Little Black Book

Detective Ally McIntosh was sick of this shit: sick of shitty coffee, hard-back metal chairs, stale doughnuts, and preachy people. She was tired of trying to be sober. Her last incident, she just had a couple of drinks and drove her unmarked police car into an unsuspecting dog and killed it. She did not think it was really a problem, though; she could control herself if she wanted, she just didn’t. Internal Affairs investigated, and they suspended her for six months and forced to see the department shrink and go to AA meetings. The people in the meetings were sympathetic, happy, and all and seemed to mean well but had no idea what the real world was like for her.

After years of detective work, dead hookers, dead junkies, dead wives, dead children, two broken marriages and a string of friendships that disintegrated like Jell-O left out in the sun, she needed to drink to not see things in the night, to fall asleep, and to stay asleep. On Ambien she would wake up in random places like a booth in a dirty bookstore in her pajamas and do not know how she got there. So, drinking herself to sleep every night was really the most effective. Now they wanted to take that away from her. If she wanted to keep her job and her benefits and her pension, she had to stay sober. They were checking her blood alcohol level consistently and checking to see if she went to the meetings. Which she was.

She needed to get a hobby or something. Maybe pickup road biking again. She still had the fancy carbon bike, which cost as much as some motorcycles did. It was collecting dust in the garage with a bunch of other stuff that had gone by the wayside when she started drinking full time.

She just needed to get her damn attendance slip and get the heck out of there before some well-meaning chick tried to talk to her or invite her out for coffee or something. Even though she hated meetings, and hated the smiley, happy people in them, she carried her Moleskine little black book with her to every meeting. She wrote little sayings and tidbits of thoughts she had while the mouths of others were moving in what they could consider words, she just did not understand them. She used an old Bic pen, black, of course. She had tried multiple times to use better pens, but always lost them. She assumed they were somewhere in the land with all the missing socks that disappeared every time she did laundry.

As her partner pulled up to the curb, she made it to the car. Not legally permitted to drive for a while and was just now starting the real work again. After six months on desk duty, she had gained ten pounds. Her ass was super flabby and last time she rode her bike she could feel her belly wiggling like the aforementioned Jell-O.

“Hey McIntosh. How was the meeting? You look like shit. This sobriety thing isn’t so good for you.” Her partner Chewy Chavez told her as she was getting into the unmarked sedan.

“Shut up! At least I’m not a Mexican.” They headed toward the crime scene they had to investigate that day.

It was funny. Chewy was one of the few friends that she had left in the department. She loved him like a little sister loves her big brother. A little love-hate, but more love as she knew he had her back no matter what. When Internal Affairs was doing their investigation, Chewy could have thrown her under the bus for a ton of shit but he didn’t. Every week he invited her to his family’s restaurant. She never went, but the gesture meant the world to her. She just could not make herself go.

As they were driving to the station, a call came in. There was another dead hooker in an alley behind a dumpster. Chavez switched on the lights and they headed over to see what had happened. As they were pulling up, it seemed like every cop in the world was there. Ally even saw the F.B.I. futzing around, strutting their stuff, walking around on her crime scene.

The real reason Ally still had a job was that there was no one who was as good as she was at solving murders. She had closed more cases than any other homicide detective in the city of Albuquerque since the way way back. Ally thought that was because other detectives were lazy.

Ally was tired, but she squared her shoulders, brushed off her pants and said to the Sargent, “Ok tell me the details.”

People thought Ally was a bitch. She knew she was just upfront. She pulled out her black book, worn as a broken-in saddle, pen poised to write what patterns she, and only she, could see.

“Well, we have a dead hooker. I can tell she’s a hooker because of all the other hookers over on the side of the street over there. The victim is consistent with the other ones in that the killer ripped all her fingernails off. There are seven stab wounds all over her groin and she bled out from what seems to be a slash in her Femoral artery. She died elsewhere but had been dropped here.”

“What’s the deal with the Feds?” Ally asked.

“Seems like some government muckety muck found her and called it in, and they are trying to fix the fact that he found her,” replied Sarge. “We are getting a statement, but he’s surrounded by the F.B.I like an 18-year-old virgin at a bachelor party.”

She chuckled and said, “Thanks, Sarge. Let me look.”

Ally walked over to the tape on the ground. The alley looked amazingly clean. Ally looked around but knew, if this murder were like the others, there would be nothing at this crime scene that could find the killer. The girls were all killed somewhere else and transported to one of the four corners of the city. There was no rhyme or reason that Ally could see to where the bodies turned up. It was like the killer just dropped them off wherever he felt like it.

The killer stabbed each girl exactly seven times in the same place this victim has “stab wounds all over her groin” with a different artery slashed. The bodies had been unceremoniously dropped off in an alley in different parts of town. There were no signs of a struggle and the fingernails ripped off the victims, usually after they were dead.

The crime-scene-geeks were wandering around with their plastic bags picking up what she knew were going to be worthless pieces of evidence for the labs to look at. She was still curious about why the F.B.I. was there.

When the F.B.I. agents left, she asked one of the techs, “Do you know who the big-wig they took out of here is?”

“Yeah, it’s a Senator or something, you know they don’t tell us much.”

She made a note in her little black book to follow up on that. “Does anybody know who this girl was?”

“Yeah, her name was Bianca, only 22. The other girls said she was kind of new out here. They really knew little about her. We don’t know if she was being run by someone or was doing it on her own.”

“Well, too bad for Bianca,” Ally said regretfully. She realized that she was not going to get much from the scene and walked over to where the girls huddled together, smoking like an old beat-up car, the sun glaring off their fingernails, the clacking of high heels sounds like chickens in the barnyard. Ally had a reputation out here as a street-fighting drunk, amongst some other things. She got a warmer reception than most cops.

“What’s up Ally?” A girl named Jasmine spoke.

“Hey, Jazz. How is it going?” Ally nodded to the other girls as she and Jazz walked out of earshot. “What can you tell me, Jazz? You know anything about the john that just got whisked away?”

Jazz had tweaker sores littering her face and bruises up and down her arm, but still had some looks left and was sort of the den mother of the herd of hookers that were all huddling together. “Ally, that dude is a sick mother-cker. I stay away from him. He’s been showing up lately and likes the rough trade, but really rough. Suzie ended up in the emergency room after a go with him last week.”

The Sargent called Ally back.

Before she walked away Ally handed Jazz a card and wrote her number on the back. “Jazz, you call me if you see him around or hear anything, you got it?” She really wanted a drink, she thought as she walked back over to the crown of techs and cops.

“The Feds called, and we are getting pulled off of the case,” said Sarge.

“What the fuck, Sarge,” she huffed into his face. “You know this is bullshit.”

Ally stormed off and got in the car with Chewy and they headed out. “I can’t believe this, this should be our case! Look, I need you to drop me off at my house. I’ve got some shit to take care of.”

The frustration was leaking out of her.

“Listen Ally, back off this and keep your head down.” Chewy’s expression was pleading.

“Yeah Chewy, I will.” She slammed the door and stomped across the sidewalk.

At her apartment, laying on the floor right inside the door was a plain manila envelope. Inside was a bunch of 100-dollar bills and a note. “Let Bianca’s case go. Take the money, or else.”

She threw the note on the kitchen table and started counting the money. She knew she should just call the boys and log it as evidence. It was $20,000 in bills she had just counted. That was two hundred, one-hundred-dollar bills. The amount of debris Ally had to clean up from the last drunk was way more this time than the last debacle she had when she was drinking. This time, there were fines and lawyers’ fees and a trashed car. The little black book was glaring up at her with all the names of girls killed by that maniac. She really needed that money; she really needed a drink.

She left the apartment and headed to the bar, convinced she would only have two drinks. That was it, only two. The bar was dark and empty with only a couple of old-timers there as it was still early. “Hey Jimmy, give me a scotch, make it a double.”

Jimmy tried not to give her a look. “Sure Ally, here you go.”

The glass sat on the bar like a lonely old lady waiting for her life to end. Ally could not stop thinking. Her thoughts distracting her from her thirst. She picked up her phone and called Chewy. “Chewy. We’ve got a problem.” She told him about the money.

“I’m on the way,” he said.

Ally paid for her drink but didn’t drink it.

One day at a time, she thought. More like one minute at a time.

Chewy was pulling up to the curb. Chewy stared at her as she said, “I almost took it, the money. I almost drank Chewy.” They sat for a minute in the car. Ally growled, “Someone needs to find this guy, and it’s going to be us.”

Chewy said, “Yeah, Ally, it’s going to be us.”

Together, they called in the money and the note. Ally found her little black book and read off the names of the girls who had died at the hand of the killer. She knew they could do it together if Ally was sober, which for today she was. This dude better watch out, Ally thought. As of today, Ally McIntosh was on the case, come hell or high water, and she did not know how to let anything go. Ally called her supervisor to let him know she was going to find this killer if it was the last thing she did. And it could be……..