Charged - Book One (3 page)

“Oh, Kegger, I’ve had the worst night,” she said, as
I opened the door. She let herself in and grabbed my beer,
finishing it.

Lolita wore a black plastic skirt that was about five
inches long and tightly hugged her toned thighs. She looked trashy:
bright red lipstick, fishnet stockings and fake eyelashes an inch
too long stretching out from a set of dark brown eyes that you
could just dive into.

Yet Lolita was different. She could separate her work
from her life, something I’d attempted to do for almost two decades
unsuccessfully. She referred to it as a “dirty job,” but she wasn’t
bitter and hardened by it, which I thought was strange.

Over a glass of wine, she once told me how some of
the older guys just wanted to talk or be next to her. I understood
that need for companionship, having spent what seemed like the
better years of my life completely immersed in my work, thinking I
could somehow change the world.

“There’s something attractive about a man that always
carries his gun on him,” she said with a seductive glance, sliding
her hands over my chest. She was always invading my space. It was a
little game she liked to play with me. I think it was called, “how
many places could she caress me before I let her seduce me.” So
far, I was winning this game.

Oh, I wanted Lolita, I wanted her bad, but she
belonged to everyone and no one. I enjoyed her company, our
conversations, the frozen peas she’d put in my freezer believing I
would cook them someday. And I admit I liked the tiny skirts, but
she would never let her job go and I knew that. So I never touched
her. I was her safe zone; I was her friend. And since my knee got
blown out, I realized she was my friend, too.

She and Aaron would check on me daily until I could
get around with the cane. It got annoying after a while, but that
first month was hell and not a single guy on the force even called.
I figured out some time afterward it was just as painful for my old
co-workers as it was for me.

THE NEXT MORNING, when I rolled out of bed around
nine, Lolita was gone from the couch and the box was still under my
mattress. After three cups of coffee and a shower, I decided to go
to Aaron’s shop.

Aaron owned an electronics repair shop around the
corner, filled with everything imaginable for an electrician’s
hard-on. He was my small crew of chemists and scientists. I admit
he’s brilliant, but he’s strange. The little room in the back of
his shop was filled with books like “Unsolvable Mathematical
Equations” and “Fun with Algorithms,” or something like that. He
graduated from high school two years early and had a PhD from
Harvard. Yet he says his two favorite things in the whole world are
a really cold beer in the morning and a really hot shower. Or was
it a really hot shower in the morning and a really cold beer? I
couldn’t remember. But I did know that he loved puzzles.

This wasn’t what made him strange. What made him
strange was that last week his hair was blue and this week it was
bright orange. His tongue is pierced, along with his eyebrow and a
few other body parts that I don’t wish to discuss. He also has
enough tattoos that if my mother were alive, she’d be praying for
him. Plus, I have an easy twelve years on him and to this day I
still don’t know why we get along. Younger brother I always wanted?
Not exactly.

When I got to Aaron’s place, he closed the shop and
we went and got a booth at Barney’s Pub.

I placed the box in front of him, “What do you make
of this?

“What is it?”

“Don’t know,” I replied.

He flipped the box over, examining every side
silently. He was intrigued. I could see the gears in his head
turning, or maybe all the hair dye was affecting his facial
expressions.

“Working again?”

“Side job,” I said. Meaning I wasn’t being paid for
my services.

“Thought you were retired?”

“Not retired, disabled,” I said, dryly. I couldn’t
blame him for asking. I hadn’t done a lot of P.I. work in the last
four months.

“How’s the knee?” he said, probably noticing I’d been
using my cane almost every day now. I myself wondered if all the
surgeries were even helping. I saw progress at first, then after a
few months, it seemed to decline. I’d pretty much lost hope that I
would ever be back to work.

“Three more surgeries,” I lied, unconvincingly. The
lack of circulation in the leg was evident, at least to me.

“If they won’t pay for it—”

I cut him off. “In the line of duty, it’s all
covered,” wondering who was watching out for whom.

I’d known Aaron for six years. I dropped off my
laptop at his shop, thinking he was just the clerk at the time. I
made it real clear the notes that I couldn’t access were sensitive.
I showed him my badge and he nodded his head and had it fixed in
twenty minutes. I should have used our own IT department, but they
were backlogged by weeks.

When he fixed it, he also read all my notes,
interjecting all his analytical ideas as to who murdered the woman
right onto my own hard drive without my permission. He even created
his own folder on my desktop, labeled “Whodunnit.” His theories
were, however, subsequently correct and I’ve basically been picking
his brain ever since.

After I consumed a Reuben sandwich and a couple more
cups of coffee, I left the box with him.

LATER THAT EVENING, I decided to investigate the
alley off of Third Street. I took the light rail to downtown and
quickly found the alley where Richie was killed. It was everything
I wasn’t hoping for. The crime scene was still taped off, but the
rain pretty much washed everything away.

The alley was deep, forty feet back, completely
vacant of any light. It was a dead end, with two-story walls on all
three sides encasing it. I saw a dumpster and one door to the
Chinese restaurant on the left, which I’m sure was bolted from the
inside. It was horrific. I could envision Richie running down this
alley and being trapped. It was narrow and he wasn’t going to get
out of it unless he grew wings. I wondered if he gave up and just
stood there.

And why did he even go down this alley? He lived in
downtown for the last twenty years and I knew Richie; he would’ve
known every nook and cranny of it. He must have been running for
his life, disoriented maybe, or high. The thought made me
cringe.

I rubbed my forehead and looked at all the angles of
the other buildings. There were no bank cameras and the back of the
alley was barely visible from where I was standing. Plus,
everything in downtown shut down early in this area. I managed to
speak to the restaurant owner for a few seconds while he was
closing up. His son discovered Richie’s body, but he wasn’t there
and the owner currently didn’t know where he was. I would have to
come back to talk to him. So I headed back to my apartment.

A couple of hours had passed when my cell rang. It
was Aaron.

“Hey,” I answered.

“Man, you gotta see this!”

I was back at his shop in fifteen minutes and I
brought Zero for the walk. I’m a tall man, but with the dog next to
me, my ego felt about five inches tall. I was acutely aware of his
miniature size when we walked.

“Is that the new guard dog?” he said, opening the
door.

I’d done it again, somehow found another animal to
save.

“Yes, and if you make him angry he turns into a
two-hundred-pound Rottweiler.”

He let a laugh escape him, shaking his head and
locked the door behind us as we headed toward the back of the
shop.

“First of all, where’d you get this?” he said.

“Off a dead guy.”

He looked up at me for a moment, ripping his
attention away from the box. It was just another piece of the
puzzle for him. There was no way I was going to tell him it was
evidence to a current homicide case that I shouldn’t have in my
possession.

The box was opened into two parts on the table, as if
it had a seam that I hadn’t noticed before and it was filled with
wires. We sat down in front of it at an antique table covered with
books and a chessboard with brass pieces. He turned on a desk lamp
and pointed into the right half.

“Now that it’s open… I can tell you what it’s not,”
he said.

I waited, noticing the excitement in his face.

“It’s not: a phone, mp3 player, GPS, portable
scanner, or a weapon.”

That didn’t leave much.

“You want to hear something strange?”

“What?”

“There’s no battery in it. No charging port.”

“So?”

“It’s glowing.” He hit the lights next to the back
door and it was glowing, although it was dim, or at least the wires
were.

Aaron was smiling now, like we had something amazing
in our possession, a foreign technology of some kind. It didn’t
make any sense. He turned the lights back on after a few
seconds.

“You see this space?” he said, pointing to a hollow
socket in the box. “It seems to be missing something. My guess
would be a transmitter, some kind of locating device. Possibly a
GPS chip.” He then flipped it over and pointed to several
quarter-inch slots that I also couldn’t see in Richie’s dim
apartment.

“See these? There are thirteen slots designed to
accept plugs of some sort. I think it’s a key.”

“To what?”

He then pointed to the inside of the box to the tiny
print set in the center, which read “Station 13.” Under “Station
13” was a series of numbers, which didn’t seem to make much sense.
Well, it wasn’t foreign.

“So what’s Station 13?” I asked, not really expecting
an answer.

“It could be anything. A missile base, a database,
the Pentagon’s basement for all I know. Who was the dead guy?”

“He was nobody important,” I said, not wanting to
reveal the gash in Richie’s head or my past relationship with him.
“That’s it?”

“No, I wouldn’t say, ‘that’s it.’” He smiled at me,
seeming pleased with his own genius, which was a common expression
for him. “There is no voltage running through this thing. There’s
no electrical current at all.”

I shook my head, letting him know I wasn’t following
him.

“It’s glowing. Glowing. Let me put it to you this
way. There is a warning label on every cell phone sold; my DMM can
read the electrical current in a human body, but this? Nothing. I
can’t even get a static charge off of it. I’ve seen a lot of
things, but nothing like this. It’s not metal. Looks like metal,
feels like metal, but it’s not. I put a torch to this thing for
five minutes and it didn’t even get warm. And you’re gonna’ have to
explain to me how this box is glowing without some kind of power,
‘cuz I can’t explain it.”

Now this intrigued me. This seemed to be a recurring
theme; first the morgue and now this box. Nothing like this.

“Well, I doubt it opens the Pentagon’s basement,” I
said, laughing a little at his imagination.

“The good news,” he continued, “is that I checked
everything I could and I believe it’s still working. The bad news
is that, if the owner knows it’s missing, he’s probably already
replaced it or moved whatever this box unlocks.”

He put the box back together and held it out to me,
reluctant to let it go. I knew he was more than interested in
something like this. I wanted to let him hold on to it, but I
couldn’t. I was certain that it got Richie killed.

“Thanks.” I grabbed the box and turned to leave.

“Daddy, Daddy, wait for me,” Aaron said in a girly
voice, holding up the Chihuahua and bouncing him in the air.

I grabbed Zero, who was still trembling and I gave
Aaron a look.

“Hey, let me know if you find out anything else about
the dead guy,” he said.

He knew I wasn’t telling him everything. He always
knew when someone wasn’t telling him something. But for some
reason, he never pried for more information with me. I nodded my
head and left.

Zero and I walked along the pavement, him seeming
uneasy in every step and my injury reminding me of my own
limitations in every step.

WHEN WE GOT BACK TO MY APARTMENT, we headed
upstairs. As we reached the last step Zero started growling, which
he almost never did. He stopped dead in his tracks and I looked
down the hallway for anything unusual. The door to my apartment was
busted open. I unsnapped my Magnum from its holster, lifted Zero up
into my left arm and slowly walked into the apartment. Quickly, I
searched all the rooms. It was empty.

Whoever broke in could’ve turned the place upside
down. If they had, I couldn’t tell that much. My piles of books
were now just smaller piles in different places. The bedroom floor
was still covered with clothes, but I wouldn’t have left all the
dishes broken on the kitchen floor and I really wouldn’t have left
the fridge open. The beer would get warm.

After I bolted the door, I gave Zero some baloney and
told him, “good dog.” The bolts were now the only parts still
working. I set Zero and the baloney on my desk so he wouldn’t get
glass in his paws.

I wasn’t really that surprised to see the apartment
had been ransacked. If you throw enough people in jail, eventually
one of them is going to come back after they are released and show
you, in one way or another, that they’re pissed. I was kind of
shocked it hadn’t happened more. But the flat-screen wasn’t gone
and my watch was still on the table. As much as I would’ve liked to
believe it was someone from the past, it wasn’t. Someone was
looking for the box. I sat down at my desk and thought about who
could’ve possibly known I had the box, besides Aaron.

It only took me a second to realize I’d made a
mistake. Someone besides the cops had already searched Richie’s
earlier this week and no one would’ve known I found anything if I’d
patched the hole in the wall. I was getting rusty.