Blood Money Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Doug Richardson

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  99 Percent Kill, a Lucky Dey Novel

  Also by Doug Richardson

  Dark Horse

  True Believers

  The Safety Expert

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  Velvet Elvis Entertainment

  13547 Ventura Boulevard

  Suite 126

  Sherman Oaks, California 91423

  Copyright © 2013 by Doug Richardson

  Cover design by Karen Richardson

  More information at http://www.dougrichardson.com

  eISBN: 978-0-9848071-8-5

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Velvet Elvis Entertainment.

  Richardson, Doug, 1959-

  Blood Money / Doug Richardson.

  For my loving mother

  Barbara Richardson

  1

  Beemer cursed.

  Two words. Two syllables. A mental rim shot inside Greg Beem’s skull. The simple phrase was perfectly descriptive, and summed up just about every seminal moment of the Beemer’s twenty-nine years. The curse described a moment that was, in truth, formative. Beemer could catalogue his life with his very own cursed moments.

  ...I wet the bed.

  ...the gun went off.

  ...she’s really pregnant?

  ...my parachute didn’t open.

  ...that knife was sharper than I thought.

  ...the bitch actually left me.

  ...I really didn’t mean to burn the house down.

  Beemer’s most recent cursed moment began at 3:16 A.M. on August sixth. Beemer remembered the time because, for some unknown reason, his eyes had flicked to the digital clock display on the dashboard of the Peterbilt tandem axel tractor rig. He was alone and behind the wheel of this beautiful piece of machinery. Nearly brand spanking new. Gray leather seats in the forward cab with a comfy sleeper bed behind. The dash was equally monochrome with an array of digital gauges and switches. The steering wheel was wrapped like the grip of a four-hundred-dollar tennis racket. But the interior was just the icing on a very masculine cake.

  Beemer had actually fallen in love the moment he first set his eyes on her. The truck was glossy black with matte airfoils. Big ass stainless wheels. Twin chrome exhaust stacks flanking the cab. And towing a forty foot refrigerated trailer that was as dark as a moonless night. Damn she was pretty. A gear head’s wet dream. Too bad she was stolen. If he could have bought her, Beemer might have considered changing his vocation to that of a long haul truck driver.

  Beemer clutched, downshifting to slow his heavy load without having to jam on the air brakes. He felt the forty-seven thousand pounds of refrigerated trailer he was towing push from behind, as if it had a mind of its own, willfully nudging the man to ignore the warning, hit the gas, and damn the consequences.

  The warning: a Kern County Sheriff’s deputy a hundred yards ahead, astride the yellow center strip of Highway 395, waving both arms over his head in an international sign of distress. Beemer wished he could count the number of times one of his cursed moments had begun with this kind of signal. In the deputy’s hand was a high intensity flashlight, the beam igniting the big rig’s windshield, directing the driver to pull over. Beemer slowed and clicked on his high beams. The blast from the big rig’s lights revealed the scene beyond the deputy. A single Kern County Sheriff’s unit parked at an angle across the southbound lane. Driver’s door and trunk lid open. And twenty yards further, an overturned Porsche Cayenne SUV. White. By the looks of the deformed body and black road char, the SUV seemed to have taken a few tumbles before coming to rest on the shoulder. The windows were either blown out or spider-webbed so badly they had turned nearly opaque. Totaled. A seventy-thousand-dollar brain fart. A certain cursed moment for the owner or, more likely, the leasing company.

  Not to mention the driver and passenger.

  Beemer clutched again, releasing the gears, and eased his foot onto the air brakes. Ten sets of brake shoes uniformly pinched ten oversized ceramic disks. Once again, he could feel his cargo shoving the cab from behind. Controlled inertia. Forty-seven thousand pounds of restrained energy came slowly to a safe stop.

  “Step out of the cab please,” said the deputy, his voice muffled by the tractor rig’s safety glass.

  Beemer rolled down the window. As the deputy circled round and through the headlight beams, Beemer clocked the cop as young. Twenty-three years old tops. Maybe five-foot-eight. Shiny black hair, matted down across his forehead by a flop sweat. The deputy’s face was pale, nearly colorless in the dimness.

  “Sir?” said the deputy. “I need your assistance. Need you to climb out and set up flares to your rear in order to control traffic.”

  “What traffic?” said Beemer. Monotone. Still, he thought the delivery sounded a little like he thought it was a joke.

  “I got accident victims…” The deputy bit his lip in frustration. What cool he had left was slipping away. “Goddammit, mister. I need your help!”

  Mister? thought Beemer. The poor deputy couldn’t see past the fog on his own lenses. Beemer wasn’t much older than him. Wiser? Most likely. Experienced, too. Worldly. And practiced in the art of covering his ass—not to mention his precious assets, all presently behind him in a stolen refrigerated trailer rig.

  “Alright,” said Beemer. “I’m on it.”

  “Got the flares in the trunk here.”

  “Right. So what the hell happened?”

  The deputy heard the question, but didn’t answer. Not that Beemer needed to know. He could guess some of it. The Porsche SUV had soared past the eighteen wheeler not fifteen minutes earlier. Beemer had glanced down as he sped down the adjacent lane. He thought he’d seen a blonde behind the wheel. As for a passenger, he couldn’t make out if it was a man or woman. All Beemer had seen was the glowing ember of a lit cigarette, followed by sparks as the butt was flicked out the window. Dumb ass, Beemer had thought. It was August. Hot. Drier than a dead gnat. Though this was the high desert, there were roadside grasses that could easily ignite. A fire would draw attention. Attention was exactly what Beemer wanted to avoid. Driving the rig at a safe sixty-two miles an hour, he figured the Porsche Cayenne and its two passengers were traveling something near eighty-
five miles per hour. Its red tail lights had disappeared into the night.

  “You know how to light these?” asked the deputy, passing off a bundle of road flares.

  “Sure,” said Beemer. By now, he was close enough to see the front left portion of the sheriff’s unit. The bumper was badly deformed and the headlight was dangling by a pair of wires. Beemer could see paint transfers. White. Instantly, Beemer was revising the story in his head. At first, he had thought the speeding Porsche had lost control and flipped. The deputy was probably in the area and had stumbled across the accident scene. But the damage to the patrol car added a new wrinkle. Somehow, the deputy’s vehicle and the SUV had traded paint in some kind of collision. This would explain the young deputy’s demeanor. The flop sweat and fogged glasses. The panicked tone.

  This was definitely one of those cursed moments. A flash in time shared by both the deputy and the big rig driver. Only the poor deputy clearly hadn’t recognized the importance of seeing the moment for what it was. Adrenalin had already pumped though his bloodstream, crossing the cerebral cortex, cementing the time and place of the incident in his memory for as long as he would live. But adrenalin can have dangerous side effects: impaired judgment and problem solving. Stab a competitive chess player with a syringe full of adrenalin before a critical move and watch his ability to plan ahead turn to mush. The key, Beemer knew, was to identify the cursed moment at the precise moment at which it begins to unfold. Training had taught him as much. Not to mention all the government-issued therapy. Awareness stems the adrenalin push and leaves the critical thinking lobes of the brain unaffected. The chess game can continue.

  Beemer scratched the top of the first flare. Sparks. Then a familiar blaze of red-dyed flame. His thoughts were clear and unmuddled.

  The deputy had surely called for assistance. EMS, a sheriff’s backup, Highway Patrol. Because of the obvious contact between the sheriff’s vehicle and the Porsche SUV, an internal investigation would follow, making the big rig driver a witness. They would take his statements there at the scene with follow-up interviews at a later appointed date. Beemer would be asked to give personal information such as his identification, current address and occupation. At some point he would be asked to explain what the hell he was doing driving an eighteen-wheel refrigerator rig southbound on Highway 395.

  This was too much information for Beemer to give. He had known it well before he applied the air brakes to stop. He also had known that he wouldn’t have the time to give it. He was on a schedule. And there was no place for this sort of delay.

  So how much time did Beemer have until assistance arrived? Ten minutes? Five? Two even?

  The young deputy was on his knees, reaching into the SUV in an effort to help the passengers inside. As Beemer walked closer, he heard whimpering. Was it the blonde woman he’d spied from his truck’s perch? Or her cigarette-flicking, potential fire-starting companion? Unknown, thought Beemer. And not that it really mattered a whit. He had only moments to execute his chess move and put this event in his rearview mirror.

  The red glow of the flare lit Beemer’s measured footsteps as he closed the gap between himself and the deputy, who was nearly prone with his shoulders wedged inside the turtled SUV. Beemer keyed on the holstered pistol on the deputy’s hip. A standard Glock 19. Quickly, thought Beemer. Remember to breathe. Then execute.

  “Shit!” yelled the deputy, wriggling from the SUV’s passenger window. This is when he noticed the red glow of flare. He snapped his head toward the blazing stick. So bright he had to shade his eyes. “What the hell are you doing? You’re supposed to place flares—”

  The deputy saw his own gun in the hand of the big rig driver, thus experiencing his second cursed moment of the night.

  "Aw, fuck!" said the deputy.

  “Stealin' my favorite curse, brother,” said Beemer, squeezing the light trigger. The Beretta gave a slight jolt and punched a neat hole through the deputy’s skull. As the deputy’s chest heaved one last time, his silvery nametag glinted in the flare’s light. Beemer wasn’t sure why—whether it was curiosity or habit—he leaned forward to note the name etched in black. A. Dey.

  “Okay. So you seen it, Beems,” he said as if to cue himself to carry on. Next, he followed the smell of gasoline, dripping from a crack below the SUV’s right rear fender. Beemer stepped back, preparing to toss the flare into the growing puddle when he heard a woman’s voice.

  “Help me…”

  The voice was slight, barely above a whisper, yet distinctively feminine.

  “Please…”

  “Yeah,” said Beemer, keeping the adrenaline from crossing his cerebral cortex. He was still in control. Still thinking with clarity. Impulses in check. With that, he let go of the flare, tossing it square into the gasoline puddle. In a combustive flash, the SUV was fully engulfed in flames. A pyre that could be seen for miles. If there were helicopters in the area, it would be a beacon calling for help. No time to waste. Get back to the rig.

  If Beemer heard the woman screaming from inside the burning SUV, he would be able to dismiss it into a remote corner of his memory. Catalogued with all the other cries he’d heard in his twenty-nine years.

  Twenty-nine years? Aw, fuck!

  Beemer climbed back into the tractor rig. As he restarted the diesel engine, he reminded himself that his thirtieth birthday needed to be a real humdinger. A go-hard, envelope-pushing night of partying. Preferably at some faraway island resort. He’d open a tab at the bar and invite all comers. Men and women. Preferably strangers because they would be easier to get along with and so much more appreciative of all the free food and liquor. They wouldn’t even need to know his name, but would be grateful to the sandy-haired surfing vagabond who had just turned thirty.

  The sudden urge for a cigarette came about the same time the flaming SUV disappeared from Beemer’s rear mirror. With his fingertips, he felt just below the shoulder joint of his left arm. Under his polo shirt was the familiar relief of a nicotine patch. Beemer was calculating when he had last replaced the patch when a northbound car surged past. The headlights appeared from around a corner, quickly switching from high beams to low. Beemer couldn’t make the model or year. All he could tell was that it was gray in color. Nondescript as hell. American? Korean? Japanese? Most affordable cars looked the same nowadays. Especially when blasting by at seventy miles per hour. A solo driver, Beemer reasoned. A solo driver who would, in moments, be a witness. The driver would soon come upon the burning SUV. After the initial shock, the solo driver would fumble for a mobile phone and dial 911. How long would it take the emergency operator to marry the report from the driver with the call for assistance from the sheriff’s deputy? Would it be instant? No matter, thought Beemer. Events were unfolding in their natural order. By the time the solo driver was officially interviewed, would he even remember having passed a southbound big rig barely a mile from the crime scene? Affirmative or otherwise, Beemer would be near his destination of Long Beach, California by then. Once there, his precious cargo would be transferred into a refrigerated shipping container and set on a journey halfway around the world.

  No problem. No problem at all.

  2

  Lucky Dey had never ever gotten used to it. Of the thousands of times he had been awakened by a telephone, it had always been with a start. As if jolted by a billion volts. It was in his DNA. His father was a heavy sleeper. The same went for his granddad. Sleeping had always come easily to Lucky. Rest his head, close his eyes, and slumber would be summoned. Anytime, anyplace. It was one of his gifts. He was a veritable Superman of sleep. But if Superman had kryptonite, Lucky Dey had the telephone. Whether it was the classic jangle of bells or some smart phone electronica or the gentlest of musical ring tones, Lucky would still feel the surge of juice and wake with a jump. So why not turn off the phone? asked one of many girlfriends who had witnessed Lucky’s bad waking habit. Simple. Lucky was a cop. He was often on call. And until a mad scientist could implant a waking node in his brain to g
ently tickle him when he was needed, he would have to suffer the goddamn telephone.

  “This is Lucky,” he croaked, clearing his throat only after he had answered. It was dark, but morning. He knew that much. It had been A.M. when he had closed his eyes. There’s no way Lucky could have slept through the day into night. Nobody ever left him alone that long.

  “Captain needs you,” said the voice, that Lucky guessed was Chelsea’s, the part-time secretary, part-time 911 operator. Her voice was slightly throaty, with the occasional excited squeak at the high end when she finally got a joke. Very sexy. But also very married, like so many East Kern County women. So many of them were freshly scrubbed, earthy and real. Nothing at all like the ladies from down Los Angeles way. Kern County women wore their lack of sophistication like their denim. Tight and without labels.

  “Goin’ on, Chelsea?” asked Lucky, fishing around his nightstand for the familiar feel of an Excedrin bottle. He snapped the lid with his thumb and dry swallowed two capsules. The headache hadn’t landed yet. But Lucky knew it would eventually arrive and settle near the base of his skull as it did most every day. “Chelsea?”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. Either that or Lucky had fallen back asleep. He opened his eyes, swept his apartment bedroom for light, landing on his television screen where the DirecTV logo bounced from edge to edge like an old Atari video game. To his left was the bathroom where the door was cracked, leaving a slice of incandescent light to bisect the small space.