Page 5 of Nightcrawler

Pictures Judy had given me, showed the porn star in her heyday along with current photos of her. Monroe had been barely legal when she’d started in the business and was now a very well preserved sixty-three. Up close photos of her face showed me that she’d had some work done over the years and had lived a clean life. Nothing in the file said she had a history of substance abuse which would have marred her near-perfect skin. She didn’t possess many of the lines and wrinkles one would associate with a woman in her sixties. In fact, had I been a straight guy in the prime of my life, I might have asked her out. She had a pretty face, if not grandmotherly, with a sweet smile and approachable demeanor. She didn’t appear to be a nasty, former porn star looking to defraud GMS, and my employer must have agreed with her.

Or maybe collecting premiums for the 250,000 face value of the policy since taking it out with them ten years ago, explained their willingness to not only use me to recover the prosthetic but make it available to other bounty hunters. The 25,000 dollar reward had gone live on the GMS website three days ago and Iplanned on collecting it myself. That’s why I was parked outside Gemma Monroe’s estate this cold November morning. I shut the file and set it aside, once again scanning the street before looking back at the houses. Passantino’s had a light on in the bedroom which hadn’t been there a minute or so before and I wondered what he was doing up so early. I stared at the window before looking at Gemma’s house where all the lights were still off.

I’d been out here three times since Judy had put the file on my desk seven days earlier. GMS always gave me or whichever investigator was working on a recovery several day’s head start before making a bounty public, so that company employees could have a crack at a recovery before others got involved. In my earlier recons, I had mapped out Passantino’s routines, getting a feel for what his day consisted of. The multimillionaire had a pretty boring routine, getting up early to jog most every day, spending a few hours at his office in Westwood three days a week, and then coming home with lights out around nine-thirty or ten. On Saturday he’d had a shave and manicure at an upscale Bel Air salon, and on Sunday night, he’d hosted a dinner party which had broken up at around eleven. Pretty routine stuff for a wealthy, single man.

During my recon, I had observed Gemma’s activities in a passive way—if I’d been sitting outside watching—since they were neighbors, it was hard not to. She’d driven out through the automatic gates of her home in a sleek, newer model Mercedes several times, always made up and dressed to kill. She seemed to lead an active social life, though, I hadn’t observed her return to the house with any men. While I was surveilling Passantino’s house, I hadn’t noticed any gentlemen calling on her either, unless you could call the pool boy and the Amazon delivery guy gentlemen. The pool boy had a clicker which opened the gatewhereas the Amazon guy had to stop at the gate and use the speaker outside to call her before the gates were opened for him.

I sighed, dragging my gaze away from Passantino’s house and checked out the street once more. An early morning jogger was coming up the block dressed in dark sweatpants and a sleeveless T-shirt with sweat stains marring an interesting male build. This guy was tall—very tall—but in the dim light right before dawn, I couldn’t make out much, except that he looked finer the closer he got. He had dark hair and a square jaw—two things that totally did it for me in a man. He looked familiar which was strange since I rarely worked on this side of the hill. Still, it was kind of nice being able to admire a guy openly when I knew he couldn’t see me watching. I knew it was stalker behavior, but I didn’t care.

When he was half a block away, I tore my gaze away from him and looked back at the house, sighing with regret. I was on the job and I needed to keep my focus where it belonged. The light in Passantino’s house was still on and I figured he was either working at his desk or working out. Either way, he was a hell of an early riser.

Looking at my smartwatch, I noted it was just after five-thirty. One glance at the horizon to the east, and I could see it was getting brighter. It would be dawn soon and with some luck, the gates would open and I’d be there to intercept Passantino and hopefully the giant boobs which he was intending to sell.

Judy and I had been scouring websites where expensive items were listed for sale. The sites weren’t exactly Etsy or Amazon where vendors were verified and kicked off the platform if they got too many buyer complaints. These were more… the black-market kind…the kind where you paid for an item with cryptocurrency or cash in suitcases. The kind of sites the FBI regularly monitored for terrorist activity…where extremistgroups often plied their trade or simply went to launder money to further their cause.

Gemma Monroe’s tits had popped up three days ago and yesterday afternoon, the small green box which indicated their availability, had turned red meaning they’d either been sold or withdrawn from sale. Since I had no reason to believe the thief had decided not to sell them, that meant Passantino would be making his move to hand the boobs over to the seller. All I had to do was wait for him to drive out of the gate, hope he wasn’t just going to the grocery story, follow him to the buyer’s location, and stop his car with some ruse to make the recovery.

I turned and looked back at the street, hoping to get a closer look at the jogger when I saw him stop just at the edge of Passantino’s property, bend over at the waist, and put his hands on his knees, seemingly to catch his breath. He was a big guy, bigger than I’d thought when I’d seen him farther away, and he was so close, I could see the sweat dripping off his hair.

He looked right, toward Passantino’s house, still bent over. When he straightened, a bolt of lightning shot through me. I knew this man! It was Miguel Huerta—or Trigg as he liked to be called—that bounty hunter who’d nearly gotten the jump on me when I took Lyle Trench down six months ago. As I watched him from my truck where I sat frozen in shock, he looked right at me…

…and smirked.

Chapter Three

TRIGG

I put everything out of my mind as I jogged toward the house…everything except the new review Nightcrawler had posted sometime after I’d fallen asleep last night. I’d read it after waking this morning and had laughed my head off. The man had a way with words.

Book title: Silence of the Toe Jam

Author: Luke Kramer

Publisher: Self-published

Genre: Horror fiction

Review/rating by Nightcrawler: ½ Star

Synopsis:

This book can best be described as a horror/slasher with a heaping side of foot fetish. Basically, it’s about several men who meet each other in a group therapy environment. They share a sexual attraction to feet…oh, and they’re also serial killers.

My Review:

What can I say about a book which surprised me and starts off with promise, only turning into a complete waste of paper about a third of the way in? It opens with a group therapy session and the round robin as eachcharacter in the book introduces himself by unloading his feelings…as well as his sexual proclivities. Some of them are very eye-opening and it’s during these introductions that I came to understand that these men have been court ordered to participate in group therapy. As the book goes on, I realize that most of them have one sort of foot fetish or another.

If I was the suspicious sort, I’d say that the probability of so many men all having the same interest in feet in the same group session had to be intentional. Surely, the author used the vehicle of the round robin, to make a point. What it was confounds me to this very day.

The varied way the fantasies of these men, and the downright detail of them makes it very clear to me—the unsuspecting reader—that they are not fantasies at all but drawn from the real-life experiences of the author. Who am I to judge an author for their love of foot sex and the translation of that desire onto the page? Then again, I’m pretty sure Stephen King never dumped a bucket of blood on a girl at some point, or Sigmund Freud woke up one day asking, “when is a cigar not a cigar?”

After the first third of the book, where all these sexual fantasies are described by group members, I thought the book would begin to get even more interesting. As it turned out, I was wrong. This was the part where the horror was supposed to come into play, right? Oh, it was a horror, no doubt about it. These men—having found so much in common with one another in therapy—decide to go on a hunt. What are they hunting for? Feet, of course. They then proceed to kidnap other men, cut off their feet leaving them to bleed to death in most cases, only to thentake the feet to an abandoned warehouse and have sex with them.

Oh, and all of this is done in silence…well, of course it is.

In conclusion, I have only one thing to say about this book…I’d rather be beaten with a pillowcase full of feet than to ever have to reread it.

I put the review out of my mind the minute I spotted my adversary about a hundred yards from Passantino’s gate. He was sitting in the driver’s seat of a brand-new, black Dodge Ram with limo tint all around but the windshield, looking at the house. I recognized him immediately…Raven Mathis…that fucker who’d stolen the Mulberry diamond bounty. Ever since the 25,000 dollars reward for the recovery of Gemma Monroe’s silicone prosthesis had been posted by GMS insurance, I’d been trying to figure a way into Passantino’s property. I knew Mathis was here for the same reason I was…to retrieve the boobs before a bounty hunter caught wind of the sale even though the listing had gone up three days ago. It was a healthy bounty for what would be a somewhat easy job and I promised myself I wasn’t going to be caught by surprise this time and miss out on the money Jamie and I deserved.

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