Nightcrawler (Trackers #1)

Chapter One

TRIGG

I stretched out in bed, feeling every day of my thirty-six years, not surprised to feel the soreness in my muscles which was always present after a long day and a hard workout at the gym. My shower had relaxed me, and I was almost ready to sleep. I had a big day tomorrow, but I couldn’t resist snatching up my tablet and searching for my favorite book review site, scrolling until I found what I was looking for.

Book title: Sunset over My Hammie

Author: Devon Clarke

Publisher: Self-published

Genre: MM College Boys short story

Review/rating by Nightcrawler: DNF 2 stars

Synopsis:

A torturous retelling of college life at a small university in Florida, relayed via sexual encounters among a group of frat boys who appear to be drunk twenty-three and a half hours a day, seven days a week.

My Review:

This collection of stories is told in first person by various drunk college men engaging in numerous and sundry sexual situations which happen all over the campus at a small Florida university. These men seem to want to relate their encounters to one-up the other men in different houses within the Greek system on campus. They include everything short of non-con, although I’m not really sure about the one from which this less than appealing title is drawn.

It appears during this encounter, taking place during a kegger—go figure—that the school mascot was stolen from its pen only to be brought back to the frat house where he became the subject of a circle jerk resulting in an angry pig and three men with wounds. Apparently, none of these excuses for mankind could see straight enough to notice the pig wasn’t a pig at all, but a boar with tusks, and not the university mascot, but a control subject from the school of animal husbandry.

That’s it. The entire plot of this short story seemed to be about a pig being covered with college boy jizz and then fighting back the only way the hairy, pink guy could. There may be more to it, but after five chapters, throwing up in my mouth three times, and the description of squealing which will haunt my dreams possibly for life, I had to DNF this bitch.

My advice to readers…don’t do it. Even if you’re intrigued by the title as I was while scrolling the newest releases of questionable indie authors, don’t pick this puppy up and crack the pages. Take it from me and pass on this one. As it is, I’m going to need therapy, brain bleach, and possibly my own beer bong by Chug Buddy.

I chuckled as I closed the window to Bestreads and set it aside, shaking my head and no doubt wearing a sappy smile. The smile gave me an uncomfortable feeling, so I immediately dismissed any joy I’d felt from moments before. I didn’t smile.

Not in real life.

Not outside the walls of my bedroom but lately, I’d really begun to enjoy trolling the site to see if Nightcrawler had posted another review. He always seemed to make me…laugh. I shuddered, dismissing the very idea of being happy. I’d begun following the reviewer when I’d spotted his thoughts on a book I’d been contemplating buying three months ago. Amused by his often-hilarious reviews of debut indie authors, I’d immediately pressed the follow button and haven’t been disappointed since.

I set an alarm for four a.m. before putting everything aside and heading to the bathroom. My wood floors were cold on my feet but then again, it was November. I took a piss and went back to bed. I needed a good night’s sleep if I had any chance of beating Raven Mathis to my bounty in the morning. The fact is, it was becoming harder and harder to earn a nickel since the man had started working for Grayson, Mallory, and Simms. The insurance company was big—one of the largest of its kind—and unfortunately, the Manhattan-based firm paid their recovery agents way too much money. Hell, that opinion was probably shared by most bounty hunters who picked up work from insurance companies, not only here in L.A., but across the country.

I shut out the light and lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, remembering my first run-in with the tenacious recovery agent. Jamie had called me the minute his efforts to locate the fugitive had paid off, and I’d set things in motion, lying in wait for Lyle Trench. The slippery bastard had somehow managed to elude every skip tracer and bounty hunter out there ever since being identified as the thief of the Mulberry diamond. Unfortunately, for me as well as everyone else on Trench’s tail, the massive insurer cast a wide net, letting everyone on the street know what the reward would be once the diamond was recovered. They even had their own guy on Trench’s trail, a man employed as a recovery agent…which is how I’d literally run into Raven Mathis.

Six months ago

I staked out the Capitol Records building where Trench had been granted an appointment with a record producer at eight a.m. It’d taken Jamie nearly a week after seeing the reward post with all the salient details of the theft and the massive bounty for the diamond’s recovery to learn that Trench thought of himself as the next great recording star. Over a decade ago, Trench had somehow gotten through the initial audition on American Idol and had been sent to Hollywood by a panel of judges who had encouraged him to follow his dreams of stardom. Maybe he was—or had been—talented back then.

What did I know about music? I still listened to an 8-track which had come with my truck and an old Bee Gees tape I’d found at a yard sale when I wasn’t listening to Donna Summer. What could I say? Before—when my parents had been alive—I’d learned how to “Do the Hustle” with my mom and dad in our living room and watched tapes from a wedding where my father moved exactly like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

I quickly put those memories of a happier time out of my mind and picked up the file lying on my truck’s passenger seat, flipping it open. I scanned Trench’s vitals one more time. While using the stage name Angel Gabriel, he’d failed to advance after that first audition on the show and TV fame had eluded him.

Trench hadn’t moved back home to Akron, Ohio after his defeat, though. He’d spent twelve years chasing his dreams on the streets of Hollywood, acquiring a healthy heroin habit along the way, before he’d robbed Charlotte Mulberry. Ten days ago, he’d robbed the Beverly Hills socialite as she stepped out of her bank after collecting her diamond to wear at a party she’d planned on attending.

As it turned out, he was a crappy thief, but luck had been on his side that day. Blurry traffic camera images of a man local street people identified as Trench, caught him running away from the scene of the crime.

Trench had been arrested and then released when the charges were dropped due to the quality of the images and a lack of evidence even though Mulberry had fingered him in the theft, insisting he’d knocked her down and stolen her jewelry. Detectives couldn’t find the Mulberry diamond valued at a cool half million dollars even though they’d checked all Trench’s hidey holes. The best they could do was charge him with a minor assault, but because he’d somehow been blessed by the stars and avoided a criminal past, he’d been released on bail. Considering he’d been an IV drug user for years, this seemed impossible, but it was true. Jamie had checked and the best he could come up with were a couple of shoplifting charges over the past ten years…both dismissed.

And yet still, the diamond had been stolen, Mrs. Mulberry had pointed fingers at Trench, and there was a substantial reward for its return. Staring down at a picture of the diamond pendant, I whistled. A half million dollars seemed like a lot of money for one diamond. And I absently thought about the reward the insurance company had posted…10 percent of the appraised value…which was why everyone in our business and their brother was on the trail of this particular recovery. The thief wasn’t worth anything to a bounty hunter but the stone everyone suspected he’d hidden someplace, sure as hell was.

It had taken Jamie—whom I considered the best skip tracer in the business—four days after Trench’s release to learn which record producer had granted the junkie fifteen minutes of FaceTime. In a town as small as Hollywood, California, I knew it was hard to get a meeting with a legitimate record producer without a name or a huge social media presence unless you were represented by a legitimate talent agent. Trench was not.

By the time he’d finally secured that meeting, the stage name of Angel Gabriel was long forgotten by a town which seemed to specialize in forgetfulness. His angelic looks which had matched the name many years ago, had long ago been washed away on a sea of intravenous drugs.

I almost felt sorry for Trench as I sat outside the thirteen-story building resembling stacked vinyl records on Vine near Hollywood, waiting for him to arrive. I combed the area around the building. It was early and, though, I could hear the usual heavy traffic on the nearby 405 Freeway, the corner of Hollywood and Vine wasn’t busy at this hour. It would be after eight when businesses were up and running in earnest. I glanced out the windshield of my old truck and spotted a bus coming down the road, moving sleeker and faster with its low-emission CNG or zero emission electric engine than its high-emission, exhaust-belching predecessor.

The minute Trench stepped off the Hollywood DASH bus, I was in motion, exiting my F-150, and moving to intercept the man, not knowing that someone else had also been watching with much the same agenda. He stepped out of the shadows and got to the singer moments before I did, catching him off guard by calling out, “Look! It’s Angel Gabriel!” It took me only seconds to see what was coming and narrowly ducked Taser darts the attacker fired toward Trench as the surprised suspect twisted to greet an ardent fan.

The darts had hit Trench square in the stomach seconds before I tackled him from behind, hitting him hard enough to propel him into the person firing the darts. He landed on the sidewalk, flat on his back beneath both of us, letting out an agonized cry of pain and in a split second, I rolled off them, praying I hadn’t broken their backs. I got to my feet and bent down to check if the man was otherwise armed, dismissing him when I saw he wasn’t. Then turned to check the damage to my quarry.

Trench lay on the ground, out cold, the darts still sticking out of his stomach. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned to the other man, resting my hands on my waist and realizing with horror, my holster was empty. I whipped my head around and spotted my weapon fifteen feet away, lying on the grass pretty as you please. I flushed in embarrassment as I went to pick it up. After tucking it away, thankful the safety had been on, I turned back around and was brought up short. The dark-haired man was up and fastening handcuffs on my unconscious bounty with a knee on his back.

“Morning,” the man said, grinning up at me, looking just as pretty and as smug as could be. “Raven Mathis, recovery agent for Grayson, Mallory, and Simms Insurance,” he said, standing to his full height which rivaled my own, and flashing some sort of ID badge in a wallet. “Bounty hunter, huh ?” he asked, sticking out his hand.

I ignored it, reaching for my badge which swung limply from a chain around my neck. “Trigg Huerta,” I replied. “I prefer fugitive recovery agent and by the way, you’ve got your cuffs on my bounty.” I was fuming as I stared at the bastard who’d just cost my bail bondsman a cool fifty thousand and me 20 percent of that. Jamie was going to be pissed as hell, and I couldn’t have blamed him.

“The early bird and all that,” Mathis had said, shrugging as he lowered his hand. I watched him clench it into a fist at his side and it was only then that I spotted the pepper spray in his other hand. I’d totally missed it. What is wrong with me? He looked at the spray can and then me and smiled again, shrugging.

“Had that at the ready, did you?” I asked, nodding at the chemical weapon in his fist.

“For you, not him…well, maybe both. Couldn’t see your badge from where you were seated in the truck,” Mathis said.

I blinked. “You were watching me?”

“Spotted you as you drove up. You’ve been parked there for quite a while. I figured you were a bounty hunter—fugitive recovery agent—but since I couldn’t be sure, I took precautions.” He clipped the can into a bracket on his belt before looking back at me with another fucking sunny smile. “You always carry that kind of firepower?” he asked, nodding to my Beretta M9 semiautomatic in full view.

“Always. Pays to be prepared,” I replied.

“I’d expect a former Marine to be able to take down a suspect without having to resort to that.” He nodded to my belt as my heart started a rapid tattoo.

“How’d you…?”

“Beretta M9…standard military issue.”

I frowned deeply, crossing my arms over my chest. “Don’t mean I’m a Marine. Could be Army or another branch.”

Mathis smirked, nodding to my bicep. “A lot of Army guys wear Eagle, Globe, and Anchor tats, do they?”

Without thinking, I reached up and covered my tattoo, forgetting that the black muscle T-shirt I’d donned that morning, only partially covered the black ink.

“Anyway,” he said, “you should think about carrying something less lethal than a Beretta on the job. You can’t tell me you never worry about having it taken away from you in a fight or…oh, I don’t know, a dogpile in Hollywood. Really, you should carry this. It works great.” He tapped the can on his belt.

“Thanks. This’ll do me just fine.” I waved my hand at the can. “Besides, neither a gun nor a can of pepper spray is gonna save you if they run out, so you’d best rely on this.” I tapped the side of my head.

“Yeah, guns run out of bullets,” Mathis said, smirking again, “which is why I follow the ‘21-foot rule.’” He bent and lifted the leg of his jeans, pulling out a large knife and straightening. He held it up and showed me. The hilt of the KA-BAR was covered with some sort of colorful wrapping and beaded. “I know you know what that is.”

“The 21-foot rule?”

“Yeah.”

“’Course I know what it is,” I huffed in disgust before eyeballing him more closely. “You’re not military?” I asked, a little surprised by this man.

“Navajo,” he said with a grin, replacing the knife.

I nodded. The 21-foot rule was a concept taught in self-defense classes to all law enforcement and military recruits as part of their training. It said that an attacker with a knife or other melee weapon could close the distance to another person in the time it would take to draw a gun. In this instance a knife would become the superior weapon.

“I’ll keep your advice in mind.” I hadn’t considered pepper spray a lethal weapon even though I had personal experience with it in my capacity of fugitive recovery agent…usually on the painful, receiving end.

I glanced down at my bounty, still snoozing on the grass with his hands cuffed behind his back and wondered how I’d let this Mathis guy get to him first. It pissed me off beyond all reason and Jamie was going to kick my ass. We both turned as an unmarked black cruiser pulled up to the curb. I recognized the blond man driving it and got a lump in my throat. The man seated beside him was as familiar to me as the back of my hand. The car made a U-turn and pulled up to the curb as the passenger window rolled down. The older man got out as the driver parked and joined him on the curb.

“Well, well, are you two working together these days?” Cassidy Ryan asked me, holding out a hand. Even though I’d known them both for twenty odd years, I wasn’t good with remembering ages. But I knew Cassidy was older than me by at least a decade or more, and his partner, Mike Williams was older than Cass by a good ten years.

“Not hardly, Cassidy,” Raven Mathis said. He grinned, shaking their hands after me before turning to Trench who still lay unmoving on the grass.

“Did you kill him?” Cassidy asked with a laugh.

Mathis turned and looked at me, grinning widely before hooking a thumb in my direction. “Huerta thinks he’s a linebacker, I guess.”

Cassidy chuckled as Mike walked over and bent to roll Trench to his back before checking the pulse in his neck.

“Why’d you go and do a thing like that, Miguel?” Cassidy asked, reaching out to squeeze me on the bicep.

“Name’s Trigg,” I grumbled.

“The fuck it is, Miguel,” Cassidy said. “Don’t forget, I know you.” He slung an arm over my shoulder.

I nodded. I couldn’t have forgotten how he knew me or what I owed Cassidy if I’d wanted to. He and I had a long history born of blood, fear, and respect, and I would always be grateful that he’d taken me under his wing after the horrible night when my life had ended.

“It wasn’t on purpose, Cassidy,” I explained, not liking the fact that these two detectives—whom I considered friends—had clearly been called by Mathis prior to his arrival. I really hated the fact that they all seemed so friendly and that I was the one who looked like a jerk here. I dragged my gaze away from Cassidy’s beautiful Kelly-green eyes who saw everything and kicked at the ground. “I didn’t see him,” I said, gesturing in Mathis’ direction. “Came out of nowhere and before I could take Trench down, he had two darts in his stomach. I… ah …kinda tackled ‘em both.”

Cassidy squeezed my shoulder again and let go. We both turned and watched Mike hand Trench off to two patrol officers who’d driven up in a black and white. Cassidy turned to look over at Mathis who stood talking to Mike before glancing back at me. “You wanna grab breakfast? Mike’s on some kind of keto diet and I’m loving it since all Zack wants to feed me is vegetables since he turned fifty.”

I chuckled. “Yeah, he probably wants to keep you around for a few years and old guys have to watch what they eat…oatmeal and all that.”

“Shut up,” Cassidy said, poking me in the rib and making me laugh.

“I’m just saying, dentures and all, Cass. Pretty soon you’ll have to gum all your food, so enjoy keto while you can.”

“Oh, my God, I’m gonna kill you.” He fake punched at me, and I laughed, holding up both fists as I feinted back, feeling oddly happy. He and Mike were the only two people other than Jamie who managed to drag out that elusive of all emotions in me. “So, you coming for breakfast?”

I glanced at Raven Mathis, noticing how he and Mike were looking in our direction as the patrolmen put their detainee in the back of their patrol car. If there was a chance the man was going to be joining us, I wasn’t into that. Besides, I’d just lost out on the possibility of getting that ten grand reward and had to face Jamie when I got back to the office. I’d have to convince him I’d get another shot at recovering the diamond. But that supposed he wasn’t carrying it on his person…because if he was, Mathis was going to claim the bounty.

I shook my head. “No, I have things to do, Cass,” I said, watching Mike and Mathis walking over.

“Breakfast?” Mike asked, sounding hopeful as he hooked both thumbs in the built-in waistband of his Haggar Expandomatic slacks and hoisting them up over his paunch before they rolled right back down to where they’d been a second ago.

“Not today, Mike,” I said, reaching out and shaking his hand before looking at Mathis. I frowned. “And thanks for fucking up my recovery, Mathis.” Before he could answer, I spun on my heel and headed back across Hollywood Boulevard to my truck, climbed in, and drove away, cursing the handsome, black-haired devil who’d stolen my bounty.

Present day

I sighed, staring up at the ceiling, remembering the way Raven Mathis had flashed that wide grin at me as I drove away, showing me a set of twin dimples on his handsome face. I never had recovered the diamond—nor had anyone else—and poor Lyle Trench had met his end a mere few weeks later from an overdose of heroin laced with fentanyl. The reward was still out there but Jamie had long ago given up on the diamond’s recovery, along with all the other bounty hunters on the streets.

It was easy for me to hate Mathis all over again for costing me a small fortune—one I’d desperately needed at the time. I hadn’t run into him again, but I still thought of him.

It was hard to get a man like him out of my mind. At nearly my height of six-four with hair as dark and shiny as a raven’s wing—and no doubt the source of what I figured was Mathis’ nickname—I still wished he was ugly and not the grinning movie star, dashing, blue-eyed man he was.

My luck was totally shit.

I rolled over and stared at my alarm clock’s red LED digits but the display only reminded me of sitting there, waiting in my truck on Vine and staring at the spire on top of the Capitol Records building with its flashing red light. I remembered thinking there was a pattern to the blinking light and then almost smiled to myself when I realized someone had programed the light to blink out Hollywood in Morse Code. I should have been paying more attention to the street.

That night, after losing out on my bounty and after enduring Jamie’s fifteen-minute tirade, I’d gone home to research the light out of sheer curiosity. I’d learned that in 1992, Capitol Records’ fiftieth anniversary year, the light had been changed to blink out “Capitol 50” and then again in 2013 to spell out Katy Perry prior to her album release.

I pushed thoughts of Raven Mathis out of my head, knowing I might be coming face to face with him again in the morning and really hoped I wouldn’t.

In any case, this time I promised myself I’d beat him to my bounty…and this time, it would be my bounty.