, he was wearing a soiled dark trench coat and scuffed-up black shoes with no socks. The guy looked like a dropped sack of potatoes. For a moment Jimmie wondered if he was dead. But as he studied the motionless figure in front of him, he detected the subtle rise of respiration under the wrinkled, dirty coat.
“Excuse me.”
The guy didn’t move.
“Mister.” Jimmie nudged him with his foot.
The body didn’t budge.
“If you don’t get out of here, I’m going to have to call the cops.”
Still there was no movement. A faint odor of alcohol lingered over the slumped form. He had wandered into the building, probably looking for a cool place to sleep, and had passed out on the stairs.
Jimmie nudged him again but the guy still didn’t move. He couldn’t get around him, so he lifted one long leg, took a giant stride, and tried to navigate three steps while going over the top of the guy. As he straddled the man, suddenly a gloved hand reached out from the trench coat and grabbed Jimmie’s ankle.
The kid smiled. “Excuse me!” The man’s grip was amazingly powerful for a semiconscious drunk.
“What are you doing?” Jimmie reached down to grab the hand that was on his ankle. As he did this, he felt a sharp sting on the back of his hand, as if a snake had bitten him.
He tried to jerk his hand back, but just as quickly it was held fast by the gloved hand that had left his ankle.
“What the hell!” A burning sensation spread like fire through the vein on the back of his left hand, between the first two fingers. “What are you doing?”
The ripped envelope fluttered down the stairs like a fallen leaf. It was followed by the jangle of keys onto the stairs. Before the envelope settled at the foot of the steps, Jimmie’s vision began to blur. An amazing feeling of euphoria swept through his body, carried by the heat that flushed his veins. He stood there weaving in a broad circle as if floating on a cloud. Sprawl-legged over the man lying on the stairs, a sensation of uncaring bliss flooded his body.
As if in a dream, Jimmie watched as the bum left the syringe still buried deep in Jimmie’s left hand. The leather glove reached up and grabbed him by the shoulder. In a rapture, Jimmie settled on the stairs, his delirious gaze focused at the fuzzy edge of the carpeted runner where his cheek landed. His vision clouded. He blinked twice. There was a fleeting sensation of drool as it ran from the corner of his paralyzed mouth, and then nothing as the filament of existence dissolved.
The bum shifted his body and pulled himself out from beneath his fallen victim. He was slight of build, the kind of spindly character who could cross a crowded street and never garner more than a fleeting glance from those who passed him. He had a pockmarked face from an adolescence of acne. But even this did not distinguish him, unless you happened to engage his eyes. If the iris was the window into the soul, Muerte Liquida’s glassy stare offered a view of hell. To a growing list of victims it was the last thing they ever saw.
He glanced quickly at the plunger on the syringe to make sure it was all the way in. He didn’t remove it but instead grabbed a roll of surgical tape from the pocket of his trench coat. He wrapped three rounds of the tape around the syringe and the dead man’s hand to hold the hypodermic in place.
Then, as if in a single motion, he grabbed the keys and slipped down the stairs to retrieve the envelope. Like a jack-in-the-box, he came back up and lifted the body from under the arms and around the chest. For someone so slim he was deceptively strong. Liquida carried the body up the few steps to the second floor. Down the corridor a short distance he found apartment 204.
He leaned the body against the wall and held it there with his shoulder as he opened the door with the key. Within seconds he and the lifeless body were inside with the door closed. He tossed the keys and the envelope on the chair next to the door.
Now he moved with lightning speed. Liquida lifted the kid in his arms so as not to leave drag marks, and carried him into the bedroom. He laid him on the bed and then removed the dead man’s coat, tie, and shoes; opened his shirt collar; and rolled up his sleeves.
Liquida then reached into the oversize pockets inside his trench coat and started pulling out the paraphernalia. This included a short length of elastic surgical tubing; a box of fresh syringes; a tablespoon properly burned and scoured with the residue of heroin; and a small jar with a charred wick, an alcohol burner. To this he added several cotton balls, all of which had been soaked in a solution of heroin and left to dry.
After impressing a thumb and fingerprint from the victim’s right hand onto the working end of the spoon and the burner, Liquida lit the burner and allowed some of the residue from the hot spoon to permeate up to the lampshade on the nightstand next to the bed. He put the hot spoon on the wooden surface on the nightstand, where it left a burn mark. He arranged everything on the nightstand next to the bed, except for the tubing. That he stretched out under the kid’s left forearm a few inches above the taped syringe that was still embedded in the large vein at the back of the victim’s hand. He removed the surgical tape and carefully impressed a single right thumbprint from the victim on the plunger of the hypodermic. Then he ran a few carefully smudged prints with his dead fingers down the barrel of the syringe.
Finally Liquida retrieved six small packets of silvery aluminum foil from the pocket of his trench coat. Four of these contained two small chips, each of black-tar heroin heavily cut and stepped on, any one of which would be unlikely to cause an overdose. The fifth sealed packet contained two deadly doses of pure heroin. He placed these in the top drawer of the nightstand. Then he unfolded the foil on the sixth packet and left it on the nightstand next to the spoon. It contained one small chip of black tar, almost five hundred milligrams of pure heroin. The second chip from the packet Liquida had processed by using the spoon and burner before loading it into the syringe.
When the crime unit processed the scene, they would find an inexperienced recreational user who had gotten a mixed bag of product and overshot his tolerance by not realizing the potency of his purchase.
The job was nearly done. There was only one more item. Liquida grabbed the kid’s suit coat from the floor, reached inside, and found Jimmie Snyder’s wallet. He opened it and started looking. Sure enough, behind one of the credit cards he found it, just like the man had said. He plucked the business card from the wallet and put it in his pocket.
He was finished, except for one final touch, something special, a personal perk. It was something for himself that the client hadn’t asked for but was going to get anyway. It would give Liquida immense pleasure. Time to draw the fly into the web. Fumbling with his gloved fingers he pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket. Inside was a single business card. He lifted the card from the bag.
PAUL MADRIANI
Attorney-at-Law
Madriani and Hinds
He slipped it behind the credit card in the kid’s wallet. Then he replaced the wallet in the coat pocket and laid the coat on the foot of the bed, next to the body.
In less than a minute, Liquida was out the door and down the stairs. He stopped only briefly to remove the duct tape he had put on the overhead closing arm at the front door two days earlier to keep it from locking.
Out on the street he mixed in with a few pedestrians. By the time they reached the corner, the disheveled vagrant in the dirty, dark trench coat had disappeared like a lethal wisp of smoke.
TWO
It’s tricky to know how good a job the government does at keeping secrets since the only ones we know about are the ones that leak. This morning Zeb Thorpe, assistant director for the FBI’s National Security Branch, is trying to wedge all four fingers and his thumb into the cloak-and-dagger dike, which is starting to drip.
Thorpe has us closeted in the federal building out near Miramar for what appears to be a session of truth and consequences.
“Mr. Madriani, Mr. Hinds, Mr. Diggs. I appreciate all of you coming out here this morning.”
