The Little Death Page 10

  I spit blood on his carpet, and I’m pretty sure I saw a tooth go with it. “I want answers, and I knew your peons weren’t gonna tell me shit.”

  Dick shifted his bulk forward, making his chair creak like it was quietly screaming. “Answers to what? Why you’re such a pathetic fag? I think you hafta blame your parents for that.”

  I glared at him through rapidly swelling eyes. If I lived through this, I was gonna look uglier than a bonobo’s butt. “Why have you singled us out?”

  He smirked. “Who’s we? You and your toy boys?”

  “Me and Spencer. Why did you have him killed?”

  He sat back in his chair, chewing on his cigar like a phallic piece of gum. “Wow, you really are that dumb, huh? Karina.”

  Oh great, he was going to talk in riddles. Before I could ask if that was his drag name, I suddenly remembered: Karina Swenson. She was one of our last clients before Spencer got killed. She was a hot blonde who wanted us to help her escape from her boyfriend, the very married and very dangerous Mike “Big Mike” O’Malley, head of the Irish crime syndicate that used to run the docks. (Before he died mysteriously and Tricky Dick took over the seaport.) She wanted to leave him, but he was a psycho who wasn’t going to let her simply leave him. So she paid us a good sum to help her fake her death by dumping her car in the river, and since bodies had a tendency to be washed away, no one thought much of it when her body wasn’t found. Yeah, it wasn’t legal, but Spencer had kind of a hard-on for her, and I just felt bad for Karina. Besides, anything I could do to piss off O’Malley was a-okay with me. “What about her? She’s dead.”

  “Please. I know that little bitch is far from dead, and I know you and that piece of shit partner of yours helped her escape. How big of a cut did she give you?”

  “Cut?” I had the sudden, sick feeling that Karina had sold us a bill of goods.

  “That little twist stole twenty-five G’s from me. How much did you and your idiot sidekick get out of it? Five, ten?”

  “She stole money from you? How?”

  “How do you think? She stole my checkbook, wrote herself a check, and cashed it before running to you twits. Were you in on it from the beginning?”

  I shook my head, even though it made the pain worse. “What about Big Mike?”

  He snorted derisively. A single drop of saliva dripped from his cigar. “What about that stupid mick?”

  Maybe it was the beating, but I suddenly realized what had happened. Karina had played us as suckers. She wasn’t Big Mike’s mistress—she was his. And she took a buttload of money on her way out the door. This begged the question why she didn’t tell us the truth, but wasn’t it obvious? No one in their right mind would willfully screw over Tricky Dick. She played us for chumps all right, and now Spencer was dead because of it. I was next on the list. “He had her too, you know.”

  I just said that to annoy him, and it worked. He sat forward, scowling. “No he didn’t.”

  “Yeah, he did. She told me all about it. Apparently he was better endowed.”

  This caused one of his thugs to snigger, and he gave him a scathing glance that made him instantly shut up. “All she could do was lie. Where is she?”

  “Answer my question, and maybe I’ll answer yours,” I said, wondering how much worse the pain would be if I hadn’t had some rotgut beforehand. As it was, I felt like I was a head-to-toe bruise, with some pureed flesh thrown in. My bones had been ironed, folded, and thrown under a bulldozer for good measure. “Why kill Spencer like that, and why such elaborate setups for me?”

  He snorted and finally took that cock of a cigar out of his mouth, propping it in his hubcap-sized ashtray. “We didn’t single out Spencer. You were both supposed to die. That fuckin’ douche bag couldn’t get anything right. We hoped you’d take the hint and blow, so we could follow you to wherever you’d stashed Karina. But you stayed, and in the meantime, we had to pay a lot of scratch to make the whole mess go away. See if I hire outside contractors again. By that time, I had that damn pretty boy faggot snorting his body weight in coke and attempting to run his own scam, and I had to do something with him. Figured I’d take care of you both.”

  “What? That doesn’t make sense. You had Sander kidnapped.”

  He sneered at me, like I was the stupidest thing he’d ever wiped off the bottom of his shoe. “Sander cast his own lot. It was that fucking Sloane I had to get rid of, nosy piece of shit. Now where’s the bitch?”

  Just his sneer alone told me Sander was dead, just like I suspected. “If I tell you, you’ll kill me.”

  “I’m gonna kill you anyways. Tell me, and I’ll make it quick. Don’t, and I’ll make it as slow as possible.” Dick made a gesture, and one of his thugs pulled out a pair of tin snips from underneath his coat. I wondered if they’d cut through bone, then realized I didn’t want to find out.

  A radio crackled loudly, and another of Dick’s goons pulled out his handset and barked, “What?”

  A voice broken with static replied, “We got trouble. There’s a whole bunch of—” What sounded like gunfire cut him off, and the radio died.

  Looks were shared around the room, and Dick sat forward, fixing me with a caustic glare. “What the hell is this?”

  “I meant to come alone, but some of my friends thought different.” Lau had quite a few disreputable friends, but Red had even more questionable contacts, so I didn’t know if there were shady but surprisingly well-trained weekend warriors storming the building, or a grungy biker gang that smelled almost as bad as they looked. I didn’t know how Red knew the biker gang, but I didn’t ask, because I felt it was one of those things that would inadvertently scar me for life.

  There was a distant but audible boom that was either a massive gunshot or a small explosion. It was enough to make the goons scramble for the door, pulling out their guns, while Dick shouted after them, “Kill every motherfucking one of them!”

  The fat bastard stood, pulling a big Smith & Wesson out of a drawer. “This changes nothing, dickwad. Where’s Karina?”

  “We sent her where you’ll never find her. The bottom of the ocean.”

  “Don’t even. You didn’t kill her. Now tell me where she is, or I shoot your kneecap.”

  I looked up at him as he came around the desk, barrel leveled at me. “Lemme get this straight. The first plan to kill me and Spencer fucked up, so your next brilliant plan was to get Sloane to frame me for Nick’s murder. But that didn’t work either, so you got Sloane to seduce me for the purposes of… what? Why did those idiots play baseball with my skull?”

  He cocked the gun, aiming it down at my left leg, and I said, “Fine, Los Angeles, where everybody goes to get lost in a crowd. Jesus, how did you not figure that out?” I had no idea where Karina was. Spencer and I bought her a train ticket going as far from Echo City as it would go, but we told her to feel free to get off wherever. Considering all the money she had on her, she may have gotten off at the first stop and rented a hovercraft.

  Tricky Dick tried to eye-fuck me, but I was too achy and pissed off to care. He must have decided I was telling the truth, because he made a dismissive noise and said, “Was she goin’ on about bein’ a model again? I always told her she didn’t have the tits for it, but she never believed me. Dames, huh? Well, not that you would know….”

  “The guys who attacked me. Why?”

  “We found nothing about Karina in your office, so we figured maybe you had somethin’ on you that said where she was. I’ll give you credit—you were good about keepin’ your secret. Which makes me think you wouldn’t give it up so easily.” The gun, which had been sagging, suddenly straightened up, aimed right for my face.

  “This isn’t making sense,” I said, hoping I could distract him from shooting me. “Why shoot at Sloane and me? Why expose me to your Roosevelt blackmail factory?”

  He shook his head at me, giving me the type of sad, patronizing look that made me want to kick him in the junk. “You’re just a stupid drunk, ain’t cha?” His
smirk faltered as the noise of gunfire, presumably on a lower floor, got closer. It also sounded like there was a motorcycle nearby, revving its engine. Did they ride their bikes into the building? How did they get them in the elevators?

  I shrugged. “I’m smart enough to hide Karina from you.”

  I knew he was going to fire an instant before he did, but I couldn’t do anything about it. The noise was loud enough to make my ears ring almost instantaneously, a whiplash of sound, and I felt the hot wind of the bullet buzz past my face like an angry wasp as I lunged from my chair. I tackled Tricky Dick in his doughy midsection, sending us both falling backward. He hit the desk with a thud, the breath leaving him in a tremendous wheeze, and his attempt to hit me with the gun was cut short because of it. It was barely a love tap on my spine before he dropped the Smith & Wesson with an audible thud.

  I punched him square in the jaw, hard enough that I felt one of my knuckles pop, but I didn’t care and hit him again. I hurt so much that a little more pain didn’t matter. “You know why I’m still alive and you failed, Dick? ’Cause you’re a fuck-up, and I’m one fucking lucky son of a bitch.” For good measure I kneed him in his pillowy groin and shoved him off the desk, where he hit the floor with all the grace of a beached whale.

  I found his gun and aimed it at him, ignoring the throbbing pain in my hand. My fingers were already starting to swell, and I could barely fit one on the trigger.

  Dick scrambled behind the desk, reaching for a drawer, and I met him there, throwing his chair aside. It slammed into the window of his office, but didn’t break it, just left a spider web of a crack in its pristine surface. I kicked him in the face as he reached for a drawer, and stamped on his hand as he collapsed to the carpet. “No way. You don’t get out of this that easy.”

  I had managed to put some things together. Tricky Dick, narcissistic asshole that he was, thought Spencer and I had helped Karina to piss him off, and he couldn’t let a personal slam like that go unpunished. But after Spencer’s quick death, he realized a simple dirt nap might not be punishment enough, so he decided to make mine slow and convoluted. Then there was Sander, up to neck in debt and trying to run his own blackmail angle on his Roosevelt Hotel clients, essentially double-dipping on Tricky Dick’s scam, and there was no way in hell he was going to stand for that. But he didn’t know about Sloane, so when Sander disappeared, he had another problem, and got the bright idea to kill two birds with one stone. When the attempt to frame me for murder fucked up and Sloane seemed clueless about Sander’s blackmail material, he started getting desperate, and having to juggle the deeply annoying yet deeply stupid Sloane all the while was just too complicated for him and his horde of mouth-breathing morons. This was a colossal fuck-up from day one, one that could have been avoided if he’d decided just to kill me and not make me suffer first.

  I kicked him in the face just for the hell of it and heard what sounded like a massive barrage of gunfire about a floor below us. “It’s over, Dick. You’re done.”

  He spit blood on his pale carpet and made a noise that I first thought was a sob. But it soon became clear he was laughing, blood making his leering smile red. “You stupid piece of shit. I own this town. You’re gonna die in jail, and I’m gonna watch.”

  “Oh, so we’re gonna be cellmates? I call top bunk.”

  The door to his office burst open, and I turned quickly, aiming the gun in that general direction. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was Kyle. “Holy shit, Jake, do you have any idea what’s going on down there?”

  “From a legal standpoint, no.”

  He scowled, apparently not appreciating my attempt at levity. “What the hell happened to you?”

  That was when I realized how I must have looked to him. Beaten, messed up, and wild-eyed, holding a gun that was more or less stuck in my hand. I was probably lucky he recognized me. “Dick had his goons rough me up. What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, right, like I was just gonna let you slink away. As soon as I heard there was some kind of apocalypse occurring downtown, I knew I’d find you there.”

  “You know me well.”

  Kyle approached me warily, like he was afraid bits would fall off of me if he got too close too fast. “C’mon, you need a doctor—”

  I should have known. I didn’t think a fat man could move that fast, but somehow Dick did. He must have found what he wanted in his desk drawer, as he stood up with a triumphant yell, leveling his newly found pistol at me. I spun, ready to fire, but I knew I was moving slow due to my injuries, and I was probably screwed.

  I’d braced for impact before the sound of the shots filled the room, but it was Dick who suddenly lurched back, blood blooming across his broad chest as he stumbled back and hit the window. Dick got off a random shot that missed before Kyle shot him again, and this time the window behind him, now splattered with blood, shattered, and his arms pinwheeled comically, sending his gun flying, before he fell backward and out the now open window. You could hear him scream all the way down to the asphalt below, but we were too high up to hear the thud.

  I stared at Kyle, who had his grim cop face on, smoke still curling from the end of his service revolver.

  “Do you know what you’ve just done?” I exclaimed, slightly disbelieving. “You killed Tricky Dick!”

  “It was him or us,” he replied, as if it was no big deal.

  Of course it was huge—monumental. Tricky Dick did own this town, and now… whose town was it?

  I didn’t care. I’d never loved Kyle more than I did at this moment.

  15

  THE fallout took weeks to settle, and even after that, there was still some doubt.

  Before Kyle got me out of Tricky Dick’s office, I searched it for anything incriminating, and I found it. Not all of it, but enough to tell me who Tricky Dick had bought on the city council and the police department so he could own Echo City. It seemed they’d all been victims of the blackmail factory at the Roosevelt Hotel, and it wasn’t just them—almost every guy in any kind of authority position anywhere in this city had participated in some kind of sex party there, gay and straight and some in between. It was apparently the best-kept worst-kept secret in the entire city. I was actually offended I had never been invited, but then again, I never had any actual power. I’d have been a waste of a blackmail.

  As for Sloane, he cut a deal with the DA and sang like a canary, naming all sorts of people whom he’d encountered while working the Roosevelt sex factory. This led to a bit more chaos and panic in certain circles. He was going to still do some time, but not as much as he would have done had he not finally spilled his pretty little guts.

  The police chief who’d been Dick’s bitch resigned, and one of the councilmen who’d been under his thumb was arrested for both bribing and graft, which seemed like a contradiction. The Lieutenant Governor fled the state and hasn’t been seen since. On the bad side, organized crime shot up, because the gangs were now fighting for the turf. Tricky Dick left a power vacuum almost as big as his ass, and everybody wanted a piece. Not of his ass—that would be gross.

  Kyle almost got fired, but then once the police chief resigned, he got a promotion. In the chaos of gun battle, fights, and bodies in the “raid” on Tricky Dick’s tower, there were some arrest warrants issued, but not much ever came of it. It was chaos, between the biker gang Red had recruited and Lau’s weekend warrior friends. There were dead bodies, but not all of them were even officially identified, for a variety of reasons. Tyler survived his stabbing, but he needed physical therapy and couldn’t remember much about his assault. Perhaps that was for the best.

  Kyle leaked me some details on Tricky Dick’s hate-fueled vendetta against me and Spencer over Karina, which I couldn’t believe I never twigged to. In retrospect, I was lucky his goons were so incompetent. I wish Spencer could say the same.

  It took me weeks to recover from my injuries, but Kyle found the time to take care of me. I guess we were back together, although we never actually talke
d about it. He was just suddenly sleeping in my bed and dumping my whiskey down the sink. At least he didn’t know about Sully’s. Still, getting laid regularly did wonders for my disposition.

  As soon as I got the cast off my hand, I returned to my office, which was the same as I had left it, right down to the bloodstains on the floor. I supposed I was going to have to break down and hire a cleaning lady one of these days. As it was, I’d put out a want ad for a receptionist, which was why I was here. I got a lot of publicity for my role in the takedown of Tricky Dick, and not all of it was bad. I suddenly had more work than I could handle. Well, cared to handle, at any rate.

  I had just topped off my flask and used my sleeve to dust off my desk when there was a knock on my door. “Yeah?”

  The door popped open, and a man stuck his head inside. “You know, I thought it was you.”

  Although I almost didn’t recognize him with his clothes on, I realized he was Chance, the guy I’d encountered at the Roosevelt. “Hey kid. Give up the go-go dancing?”

  “Yeah. I got tired of the Speedos. Gold lame is hard to clean.”

  “I bet. What can I do for you?”

  Chance put the folded-up newspaper on my desk. It was open to the ad I placed. “I’m applying for the receptionist job. I can answer phones and take messages with the best of them.”

  And here I was expecting a woman to reply first. But he was almost as pretty as one, so I supposed that was close enough. “Can you type?”

  “One-handed even,” he replied with a sly half smile.

  Having him around might be a dangerous temptation, and on top of that, could I trust him? He was a part of the Serpent Club, after all. But I did owe him, I suppose. He threw that nightstand through the window, and he had to know it was weird while he was doing it. I probably owed him my life. “How’re your coffee-making skills?”