The Little Death (12 page)

One of them reached into his coat pocket, clearly going for his gun, while the other sneered and said, “Who do you think you’re fooling, Falconer?” Goon number one grabbed my arm, and I let him, as there was no avoiding it. But I let the magazine drop into my hand and jabbed its blunt tip right into his thick throat.

A tightly rolled magazine was the equivalent of a baton, at least as far as sensitive areas of the body were concerned. In the throat, it was as good as a lead pipe.

He let me go as he grabbed his neck and started choking for breath, leaving me free to turn and face goon number two. He had his gun out, but it wasn’t yet leveled at me, giving me just enough time to kick him square in the nuts. He doubled over reflexively, and as he did, I gave him a sharp uppercut that caught him right under his tiny inbred chin. It should have been enough to knock him out, but all it did was make him stagger, so I was forced to throw a right cross that connected with his head just under the ear, a notorious soft spot if you could hit it just right. I must have, because he went down like a sack of hammers, even though a shock of pain zigzagged from my hand, up my arm, getting jammed up somewhere near my shoulder blade. I didn’t know if I dislocated a knuckle or broke it, but I was too high on adrenaline and booze to care. It would catch up with me later, but by then I might be dead, so who cared?

The magazine was broken, useless now, and so was the guy who got it in the throat. He was still conscious and choking, but probably not for long. I took the unconscious goon’s gun and key card and took off for the elevator.

I wasn’t going to have a lot of time, and I was going to have to get to the top of the building before they could take me down, which would take some doing. Of course Tricky Dick would be in the penthouse, and of course there were going to be dozens of goons between me and him. My only hope was they wouldn’t know I was here until it was too late.

The elevator could only be unlocked with a key card, which I now had, and inside it was all mirror-finished stainless steel with a bit of industrial gray carpeting on the bottom. I had never been in a fancier elevator, and I could see why it was members only. It wouldn’t be this nice if it was open to the general public.

What I could tell from blueprints and the little information I could cobble together, almost no one occupied this building, just Tricky Dick and his various minions, lackeys, and friends. It was curious, such a big building almost permanently empty, but it made sense if you thought of it as a symbol, as Dick’s “fuck you” to everyone. He owned so much of the city, he could even have an empty business tower all to himself. Tricky Dick’s dick, rising out of the heart of the city. That shows you what an asshole he is.

I rode the elevator up to the eighteenth level and stopped it just as it passed. I used the emergency release button to get the doors open and saw that I’d hit it more or less right, as I could drop down two and a half feet to the floor below. I didn’t know if anyone was keeping track of the elevators, but if they were, I had to keep them guessing.

I jumped down onto the brown-carpeted floor, feeling a small jolt in my knee, but nothing tore or broke, so I put that in the win column. There wasn’t anyone on this floor either, so I got lucky more than I should have.

From there it was a brief run up the fire stairs, although I paced myself so as not to get winded. How embarrassing would it be to finally face off with Tricky Dick, only to need to take a time-out because I was wheezing? There was only so much a man’s ego could take.

I expected trouble as soon as I came out onto the penthouse floor, and for a second I thought maybe I’d gotten lucky. It seemed abandoned, an empty office with dirt brown carpet and whiter than white walls. There was a faint scent of cigarettes and coffee, a suggestion someone had been here recently, which was good, because otherwise it seemed totally abandoned. Just another empty office on an empty floor in an empty building.

Then I heard the slight squeak of a hinge, and I drew my gun, but instantly I had a choice to make. There were two side doors opening up into the empty lobby, with a thug emerging from each one. If I shot one, I’d have to shoot the other, but then I’d open up the shooting war. I’d win the initial battle, but I’d lose the war, ’cause thugs would come pouring out of Tricky Dick’s office like cockroaches disturbed by the light. I had no choice but to charge the thug closest to me, throwing a modified football tackle, going shoulder-first into his gut. He let out an explosive sigh before momentum flung him backward, and I turned and leveled my gun at the other thug. “Lose the heater, or I’ll splatter your brains all over these fucking walls.”

With reluctance, he tossed his piece aside, far from my reach, and said, “You ain’t leavin’ here alive.”

“I know.” I was actually hoping my backup would arrive soon, but I knew it was an iffy proposition from the start. If it was suicide, so be it.

I kept an eye on both thugs as I backed up toward the main office door, sure that I was in for the fight of a lifetime. I turned at the last minute and burst through the needlessly elaborate doors of Tricky Dick’s office, expecting hell. Good thing, as I got it.

Their technique of dog piling me seemed a little desperate to me, but it was effective. I was almost buried under the weight of men as they grabbed me and pummeled me with meaty fists the size of ham hocks. They smelled of cigarettes, gun oil, wet wool, and flop sweat.

I just started throwing elbows, kicking where I could, almost literally fighting blind as I’d already taken a punch to the eye that left me seeing stars and feeling the sickening throb of swelling to come. But somehow I’d managed to clear a little space, and I was able to throw more proper punches, not caring too much what I hit as long as I hit something. Of course, I was being hit back, but more room allowed me to duck and weave a bit.

With the brawlers thinning out, some asshole was finally able to pull his gun, but he was still so close to me that I was able to grab his arm just as the gun went off, a deafening blast in tight quarters that managed to hit someone else. I socked him right in the jaw and ripped the still-warm gun out of his hand, but then someone ripped it out of mine as another asshole gave me a sucker punch in the kidneys.

I got a few wild hits in, but eventually I was crushed under the weight of the bodies, my brain reeling from head shots as I was divested of my shotgun and handguns. Never even got off a shot. How sad was that?

I thought maybe they were just gonna crush me to death, but once I was unarmed and tenderized, they dragged my carcass to a chair and threw me in it, like a sack of dirty laundry.

Apparently, this whole time, Tricky Dick was sitting behind his desk, watching the beat-down, like a bored CEO waiting for a business meeting to conclude. It was probably a good thing I hated him before, because I would have really hated him now. He was sucking on a phallic little stub of a cigar that smelled like my old jockstrap, and he looked much the same as always, except he’d added a chin since I last saw him in person.

You’d think a guy with all his money could have afforded better hair plugs. It was always thin, a brittle brown constantly puffed up unnaturally with product, and at the best of times it was like a ratty marmoset had died on top of his scalp. His face was round, matching the roundness of his body, and no thousand-dollar suit could make him look any better. He appeared to be Santa’s evil, clean-shaven brother. “I always knew you were stupid,” he finally said, tapping his cigar in a marble ashtray that probably cost more than my first car. “But this stupid? How do you not drown when it rains, boy?”

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?”