The Killing of Jay Hardy: Kristen Black Series, #2

By Theodore Gide

Kristen Black, PI, is forced by an agent of the dreaded intelligence service, Military Security, to find a small metal case that's missing. About the size of a paperback book, the case is very cold to the touch, and it has a keypad that responds to body heat. The agent won't tell Kristen what the mysterious item is or why he's so frantic to retrieve it. Right from the beginning, Kristen is under constant threat by other parties who are also looking for the case and are willing to kill to get it. As the search continues and the body count increases, Kristen begins to suspect that the metal case is not just a threat to the agent but it's also a threat to everyone else in the world, including her.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Theodore Gide
• Release date: Apr 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223708377

Theodore Gide

My name is Theodore Gide and I live in Brooklyn, NY. I have been a sculptor, a stair builder, a 3D computer modeler and, now, a writer of stories about love, lust, power and murder.

Book preview

THE HARBOR

Christian’s hand went by habit into the side pocket of his long black trench coat, but the cocaine shooter was back at his room. In his mind he could see it sitting on the edge of the table — shiny chrome, and packed with beautiful white powder. He hadn’t expected the operation to take this long. His head hurt and he was getting foggy, like there was a cloud in the front of his brain. He’d cased the pier in the daytime. Walked it from one end to the other and planned every step. It seemed simple then, easy to see where the crates would come in on a truck, where they’d be off loaded, where they’d be hoisted onto the boat. An easy job moving some contraband cigarettes and pills for some fast cash.

But Christian hadn’t anticipated how dark it would be. He had planned for the operation to take place right next to the big arc light positioned directly to the north but now there was a towering pile of containers that hadn’t been there in the daytime, casting a deep, black shadow over the staging area on the pier. Working in the dark was dragging the operation down.

He looked to the south — that light was off. He could bust out the base plate and rig it but the nightwatchman, half a mile down the line, would probably wake up in his little hut wanting to know what was going on. Damn! He needed that coke.

He’d paid the three dock hands well, overpaid them in fact, but things were moving too slow, way too slow. He looked out to the south, watching for movement in the dark on the harbor waters. The deal was if the crates weren’t ready when the boat arrived, gliding silently in the night with the running lights off, the boat would turn around and leave, no excuses. He’d been banging on the coke all day and his nerves were stretched tight like violin strings.

The fuck is going on! he bellowed as one of the men was walking away from the pile of crates. Christian’s features were boyish, almost pretty, his light brown hair long, settling on his shoulders, his fingers thin and elegant, but he had a deep, loud voice and he used it to good effect to threaten and bully people.

Need the big forklift. Cezar’s getting it now.

They’re cigarettes and pills, you morons! Use the forklift you’ve got. Or carry the fucking things, I don’t care, but I want them on the loading platform now, not next week!

The smaller one who spoke good English shook his head and sneered at him. They’d shown him respect when he gave them each five hundred dollars, but it had all been downhill since then. If he hadn’t withheld the back end of their money, they’d probably be gone by now. They knew what he was doing was illegal, and in violation of curfew, so why were they suddenly getting antsy now that the crates were off the truck?

A helicopter with search lights passed close by and they all ducked into the shadows until it passed.

You think so? Pick one up, big man. Show us.

Christian pushed the smaller man aside, threw his trench coat to the ground, wrapped his arms around the smallest crate and pulled at it, intending to hoist it up on to his shoulder. But it didn’t move. The rough wood framing of the crate scraped against his shirt as he tried again but he only managed to get it a few inches above the larger crate it was sitting on, his arms straining with the effort. Some of the other crates were four times the size of this one.

Cezar, the man who went for the forklift, swung the machine in close to the group, aimed it at the first large crate, cut the motor and jumped down. He was kind, unlike the other two who often turned their backs to Christian, grinning and muttering in their native language. Sir, look here. He stood to the side and pointed a penlight at a panel routed out of the side of the crate, inset an inch below the surface, shielding the light with his other hand, so only they could see it.

It was dark when the operation began, and Christian hadn’t inspected the crates. He’d had no reason to, they were just boxes. Now he bent down and saw a keypad shining in the cone of Cezar’s light. What the fuck is that? What are you showing me?

It’s a sec ... Cezar looked to his companions and one of them said, Security lock. You have to punch in a code to get into the crate. It records when the crate is sealed and when it’s opened. Probably has a camera embedded in it too. That’s why we stand to the side, we don’t want to be in view of the camera. You should too.

Christian’s head was rigid with tension. Damn! He’d give an arm for a line of coke right now. He exploded. I don’t want to open the fucking crates! I want to move them.

Two of them turned away, sneering. Cezar intervened, Sir, what he is trying to tell you is, this isn’t cigarettes, this is machinery, military hardware. He is trying to help you.

Christian started to speak but the taller of the three men angrily interrupted him. You should listen to us. We all worked Borinquen on the Southern Front. We know what we’re talking about. You don’t. This is fucked up, what you got us doing here. Stolen military hardware. The man turned to the side and spat on the ground.

Christian said, weakly, Borin—

Borinquen, military port, Puerto Rico. We worked the docks during the first attacks. This is military. Serious stuff. Not cigarettes. Not pills.

***

Later, Christian sat in the window of the room he rented week to week, a pale light coming in from the streetlight outside and snorted one line of coke after another, trying to clear his head. The room was a chair, a bed, a hot plate and a toilet. No shower. No kitchen.

The crates had made it with seconds to spare onto the loading platform. Not a word passed between him and the ship’s crew as they hoisted the crates on to the deck with a silent electric crane. He didn’t know who they were and he didn’t want to know.

It was humiliating. Guys he paid good money to laughing at him behind his back. Military hardware? The agent had fucked him. He should have figured ten K was too good to be true for a simple hand off of some crates without shipping tags. But if this was military hardware, that meant he was fucking with Military Security. Damn!

The agent for the buyer was foreign. Korean maybe. Did the client know how much shit they’d dropped him into? What it meant to fuck with MS? Of course they did, that’s why they conned him with the bullshit about pills and cigarettes. He clenched his fists in a ball, trying to squeeze out the frustration he felt.

But he still held the advantage. The agent had repeated over and over, with a strange, nervous edge in his voice — the small metal case, not much bigger than a paperback book that now sat on the edge of his table, the second drop, that was the most important item, more important than the other cases now making their way across the dark Atlantic on a boat cloaked against radar. That was the meeting he couldn’t fuck up, any future work from this group, which he was led to believe could be considerable, depended on him making that delivery.

He looked at the time on his screen and smiled, the man assigned to receive the metal case would be waiting for him now, standing on a corner, wondering what had happened, twisting in the wind. Well, the man could go fuck himself along with the others. He wasn’t going to call them. He’d wait until they reached out and then he’d renegotiate, maybe he needed twenty grand to make the second drop, fuck them and their ten thousand.

He leaned back, straining the legs of the cheap wood chair that came with the room, and closed his eyes as a wave of power from the cocaine slammed into the front of his brain. Maybe twenty wasn’t enough, maybe the risk was worth fifty thousand. His teeth were grinding with excitement. Fifty K — that’d be nice, real nice.

He looked at the time again and sat up straight. Damn! Word was that the Girl was dancing tonight, the first time since the Spring when Horst Bregman, her boyfriend, went down in a firefight with Military Security. He loved the phrase — the Girl — like Ellie was apart, above the other strippers at the club. The men treated her different, showed her respect they didn’t give the other girls. Do wrong by her and you’d have half the club regulars after your ass. He hadn’t asked her out, maybe he was afraid to, but every so often when he glanced at her, trying not to be obvious, she’d give him a little smile, maybe of encouragement. Fifteen minutes was tight, but he could make it, flying on coke.

He put his hand on the case and thought about it. The case was thin and strangely cold, like it had just come out of a refrigerator. Christian had no idea what it was or how it maintained that consistent cold temperature. He’d asked but got no answer. It also had a keypad that was sensitive to body heat. Tapping the keypad with a pencil did nothing but if a finger hovered over it, the keys changed color. He slipped it into the side pocket of the long black trench coat he favored and went out the door, his coat swaying with his walk.

THE CLUB

Ellie was nervous, that surprised her. She hadn’t danced in months, not since her boyfriend died, but her only experience with stage fright was when she was 14 years old and got pushed onto a bare stage next to a truck stop in the badlands somewhere in the middle of the country with nothing but a cheap digital music player to set her up. She feared that crowd of drunken men, grabbing their crotches and yelling — Show us your tits kid. But over time she learned how to control them, learned how to mold their desire into her profit. She was good at what she did, and her regulars paid up, littering the stage with bills and cash cards. She was the single biggest draw at the club.

She looked out from the heavy black curtains and nodded to her lighting guy. He hit the lights and the stage went dark, only the polished brass center pole, rising up to the ceiling and the long shiny brass rim on the bar showed reflections of the LED lights coming through the windows. All else was dark. Ellie was wearing her standard stage gear — cut off faded blue jeans, white slip-on sneakers, white tee shirt and a baseball cap, her ponytail sticking out the hole in the back of the cap. This was not a night to work up new material. Her fans wanted her back as they remembered her, and she wanted to be there for them. Her heart warmed as the chant began, slowly at first — ELLIE! ELLIE! ELLIE! — but growing louder in volume as she made them wait, knowing by experience and instinct, exactly how long to hold men off and when to give them what they wanted.

She stepped out to the pole and nodded to the DJ and he dropped one spotlight on her, a cone of silver white with Ellie at the center, smiling, motionless, one hand on her hip. The men in front of the stage yelled — YES! and Ellie began her dance slowly, casually, a few hip bumps, a twirl, just warming up, feeling good, knowing how to bring the crowd up to a fever pitch, rowdy enough to throw money at her but not crossing over the line into unruliness. Like dogs, packs of men can turn wild in a second, but this was her world, her place and she was in control. She moved casually out to the edge, leaning down to let her fingers grace the hands of one man, then another, her regulars. Wagging her finger at a man who made a grab for her leg. Not yet, Bruno. Not yet, she purred with a wink. Glittering cat masks in different colors were pasted randomly on the matte black walls of the club. Behind the stage in bright red glitter, with a red cat mask set off to each side, were the words — THE CATNIP CLUB.

She did a few hip thrusts, getting the boys excited, went back to the pole and did a quick spin, a smile on her lips but something distracted her, and she looked to the front doors, empty now with everyone clustered around the stage, and watched two men come in, scanning the crowd. A long brown overcoat on one, a blue zippered jacket on the other. She followed their gaze and saw that they were looking at a young man, a cute young guy she was interested in. Christian, she thought his name was. New to town, trying to make his way in the criminal world. Tall, lanky, sensual lips, red enough to suggest lipstick but she didn’t think so.

He turned, just as the man with the long overcoat stumbled, and dropped a sawed-off shotgun he had concealed under the coat, making a loud clatter against the hardwood floor. The man righted himself, but now the gun was out and pointing at Christian, maybe by accident. Ellie tried to shout to Christian, but the men in front of the stage were chanting ELLIE! ELLIE! ELLIE! and their voices drowned out her words. Suddenly a long barrel pistol was in Christian’s hand, and a shot ripped through the noise of the crowd. The man in the blue jacket went down, as Christian’s bullet punctured his side and shattered the glass in the left door, but the man with the shotgun returned fire, blowing through Christian’s chest, spinning him full circle, his long black trench coat fanning out around him. Stunned, the DJ pulled his disc, silencing the room to a hush, leaving just the echo of the gunshot reverberating off the walls.  

For a second, the room was silent then the crowd panicked, moving in a surge one way then another, not sure which way to go until the man with the shotgun turned, burst through the double doors, and ran north up the plaza, leaving his partner dead on the floor. The crowd followed him, men at the back pushing against those in front, stepping over the blood, their shoes crunching the broken glass, fleeing the scene. Whether they were involved or not, these were not people who wanted to be questioned by the police.

Ellie was motionless on stage, but her mind was moving quickly. The stage was just a plywood platform with a black canvas skirt around the edge, empty underneath. As Christian was spinning, his coat spread out almost horizontal around him, something heavy flew out of his pocket and slid under the skirt, banging up against one of the struts right beneath her. She stepped lightly down off the stage, avoiding looking directly at Christian, bones and organs showing in his chest like the carcass of a hunted animal, his blood spreading out into a large shiny pool. She stuck her hand under the stage, fished around and felt a cold metal object and brought it out.

Horst Bregman, her late boyfriend, kept a large lead lined pouch behind the cash register on the bar to cloak his screen and his headset whenever he thought the police or Military Security were looking for him. Ellie stopped for a minute to calm her breathing, then she skipped through the stragglers, the drunks left behind, stumbling around in an alcoholic haze, trying to figure out what had just happened and through the rush of dancers coming out of the dressing rooms in a panic. She looked across the room to see if anyone was watching and slipped the object into the pouch and zipped it up.

After everything quieted down, after she’d made a statement saying she saw nothing, knew nothing, didn’t recognize any of the men involved, and the police had gone, she’d lock the doors and look at the object to see if it was the reason people were lying dead, face down on the bare wood floor of her club.

Fuck, she said out loud, wondering how much it was going to cost her to get these blood stains out of her floor.

MORNING

Kristen woke in the dim light of morning with her cheek on Maureen’s upper arm and kissed the crook of the elbow, her lips brushing against the tender skin. She liked the taste, the odor of Maureen. Once, at Maureen’s apartment, Kristen had rifled through a volume of old photographs, most showing Maureen surrounded by a pack of girls, sometimes wearing numbered sports jerseys, sometimes just tee shirts and cutoffs. Sweaty, holding a ball of some kind, mud stained and happy. Green lawns and ivy-covered buildings spread out behind them. Sports equipment scattered casually on the grass at their feet.

The earliest photographs would have been taken at about age ten, a scrawny girl taller than all the rest with fawn colored hair and freckles. The oldest photographs showing Maureen in her late teens, a robust young woman, still the tallest girl on the team. Generally, there was one girl, different girls at different ages but almost always one girl that Maureen had her arm around. Both sweaty, probably having just finished a scrimmage of some sort and grouped together for a picture.

Kristen imagined that world was somehow suffused in Maureen’s odor but when she tried to describe this idea her poetic gifts failed and Maureen said, You’re saying I smell of girl sweat and grass stains?

Kristen sat up, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. She quickly lay back down, snuggled closer to Maureen and pulled the covers over her shoulders.

It’s cold.

Because your boyfriend tried to blow up the world, thus sending fuel prices through the —

Maureen stopped speaking when she felt Kristen stiffen.

In a hush, Kristen said with a slight trembling in her words. Don’t, Maureen. Please. Don’t ever make light of David’s death.

Maureen’s lips were in Kristen’s hair, her right hand idly caressing Kristen’s ear, smoothing the hair around it.

Sorry. Don’t cry, okay?

The river glared in the morning sun, casting a yellow light on the light gray walls of Kristen’s bedroom. The room was just big enough for a bed, a small closet and two chairs. A large square window, framed in brushed stainless steel, faced west, and looked out over the northern tip of the vast ocean of shacks and RVs, two and three stories high, that populated the western border of Brooklyn from a point south of the Brooklyn Bridge, spreading out and around the bars and saloons of Red Hook and further, occupying all the property leading to the old IKEA building and commonly called, appropriately — Shanty.

Kristen tried to hold on to the warm slumber of sleep, but Maureen’s comment had forced her awake.

Interrupt!, an extremist eco group was regularly bombing petrochemical plants and oil refineries around the world, successfully destabilizing the international economy and making it difficult for the nations about to go to war to keep their armies supplied with equipment. David Souvel, a young man Kristen had fallen in love with was, unbeknownst to her, instrumental in the group. After he died in a firefight and his involvement with the terrorist organization was revealed, Military Security had ransacked Kristen’s office, taken her and Maureen into custody and interrogated them for days. They were still officially classified as possible collaborators.

Maureen said, Time to get up, and tried to extract her arm from under Kristen.

Kristen held Maureen’s arm tight, her cheek pressed firmly against it. Why? The bed’s warm. The world’s cold. Stay here under the covers. We’ll watch old movies. The window was shut tight against the November chill but the odor of grilled meat wafting up from the landscape of food stalls surrounding the ferry terminals, and the ruckus of sounds coming from the traffic in the harbor seeped in around the edges of the window announcing the day whether Kristen wanted it to or not.

It’s a workday. We can stay in bed on Sunday maybe, not today.

We don’t have work and you get up even earlier on Sundays than the rest of the week.

We have no work because your boyfriend tried to blow up ... you finish the sentence this time ... so we have to go out and find work. Or we can stay here in bed and starve to death, slowly, in the cold.

I don’t want to starve, Kristen’s AI said, a disembodied voice emanating from the center of the room, shivering and hungry and cold. I want to die with dignity.

You can’t starve, Betsy. You’re just a figment of Kristen’s imagination, Maureen said.

So quick to dismiss me and technically, that’s not true, Maureen. I exist in Kristen’s neurons but I’m not a function of her imagination.

"You got that right — nobody could imagine