Black Beast: A Hard Boiled Murder Mystery (A Detective Bobby Mac Thriller Book 1) Read online

  What readers are saying about

  Black Beast: A Detective Bobby Mac Thriller (Volume One)

  "Kudos to R.S. Guthrie!! I started reading Black Beast and from the first chapter I couldn't wait to find out where the story would lead -- a real pager-turner full of suspense and intrigue."

  Becky Illson-Skinner, Mystery Writers Unite

  ~ ~ ~

  "R.S. Guthrie is a marvelous storyteller...The development of his characters is awesome. You feel you've known 'Bobby Mac' all your life."

  Kathleen Hagburg, co-author of Getting Into the Zone,

  a Course and Workbook For The Mental Game.

  ~ ~ ~

  "[Black Beast] establishes Guthrie as a bona fide talent."

  Beth Elisa Harris, author of the literary blockbuster Vision.

  ~ ~ ~

  “There is police work involved, espionage, fantasy, religion, military twists, drama, things to make you angry, laugh and even shed a tear or two…I guarantee you will close your eyes and imagine what Bobby Mac is seeing, doing and hearing. I did.”

  —Dan Osborn, Reviewer

  Black Beast

  By

  R.S. Guthrie

  Copyright © 2011 by R.S. Guthrie

  Amazon Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover Art: R.S. Guthrie / 123RF photo

  Author’s Note:

  Most of the action in this novel takes place in Denver, Colorado, the Metro vicinity, the mountains, and other nearby areas. Certain liberties have been taken in describing the city, its institutions, people, locations, history, etc. The world presented here is entirely fictional, as are its characters, events, departments, and other details. Any resemblance to actual incidents or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five (Epilogue)

  About the Author

  L O S T

  To my wife, who has always believed.

  PROLOGUE

  March 30th, 1947 – Tunisia

  FATHER TERRENCE Macaulay awoke. He smelled the hospital room before he saw it. The odor was indeed antiseptic, but there was a missing element—a subtle cleanliness that permeated American hospitals.

  So he knew he was a foreigner.

  Somewhere.

  His head ached—a dull pounding behind the eyes. He wasn’t under restraint, but the entirety of his body felt immobilized by the sheer density of his overarching pain. He opened his eyes slowly, but he could not see—no more than halos of light, anyway. His vision had apparently not yet conceded the tenuous return to consciousness.

  He didn’t remember much, not even his name. Not at first. And in those first few minutes of consciousness, amnesia was bliss; comforting somehow—yet the comfort did not come so much from not knowing who he was as it did from the gut realization that he didn’t want to know.

  The physical pain was enormous, yes, but he could also sense a surrounding emotional anguish out there, waiting in the peripheral shadows of his mind. Terrible memories, creeping around the dark recesses, waiting for him to misstep so that they might pounce.

  Parts of his memory did eventually come back to him, but none of them rushed in like a bull; rather, the remembrances filed in like a persistent army of fire ants.

  Two factions of his mind played a game of question and answer:

  How did I come to be here?

  (You came because you were needed.)

  Someone needed my help.

  (Yes.)

  The Ben Younes family.

  (Yes.)

  Little Ramzi.

  (The boy.)

  Poor little Ramzi.

  (A casualty of the holy war, Father.)

  So young, so innocent in all of this.

  (You did to him what had to be done.)

  I will never concede that. Never.

  (To believe less would be to call yourself murderer.)

  Perhaps that’s true.

  (No, it is not. You are a savior. A warrior of Ardincaple.)

  How long have I been under?

  (Not long enough. It will never be long enough.)

  Where am I?

  (Where you always are. Where you are required to be.)

  But where AM I?

  (What is the difference? What has ever been the difference??)

  The events played back through his head—the exorcism, the police, Ramzi—suddenly Father Macaulay remembered the fight; the terrible struggle with the beast. He reached down to his left leg in a panic. With the quick movements, fresh tendrils of pain rose and climbed atop those before them.

  “We couldn’t save it,” a voice with a thick Arabic accent said.

  “What?” said the Father.

  “Your leg. I’m afraid it was injured beyond repair.”

  “Beyond repair.”

  “Yes. Very unfortunate. We did our best, however.”

  Father Macaulay stopped reaching for a moment. He squinted, but all he could glean was a dark-skinned shape standing at the foot of the bed. A white coat, perhaps?

  “I’m Doctor Rashid,” the man said.

  The priest tried to speak but the inside of his mouth was far too arid and caked—his tongue swollen like a piece of shoe leather. He clacked and made a motion with the fingers on a raised hand.

  “Water, yes, I’m so sorry,” Rashid said, and hustled to the nightstand.

  Macaulay closed his eyes and listened to the welcome sound of water being poured into a glass. The man put an extra pillow behind his head so Father Macaulay could sip carefully. The water was cool, only slightly above room temperature, but it tasted like sweet honey nectar.

  “How long?” the priest managed, after a second drink.

  “Hmm?”

  “How long have I been unconscious?”

  “I’m afraid it has been well over a week, my friend.”

  Macaulay closed his eyes again and let his left hand wander cautiously down toward his left thigh.

  We couldn’t save it.

  The pain told him his leg was there! He could feel his foot; in fact, it hurt, for God’s sake! He could feel his toes, his calf w
here it pushed into the mattress and the linen as it rested on his shin. But as his hand slid to where his knee ought to have been, he found nothing but empty space beneath the hospital blanket. His leg was gone.

  He now remembered the outcome of that horrible night.

  The night Ramzi died.

  (He did not DIE, Father—you KILLED HIM.)

  It was an exorcism.

  (It was that, and more.)

  An exorcism gone terribly wrong.

  (YOUR exorcism.)

  You said yourself, I did what I could.

  (But the parents believed you!)

  Believed WHAT?

  (That you would save their little boy.)

  That was not possible.

  (It is NEVER possible.)

  Then why did they believe?

  (You promised them.)

  I did nothing of the sort.

  (Your eyes.)

  My eyes?

  (Your kindness.)

  What?

  (It is your compassion that gives them hope.)

  Is that so wrong?

  (Yes. It is wrong to offer hope where none should exist.)

  The beast nearly killed me.

  (You killed the beast.)

  Yes.

  (Bête Noire).

  The Black Beast.

  (The BOY.)

  NO!

  The monster had shredded his leg as he lost consciousness; shredded it—bone and all—as if it were made of rice paper. Stole his leg before he could place the Crucifix of Ardincaple deep into the creature’s dark heart.

  “Have I had any…has, has anyone come by?”

  “Yes, Father. Another priest. He came at noon, each of the first three days. I haven’t seen him since,” the doctor said.

  “Did he say anything to you? His name?”

  “Father Rule.”

  “Did he leave any word?”

  Rashid smiled. “For another time, Father. You need rest.”

  “Please,” Father Macaulay asked him.

  The doctor moved to a cabinet and opened it. He returned with something in his outstretched hand.

  “He left you an envelope. And he said to tell you to be well.”

  Macaulay took the letter. When the doctor moved across the small ward to look at another patient, he opened the parchment.

  Father Macaulay,

  First, my prayers for you; that you might reconcile what was lost these three nights prior, my old friend. Appendages pale in comparison to human life. We’ve seen many things together, you and I, but I fear our partnership (and not our friendship) has come to an end. You well know I will not be able to protect you from the votes any longer. The Church no longer accepts your doctrines, Father. Nor mine, I suppose, but I’m better at keeping them secret.

  In some ways I pray that the doctor is correct, and that your memory has abandoned you—and that it might stay so. It would be a blessing, my friend, to forget. The images of our final quest together will assault me for all my time in this world and the next. Indeed I’m afraid there is no absolution for what we have done. Poor, poor Ramzi. You did what was necessary; we both know that. But the ramifications.

  I have your journal. And your crucifix. It did not seem safe, nor prudent, to leave them with you. When you are well—when we see each other again—I will return them. Your secrets will be well-protected whilst in my care. All God’s blessings to you, Mac.

  Ever yours,

  Father Rule

  “Deliver those who are being taken

  away to death, and those who are

  staggering to slaughter,

  O hold them back…”

  ~Proverbs 24:11-12

  CHAPTER ONE

  Colorado, 2011

  THE COLORADO State Penitentiary is one hundred and fifty miles from downtown Denver. The drive took me a little over three hours, a journey through the explosion of early summer, along highways hewed through the hypnotic, incandescent glory of the Rocky Mountain backlands. The traffic thinned after I left Interstate 25, taking US-50 westward out of Pueblo.

  The CSP is in Canon City, at the eastern end of the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River. It was a peaceful journey through the slopes of Ponderosa Pine, splashed with the early summer bloom of purple Locoweed with its coiled fruits and fleshy, pale-green stems mottled with red.

  I pulled the fully restored ‘51 International L-110 pickup into a spot marked “visitor” and throttled her twice before turning off the ignition. The engine ticked rhythmically against the still morning.

  It was shaping up as a warm June day in Colorado, the sun blistering white in a calm, cloudless, ocean-blue sky. My old forearm crutch rides in the gun rack in the rear window, one rung above the ghost of my father’s Remington Model 700 Classic.

  That gun traveled in this truck, hunting season or not, right up until the lymphoma finished feasting on his insides and he gave the gun to my brother, the truck to me, and died.

  Paddy Macaulay died as he lived: no fanfare, fuss, or notoriety. He pulled the death card, stretched the hand as long as he could on the measly ante he got from the county, and met the end with the soft dignity of the old Scottish lad he was. Mom was gone ten years by then and he told me that he’d go for as long as God would have it, but he missed her, and he wasn’t the kind to call a misdeal.

  I hadn’t used the crutch in years, not since the first of several prosthetics for highly active above-knee amputees such as military personnel, firefighters, cops, and the like.

  As I moved up the walkway I removed my sunglasses, squinting hard against the angry brilliance of the high altitude sun. The rays felt like a frying pan on the skin. It was only ten in the morning and maybe seventy-five degrees but there was already a thin film of sweat on my forehead and my armpits were damp. I squeezed the brim of a well-worn Bemidji State hockey cap and pulled it over my eyes.

  The first months following the loss of my leg required a kind of determination I really didn’t think I had—the kind that requires a long excavation. The tools we find for such work are not modern and well-honed but crude implements, forged from furnaces in the dank, rancid cellars of the soul where the only fuel is loss and despair and the consuming fear of never having things back the way they used to be.

  “Bobby Mac,” the familiar face at the desk said as I entered the reception area.

  Nate Sanders, a hulking, 280-pound black man with enormous mutton chop sideburns and an effeminate, tiny voice had joined the Sheriff’s Department about the same time I was getting out of the academy.

  “Nate.” I accepted his meaty paw and shook it firmly.

  Our sons used to play ice hockey in the same youth league. He was divorced around the same time my wife Isabel died.

  “So Cole plays college hockey,” Nate said, gesturing to the cap.

  “For the Beavers, yeah. I still don’t get that game, though.”

  “Hoops was your game, Mac. On two legs or one, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “We adjust, Nate. We play the cards.”

  “You here for Durning?”

  “Yeah. His sister—Lucinda—she asked me to come up early. Said Durning really needs to see me. She asked for the favor.”

  Sanders shrugged. “His sister? Go figure. I’ll need your piece and your phone.”

  I handed over the Beretta 96 Brigadier Inox 40 caliber from my holster and signed the register. Nate gave me a special visitor’s badge that told the other corrections officers and trustees I was a cop. I also pulled my DPD badge and clipped it to my belt.

  “Those Italians sure can make a piece, can’t they,” Nate said, admiring the stainless steel pistol. “Twelve shots?”

  “Yeah, eleven in the mag, one in the chute. Faster reload with the beveled magazine. Also has the reinforced slides.”

  “This is the forty-caliber Smith and Wesson they made for INS?”

  “Yep. What’s up with Durning, Nate? He find Jesus or something?”

  “Dunno. I guess he wants to mak
e amends,” Nate said, shaking his head and buzzing the next gate. “I say to hell with him. Tonight he goes.”

  “Thanks, Nate,” I said, and attached the CSP badge to my shirt pocket.

  “You take care, Mac. Tell your son ‘hey’.”

  Cole was home for the summer, staying at the house. We didn’t have a lot to say to each other.

  I nodded and moved through the first gate.

  Another guard met me and escorted me down a long sterile corridor, through another checkpoint, and to a door that opened into a large courtyard. We crossed through under the perfect azure sky, past two corrections officers who supervised the activity of a solitary maximum-security prisoner, shackled in full restraints and chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.

  One of the beefy guards nodded behind mirrored twenty-dollar shades and stared. They couldn’t turn from the one-legged sideshow.

  I was used to it.

  “Work here long?” I asked, making idle chatter.

  “Almost there,” replied the officer.

  Life for a death row inmate at the CSP consisted of twenty-three hours in an isolated cell, one hour per day for shower and exercise. All meals, visitors, and bathroom functions happened during the twenty-three hours cell-bound. No exceptions other than the infirmary or the morgue.

  The CSP had a special segregation unit called the Execution Suite. During warrant week, a seven-day period established by the governor, the condemned prisoner was moved to the Execution Suite to await delivery of sentence by lethal injection.

  Eb Durning was scheduled to ride the river at twenty-one hundred hours.

  9PM.

  We entered the interior of Hotel California—so called by the hacks and cons—through a large, double-shielded door with another gated checkpoint. I was asked to sign a second register and also to read a short list of dos and don’ts.

  “You’re the guy,” the officer at the station desk said.