Jack of Hearts Read online

  Jack of Hearts

  A Detective Jack Stratton Novel

  Christopher Greyson

  Contents

  Also by Christopher Greyson

  1. A Good Thing Going

  2. Pause the Game

  3. Aviophobia

  4. Rule Number One

  5. Not My Idea

  6. Beware of Alligators

  7. I Love You, Lady

  8. So You Got a Boo-Boo

  9. A Fine-Looking Boy

  10. Animal Control

  11. Two by Four

  12. The Battle Butterfly

  13. A Bad Idea

  14. I’d Like to Join

  15. Jumping to Conclusions

  16. No Pressure

  17. Theories and Lists

  18. Special Delivery

  19. The Shadow Man

  20. Give the Man a Cigar

  21. A Singing Frog

  22. What Happened to the Door?

  23. Taken to the Cleaners

  24. Digging

  25. Bait

  26. Look, I’m Invisible

  27. My Home

  28. Think Like a Criminal

  29. Delay of Game

  30. Leash the Beast

  31. Loose Ends

  32. Swamp Water from Hell

  33. It Was a Good Plan

  34. Surprise

  35. Embrace the Hate

  36. Old Friends

  37. Love-struck

  38. Let Him Sleep

  39. In on It

  40. That’s Amore

  41. Pedal to the Metal

  42. Help or Get Out of My Way!

  43. Benched

  44. Promise

  45. Chapel

  46. You Owe Me

  47. Tuna Casserole

  48. Hanging with Goofy

  The Detective Jack Stratton Mystery-Thriller Series

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Christopher Greyson

  Novels featuring Jack Stratton in order:

  AND THEN SHE WAS GONE

  GIRL JACKED

  JACK KNIFED

  JACKS ARE WILD

  JACK AND THE GIANT KILLER

  DATA JACK

  JACK OF HEARTS

  JACK FROST

  Psychological Thriller

  THE GIRL WHO LIVED

  Epic Fantasy

  PURE OF HEART

  This book is dedicated to my parents, Ted and Laura. Together briefly, but eternally united, their timeless love will always be an inspiration to me.

  1

  A Good Thing Going

  “Was the funeral fun?”

  Leaning his tall frame against the lanai doors, Curtis Dixon held up the memorial service bulletin and chuckled at his own handiwork. The picture of the elderly woman’s face on the front was now covered with glasses and a bushy mustache.

  “You shouldn’t have killed her.” His aunt’s words clicked as sharply as her high heels as she marched across the tiles of the grand living room and plucked the bulletin from his hand. The ice in her rum runner tapped against her glass when she stopped.

  “She slipped getting into the bathtub,” Dixon said. “It’s not my fault if old people are clumsy.” He shrugged, and his taut muscles rippled beneath tan skin.

  “You were only supposed to pick up the package. We don’t need this extra attention.”

  She was still dressed in her black business suit from the funeral, and every time Dixon saw her in that suit, he pictured her berating the cowering employees in the posh office in which she had once worked. How many times had she told him the stupid story of how she had risen from poverty to run one of the largest fashion magazines in the world? That was years ago and she’d long since retired, but how she loved to remind him of how powerful she’d once been.

  Of course, Dixon knew how she’d risen from poverty. She had been a dancer in a strip club, along with Dixon’s mother, when a rich old businessman had taken a fancy to her—and married her. And just like that, it was goodbye poverty, hello glitz and glamour. He eyed her slender frame. She was pushing seventy, but between the gym, plastic surgeons, and spa treatments, she was still a looker.

  “Is that why you called me?” Dixon asked. Outside the glass doors, dozens of streetlights across the retirement community snapped on. “Just to rag at me about a dead old lady nobody is even going to miss?”

  “I need you to pick up another package, Curtis. The address is 4 Gulf Coast. Roy McCord.”

  Dixon’s eyes brightened like the streetlights. He inhaled through his nose and his chest swelled.

  “Just get the package. There’s one elderly man living there, and his bedroom is in the back-right corner of the house. No one dies. Is that clear?”

  “Will you stop blaming me?” Dixon held out his arms, stretching the tattoos of cobras that wrapped around his thick forearms and twisted over his bulging biceps. The snakes pointed to a tattooed Anubis with red eyes that covered his neck and disappeared into his black tank top.

  Dixon’s show of brawn had the desired effect. Fear tightened his aunt’s face and the ice in her glass tinkled as her hand shook slightly.

  “Old people die,” he said. “Some of them slip down the stairs. Others fall asleep with a pillow on their face.”

  “Every time someone dies, they investigate,” his aunt snapped. “Pick up the package tonight. Nothing more.”

  Dixon stepped so close to his aunt that they were almost cheek to cheek. But she’d had time to compose herself, and she was steady as she stared at him with blue eyes as cold as the ice in her tumbler.

  “You have a good thing going here, Curtis. Don’t blow it by killing anyone else.”

  Dixon kissed her cheek. “For you, Auntie, anything.”

  Roy McCord tossed back the blanket and rolled out of bed. He didn’t bother turning on the light; his eyes were used to the dark, as he’d been staring at the ceiling for the past two hours. Ever since the nightmare had awoken him.

  He glanced at the clock on the nightstand: 1:04 a.m.

  He knew that he’d go back to sleep later tonight, but he made the bed just the same, pulling the blanket tight enough to bounce a quarter off the surface. Old habits die hard. He’d been out of the service for forty years, but once a marine, always a marine. He still wore his gray hair in a high and tight crew cut, and he carried himself with his shoulders back, chest out, and chin down.

  He smoothed the top sheet and headed for the living room. The streetlights that dotted the retirement community provided enough glow for him to see. His eyesight hadn’t gone south with him to Florida. He was grateful for that.

  He looked out at the empty street and listened to the quiet. The silence had weight—a presence, even.

  As he watched, the front door across the street opened, and Bernie Lane stomped out, tying his bathrobe, his gangly poodle in tow. They say people tend to look like their dogs, and Bernie was proof of that. His white hair shot out in all directions, as if he’d been electrocuted. If he put the dog on his head, you’d wonder where the dog went.

  Bernie grumbled and griped at the dog while it did its business. Roy grinned as the dog kept changing its mind where it wanted to go. I should get a dog. He walked over to the corner cabinet. A collie maybe.

  He poured himself a small glass of whiskey and headed for the recliner. He tried to relax into the soft chair, but his whole body was tense and sweaty. The air conditioning was on, but it couldn’t keep up with this heat. Lately it had been pushing ninety-five, even at night.

  “Maybe I should have moved to Montana,” he muttered as he sipped his drink.

  Roy glanced down at the wedding picture on the end table, but quickly looked away. It was getting close
to their wedding anniversary. His Anne had been gone almost ten years now, but the glimpse of her pretty face made his chest tighten. He ached for her. Sometimes he still half-expected to hear her voice call to him from the other room; other times he wondered when she would get home, as if she had just gone out for a walk. Tonight, she would have walked into the living room, taken the drink from his hand, and brought him back to bed.

  He took another bitter sip.

  Their son was gone, too. Cancer took him five years prior. His daughter-in-law had remarried last year. They didn’t have any kids, so Roy was alone. Even the guys in his squad were almost all gone. He only had one friend left. And now that Darius had stomach cancer…

  He took a long sip.

  At least he’d given Darius one last hurrah. He swirled his glass as he remembered their recent trip to the Bahamas. Glancing at the dolphin statue on the mantel, he chuckled. He had broken even at the casino, but they gave him a statue anyway. A silly thing, but to him it was a reminder of a good time with a friend.

  Roy had won the trip for two at bingo, and he immediately knew he’d take Darius. Who else? Of course, at their age, it wasn’t like old times. Back in the day, he and Darius would get thrown out of a bar at closing time; now they were in bed by ten. “Like a couple of little old ladies,” Darius joked.

  A laugh started to build, but it was cut off by Roy’s tightening throat.

  Thinking of Darius reminded him of the nightmare that had awoken him earlier. Not so much a nightmare as a memory. A memory of a nightmare.

  The Battle of Huế.

  It happened during that one month of sheer hell in Vietnam. A month that burned so hot he knew he’d never leave it behind. It had branded him for life.

  It was during that month, during that battle, that the nightmare began. One hot night, the Vietcong had them pinned down in a tiny village. And from where they crouched, silently, Roy could see a wounded young American soldier lying out in the street. Everyone said the soldier was dead, but Roy wasn’t certain. Every once in a while, Roy could have sworn that the soldier moved. Roy didn’t know his name, didn’t know how he’d ended up there, but as they hid in the dark, Roy couldn’t help but watch him. For hours, he looked out at the man—a boy, really—and thought: That could’ve been me.

  The young soldier lay on his side in front of what was probably once a pretty little flower garden. It was a six-foot square surrounded by a two-foot-high rock wall. In front of it was a stone bench. Roy could imagine the garden filled with spring flowers, but right now it was a barren patch of dirt.

  The soldier must have been trying to dive into it for cover.

  He never made it.

  Seeing something like that changes a man. Hiding in the dark with the heat and quiet and turning your mind inward does something to you. Sometimes it’s good. It makes you assess where you are and where you’re going. Other times, it does something else to you.

  Something not so good.

  Around midnight, the soldier moved again. Roy’s CO said it was rigor mortis setting in, but Roy knew it wasn’t.

  He took another sip of whiskey.

  It could’ve been me.

  Lying there like a hurt dog in the street.

  Slowly dying.

  With a crowd of people watching.

  I’d want someone to get me the hell outta there.

  As the night ticked slowly onward, the thought kept repeating in his head: It could have been me… It could have been me.

  And then he added another thought to the mantra: Treat others the same way you want them to treat you. Since he was a little boy, his mother had drilled that philosophy into his head. It was sage advice, but not so easy to obey when following through on it might get your head blown off.

  When the boy moved again, so did Roy. He crawled. He pressed his body as flat against the ground as he could and went slow. The street was littered with sharp gravel, blasted loose by explosives and gunfire. Every time he pulled himself forward, the scrape of the little rocks against the tar sounded like thunder in his ears.

  It took several minutes to reach the soldier. They were the longest and worst minutes of his life. He felt like a condemned man standing before the firing squad, waiting for the bullets to rip him apart.

  When he finally made it, the soldier’s eyes fluttered open.

  Blue. The color of a clear summer sky.

  The kid didn’t say anything, but gratitude shone in those blue eyes. Roy would never forget that. How do you thank a guy for crawling into hell to get you?

  But any hope of getting them both out of there vanished in a hail of bullets. Metal rain poured down on the town square, turning night into day. Roy yanked the soldier under the stone bench and pulled them both against the rock-walled flower bed.

  Metal shrieked as it shattered against the wall. Bullets pulverized the stone into clouds of dust. Rock fragments scattered like buckshot, tearing at their skin.

  The Americans responded with a hellfire of their own.

  Trapped between two massive firework displays, Roy felt wave after wave of sound ripple through his body. The stone shielded him and the soldier from most of the onslaught. But there was a small gap between the bench and the wall, less than an inch at most, and with so many bullets flying, an inch was too much.

  One bullet made it through.

  Roy looked down at his right hand. Next to the old battle scar was a fresh one on his knuckle.

  He sipped the whiskey.

  As Roy had aged, so had his bones; they were breaking down like the rest of him. For forty-five years, a piece of that bullet had remained lodged in his hand, until three months ago when it broke free. He woke up one morning with his hand looking like someone had blown up a rubber glove. It had swelled to double its normal size. The doctors removed the shrapnel, but his old hand ached more now than it ever had.

  He received a Purple Heart for that one. He earned another when he got shot in the leg three months later. He was awarded a Bronze Star for rescuing the soldier.

  Medals. Scars. Just different ways of remembering things you’d rather forget.

  From somewhere in the rear of the house, a sound pulled Roy from his dark memories. A little suck of air, and then something sliding. For a second, he thought that Anne had opened the refrigerator, but that was impossible. Anne was gone. He was all alone.

  Someone had opened a window.

  Roy set his drink down on the end table without making a sound. He missed the coaster. He could hear Anne’s voice warning him about leaving a ring on the wood. He almost whispered back, “Not now.”

  His heart pounded in his chest with deep thuds. He kept a baseball bat in the kitchen by the door, but that was too far to be of any use. I really wish I’d gotten a dog.

  Another noise came from the back of the house. His heartbeat pulsed in his ears so loudly he could barely identify the sound.

  Pantry door.

  As Roy moved quietly to the wall, the whole room seemed to roll. He cursed when he saw his hand tremble. Fool. He steadied himself by holding onto the mantel.

  A chair in the kitchen made the slightest scuff. Someone was making their way through Roy’s house. They were coming closer now.

  Roy looked for something he could use as a weapon, but there was nothing. He balled his hand into a fist.

  One punch. I have to have at least one good one left in me.

  Roy’s temples throbbed. He inched closer to the kitchen door.

  The door swung slowly open.

  Roy felt as if he’d been shot in the chest with an arrow. Piercing pain radiated outward briefly and then raced down his left arm. It hurt to breathe.

  Not now.

  He groaned. The pain was so intense he dropped to his knees.

  A man peered out from the kitchen. His hair was long and made his thin face look gaunt. The intruder stood frozen in the doorway and stared at the old marine on his knees.

  “Take what you want and go,” Roy gasped as he cr
awled to the phone.

  The man lunged forward and cut Roy off. He stood with his feet planted and his shoulders squared, as if he were about to swing.

  Roy shook his head. “Ambulance. Just go.” The room spun, and Roy fell face-first to the floor.

  The man wore sneakers and jeans. He set a small black backpack at his feet and crouched down in front of Roy. His eyes were a gray-blue, like a cold winter’s day. He extended his heavily tattooed arms and tilted his head back, revealing a tattoo that looked like some Egyptian dog statue with red eyes.

  “Welcome to death.” A thin smile spread across the man’s face as he gazed down at Roy.

  Roy had seen that look before. Most men hated killing, but in war, some realized that the power to bring death was something they enjoyed. As the blue in the man’s eyes brightened, Roy realized that tonight he was going to die.

  The invisible bands squeezed Roy’s chest harder. He felt as if an elephant were sitting on his chest. His square jaw tightened as the crushing pain intensified. What little strength he had left was slowly draining away.

  The man opened the backpack and pulled out a white nylon rope. The rope was coiled except for the end, which was tied into a noose. The man held it up and let the noose swing back and forth.

  Roy began to foam at the mouth.