Rigged Read online

  contents

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11 Dee

  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

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rigged (A Thriller)

  Grilz, Jon

  (2013)

  * * *

  Rigged

  Jon Grilz

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

  Copyright © 2013 Jon Grilz

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1484168372

  ISBN-13: 978-1484168370

  DEDICATION

  To my Grandma Grilz. My biggest fan and best bud.

  .

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Cover Art by:

  Christian Masnaghetti

  www.chrismasna.deviantart.com

  Edited by:

  Autumn Conley

  [email protected]

  To Faith for her perspective.

  To my mom for her tireless eye.

  Chapter 1

  It was early in the spring of Sergeant Mark Perez’s fifth year in Bluff Falls, North Dakota, when he became acquainted with the body of a young woman, dead from an apparent overdose, most likely crystal meth. A cool wind cut low to the ground and rippled at the sheet that concealed the body. Perez hadn’t bothered to look underneath. The medical examiner’s prelim was good enough unless the autopsy revealed anything different. Meth was big business, and North Dakota—at least its westernmost parts—had big money to spend, thanks to the oil boom. There seemed to be no end to Mark Perez’s frustrations, thanks, for the most part, to three things: oilmen, money, and drugs.

  “What are you thinkin’, Boss?” Sergeant Nikki Hamill asked. She knew he hated to be called Boss, but it seemed fitting. Given the fact that he had more experience in investigations than the rest of the department combined, after eight years with the big-city Chicago PD, he’d somewhat earned the title by default, regardless of rank.

  “Dead girl,” he said. Perez was sporting his usual off-the-rack suit and coat with striped tie, his head only a few inches higher than Nikki’s. His face always freshly shaved, what remained of his thinning hair combed across the top of his head, a sad attempt at vanity. Each morning Perez considered shaving his head as well, but couldn’t bring himself to do it for whatever reason, like it meant accepting he was getting old. Maybe it was some kind of recessive trait from his mother’s Latin blood, a pride he couldn’t shake.

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Hamill said as she stood next to Perez, all five feet five of her, with a long auburn ponytail and reflective, mirrored-lens sunglasses. She must have looked out of place back when she wore the blues of a patrol cop, before Perez took any interest in knowing her name. Nikki was dressed in her usual style: gray editor pants and a long-sleeved fitted button up; on that day, she’d selected white. He watched Nikki squat down near the body and couldn’t help but sneak a peek at her back side. She didn’t have much in the hips department, but she was still an attractive woman. “I was asking for your thoughts about it,” Nikki said.

  “I try not to think about it,” Perez said as he walked around, taking it all in.

  Just around the corner was a mobile home park, and next to that an RV lot and campground. Neither of them had been there a year prior, but space was at a premium thanks to the oil field jobs. Given how close they were to Williston, it wasn’t that big of a stretch for the oil workers to make the commute from Bluff Falls. Thus, housing in the area—even the temporary, cramped-up variety fit for bachelors and the women who entertained them—was a booming business all its own. The wind kicked up again and carried the smell of crude oil. It was faint, a hitchhiker on the hands and shoes of the rig workers around town. It was a sweeter smell than he would have thought, softer and subtler than gasoline, though not one he couldn’t live without. When Perez thought sweet and soft, he wanted to think about the smell of Aurelio’s pizza sauce, catching a whiff from the kitchen through an open door on Harrison Street in Chicago.

  Hamill tapped her pen against her notepad in that loud, rapid-fire way that she only did when Perez annoyed her. She looked around at the straggling gawkers before she lifted the sheet to look at the body. “I’m guessing OD by the looks of it,” she said, taking the initiative in the investigation since Perez had no motivation for the usual dog and pony show. “Maybe twenty-five years old, but she looks ten years worse for wear, thanks to meth. Purse has about ten bucks in it, no plastic or ID, but a couple of condoms. I’m guessing she’s dressed to trick in that trailer park-chic outfit.”

  Perez smiled as Hamill broke it all down. He took some delight in her big-city investigator impression, and she was pretty good at it too. “So…how’d she get here?” he asked.

  Hamill rocked her head from shoulder to shoulder. “Hoofin’ it, maybe. Maybe she got stoned and took a stroll. Could have gotten a bad dose, maybe took too much and just kind of wandered away.” Hamill turned the girl’s arm with her own latex-gloved hand and inspected it, then did the same between the girl’s toes. The heel of the dead girl’s shoes flashed with little lights on the inside when they moved. “I don’t see any track marks, so she probably wasn’t a spiker, but you never know. I heard of a guy who got booked in Australia that used to shoot up into his tear duct.”

  “Creative,” Perez said, shaking his head. “What’s wrong with these people?” Perez thanked an officer for bringing over a cup of coffee from the diner a few blocks down and took a sip before he asked, “What are the chances the body was dumped? Maybe she was assaulted, uh…you know, downstairs—some roughneck getting a little too rough with a working girl.”

  Perez averted his eyes as Hamill lifted the waist band of the girl’s short skirt that was three sizes too small. “Her underwear still seems to be intact and on the right way, what there is of it. No torn buttons, no bruises, no defensive battle scars. I’m guessing she just plain ODed.”

  “So much for intrigue,” Perez said.

  “Well?” Hamill said, arching an eyebrow at Perez. “What’s the word?”

  “Go ahead and do the usual one-two-three, write up the report, call the body wagon for the haul away, get a couple of uniforms to do door-to-doors for what it’s worth and see if anyone saw anything. Get a picture from the scene photographer and show it around to the locals, see if we can get a name for her.” He turned to Hamill. “I’m gonna go get some breakfast. You wanna join me? I’ve had a hell of a craving for waffles lately for some damn reason. Just can’t shake it.”

  “No thanks,” Hamill said as she looked down at the dead girl. “I’ve kind of lost my appetite.”

  Perez looked down one more time as Hamill replaced the sheet over the girl and called in to the coroner. More likely than not, the girl was just another castoff of the drug trade, a lost soul dragged to hell by meth, never to return. She’d be a life forgotten, a statistic, with nothing for a legacy other than some bureaucratic paperwork in a filing cabinet. It was sad, really, but Perez tried not to thi
nk about it. Even if she did have family, would they really want their last image of their sister or daughter to be a worn-out street walker, dead in a gutter?

  The spring wind picked up for a moment, and it felt cool against Perez’s face, almost refreshing, though it didn’t last. The stench of the trailer park kicked up too—the aroma of addiction and desperation—and for a moment, he considered passing on the waffles.

  Chapter 2

  It was a slow night when the man walked in. Marty had hoped to get off early enough to pay a visit to the strip club, and he already had a pocketful of singles that he would have eagerly stuffed in the G-string of any girl with a gem-inspired stage name, but the visitor looked like trouble in an out-of-town sense.

  Whoever it was, he had a way about him—not so much a swagger as a stroll, not so much confident as ambivalent. It lingered in the way he wore that porkpie hat on his head, felt with that little knot at the side, something like the mini-fedoras worn by so many hipsters, but not really. Porkpie, Marty was pretty sure that was what they were called.

  The guy looked like he belonged more at the Preservation Hotel or some seedy little place in the New York burrows that didn’t exist other than in the memories of retirees. He sure as hell didn’t look like he belonged at the dive bar. When he showed Marty his ID, without being asked for it, Marty eyed him up and down. “Charlie Kelly,” Marty read to himself and handed the ID back. He gave Charlie another glance, Charlie was dressed in a long-sleeved thermal under a faded old t-shirt; it was the real thing and not some two-fer, mock shirt, a knock-off of some retro theme. He took a seat at the bar and pushed the sleeves of his shirt halfway up his forearms.

  “What’ll ya have,” Betty the bartender asked. She was sixty whether she would admit it or not, with long grey hair hanging past enormous breasts that dragged down the neck of her tank top to reveal old, faded animal tattoos, stretched and contorted into barely discernible shapes. When it came down to it, Betty packed a stronger punch than most of the guys in town, and everyone else who worked at the bar knew she kept a sawed-off in the back room.

  “Whiskey…Irish if you’ve got it. Single malt’d be even better,” said the man in the porkpie hat. He smiled politely as she poured him a glass from a Canadian blended whiskey bottle.

  It didn’t take long for those Wheeler brothers, Jimmy and Petey, to start in on him, throwing out little catcalls and the like. Marty couldn’t make out what was being said on account of Betty liking to turn Bob Seger all the way up to eleven. In celebration of the start of the baseball season, the Wheelers had been knocking them back since noon; they didn’t need much of an excuse to start drinking early. To make matters worse, they hadn’t won a single bet all week, and things had started to pile up. Charlie didn’t seem to pay them much attention, keeping with his ambivalent character, and it wasn’t until they blocked him on the way out of the commode that he seemed to take any offense to their half-assed jeers. He certainly took offense.

  Petey, the wider and younger of the two, bald since he was in high school—all six years of it—and never without a baseball hat to hide his shame, was on the ground in a flash, his nose split open and bleeding like water from a spigot. Jimmy, skinny enough and with so much hair on his head that one would question if he and Petey shared a daddy, reached for an empty bottle on the bar, but he took a shot to the throat for his efforts. He hit his knees, looking like one of those universal choking sign posters.

  “Shit,” Marty muttered under his breath. He had immediately gone on alert the moment the Wheelers blocked Charlie in. He didn’t move all that fast, even when he had purpose. His tight black security shirt was stretched like a snare drum across his broad chest and far more prominent stomach. He was the kind of guy who had aspirations to be a bouncer, for whatever that was worth and took pride in his mullet haircut.

  Porkpie Charlie must have figured Marty was backup for the Wheelers; he was a stranger in a strange land, and he didn’t know the locals. He did a little sidestep and kicked Marty’s foot out from under him. Somehow, he made it look smooth, almost like an accident. The big man fell like a sandbag falling out the back of a pickup and whacked his head on the bar rail.

  Marty was out cold by the time his body slumped to the floor. He woke up a few moments later to Porkpie standing over him, asking if he was okay. By the trail of blood, Marty figured those chicken-shit Wheelers must have ducked out the back.

  “You okay?” Porkpie asked, down on his haunches a look of genuine concern in his hazel eyes, not looking so ambivalent anymore.

  “Wh-what happened?” Marty asked, every syllable creeping out of his mouth like they were lost and couldn’t find the way.

  “Took a little tumble there,” Charlie said, wearing a polite smile. “Took a nasty bump on the bar. Must’ve knocked yourself out for a second there.” Charlie did what he could to help heft the big man back to wobbly feet, but Marty could feel that it took effort, not a whole lot of muscle to Charlie Kelly. “Reminds me of when I was eight or so. I was ice-skating with a friend; just a little guy, but he was quicker than shit. Anyway, I got this bright idea in my head that we should race around the rink, first one to do three laps would be the winner. Well, to this day, I only remember the first lap. Woke up in the warming house and heard that the attendant had to carry me in. They said I was crying, but I don’t remember that. My dad and sister were still out there skating. People didn’t get so worried about concussions back then, I guess.”

  Charlie spoke in a matter-of-fact way that was easy to get lost in. He said every word so casually, as if in passing, that Marty actually lost track of what had happened. He simply forgot the events leading directly to his unfortunate tumble. Betty wasn’t around and must have missed it all, or else someone would have had a sawed-off up his nose. Before Marty knew it, Charlie was helping him find a mop to clean up the blood from Petey’s nose. “Please call me Charlie,” he said. By that time, Marty had already thanked Charlie for his help, and Charlie had tipped the brim of his hat, like a cowboy, before he finished the last of his whiskey and walked to the back door.

  Before he got to the door, Charlie turned back to Marty, who was mopping up the last of the Wheeler DNA, pulled out a picture of a young brunette, and asked, “Hey, Marty, have you seen this girl around by chance?”

  Marty stopped mopping and looked at the picture real thoughtfully, taking his time, then shook his head and answered, “Sorry, Charlie, no. I’ve never seen her before.”

  Charlie thanked him again and walked out the back door.

  Marty thought it strange that the man had chosen to head out the back door, since that was probably where the Wheelers were waiting for him. After Charlie was through the door, Marty made his way back there and peeked out, just to make sure the cops or an ambulance wouldn’t need to be called for the new guy in town. The Wheelers were too stupid to back down from a fight, even when they weren’t half in the bag, and they weren’t the type to take a lickin’ with a smile. Anyone who knew them knew they’d just convince each other that revenge was the best way to go, something about family honor, as if they even knew what honor really meant.

  Jimmy, true to his reputation, was on the warpath, and he thought it was a good idea to get the lever-action .22 from under the seat of his truck. He used it for shooting squirrels or street signs, but a stranger in a porkpie hat who’d hit him in the throat would be a good target, too, at least for a scare.

  The trouble was, even that plan didn’t work so well—at least not for Jimmy. Charlie just kept up that same sort of wander, right into the path of the gun, all the while making it look like his attention was on the little cigarillo he’d pulled from a small brown case and placed in his lips, unlit. In an instant, Charlie grabbed the stock of the gun that was damn near in his chest and popped it up, smacking Jimmy in the nose to give him a matching injury to his brothers. Jimmy, dumbfounded, hit the ground with a handful of blood. Charlie took a look at the gun in his hands. He racked the lever a few times, and
a single .22 shell bounced off the pavement. He gave the Wheeler boys a what-were-you-thinking kind of look before he dug in his pocket and pulled out a knife. Petey took a step back, and Jimmy scooted back on his butt, both of them still leaking crimson from their nose. Porkpie Charlie didn’t have bad intentions though; he simply took the knife to the gun—not the brothers—and unscrewed the bolt, popping the lever clear.

  He dropped the dismembered corpse of the useless weapon on the ground and held up the lever. “I’m keeping this,” he said, and then went on his way.

  The Wheeler boys just stared at each other, each working out in their own slow way how they might explain their shattered noses and swollen eyes to people.

  Meanwhile, Charlie rolled down his sleeves and lit his cigarillo with a small plastic lighter, blowing a puff of smoke that hung in the cold night air as he wandered down the street toward the building with a search light that arched into the sky. The same place Marty had been hoping to go to before all the commotion started.

  The DJ played some Top 40s song that Charlie didn’t know off the top of his head, not that his attention was so much on the music as on the girl seated next to him at the high-top table, scantily clad in an ensemble that must have had her feeling a bit drafty—everywhere. Even so, she didn’t act the least bit cold.

  Her eyes moved from Charlie’s eyes up to his hat. “Nice hat. You in a band or something?” She had glitter on her cheeks and smeared across the top of her chest to give glisten to her ample cleavage. Occasionally, the reflection off a disco ball over the main stage glinted on her skin, causing her to sparkle just a bit.

  The lights were low, almost off, and the accent lights around the room were a pinkish red. Charlie had heard once that strip clubs did that intentionally to hide the imperfections on their girls’ skin. There was a faint makeup line around the girl’s chin, kind of like a mask, but she really didn’t look to have all that bad of a complexion. He saw a pimple or two as well, but that came as no surprise, she clearly hadn’t left her teen years behind that long ago; she couldn’t have been much older than twenty-two, if that. Her soft green eyes were hidden behind too much eye shadow and mascara. She had delicate features, but those were all hidden away behind a veil of someone else’s expectations.