The nightmare at manhatt.., p.1
The Nightmare at Manhattan Beach (A Thomas Austin Crime Thriller Book 7), page 1
THE NIGHTMARE AT MANHATTAN BEACH
A THOMAS AUSTIN CRIME THRILLER
BOOK 8
D.D. BLACK
A Note on Setting
While many locations in this book are true to life, some details of the settings have been changed.
Only one character in these pages exists in the real world: Thomas Austin’s corgi, Run. Her personality mirrors that of my own corgi, Pearl. Any other resemblances between characters in this book and actual people is purely coincidental. In other words, I made them all up.
Thanks for reading,
D.D. Black
CONTENTS
I. Shadows Of Home
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
II. A Special Kind Of Anguish
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
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
III. Dig Two Graves
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
A Note From the Author
Also by D.D. Black
About D.D. Black
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.
- Paul Gauguin
A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.
- Francis Bacon
He who pursues revenge should dig two graves—one of them for himself.
- Old proverb
PART 1
SHADOWS OF HOME
CHAPTER ONE
Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn
“Hey Carlos, look at those businessmen playing tag,” Aurelio said.
Disappointed that his brother didn’t look up from his screen, Aurelio dug his toes into the sand. He continued watching through squinted eyes as the two men ran down the beach. They were wearing dark pants and fancy-looking jackets. Suits like the ones daddy wore five days a week when he took the train from their Brooklyn apartment into Manhattan to make money. The man who was “It” was about twenty feet behind the one who was running away, but neither of them looked to be having any fun.
As usual, Aurelio’s older brother Carlos wasn’t paying any attention to him. Instead, he was immersed in the game he’d recently downloaded onto his Nintendo Switch: Viking Battles 3. In the game, you sailed around the seas looking for treasure and battling sea monsters and anyone else who got in your way. And you got to drink mead and say “SKOLL” a lot, which was awesome.
Aurelio created a little boy character named “Golden Soul the Enchanted,” but Carlos had deleted it while he was sleeping. Carlos was a berserker character. In the game and real life, too.
Even though Aurelio had only gotten to play it a few times, he already considered Viking Battles 3 the coolest game ever. And not just because he’d heard his older brother say the same.
The men, who had started far down the beach near a big wooden warehouse, were now coming in their direction, though they were closer to the water. Aurelio loved tag and he promised himself that when he was older he’d still wear shorts and t-shirts when he played. He’d never play tag in a suit.
Dad was only a short distance away—pacing next to a park bench a few feet from the sand—and Aurelio could hear him shouting money stuff into the phone: stocks, bonds, and something called ‘derivatives,’ which made Aurelio think of math for some reason. Dad had only taken them to Manhattan Beach once before. That time he’d been on his phone most of the time, and this time he’d taken a call within five minutes of their arrival. Still, mom said dad had to work on weekends sometimes because he had a very important job.
Aurelio tried looking at the screen of Carlos’s Switch, but his brother snarled and angled it away, using his body as a shield. It was supposed to be their Nintendo Switch, but Carlos treated it like it was his.
Aurelio thought of something. “I heard that Viking Battles 3 has a glitch where you can get infinite lives,” he said, excited to know something about the game that Carlos didn’t. “Saw about it on YouTube.”
Carlos sighed. “Everyone knows about that glitch. It’s like two weeks old. Quiet, FEEF-uhl, I just got to the Cave of Eternal Treasures.”
“What?” Aurelio didn’t know what feef-uhl meant, but he suspected it wasn’t something nice. Again he tried to see the screen, but Carlos turned away.
He hated being the little brother. Carlos always got to control the Switch and seemed to know everything about everything. Aurelio was almost six and that made him over halfway to ten which meant he knew a few things, too.
He stood and walked a few paces down the beach. He kicked the sand. In the few times he’d played, he’d never even gotten to the Land of Urothea.
“Dad said stay on the steps!” Carlos barked, not looking up from the game.
Aurelio ignored him and glanced at his dad, who was walking tiny laps around the bench and looking worried. Or maybe angry. He had the kind of look in his eye that meant he was doing important money stuff.
The two men chased each other until they were even with Carlos and Aurelio on the beach, though now they were on the wet sand very close to the water.
Aurelio shoved his hands in the pockets of his swim shorts. “Why…” He wanted to ask Carlos again why two grown men would be playing tag in dark brown pants and jackets, but then he had another thought.
Maybe they weren’t playing tag.
No, they definitely weren’t. The second man was trying to catch the first because they were fighting. “Carlos, I think they’re fighting.”
The man in front had short black hair on his head and face and, just after passing them, he angled up the beach toward the steps and the road. In his mind, Aurelio started thinking of him as Black Hair the Fearful. The other man—the one who was “It” if they had been playing tag—was a little larger, with long flowing blond hair kind of like Aurelio’s mom. He was missing one shoe, his round face was red and sweaty and—now that Aurelio could see it—angry. Aurelio began thinking of him as Red Face the Conqueror.
“Carlos?”
His brother didn’t answer.
Aurelio looked for his father, who was now a little further away, shouting something about ROI and buyouts and leveraging capital without diluting shares and tanking the stock price. To Aurelio, it all sounded like made up stuff. And not fun made up stuff like in Viking Battles 3.
Black Hair the Fearful reached the stairs and bounded up the first two, but tripped on the third, allowing Red Face the Conqueror to catch up. Red Face lunged for Black Hair, but missed as Black Hair rolled to the side. Aurelio heard Black Hair shout one of the bad words his dad often yelled into the phone. Something that Mom would scold him for saying, which didn’t seem fair.
Red Face adjusted and jumped on top of Black Hair. For a second he thought the men might start wrestling, like Uthar and Moki did in Viking Battles 3 after slaying the Golden Kraken.
But then the men started punching each other.
Aurelio got scared.
They really were fighting!
Red Face punched Black Hair right in the face.
Black Hair started bleeding from his nose. It was worse than the fights in the video game. Aurelio wanted to yell "Stop!" but he didn't. No one listened to six-year-olds anyway.
They tussled again, but Red Face fell and Black Hair leapt up, blood streaming down his face, and ran toward a row of houses and businesses along the road.
“Carlos, look.” Aurelio said, but not loud enough for his brother to hear. Without even thinking about it, he’d wandered up the steps toward the men, away from his brother.
Aurelio’s feet kept following the men. But when they crossed the road, he didn’t. He wasn’t allowed. He stopped under a tree and watched as Black Hair skidded to a stop in front of a white truck. He began fumbling from pocket to pocket, probably looking for his keys.
He was too late.
Red Face reached him and grabbed his neck, then pushed him toward one of the buildings, which looked to be an old house with a pizzeria on the bottom floor.
Aurelio knew that when people died in real life, they didn’t drop all the treasure and weapons they’d accumulated throughout the game, but he didn’t know what did happen. He looked both ways, then ran across the street, staying far away from the men but unable to contain his curiosity.
Aurelio's heart was beating fast as he inched closer to the window. He wished the men would stop fighting. He stood on his tip-toes and peeked in. Red Face had Black Hair in a headlock, dragging him through an open doorway and around a corner.
Everything had gone quiet. Aurelio could no longer see anything.
He glanced back in the direction of his family. Carlos’s face was still glued to the screen. His dad hadn’t even noticed that he’d crossed the street. He couldn’t hear his dad’s words, but saw his mouth moving angrily.
Then he heard an electric buzzing sound from inside the building.
And a scream that was worse than anything he’d heard in any video game.
CHAPTER TWO
“Damn!” Thomas Austin tossed his cellphone on the bed and looked around his cheap, barren hotel room.
The place had a double bed, a threadbare carpet, and a nightstand with a busted alarm clock and a small lamp topped with a lampshade gashed down the side like it had been in a knife fight. The one small, dirty window was covered by a frayed, mustard-colored curtain.
He’d been in Brooklyn for three days now, and after hitting dead end after dead end in his investigation, he was running out of leads.
Through his investigative efforts he’d come up with four names. The first three were Christopher Palini, Gretchen Voohrees, and Jackson Baker. He was certain that all three were connected to the Namgung crime family and the massive conspiracy that kept them in business.
But it turned out that having names was not enough—not nearly enough.
The fourth name on his list was Jorge Diaz Lopez, a former FBI agent and the reason he’d come to Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, in the first place. He’d found evidence that his wife had been having an affair with Jorge, but it turned out she’d been working with him to bring down the Namgungs along with the corrupt elements of the NYPD and FBI, allowing them to operate. The “evidence” of the affair had been concocted to cover their tracks.
Jorge had confirmed that the other three were involved, but hadn’t been able to help beyond that. Palini was the Bureau Chief of Organized Crime Control. He used his position to control investigations into the Namgungs and steer cops away from their operations. Jackson Baker was an NYPD sergeant who did Palini's dirty work—intimidating witnesses, destroying evidence, and sometimes outright murdering those who threatened to expose the conspiracy. Gretchen Voohrees was an FBI analyst, blackmailed into manipulating data to hide the scope of the Namgung's crimes.
He’d gotten in touch with some of his old FBI contacts to dig up information on Palini, but they warned him off, saying it was too dangerous to go sniffing around. Approaching Voohrees was a dead end too—she had disappeared without a trace after being suspended six months ago. And efforts to locate Baker through his former NYPD colleagues led nowhere; no one was willing to share anything concrete and Austin feared that, like Voohrees, he might be in the wind. He was chasing men and women involved in possibly the biggest corruption case in the history of the FBI and NYPD. And whoever was running the thing had done a good job covering it up.
One of the problems he’d encountered was that all three were not only well-respected members of law enforcement, they were also respected in their communities. One old friend from the NYPD had told him of Palini: “Look, man, I don’t know what to tell you. Is he corrupt? Probably. But he’s not Dr. Evil sitting up in a lair. He’s a regular guy—a community leader who paid for a new ballfield for the little league—who might also happen to be deeply corrupt as well. Things aren’t that black and white. Haven’t seen him for a month or two, but even if I had, I wouldn’t risk my job by going after him.”
That was the call that made Austin toss his phone on the bed. Al Capone was famous for funding soup kitchens during the Great Depression, too. Giving to charity didn’t mean one wasn’t also a murdering psychopath.
He needed a walk.
The elevator was being repaired, so he took the stairs down three flights and stepped out of the hotel, heading toward the beach.
As Austin meandered past rows of brick townhouses and limestone apartment buildings, he caught fleeting glimpses that reminded him of his years living in the area. Through the half-drawn blinds of a first-floor window, a woman watered a jungle of houseplants, their leaves glistening like emeralds. A few people barked into cellphones, others sat on benches reading, some hurried in and out of cars. Parents pushed pastel-colored strollers while elderly couples sauntered leisurely and store owners stood in their doorways in the morning light, taking in the day.
The neighborhood was a blend of urban vitality and coastal tranquility, much busier than the solitary calm of his little beach town of Hansville, Washington. But this little Brooklyn neighborhood was also a lot more tranquil than the chaotic, pulsing city of Manhattan across the water.
Turning a corner, he stumbled upon a small, leafy park nestled between buildings. A basketball court, its paint faded by time, was the centerpiece, alive with the laughter and playful shouts of teenagers playing a weekend pickup game. On a nearby bench, under the dappled shade of an old oak, an elderly man was engrossed in his newspaper. A frail-looking teenager walked a giant black Labrador. Or was the Labrador walking him?
Austin missed Run, his corgi. She was at home being watched by Kendall Shaw, a new detective in the Kitsap Sheriff’s Department with whom he’d worked on a case that had ended only days ago. It felt like weeks. Maybe months.
That meant it felt like decades ago that he’d first understood that his wife’s final piece of writing—which he’d thought was the beginning of a novel—was actually related to her death. For a year he’d sat with her typewriter in his spare room, the cryptic sentences the only piece left of what he thought was her first attempt at becoming a crime novelist.
It had read:
Michael Lee Kim strolled into the parking lot of his favorite Korean restaurant in Brooklyn at 7 PM on a Tuesday. He went to Mama Dae’s once a week for their grilled steak and kimchi. He’d never lived in Korea, but the meal made him think of his grandma, who passed away when he was ten. He’d worn his lucky shirt—an authentic David Bowie shirt from The Serious Moonlight Tour—because he was meeting a date. The date, Megan, turned out to be a stand-in for the Namgung crime family, and she was there to steal his identity, then kill him.
He’d chased leads stemming from those words for over a year and now here he was, wandering through a remote section of Brooklyn with little to show for it.
He inhaled deeply, taking in the savory aroma of charred meat from someone's backyard smoker intertwined with the sweet, almost tangy hint of the ocean breeze. Between the narrow gaps of the buildings, he caught sight of the shimmering waters of the Atlantic.
“Aaaaoooooohhhhhhh.” A low, moaning scream came from around the corner. Not a scream, exactly. More of a guttural cry of anguish.
It came again and Austin hurried toward the sound and found it coming from a homeless man sitting next to a garbage can. He was wrapped in a thick jacket that appeared much too warm for the day. His face was like beaten, creased leather, and a little broken mandolin lay on his lap.
