The Little Death

by Andrea Speed

  No such luck. Sheppard’s Field was sprawling, with separate runways for the local flights and the puddle jumpers coming in from other cities, but it really wasn’t as big as it seemed to be. It was an optical illusion, fostered by its proximity to a swamp and a landfill downwind of them. It was the only bit of paved civilization in this abandoned pocket of nothingness. Any plane funded by Tricky Dick, no matter how small, would have to be nice; therefore it would stand out like a tarted-up stripper in a dead cornfield. I spied it almost immediately upon entering the small, drafty hangar that passed as a terminal. But since I had a view of the window and Kyle didn’t, I was able to successfully suggest we split up to cover more of the area. I sent him in the opposite direction, so I was able to approach Tricky Dick’s plane on my own.

  Sloane was waiting in the shadow of one wing, hands buried in the pockets of his coat, hunched up against the cold. “Your pilot running late?” I asked. “Or are you catching a bus?”

  He stiffened, as if I just tased him in the nuts, and his head whipped around toward me so violently I thought it might sail off into the propeller of a nearby plane. “Jake! What—how did you find me?”

  “I finally put two and two together, sweetheart,” I admitted. I was an idiot. I wanted to blame the booze, but that wasn’t all of it, not this time. “So tell me, doll face, what was the plan?”

  For a moment, he looked haunted, his expression naked and genuine. But then a shadow seemed to pass over his face, and he gave me his sexy off-kilter smile. “I’m sorry, Jake. I got scared. After everything that’s happened, I thought maybe it really was time for me to go. I couldn’t tell you; I feel enough like a coward as it is.” He put a hand on my arm, sliding it up toward my shoulder. “But now that you’re here—”

  I yanked my arm away, giving him the evilest look I could muster. “Can the balloon juice, Sloane. What was the scam, huh? Why did Tricky Dick put you up to this? What’s in it for you?”

  He widened his eyes and thrust out his lower lip ever so slightly, trying on an oh so innocent look that didn’t quite work on a smoking hot guy like him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Kyle’s with me. I’ll have him arrest you for prostitution. Now be honest with me. Why the hell did you hire me? What does Tricky Dick have planned, huh?”

  As soon as he realized I was serious, his pout morphed from sexy to sullen. “I just wanted you to find my brother.”

  “No you didn’t. Cut the bullshit.”

  “Look, I was paying off his debt, okay?” he snapped, suddenly angry. “Sander couldn’t completely afford his habit. He got in over his head…. This was the only way to get him released.”

  “Released?”

  Sloane nervously fussed with his hair. It made it messy but still attractive. “Sander’s at Dick’s cabin. He can’t leave until I pay off the debt. It’s paid off now. I’m going to get him.”

  This didn’t sound right at all. “So Dick has been holding him hostage?”

  “No, it’s just… it’s complicated.”

  “Really?” Was Sloane this stupid? Maybe. He was pretty as hell, and he didn’t rely on his smarts to get him through life. “How do you know he’s still alive?”

  That seemed to startle him. “What? Of course he’s still alive.”

  “You’ve talked to him.”

  “Yeah.” He paused briefly. “We’ve exchanged e-mails and texts. I just texted him that I’m on my way.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle. Yeah, Sloane really was that stupid. “All shit that can be easily faked. What about the earring? What was that?”

  “It was his earring but not his ear. It was from someone else.”

  “Who?”

  He shrugged, unconcerned. “Some guy. I dunno. Didn’t ask.”

  “What the fuck is the point, Sloane? Why me?”

  He clicked his tongue in exasperation. “I dunno, all right? Ask Dick. All I know is, he wanted me to hire you to look into my brother’s supposed disappearance, and I was supposed to drop Nick’s name. Dick said you had to pay.”

  “Pay for what?”

  He both shrugged and shook his head this time, trying to add a little variety to his stupid menu. “He didn’t say. He just said you should have been taken out a while ago, but no one can get you. You’re a bad penny who keeps turning up.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I think it’s an old saying—”

  “That was rhetorical,” I told Sloane with a frown. Why would Tricky Dick be after me? It didn’t make sense.

  “What were you supposed to do? Frame me? Lead me into a trap?”

  He shook his head and shrugged again. “I don’t know. Something went wrong with the Nick thing, so I was supposed to get you poking around based on the earring, but… I don’t know where he thought it would go. I didn’t know Tyler was gonna get hurt or that gunmen were gonna shoot at me.”

  “But you didn’t care,” Kyle said, suddenly coming around the far side of the plane. I wondered how long he’d been there listening. He looked pissed off, and damn, he was hot when he was angry. “You knew this asshole was trying to kill Jake, and you strung him along.”

  “My brother—”

  “Is either working with Blunt or dead! You can’t be this stupid.”

  “You’re a dead man as soon as you get off this plane,” I told Sloane. “Or Dick’s gonna make you wish you were. You’re a liability now.”

  Sloane’s pouty look returned, but now it was bratty and annoying, nowhere near as sexy as it used to be. How had it ever seemed sexy? “I’m gonna go get my brother. He said you’d lie.”

  Sloane made to move around me, but Kyle grabbed his arms and pulled them behind his back, taking out his handcuffs with practiced ease. Yes, he was in plain clothes right now, but he still had his police gear with him. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re under arrest.”

  “For what?” Sloane protested.

  “For conspiracy to commit murder, and whatever else I can think up and make stick.”

  Sloane scoffed in disbelief. “Murder? Who the hell did I try and murder?”

  “Jake Falconer,” Kyle told him, and stared at me over Sloane’s shoulder. His eyes seemed to say, What the fuck have you gotten us into now?

  A fair question. At least I was finally beginning to see the light.

  14

  SPENCER’S murder was partially unsolved. I say partially because I’d managed to shoot the shooter, a piece of professional muscle named Jess “Mauler” Poulin. But he was for hire—anyone with an extra thousand and a grudge could’ve hired him—and the dead aren’t particularly chatty, no matter what the psychic hucksters down on Canal Street claim. His dealings were all cash, and he left no clue as to who hired him, so the cops never arrested his employer. I had no good ideas either, because who hated Spencer? No one, as far as I knew.

  But people hated me. I had an enemies list almost longer than a friends list, and mainly due to my sparkling personality. If I had gained Tricky Dick as an enemy, I was well and truly fucked. It also might explain who hired Poulin.

  I was supposed to wait for Kyle in the hangar as he waited for the uniforms to show up and cart Sloane off, but of course I headed straight for the car and started off. I wasn’t stranding Kyle here; he could get a lift from one of his cop buddies. I needed to get going on this now, since if I thought about it and tried to be sensible, I’d probably lose my nerve. I wasn’t a complete idiot—I put in a call while I was driving, just so I had a backup plan if everything went monstrously wrong, which it probably would. This wasn’t smart on any level, and my lack of preparation pretty much guaranteed a clusterfuck, but I was so angry I didn’t care.

  I did stop by the office, to pick up my flask and the shotgun as well as some spare bullets. I was preparing to go out in a blaze of glory, but really I would have settled for not being killed within three seconds of arrival. You wanna be macho, but you also have to be realistic.


  I left, although not before swilling down half the flask. I needed liquid courage, but rage often made up for it. Right now I needed to calm the rage, because it could blind me as much as fuel me.

  It wasn’t an exaggeration to say Tricky Dick owned half the city, because he did. Politically, he just about owned it all, and if he owned people within the police force, it wouldn’t surprise me. In fact, it would explain everything. Why Giardi’s death was brushed under the rug, why Spencer’s murder investigation dead ended right away, why shit had been so weird lately. It all made sense. Maybe if I was a better detective, I’d have figured that out long before now, but you can’t have everything.

  In spite of owning just about everything, he had a favorite hangout. It was the tallest and newest skyscraper downtown, informally known as the Tower, formally known as Blunt Tower. I have no fucking idea what he does in there, and I’m pretty sure no one does. If forced to give a name to what he does for a living, he says he’s an import/export man. What imports and exports exactly? As far as I can tell, drugs and sex slaves. But I bet those don’t fit on the business cards.

  He was probably there, though. It was daytime, and he made a show of pretending he worked like any regular schmo. I can’t believe anyone bought it, but presumably some did.

  Before leaving, I found myself going through Spencer’s old wreck of a desk, until I found one of his glossy girly magazines. I still wasn’t sure what I was doing until I rolled the magazine up into as tight a cylinder as physically possible. It was a trick Lau taught me once, on a slow night at the bar. If I could prevent Dick’s goon bots from shooting at me as long as possible, I might actually get somewhere. I used my belt to make a kind of sling for the shotgun, so I could hide it under the coat and behind my back.

  Traffic was fairly light, which meant I might have believed in destiny if I was into superstitious bullshit. I took another slug from my flask for courage and then parked around the back of the Tower. I didn’t want anyone identifying my car before I got in, although that was a slim possibility. I slipped the tightly rolled-up magazine inside the sleeve of my trench coat, glad I remembered to use a rubber band to keep it as tightly rolled as possible. That was the most important part.

  I was able to get in through the front glass doors before being approached by two thick-necked goons in matching off-the-rack black sports coats, looking like twin mercenary golems. “Hey, is this the Mutual Insurance building?” I asked, in as cheerful a voice as I could muster.

  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 t
hrob 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?”