The C.I. Read online

  THE C.I.

  A Crime Thriller

  Les Roberts

  Copyright © 2023 by Les Roberts

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Down & Out Books

  3959 Van Dyke Road, Suite 265

  Lutz, FL 33558

  DownAndOutBooks.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

  Visit the Down & Out Books website to sign up for our monthly newsletter and we’ll deliver the latest news on our upcoming titles, sale books, Down & Out authors on the net, and more!

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  The C.I.

  About the Author

  Books by the Author

  Preview from Quietly Into the Night by Vincent Zandri

  Preview from Right Between the Eyes by Scott Loring Sanders

  Preview from Yesterday Rising by Stephen Burdick

  For my BFF, my personal chauffeur and so-called manager,

  my kind, generous next-door neighbor who drives me nuts,

  an all-around amazing friend who keeps me going

  when some days are tougher than others,

  Amy Helene Schneiderman

  CAPTIVE

  It was the first time in his life he’d been inside a police station, and it was scaring the bejesus out of him. He’d seen those precincts in the movies and on television. “Law and Order SVU” had been on TV almost as long as he’d been alive. Their New York City headquarters were dingy and depressing. None of the chairs matched the others, and no cops had framed family photos on their desks. None of the fictional precincts looked like this particular police station, right in the middle of downtown Cleveland, and halfway up a high-rise building that also held the county sheriff’s office and the municipal courts. Those phony-baloney Hollywood cop shops all seemed as though scenic designers created them after lazy three-martini lunches and thought about getting out of there to see a long line of producers running expensive offices in Beverly Hills, in which a hypersexy receptionist fixed them exotic Starbucks coffee drinks while their bosses were getting their nose hairs plucked and their pubic hair waxed.

  Not this police station, though. Not the real one. This one looked like something out of a 1950s horror flick, and smelled like fear, sweat and ancient farts—a place where you check your dreams at the door. Odds were against ever seeing them again.

  He’d majored in business at college, working post-grad as middle-management at a computer-software firm in the southeast suburb of Twinsburg, even though his apartment was just west of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland-proper—a neighborhood known as Ohio City, approximately a half hour drive to where he’d grown up and where his mother still lived, across the river in Shaker Heights with her boyfriend—a guy the kid had very little use for—so he didn’t see Mom as often as he’d like to.

  No techie, he knew little about software, but that’s where the economy seemed to be headed, so he was learning the business every day, and how to reach out to companies needing specialized software—at a salary lower than he’d hoped for when he accepted his diploma from Case Western Reserve University after a generous scholarship got him through four years as a marketing major.

  But now he was officially under arrest, handcuffed behind his back. The plainclothes cop who pulled him in had roughly shoved him onto a hard wooden bench until someone was ready to pay any attention to him. It was the most humiliating hour-and-a-half of his existence—being on public display so anyone would think him a busted serial killer on his way to Death Row. The cuffs were too tight around the wrists, and he kept flexing his fingers to keep them from falling asleep and tingling.

  Why the cuffs? Did they think he was going to escape—to ˝make a break” for it—run past ten other cops with guns at the hip, then push the elevator button and wait patiently to ride down nine flights so he could jog off into the night, screaming—as if there were anyone around to help him? Doubtful.

  Barely past adolescence and his teeny-bop complexion, he had dark blond hair, blue eyes, and a baby face, and looked as if his only crime was changing lanes on the I-271 freeway at two o’clock in the morning without signaling, so he was certain he wouldn’t get more than half a block away without getting caught again—or worse, being stopped by a downtown street gang, robbed, and had the snot beaten out of him just for the hell of it.

  He’d scarfed down a Subway sandwich a few hours earlier, and now it was doing a hot merengue inside his stomach, and his throat was more than halfway closed. Stress does that to you.

  It was November, when more pumpkins are purchased and eaten than at any other time of year. He knew whatever might happen to him in the next hour, he wouldn’t have one damn thing to be thankful for when his mother cooked her annual holiday turkey and invited her single or divorced friends for dinner—people estranged from their own families or loved ones and had no overcooking feast-giver to beckon them to an annual food fest where everyone sits around the table and lies about all they were thankful for in the past year. His mother always called it the Thanksgiving for Orphans. That was how she met her current live-in boyfriend.

  He hated going there for early dinner each year, as he was pretty close to being vegan, unwilling to eat anything she cooked besides the green beans with almonds, and the mashed potatoes minus the meat gravy. He rarely enjoyed a TV football game, either—watching football in the living room with young adult guys fighting over who gets the turkey legs, banging into each other from too much wine or beer, and topping off the dinner with pumpkin pie while watching big, tough men ram each other and then all fall down together in a heap.

  For the past two years, he’d dragged his girlfriend, Jill Taggart, to that so-called banquet along with him. This time, though, she’d left town for three weeks to be with her own parents in Cincinnati.

  She hadn’t invited him to come with her.

  Right there was the real reason he was stuck on that damn bench with his hands cuffed, as those of both genders walked by and gaped at him as if he were an obscure animal entrapped in some cheap roadside zoo.

  Finally, more than ninety minutes later, a bulky man whose disappearing hairline was a red-blond Marine buzz cut, wearing an old cardigan over a plaid shirt and a bright red tie, stopped and studied him carefully as if he was to be a Master’s thesis subject? More probably, he thought, he’d be tossed into a dogfight training facility as bait.

  The bulky guy, a detective badge affixed to his belt, most resembled a paper sack filled to capacity, no room left for one more can of mushroom soup or the sack would burst, groceries winding up all over the floor. He might have swallowed a soccer ball. His stomach stretched the shirt so badly one could easily see his bare skin between the buttons.

  At length he said, “So you’re the drug kingpin, huh?” His contemptibly raspy voice might come from having Coke and Drano for lunch. It made the kid want to clear his own throat.

  “I don’t think I am,” he said.

  The cop’s face turned from interested observer to werewolf horror. “Argue with me some more, boy! No one will hear you because your head’ll be up your own ass. On your feet. You and I need a little talk.”

  He grabbed an elbow, yanking the prisoner off the bench, then turned him around and marched him down a long hallway and into a medium-sized room that was obviously somebody’s office.

  Then the cop locked the door for no apparent reason and glared at the cuffed young man as if looks could kill. It wasn’t one of those interrogation rooms with a one-way mirror on the wall so other cops could sit behind it and watch and listen. More frightening, it was totally private—nobody could see what went on in there. The kid feared a hidden vidcam somewhere in the walls or in the overhead light fixture, but didn’t have the balls to look for it. He wondered instead where his captor kept his rubber hose.

  “I’m gonna take your cuffs off,” the cop said. “But if you try to get away before I say so, I’ll kill you with my bare hands. Just look at me, boy—you know I can do it.” He took a deep breath, pushing out his chest as far as his belly, easily spun his visitor around as if he were a mannequin, and unlocked the cuffs, leaving sore red circles on either wrist. The kid rubbed them and shook his hands as if he’d just washed them and no towel was in sight, trying to get some life back into them.

  “Siddown, young warrior!” It wasn’t much of a visitor’s seat—more like a chair left over from a fifty-year-old kitchen set. The cop hung over the boy for a while, one eye half-closed—a real threat. Maybe he was fixing his suspect’s face firmly in his mind so he could make a portrait later from memory. Then he flopped down behind the desk in a chair that looked a lot more comfortable.

  “My name is Detective Keegan Mayo, Cleveland Police Department,” he announced, holding up sweaty, meaty hands. “Life and death are right here between my fingers, boy, so be goddamn careful what you say.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy answered, because he knew if he said anything different, he’d have to pay for it.

  Keegan Mayo took a yellow legal-sized pad from his desk drawer, and a ballpoint pen he’d commandeered from one of the branches of the Huntington Bank. “What’s your name, boy?”

  “
Jerry Paich,” the kid told him truthfully.

  “Is Jerry what’s on your birth certificate? Is it just plain old Jerry, like you call a four-year-old—or is it Jerome? Is it Jeremiah? Gerald? Or maybe it’s short for Jerk-off.”

  “It’s Jericho, sir.”

  “Jericho? Like the town in the bible where the walls fall down when some Jew blows a trumpet?” He snorted, “That’s from the Old Testament. You a Jew?”

  Jericho wondered if he’d been arrested for a certain religion. “Catholic, sir. But I don’t much go to church anymore.”

  “Too goddamn bad,” the cop said, “because you got a hell of a confession to recite to some pedophile priest.” He shook his massive head sorrowfully, as if every criminal he’d ever busted was fallen-away from his religion, and every Catholic priest was a sexual abuser of little boys. Then he said, “What’s your last name again? Page? Like a page in a book?”

  “No, it’s Paich. P-A-I-C-H.”

  He wrote the name down on his pad. “Polack, huh?”

  Jericho shook his head. “Slovenian—on my father’s side. My mother is Italian—well, she was born here, but…”

  “Who gives a flying fuck where your mother was born? Lemme see your driver’s license.”

  The prisoner dug his wallet out of his hip pocket and surrendered it to the cop. No one with even a modicum of sense, innocent until found guilty, would hand his wallet over to a cop behind closed doors, money and all. Mayo read everything on the driver’s license, made some more notes so he could check Paich’s driving record and see if he’d ever been arrested before, and ran his thumb over the paper bills to determine how much his captive was carrying. When he found less than twenty dollars, he was no longer interested, pushing the wallet back across the desk. “Twenty-three years old and you live in Shaker Heights, huh?”

  “That’s where my mother lives,” he told him. “I have an apartment on the Near West side.”

  “What’s your Slovenian father gonna say when he has to come down here and bail you out?”

  Jerry flinched. “He’s dead, sir. Died four years ago. Cancer.”

  Mayo stack back in his chair. It squeaked. “I got news for you, Jericho Paich. You have just stepped in shit.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jerry Paich was not much of a toker in Catholic high school in the Saint Clair-Superior neighborhood. He was a good boy back then, never got into any trouble. He joined no clubs except the Political Science Club, which met once every two weeks. Not being a teen-age jock, he never went out for sports. He never stuck out his neck mouthing off wise to any teacher. As nearly every good old American kid alive did, he shared joints with his high school buddy-boys—“regs,” they called them, really crappy, inexpensive cannabis full of seeds and stems they’d picked up from black guys hanging out on street corners. Jerry’s main reaction to it was getting giggly and then getting sleepy.

  He did smoke weed a little bit in his four-year stint at Case Western Reserve—just on weekends and never during the summer or whenever he visited his mother.

  Jill Taggart—girlfriend during his senior year and eighteen months beyond that, was more into grass than he was, even cocaine at times, and he hadn’t yet processed in his mind they never had sex unless she lit up a joint first. When she did, she turned into a wild woman—scratching, biting, hair-pulling, slapping, ball-sucking, fisting, rimming, all of which scared him silly. He loved the kinks of it, but was uncomfortably aware he couldn’t really live up to it.

  As the relationship slowly rattled along—hardly ripening of what might turn into something permanent—he worried she had to get high first, all by herself, thinking he was a lousy lay and needed artificial stimulus to get through it. But he went along with it, relatively inexperienced in previous sexual adventures—a few one-night stands and short stints lasting six weeks or so—and he certainly enjoyed fucking her, whether he was stoned or not.

  Mid-twenties straight guys didn’t need much more stimulation than a young woman just showing up and taking her clothes off.

  Then Jill surprised him by saying she quit her job at a public relations firm for a too-low salary and heading to Cincinnati, the far south “C” city as opposed to Cleveland on Lake Erie or Columbus in the middle of the state, for three weeks at her parents as her dad recuperated from a back injury—and just possibly looking for a better-paying job

  Then she confessed to him she had more than half a pound of cocaine hidden in her underwear drawer, along with enough meth to make her stoned for a month.

  “Methamphetamine?” he said, not realizing no one ever used the long ““version. “Are you kidding me? Getting caught with all that shit could send you to jail forever.”

  “I don’t use meth, Jerry. I sell it. I started selling right after graduation.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because you’re a tight-ass,” she said, holding up a clenched fist indicating what a tight-ass he was.

  Annoyed, he sat on the dark tan sofa bought at a resale shop when he moved into his apartment. “I’m no tight-ass, Jill. I just outgrew drugs. I know you haven’t, which doesn’t bother me. But peddling it?”

  “I sold while we were still in college—you didn’t know that, did you? Well, now I do it full time, making triple the money I did working for some boring assholes, and that’s why I can afford this long holiday trip. But I can’t just leave the stash in my drawer for three weeks, so I want you to keep it for me.”

  “Me? I don’t want it. Don’t you know anyone else?”

  She raised her shoulders. “Not that I could trust.”

  He gritted his teeth. “Well, I’m not going to use it, so don’t worry.”

  “Yeah,” Jill said, and was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I’ve given several people your phone number in case they need to buy any.”

  “I’m goddamned if I’m going to sell it!” he said, his voice teetering on the edge of spasm.

  “You’ve got to. You’re my boyfriend, Jerry—we help each other out all the time.”

  “Not anything that’s above the law!”

  “Look—I’ll be glad to give you a piece of it,” she said. “Maybe fifty percent of my profits—besides which, I have to pay to get the stuff in the first place.”

  “Who are you paying?”

  “The less you know, the better off we both are.” She opened her large purse, took out a hollowed-out jewelry box full of ganja, some plastic sandwich bags, a large fabric freezer bag with enough meth in it to shock Jerry, and a small digital scale, putting all of it on the coffee table. “It’s no big deal. Just answer the phone and whoever wants to buy, they’ll have to come here. How hard could it be?”

  Jill had no idea.

  Jerry was to keep strict accounts of the sales, and return whatever was left, plus the money, when she came back from her trip. What the hell was he supposed to be, anyway? An accountant?

  She confided she got weed, cocaine and meth through a wealthy, weird-looking man who’d never gotten a suntan, ever, who she met at her public relations job when he was there giving a speech—and he’d really be cheesed off if she didn’t pay him a large chunk of whatever money she made—and that scared Jerry more than anything.

  Still, he wasn’t a guy who says “No” to anyone—not to his parents, and not to a regular girlfriend who got stoned and crazy in bed. So he agreed, which brought Jill such a smile she creatively fucked him goodbye before heading off to Cincinnati.

  He stared at the accoutrements for more than an hour. What the hell was he going to do with all of it? He’d never used crack in his life and had only done cocaine a few times because it sent him through the roof and terrified him. Now the thought of selling it to people he’d never met grew weirder by the minute.

  Three weeks of tiptoeing and keeping his head down when the doorbell rang, and then he’ll want no more of it. What was three lousy weeks, anyway?

  Jill had only been gone two days when Jerry got the first phone call from one of Jill’s best friends who wanted to come by and make a purchase.