Serial Killer Chic

Null & Boyd Noir #5

by Gary S. Kadet

Not since the Boston Strangler has there been such a twisted rash of serial killings as the Mommy Porn Murders. Once again Lieutenant Kay Boyd is recruited by the FBI—specifically, because master criminal Null, her former CI, is now the CI of Special Agent Joel Thrawn and looks good for the murders. The only problem? Null is nowhere to be found, but not because of the murders.

Null has gone to ground as he’s being hunted down by The Gangsta Boyz, the street gang that he had once been the Shot Caller for until he was deposed by the conniving Ronald Brogan. Now he’s laid up in a safehouse recovering from multiple gunshot wounds.

Meanwhile, two villainous women from Null’s past are carefully plotting his murder. The Gangsta Boyz are hunting him down and law enforcement is hunting him down. His only ally? A very much conflicted Kay Boyd. As Null and Boyd together with Agent Thrawn close in on the malefactors, Crime Boss Malek “The Mallet” Turbot, permanently maimed by Null in his takeover of the Boston criminal underground, has imported ace hitman Innokenty Gorets to take out Null permanently and exact his revenge.

Excerpt

Excerpt

Chapter 1
- The Setup -

Sordid.

If a brilliant, glaring, bright white could ever be called sordid, then the whole color of the big room of the squat that disgraced Boston Police Lieutenant Kay Boyd blundered into could credibly be described as that. It was a sordid effulgence. The room exuded sordor that was obvious to her even as her eyes adjusted to its sustained flash of so much color that it topped out as having virtually no color at all. The hallway she had just emerged from was a rough, dog-eared bible black which made the shock of her initial entry into the squat that much more jarring.

Boyd was a study in contradictions from just her physical appearance alone: Though she stood maybe five-foot-five, her overall carriage made her seem taller. It was easy to see that she once had quite a shapely figure, but too much alcohol, bad food and a preference for the unisex or androgynous look in plain clothing made you have to look twice to see it. (And it’s quite likely that you would look twice to see it.) Her close-cropped, graying auburn hair and the drab clothing might have had you make her for a bull dyke, but she was the furthest thing from it. And despite the fact that in real life she could do what movie-star actress heroines only could do in the movies—bring a large man down to the ground and cuff him from behind in a few easy moves without missing a trick—you would never once suspect that she would or could do that, which was how she wanted it.

“Only you,” she groaned in a parody of pain.

“You’re surprised, Kay? Unable to anticipate my every move?”

“Spare me the rhetoric.”

“I’d have thought by this time, taking into account the fact that I only have maybe five or six real moves to make at any given time, that I’d be predictable to you by now.”

“Oh you, you’re definitely that, you bat-shit crazy bastard. And yet I still don’t understand you.”

Mass murderer, criminal savant and now the former “Meth King of New England,” Joseph Xavier Null—a.k.a. “DQ Null,” “Joey X” and—now that the street had become more relaxed about uttering his name with only one uneasy look over the shoulder (whereas before, that look would have been almost constant)—just plain Null cracked open his throat again to speak, sounding as parched, dry and distant as a mynah bird approximating human speech.

“You know it, Kay, so don’t pretend you don’t. You know it. I only do one thing—”

“Yes, we all know all about it, Null. Everybody in New England who’s only heard your name once knows what the punchline to that old chestnut is.” And here she began to sneer. “Just one thing. You do just one thing.” She shook her head in mock disappointment and amusement.

Null clapped his hands once, presumably as a sign of approval, although you couldn’t be sure of his meaning down to even the simplest of acts. There was always some sort of subtle mechanism at work within Null, which was why he seldom moved quickly. Every move he made was born of the hesitation of calculation. If you didn’t know it at the time, you’d come to know it sooner or later, that if he ever moved fast at all, someone’s life was seriously on the chopping block. And if you were in close proximity to that move, the life on the chopping block might very likely turn out to be your own.

“I’d laugh if there weren’t too many logistical reasons that I can’t. I honestly would,” Null growled softly, yet nowhere near a purr.

“Honestly. I just love that word coming out of the mouth of the king of lies.”

“Haven’t you heard, Kay? I’ve been deposed.”

“Everyone’s heard about it even if they had no reason to hear about it.”

“I don’t think I made the Seven O’ Clock News.”

“No, but there was something in the International Times about you. If I read it right, you were trying to push the button on the freaking pope!”

“You read it right.”

“Jesus. You botched your own hit?”

“I wouldn’t put a hit on myself.”

“And I wouldn’t rule that out.”

“Nor would I.”

“The pope!”

“My failed assassination attempt you mean. Jesus wept when he should have just slept.”

“Nevertheless, you managed to strew the Vatican with more than a few bodies as usual. You wrecked the place.”

“It was a matter of convenience. I thought I might knock a few pins over as long as I was in the neighborhood.”

“Some neighborhood.”

“Jesus wept...I schlepped.”

“Pins you call them. Great. Beautiful. Not really human at all. Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war. That sort of thing.”

“Oh, yes. Exactly that. The Pontifical Swiss Guards. Not the Vatican, really, but Casa Santa Marta—Domus Sanctae Marthae—the building next door to St. Peter's Basilica. And here I thought for a millisecond that I might have been acting as God’s cleanup man while all I did the whole time was make a mess.”

“Make a mess. That’s what you call it? That’s all you ever do, you fucking freak. Don’t you get that?”

“I think he got that a long time ago, Ms. Cop.” This from a woman who was obviously a nurse, as she was taking Null’s pulse with a wristwatch (not a Fitbit), although she too wore only drab, casual street wear, a layer of tee shirts and jerseys beneath a worn denim jacket above a pair of dingy khakis. And if you looked at the jacket for over a minute, you could see that at one time it must have been “bedazzled,” even though, for the most part, the gaudy plastic gems had all flaked off leaving behind a large number of crusty, gem-shaped shadows on the material. Her face was pretty, almost heart-shaped, but deeply lined, puffy, slack and haggard. Gin blossoms playing across her face betrayed her alcohol abuse. Her dirty blonde hair was long and hung heavily down in thin and matted clumps. It was obvious she hadn’t bathed in days.

Boyd kept enough of a respectful distance not to be able to smell her or the festering hulk that once was Null. And she was aware of it. “You can call me—”

“I can call you a fucking bitch any time I feel like it, Lieutenant,” Missy, the nurse spat.

“Still aching over the loss of your husband, Missy?”

“I’m better, thanks, Ms. Coppo. Null made a big mess of that too, as you just said, but, in that case, he made enough of a mess that it amounted to a kind of clean up. At least for me.”

“Okay. Great. All better now?”

“No, I’m a lot worse, fuck you very much. Do I gotta remind you? Nat was your CI.”

“So was Null.”

Null replied with some barb-edged wheezing as prelude to it. “But I wasn’t even that, was I?”

“Take it easy, Joey X. Your sutures are still fresh.” Missy then shot Boyd a withering, narrow-eyed stare. “You’re almost as big a fuckup as Null, Ms. Coppo. Kinda makes me think you both deserve each other. Ain’t that so, Joey X?”

“I’m not going to quote Clint Eastwood off ‘Unforgiven.’”

“Now that’s the Null effect I was looking for—”

“Just do what the cops do best, bitch, and fuck the hell off, will ya?”

“Love to, but I’ve been summoned to see the king.”

“You know, it’s a bit too ironic to point out that I was never really a king when I ran things and now that I’m not running things anymore, everyone takes great pleasure in calling me one.”

“I never said irony was dead, Null.”

“It’s the one thing I could never kill.”

“That and Ronald Brogan, current Shot Caller of the Gangsta Boyz, am I right? Isn’t that how you got laid up here in this preposterously laid-out makeshift critical care unit?”

“Missy’s an RN, a certified level-one trauma nurse. Did e-room triage down at Mount Auburn Hospital.”

“But not one right now, though, right, Null? Didn’t she suffer another one of your famous hiccups along the way? Like doing a basement autopsy of late Family Crime Boss Gomez Gomelsky. While he was still breathing?”

“You’re a day late and a dollar short, Ms. Coppo. That’s just a vicious rumor. I ain’t interested in pathology.”

“Except when it comes to Null, you forgot to add.”

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