The Wicked Flee (A Marty Singer Mystery Book 5) Read online

  “Are you Kevin Handley?”

  “G-g-go f-f-fuck yourself,” he said. “Nig-g-ger.”

  She hooked a foot around one ankle, pushed him in the opposite direction, and pitched him face-first into the nearest snowbank. Her boot kept him in that position as he squirmed and shouted muffled obscenities into the snow. She counted off twenty seconds, then grabbed his hair and pulled his head back.

  “No one’s going to know the difference between you running naked into the woods in the middle of the night in January and me holding you down in a snowbank for the next half hour,” she said. “You want to lose your nose to frostbite, it’s okay by me.”

  He stuttered another curse and she pushed him back into the snow. She counted to twenty-two this time and pulled him out. “Kevin Handley, yes or no?”

  “Y-y-y-yes,” he gasped.

  “Is that Tiffany Chilton in your yard?”

  His mouth worked in a funny way and Sarah moved to push him back down. “Yes! Y-y-yes. Tiffany something. That’s all I know.”

  Sarah smiled for the first time that night. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Handley. Now let’s get you somewhere warm and secure. I think I know a place.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The goddess of sleep had folded her angel wings around me. The sandman had tossed a bag of magic dust in my eyes. Consciousness was a distant, somewhat unpleasant, memory. And all it had taken to achieve this state was a low-grade fever, a ninety-minute coughing jag, and a half bottle of NyQuil.

  I was in the second week of an illness so severe that to call it a cold seemed laughable—but laughing brought on a new round of coughing, so I’d been avoiding any form of comedy for a while. I hated winter colds. They were my least favorite way of being sick. Scratch that, second least favorite way. Cancer took the cake, of course, and I’d had my fill of that particular bug. But colds came in a close second. They made me feel so . . . bleh. Not quite sick enough to see the doctor, too miserable to do anything except sit and read or watch TV. Sleep had been elusive and the gray January winter coupled with my cold made everything colorless and bleak, such that I found myself wishing for sticky Virginia summers just for something new to complain about.

  With enough self-medication and plain old exhaustion, however, my body had finally thrown in the towel and, for the first night in a week, I’d floated away on dreamy green clouds, something I hadn’t managed much of since picking up the bug around New Year’s Eve. Like most drug- and sickness-induced sleeps, though, it wasn’t a sound slumber. Hazy dreams—of steam baths and Mentho-Lyptus cocktails and a lab-coated octopus wrapping tentacles around my chest—mixed with reality, and I had the strangest feeling that the octopus had taken one tentacle and knocked on my chest instead of squeezing it to a pulp.

  My eyes snapped open. The knocking wasn’t part of the dream—it was part of the reality. Someone was pounding on my front door. Aggressively. I groaned, threw back the cover, and swung my feet over the side of the bed. Pierre, my cat, jumped to the floor with a thud from his position near my feet and ran into the hall, assuming that if the human was standing, it was time to eat.

  I glanced at the nightstand clock. 9:17 p.m. The sweatpants I’d been living in for the past ten days were within easy reach, so I slipped them on, threw a fleece over my head, and pulled my SIG Sauer from the nightstand drawer. Thirty years on Washington, DC’s Homicide squad had given me habits that were hard to break.

  The pounding continued during the time it took me to reach the landing, jog down the stairs, and cross the living room. I glanced through the peephole, then unlocked the door. On the other side was a young, whip-thin Asian man sporting perfectly spiked hair, a puffy winter coat made out of some metallic material, and wraparound shades despite the pitch-black night. A piercing through one eyebrow and five rings through his right ear made him look like the average punk at a rave, but I knew it was all part of the persona for Chuck Rhee, an Arlington PD detective specializing in the gangs that roamed Northern Virginia along the DC border, and a friend of mine.

  “Chuck?” I said, my voice phlegmy. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Marty,” Rhee said, his voice tight, the syllables clipped. “I need your help.”

  “Come on in,” I said, taking a step back. I shut the door and turned on some lights. “Coffee?”

  Rhee shook his head. He wouldn’t sit, instead standing with his hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. Tense, angry. A coil of wire, ready to snap or spring. “Can’t. I got a problem.”

  “You take on gangbangers eight hours a day. What’s bad enough that you’re calling it a problem?”

  “It’s Lucy. My sister. She’s gone.”

  My cough medicine buzz melted away. “Talk to me.”

  “We were supposed to have dinner around five,” Rhee said, running a hand through his hair. “I got off my shift at four. I told her I’d pick her up at our grandparents’ place.”

  “That’s where she lives?”

  “Yeah. I’m gone too often to look after her and my grandparents live near a decent high school, so she’s with them. I give them some cash to help with bills,” he said. “Anyway, she’s not there and my grandparents told me they hadn’t seen her since she left this morning. I called her phone a million times and no answer.”

  “Okay.”

  Rhee paced to the couch and back. “I know. Teenager misses a dinner date with her older brother. That’s not weird, it’s normal. And maybe her phone’s off or not charged or she don’t feel like answering.”

  “You wouldn’t be this upset if it was typical teenage crap.”

  Rhee let out a breath. “Lucy don’t miss things like this. She don’t forget to call. She don’t blow off family. Not since our parents died. She ain’t no saint; she just does what she says she’s gonna do. If she don’t want to do something, she says so. If she’s going to be late, she calls.”

  “Okay,” I said. I sank into a chair. “What are you thinking?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I filed a report, but no evidence of foul play, you know? At sixteen, she’s just a runaway to half the departments around.”

  “They’ll listen to a cop, though.”

  “Yeah, and my buddies in Arlington are following up right now, but . . .” He trailed off.

  “Not good enough.”

  “No,” Rhee said and raised his head to look at me. “Singer, I’ve seen kids on the street, the ones the gangs recruit. Or sell. Four hours is a lifetime. They can be across the state line in an hour. They can be in another time zone in eight. I can’t wait for this to make its way through the system. I need to tackle this myself. Now.”

  I nodded. “Where do we start?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Eddie Molter prowled the streets of Woodbridge, trying to find the dump that matched the address he’d been given.

  He hated this part of Virginia. He didn’t know it like he knew Maryland or the stretch between DC and Baltimore. The town was smashed up against the highway on one side and Route 1 on the other, with enough strip malls and check-cashing stores and Pollo Locos vomiting cars onto the roads to make driving seem a lot like taking part in a demolition derby, even late on a Saturday night.

  It didn’t help that he had no idea where the hell he was going while making the most important drive of his life. The map on his phone was nice, but Eddie liked to drive, not navigate, and he was terrible at it. All Gerry had given him was an address, a few landmarks, and one telltale sign to follow: when he spotted the biggest black-and-silver Raiders banner he’d ever seen in his life, he’d found the right place.

  “His name’s Tuck?” he’d asked Gerry when he first got the call. “How do you know him?”

  “He worked a construction job up here, near Columbia. He came in for a girl every night. When he wasn’t busting heads over at the Roadhouse, I mean.”

>   “How’d he get in touch with you?”

  “When you told me you were looking for something . . . special, I passed it on,” Gerry had said, unsure if he was in trouble with Eddie or not. “He’d already asked me if we had some work, so I didn’t think it would hurt to pull him in.”

  “Did you give him my name?”

  “No! No way,” Gerry said, quick to reassure his boss. “I just told him you’d call and that he’d better not be bullshitting.”

  And that’s how Eddie came to be lost in the back end of Woodbridge. The map said he was less than a mile from his destination, but he felt like he could be across the street from the place and he wouldn’t know where he was. Time to call.

  He dialed the number with a thumb, and waited. Two rings, then a voice answered, low and lazy. “Yeah?”

  “Is this Tuck?”

  “Yeah.” The grunt barely made it through the crash and bang of TV commercials in the background. “Who’s this?”

  “Gerry’s friend,” Eddie said. “I’m about ten minutes away. Do you have what I came for?”

  “Ready and waiting,” Tuck said.

  “I’m looking for a Raiders banner? Anything else?”

  A pause. “I’ll be on the porch.”

  “See you in ten,” Eddie said and hung up, wondering what kind of idiot he was dealing with. It was pitch black out and below freezing. All the dude had to do was flick a porch light on and off to let Eddie know where to pull over, but he wanted to stand sentry. Whatever. At least Eddie didn’t need to know what Tuck looked like now—he was going to be the only numb-nuts standing outside on his deck.

  He took a left off of Route 1 onto Featherstone Road and cruised past the duplex homes and garden apartments. Frost had built up on the side of the road and fogged the windows of parked cars and apartments alike. A quick glance at the map, another left, and a minute later he spotted the Raiders banner rising and falling in the breeze.

  Standing on the porch to one side of the banner and backlit by an open door was a stocky figure in jeans and a T-shirt. Tuck, evidently. His hands were jammed into his pockets, the only concession to the cold. Eddie stopped the car at the bottom of the porch steps and got out.

  Taking in the flat stare and the crooked nose—busted multiple times—the set of the shoulders and planted feet, Eddie sighed to himself and tried to keep his face as expressionless as possible. The guy was an open book, just another knucklehead who liked to swing first and talk later. Bar brawls and parking lot fights were probably weekly events. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to have an in-depth discussion with the guy. He needed to grab what he came for, pay the man, and leave.

  “Tuck?” Eddie asked, coming up the steps. He got a grunt in reply, then the guy—a kid, really, but built like a brick shithouse—turned and opened the screen door to go inside. Eddie followed him.

  The entrance spilled directly into the living room. It was about what Eddie had expected to find. A TV that probably cost more than Tuck’s car—but propped up by cinder blocks and a sheet of plywood—dominated the room. Gaming consoles and a stereo were connected to it, the connecting wires spilling onto the floor haphazardly. Tower speakers flanked the jury-rigged entertainment center. Cans of low-end beer and forty-ounce malt liquor bottles lay scattered around the room. A few posters of heavyweight MMA fighters had been tacked or taped to the walls. Smells of food and mold lingered in the room despite the blast of cold air they’d brought with them.

  Sitting in a broken recliner in the far corner was a ginger-haired, fish-eyed dude with a wispy mustache. He ogled Eddie like he’d seen an alien. On one end of a beat-up, rust-colored couch—the only other piece of furniture in the room—was a long-legged blond guy cultivating a stoner look with a plaid shirt, black watch cap, and a half-baked goatee. He looked back at Eddie and blinked a few times, as though he had expected one thing to walk through the door and found to his surprise that something very different had shown up.

  Tuck gestured to the first one, then the other. “Ookie. Che. They’re cool.”

  Slacker housemates. Eddie dismissed them and looked at Tuck. “Where?”

  “This way,” Tuck said, then motioned to Che. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

  “What are you doing?” Eddie asked, irritated. “This ain’t a joke.”

  “They’re going to know, anyway,” Tuck said, pushing back. “If I said they’re cool, they’re cool.”

  Eddie shrugged and put a bored look on his face. “It’s on you if they talk about it.”

  Tuck looked like he wanted to get in his grill for that, but he turned around and led the three of them down a corridor to the bedrooms. Ookie, not invited, came down the hall anyway, trailing the others. Tuck’s bedroom was closed and he took out a set of keys and unlocked it, then opened the door and threw the light on.

  On the bed was a slim Asian girl with glossy black hair down to the middle of her back. She wore jeans and a pink warm-up jacket. She lay sprawled on the bed like she’d been tossed from the doorway and was either asleep or unconscious.

  “Is that . . . ?” Che asked, surprise in his voice.

  “Yeah,” Tuck said, smirking. “I brought her in while you losers were at work.”

  “She got a story?” Eddie asked. He sat on the edge of the bed and gently grasped the girl’s chin, tilting her head back and forth, looking for bruises or cuts, then gingerly peeled back her lips to look at her teeth. The girl moaned softly as Eddie moved her.

  “We used to hang,” Tuck said, crossing his arms and leaning against the door frame. “She wouldn’t put out. Took a swing at me when I tried to get some.”

  “Yeah?” Eddie said, not bothering to look at Tuck. In the same gentle manner he’d used to manipulate her head, he rolled her jeans up to check her calves, then did the same with the sleeves of the jacket and peered at her forearms and wrists. He silently approved. No tracks, no bruises, no rashes, no signs of self-abuse. “Did she connect?”

  Tuck grunted but said nothing. Eddie heard the one friend, Che, shuffle from foot to foot.

  “What did you use on her?”

  “Roofies,” Tuck said.

  “She do drugs? Booze?”

  “No drugs,” Tuck said. “Drank some, not much.”

  “Did you ever sleep with her?”

  “Nope.”

  Eddie shot him a look.

  “Believe me, man, I would remember,” Tuck said.

  “She screw anyone else?”

  “If she didn’t want some of this, she didn’t want it from nobody.”

  Eddie smiled. “Yeah, okay. What about your two buddies? They fool around while she was knocked out?”

  “Man, they didn’t even know she was here.”

  Eddie looked at Che full-on. “Is that right?”

  “Didn’t know, man,” Che said.

  Eddie held the stare for a second, then turned it on Ookie, but snorted and turned back at the girl on the bed. “She got a family?”

  “Older brother. He’s never around,” Tuck said. “No parents.”

  “She’s got to sleep somewhere.”

  “She lives with her grandparents.”

  “Are they going to be a problem?”

  Tuck shook his head. “They don’t know English, don’t have cell phones. She does everything for them. Buys their food, pays the bills. They’re clueless.”

  Eddie stood, nodded. “Does she have a purse? A wallet? Phone?”

  “Yeah,” Tuck said reluctantly.

  “Get them,” Eddie said. “If somebody calls or wants to see her ID, I’m not going to sit there with my thumb up my ass.”

  Tuck disappeared for a minute, came back carrying a leather purse. He handed it over and Eddie rifled through it, making sure the essentials were there. He pulled out a smartphone with a Hello Kitty cover on it.


  He held it up, looking at Tuck. “Locked?”

  Tuck shrugged. “I never knew the code.”

  Eddie snapped the purse shut and slung it over a shoulder. “Does she have a coat?”

  “She had one. I don’t know where it is.”

  “Well, grab something, asshole,” Eddie said. “I’m not going to let her freeze to death.”

  Tuck’s eyes narrowed and his jaw and fists bunched. Eddie hadn’t moved from the edge of the bed, but he shifted slightly to square his shoulders to the punk. Behind Tuck, both friends swayed a little in place, but didn’t move. The look on their faces was noncommittal.

  “I don’t have time to screw around,” Eddie said, staring back at Tuck. “Do you want your money or not?”

  Tuck took a deep breath and told Ookie to get the fuck out of the way so he could look in the closet. He dug around for a minute, then pulled out an old hoodie. Eddie tilted the girl upright and the two of them dressed her clumsily. When they were finished, he reached into an inner pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. He quickly counted off a dozen twenties, folded them in half, and handed them to Tuck.

  He turned back to the girl, carefully arranging her head and hair on the pillow as if she were a model posing for a photo shoot. Which turned out to be partially right—he pulled out a phone and took several pictures, careful to capture her face and hair. Then, with no effort, Eddie swung the girl over one shoulder, and everyone stomped out of the bedroom to the front of the house. Tuck walked onto the porch and glanced around the neighborhood. But it was after eleven on a frozen Saturday night. People weren’t looking out windows or standing in yards; they were huddled on the couch or in bed. Tuck signaled to Eddie and held the door for him as he carried the girl outside.