Crispy Critters (A Crime Thriller) Read online

  "Where's the furnace?" yelled Cleary, making gestures with his big black rubber gloves. Torrance led him into the kitchen to a large closet near the back door that led out into a tiny backyard.

  Leo had snuck in the opened front door and followed the two men into the kitchen. He was wearing a black nylon jacket and had a fake set of ID around his neck that said Ned Healy, Arizona Gas. He opened the side zipper on his backpack and pulled out a Colt 45 he owned. Nothing fancy, just a gun the size of a baseball bat. He waited for Torrance to turn around, which he eventually did when Cleary nudged him.

  "Shit," he said. "What the fuck is this all about?"

  "Sit down, asshole," said Leo, his face hard. He hated the guy the instant he saw him. He wanted nothing more than to pistol-whip the little creep. Torrance sat reluctantly on a wobbly kitchen chair tack-welded together in the sixties and reupholstered at least three times.

  Cleary pulled off his helmet and face hood and rubbed his head. His glove came away slick with sweat.

  "What about the gas?" asked Torrance.

  "You're safe for now, David,” said Cleary. “But if you so much as twitch, my friend here from the gas company will shove that Colt up your ass and shoot your balls into Mexican airspace." Torrance turned to Leo.

  "Hey, Ned. You're the one who's going to get his balls removed." Torrance didn't look cowed anymore. He was fully awake - had smoothed down his short brown hair that was sticking up, and was getting feisty. Leo looked worried. Was this guy on drugs or just stupid?

  Cleary had taken the two blue pills from Leo and mixed them in a glass of water from the sink, which was full of dishes. That was Cleary's second mistake. He should have known that was a lot of dishes for just one guy.

  "Here! Drink this. It will save you from the effects of the gas."

  From behind Leo came a female voice, full of sleep and high-tar cigarettes.

  "You take my husband for some kind of bird brain? You drink that shit yourself if you think it's so great."

  Standing in the hall was a woman about five feet tall and nearly as broad as she was high. She was wearing a stained nightshirt that couldn't hide pillowy breasts, stomach and hips. Her hair was tinted bright red with yellowish-white roots exposed and flared out down past her shoulders like wild alien sagebrush.

  When she smiled, which she was doing now, she revealed tiny yellow teeth with gums so receded you could see the angry stumps of the roots. She was holding a shotgun - a big two-barrel job that looked rusty and unused - that she was swinging back and forth between Leo and Cleary.

  "I said drink that shit," she growled. "If it's good enough for Davy, it's good enough for you." David got up, smiling a partially toothless grin and joined his girlfriend.

  "Yeah. Let's see how you boys do. Medicine is good for ya’," said Davy.

  Cleary just stared. At this point, he would rather be shot than helpless on roofies with this pair.

  "Feeling shy?" the woman said? Okay. Let's try this. Davy, you take gasman's gun there. Good. Now you shove it into the fireman's nut sack. Well now, aren't you bein’ enthusiastic." Cleary jumped, but held his ground. The woman gestured with the barrel of the gun to Leo. "Now, you lift your hands up, grandpa, and walk over to that table and drink that pick me up just like it's the nectar of the Gods. Or your fireman friend there is gonna lose something precious in exactly ten seconds. You ever been on one of those fireman nudie calendars, Mr. Fireman? Well, you won’t be after what we do to ya."

  Cleary glared, his mind racing, his eyes on Leo, who was reaching for the water. Leo took the glass, raised it in a toast to his attackers and drank half of it. When he stopped, Red wiggled her gun at him again.

  "Now, now. Finish everything up before you leave the table. You know those are the rules." Red stumped across the kitchen and pushed the shotgun into Leo's temple. Leo finished the glass and looked over at his friend.

  Cleary estimated they now had about twenty minutes or so before Leo became paralyzed - totally conscious, but unable to move a single muscle.

  "I think you boys have been up to no good,” said Red. “I heard about a couple of fellers, guys like Davy here with an occasional itch for younger meat, who were burned up in their houses. Imagine that! Could they have spontaneously combusted? Yeah. Don't look at me like that Mr. Yellow Submarine guy. I can read. And you look like a friggin rubber dingy standing in my kitchen." She pulled up a chair from the table and sat down. Davy was still standing by Cleary with the Colt 45 aimed at his groin.

  "We're going to have us some fun tonight, Davy. These two clowns just walked into our life and we would be disrespecting of our good fortune not to take advantage. You think so, hon?"

  "If these guys were coming to fry us - I think we should fry them back," answered Davy.

  "In time, my darling, in time. Meanwhile Gas Guy, maybe you should sit down on the floor there so you don't topple over and scratch the fine furniture." Leo slumped down, already looking unsure of his legs. Cleary watched him. It had to be psychological. No way could the Rohypnol be acting so quickly.

  Leo's head eventually nodded forward, and his chin hit his chest. Davy gave him a kick in the side and Leo barely reacted.

  Red had left the room for a few minutes and came back dressed in a cheap flower print dress made from several yards of garish fabric that could only have been a bedspread in a former life. Could the Chinese factory workers even imagine a person needing a dress big enough to cover a king size bed? Red was jubilant though.

  "Got anymore of those pills Mr. Fireman?" Cleary shook his head. He was seated now; sweat running down his forehead. The suit was like a walking sauna.

  "That's too bad. Maybe we could slip some to Davy and have a bit of a party here." Davy had gone through Leo's jacket and found the car keys, which he was holding now. He gave Red a puzzled look.

  "Don't worry, sweetie. You will get your turn," she said. "Now. Where's the car?"

  Cleary turned to her and gave her a blank look. Red sighed. "This will go a lot smoother if you would be more helpful. I thought firefighters were there to serve.” Red looked over at Leo who was now comatose. “I can tell this guy is a friend of yours. I saw the look on your face when Davy kicked him. Am I right? Ah ... the silent type. Well. If you don't want to talk, that's fine by us. But every time you give us the silent treatment then we'll do this. Davy, give Mr. Gas Guy a serious boot to the head.”

  "No!" shouted Cleary.

  "Look, the rubber dinghy speaks," laughed Red.

  "Don't hurt him. This was all my idea," said Cleary.

  "The suit and everything?"

  "Yeah. He's just ... he shouldn't be here."

  "No, he shouldn't. But was he helping you on all of those houses? The ones you burnt?"

  "No." Cleary lied. "That was just me."

  Red laughed and scratched one breast with her free hand. "You lie like a rug. That's what my Momma used to say. One of her favorite sayings actually, until I cut her tongue out with a box cutter." Davy groaned and Red looked at him.

  "They found you on that stupid sex offender site so don't growl at me. That picture of you they used would curl paint. But they didn't find me there, did they. Cause if you had, Mr. Fireman, you would have stayed the hell away from us. Davy here? He's a child who sometimes likes to have sex with other people of roughly the same intelligence. That would be a six year old, I'm guessing. Meanwhile, I'm a much greater threat to the community. The community just doesn't know that yet. But you're gonna find out first hand." She stood up and tried patting down her wild hair.

  "Now we don't want to mess up our little love nest here. So, what you're going to do is, you're gonna pick up your friend, cause you're a big, tall strapping firefighter, and you're gonna carry him out to the car. Or, we could just carve him up in front of you right now, if that’s what you’d like. Show you what he's made of - so to speak. What do you say?"

  :

  Carrying Leo to the station wagon was far from easy for Cleary. First, he ha
dn't fire-carried an adult for over ten years. And second, Leo was way past relaxed and therefore almost impossible to pick up. All of Leo’s muscles were completely at rest. Cleary felt like he was carrying a dead man, a thought he didn’t want to dwell on long.

  When they got to the station wagon and looked in, Red started to laugh. The back storage area and the back seat were packed with green garbage bags full of trash.

  "You boys recycling?" she asked, waddling her way to the passenger seat.

  Cleary shook his head. The garbage bags were his invention - and Leo's hobby. As a fire inspector he learned that green garbage bags full of paper trash, like the kind you would normally find at the end of your curb on trash day, burn at very high temperature - usually over five hundred degrees. And they left no telltale clues like gasoline did. They were the perfect arson’s tools.

  But they took a bit of work to assemble. Leo would collect newspaper and cardboard, crumple the paper up as tight as possible and cram it into these large green trash bags. Once done, they were easy to carry, if not a bit awkward, and anyone who saw you carrying some down a dark alley just figured you were out doing chores. They had filled the station wagon with as many as they could force inside and still close the doors. Red opened the back door and pulled out several bags to make room, which she tossed into the alley. Then she stopped and kicked one a few times until it ripped open.

  "Paper? These bags are full of paper." She looked at Cleary, who was standing in front of Davy, his arm starting to shake. Then she started to laugh like a mad woman, her sides shaking and her chest heaving under the thin fabric of her dress. Cleary noticed for the first time she was wearing hiking boots.

  "We may need these, Davy. They are going to come in handy. So you, Mr. Fireman, throw your friend in the back onto the pile. It’ll be nice and comfy for him. And you sit there where I've made you some space in the back seat. Davys going to have his gun on you full time while I drive. You try anything, we put a big hole in your rubber dingy."

  Red started the wagon and roared out of the alley, blowing a cloud of blue fog in her wake. She had a heavy foot. Cleary looked back at Leo who was partially buried by the garbage bags, his eyes open and reflecting the street lamps as they flashed by. Cleary couldn't imagine what Leo might be thinking at this moment. Probably taking stock, maybe going over the good times one more time. Or wondering what his two girlfriends were doing right now and whether he would ever see them again.

  Leo had told Cleary once that he thought starting fires was kind of like sex; that he had even gotten a bit excited once while lighting up a pile of tinder. He probably wasn’t thinking that now though, with a very uncertain future lying ahead of them.

  Cleary turned back to stare at Davy. He was pretty much out of ideas. He imagined the most likely scenario was death in the desert. These two psychopaths were living out some perverted dream of domination and torture that he had kindled in them. And now the two firefighters were just along for a very bumpy ride.

  :

  Bathgate's cell phone started to vibrate on her bedside table. She looked at the time - saw it was 1:05 in the morning. She spent the last two days on the graveyard shift and the first time in a week she gets to have a normal night’s sleep, her partner wakes her up.

  "This better be good," she said.

  "I think I know who the next target is."

  "You mean the arsonists?"

  "Have you ever looked at this sex offenders website?"

  "I don't work Vice, remember? We’re Homicide."

  Scott ignored the sarcasm. "It classifies all state offenders from category one to three. The last four perverts who died in fires were all rated three - the worst offenders."

  "So?"

  "That eliminates over 95% of these guys. In the whole state, there are only ten."

  "I'll sleep better knowing that. If you’d let me."

  "But you know what else they had in common?"

  "Low self-esteem?" she answered, remembering Cleary’s comment.

  "That and the fact that the victims all lived in or rented a single house. Whoever is torching them wants the fire contained."

  "Philanthropists."

  "What?"

  "Nothing. So why are you calling me?"

  "In the whole state there are only ten category three offenders, only eight of those live in houses. And six have already died in fires."

  "Six?"

  "We missed two."

  “Shit.”

  "And I learned something else. All the fires occurred on the second Tuesday of the month, like clockwork. So now we know who is next on the list and when the fires will be started."

  "Second Tuesday of the month? Poker night?"

  "Yeah. And that's tonight. It's happening now."

  "Double shit!"

  :

  Ten minutes east of Palm Springs on Christopher Columbus Highway, lay the loneliest expanse of desert you have ever seen - miles and miles of saguaro and jumping cholla and baked red sand.

  Red pulled off Highway 10, the same route Leo and Cleary followed to get to Torrance’s one-story, and followed a gravel road north into the scrubland. Leo was still completely comatose. Cleary checked him once to see if he was still breathing; to make sure he wasn't going to suffocate on a garbage bag.

  At one point, Davy almost dozed off, and his gun began to sag, but before Cleary could grab the weapon, Red jabbed her boyfriend hard in the side with her sausage-like fingers, and he jerked awake. Just as Cleary was beginning to berate himself for the third time about missing an opportunity to wrestle the gun from Davey, Red turned and stopped the wagon. Nobody said a word as they listened to the big engine tick as it cooled in the light breeze.

  Red pried her door open and squeezed herself out of the seat, waving at Davy to get around to Cleary's side and help with the rag doll in the back. Davy wasn't gentle with Leo. He basically grabbed his legs and pulled. Leo's head hit the back bumper hard and then struck the sand with a hollow thunk. Davy then dragged him around to the front of the car. Cleary tried to help, but Red shoved her shotgun into his shoulder blades so hard, it brought tears to his eyes and made him step back.

  "Your buddy is going to have to fend for hisself. You on the other hand can help with the kindling." She meant the garbage bags full of paper and cardboard. She was no dummy. Cleary hauled out twelve bags and heaped them in a pile about twenty feet from the wagon.

  "Now we're going to have us a BBQ, Davy. I brought our gas can we use for the lawn mower. There's only a gallon or so in there, but I think that will do. Save half though."

  Davy then soaked the garbage bags with gas and put the plastic fuel tank to the side. Cleary was watching Red. He could see she had something in mind.

  "I know your friend here took some roofies. So he is awake and probably paying close attention to the situation. He just can't move a thing. I think I saw him blink once, but that's about the full of it. I was roofied once, and I know what it feels like. It ain't too much fun. So I was thinking, what could be worse than to watch yourself being burnt alive, not being able to move a muscle, but feeling every last stick of pain? Pretty sick huh? Well, that's what’s in store for you and your buddy. We're going to feed you to the fire real slow."

  "You're going to need some wood then," Cleary said. "There ain't enough mass there to keep a fire going for more than ten minutes."

  "Oh. You are the fire expert aren't you? And where am I going to find wood in the middle of the desert?"

  Cleary shrugged. He was buying time and keeping an eye on Leo. He didn't have a watch, but he guessed he had taken the pills about forty-five minutes ago. They should last a few hours. He needed to do a lot of stalling.

  :

  "When do you suppose this guy lights these places up?” asked Scott. “It's not something we talked about." He had his hands on the display screen, looking for directions.

  "I don't know. Cleary's truck was reported around one-thirty the last time and was gone by two when the patro
l car shoved up."

  "Thirty minute’s response time. Damn! If they had been there in fifteen, we might already have this guy in custody."

  Bathgate turned down a side street. They were only a few blocks away from Torrance’s home. "We've got an all-points out on the truck. But there are probably two patrol cars in the whole division this time of night."

  They pulled up in front of the bungalow. "Lights are on," said Bathgate. They both drew their service revolvers and closed the car doors quietly. They went around the side, Bathgate creeping up the walk to the front entrance visible from the side yard. She looked in the curtainless window. A yellowish light was illuminating the kitchen. She tested the door, which was unlocked.

  "Police. Open up!" Bathgate waited, but there was no sound coming from the house. She opened the door expecting to see the furniture piled up or the drapes pulled down. She was imagining catching Cleary in the act, maybe a lighter in his fist. Scott came around from behind the house and joined his partner in the kitchen. There were dirty dishes in the sink, but the one small bedroom was empty. No sign of struggle was evident, nothing broken. But where did the tenant go?

  "This a change of MO? Or just some guy who decides to go for a walk at two in the morning?"

  "Not just a guy. There’s make-up in the bathroom and women's clothing in the closet. Looks like a couple lives here."

  "Torrance has a girlfriend? I guess that's a good thing. As long as she's older than ten."

  "Judging from her dresses, I’d say she's a size XXX. She's a grown up woman alright."

  "And they’re both gone. This doesn't look good. This doesn't look good at all. Maybe Cleary finally met his match."