Blank Slate (A Kyle Jackle Thriller) (2 page)

The fishing was fabulous. He had chartered a fifty-foot Hatteras out of the marina and hooked up with some marlin twenty miles offshore. The Captain made some comment about the The Old Man and The Sea and some guy Hemingway-never heard of him. Told him to shut the fuck up and get me another beer.

Three days of fishing and drinking and he needed more. He dialed an eight hundred number off a very exclusive business card and ordered what he needed. She showed up right on time at eight o’clock.

She was perfect. “У вас есть хороший сиськи,” he said with a welcoming smile. A blank look from her- “Your tits-very nice,” he repeated in English. He would have figured her accent for Russian-too bad. She was mid-twenties, tight body, and a nice enough face.

He had finished dinner a couple of hours before-great medium rare steak and a couple of martinis. No idea why people in this country didn’t just order a bottle of vodka instead of sticking it in a fancy glass. No matter, he had ordered a bottle of good vodka from room service. The coke he brought with him.

A little warmup first. Kicked a little music on the cd player she brought inside her bag. Some jazz, none of that reggae or salsa shit that the locals insisted on. The girl was wearing a tight silk shirt, buttoned all the way up the front. A tiny skirt that accented the long legs going all the way down to the five inch black heels. A pair of long black gloves reaching to her elbows. She started to dance to the music-slow, sensual, as she began to toy with the top button on her shirt.

He motioned her over. Squeezed her tits-hard. Grabbed the top of her shirt and ripped it open strewing the buttons across the floor. Pushed her back on the middle of the floor and waved at her to continue dancing. This one wasn’t afraid of him. They usually were by this time. He would fix that soon enough. He had another drink. Another line of coke.

The shirt was completely gone now. Her nipples were standing up in the cold air of the room, a few faint bruises just appearing across her breasts. She teased him a little more with the tiny skirt and finally dropped it to the floor. Nothing left but the gloves, a thong and shoes. He stood and walked across the room. Grabbed her from behind and began to grind his hips into her in time with the music while he roughly squeezed her tits from behind. Bit her on the neck-hard. She jerked away.

“Fucking bitch!” he shouted. He took a step toward her, slapped the shit out of her and she fell backwards on the bed. He wasn’t ready for her yet-the combination of coke and vodka really took it out of a man. Went to the bathroom and dropped a couple of little blue pills.

When he came out, she had a drink waiting for him. Better. Now she looked afraid, more submissive. Just the way he liked them. Knocked back the cold vodka while he waited for the pills to do their magic. She continued to dance and tease him with her every movement.

He shook his head from side to side. Something was very wrong. The room was beginning to blur and spin around the edges. He tried to stand, but fell. She caught him and eased him back onto the bed. He stared at her for another minute unable to move, until everything faded to black.

Terrible fucking hangover. Started to roll over. Couldn’t do it. Opened his eyes-felt tight pressure on his wrists and saw that they had been tied to the heavy wooden posts on the bed. His feet too. The girl was still there-she saw he was awake now and walked over to the edge of the bed. She crawled onto the bed and in a slow, sensual move, straddled him-completely naked now except for the damn gloves. OK, maybe a little kinkier than he liked, but at least he was beginning to respond as she gave him a full body massage using nothing but her tits and long flowing hair.

“Enough of this shit-get me untied. I want you now,” he sputtered.

She smiled an enigmatic smile and suddenly grabbed a pair of pantyhose from the side of the bed and stuffed them in his mouth. He was going to kill this bitch for sure when he got loose, but
Damn
, she was good. Almost in spite of himself, he was responding to the domination as she continued to tease him. The preliminaries over, she was more direct, stroking him with an intensity that left him begging for more.

He was close now, his breathing coming in hot, ragged gasps through his nose as he rode the wave. His entire body stiffened….not much longer now. She could feel it too and redoubled her efforts. Incredible-the first explosion of an orgasm so intense, he could feel it rolling through his entire body. Then he heard it-a metallic
snick
followed by a searing pain that exploded from his groin to his brain.

She held up the rapidly wilting trophy she had just taken in one hand and the bloody knife in the other. He was beyond terror, blind with pain-but after a few more minutes of her cruel ministrations with the blade, that too had passed.

Manny Rivera wrinkled his nose with distaste as he sat nursing the last of his café con leche. The pervasive smell of mold, antiseptic, and other scents he would rather avoid identifying were finally beginning to overwhelm even the strong sweet aroma of the Cuban coffee. He also suspected the sweaty suit that seemed to grab him in all the wrong places and the wrinkled shirt he had worn since the previous evening

were the prime suspects in the aromatic assault on his nose. Nothing too unusual with any of this-such was the glamorous working life of a cop. The only benefit to being a detective in homicide, he thought wryly was that instead of wearing a cheap, uncomfortable uniform, he was able to wear a cheap, uncomfortable suit-one that happened to smell like last night’s garbage.

He hated this hospital-too many bad memories-it was like a bad acid flashback anytime he walked through the door. Miami General was a shit hole– most weekends brought a steady stream of hookers, drunks, and the forgotten dregs of humanity streaming through the well-worn doors of the Emergency Room. A cop would never come here unless he had just been shot. In that case it was the best ER in the world; the number of unwilling victims bearing unwanted chunks of lead in their bodies was double any other ER within two hundred miles.

He had been through the ER twice as a reluctant patient and managed to survive-the first time was six months after he signed on the force when some drunk cold-cocked him from behind with a Budweiser bottle. That one cost him thirty stitches and a concussion. Along with a lesson learned-never turn your back on a drunk even if she is five two and looks like a Miami Heat cheerleader.

The second time, it was a ricocheting fragment from a 9mm that hit him in the right hip. A car thief cranked off a couple of rounds in his direction during a wild chase through the narrow alleys on a hot Miami night. He instinctively returned fire; after limping up to where the gunman had fallen, could see the blood bubbling blackly out of his nose in the moonlight while he gasped his last breath. Turned out to be a punk fifteen-year old kid.

It wasn’t much of an excuse, but he liked to think that was part of the reason for all the sleepless nights, the drinking, and lousy relationships that had defined his life for the past ten years. The Department had insisted on psychological counseling for six months after the shooting-a total waste of time blabbing to another empty suit. Better to spend a few hours on a Friday night talking to another cop over a few beers.

He crushed the empty cup in his hand, briefly considered the distance and tossed the crumpled paper toward the waste can across the room. Rimmed the dented lip and skittered across the waiting room floor. It was going to be that kind of day.

Time to focus on the problem at hand. He looked across the waiting room at Jean Roland, the floor nurse for the ER. Jean was a leggy California blonde who had come to Miami a few years before when South Beach was still in its prime. Both she and South Beach still attracted some attention on occasion from the tourists, but their glory days were definitely behind them. Jean and he had a little personal history between them going back for a few years-most of which he remembered fondly.

Somehow, there had seemed to be a distinctly chilly edge to their conversations anytime they had talked over the past few months-could be that her memories of their time together weren’t nearly as positive as his. It was more likely she had just gotten tired of the late night calls when he had been drinking and had struck out at the local bars. Those nights seemed invariably to end with the sheets on his bed being twisted into a sweaty mess and mornings that brought nothing more than awkward, angry departures.

He caught her attention and gave her his most charming smile from across the room. “Jean, can I get a few minutes alone with your mystery man?”

She glanced up with an annoyed expression that spoke volumes. That look was usually reserved for the ragged drunks who staggered in through the doors of the Emergency Room every night like the foul smelling tide flowing into the stagnant recesses of Biscayne Bay.

“Manny, I’ll let you know later. Right now he’s in no shape to talk to anyone. He’s in pretty bad shape-hasn’t been conscious since he came in last night. I think they just brought him back from an MRI. In the meantime, just cool your jets and let me do my job. I’ll check on his status and get back to you,” she said as she twirled on the well-worn marble floor and stalked out of the room.

“Yeah, she still loves me,” Rivera muttered with an embarrassed smile.

Even when angry, he still loved the way she knew how to make an exit. The other occupants of the waiting room temporarily took their attention away from watching Oprah reruns long enough to enjoy watching him squirm like an awkward fifth grader at his first dance.

Rivera suddenly feigned a profound interest in his police radio as he turned up the volume and found yet another way to annoy everyone around him as he started scanning the patrol frequencies. With their unexpected entertainment over for the moment, the rest of the occupants sank back into a resigned stupor designed to carry them through the endless hours of waiting.

As Jean marched purposefully down the hall toward the ICU, the throngs of people blocking the hallway parted like the Red Sea before her as she resolutely walked through.

“Damn him” she raged under her breath. For at least the tenth time this month, she asked herself why she continued to put up with Manny’s inability to comprehend even the rudimentary basics of what it took to have a relationship. As near as she could tell, this guy had reached his full maturity in high school as far as his dealings with women and was never going to change. He obviously didn’t have a clue and the sooner she accepted that, the better. Distracted by her frustration with Rivera, she stepped just past Room 17, realized her mistake, spun on her heel and forcefully shoved the heavy wooden door open.

She startled both herself and the doctor who was leaning over the patient adjusting his pillow. “Oh. I’m sorry to barge in….” The words caught in her throat as she suddenly took in the sight of a doctor she had never seen before. He was wearing a lab coat from the hospital that barely contained his muscular bulk. The unshaven face, the crude black tattoos on his forearm barely visible under the sleeves of the coat all screamed that something was very wrong.

Completely frozen in shock, she was like a rabbit suddenly confronting a rattlesnake. She stumbled backed against the white plaster wall as he stepped closer and exposed a toothy grin containing some of the worst dental work she had ever seen. No time to dwell on that as he almost gently grabbed the front of her scrub uniform, mumbled something with his rancid breath like “Es gonna be OK.,” and slammed her head with such force into the wall that the IV bottles fell off the bed side stand and shattered on the linoleum floor. Jean knew none of this as her world faded to black and she crumpled unconscious to the floor. Without a second glance, her assailant picked up the pillow and turned his full attention back to the unconscious man lying on the bed.

The harsh jangling and vibration of his cell phone jolted Rivera out of his reverie. He realized he had been dozing in the humid warmth of the ER waiting room. An old wrinkled prune of a woman graced him with a silent look of reproach and nodded solemnly at the No Cell Phone sign hanging askew on the wall. Rivera nodded politely at her, decided he would probably go to hell for what he was thinking about a woman who was certainly old enough to be his Grandmother, and thumbed the TALK button on the phone.

“What?”

“Damn, you’re in a great mood this morning,” said Zapata, a senior detective who worked with Rivera in the Criminal Investigation Unit.

“Screw you, and what the hell do you want? I’ve been sitting here for three hours in this shit hole and I’ve got work to do. You ever get out from behind that desk you’re so fond of and you might actually learn something about that.”

“Chill the attitude and listen up. This is important. It’s about your John Doe,” said Zapata with an ominous tone in his voice that Rivera had rarely heard in their many years together.

“OK, so who is he?” asked Rivera.

“No idea on that yet-still a mystery, but we just got a call from a patrol unit responding to another 911 call in same alley a couple of hours ago. Some cook for a Chinese buffet was taking out the morning trash-found a dead chick dropped off in the dumpster out back. Of course, he totally freaked out and started screaming for help in Chinese. Judging from the way her neck was flopping at an angle God never intended, it looks like some big bastard snapped her neck. Other than that, we don’t know much. Too much blood to tell what else happened to her.”

“Got to go,” yelled Rivera as he slammed the phone closed and sprinted to the rear doors of the ICU. It was only a couple of long hallways to the Intensive Care Unit and Rivera mentally cursed himself every step of the way. In just a few moments, his John Doe had gone from appearing to be the innocent victim of a violent crime to somehow being involved in a vicious murder-and Jean was walking blindly into his hospital room. Rivera skidded on the slippery tile around the last turn to the ICU and knocked over a female intern busily updating a patient’s chart. The papers flew into the air and were still fluttering to the ground as he bulled his way to the room.