Natural Born Killers

By Rick Hartford

The dead mans’s eyes were wide open in apparent surprise, as if he was shocked to find himself DOA on a Saturday night.

He was on his back, his arms and legs splayed like he was attempting a snow angel on the dirt floor of a large old barn. Next to the barn there was an old white farmhouse.

Detective Zephyrus “Zeph” Kazan stood in the entryway of the barn and cupped his hands as he lit a cigarette and watched officers secure the scene.

Zeph could smell his partner before he could see her in the dark. Lola Lopez wore a lime and nutmeg perfume which always made him lose his concentration. She snatched his cigarette from his lips and took a long drag. Zeph went to fish one out of his pack for her but she held up a hand.

Zeph and Lola had been partners since the beginning of the new year. He was becoming more than little fond of her and he felt the same vibe coming back.

They had never done anything in public which would indicate they were an item like kissing or holding hands, although he thought that sharing a cigarette was a pretty intimate gesture. He wondered whether he had crossed some line.

“Just a few more minutes,” he said to her. He could see where the officers had marked the position of the spent bullet casings. There were at least a dozen little flags marking the ejected shells.

“There was either a hell of a gun battle at close range or a case of extreme overkill,” he said. The sergeant in charge of the scene, Patrick Shannon, gestured for Zeph and Lola to come over.

“Take it away, detectives,” Shannon said. “She’s all yours.”

“What’s it looking like, Paddy?” Zeph asked.

“There’s a lot of spent lead and a lot of blood. There was more than one person bleeding out here, but everybody but this unluckily chap either walked or was carried off the field of battle.”

“Any ID on this guy?”

“We got a wallet, but nothing in it but some cash and a Saint Christopher medal. So he’s not making it easy for us.

Zeph felt a sudden wave of sadness. “He was a soldier,” he said, more to himself than anyone else.

“What?” Lola said.

“Soldiers look to Saint Christopher to protect them from harm,” he said.

Zeph and Lola stepped over to the corpse. Lola spoke into a tape recorder. “White male, early to mid-thirties, heavily muscled. Six feet tall. Bullet wounds to the chest and abdomen. Carrying a Saint Christopher medal. And, wait a minute, a tattoo on his left shoulder. Some sort of bird.”

“It’s a barn owl,” Zeph said.

“Barn owl,” Lola repeated into the recorder.

“That tattoo gives me the creeps,” Lola said.

“The barn owl has a spooky reputation,” Zeph said. “In mythology it represents doom. It’s said that its scream is a harbinger of death. In some places it’s referred to as the Death Owl. Too bad, because all the critter really wants to do is eat vermin.”

“Why would anybody put that tattoo on their body?” Lola asked.

Zeph shrugged. “I met a guy who had an erection tattooed on his shoulder. Go figure.”

Lola hit him in the arm.

“He looks like a tough customer,” Lola said.

He looks like a man who has done things,” Zeph agreed. ‘I know the warden at the state prison. She has her ear to the ground for trends in the criminal subculture. Let’s see what she can tell us about body art.”

The two headed out to the state prison at Somers the next morning.

Warden Rebecca Dickson welcomed them into her office with a broad smile and hugs. Lola was impressed by the natural warmth of this woman, who had to see hatred, despair and depravity on a daily basis.

“So what’s up, Zeph?” Dickson said after they had taken their chairs and after coffee had been served by one of the inmates, a soft spoken man who looked to be in his late 60’s. After he had bowed and left, Dickson confided in them. “He used to own two restaurants, The Open Hearth in Hartford and the Smoke House in Farmington on Route 4. All the politicians, police and media frequented those places. Then somebody found his missing wife in the freezer.”

Zeph thought to say “chilling,” but swallowed the joke. He had given up wisecracks as a New Year’s resolution. Better than giving up smoking.

Zeph and Lola told described the murder scene and the tattoo. He pulled out his iPhone and showed the warden some of his photos.

She opened her laptop and searched through her extensive database of all the prisoners currently behind bars, in addition to others over a period of five years when she first started taking records.

After ten minutes she looked up.

“We have a winner in the barn owl tattoo category. His name is Martin Silk. He just got here today. Thirty one-year-old owner of a construction company in the valley. In for aggravated assault on a member of the board of education who was defending the use of masks in the schools. The school board member fell and hit his head after Silk punched him. He’s on life support. It’s been six months. Brain dead. The family faces a hard decision.”

“Can we talk to him?” Zeph asked.

“We’ll contact his lawyer and try to set something up for tomorrow,” the warden said.

Next they checked with the federal prison in“ Danbury. No owl tattoos on record.

“I’ll touch base with people I know in the military,” Zeph said.

They drove in silence for a while.

“You’re acting distant,” Lola suddenly said.

Zeph did’t answer for a minute. And then he looked at her. “Are we involved?”

Lola turned to him. “Would that be a problem?” She was smiling.

“Never!” Zeph said. “Its just that I worry that the brass is getting nosy. I don’t want them to break us up. I have too much invested in seducing you with coffee and donuts to start over with another partner.”

“That’s not going to happen,’ Lola said. And to celebrate that fact I am taking you to dinner tomorrow night. At my place.”

Lola dropped him off at the station where he picked up his car and headed home.

He thought about her chocolate skin, her deep brown eyes, her long black hair and her muscular body. He wished he was going home with her tonight. Instead he would be alone with his thoughts. And they were dark ones.

At nine the next morning they got the news from warden Dickson. Silk had been found dead in his cell, an apparent suicide.

“Coincidence?” Lola said.

“I don’t believe in them,” said Zeph.

“I think we should talk to the owner of the farmhouse,” Lola said. The home was owned by an attorney who had been out of town on business the night of the shooting, according to his secretary.

“He should be home now. Let’s just go there,” Lola said.

Lola drove a 1970 Dodge Challenger, a car seized in a drug bust which she had been taken out of the motor pool.

The big V8 growled as they left the station and headed to the farmhouse four miles away.

There was a black Mercedes in the driveway when they got there. Lola rang the door bell, which chimed the Flight of the Valkyries.

A severe looking woman in a dark grey suit and tall high heels opened the door.

“I’m Detective Zepharus Kazan and this is my partner, Lola Lopes. We are here to see Attorney Brixton.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

The police don’t make appointments,” Lola said. “Who are you?”

“Melinda Savage, Mr. Brixton’s secretary. So I actually know the answer to my own question. You don’t have an appointment. But come in anyway.”

The two detectives stepped into the foyer and Savage gestured them to follow her. “He’s in the study,” she said, pointing the way.

Just at that moment Zeph heard an engine start. He turned and went to the front door just in time to see the Mercedes backing out of the drive, the driver then gunning it up Farmington Avenue.

Zeph turned to Savage. “That him?”

Savage shrugged.

Just to make sure, Zeph looked into the study. Empty.

Zeph held out his card to Savage. “Have him call me. If he doesn’t cooperate, the next time we will bring some silver bracelets for him to try on.”

Savage made no move to take the card. Zeph dropped it on the carpet. “Try not to vacuum it up,” he said.

“I’m not the maid,” Savage said. “Next time see to it that you make an appointment.”

“Wanna chase him?” Lola asked, moving behind the wheel of the Challenger.

“Why not?” Zeph said. “Beats going to the station.”

The Challenger had a standard transmission, four on the floor, with a four barrel carb and a 426 Street Hemi engine. Traffic up Farmington Avenue was light, and in under two minutes they were approaching the entrance of I-84. Lola loved speed.

“Which way did he take?” Zeph wondered out loud. There was no way he continued on Farmington Avenue, which was an eternal traffic jam. So it had to be west toward Waterbury or east to Hartford on I-84. “I say east,” Lola said, cranking the wheel left.

She punched the accelerator. They were both thrown back into their seats like they were in a Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor leaving the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Attorney Lyle Brixton figured he had blown the two cops off, thanks to his secretary. They were a great team, he thought. He thought of her in bed, her nails making red streaks of blood as they dug into his back.

The phone rang. He put it on speaker.

“Sorry chief,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

You have no idea how sorry you are going to be, Brixton thought.

What he actually said was: “What’s going on, Sully? Give me a rundown, will you? Are you Ok?”

“Yeah, thanks chief.” The voice on the other sounded relieved. Brixton looked into the rearview mirror. Anybody in back seat of the black Mercedes would have seen his snarl. It was the equivalent of a smile, for Brixton. A box cutter wielded by a former client had severed the muscles in his face. So a snarl was all he could muster. It fit him to a tee.

“So what happened?” Brixton asked Sully.

“They flipped the tables on us, chief. We grabbed Martinez at his office, threw a hood over his head and came to the barn to tenderize him before we offed the mofo. We were just setting up the video camera when his bodyguards came through the barn door in an armored car. We were lucky to get out alive. But Smitty didn’t. You know that, right?”

“Seems obvious, from the evening news,” Brixton said.

“We couldn’t get to him, chief. It was a shit storm in there.”

“And Martinez?”

“They got him out of there before we could waste him. It happened so fast, chief.”

“Ok, Ok. You and the boys go to ground for a while. I’ll watch the situation.”

“Right, chief.”

Brixton hung up.

He looked In the rearview again and saw the Challenger. He was almost to the Capitol Avenue exit. He accelerated and took it at the last second, running the light at the end of the ramp and gunning the Mercedes through Bushnell Park and into a private parking garage off Main Street, He waited a moment next to his car. They didn’t follow him, in, the Challenger just motoring slowly by.

Raphael Martinez looked at himself in the mirror as he straightened his tie. His gold cufflinks twinkled back at him as he inspected his face. Not a blemish on it, which was the way he planned to keep it.

It was a close call. Obviously security had failed, miserably. But he had to give it to Enrique. The man rose to the occasion. After Martinez’s would be assassins broke into his office, pretending to be delivering flowers and wasting Maria, his receptionist, as well as his bodyguards Bruno and Frank, they had handcuffed him and had thrown a hood over his head and carried him down the stairs, fifteen long and bumpy flights. Back in the office, Enrique had taken two rounds, one to the left shoulder and another to his right thigh. But the man was a monster. He dragged himself to the garage and threw two Mac-10’s on the passenger seat of his armored car, following Martinez through the tracking device he had insisted his boss have implanted in the back of his neck, just above the hairline.

The rest, as they say, was history, Martinez thought. Enrique drove that car right through the closed barn door, rolling out of the driver’s seat with a machine pistol in each hand, wasting everybody in sight. Then he grabbed Martinez, draping him with a bullet proof blanket and throwing him into the trunk. He then got back behind the wheel, accelerating backwards for a quarter mile at 80 miles an hour. He had gone to the same defensive driving school as the Secret Service.

It was only after getting to the safe house that Enrique allowed himself to collapse in a pool of his own blood.

Later, with Enrique awake in his hospital bed, the two men quietly dissected what had happened. For some reason the most unsettling observation Martinez had was the tattoos the assassins sported. What the fuck was the significance of some hoot owl?

Martinez thanked Enrique and patted him on his good shoulder. “Thank you, my friend. You saved my life.”

“Boss,” Enrique whispered, half asleep. “Let me know what you find out about the bird.”

“Let me know what you find out about the bird,” Lola said to Zeph as they parted for the night. “And don’t forget, dinner at 8. Be there or be square.”

Zeph had remembered a contact that he had cultivated a few years ago when he was investigating the threat of a radical right wing group that was rumored to be preparing to assault the police department with rocket launchers. The real motivation of the group, head bangers and satan worshipers, was to create a diversion in order to hit the three largest banks in the heart of the city. That was the extent of their ideology.

Zeph’s source helped the cops round up the Storm Troopers, as they called themselves. The source was a living encyclopedia of radical groups.

They met at the Merry Go Round at City Park. His friends called him Bronto, after the Brontosaurus, because of his long neck and small bald head. Bronto insisted that they go for a ride. They took horses side by side.

“I looked into what you told me about,” Bronto said after the music had started and their steeds pumped up and down as they rode around in circles.

“I don’t know nothing about Owl body art. All I can tell you is that the dope on the street is drying up cause the upper managers is being hit.”

Zeph said nothing. Bronto shrugged. “There’s been three hits as I know about. The drugs as you know mostly come in with the Columbian cartels, who distribute the stuff via Latin Kingpins to the Knucklehead dealers who are about as brain dead as their customers. In fact, almost all of them are customers themselves, so the profits go right into their arms. Anyhow, the only ones who make any real money is the Columbians and their Latin Daddies.

“So,” Zeph said. “Somebody has decided to cut the heads off of Medusa.”

“That’s the metaphor,” Bronto said.

“How many people are we talking about?”

“Suits me,” Bronto said. “Maybe one for every city? Don’t seem too grand slam, but, you cut off the pipeline you are going to change the entire landscaping.”

“So they are vigilantes,” Zeph said to Lola over dinner. They were eating by candlelight at her apartment. She was dressed in a black silk robe. He had to guess what was under it. He hoped he was right.

They had gone to the kitchen for dessert, vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce when Zeph’s phone rang. He was going to ignore it, but he could see at a glance it was Bronto.

“Hey Long Neck, what’s happening,” Zeph said.

“Better drop on over,” Bronto said, his voice barely a whisper. “Got something to lay on you.” Bronto coughed and made choking sounds. “Better make it quick, brother. I ain’t got all night.”

“Fuck!” Zeph said.

“What’s wrong?” Lola said.

“It’s Bronco. He’s been hurt. I”m sorry. I have to go.”

“Need backup?”

Zeph looked at her for a long moment. Deciding.

“We’re in this together, partner. I’ll start the car while you get something on.”

They were there in fifteen minutes. Bronto lived in a guest house at a mansion on Albany Avenue. Lola pulled in and killed the lights. The main house and guest house were dark. Zeph motioned Lola to the back of the property as he headed to the front door. The door was ajar, so he slipped inside. Stooping low, Zeph made his way. He knew the layout well. He could see a computer screen lit in the den and walked silently toward it. He could see Lola at his right, giving him the all clear signal.

When he entered the den, Zeph saw Bronto lying on the couch, his eyes open and staring at the ceiling. Zeph checked his pulse. Nothing doing. Then he saw a blood trail and followed it out the back slider into the outdoor porch, his gun up. There was a man crawling, slowly, a thick stream of blood following him as he desperately clawed himself onward.

Zeph rolled the man over. Blood oozed from the man’s nose. His breathing was ragged. All the man had on was a white wife beater and sweatpants. His barn owl tattoo was streaked with his own blood.

“What the fuck are you doing here,” Zeph said.

The man looked up with a smile.”

“Dying,” he said. “What about you?”

“Did he know about the tattoo?” .

“I need water,” the man answered.

“After you talk.”

The man gave Zeph a conspiratorial grin. How about water and then I talk? I’m not going to make it if you don’t give it to me. And I’m sure that you want to hear the whole story.”

Lola was behind Zeph. “I got it,” she said, running to fetch some water from the tap in the kitchen.

When she got back, Zeph’s head hung low and the tattoo man’s was even lower, slumped over dead.

Zeph said that before he died, he managed to describe a vigilante group of police, fire and others in the community who made a vow to kill all of the high level dealers. “He gave me names, addresses,” Zeph said. “Now we can bring these guys in. The irony, hey. Good guys charged with the murder of scumbags. This is where we as a society have come to.”

“I prefer law and order,” Lola said. “You can’t allow people to kill everybody they don’t approve of, not without a trial with a guilty sentence.”

Zeph, turned to look at her.

“That’s why I love you,” he said, quietly.

After calling it in and giving their report, Zeph and Lola went back to her apartment. The ice cream had melted. They had a couple of drinks in Lola’s living room. It was midnight and she yawned. “I”m taking a shower,” she said. “Want to join me?”

“Sure,” Zeph said. In the bedroom she undressed and grabbed a towel. He did the same.

Lola stopped dead in her tracks at the doorway. She couldn’t take her eyes off of the barn owl tattoo on his upper arm.

“Jesus, Zeph,” was all she could say.

“I know, I know,” he said, raising his arms in mock surrender. I hope that we can continue the way we are. We are the good guys. We are getting rid of the scum of the earth who prey on weaklings who destroy their entire families in service of skag.”

“What about Silk,” Lola said. “You were going to pretend to interview him?”

“Not quite,” Zeph said. “He had to go. The authorities were going to find about him sooner or later. I knew I had to head them off. I had him neutralized.”

“Neutralized?” Lola said in horror. “Is that what you call murder these days?”

“There was a lot riding on this situation, Lola,” Zeph said. “The warden is one of us. If they interviewed him that would put Rebecca at risk. We couldn’t have that.”

“What about your friend, Bronto? Some sort of reward for his service, right?”

“I never thought he would hit pay dirt so quickly,” Zeph said. “If anybody could reveal us, it was Bronto. He was that good.”

“So you “neutralized” your friend. What about the other guy, Bronto’s killer? He didn’t conveniently just die, did he. You killed him after he murdered Bronto to cover for you.”

“You know I had to get rid of him, right? I had to protect the integrity of the operation. He was in no shape to go anywhere but right to the hospital. Then he would have been out of my reach.”

Lola thought about her pistol, which was on the bed behind Zeph.

Zeph moved toward her, forcing her back into the bathroom.

“You know, some people commit suicide in their bathtubs,” he said. “You ever hear that one? They slit their wrists and bleed out while taking a hot bath. It’s messy, but not particularly painful,” he said. ‘I’m sorry Lola, but this is the way it’s got to be.”

Lola suddenly felt giddy. She looked down at the floor and saw the cast iron sadiron which her great great grandmother had used to iron the family clothes. Lola inherited it and used it as a door stop.

“I could get a tattoo too,” Lola purred, looking Zeph in the eyes. She dropped the towel which was draped over her breasts. Zeph pulled Lola roughly to him, his mouth hard on hers, then dropping to her neck.

“You going to give me a hickey, Zeph?” She gently pushed him away.

“Let’s take that shower first,” she said. Then we can talk in bed. Wait, I”m gonna need this,” she said, reaching for her towel on the floor.

Lola grabbed the handle of the cast iron door stop instead and swung it with all her might, the point of the iron connecting with Zeph’s temple. He looked at her in disbelief. He opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a roar, followed by in explosion of blood. He fell face first in the shower.

Lola put on her black silk robe and went out to the kitchen where she made herself a drink and lit a cigarette, her feet up on the kitchen table facing the bathroom. She had her pistol on the counter in case Zeph rose from the dead.

She thought about the barn next to the farmhouse, wondering whether the place had actually had a barn owl.

It would be about time for it to fly home from the fields, she thought, after a night of hunting.

Death from above on silent wings.

No judgement made.

No hatred, no anger.

A natural born killer, just doing its thing.