Young Writers Society

Peter "Viggo" Carlsen, a former cop, is on the run with Nyssa Malik, whose abusive fiancé, his former partner, Russel Pierce, framed him for murder. Before she left Russ, Nyssa staged her own murder.

To know more, read Chapter 15.2.

Captain Cordello stepped into the office she had assigned to the Feds. Rotwell and Mavrici were out. Reims and Jenks were, as per usual, paddling through a sea of paperwork. Flores sat in a corner, making a couple of quiet phone calls, looking like he was trying to disappear. Lazy idiot. He was seriously getting on her nerves.

Cordello smiled one of her rare smiles at Reims – it looked a little frayed but, then, she had cause. The detective sat up straighter. He always stood to attention for her. She liked that about him, he had never expected her to earn his regard. His respect was on the standoffish side, no ass-kissing. Some of the colleagues resented that but Cordello understood.

Reims was an honest man, a good cop. He was afraid having friends in the force would compromise him. He had chosen to work to the best of his abilities, even if it meant keeping his personal and professional lives strictly separated. She trusted him a lot more than she did charming snakes like Russel Pierce or Robbie Flores.

“Flores, can you wait outside?” she asked, her tone making it more of an order.

Flores left without a word of protest, which she hadn’t expected. He usually had a thing about being excluded. The door slammed behind him.

Cordello glanced from her lieutenant to Agent Jenks, then back. She wasn’t sure how she felt about sharing information with the taskforce. Reims seemed to be getting along especially well with Jenks, but she wasn’t a big fan of change – she was slow to warm to newcomers. More than that, back at the beginning of her career, Breen Cordello had been badly burned by a couple of Feds.

She had been part of a similar taskforce with the DEA and the FBI. She had done a lot of the legwork, but she had been naive, she hadn’t played her cards close enough to her chest. As anyone but her could have expected, the feds had taken all the credit. One of them had even disparaged her to her own bosses. It hadn’t done permanent damage to her career, but it had delayed her determined climb up the ladder by a good two years.

She had gone out of her way to cultivate contacts in several federal agencies, but she tended to suspect them all of being glory hounds.

Jenks seemed to sense her discomfort. He stood up. “I can leave you two to it if you want.”

She took a deep breath and made up her mind. “No, please, Jenks, sit down. I feel that the FBI needs to be informed.”

He complied. She took a seat too, which was out of character. Cordello was usually on the move, she didn’t stop, she rarely even paused. Even during meetings, she was always getting up to pace. But, now, she felt like sitting. The politics were wearing her down. Playing interference between her people and the hierarchy was never her favorite part of the job. No one in the station had any idea what kind of pressure she bore for their sake. These days, it was near unbearable.

Pierce was going to give her an ulcer.

She sighed. “I had a crisis reunion with the DA office and Deputy Chief Cordial this morning.”

The two men exchanged a look and Reims shrugged. “We heard the rumors.”

“We decided it was high time to arrest Detective Pierce. At eleven this morning, a detective from Internal Affair took four uniforms to his place of residence. According to his surveillance detail, that’s where he was. Unfortunately, it now appears that he had slipped out.”

“You lost him?!” Jenks burst out.

Cordello secretly shared his angry disbelief: heads would roll over this fuck-up. She hoped hers wouldn’t. She felt badly let down on that one. She simply had no choice but to trust her subordinates in the minutiae. It had been clear from the first that this case would be big, though, and she had made sure to put her best on it. Her best apparently couldn’t handle watching a suspect. She was pissed off enough to make sure that some of that shit rolled down the hill.

“Agent Jenks, please,” she said, “calm down. It’s not the first time Pierce has snuck out. We’ve got no reason to believe he’s on the run. With any luck, we can arrest him when he comes back. We’re keeping the information contained for now. But since you wanted to interrogate him again tonight…”

She looked at them curiously, like she couldn’t fathom why. Reims played along, “We need to go over his history with Carlsen again.”

“Why? You think he’s still hiding something?”

Jenks replied, “We are pretty sure he is. In her journal, Nyssa Malik made a pretty good case for Carlsen’s innocence.”

“A circumstantial case.”

Cordello had to focus on that. She felt responsible for all her people. As long as there was no hard evidence of a frame-up in the Defoe murders, she wouldn’t have to face the possibility that she had let Carlsen down. Much easier to cling to the facts as the justice system accepted them. And it would destroy her career if Carlsen turned out to be innocent.

Jenks and Reims exchanged another look. Jenks decided to do the talking, probably because he didn’t want to set Reims against his own captain, “The Defoe case still holds water – barely, but not the corruption charges against Carlsen.”

“No, the press pounced on the possibility that he was dirty, but it was mostly rumors.” Cordello paused, rubbed a hand over her eyes, revisiting, as she now did too often, every moment of the trial in her mind. “And a very small part of the DA office’s theory of the crime.”

She looked to Reims, who nodded. “They were failing to make the crime of passion angle stick. Carlsen had no history of violence against women. Quite to the contrary. From what I remember, he had a surprisingly light touch with women and children.”

She nodded, remembering Carlsen as another detective she had relied on. “The DA definitely pushed the illicit love affair angle hard. But, in the end, they had to use the rumors of corruption and the climate of paranoia to paint a credible picture of Carlen as a multi-murderer.”

But, technically, Carlsen had been tried and convicted for the murders. Technically – and that’s the angle shehad been pushing with the press and her superiors, he had never been arrested, never been convicted for anything else. Those new accusations against Pierce related to an entirely separate matter, to a decade-old investigation into corruption within her station. That investigation made her look bad but wasn’t her responsibility. If it had been botched, it was IAD’s problem.

Still, she couldn’t afford to be seen as a captain with a blind spot for rotten apples among her subordinates – or her career was going to come to a swift end.

“It’s more than that,” Jenks told her a little too smugly for her tastes. “The Defoe case looks like it could be linked to the corruption problem.” Cordello, who hated that fact, narrowed her eyes at him. “We’ve got the timing. We’ve got the affair.” He paused, explained, “Helen Defoe communicated with her lover on burner phones from the same batch as the mole’s.”

“But, if Carlsen was the Defoes’ killer, as well as Helen’s lover and the mole,” Reims asked, “why did Malik trace the dirty money back to Pierce? Two possibilities. Either Pierce was both the mole and the lover, and framed Carlsen, or Carlsen and Pierce were both corrupt, with Carlsen also sleeping with Helen Defoe. In both cases, sooner or later, Carlsen and Pierce still have accounts to settle.”

“Third possibility,” Jenks added, because he liked the third possibility a lot more than Reims did. “Malik can’t be trusted, and she was Pierce’s accomplice.”

“Before or after the Defoe murder?” Cordello asked.

“Both are possibilities. But after, we believe.” Jenks nodded to himself and Reims sighed. They had gone over this one too many times. “Malik conducted a serious investigation into the leak, back in the days. Why would she do that if she was part of it? It makes no sense. I trust Malik’s diary, her account of events – up to a point. I believe that, at the time, she thought Carlsen was the driving force behind their unauthorized investigation. I believe that, after his arrest, she fell into an abusive relationship with Pierce. And – God help me – I believe that he wouldn’t let her out of that relationship. Maybe she turned to an old friend, seeing him as the lesser of two evils.”

Cordello acquiesced, “Yes. We’ve already corroborated a lot of what she recorded in her diary. There is only one discrepancy that we could find, as far as the domestic violence is concerned.”

Jenks reached for his notepad, his interest obvious. “And what would that be?”

“Medical records. There were none.”

“None?” Jenks repeated. “How could that be? I saw the pictures. Who didn’t? That girl received medical attention. She must have.”

“But there is no record of that,” Cordello insisted. “Either she used a different identity – but I think it would have come out, with her picture all over the news – or Pierce put her in touch with some kind of mob doctor.”

“Damn.” The FBI agent dropped his pen. “We need to speak with him.”

“Why?”

“Show her.”

Reims dug a file out of a nearby pile, pulled out a page and held it out to Cordello. It was a low-quality photograph of a rocky beach. Footsteps were clearly visible, leading from the water to the vegetation. Whoever had left them was limping. Badly.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to a darker stain on the sand.

“Blood. It was identified as Carlsen’s. Our working hypothesis is that he hurt himself swimming to the mainland. We’ve got little doubts that Malik either facilitated or arranged his escape. Maybe Carlsen’s hiding using the same means Pierce used to conceal his mistreatment of her.”

Cordello hesitated. There was a question she wanted to ask but didn’t dare. She was not the only one in that, though Pierce’s lawyers wouldn’t hesitate.

Fuck it, she thought. It had to be said. She had insisted that different investigators work on Carlsen’s escape and on Malik’s presumed murder just so the first set could consider a possibility the second set wouldn’t – couldn’t afford to because of the media pressure. “Could she be alive?”

This time, the look that passed between the unlikely partners was alarmed.

“We’ve treated that as one hypothesis out of many,” Reims admitted.

“How likely is it?”

Jenks shrugged. “It’s possible. Malik is most probably dead, killed by her boyfriend, but she could still be alive.”

Reims cut in, “And if she’s alive, she’s with Carlsen right now. I knew them back then, and I’ve got no doubt about that.”

“She turned to Carlsen for help when she couldn’t get out of her relationship with Pierce.”

“Primed to be manipulated,” Cordello ventured.

Jenks beamed at her in approval. “Oh, yes, Captain Levowsky confirms that she had been raising doubts about Carlsen’s guilt. I can picture that. She’s desperate, he uses their past friendship. She devotes herself to getting him out. First, she tries to get his conviction overthrown. When it doesn’t work, he sets her to work planning his escape.”

“The earthquake…” the captain began.

“The earthquake was a stroke of luck for them but we all know that we’d have caught Carlsen a long time ago if there hadn’t been some planning beforehand.”

Reims acquiesced. “Someone supplied him with cash, medical help and a vehicle. Malik is as good a guess as any. Better, actually.”

“Any other potential accomplice?”

Cordello’ tone implied that they’d better have them. If Malik was still alive, it would only make this mess worse for all of them.

“Very few,” Jenks replied. “Carlsen’s family is completely estranged from him. He had few personal friends. He kept to himself in prison.”

“Alright.” Cordello nodded. “Let’s say Malik helped Carlsen plan his escape. It means she’s still alive?”

“Not necessarily. I guess Pierce could have grabbed and murdered her as she was making her exit. But that’s pushing coincidence a little far.”

Again, Cordello nodded, conceding the point. “Right. I can see where it would be tempting to resuscitate Malik.”

Jenks smiled grimly. “I’m afraid it doesn’t do anything for our chances of catching Carlsen. A man alone is one thing. A man with an accomplice is another. And Malik could be a problem.”

Cordello harrumphed. She could remember Malik drunk out of her mind and she could remember Malik pining after that snake Pierce. The girl didn’t strike her as much of an obstacle.

“She’s very smart, very detail-oriented.” Reims shrugged a little. “You remember how Carlsen used to call her his ‘little genius’?”

Cordello nodded.

“And even putting Malik’s character aside,” Jenks remarked, “Pierce’s dirty money has disappeared. Maybe into her pocket? Our forensic accountants say that’s 1.3 million, total.”

They went very quiet.

“1.3 million,” Cordello repeated blankly. “Pierce had 1.3 million, and he didn’t run.”

“Looking for a bigger score, probably. Isn’t that what they all do?”

The FBI agent shook his head, bleak and sober. “And that’s how we catch them, in the end.”

***

There were no news vans in front of Russel Pierce’s house. Cordello and the rest of the brass had delayed his arrest long enough that journalists had stopped camping out there hoping for a scoop. They just harassed Russ when he came in or out of public buildings. They made for a more appropriate background than his bungalow in the suburbs. It looked too nice and comfortable. Medias weren’t comfortable with the fact that monsters too lived in gingerbread cottages.

Of course, the police car sitting in front of this particular gingerbread cottage was a big clue that the place wasn’t the sweet haven it promised. The vehicle looked ominous in the rapidly diminishing light. Flores parked next to it. He was so nervous that his hand almost slipped on the gear lever, but he forced himself to smile at the uniform sitting behind the wheel.

“Any movement?” he asked, flashing the officer his badge.

“Completely dead,” the young man replied.

Flores nodded – not that he cared. “Keep up the good work. I’ll be inside.”

He started his engine again and drove down Pierce’s alley unchallenged. A bungalow sat in the middle of a large yard shaded by trees that hid it from view. A small, unprepossessing building, it sported an impressive number of windows as well as a wide porch. Flores had never visited Russ’s house. Their ‘friendship’ had been about partying hard, sharing blow and hooker.

Someone had put some effort into the garden. The pines and the shrubs were immaculate. Flowers had been planted all around the house, as well as in the window-boxes. The plants were already drooping. Flores, who recognized Nyssa Malik’s hand in them, wasn’t surprised.

He had minored in art in college and he usually made a note of people’s tastes. His instincts told him that the bungalow itself and its decoration were all Russ. The rooms were too long and narrow, the floor-plan unpractical as well as in poor taste. The walls were a dull mustard yellow. There was a hideous green and purple linoleum on the floor. Posters of tacky cartoon characters were taped here and there on the wallpaper. They only added to the gloomy atmosphere.

Flores stuffed Malik’s key and its torn evidence bag into his pocket as he shut the door behind him. Garfield smirked at him from the other side of the entry hall. That feline bastard was holding a plate of lasagnas up in the air and out of reach of Odie, who looked starved.

Shaking his head at the pair, Flores glanced around. He hadn’t been paying much attention while serving the search warrant on the house with the rest of the taskforce.

Reims, always a stickler for protocol, had made sure that every scrap of paper, as well as all the devices, were bagged and taken back to the station, where they currently sat in an evidence locker. Flores had spent most of the afternoon and evening going frantically through it all. He hadn’t found what he needed there.

It would probably be smarter to go about the search in a methodical, scalpel-precise manner. This late in the day, however, desperation was the name of the game. Flores took a random book from the long shelves running along one wall, noticing the thick coating of dust. He shook it and dropped it, did the same with the one next to it. He went through the furniture, the clothes, pocket after pocket, shelf after shelf, knocking over the wardrobes, the tables, etc., as he went.

It didn’t take that long but, then, it wasn’t a big house and the FBI and the SFPD had already gone through it. Afterward, Flores stood in the midst of the chaos he had created, panting.

“It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay.”

No, it wasn’t. Even if the taskforce didn’t stumble upon Pierce’s blackmail pictures in the course of the investigation, Pierce himself was going to let them leak sooner or later, either once Flores stopped helping him or when he wasn’t needed anymore.

“Shit,” Flores swore, kicking a chair. “Shit, shit, shit!” Spotting Garfield out of the corner of his eyes, he tore the poster off the wall. “Screw you, Russel Pierce. Screw you.”

Hot and cold now, he suddenly realized that the blackmail pictures were the least of his worries. The taskforce was bound to catch Pierce at some point and to find out that Flores had helped him.

Damn it! Forget about statutory rape, he thought, let’s talk about aiding and abetting.

Pierce was as dirty as they came, and crazy to boot, and he was somewhere out there, probably making new victims. Flores had helped him evade arrest, he was liable for everything the madman was doing.

“Shit,” he repeated.

He had heard, read about the things they had done to Carlsen in prison. He wasn’t risking it.

***

When Russel Pierce didn’t pop up again that night, the SFPD turned the city upside down looking for him. The manhunt went on all night and most of the morning without visible results. It was close to noon when Jenks and Reims received their first piece of news. It was gruesome, and it didn’t come from a source they had expected. They were still at the station doing research while Mavrici and Rotwell had gone out looking for new leads.

Jenks’ cell rang. He picked up the call, knowing it was his partner. “Nothing yet, Lara.”

“I don’t know about that,” she replied. Her voice sounded somewhat strangled. “We’ve got a problem.”

“What’s going on?”

“We’re at Tracy Sarasian’s place.”

He frowned. The name was familiar, but he couldn’t place it. “Who is Tracy Sarasian?”

Reims answered, never looking up from his papers, “The mother of that murdered stripper Malik mentions in her diary.”

Mavrici must have heard that because she jumped right back in, “We’ve just found her body.”

“Oh, shit.”

“It’s Pierce.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Her neighbors recognized him and…You’ve got to see it, Liam.”

“Give me the address.” She rattled it off. “I’ll be there in half an hour, tops.” Reims gestured to him. “Reims’s tagging along.”

“What about Flores?” Mavrici asked.

“Haven’t seen him yet today.”

“Good riddance.”

***

Sarasian’s place was scary. There was blood everywhere. The victim’s body was spread on the living-room’s sofa, but the state of the bedding clearly indicated that she had been raped and beaten to death there. That cold bastard Pierce had worked her over in bed, then moved her out of the room, probably so he could sleep the night away from the stink of decomposition.

He had redecorated the kitchen: maps of the state of California were pinned to the walls, covered in doodles and small red pins.

“What’s that?” Reims asked.

“It looks like he was conducting his own little manhunt,” Mavrici replied, digging into a pile as she spoke. Her gloved fingers stilled, and she let out a little whistle. “Look at this.”

She handed the handful of papers to her partner. He held them so Reims, who hadn’t donned his own gloves yet, could read them too.

“A witness statement?” the detective stammered, baffled.

It boggled the mind, really. Just when he was getting use to the idea of Russel Pierce the criminal, the man sprang a perfect piece of police work at him. It looked like Pierce had been following up on leads in search of Peter Carlsen and, while the hunt itself was pure bloody madness, there was a method to it.

“Criminals often revert to old habits when they’re backed in a corner,” Jenks observed with a feebie’s unshakable composure.

Reims nodded. It was logical, but the sight of that kitchen, blood and paperwork, made him sick.

“What the hell?!” Mavrici started angrily. “I can’t believe this shit!”

Shaking himself out of his weird mood, Reims moved toward her. She was standing with her back to him. She held something in one hand, the other was down her flank, clenched into a fist. The source of her perplexity and rising fury seemed to be a thick stack of hastily photocopied documents.

“What’s that?” he asked.

She threw the papers angrily back on the counter.

“It’s our log of sightings!” she burst out. “How the hell did he get his hands on that?!”

Reims could hear the unspoken accusation. In his place, others would have taken umbrage. In other circumstances, maybe he would have too. Two salient facts helped him put his ego on the back burner. First, he didn’t feel snow white in this mess. Hard to, especially while standing in that kitchen, the scent of cold blood thick in his nose. And then, there was Jenks. The FBI agent was a cool professional and deserved to get the same in return.

They exchanged one long look.

“How long has Flores been gone?” Jenks asked in a grim tone of voice.

Reims made a noise halfway between a snort and choking. “Since yesterday afternoon when the captain threw him out to tell us about Carlsen. I didn’t think much about it,” he added, “except…”

He fell quiet. Shit. Flores was just stupid enough to leak information to Pierce – either out of pique or because he was just plain dumb. He was also just smart enough to be useful to the corrupt detective. Just smart enough to procure the log for Pierce. Just smart enough to find out about Pierce’s impeding arrest.

“Good riddance,” Mavrici said, her tone heavy with a painful kind of sarcasm.

Reims finally gloved on. Time to show the feebies what the locals could do. He picked up an empty box of cereal. “Looks like he’s been holing up in here for a while.”

“He’s probably been staying in and out of here since he first got suspended. He knew an arrest was pending and he needed some place to sift through all that information.”

The detective nodded, made a note of it. He would have to call in to Sarasian’s workplace, to her friends and family, to determine whether she had been allowed out of her apartment while Pierce obsessed in her kitchen and whether she had said anything of interest to anyone.

Mavrici’s bleak eyes were still riveted to the bedroom’s door. “Why did she put up with him?”

Reims answered obliquely, “Pierce had a thing for grieving mothers – and sisters, girlfriends, wives, daughters…”

“Did you know that back then, back when you were still buddies?” Mavrici asked snidely.

“What are you implying?!” he snapped. “That I let…”

Jenks put a calming hand on his shoulder. “She didn’t mean it. We are all…a little tense.”

“I’m not tense!” she exclaimed. “I’m furious! And I don’t understand. Why kill her?! What’s the point?”

Well, that one was easily answered…

“Because he found them. He didn’t need to hide anymore. He’s leaving, settling scores, taking his 1.3 million and flying off into the sunshine.”

***

“Call me,” Reims’s recorded voice said drily.

“Shit.”

His fingers shaking, Flores deleted the message and listened to the next one. The tone was considerably darker, “Where the hell are you, Flores? Come to the station right now. And call me!” He deleted that one too, listened to the next one, “Where are you, Flores? Call me now.” Reims paused, went on, “I’m at your place. Your wife’s terrified. She says you left through the window in the middle of the night. We can help you, but you’ve got to check in.”

Trish was terrified? Well, no wonder, Flores thought, staring at a damp patch on his motel room’s wallpaper. He hadn’t had time to explain anything to her. If he had known it was going to take the taskforce hours to link him to Pierce, he would have told her everything. Instead, he had come home, spotted the black and white parked in front of his house. He couldn’t be sure it was only there to ensure his safety. For all he had known, a warrant could have been issued for his arrest.

There had been no way he could drive by and not stop, however – there was no way he could leave without kissing his wife one last time. Maybe he was crazy, but he loved her too much.

Trish just didn’t understand him. Sometimes, it even angered him, how little she understood him. She thought it was for a lack of love. When she had found out about the one affair at the beginning of their marriage, she had cried for days, thinking he didn’t love her anymore. It had taken all his powers of persuasion to convince her that there had only been the one mistake.

Sweet Trish…She thought that sex was somehow related to love.

It simply didn’t work that way for him. Frankly, at this point, it wasn’t even related to attraction anymore. He just needed women to gorge himself on empty orgasms. He had come in bodies he despised, and borderline hated, until his heart and penis felt used to the bone.

Trish would never understand that – how much the compulsion hurt him. She would leave him. He couldn’t stop but he couldn’t handle the thought of hurting his wife again either. It was tearing him apart. The stress was killing him. He had taken to self-medicating with weed. Marijuana had done the trick just fine for years – until Russel Pierce had first pushed him toward coke. Blow was expensive, way more expensive than pot. The habit was also harder to conceal.

And everything had spiraled out of control. Not for the first time that night, Flores cursed Russel Pierce.

He had started taking the battery out of his cell again, but he paused, reconsidered. Fucked up as everything was, he knew how to make at least one thing palatable. He dialed a number he knew by heart – and wasn’t that fucked up?

“Can you get me some tonight?” he asked.

***

Russel Pierce wasn’t running. He was walking. He refused to be hurried along. When you allowed yourself to panic, that’s when you made mistakes. He didn’t make mistakes. He was walking from Russian Dollz, where he had looked for Flores in vain, to Mark’s place in her ritzy neighborhood.

Her building had a security guard at the front desk who had to buzz you up. Russ just hid behind a column, watching inside until the guard left his chair to take a leak. Russ snuck inside, tiptoed across the hall to the desk and pushed the button that opened the elevator doors. He got down on the first floor and climbed up three flights of stairs.

Mark lived on the fourth floor but, since she shared it with absentee Dutch owners, she would be suspicious if she heard the elevator stop on her floor. Then again, she probably wasn’t home yet. She was a night bird. He checked his watch and decided to give her two hours. He had a perfect line of sight on her door through the narrow window of the emergency staircase.

Chances that someone would walk on him at this hour were low. Russ made himself comfortable.

Mark came in around ten – early for her. She was wearing a winkled pink pantsuit. Coming home from work, then. His prey hadn’t been in the mood to party.

Too bad for her.

He slipped out of the staircase and snuck up on her. The first she knew of him, he had one hand over her mouth and was pushing the door open with the other one. She struggled but he was so much stronger than her, it was child play to keep her in place one-armed. He took the keys from the door, locked it. Mark saw what he was doing and let out a frightened little gasp.

“Hi, baby,” he crooned in her ear. “Thought I’d pay you a visit before I left town.”

He half carried her into the kitchen. He picked an impressive-looking blade out of the knife drawer. It was an eight-inch-long, four-inch-wide chopper. He trailed its tip along Mark’s throat. It was a curiously erotic sight – curiously because he wasn’t that into knives. He much preferred using his hands on women – a belt would do in a pinch but, as for blades, he stuck to razors. They were handy to mark the bitches and give them a reminder of whom they belonged to. Even then, he preferred to burn them – now, that was branding…

“Careful, angel, it’s sharp. Now, be a good girl and I’ll make sure you enjoy it. But if you piss me off, I’ll make it hurt. A lot.” He kissed her neck tenderly. She trembled. She was crying. “Do you understand?”

She nodded – she barely dared to, wisely scared as she was of the knife.

“Good girl. I’m going to take my hand away. If you scream, I’ll cut you to ribbons before I leave, and that’s a promise. Understood?”

Tremble. Nod. He let her go. She breathed in and out deeply, then she took a careful, little step away from him.

“Russ,” she said.

He slapped her.

“It’s really annoying,” he told her, “how none of you seems to get that you don’t talk unless I allow you to.” She wasn’t crying anymore, just holding her cheek and looking shocked. “Of course, talking to me didn’t seem to be a priority of yours until now.” Panic filled her eyes. “It’s okay, baby.” He patted her short hair, as gentle as could be. “I know you’re sorry. Tell me you’re sorry.”

“I’m…so sorry, Russ.”

“That’s right.” He rubbed his thumb across her lips, pleased. “You haven’t annoyed me yet, Mark. Don’t annoy me. Or you’re going to be sorrier.”

“I don’t want to annoy you…”

He slapped her again. “Watch that mouth.”

“Sorry. I…” she squealed.

She pressed her lips together, probably waiting for a third slap. Instead, he rubbed her stinging cheek. “Sorry is okay, baby, one of the few things you can always say. Now, Mark, move your sweet, sorry ass. You’ve got money stashed around here, don’t you?” She hesitated. He slapped her again. “Now. And where is your credit card?”

She looked like she would protest. He was all for it, since it gave him a reason to punish her. “Oh, Mark, baby, let me show you what happens when you refuse to obey.”

She opened her mouth and he knew that she was going to scream. He caught her by the hair and stuffed a dishtowel in her mouth. He juggled her wrists into one hand.

“This,” he told Mark, unbuckling, “is going to be fun.”

And when he found Nyssa Malik, he was going to have even more fun.

***

Flores felt exposed standing on the curb waiting for his dealer’s car. The motel he had wound up in, the Tipsy Bird, attracted the worst kind of clientele – not that Flores was about to judge, considering his present circumstances. But it was the end of Summer and the night was warm and ripe, people bustling about.

When Jaime’s brand-new red truck turned around the corner and slowed down, he opened the passenger’s door and got inside without hesitation. The car immediately sped up, the door’s locking mechanism clicking on – and Flores realized that he didn’t know the driver, a huge white man with closely cropped hair and military tattoos circling his muscular forearms. “Who the hell are you?!”

The man’s eyes didn’t flicker away from the street ahead of him. Flores would have done something about that, but the cold end of a gun barrel pressed against his nape and he froze. He didn’t dare turn around. Belatedly, he realized that it was a four-seater and that they had company on the backseat.

“Phone,” the invisible passenger grunted, shoving a smartphone at him with his free hand.

“What?!”

“Phone,” he repeated.

Flores took the cell out of reflexes more than anything else and pressed it to his ear. “Yes?”

“Good evening, Detective Flores.” It was a man’s voice, with the barest hint of an accent and a sophisticated relish to every word. “I hope you won’t be angry with Jaime for organizing this little one on one.”

Glancing at the driver out of the corner of his eyes, Flores mumbled, “More like two and a half on one.”

The caller chuckled. “Quite right, detective. Quite right. Well, I didn’t give Jaime much of a choice in the matter, I’m afraid.”

“Is he alright?” Flores asked.

He couldn’t help it. A dealer Jaime might be, but he was just a kid.

“Jaime’s perfectly fine. You should worry about yourself instead. I know everything about you – your little coke habit, the hookers you bully into taking care of you, your lovely wife.”

“Leave Trish out of this!” he snapped.

Before his anger could really take form, the driver shoved a gun in his face. “You listen,” the man told him.

“I’d be happy to leave her out of this…if you do something for me.”

“What do you want?” Flores asked.

“I find myself in an unfortunate position, detective. I had a long-standing business relationship with Detective Russel Pierce, you see. I can’t afford for him to get arrested.”

“You want me to find him for you,” Flores guessed.

“Yes.”

He took his head in his hands. He should have seen it coming. He had known Pierce was dirty for a long time. The other detective had hooked him up with people who procured drug for him on a tit for tat basis, after all. Plenty of Russ’s criminal contacts were no doubt in a panic right now over everything he could spill if he got arrested.

Did Flores care? Oh, yeah, he was cheering them on. It would be a thorn out of his side if they got rid of the bastard.

“What do I do when I find him?”

The car had slowed down.

“Keep the phone. Luc’s number is programed in it.”

Luc was parking the truck in a back-alley Flores didn’t recognize.

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Oh, yes, of course. You’ve got twenty-four hours, detective. Any longer and I’ll need your lovely wife to help me pass the time – am I making myself clear?”

“Crystal.”

The boss hung up and Flores, glancing at Luc, realized it was time to make himself scarce. He stepped out of the car and watched as it maneuvered out of the alley. Then, he sighed in resignation when two menacing silhouettes appeared at one end of the alley. He spun around and stopped short. Three young men were turning the other corner.

It was such an obvious setup, he thought. Didn’t mean that it wasn’t going to hurt.

“It’s just a preview,” one man, his voice heavily accented, warned him before they went to work on him.

To know what Nyssa and Viggo are up to, read Chapter 17.1 (be cool about it too, I'm still working on parts 17.1 et 17.2).