Cold Jade

C
opyright
© 2015 by Dan Ames

THE MURDER STORE is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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ll rights reserved
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“
H
ave
you ever made a just man?”

“Oh, I have made three,” answered God,

“But two of them are dead,

And the third

Listen! Listen!

And you will hear the thud of his defeat.”

-
S
tephen
Crane

T
he content
of the website whistled through the cyber switchbacks, bounced between hundreds of free wireless hosts and encrypted IP addresses before it was distributed to a small collection of pre-paid subscribers.

The first customer to log on was a man who had inherited a highly successful and profitable plumbing supply company in New Jersey. He had been the sole beneficiary of his father’s estate, which included an impressive investment portfolio. The man had nothing to do with the actual plumbing supply business or its day-to-day operations. He simply reaped his share of the profits, along with the dividends of the stock holdings.

Most of his time was devoted to a hobby.

The hobby was by no means cheap.

And although the dividends from his trust fund had typically been more than enough to cover all of his normal expenses in the past, they were nowhere near enough to cover the costs of his secret pursuits.

His private passions were very, very expensive.

Which is why he had been tapping into his inheritance account’s principal and watching with a sort of sick fascination as the total amount dwindled.

But he had no intention of stopping.

It was how he spent the majority of his time now. The truth was, his workday and work week entailed no actual work. His day-to-day calendar was completely empty as the company was run by a very capable set of managers who knew the business far better than he did, and had become visibly annoyed when he first inherited the business and tried to become more involved in the operations. After a discussion with the senior managers of the company, it was decided that he would be more of a consultant, only called upon for the most dire of emergencies.

In the intervening years, there had been no emergencies.

So with a completely bare calendar, he was left all of the free time in the world to indulge his dark obsessions.

The man followed the very specific and highly complex instructions to log onto the site. The protocol, which always arrived in an encrypted email, changed every time The Store was refreshed with new inventory. The man was comforted by the complexity of the operation and took it as reassurance that the people behind the enterprise were extremely careful and knew what they were doing.

He couldn’t argue with the results.

It took several minutes to complete the verification process, which included a retina scan, and then the site appeared on the man’s enormous, plasma computer screen in his home office. The door had an internal deadbolt so no one could surprise him as he did his shopping.

The screen went live and the man slowly released the breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding.

With crisp graphics, neat copy and high resolution photos, the product page looked like any other major retailer’s website. The difference was the type of items being offered for sale.

The man’s breath caught in his throat, and a sexual surge pulsed through his body as he took in the images before him.

He didn’t want to rush this, but nearly everything he saw he wanted to buy.

Forcing himself to slow down and relish the shopping experience, he painstakingly reviewed all of the photos, and read each product description several times over, comparing and contrasting features, product attributes and price.

The images excited the man to the point of distraction. His breathing became rapid and shallow as he fully surrendered to the addiction that consumed him.

Eventually, he realized he had fallen completely in love with the face of a beautiful nine-year-old boy.

He let out a slow breath, closed his eyes, and made his purchase.

I
t had been
a long winter for the coyote mother. Her pups were still young, and she had fed them as best she could. But now that spring had descended on the Rockies, and the creeks were running swiftly, full with the melted snow from above, she was looking forward to days with plentiful food available.

The morning sun slowly made its way into the cave’s entrance, and the mother knew it was time for her to forage. She let her pups know they were to stay in the cave. It took several coarse growls, and a few pushes with her nose to get the message through to her firstborn, the stubborn one. But finally, she persuaded him to stay put. In a few weeks she would bring them out and begin the long education that deep down she knew not all of them would live to finish.

The sun hit her back as she trotted from the cave and a cornucopia of smells assailed her. Damp pine needles, the faint scent of a bear and the assorted varieties of mold from tree bark sitting on the forest floor.

She stood still for a moment, sampling the offerings from the air, and then turned south, toward a breeze that carried a touch of something she couldn’t quite place.

Her brisk strides took her quickly to the source of the smell. There was wetness primarily, although her primitive brain couldn’t compute that a flash flood had washed away part of the hillside. No, all she knew was that water had been plentiful here, and that something was there, something that made her stomach grumble with hunger.

It took her another ten minutes of investigating until she found it. The odor seemed familiar to her. It reminded the coyote of times she heard the strange creatures near the paths at the edge of her range. But this time it seemed different. And then she recognized it.

Blood.

The smell invigorated her, at the same time that the other smell, the one from the creatures, made the hair on her back stand up. She dug with her front paws at the area with the strongest of the scents. The mud yielded easily to her sharp claws, and the odor of blood became richer. She actually tasted the blood and then the adrenaline hit her as she recognized the feel of bone. She dug and unearthed more of the bone and when an especially large section popped free, she clamped down, her brown eyes scanning the tree line for any sign of movement. She bit and pulled, her warm saliva now coating the bone and freed the carcass from the mud and small, tangled branches.

The coyote lifted her head and pulled until she felt something larger break free from the thick mud. The coyote ran, her body alive with the surprise of finding a much bigger meal than she had initially thought. She pulled the body along behind her until she was out and away from the scents that scared her. The coyote found a small grassy hill from which she could surmise anything that decided to approach her.

She swiveled her head and looked at the edge of the forest. There was no sign of anything she needed to fear. Her stomach vibrated with hunger and she thought of her cubs. The sun broke free from the last of the clouds, and the coyote felt its warmth on her back.

And then she lowered her head and began to feed.

T
he Gulf
of Mexico was strangely calm. It was well past noon and the sky was clear with a blazing yellow sun that unleashed the kind of merciless insistence that simply could not be ignored.

Wallace Mack stood in the back of his fishing boat watching the shadows in the water with great interest. He’d been out on the water now for nearly six hours and had already caught some snook but not any of the yellow fin tuna that were his targeted prey.

He reeled in his lure, went to the Yeti cooler and pulled out a cold beer. He moved to the captain’s bench under the canopy that provided the only shade on the boat. He took a long drink of the beer and smacked his lips.

He’d lived in Florida now for nearly five years, having spent the majority of his previous twenty-five years in Quantico, Virginia working for the FBI. Virginia was warm for a good part of the year, but nothing like southern Florida. The sun in Florida was a microwave and you could feel your skin cooking by the minute.

But Mack wouldn’t trade Florida for anything. He loved it here.

Mack drank from his beer and tried to figure out how much longer he would keep fishing. It was only going to get hotter as the day wore on, and something told him that even though the tide was still up, the peak feeding time had passed. He sipped from his beer and looked out over the flat, jade water. A pelican flew in from overhead and dove not far from the boat.

Mack took that as a good sign.

He drank the rest of beer, went to the side of the boat and cast his lure out.

There were a lot of shadows in the water now; drawn by the two handfuls of minnows he’d tossed into the water. Along with the chum he’d throw into the clear blue water, something was bound to inspire the shadows into action.

His target could smell the blood from the cut bait, and was attracted by the panicked baitfish, struggling to survive.

Mack closed the bail of his reel once he figured his lure had reached the depth he wanted, and began to reel the line in with a start-and-stop rhythm designed to–

The fish hit with a stunning ferocity and Mack reefed on the line, setting the hook, and listened as the fish began to take line out with a fury. The line ripped off his reel and sizzled as it shot out toward the water. Mack estimated at least a hundred yards was taken out before he sensed the fish begin to slow down.

Mack still marveled over the power of the strike. It reminded him of his days playing high school baseball and connecting with a fast ball, the incredibly satisfying thud of power that reverberated through his body.

Now, the line was definitely slowing down so Mack raised the tip of the rod and started to reel it back in, straining against the strength and weight of the fish.

The Gulf of Mexico held a stunning array of species. It was one of the things Mack loved about the fishing in Florida. You never knew what you were going to get. He’d caught everything from snapper, snook and redfish to sea trout, shark and grouper. But judging by the speed and power of the fish at the other end of the line, Mack felt confident it was the tuna he was after.

It took nearly ten minutes for Mack to get his quarry near the boat. The fish must not have liked what he saw because it took off again, this time stripping off another fifty yards of line and bending Mack’s rod nearly in half.

The return battle went faster as the fish tired, and soon, he was in sight of the boat.

Mack saw the silvery blue green of the fish and instantly confirmed it was a tuna. The kind that you could put right on the grill and with a little lemon would taste out of this world.

Mack pulled the fish toward the boat, saw the dark shadow, bigger than the others, rise up from the depths and speed like a missile toward the tuna.

Mack grit his teeth. He knew what was coming.

The long dark shadow was without a doubt a bull shark.

Or, as the local fishermen liked to call it, The Man in the Gray Suit.

Bull sharks were attracted by the struggling fish hooked by anglers, and loved to come in and take a big chunk out of the prize, if not the whole thing.

With the risk of breaking his line, Mack heaved as hard as he could on the pole, pulling the tuna toward the boat, trying to make the shark miss even though he was risking a line break.

The gamble worked, but only partially as the shark still got a glancing strike in against the tuna.

Mack felt a brief, violent pull on the line, and then the fish was free and he hoisted it into the boat.

The fish landed on the deck, part of its tail gone, a chunk of its belly missing, and a series of lacerations along its side, spilling blood on the white deck. The tuna was a beauty, the perfect size for Mack at around ten pounds.

He looked again at the bite marks along the side of the fish.

Mack had won, but the shark had levied his tax.

It was a truism among fishermen in the Gulf.

You could catch a lot of fish out here, but sooner or later, you had to pay The Man in the Gray Suit.