The Midtown Murderer (27 page)

Chapter 64

Jake and Elwood followed
Trent down the sterile corridors inside the Piedmont Secure Storage facility to unit EE348. The only noise was from the silky conditioned air rushing through the ventilation system and out of the overhead vents.

“
Quiet as a morgue in here,” Elwood remarked.

“
What do you expect? It’s three
A.M
on Christmas morning,” Jake said, inserting the key into the slot in the keypad. There was a beep and the small light on the keypad flashed a Christmassy green and the locking mechanism clicked.

Jake and Elwood filed in first and Trent turned on the light
s. “There’s a crowbar in the corner,” Trent said, leaning against the door, within easy reach of the M4 shotgun resting on a shelf beside the door.

“
Heavy fucking box,” Jake said, as he and Elwood lifted the top one down. Elwood went to work with the crowbar. They lifted the lid off and set it in the corner. Jake thrust his hand into the sand and came up empty. “The fuck?”

             
The men spun on Trent, but it was too late.

Trent
pulled the trigger and shot Elwood through the sternum. The Remington round sounded like a cannon going off as the one-ounce copper slug ripped his chest in half and punched a hole through the wall the size of a giant truck tire. The warm stink of urine and excrement and blood mingled with the acrid smoke. Elwood’s torso folded backwards like it was hinged to his lower body. His legs and gut stayed upright, spilling blue-coiled intestines and organs and spouting blood like a macabre water fountain.

Trent
’s ears were ringing as he tossed Jake a pair of handcuffs. “Put ‘em on,” he said, gesturing with the M4. “Or you get it now.”

Jake put the cuffs on.
“W-what do you want?”

“
On your knees,” Trent said, swinging the M4 like a baseball bat and striking Jake in the side of the head.

Jake
staggered sideways then dropped to his knees. Blood trickled down his ear. He groaned and said, “How long you think before the attendant calls the police to check on the explosion?”

“With everything going on downtown? We got time.”

“Time for what?” Jake said, struggling to get up.

Trent kicked
him hard in the face and his nose burst in a cloud of red. He fell over backwards and Trent straddled his chest.

“Elwood said the
Kings are inbound this morning,” he said, holding Jake’s head down with the palm of his hand on the man’s forehead. “What type of aircraft are they flying in and when are they landing?”

“
Y-you got it all figured out,” he said, bright red blood flowing over the side of his face. “You tell me.”

Trent
pulled out his knife. “Now, Jake!” he yelled slicing a flap of skin from under Jake’s right eye down to his chin.

B
lood flowed from Jake’s face and his eye quivered in its socket. Minutes later there was a small pile of sliced skin on the floor and Trent had the last piece of the puzzle he needed.

“H-have mercy, Trent,” Jake said, tears mixing with the
gushing blood from his ruined face. “I-it’s Christmas.”

“Mercy like you showed Sylvia?”

The veins in Jake’s neck almost popped through his skin. “Y-you think vengeance is going to bring her back?”

“
No,” Trent said, burying the knife to the hilt below Jake’s collarbone. The scream made him almost feel sorry for the one who had tortured and killed Sylvia. Almost. He twisted the handle hard and said, “But you’ll never hurt anyone again.”

Chapter 65

Now it was five
A.M.
on Christmas morning and Trent was sitting in the driver’s seat of an old panel van off the side of a rutted dirt road in Atlanta. The truck, which was more than a decade old, was painted a dull green. Huge silver flakes were falling from a slate-gray sky, whirlpooled by a strong wind. Even with the window rolled up and the heat on full blast he cringed at the frigid air.

He was parked beside an open sewage trench next to an enormous landfill that had a
gray-green mist of methane gas hanging over it. He was feeling slightly nauseated from the stench of the garbage. He flicked on the radio and heard the words, “Trent Palmer, the Lone-wolf killer, massacres 36 in downtown Atlanta . . .” Then there was a lot of fuzzy speculation as to his whereabouts and whether or not he was still alive. He flipped the channel, “. . . Christmas miracle. Chloe Lee was reunited with her mother . . .”

Some good news, he mumbled
, dialing in the Atlanta Air Traffic Control frequency on his Aviator Pro iPad app. ATC was sequencing the jets to land to the west and he was abeam the final approach course roughly five miles from the end of the runway. The MANPAD was on the seat next to him. His Ducati was in the bed, fastened down tight with straps, and pointing toward the doors, like a fighter jet on the alert pad.

Trent knew his best bet to demolish the
Kings was to take out the ringleader. According to Jake, Huero Largo and his upper-level management team were inbound from Miami to collect their MANPADS. They were onboard a chartered a Boeing 737 with the call sign ‘Kings 666’ and scheduled to land at five-ten.

Trent heard the first exchange with the
Atlanta control tower and the aircraft.

“Atlanta tower,” the pilot said, “
Kings 666 is outside Acer intersection for the ILS approach to runway 27 left.”

“
Kings 666, you are number two behind a Delta 757 on a three mile final.”

“We have the traffic
on TCAS.”

Trent crawled
between the front seats with the MANPAD into the bed of the truck and swung open the rear doors. A cataract of frigid air rushed in and numbed his ears. He knelt down and shouldered the weapon. The smell of the garbage assaulted his nostrils as the Delta 757 emerged from the bottom of the clouds directly east of the dump.

He was fully awakened by the ear-piercing screams of the turbofans
as the pilot increased the engine power to compensate for flap and slat drag. The aircraft was trailing streamers of mist from its flaps and wingtips as it thundered overhead.

He heard the next exchange between the tower and Boeing 737. “
Kings 666, the Delta 757 is over the numbers. You are cleared to land.”

“
Kings 666 is three in the green and landing lights on. I understand we are cleared to land.”

Trent
shouldered the MANPAD and switched on the tracking laser. The moment, he thought, has come; everything is now; rolled up into the present. Into this instant.

When the Boeing descended through the clouds, he sighted the beam on the aircraft’s underside and squeezed the trigger.
A malicious white light that looked like the flame on a welder’s arc streaked on a flat trajectory toward the Boeing. A split second remained before impact. Then came the sound of the explosion. It was a deafening crash as the Boeing’s right engine and inboard wing erupted in a raging storm of fire and smoke. Streaming flames, black smoke, and shedding parts, the jet rolled and shuddered like a ship foundering in rough surf.

“
Fuck you, Kings!” Trent screamed, feeling the dry roar of blood in his ears as the right wing separated from the fuselage and the crippled jet rolled on its back. The Boeing exploded in a fan of white-hot flames. The blast almost rolled the van into the ditch; and the sound hit his eardrums like a thunderclap.

The crippled jet buried itself in the
wasteland of rotting garbage; igniting the buildup of methane gas in a great ball of fire that bloomed upward and outward into the clouds. Jets of garbage and pieces of shrapnel speared upward and outward from the landfill looking like great galaxies of sparkling stars. The air howled with the violence of the explosion.

Trent
could hear the steady pelting sound of the blasted fragments hitting the earth as he connected a narrow, corrugated aluminum ramp to the floor of the van and lowered it to the ground. He unfastened the straps that held his Ducati in place and took the handlebars in his gloved hands. He started the bike and the engine screamed inside the sheet-metal cab. He steered down the bridge and onto the dirt road, briefly turning his head to see random tongues of orange flames and spurts of white vapor rising from the landfill.

All his focus was in front of him, all his resources aimed at the here and now as he steered his
Ducati down the road. He felt the beautiful balance of his weight over the tires as he rounded an onramp onto I-285. Minutes later he was lost in traffic.

Chapter 66

Trent couldn’t believe it was already
Christmas night. Time flies when you’re adding up all the gangsters and crooked cops you’ve murdered, he thought, snuggling into a sleeping bag that he had purchased at Goodwill. He was tucked in a deep depression between the giant roots of two Magnolia trees in Piedmont Park. His toes were numb and his teeth chattered as he positioned his duffle bag full of cash behind his head as a pillow. He was trying to be invisible until midnight when his bus pulled out. He figured that he was so wanted that no cop would ever think that he had stuck around Atlanta.

It was then that h
is prepaid Boost phone rang. It was Rikki’s number. He flipped the phone open. “Rikki?”

A
man was screaming. Then a gunshot thundered through the connection. A muffled crying sob-a gagged woman screaming-then grunts, a gasp. Rikki came on the line. “P-p-please, Trent, give the Kings the key.” The voice shaky and faint. “G-give it to them . . .” Trent could hear spittle pop against the mouthpiece. The fact that it was Rikki meant Chief Clay was dead. You don’t put the woman on the line to make a point with the man. You kill the man so the woman understands.

A raspy voice came through the line. “
We cross paths again, Mr. Palmer. It’s Huero Largo. I need those Stingers. Get them to me or I’m gonna start on her with a blowtorch. Toes first as I work my way up. I’ll give you a little demonstration . . .”

Trent slowly closed the phone.
I should have protected her, he said to himself. It’s all over. I failed. Well, he thought wearily, so goes it. Fatigue and cold had invaded him completely as he staggered to a drugstore store on Tenth Street where he purchased a bottle of vodka from a broad-beamed, middle-age proprietor who whistled to himself.

Not only was h
e was suffering from the intense fear of the last week that his body had delayed and delayed, but now Rikki was probably dead and her image and Sylvia’s image kept blurring into an image of Mother Maria weeping profusely, and his guilt and anxiety were urging him toward death and non-being.

On his way back to the park, he stopped under a street light
near a fragile-looking old man wearing a tattered great coat. Ice crystals were snared in his hair like windy snowflakes whirled there as he rummaged through a trash bin.

Trent
pulled the prescription of Percs from his pocket and swallowed them one by one, washing them down with the vodka, unaware that the old man had stopped to watch him.

He tossed the pill container in the snow and thought
objectively about his impending death and that of Plato’s ancient dualism: body separated from soul. He thought of the body ending abruptly as Sylvia’s had, and her soul, like a baby bird out of its nest to fly elsewhere. She could only continue to exist if God existed. Let it be true, gentle Jesus, he thought, to be reborn again, as the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
says. Because Sylvia and I can meet again. In a newer and clearer and more long-lasting place.

He had difficulty breathing e
ach time he drew air into his lungs; he felt his heart laboring and sensed the concrete slab that had situated itself on his chest. My gravestone, he thought, crossing the street and pausing under a street light to examine a newspaper in a rack.

The
bold headline read: ATLANTA WAR ZONE! The front page consisted of two colorful photos: The top one was of the inferno at the landfill. Through the flames he could clearly see the shattered tail section of the Boeing sticking out of the mounds garbage. It reminded him of Shamu’s giant tail sticking out of the icy water at his SeaWorld home as the killer whale sliced back into its pool. Love you, Shamu. You’re fucking awesome.

The lower
photo was of the fiery tornado rising from the crater that was once Lynn’s animal clinic. Oh god, he said to himself, running a hand across his streaked face as he thought about Radcliff and their burgeoning friendship and how badly it had ended.

He
shivered frantically as he shuffled through the twirling snow across the street into the park. Halting there, he gazed down the ivory hillside, trying to make out the bottom of the hill. Trying to determine how far away his grave was, how many steps he had left.

He
crept snail-like through the snow, exerting himself as sparingly as possible in an attempt to preserve his remaining energy. This could be the greatest descent in the history of mankind, he thought. I am so trivial. So small.

With both arms grasping the trees, he dragged himself down the hill in an agonizing expenditure of himself.
How long have I been in the park? he wondered. No way for him to tell. His power was nearly bankrupt; his bones seemed to quake as the weight on him grew. He felt his body heat slipping away. Death is overtaking me, he realized. This is the destiny of all mankind. At least I won’t be alone.

He shut his eyes and wheezed in the rarified air,
unaware that he was being followed. Snow crashed off the crown of a tree and hit him squarely in the head. He hardly noticed as he stumbled, then crept shakily toward the two magnolia trees that were flanked by egg-shell swells of snow.

My reward, he thought,
panting for each breath as he slipped into his sleeping bag like a mummy and shut out the violence. There was no icy wind. The ground was motionless. It was frigid and silent in his tomb. He’d read that freezing to death was comfortable, warm in the end. The pills would put him out and the cold would do the rest. The proper time had come. He would die now. Sorry Sylvia. Sorry Rikki. I miss you, mom. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Good luck with that one.

H
e thought of Superman flying in reverse around the world, going faster and faster, making time spin backwards so he could save Louis Lane. How he wished he could go back in time to save Sylvia and Rikki.

The last minutes of my life he thought, closing
his eyes. Suddenly he saw a pretty Latin girl, barefoot, with dark hair pulled up in a bun, wearing an unbuttoned sweater over her blouse, a bright yellow skirt, and holding a pair of slingback high heels. She seemed to be window-shopping.

“Sylvia! Sylvia!” he yelled.

She turned, regarding him with warm, intelligent, brown eyes.

“It’s me, Trent!”

Her eyes widened and she smiled. She laughed and ran to him. “Of course it’s Trent; I’ve been waiting for you day and night!”

“Oh, Sylvia,” he said, leaning
toward her and kissing her on the cheek; she smelled of jasmine and lilac, her lips seemed ripe and full of life. “I love you so very much.”

“Trent,
my honey for life,” she said stroking his cheek, “how I have missed-”

H
e opened his eyes. Someone was sticking something in his mouth all the way back to his throat. Was it the barrel of Butler’s gun? Whatever it was he was gagging on it. He threw up in his sleeping bag. Someone pulled him into a sitting position and pushed his head between his legs so he could vomit. And then the thing was back in his throat and he threw up again. And again. Trent fell back on his sleeping bag gagging.

A homeless man held a cup of steaming coffee to
Trent’s lips and said in a soft voice, “Drink this.”

Trent took a swallow and coughed.

“Drink more.”

A voice he knew. Anima!

Anima leaned over and flashed his bic lighter to examine Trent’s pile of quickly-freezing puke. The dim light illuminated his shiny forehead and watery blue eyes. “How many pills did you swallow?”

“Thirteen.”

Anima pushed the vomit around with a stick and said, “They are all here. That’s very good.”

“
I want to die!” he said, wrapping his arms across his chest in an attempt to ward off the cold.

“No
. You need to live.”

“
Sylvia’s dead! Rikki’s dead!”

“Not your fault, Trent,” Amima said, helping him to his feet.
“How do you feel?”

“T
errible,” he said, dry heaving into the snow.

“
Before the cold kills us,” Anima said, taking Trent’s black duffle bag and guiding him by the arm, “we need to get out of the park and find someplace warm.”

“And then what?”

Anima prodded Trent ahead of him and said, “You think about your future and leave the past alone.”

#

Three month later, Trent walked through a narrow doorway and down a staircase lit with orange-colored lights and into a small jazz club on Mission Street in San Francisco. It was a small, intimate club with redbrick walls that were illuminated by crystal wall scones. The parquet reflected the light like a mirror. It was early evening, and a pianist played Latin jazz unobtrusively.

Like any normal person he was still shocked and horrified
by the whole awful, ugly, rat-trap experience in Atlanta, but he knew the importance of being able to move on with his life, no matter what had happened. And it wasn’t just talk with Trent. He had loved Sylvia, and she had died the most horrible death imaginable. After her death his therapist had taught him to ‘compartmentalize,’ and to ‘stuff it into a box.’ He chuckled when he thought of the all the gangsters and crooked cops stuffed into the box that had exploded beneath Lynn’s veterinary clinic.

He seated himself on a barstool and ordered a bottle of Guinness from a white-coated bartender with thick black glasses.
He took a sip of the heavy bitter-tasting brew and thought it was very good. In the bar mirror he could see his reflection. He was dressed in a black pinstripe Italian suit with a beautiful pink tie. A hairstylist had dyed his hair blond and cut it short. He wore black glasses and sported a gold earring in his left ear. He had put on weight and looked nothing like his Christmas mug shot.

He
was rooting through his black duffle bag for some small bills when he found the upside down five-pointed gold star he had taken from the Latino’s body. He was sipping the black beer and wondering what the satanic symbols meant when a special report detailing the horrific rapes and murders of two sisters championing woman’s rights in Ciudad Juarez came on the muted big-screen TV to his right.

Trent
wiped froth from his lips and followed the closed-captioned report. The story reveled in awful detail how the activists had been bound with belts and their mouths stuffed with wads of aluminum foil. Trent’s mood worsened with nausea as the story unfolded. Bite marks on the foil indicate that Sally and Gabby were alive when their mouths had been stuffed and that they were raped repeatedly afterwards. Each woman was then shot through the vagina with a .45 caliber handgun and left to bleed to death. The women, according to the reporter, had “writhed like snakes on the earthen floor.”

And then there were school pictures of the women. Sally, the older, had light, straight hair, braces on her teeth, and
square shoulders that made her look like an athlete. Gabby also had blond hair and white teeth and smiled so wide she looked like a young actor in a tooth-whitening commercial.

It was
then that Huero Largo’s picture flashed on the screen. It jerked Trent half around, as if with an electric shock. Largo’s shark-slit mouth was frozen into an evil smile that continued to stare from the TV. An iPhone video of the murders was recovered that showed Largo wedging his pistol into Gabby’s outspread legs and pulling the trigger. According to the reporter, “blood glistened on her thighs as bold as roses.”

B
y the time the story concluded, Trent could hear the harsh rasp of his own breathing. The image of Largo had been burned into his brain so severely that he could hardly focus on anything else. Never in his life had he felt such hatred, such loathing for anyone. He had a million dollars and he’d spend every fucking penny of it searching for the bastard. Then he’d kill him if it was the last thing he ever did.