The Dark Path

  The Dark Path

  Kevin McManus

  Copyright © Kevin McManus

  The right of Kevin McManus to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First Published in 2019 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  Print ISBN 978-1-912986-76-7

  Contents

  1. The Spike

  2. Bad Seeds

  3. Wired

  4. Rest for the Wicked

  5. Cry Little Sister

  6. Loose Ends

  7. Toombs

  8. Hit the Dirt

  9. Rumors

  10. Running Scared

  11. Thin Ice

  12. Klein

  13. A Spiderweb

  14. The Ghost of Damien Huerta

  15. The Jack of Diamonds

  16. No Dice

  17. Rat Trap

  18. Sliver

  19. Busted Up

  20. Off Limits

  21. Blood or No Blood

  22. Dangerous Territory

  23. Turnpike

  24. Death is not the End

  25. A Demon’s Whisper

  26. Black and White

  27. In the Cold Morning Light

  28. Headbanger

  29. A Diversion

  30. Stains

  31. Manhattan Skyline

  32. Primal Scream

  A note from the publisher

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

  You will also enjoy:

  1

  The Spike

  Tuesday, January 8th, 2019

  Hell’s Kitchen, New York

  11am

  Lieutenant John Morrigan sat behind the wheel of his Subaru WRX. He lit up a cigarette, checked a recent missed call on his cell phone and hit call back.

  It was his ex.

  Helen.

  She’s probably at the office, Morrigan thought. Those Upper West Side assholes pining for penthouses really make her work for it.

  “John,” she said, almost as if she was addressing a client.

  “Bad time?” he asked, already preparing himself to hear the click of the call ending.

  She sighed. “No. I actually just came back to file the papers on a property I closed. Timing’s perfect.”

  She never used the word “perfect” when we were together.

  “How is work?” he asked.

  “The same,” she said. “You?”

  Morrigan shifted his focus to the building twenty yards ahead of him on the left—your average pawnshop in the ghetto, complete with barred-up windows and a cracked and faded sign that read “PAWN: BUY AND SELL” across the top. The entire area was bustling with the activity of four officers in NYPD blues cordoning off the area, with two other detectives standing watch over the bullet-ridden body of the owner resting inside.

  “Same,” Morrigan said to his soon to be ex-wife, ready to take on body number three for what had to be one of the busiest months he’d experienced in over ten years on the job. He cleared his throat. “You, uh, left me a message, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Helen said. “There was a problem with the papers.”

  “I signed where the Post-its were.”

  “Those were fine. The lawyer just forgot to send you another section.”

  Morrigan was up to his gills in all the bullshit fallout that came with getting divorced. It was his second (and for him most likely the last) divorce he had gone through. Caroline had been a nightmare of a wife to deal with when he went through the first round. Helen was like a saint compared to her idiosyncrasies.

  But knowing that another day was getting tacked on to the proceedings was worth a sigh and an eye-roll at best.

  “Have him send it to my apartment,” Morrigan said, his hand already inching for the door.

  Then he swore he heard Helen snigger sarcastically. “I would,” she said, “but we both know you’re rarely there.”

  “Comes with the territory. I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve been through this before.”

  “And getting a divorce ensures that I don’t have to go through it again.”

  Nice one, Morrigan thought.

  “Look,” Helen said, cooling her tone, “I called because I wanted to know if it was all right if I came by the precinct and had you sign it there. I know your schedule. It’ll just work easier that way.”

  “I won’t be in for a while. Probably a couple of hours.”

  “Well, call me when you’re there. I can get over there in thirty, and we can finish this up.”

  “Yeah. Definitely… I’ll call you.”

  “Please do, John. I just want to get this over with.”

  And with that—the line went dead.

  “Yeah,” Morrigan said as he slipped his cell into the pocket of his leather jacket. “Me too.”

  One of the beat boys in blue pulled up the yellow tape for Morrigan before he ducked inside the shop and paused, overwhelmed by the smell of copper and cordite that invaded his nostrils with the most potent of scents.

  “Christ,” he remarked. “How many shots did this guy take?”

  To his left, two other detectives dressed in jeans, jackets, and hoodies stood across from each other and several feet shy of a body lying face down, left arm above his head, right arm tucked under his body. White male. Fifties. He was fresh enough that rigor mortis hadn’t set in but dead long enough that the blood pooled around him had begun to turn a gothic shade of black.

  The detective on the left, Andrea Bukowski, tied her hair into a tight bun as she exhaled the sigh of an officer eight hours into her shift. She was a good-looking young woman. Had a faint scar above her lip from a childhood trauma that she never cared to divulge.

  “He was shot fifteen times,” she said, traces of her Bronx accent coating her words. “Techs already found all the shells.”

  “He the owner?” Morrigan asked.

  “Yeah. Hector Zimmerman. He’s had this store for twenty years. Business has barely hung in there, based on the lack of foot traffic.”

  “Witnesses?” Morrigan inquired as he pointed to the corners of the store. “Surveillance?”

  The detective to his right, Steve Hackett, ran a hand through his ginger hair and gestured to the door. “Three people outside said they might have seen something.”

  “Might have seen something?”

  Hackett approached him. Lowered his voice. “One of them is an old lady with lenses on her face the size of coke bottles. She thinks she saw three guys in Halloween masks come in, shoot the clerk, then bounce.”

  “What about the other two?”

  Hackett shook his head. “They said they were across the street looking toward the shop, but from where they were sitting all they heard was the blast.”

  “They didn’t see nothing?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Morrigan rubbed his stubble. He turned back to the body and got down on one knee. “What’s it look like to you, Hackett?” he asked.

  “I think it was quick,” Hackett said, taking up a position behind Morrigan like he was looking for his mark in a stage play. “The shooters enter,” he raised a finger gun, “bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.”

  Morrigan smirked. “Great re-enactment, Steve. I’ll make sure to
forward your number to the producer who turns this into a TV movie.”

  “They didn’t take anything either,” Bukowski chimed in. “So this looks like a straight-up execution.”

  Morrigan pondered. “Anyone know anything about the victim? Any kind of ties? Beefs with somebody?”

  Hackett shrugged. “Nothing so far, never had run-ins with the PD before.”

  “See if his name comes across any reports at the office. Maybe he filed a shoplifting report a while back or something.”

  “Copy that,” Hackett said.

  Morrigan stood up. “Where’s the lady with the coke bottles?” he said. “I want to talk to her.”

  Bukowski motioned outside to the old woman standing behind the yellow line. Morrigan walked slowly over to her.

  “What’s your name, hon?” Morrigan asked the old lady, his slim but sinewy frame hunched over to meet her at her level.

  “Jeanette Ruiz,” she said in a frail and strained voice.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Jeanette Ruiz,” Morrigan said with a smile, forcing a warm demeanor for the sake of getting answers. “You said you saw what happened here?”

  A nod. It was an effort for someone of Jeanette’s age. “Three men,” she said. “Ran into the store. They shot at the man. He ran to the door and was waving at them. Then they shot him.”

  “And you said they were wearing masks?”

  “Yes. Masks. Three of them. Halloween masks. I most certainly saw one of them. It was a baby mask. The other two were harder to see. One looked brown. The other was orange.”

  A tiger, maybe, Morrigan thought. “Do you happen to know what kind of guns they had?” he asked.

  Mrs. Ruiz searched her memory. “Handguns,” she said. “Most certainly. Pistols.”

  “Don’t suppose you know specifically what kind?” It was a stretch of a question, but Morrigan wanted to try anyway. You never knew who was or wasn’t packing a piece.

  But the old woman shook her head. “No.”

  “And how were they dressed?” Morrigan continued. “Black clothing, you said?”

  Another nod. “Hooded sweatshirts. Black pants. Black shoes.”

  “And which direction did they come from? Can you show me where you were when you saw them?”

  They shuffled over ten feet to the left, not far from the front of the store and adjacent to the gravel parking lot on its right. A patrolman herded away the small gaggle of people who were trying to get a peek inside the scene, while the rest of New York continued to, in persistent and robust fashion, go about its merry way.

  “I was here,” Mrs. Ruiz said, standing in the middle of the sidewalk as she went back in time with Morrigan. “I was walking. I was looking at my grocery list and realized I didn’t need apples…”

  An unnecessary add-on, Morrigan thought, smiling.

  “When I walked to here,” Mrs. Ruiz said as she trotted forward two steps and pointed to the left, “those men ran out of the parking lot. They were fast, too!”

  “Did they look at you?” Morrigan asked. “Did they acknowledge you in any way?”

  “No. They just ran to the store, the owner came up to them and shouted, and then they shot him.”

  Morrigan perked up. “What did the manager shout?” he asked. “Did you happen to hear it?”

  Her eyes went wide like the memory was being re-enacted in front of her. “The manager said ‘No!’ He shouted it very loudly. He said, ‘No, not yet!’ I remember it well.”

  Morrigan sorted the facts out in his head.

  “Then they shot him?” he asked.

  A nod. “I decided to come over here when it happened,” she said, shuffling to her right and hugging the fence. “They shot their guns a lot of times. I can’t say how many.”

  “Fifteen times?”

  “And then they ran to the parking lot again,” Mrs. Ruiz said, once more gesturing to the gravel lot on her left. “They took off in a car.”

  “Did you see what kind?”

  She shook her head. “No. I looked away. I didn’t want to upset those men.”

  Understandable, Morrigan thought. Especially when firearms are present.

  Morrigan asked all the questions he could of Mrs. Ruiz before cutting her loose and giving her his card. He’d talk to her again, most certainly, but he needed a few of the uniforms to canvass the neighborhood and see if anyone had any other views or bits of the narrative that would help him piece together the puzzle.

  But they didn’t. People either didn’t know or weren’t willing to say.

  Just another day on the job.

  “Body’s en route to the coroner,” Hackett said as he met Morrigan on the curb. “I did a walk of the neighborhood to see if anyone had a phone or a camera pointed in this direction. The closest thing was a security cam for a money-cashing place two doors down across the street. The footage only shows the front of the joint. Nothing else. Bukowski’s pulling traffic cam footage to see what they find on the car front.”

  “I’m gonna head back,” Morrigan said, zipping up his jacket to stave off the chill. “Tell forensics to hit me up the second they have their initial findings.”

  “So, we’ve only got Mrs. Ruiz’s testimony on what happened in the meantime. Looks like a case of—”

  Morrigan held up his hand. “Please. I beg you. Can it with the isms and clichés.”

  Hackett winked, turned on his heel, and headed toward his vehicle.

  Morrigan reached into his pocket, produced a smoke from the pack he had stuffed away, and popped it in his mouth. Between the body and the divorce papers hitting him all within an hour of starting work, Morrigan was beginning to suspect that he was in for one of the roughest shifts in recent memory.

  2

  Bad Seeds

  Midtown Precinct North

  2pm

  “Yo, Morrigan,” Bukowski called out from her desk. “Take a look at this.” She turned her computer monitor to the side for him to see. “Take a look.”

  He hunched over and found himself staring at an Amazon listing for dozens of Halloween masks of all colors, shapes, and sizes.

  He raised an eyebrow and glanced sideways at her. “Is there a department fancy dress party coming up I don’t know about?”

  “Smart-ass,” Bukowski replied, scrolling down with her mouse. “I was looking at this.”

  She clicked a listing and opened up a page showing a three-mask package of Halloween masks listed at $24.99—a baby mask, a tiger mask, and a bear mask.

  Bukowski looked up at Morrigan and awaited his reaction.

  “Pretty close to what Mrs. Ruiz was describing back at the scene,” he said. “She said a baby mask for sure and a something orange and brown.”

  A nod from Bukowski. “I’m doing what I can with the company to see about purchase histories. Might take a while. I’m looking to see if there are any other listings on here that line up with what Mrs. Ruiz said about the masks. So far, this listing is the only one that lines up. I got lucky. I typed ‘Halloween masks’ in the search, and this was the first one that showed.”

  “Maybe our guys bought the first thing they could find online.”

  “Sloppy of them if they did.”

  Morrigan shook his head. “Not necessarily…”

  The way he sighed and crossed his arms caught Bukowski’s interest.

  She asked, “What’s spinning up top, Morrigan? I can see your brain working overtime.”

  Morrigan uncrossed his arms and sat on the edge of her desk, shifty—he didn’t like it when other people tried to figure him out. “Our shooters didn’t rob or take anything,” he said. “So, it’s clear that the victim was killed as the result of a hit, right?”

  A nod from Bukowski. “Most likely scenario. Question is why.”

  Morrigan furrowed his brow. “I keep going back to what Mrs. Ruiz said.”

  “Which part?”

  “When the manager yelled out ‘No, not yet!’ before our guys popped him.”

 
Bukowski waved her hand in a fifty-fifty motion. “You could chalk that up to adrenaline. He could have been panicked. His brain was firing on all cylinders the second he had three guns shoved in his face. Remember that shooting last October at Ruby’s salon. Remember what that woman getting her hair done at the time yelled out when the shots went off?”

  Morrigan remembered it all too well. “Yeah,” he said. “She said ‘Jesus has risen!’”

  Bukowski flexed her brow in a “see what I mean?” manner. “I don’t doubt,” she said, “that the shooting was a hit. I’m just not sure what the manager yelled out before he got shot holds much significance.”

  “We agree it’s a hit, though. Correct?” Morrigan said.

  “Correct. Until we find something to prove otherwise.”

  “So, if it was a hit, maybe the manager was yelling something out about… I don’t know… a loan he was late on. Something like that.”

  “Christ, you’re reaching.”

  “Run through all the possible scenarios, Bukowski. Eliminate everything until the one thing stands out. It’s called good old-fashioned police work.”

  “Or you work the evidence, Morrigan. Crunch the numbers. That kind of thing.”

  A sigh from Morrigan. “What time did this go down?”

  Bukowski took a moment to sort through her notes. “Almost 10am on the dot.”

  “Ever see that movie, Léon: The Professional?”

  Bukowski scoured the recesses of her brain. “Oh. Yeah. Big time.”

  “Maybe,” Morrigan said, “our guys pulled a Gary Oldman and whacked him right on the dot when he was due for a late payment on something.”