Edward Lee - Creekers

And Natter’s voice, now, rattled on. “An incentive, perhaps? Yes.”

“What are you talking about, you fucker?” Phil yelled into the phone.

“There’s someone here,” Natter guttered on, “who’d like very much to talk to you.” The line crackled, the pause seemed to last hours. Then:

“Phil?”

Phil’s heart dropped. It was Susan.

“Phil, they have me!”

“Where are you?”

“They’re doing…horrible things to me!”

Phil needn’t imagine. “Tell me where you are!”

“Phil, don’t come here! They’ll kill you—”

Her voice was pulled away, and Natter’s returned. “Incentive enough? Or…perhaps not. Listen, lawman.”

A scream shot through the line. Phil winced.

“In case you’re curious as to the cause of that scream,” Natter told him, “I’ll have you know that your good friend Mr. Sullivan just cut off one of your paramour’s nipples with a pair of roofing shears. But perhaps you need even more incentive. Yes?”

“Stop it! I’ll do whatever you say!” Phil yelled.

“Listen.”

“No!”

Another of Susan’s screams shrilled through the line.

“That,” Natter said, “was the entirety of the breast. Your friend Mr. Sullivan really is deft with a knife.”

“Hey, bub,” Phil heard next. “Come on out. Let’s party!”

Phil’s emotions collided. He could picture what they were doing to her. And the only other thing he could picture was killing them all.

“Natter, you there?”

“Indeed.”

“Don’t hurt her anymore. I’ll come out there. Just tell me where.”

“Ah, a test. Think.” Natter chuckled. “You know.”

“No, I don’t know! Tell me where you’re at!”

“Little boy. You remember.”

click

“Goddamn!” Phil shouted and slammed down the phone.

“They have Susan, don’t they?” Vicki asked.

“Yeah. Why? Why did they take her? Why do they want me to come there when they could’ve killed me earlier at Sallee’s?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Come on!”

They raced outside to the lockup. Maybe Gut, the prisoner, would be able to tell him something. And maybe Mullins had some guns stored there.

But he wilted when he trotted into the room of holding cells.

Gut had been…

Gutted, Phil observed.

He’d been hung by the neck from the cell’s ceiling, his large abdomen drooping open like fat white lips from a spine-deep knife slash. His innards lay in a pile at his swinging feet.

He pushed Vicki out into the hall before she could see it all. “Go down to the end of the hall and check out the storage room,” he directed. “Look for guns, ammo, anything we can use for weapons. Hurry!”

Distracted, she did so, and Phil went back into the cell rows. Gut’s cell door was unlocked. Who unlocked it? And when he looked closer, he noticed a scrap of paper pinned to Gut’s chest.

Phil squinted through the bars.

WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU, someone had written on the note.

In blood.

Christ, they planned this whole thing. But why?

He didn’t waste time. Several more lockers lined the block. Phil rummaged through them all but found nothing in the way of weapons. What kind of a fucking police station is this? he outraged to himself. There wasn’t a gun to be found. Like a fucking gas station with no gas! All he had was a puny .25, but he’d need a lot more than that for the undertaking he foresaw. A shotgun at least, and a couple of 9mm’s would be nice. But in the last locker, in a box at the bottom, something caught his eye. He picked it up…

My God, he slowly thought.

It was a framed black and white picture, like something taken at a graduation, yellowed with age. Two men, in police cadet uniforms, stood smiling for the camera, their arms draped about each other’s shoulders.

Phil couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

One of the men was Mullins.

The other was Dignazio, the guy who’d set Phil up on the Metro scam.

“I just pulled up out front,” came a voice from behind him. “Didn’t want you to hear my car. Pretty nifty job they did on Gut, huh? It was me who gave ’em the keys.”

Phil turned to face Mullins, whose bulk filled the block entry. The chief’s fat hand was filled with a Colt .357.

“You set me up,” Phil said stonily. “You had Dignazio kill that kid and plant the illegal rounds in my piece.”

“You got it.”

“Why?”

“To get ya back. Me and Dignazio, we been friends since we got out of the academy. I asked the guy a favor, and he did it. And me and Natter—well, we ain’t exactly what I’d call friends, but we’ve always had an agreement. He runs his whores out of Sallee’s and gives me a cut for lookin’ the other way.”

“And I guess he gives you a cut for looking the other way on his PCP network, too, huh?” Phil suddenly felt certain.

Mullins’ big, bulbous face grinned at the remark. “Jeez, Phil, you must’a left your brains back at Metro along with your career.”

“What’s that mean?” Phil asked.

“Natter ain’t got no PCP network.”

Phil peered through his own confusion; he stood in an instant fog. No…network? Suddenly the revelation made sense: in all of his investigative work, he actually had found not one iota of evidence to suggest that Natter was dealing PCP. Just heresay, just lies. Just…Mullins, he realized.

“You’ve been lying to me the whole time. You’ve had me looking for a PCP lab that doesn’t exist. You made the whole thing up.”

“That’s right, partner,” Mullins admitted. “And you fell for it hook, line, and sinker. I know you’ve had a hard-on for PCP since Metro, so after I had Dignazio shit on you, I figured the quickest way to get you to take a job here was to make up some bullshit about Natter running dust. Shit, Natter ain’t never run dust. It’s all just been a bunch of cowboys like Peters and Sullivan and those guys, workin’ for a couple of labs out of town.”

“But…the murders—”

“Oh, sure, there’ve been murders for a long time, that part wasn’t BS. Natter and his Creekers have been offing people for as long as I can remember. It was part of the deal. I looked the other way on that, too. And when time started to get short, I told him to start hitting local dust runners ’cos that way you’d be more likely to believe the whole story in the first place.”

Hook line, and sinker, Phil thought. He’s right. Yeah, it all made sense now, all except one thing.

“Why? Why?” he asked in total perplexion. “Why go to all that trouble? It almost sounds like you were trying to lure me back to Crick City.”

“Something like that. It’ll give ya something to think about on our way to Natter’s.”

“Oh, so you’re going to deliver me, is that it?”

“Might as well, I’m here.” Mullins waved the gun toward the exit. “Drop your piece on the floor, and don’t try anything.”

Frowning, Phil took out his pocket .25—his only weapon—and tossed it aside.

“Good boy. Now come on. You’ve got some driving to do.”

Mullins kept his distance as Phil approached the exit. Shit, I’m had, Phil thought. He could try a disarm, but the chief wasn’t close enough; making a move would get him shot. His only chance was a distraction…

And at the same moment, Vicki walked in. “Phil, I couldn’t find anything in the storager—”

Mullins, taken by surprise, turned at Vicki’s voice. Then Vicki shrieked. It was all the distraction Phil was going to get, so he took his chance, spun back, and hit Mullins across the bridge of his nose—crack!—with his right hand. With his left, he grabbed Mullins’ gun.

A round went off; Phil flinched at the massive concussion. Next the two men were on the floor, wrestling. But Phil had the gun, and he shoved its blue-steel barrel under the chief’s jaw. “Give it up!” Phil growled, but Mullins only struggled further, his own hands pawing at Phil’s.