Measureless Night (Ash Rashid Book 4) Read online

  Also by Chris Culver

  Stand-alone novels:

  Nine Years Gone

  Just Run

  Ash Rashid novels:

  The Abbey

  The Outsider

  By Any Means

  Measureless Night

  MEASURELESS NIGHT

  * * *

  Chris Culver

  MEASURELESS NIGHT

  All Rights Reserved © 2015 by Chris Culver

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Chris Culver

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Connect with Chris Culver online

  About The Author

  Measureless Night

  Chapter 1

  Water, the last vestiges of a snow shower earlier that day, slid across salt-encrusted sidewalks to the street before settling and freezing in potholes, forming oily black mirrors in the roadway. The flicker of a television danced through the curtains of an American four-square half a block away, the only sign of life on an otherwise dark night. It was an aberration from what she had seen on the previous seven nights but not enough of one to forestall their plans; likely, the television’s owner—an elderly woman who lived alone and whose children rarely visited—had merely fallen asleep with it on.

  Inside their vehicle, Carla could still smell the hand lotion she had put on that afternoon, the cheap aftershave Jacob had lathered on that morning, and the stale remnants of coffee in the mug to her side. Rarely did she feel as alive as she did in moments like this, when adrenaline coursed through her body, heightening her senses. Though she had tried every drug her husband had pushed to his less than discriminating clients, adrenaline was Carla’s favorite. It reminded her of the power she had inside her, the power of life and death.

  Their vehicle was off, had been off for several hours now. Carla preferred to work alone, but she couldn’t do the job by herself. She needed help, and Jacob, her stepson, willingly obliged. Michelle Washington, their victim, had light brown skin and hopeful brown eyes that seemed to say nothing bad had ever happened to her. She had the body of a runner, with small breasts, thin hips, and skin stretched taut over the muscles of her arms and legs.

  By day, she worked as a social worker for the city, and at night, she slept alone in an antique queen-sized bed with an olive green comforter. She had spent the evening at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and had been dropped off by a friend, Detective Ash Rashid, a few minutes ago, only to leave again and walk to her brother’s house two blocks away. There, she’d meet her parents and her brother for their weekly Wednesday night supper. Neither Michelle nor Dante nor Ash knew it, but they all had a role to play in the events to come, and they were all dead in theory, if not in fact.

  Michelle, the most difficult of the kills Carla had planned, would die first, but she and Jacob had lined the dominos up weeks ago. Now they needed a push.

  Carla glanced at Jacob out of the corner of her eye. He stared intently at Michelle’s house, just as he had for each of the previous seven nights. They hadn’t stayed in the same spot each night, not even on the same street, but she knew the area well. The interstate lay a mere four blocks from the house, the cabin in the Morgan-Monroe State Forest where they planned to extract what they needed from Michelle lay an hour’s drive from that, and the dumping ground near the Boy Scout camp on the northeast side of Indianapolis lay a little over an hour from the cabin. They didn’t have long to wait, but she still had to find tricks to pass the time without losing her edge.

  “Do you ever read, Jacob?” asked Carla, breaking the silence for the first time since their vigil began.

  “Like books?”

  “Yes, books,” she said, casting her gaze out the window. “Novels, maybe. Something for fun, at least.”

  He looked at her and put his hands on the steering wheel. “No.”

  She nodded, expecting that answer. “I’ve been reading some lately. Did you like killing that girl in Kansas?”

  The girl in Kansas, twenty-seven-year-old Zoe Dawson, was a newly-engaged single mother who lived in a very cute, historic bungalow near the intersection of Twenty-Fourth Street and Washington Boulevard in the Kansas side of Kansas City. Carla didn’t think of herself as cruel, and she wouldn’t have chosen Zoe, a woman with so much life to look forward to, had she not fit the profile so well. Twenty-seven years old, five foot four, and a hundred twenty-five pounds, she could have been Michelle Washington’s twin. She provided the perfect opportunity to practice, and while her death was unfortunate, the real tragedy was her son, who had woken up at precisely the wrong time and come into the room at precisely the wrong moment.

  Carla had lit a candle for both of them in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis on the way back to Indianapolis.

  “The girl with the kid?” asked Jacob.

  “Did you kill anyone else in Kansas City and not tell me?” she asked, smiling sweetly.

  “No,” said Jacob, quickly.

  “It’s a simple question, then,” said Carla, looking out the window. “Did you like killing her? Was it fun to corner her and see her cry?”

  He glanced over but immediately looked back at the house. “What the hell kind of question is that?”

  “I’m just curious. I only have my experience to go on, but a couple of the books I’ve read recently describe it as being an almost sexual experience. I wondered if it was like that for everybody.”

  Jacob shook his head. “No. It wasn’t fun. It was…too wet.”

  It had been Jacob’s first time practicing his knife work, and he hadn’t been very sure of himself. As unpleasant as it had been, she needed to make sure he could do the job. Theoretically, she knew anyone who could channel enough force through an ax could cut someone’s hand off, but she had never seen it done before. Jacob certainly had the strength, but she didn’t know if he had the will. Would he run when their victim screamed? Would he demand they call 911 rather than watch her bleed to death? Before she could move forward, she had needed those questions answered. Thankfully, he had obliged.

  Truthfully, Jacob’s trepidation had surprised her. It was so unlike his father, her husband. Many of the men she knew—her husband among them—seemed to enjo
y killing people. Carla didn’t relish the job, but she understood its necessity. Few messages were as effective as those written in blood.

  Michelle would be the fifth murder Carla had been involved with. The first had been sixteen years ago, a drug dealer named Reggie Johnson. She had been in high school then, barely through her ugly duckling stage, and she was still trying to find herself.

  Reggie specialized in large-quantity deals, so he worked mostly with other dealers, Carla included. She liked the money provided by her illicit career, but more than that, she liked the thrill of it and the control it gave her over others. The day he died, Reggie had worn a black leather jacket, a black turtleneck sweatshirt, and a pair of jeans. It happened in the parking lot of a fast-food joint near I-65, southeast of the city. Supposedly, Carla and her boyfriend had come for a routine resupply of the marijuana Carla sold to her fellow students at George Washington Community High School. David Something-or-other—Carla couldn’t remember his actual name now—shot Reggie twice in the chest with a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun.

  She hadn’t anticipated it going that way, though she knew David had brought a shotgun with him. Sometimes fate has a way of bringing good things to people who deserve them. Before driving there, she told David that Reggie had sexually assaulted her during a previous drug deal. She explained to him that she couldn’t tell the police because they’d demand to know how and why she and Reggie knew each other, nor could she tell another responsible adult. She was on her own, with just her boyfriend to protect her.

  In fact, Reggie hadn’t touched her at all. Had he merely done that, she could have forgiven him…if given suitable recompense. No, Reggie died because he had asked to die, begged for it really. He called her fat. He had said it aloud to one of his partners, right where she could hear it as she climbed out of her car for a re-up near her high school. You know Carla. The chubby one. That’s what he had said, explaining who he planned to meet. Reggie’s partner looked right at her and nodded. Carla hadn’t said anything at the time, not that Reggie would have cared either way, but she couldn’t forget it. It was so carelessly cruel.

  Carla and David drove out to that Wendy’s parking lot on a cold February afternoon to teach Reggie a lesson, but when they showed up, Reggie saw that shotgun and pulled his own weapon, a black revolver, from his pocket and raised it toward her. Despite witnesses, David fired without hesitation, killing Reggie on the spot. Had she known his loyalty ran that deep, she would have slept with him one final time as a thank you.

  David didn’t try to run after the shooting. He simply put his shotgun on the ground, laced his fingers behind his head, and sat down. Despite an extensive interrogation, and despite being charged with murder, he never mentioned Carla’s name. Not once. David Something-or-other, her dashing hero to the end. She really wished she could remember his name; his sacrifice would seem so much nobler that way.

  The second murder was both simpler and more complicated. Carla’s father was one of the most inept petty criminals in the city and, normally, neither of them cared what the other did. But then in her senior year of high school, her father’s drug use increased and he started openly bringing home strays—girls, some the same age as Carla, some of whom she even knew—he picked up in bars around town. The neighbors started talking, raising questions not only about her father’s misadventures but also about her. She lost customers, but she could deal with that. Then, her father knocked up one of his girlfriends, which decided his fate.

  On an average weekend, her father snorted an eighth of an ounce of cocaine. He bought it from a kid who worked a street corner near his parole officer’s office. The product was garbage. Good coke, the kind a quality dealer sells, is roughly seventy-percent pure and won’t have any harmful additives. Her dad’s coke was probably twenty- to thirty-percent pure and had likely been cut with lidocaine, a commonly available anesthetic that simulated the numbing effect of real cocaine.

  Carla, one Friday afternoon, decided to give her dad a taste of the good stuff. She bought a quarter of an ounce of a very good product and purified it further herself with an acetone wash. By the time she finished, she had an eighth of an ounce of extremely refined cocaine, a product somewhere between three and four times the strength her father had grown accustomed to. She swapped his drugs for her own and cheerfully met some friends at the local movie theater. When she came back, she found her father slumped over a cat-scratched coffee table in the living room, dead. The police questioned her about her father’s associates and friends, and she happily gave up everyone. The police arrested her father’s dealer and convicted him of a number of charges, including involuntary manslaughter. Even though he hadn’t harmed her father, he deserved the prison time. Selling the junk he did, he harmed the business for everyone.

  As strange as it felt to say, Carla found killing her father to be the most satisfying thing she had ever done. She felt proud of herself for it. She got away with murder, something very few people can say, and she did it for a good reason. She kept her father from knocking up any other unsuspecting idiot girls, and she managed to remove a drug dealer from the streets in the bargain. The world needed people like her, people willing to do the necessary thing at the appropriate time. If that meant she gained something as a result, all for the better.

  A car passed their vehicle, its tires hissing on the damp asphalt. In some neighborhoods, that might have been enough for Carla to call the night off. But not here. Not where the homes were so old they had been built with carriage houses too small to hold a modern vehicle. Everyone parked on the street. She and Jacob blended into the shadows and the night itself.

  The minutes stretched into an hour, and Jacob’s breath grew more and more shallow and rapid. At some point, he started bouncing his foot on the floorboards. Carla understood his nervousness the same way a blind man might have understood the color red. She had read about and heard others talk about their nervous experiences, but the actual feeling was as foreign to her as the landscape of the moon.

  Then, Michelle appeared, brandishing the sort of genuine grin that had escaped Carla despite years of practice. It was something in the eyes, she supposed. Michelle’s black, thick hair bounced as she walked. A happy young lady returning home from a family get-together, perfectly content and perfectly ignorant of the threat in front of her or the sin that had given rise to it. Lost in her own world, they’d take her easily.

  She and Jacob left the car at the same time, pretending to argue. Carla held a map and Jacob scowled. It felt colder than usual that night, and a breeze whistled through the leafless limbs of nearby trees. Jacob had his mother’s thin, wiry build. He wouldn’t intimidate anyone, but he could take care of himself in a fight. He had proved that in Kansas, removing Zoe’s hand with a hatchet while Carla held her down. They carried few supplies between them. A compact semiautomatic firearm for emergencies, polypropylene gloves, a rather expensive cell phone purchased from a convenience store with which they could make anonymous calls. Their primary tools were their brains. Carla preferred it that way.

  They caught Michelle as she opened the front door to the house, safety just beyond her grasp.

  “Excuse me,” called Carla, waving from the sidewalk. “I hate to bother you, but my brother and I are lost.”

  Michelle huddled behind the storm door as if it were some kind of shield.

  “Where are you trying to go?”

  Carla folded the map in on itself and strode forward. Jacob followed a few steps behind her.

  “We’re supposed to meet a friend of mine from college,” she said. “I’m in the right neighborhood, I think. This is Irvington, right? My cell’s dead, and all I’ve got is this stupid map I printed from the Internet.”

  Even though Carla and Jacob kept coming forward, Michelle’s face relaxed a little.

  “What street are you looking for? I might be able to point you in the right direction, at least.”

  “Thank you so much,” said Carla, smiling and walking the
rest of the way to the house. As soon as she reached the stoop, she held out her map with one hand while reaching to the weapon at her waist with the other. “I’m looking for Maple Lane. My map says it should be just up the street, but I can’t find it.”

  “You’re fairly close, actually,” said Michelle, her voice brightening. “Go to the end of my road and hang a left onto Poplar. It’ll intersect Maple in just a block or two.”

  Carla smiled broadly and let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you so much. I need you to do one more favor for me, and I need you to stay calm. Can you do that?”

  Michelle’s back stiffened. She seemed to hold her breath, but then she nodded.

  “I need you to walk back into your house as if you’ve just asked us inside,” said Carla, moving the map to expose the barrel of her firearm. “If you don’t, I will shoot you. We’re going to follow you in. If you listen to us, we won’t hurt anyone.”

  Michelle took a step back and swept her arm to the side. “What do you want?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  Chapter 2

  In my defense, it didn’t start as an unmitigated disaster. By the project’s halfway point, though, I’d say I was well on my way toward it. Bits and pieces of my wife’s rocking chair—the one her grandmother had rocked her mother in, the one she and I had rocked our kids in every night of the first few months of their lives—lay strewn across my garage floor, while my daughter sat two feet away from me on the other end of my maple workbench, her feet dangling in midair and a curiously understanding expression on her face.

  “Ummi’s going to be mad.”

  I wiped sawdust and wood glue onto my jeans and stepped back from the products of my labor, marveling at Megan’s gift for understatement.

  “Yep.”

  “You should have taken a picture before you took it apart.”