Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 1–3: The Hundredth Man, The Death Collectors, The Broken Souls. J. Kerley A.
before folding it over, aligning the blank end with the return-address end, the one printed Bayside Consulting.
“I don’t want to be here.”
“Nobody does their first time. After you.”
I pushed open the side door of a small former church on the south side of downtown, now a meeting place for Alcoholics Anonymous. Ava reluctantly entered a spacious room with tables and chairs, a pool table, an ancient pinball machine, and two pop machines. A bulletin board advertised meeting times and alcohol-free dances. Beside it was a rack of literature. Steps near the back led upstairs. There was a small snack counter. Behind it an older guy with Einstein hair attended a restaurant-sized coffee urn. Four guys played cards at a back table. Two women were shooting pool and trading barbs with the guys at the table. Words passed between the pool players and card game and they all started laughing. A man in a business suit sat alone near the back, sipping tea and reading The Wall Street Journal. He whistled and fiddled with his tie. Ava studied the faces from the corner of her eye.
“Where are all the…people with problems?”
“They’ve got us surrounded.”
“Have they been drinking? They’re laughing.”
“They’re laughing because they haven’t been drinking.”
Ava started shaking and sprinted to the rest room with her hand over her mouth. The guy behind the window smiled. “New,” he said.
“First-timer,” I affirmed.
“She’s in the right place. You in the fellowship?”
“No. But a believer, nonetheless.”
He gave me a thumbs-up and returned to his coffee ministrations. Ava returned two minutes later, face red and eyes wet. She still shook, withdrawal jitters kicked in by fear of this place, at first telling her only what she was instead of what she could become.
“I can’t take this, let’s get out of here, Carson. Let’s come back tomorrow.”
Footsteps thundered down the stairs beside us, big feet with a Bear above them, a bear in jeans and a blue sweatshirt, a cap from Bass Pro Shops covering an ursine shock of brown hair. A two-hundred-eighty-pound embrace lifted me from the floor like a sack of feathers. Bear’s delight was electric, transferable; jumper cables for my attitude.
He said, “Damn, just look at you: lean and mean and that same stupid-ass grin.”
“It’s not the same stupid-ass grin, Bear, it’s an upgrade.”
Bear yelled to the coffee guy. “Hey, Johnny, this is my old partner, Carson.”
Einstein shuffled back to the counter. “You’re the one stole the wheelbarrow and rolled him in here?”
Bear turned to Ava. Her hand disappeared in his massive paw. “Hello, Ava. Carson’s told me all about you.”
Ava turned to me as if I’d betrayed her again. Bear laid his arm lightly around her shoulders. “A bit rocky?” he asked, turning her toward the steps. “You should have seen my first day—Carson dumping me on the floor like a load of bricks, me howling mad, shaking like a dog shitting peach pits…”
Bear turned to me and winked. Then he guided Ava upstairs, one step at a time. She stayed for an hour and then I took her home. We’d both fulfilled our parts of the bargain.
“You’ll be all right?” I asked.
She looked toward her house and back at me. “Listen, Carson. I want to say—”
I shushed her with a finger over her lips. “Just stay safe.”
We had an awkward moment—nodding and mumbling until she turned away. When her door shut I heard a high whine in my head as I tried to remember how to drive, what lever performed what function. My hands lost the notion of grasp and I forgot what I was doing and where I was going. After a deep breath I finally coordinated the machinery and began pulling away into air as coarse as burlap.
“Carson, wait!”
I jammed on the brakes, turned, and saw Ava running stiffly toward me.
“I’m afraid of what could happen. Could I—would it be too much to ask…”
Her hand clutched tight to my arm. She looked ragged; spun and wrung and flung a hundred directions. But I saw something else too: a sense of resolve, loose but gathering, like pieces long apart but finally, with the seamless and inexorable pull of gravity, coming together, needing to be whole.
“Let’s go pack your bags,” I said.
Just like that the air turned to velvet.
“From this Friedman you figure Nelson was humping and pumping in Biloxi,” Harry said, pulling off his lime-green tie and jamming it in the side pocket of his jacket. The tip hung out, looking like the head of a flattened frog.
“All expenses paid, from the sound of it.”
A group of day-shift patrol officers charged into Flanagan’s, hooting and hollering, out of uniform, free for another day. Harry and I nodded to familiar faces and turned back to the table. I’d settled Ava at my place and returned to meet Harry for brainstorming and a bowl of gumbo.
Harry was in a contrarian mood from a day filled with too many walks down dead-end streets. He pitched his spoon into his empty bowl. “Probably has nothing to do with anything.”
“There’s the shadow man Shelton saw with Nelson. The one that wasn’t like the others. Plus Nelson’s blabbing about having found his bottomless honey jar, easy street.”
“So? Messer said that was his theme song, always on the edge of a major score.”
“Nelson was the first. Someone’s grabbed stuff from his apartment. There’s got to be lines right to Nelson.”
Harry flicked an invisible string in the air like plucking a harp. Silence.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, slumping in the booth.
“What’s eating you most about this thing?” Harry asked. I watched across the barroom as a patrolman demonstrated how a DUI bust had failed the walk-the-line test. The cop held his arms out like stepping onto a tightrope, teetering, putting one toe inches in front of the other. The onlookers howled and clapped.
“It all comes back to the lack of passion,” I said, quoting my brother, again running on his ideas, hating it because it was my only choice. “It’s not vengeance killing or serial killing. It’s something different. There’s no sense of finality. He wants more from them than their deaths.”
Harry shot me dubious. “Like zombies, you’re saying? The living dead.”
“The working dead. They have a job to do. I just don’t know what the hell it is.”
Across the room the patrolman finished his act by pirouetting into a stumble and falling facedown on the floor. The crowd went wild. Harry glanced over, frowned, looked back at me. “I don’t know, Cars. My head’s jammed up enough just trying to lay scenes and vics over one another and come up with places they match.”
“Bodies are similar,” I said, tapping my swizzle stick against my cocktail glass like ringing a bell, bing. “Ages are close.” Bing
“That’s about it,” Harry said. “Even the venues don’t have many matching points.”
I tolled the venue information. “One outside, one inside.” Bing
I tolled the time of day. “One daylight, one night.” Bing
I tolled coloring. “One guy rather