Sylvia’s agony was worn all over her face. I rolled a cigarette between my fingers, put it in the corner of her mouth and lit it. She wasn’t dead. I kneeled down beside her as she breathed out a lungful of smoke. Her heart pumped gulps of blood out with it. Her deep, hoarse breathing seemed to suck the cigarette smoke into the cavity in her chest.
“I just had to see you before you died,” I said.
A smile lingered on her lips.
“We had something, didn’t we?” I asked.
The smile just curled up more. Gemma stepped up beside me and unloaded the chamber into Sylvia’s head. “Put her out of her misery,” she said.
I wrote up the story like any good journalist, and my editor went over it with his red pen and tore out its soul. Editors tend to do that. There was nothing left when it was published, just the memory of a few good people and a lot of bad ones, who meant well and had been corrupted by society.
“Where’s he sending me next?” I asked Ed’s wife as she lay beside me in his ornate king-sized bed.
She didn’t know, but she wouldn’t let me go until I’d come.
THE END
The story continues in The Deal - Ray Hammer Book #2 Keep reading for an excerpt.
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If you liked this book, why not try…
RAY HAMMER
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Ruby: There Will Be Revenge
Heart: You’re Dead to Me Now
King: Beware the Man Inside
DAWN HOPE
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The Deal: Would You Kill For an Ace?
Chapter 1
I should have been anywhere other than here at this airport, LAX, on a Friday morning. I was late and I knew it. My editor would be pissed if I missed the plane—not that I gave a shit about whether or not I pissed him off. As a matter of fact, if I could, I’d crawl up Al Ronson’s ass and lay eggs just to see him itch, but that’s beside the point.
The point was, I was on assignment, and assignments meant money, a resource I was frequently short of, so I was getting on that plane if it killed me. I rushed towards the gate, three overpriced airport paper bags under my arm. A coffee teetered in my right hand as I tried to rebalance my load. An upbeat voice, too chirpy for a Friday morning, called my name over the loudspeaker.
“Paging Ray Hammer: Please head to Gate 49B. Your flight is about to depart.”
I shuffled the books under my other arm. I’d picked the new Lee Child novel. He was working with his brother now and I wanted to check out whether they were still worth reading or whether I should go back and start reading from Killing Floor. I don’t know why I’d stopped for the coffee. Maybe it was because I was feeling jittery. I hadn’t had a drink since last night and my head throbbed, that sharp pain of a hangover. I glanced at the book on sobriety under my arm. 12 Steps. I didn’t think I’d be getting past the first one, but it was worth a try. This had been going on for too long.
I quickened my pace. My feet clicked and clacked on the polished concrete floors. I could see the gate up ahead now, an impatient flight attendant staring directly at me. I tried to lift the coffee to my lips, desperate for a hit of that life-affirming caffeine, but as I did so, it tipped out of my grip.
A woman rushing past in the opposite direction caught my elbow; the coffee spun in the air. I lunged out at it with my free hand, hit the paper cup. The lid came off, the contents spilling out towards her. She stepped quickly to her left, almost dodged the spray . . . and flecks of brown coffee stained her white shirt.
She kept going, pausing for just one second to turn back to look at me, and there was recognition in her gaze. She seemed familiar, but I couldn’t quite place her. Had I seen her earlier that day? Had she been in the bookshop? Was she someone from my neighborhood? Had she caught the same Uber here with me? The only thing worse for your memory than a hangover was the haze you lived in when you’d kill for enough booze to give you a hangover.
Twelve fucking steps.
Her expression was wary, as though she wasn’t rushing towards somewhere but hurrying away from it. She turned away and hurried on through the concourse, blending into the crowd of people. I reached down to retrieve the coffee cup, turned back to look at her one last time, but she was a ghost. She might as well have vanished through the wall onto Platform 9 ¾. I deposited the cup into the nearest trash can.
My name was called one last time, in the kind of voice that let me know in no uncertain terms that if I wasn’t at the gate in precisely twenty-seven seconds I might as well kiss my off-peak cut-price coach ticket goodbye.
I made it to the gate. Even with my hands full (minus the coffee, of course), I managed to find my airline ticket in my back pocket, press it to the scanner and shuffle aboard the flight.
I might not be in the Marines anymore, but I still travel light. It was a lesson that I’d learnt a long time ago: the less you have, the easier it is to move, to go wherever you need to go. The easier it is to get away from whatever it is that’s haunting you. So there was no carry-on baggage to stow in the overhead compartment, no checked luggage. All I had to do was find my seat: Row 27A.
An older woman with the shadow of a moustache on her upper lip grunted as I tried to squeeze past her and into my seat. I always choose the window seat. It’s crazy, I know, being hemmed in, not being able to get out, but I’d prefer to be able to see the outside world when trapped in a tin can flying through the air. I’ve seen enough of those shows where planes go down and if, God forbid, that ever happened to me, I sure as shit wanted a heads-up.
I gripped the arm of my chair as the cabin crew performed their final checks. I should have been used to this—flying, travelling, going all over the world—but every time I did, I still felt like this; my stomach dropping out from under me. I would rather be anywhere else. I’d rather be back home i
n Watts, California, my feet up on the coffee table, reclined in my chair out on the porch, looking out over Central Avenue as I wondered what the day would bring.
But that’s not the life of an investigative journalist, the life that I had chosen to replace my old one, and Ed—the pet name I had Al Ronson, since I loved him so fucking much—for had a story that he wanted covered.
“What do you know about Bougainville Island?” he’d asked when he’d called the other morning. I’d told him that it was the last place on earth I’d want to go. Maybe Papua New Guinea might be a great place for a drunken bachelors’ weekend, where alcohol consumption probably wasn’t so strictly policed and secret trysts with female tourists hungry for a dirty adventure would stay secret after we left. But go there for work?
“Not fucking much,” I told Ed. “Don’t care to learn any more, either.”
So I here I was, sitting on this plane on my way there. Never let anyone tell you Ed doesn’t have a sense of humor.
The woman with the moustache next to me grumbled something and unwrapped some candy. She chewed gratuitously, that gum-smacking sound that you can’t get out of your head. I gave her the stink eye then looked out of the window.
I thought about the woman I’d bumped into in the terminal, the way she’d looked back at me, the way she’d deftly side-stepped the falling coffee and I wondered what she’d been doing there. Who she was running from.
“Cabin crew, arm the doors,” instructed the captain. The big jet engines powered on, faltered, surged again with a whoomph.
My eye was drawn forward and down toward my window as it was covered in a sticky, red spatter. Paint?
No.
It was blood. No doubt about it.
The Deal: Would You Kill For an Ace?
Chapter 2
Piper pushed herself back against the wall, pulled her knees up to her chest and bit down on her knuckles. Don’t make a sound. Don’t breathe. She didn’t want to attract the attention of the guard. Frankie had made that mistake.
On either side of her, the other girls whimpered. The guard prowled. Piper wondered whether he was coming back, the man who’d put them here, whether they’d be fed again—it had been a couple of days. At least that’s what it seemed like. It was dark in here, hard to keep track of time, and the constant whimpering didn’t help. She turned her attention away from the corner. She didn’t look . . . couldn’t look.
How long had she been here now? It seemed like weeks or months ago that she had been preparing for her entry exams to the United States Airforce. Now she sat huddled up to herself, naked, skin and bones, freezing on the cold concrete floors in this basement. No windows, no heating, just the stale air of human depravity. It’s scary how quickly you become accustomed to living in your own waste.
The guard’s eyes roved, constantly moving, watching, checking, observing. She almost wanted the man to come back. But then, last time he’d taken the twins and they hadn’t returned. Piper wasn’t sure she wanted to know what happened when you were taken: where you went, what he did to you. She shivered and the chains clinked softly against her ankles. Zip ties dug into her wrists and she felt faint with hunger. He had to come back soon, surely? But what if something had happened to him? What if he didn’t come back? There’d be no more food. The guard . . . oh, the guard would . . .
She’d rather not think about it. But no matter how much she turned away from that corner —Frankie’s corner—no matter how much she tried to avoid the eyes of the other girls, she couldn’t scour it from her memory. The scene replayed over and over in a loop. Maybe she was going delusional. Maybe it hadn’t happened. Maybe she wasn’t here. Maybe this wasn’t real.
But the pit in her stomach . . . the memory looping over and over. The guard drooling, padding by at the end of his chain. This nightmare was real and there was nothing she could do about it. She wanted to scream in anguish or agony or fear or hope.
But Frankie had made that mistake.
The last time the man had come, he had opened the door, seen her there, screaming, squealing, carrying on. He’d stepped over to the guard, released the chain. Piper heard the barks now, as the guard—a freakishly large German shepherd— leaped forward, taking long, powerful paces, pounced, lunging right at Frankie’s throat. The moment played over and over in her mind and her eyes flicked involuntarily towards the corner where Frankie’s body was splayed out at unnatural angles, throat open, eyes lifelessly staring at the ceiling, skin blue—swelling into her manacles, around the zip ties, bursting at points, seeping juices.
Then she heard the rattle of the keys in the locks on the door. He was back.
The other girls whimpered. Piper turned her face away from the corner, away from the other girls, and away from him.
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The Spill: The Beach Never Looked So Deadly (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 1) Page 14
