Ice Cold Death Read online

  Ice Cold Death

  Alexes Razevich

  Razor Street Publishing

  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

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Also by Alexes Razevich

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2018 Alexes Razevich

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidently and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author. Requests for permission should be sent to [email protected].

  ASIN: B07C19P2TH

  Created with Vellum

  1

  Brad Keel was deader than dead.

  He lay on the ice rink, his blank eyes staring at the wooden beamed ceiling, his hands clutched around the broken hockey stick jutting from his gut. It wasn’t the stick that killed him though. Most likely death had come from the nasty gash across his throat.

  Blood had gushed from the wound, spraying out and pooling to either side of his body. It could have been cut by a dull knife, that ragged gash, but my bet was on the blade of an ice hockey skate. It was an ugly way to die.

  “Man,” Tosh, our team captain, said. All his shock and horror lay exposed in that one word.

  He and some guy I didn’t know stood near me by the glass wall that surrounded the small ice rink. Behind us, in the dressing area, my teammates sat on long, scarred wooden benches or stood, arms folded across their bodies, some leaning against a bank of gray metal lockers on the back wall. Hockey bags lay scattered at their feet.

  “Man,” Tosh said again. “Someone was pissed as fuck at Brad.”

  I exhaled a long slow breath. He wasn’t wrong.

  I cast my senses out but there was no trace of who had done this—no lingering anger so potent I could chase it to its source, no traceable guilt or regret, no psychic scent left behind.

  Joe Lopez, who ran the Zamboni and had opened the rink for us at 5:30 this morning, was on his cell to 911. I heard him giving vague details—“No, a team had booked the ice for an early morning practice is all. We found the body together, at the same time. Yes. No.” His voice shook. His hand holding the cell phone shook.

  He gave the rink location, pressed the call off, and stowed his phone in one of the pockets of his dark-green cargo shorts.

  The sudden silence—broken only by the occasional cough or shuffling of a hockey bag—was downright eerie inside a darkened shopping mall, the small ice rink the only area lit. I looked across the ice to the glass tables and wire back chairs on the far side where fans and family could sit. Beyond them was a restaurant, closed now, that did a good business with kids’ skating birthday parties and shoppers. To my left were the usual retail stores you’d expect, though I couldn’t make out the names in the gloom.

  Finally Tosh said, “I guess we’re not getting any ice time in this morning.”

  A couple of the guys said, “No,” or “Doesn’t look like it,” but mostly people only talked in low tones to the person next to them, all of us wondering what came next.

  The team had shown up at this ungodly early hour for a between-seasons practice. The Rink Rats were a stable team with very little turnover. We’d all known each other for years and the guys more or less accepted me, the only woman on the team in a sport that was definitely male dominated, as just another skater.

  The only stranger was a guy who looked to be a few years older than me—I guessed twenty-seven, twenty-eight at a stretch—who’d come to substitute in net since our regular goalie was on his honeymoon.

  I kept my thoughts to myself. Even with no psychic fingerprints on the murdered man, the violence and death vibe swirling around was making my head ache and my stomach cramp. There’s lots of upside to being psychic and an empath, but there’s equal downsides. Feeling Brad Keel’s surprise turn to fear and then to pain as he was murdered wasn’t something I could talk to the guys about. They’d think I was nuts.

  Vertigo hit me suddenly and hard. I swayed on my feet. The substitute goalie, the one person I didn’t already know, grabbed my shoulders to steady me. The instant his hands closed on my shoulders, I felt the magic pulsing through him. I probably would have felt it earlier if seeing Brad’s body hadn’t sucked up all my attention.

  “You’re a wizard?” I muttered as he gently moved me to one of the small wooden benches the rink provided instead of locker rooms.

  I felt him stiffen ever so slightly as he eased me onto the bench. No one watching would have noticed, but I felt it. So, the answer was yes.

  I sank down on the bench.

  Tosh took a step toward me. “Hey, Oona. You okay?”

  I waved him off with a small hand gesture.

  The stranger-goalie was hunkered down over his heels next to me. “You sure you’re okay? You look pale.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t okay. The vertigo was overwhelming. Visions of the murder flooded my mind.

  The clock read three thirteen. The night sky outside was cloudy and charcoal gray. A small breeze blew. Brad was laughing as his companion unlocked the mall’s door. Both men had ice skates slung over their shoulders and hockey sticks in their hands but weren’t carrying bags—so they hadn’t brought the rest of the usual equipment. They stepped inside the dark building. Brad’s companion flipped on the light over the rink.

  I sniffed and smelled the marijuana they’d smoked earlier. Both were still feeling the effects.

  And then they were on the small rink, skating hard against each other, the way friendly rivals do. I couldn’t see a face for Brad’s companion, but there was something off about him—a weird sort of doubling—as though he were out of phase with himself. His aura was doubled, too, somehow, the muddy forest green of jealousy and resentment overlaid with an oscillating black of non-forgiveness. One person could show both, but something felt twinned about this guy, as if his dark emotions weren’t his alone.

  I felt his fury growing stronger as they skated. There was history between these two, history Brad wanted to put aside. His companion reveled in his anger, stoked it with harsh memories I couldn’t catch hold of enough to know their source.

  The companion stole the puck from Brad and laughed cold and hard. Annoyed, Brad hacked hard at the other man’s stick, breaking it three-quarters of the way down the shaft. The shaft broke unevenly, leaving a sharp jagged point on one side of the break.

  His companion’s fury rose but he hid it, laughing, skating backward, taunting Brad by waving his broken stick like a sword. Brad followed, skating forward, laughing at his friend’s antics until the companion had maneuvered them into the faceoff circle at center ice. The companion stopped then, digging his skate blades into the ice, bending his knees, setting his balance.

  Brad stopped only inches away.
r />   “Sorry about your stick, bro,” Brad said.

  The other man lifted the broken shaft and held it in front of his chest, horizontally in both hands. With a grunt, he shoved the stick hard against Brad’s chest. At the same moment, he swung his right leg around and tripped Brad to the ice.

  “What the hell?” Brad shouted and planted his hands on the ice to lever himself up.

  Before he could, the companion plunged the pointed end of the broken stick into Brad’s gut. Brad grabbed the stick with both hands and tried to pull it free. It was jammed in too deeply and he couldn’t move it. Blood leaked from the wound.

  “Help,” Brad said, his voice cracking.

  The companion stood a moment, staring down at his struggling friend. He skated up toward Brad’s head, lifted his foot and ran his skate blade hard over Brad’s neck.

  Blood spurted from the wound, the spray jetting out across the ice. Brad’s mouth dropped open. Stunned. He kept trying to pull the stick from his chest even as blood was pouring from his neck, his life leaking away.

  His hands on his hips, the companion watched the seconds it took Brad to lapse into unconsciousness, then calmly exited the ice and sat down on a bench.

  I had that odd out of phase sense again, as if I saw him out of focus and doubled. I struggled to see his face but couldn’t get a fix on it. He took off his skates, put on his running shoes, and walked out of the mall, turning off the lights and locking the door behind him.

  On the rink, Brad was already dead.

  I shivered, disgusted to realize that I sat only inches away from where the killer had calmly removed his skates and left Brad to bleed out on the ice. I scooted away to the other end of the bench.

  My team stood around me, concern written on their faces. The sub-goalie/wizard held out a cup of water. I didn’t know where it had come from but was grateful for it.

  The goalie said softly, “You screamed.”

  My face grew hot. I’m the only woman on an ice hockey team with fourteen guys—and I’d screamed like a little girl.

  The paramedics arrived with a stretcher. Through the large glass doors that faced the street, I saw three big, red fire trucks, an ambulance, and a police car. Two cops followed in behind the paramedics. The cops took one look at all of us gathered there and frowned ever so slightly.

  “They’ll split us up for the interviews,” the substitute goalie said. His voice was a near whisper, speaking only to me.

  “You’ve been through this before?”

  He shook his head slightly. “Heard about it from clients.”

  I wanted to know what kind of work he did that people described being interviewed by the police to him. Before I could ask, the shorter of the two cops—his name tag read R. Scott—said, “Is someone in charge of this group?”

  The taller, heavier cop stepped away and pulled out his phone. He spoke too quietly for me to hear what he was saying.

  Most everyone, myself included, looked at Tosh, who shrugged and said, “I’m the team captain.”

  “Good,” Officer Scott said. “We’re calling to have some people come in to help with taking statements. In the meantime, we’ll start speaking with everyone one at a time. What I need you to do,” he made clear eye contact with Tosh, “is keep those who haven’t been interviewed yet from discussing what happened among themselves. Can you do that?”

  Tosh nodded.

  Officer Scott flashed a thin but approving smile. “Can you tell me why you are all here?”

  Tosh glanced at the knot we’d formed, the team unconsciously coming together to support each other.

  “We came for an early practice.”

  Scott wrote in a notebook he carried.

  Why a paper notebook, I wondered. Why not his phone or a tablet?

  “Was the door open or did you have a key?” Officer Scott said.

  Tosh looked at Joe. “He let us in.”

  Scott shifted his gaze. “And you are?”

  “Joe. Uh, Lopez. I drive the Zamboni, keep the place clean, score keep sometimes, help out with rental skates, that sort of thing.”

  Scott nodded and made another scribbling motion in his notepad. “Was the door locked or open?”

  “Locked,” Joe said. “It’s a habit I have, to always try the door before I unlock it. A couple of times kids have broken in and stolen stuff from over there.” He jutted his chin toward the restaurant, protected now by a pull-down metal grate. “I like to be sure no one has gotten inside before me and might still be here.”

  The officer nodded and turned back to Tosh. “Go on.”

  Tosh hiked up his shoulders. “We walked in and saw Brad dead on the ice.”

  Scott didn’t show any outward change, but I felt his interest climb. He motioned with his head for Tosh to follow him and led Tosh around the edge of the rink until they stood near the door we’d come in that morning.

  I strained to hear, but they were too far away. I really wanted to hear that conversation.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw the substitute goalie/wizard muttering to himself. There was a sudden pop in my ears and I heard Tosh and Officer Scott as clearly as if they stood next to me. I shot the wizard a Thank You nod, acknowledging that I’d felt his magic and appreciated him sharing so I could hear what Tosh and the policeman were saying.

  “You knew the victim?” Scott asked.

  “Hockey is a small world. Most of us know each other. Brad played a division up but subbed down occasionally. He subbed for our team over at Bay Harbor, the ice rink on Western, a couple of times last season.”

  Scott glanced back our way, his eye catching on me for some reason. I looked away.

  “So, you all knew him?” Scott said.

  Tosh nodded. “Casually. I don’t think any of us knew him well.”

  My head rang with pain like an anvil being pummeled by a sledgehammer. Leftover tension from the vision. Or maybe an effect of the magic the wizard had sent my way. Or plain old stress. I had some prescription Norco in my purse. Vicious headaches accompanied or followed my visions often enough that I needed something to let me function until they passed. I really wanted to get up and take one.

  The paramedics were on the ice with the body—easier to think of it that way—the body—than as Brad. More people were arriving. I was relieved when Tosh, Officer Scott, and two more cops walked back to us.

  “Detectives Smith and Bronson,” Scott said, looking in turn to each of the two new cops, “will take your statements individually and then you are free to leave.”

  Me first, I wanted to shout. The pounding in my head was growing more painful by the moment. I couldn’t get out of the rink fast enough to suit me.

  I wasn’t in the first group taken aside. The wizard wasn’t either. He slid up next to me.

  “You look like you’re not feeling well.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and rubbed my upper arms.

  “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.” I dropped my voice low. “And thanks for that enhanced hearing.”

  He smiled, closed mouth, and his eyes were bright. “No problem.”

  “Did you listen to their conversation, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Oona,” I said.

  “Diego.”

  We sat together a while in silence until I said, “You seem familiar. Have we met before?”

  “You seem familiar to me as well,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure we haven’t met. I’d remember someone named Oona. Maybe we saw each other around various rinks.”

  “That’s probably it,” I said, but it didn’t feel right. “Maybe grammar school or something. Did you grow up around here?”

  He shook his head. “Palo Alto.”

  One of the detectives—Bronson, by his name tag—squatted by the bench where I sat and said, “Would you mind coming with me? We’ll do your interview now.”

  I followed him off to a quiet spot and answered his questions the best I could. I didn’t tell him about my visi
on of the murder.

  2

  By the time the cops were done with me, the sun was fully up. I lugged my bag and stick back to my car parked on a side road next to the mall. I was closing my car’s trunk, having stowed away my gear, when Diego walked up. The Norco had kicked in and my headache was fading. I was still shaken though. I’d never seen a dead body before, much less the dead body of someone I knew who’d been brutally killed. I felt foggy and cranky and not in the mood to talk to anyone, now that escape seemed so near.

  He touched my elbow. “How are you doing?”

  I pulled my arm tight to my body.

  I don’t like touching strangers or strangers touching me. Sometimes it was fine, and I didn’t feel a thing. Sometimes I felt too much. Who wants to shake hands or even bump shoulders with someone and suddenly know exactly how miserable, or angry, or resentful they were? Strangers should keep their inner lives to themselves as far as I was concerned.

  And sure, he’d already touched me when he thought I was going to faint, and all I’d felt from him then was his magic, but you never knew what you’d get when someone made physical contact.

  I’d met a few wizards before, but most had been older, and frankly, rather crotchety. This Diego guy didn’t feel sour or prickly at all. What he felt was no nonsense. Kind, unless you messed with him—then it would be no mercy. Goalies, in general, could be like that. Maybe wizards, too.

  I felt him looking me over, his eyes flickering up and down my body. I didn’t mind. Was a little flattered, in fact. It had been a while since a man looked at me that way.

  He took in my physical aspects as if he were seeing me for the first time—a bit taller than average and thinnish. Brown hair pulled into a low braid to fit under my helmet, hazel eyes. I wasn’t a great classical beauty, but little children didn’t run away screaming when they saw me. I didn’t feel any boy/girl interest toward me from him, which was okay. Preferable, in fact.