Bad Men Will Come, page 14
Their opposing styles proved complementary. Where Hively was hard charging, always in action, stalwartly applying pressure to suspects, witnesses, and superiors, Sturges was calm and methodical, a cool head, as it were, a person able to see things from a remove. In addition to that, he didn’t mind the grunt work of the job, the relentless paper trail, data entry, research. Most important, at least to Hively’s mind, Sturges didn’t mind taking a back seat to him, following his lead or taking his orders. This, even though Hively, at age thirty-three, was twenty-plus years his junior. So, incongruous as they were, the setup worked, and the city bore the fruit. Most high-profile cases, such as a midnight slaughter in a motel, now got tossed their way.
Sturges did a full spin in the middle of the motel room, gawking at the 360-degree massacre that lay before them. “When I heard Sundown Courts, I figured it must be another overdose or something.” He gestured first to Pippen, who was still sitting upright, head lolled forward, with lumps of brain glommed onto the wall behind him, streams of blood having sluiced from his ears, nose, and mouth; then to what was left of Kevon, whose body had teetered sideways to where his shoulders and what was left of his head dangled off the bed. “What do you think took the top of his skull off like that?”
“Bullets, I reckon.”
Sturges bent to inspect the injury closer. The trauma had caused Kevon’s eyes to skew lopsided. One now rested about two inches lower than the other. His head was missing most everything above the eyebrows. Sections of skull, chunks of hair from his flattop still attached, were lying on the floor, mixing it up with what looked and smelled like vomit. Some spinal fluid seeped out of the decimated brainpan and dripped down into the medley.
“Jesus.” Sturges recoiled as if the man’s gray matter were infectious. He clasped one hand over his mouth and flapped the other around as if to shoo away the sight. He turned to Hively. “Hale said you might know these guys.”
Hively nodded. “Seen ’em around. They run a corner on Spring Street for Nico Blakes.”
“Blakes? Shit the bed. That doesn’t do us any favors, he’s involved.”
“That one there is Kevon Thompson. And this one is Eric Pippen.”
“Yeah. Wallets were in a drawer over in the room next door. Cell phones were over there too. Locked, though.”
“iPhones?”
“One of them. Other two are burners.”
“You try holding their fingers up to the touch screen?”
“Yeah, didn’t work.”
Hively pointed to the pool of vomit and innards between the beds. “This part of the scene or from one of ours?”
“This muck here is evidence. The sick outside the door is courtesy of our first responder. Lady patrol officer. One of the new ones. Mounts, I think her name is. Becca Mounts.”
“She interview any witnesses?”
“Yeah, she recovered enough after she lost her lunch to get some preliminary statements. Enough to get the shape of the thing at least.” Sturges studied the blood spatter that circled Kevon’s body and mimed the angles from which the shots must have come for him to arrive at such a gruesome end. “It’s like that goddamn emoji they have on your phone that says your mind is blown. Plain overkill if you ask me. Who’d do such a thing?”
“Somebody with a gun or two.”
“You’re sassy tonight.”
“I’m tired. What’d the wits say?”
“Far as I’ve gathered, the fun started in here. Four men, white men, mind, enter with guns. Bang-bang, these two meet their maker. For whatever reason, the party involved rented two rooms, this one and the one next door.” Sturges hiked a thumb toward the adjoining wall that was pocked full of bullet holes. Beams of light from the next room filtered in through the cylindricals like tiny searchlights. “Our shooters must have been alerted to this fact somehow, because all of a sudden they strafe the wall with everything they’ve got. From there, the whole melee spills out into the corridor. Four against one, from what I understand. They chase this one guy all over tarnation, shooting up the joint. We got shells on all three levels of the motel, the courtyard, between buildings, and the parking lot, coming from at least six different weapons. Anyhow, as our running man flees, he tags one of the gunmen. You see the body on your way in, over there on the backside of the motel?”
“No, I came straight up.”
“Well, he somehow manages to get to a car and lights outta here. Not before ramming another vehicle, from what I understand. The three gunmen that are left hop into two different cars, give chase. And poof, they all disappear into the night. That’s that. For now.”
Hively had been frisking the room as Sturges related these events, looking through drawers, sifting through the pockets of the clothes scattered about. He came out of the bathroom holding a small garbage pail with a loose latex glove. “Did anybody see this? There’s a half dozen condoms in here.”
“Makes sense. Couple in a room on the first floor was watching the whole thing. Saw a bunch of girls go out of the room shortly after the gunmen went in. You wanna start with them or the motel owner?”
Hively thought about it. “Show me the third vic.”
They stepped over the puddle of vomit outside the doorway, went down the stairwell and around to the back of the adjacent building. All along the route, techs were tagging physical evidence. There were so many bullet casings on the ground it was like playing hopscotch to get around them. The sheer volume of spent cartridges and blood would keep the techs busy until the sun rose and cut a line across the sky and fell again. At one point they’d run out of markers and have to make a run to the station for more.
A female patrol officer was standing guard over the area where the third victim lay while a police photographer snapped pictures of the scene. Hively asked the photog to step aside and squatted down to examine the body. He had to be careful not to step on the teeth that littered the sidewalk from where the man’s jaw had been blasted off his face.
“We got a name on this one?” Hively asked.
“No ID on him,” Sturges said.
The patrol officer cleared her throat and spoke. “I know who he is, sir. Name’s Jerry Perky. He’s a lowlife, runs some girls here at the motel. Prostitutes,” she clarified.
“You Mounts?” Hively asked.
“Yes, sir.”
Mounts was a short, compact woman with stern, furrowed features and ramrod-straight posture. Her brown hair was shorn on one side with the rest of it slicked back into a tight knot. The way she spoke was very formal. Hively asked her if she’d been in the military.
“Yes, sir. Army.”
“Where’d you serve?”
“Germany.”
“How do you know Mr. Perky here?”
“I’ve been night patrol in this area for the last three months, sir. In that time, I’ve responded to three calls at this location. All of which involved disputes between various men and a couple of the women who I believe worked for Mr. Perky. He showed up in all three instances.”
“This your first murder?”
“First one quite like this, sir.”
“These women who worked for him, you know who they are?”
“I know the ones who were involved in disputes.”
“Good. You know where to find them?”
“I have their last-known addresses.”
“We’re gonna need to speak with them as soon as possible. Track them down and bring them in.”
“Yes, sir. There’s one other thing, Detective. The tech found this.” Mounts handed a small plastic evidence bag over to Hively. Inside was a key card for the motel. “It was in his shirt pocket. They wanted me to wait and turn it over to you when you got here.”
Hively flipped the bag over, examined both sides of the card. There was no room number.
“Was this guy a guest at the motel?”
“If he was, he wasn’t registered,” replied Mounts.
Hively stood from his squat and stretched his back out. “Sturges,” he said, “whattaya say we have a go at the owner now?”
Members of the press were crowding the A-frame barricades that spanned the entrance to the parking lot. As Hively and Sturges trekked past them on their way to the motel office, the reporters cajoled them for a statement. The detectives ignored their hollers, but then a sharp whistle turned Hively’s head. He noticed Ernie Ciccone, the crime reporter for the Cain City Herald, standing apart from the rest of the throng. Hively stopped walking and signaled for the patrolmen manning the barriers to let Ciccone through.
“Not this asshat,” griped Sturges.
“Bear with me,” said Hively. “We can use him.”
The reporter ducked under the tape and strutted over, much to the dismay of the assembled journalists, who voiced their protests. Sturges waved his hands up and down to settle the disgruntled horde.
“Quit your moaning. You’ll get your statement in due time.”
Ciccone, a chinless little fellow with squint eyes, more hair sprouting from his ears than his head, and a beak that hooked off his face like an upended question mark, was no one’s favorite human. The man didn’t seem to have hobbies or interests outside of his vocation. He hovered at the edge of every crime scene like a scavenger biding its time, waiting to swoop in on the scraps. He had a way with the printed word, but the manner with which he wrote about crime was tinged with the salacious. Murder, in particular, he treated more like a fetish than any great tragedy. The ramifications of such horrors, the impact on families, communities, were inconsequential to him, tacked on at the end of his articles, if at all, to appease his editor. The murder was the thing.
But Ciccone had been on the beat for going on three decades, so for better or worse, he was more tapped into the criminal enterprises in town than half the cops were, had watched them morph and grow, die, and flourish again. He understood the lineage of Cain City crime from the roots up. Plus, it was too late in the night for anything he wrote to make the morning papers, so Hively figured it couldn’t hurt to fish around a little.
As he approached, Ciccone said, “If it ain’t my favorite interracial couple.”
“That nose of yours ever give you neck problems?” Sturges cracked.
“That’s rich coming from you, Slug. But since you ask, no. None whatsoever. It does, however, allow me to smell your bullshit from a mile away, so don’t try to feed me any of it.” Ciccone clapped his hands in anticipation. “What do you have for me, Detectives? Word on the line is we got a real bloodbath on our hands. That true?”
“That’s pretty much the sum of it,” admitted Sturges.
Ciccone’s slit eyes sparked to life, and his body did this little twitch of excitement. “How many you got toes-up over there?”
“Three,” said Hively. He got straight to the point. “Me and you are gonna play a little word association.”
“Ooh,” Ciccone said, puckering his lips. “I like games.”
“Jerry Perky.”
Ciccone looked back and forth between the detectives like an expectant puppy awaiting its next treat. His expression gave way to disappointment. “That it? Jerry Perky? Who is he?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Never heard of him. I know a Dale Perky got busted for armed robbery of a check-cashing place couple years back. And a Shalaine Perky got ten years at Moundsville on a manslaughter bid, stabbed her boyfriend in the throat, claimed self-defense.” Ciccone pointed to his head. “But I don’t recall any Jerry Perky in the catalogue.”
Sturges said, “They related? The other two?”
“Cousins, I think.”
“Where’d they live in town?”
“Where else? West End.”
Sturges stole a quick glance at Hively. Ciccone caught it.
“What am I missing here?” Ciccone asked. “This have something to do with that batch of overdoses on Saturday?”
“No connection that we know of,” said Hively. “You hearing anything about that?”
“Nothing you haven’t already read. But, bunch of bodies in a short period of time. Usually these things aren’t coincidental.”
“C’mon, Ciccone,” said Sturges. “This is Cain City. You know as well as anybody, butterfly flaps it wings on one end of town, don’t mean it causes a triple homicide on the other.”
“Holy hell, you know something big’s going on when The Slug starts spitting chaos theory at you.”
“Oh, I’m full of surprises,” Sturges said.
“You’re full of something. Of that, I have no doubt. All right, Detectives, how ’bout telling me who this Jerry Perky fella is? He one of the three you’ve got on the slab?”
“Yeah.” Hively tapered his mouth shut and he chewed his lip while he thought for a second. “We need to find out if those Perkys have another cousin. Tell you what, Ernie. Whatever you find on this, you pass it to me before you write it up. In return, the information we get, I’ll feed it to you before it breaks. Exclusive to you. But you gotta keep that name under your hat until we release it. Deal?”
“You got it.” The false grin of a ventriloquist dummy spread across Ciccone’s face. “Pleasure doing business with you fellas.”
He rejoined the pool of reporters outside the perimeter while Hively and Sturges continued into the motel office.
“You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?” said Sturges. “Two of Blakes’s crew dead. If this Perky turns out to be a Stender—”
Hively finished the sentence. “It means the truce is over.”
Sturges whistled. “If that’s the case, this little brouhaha here could just be the Archduke Ferdinand of the whole shebang.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
There’s a Man with a Gun Over There
The office of the Sundown Courts was a cramped, airless affair with a thick pane of safety glass dividing the business side from the customer’s, and was hardly big enough for the desk and one chair it housed. The owner, an old curmudgeon named Merle Frickie, had a fluff of dove-white hair, a beard that matched, and a face like a crustacean—eyes bulgy and wide-set and with no lids to speak of. He sat in the chair, arms crossed in the defiant stance of a child, and scowled at the standing detectives. Hively had played nice with Frickie to this point, but the old man was being cagey, giving answers that were intentionally opaque, and he was starting to lose patience.
“We kept the cameras up,” the old man explained, “to create the illusion, you know, that we had some kind of security apparatus in place, act as a deterrent, but them things crapped out years ago. We were past warranty on ’em, so wasn’t much incentive to get ’em fixed.”
“And you say you didn’t see any of the gunmen?” Sturges asked, real friendly-like, ingratiating. “Didn’t see the cars fleeing the scene?”
“No, sir. I heard the shots and crawled my ass under this here desk fast as you can say dagnabbit. Didn’t even peek my head out until I heard the police sirens coming up the way.”
“Didn’t sneak a look, even when you heard the cars tearing out of here?”
“That’s when you catch a stray right between the eyes.” Frickie jabbed a finger into the middle of his forehead. “When curiosity gets the best of you.”
“How long did the whole thing last?” Hively asked.
“Shoo.” Frickie let out a whistle that trailed off like a bomb’s descent. “Good little skirmish, that was. Went full-on for a long while. Thought it weren’t never gonna end. Damn near gave me flashbacks to the Tet.” The old man mimicked having an M-16 in his hands, bracing for action. “There I was, mortar fire on my right, machine-gun fire on my left, knife in my teeth, gooks all around me.” Frickie chortled at his own big joke and looked to the detectives to validate his humor. Sturges gave a half grin to placate the old man, then picked up the motel’s logbook and started perusing its pages.
Hively said, “Can’t imagine the types of clientele that frequent this place are too good for business in the long run.”
Frickie wiggled his features around until they looked sufficiently aggrieved. “Not sure what you’re insinuating, Detective. I have a motel that has rooms to rent, and if people want to rent them, I’m not likely to run ’em off by asking what they’re about to get up to in there. Long as they don’t trash the joint, they’re fine by me.”
“So you turn a blind eye to the junkies, hookers, gangbangers?”
“Look here, business is business. I’m in no position to police no one’s morals. If I turned people away ’cause I thought they were on hard times, I wouldn’t have a clientele. Hell, I sympathize with them. I’ve seen hard times. Me and my brother been running this place for forty-three years.”
“Uh-huh. So you know there are ordinances in Cain City against renting rooms by the hour or half day, anything like that?”
“I know the law, thank you very much.”
“So we poke around, we’re not gonna find any improprieties?”
“No, sir. We keep things above board here at the Sundown.”
“No exceptions?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Then why”—Hively pulled the plastic evidence bag with the key card out of his inside jacket pocket, dangled it in front of the man’s face—“was this found in the possession of the man who’s lying dead out there behind your motel right now? Shot to death. Last I checked, it was illegal to rent a room to someone without checking them in with some form of ID. And he wasn’t registered in your logs as a guest. No description of a vehicle, nothing like that. So I’m stumped. Where’d the key come from?”
