Dead On My Feet - A Thriller (Phineas Troutt Mysteries Book 1)

by J. A. Konrath

  Whole thing was odd. Those two guys weren’t right-wing dingbats fighting for a political cause. They were pros, not protestors. And how scared of your boss did you have to be to stay quiet when some drugged out psycho was playing MLB with your shins?

  It should have made me suspicious. But I no longer gave two shits about anything beyond chemical and carnal distractions. I got paid, then I went on a bender, self-medicating with sex and drugs, and promptly forgot about Griffith.

  Until now.

  I hopped into the shower and turned it up as hot as I could bear.

  I turned it up hotter.

  I scrubbed my body until I tingled, and my skin was pink and steaming when I got out.

  I toweled off with a blood-stained towel that the maid hadn’t replaced since my last stay.

  I put the letter from Annie in my nightstand, on top of the obligatory Gideon’s Bible, with the dozen or so other unopened letters from her. Then I reread the one asking for my help.

  It said the same thing that it had said before. No surprise there.

  I went over to the air conditioner and pulled up the red pile carpeting in the corner. Beneath it was a floorboard with a finger notch that I’d carved into it.

  My stash.

  The hiding spot wouldn’t hold up to a decent search, but it was doubtful anyone who broke into my room would do a decent job. This neighborhood catered to winos and junkies, who might break in to look for loose cash or drugs, but their search would end with the dresser. As for cops…

  I got arrested on a semi-regular basis. It came with my line of work. But the charge rarely stuck, and my ID still carried my old address so it was doubtful they’d be able to find me even if they wanted to.

  Well, one cop probably could. A Homicide lieutenant named Jack. The best way to describe that relationship was interesting. Last meeting with Jack I’d ended up with two slugs in my shoulder. It was still tender to the touch.

  You need to toughen up, princess. Life is pain.

  Not that you’ve got much life left…

  That’s Earl. We have a suicide pact. When he kills me, he kills himself.

  I learned about Earl via a dynamic spiral CT scan with IV contrast enhancement. A pudgy doctor with the bedside manner of Himmler had given me two years. I’d proven him wrong.

  But I was done trying to prove anything to anyone.

  Earl was a hungry bastard, and he’d settle for nothing less than devouring every cell in my body.

  And I just didn’t have the will to fight anymore.

  No lollypop for you, buddy. Crybabies don’t get lollypops.

  They apparently don’t get cocaine, either, because there was none under the floorboards. But I had a few Xanax left, and a handful of oxycodone, in an unlabeled pill bottle. I popped three Xanies, dry-swallowed them, then crashed on the bed and fiddled with the cheap clock radio on the nightstand. By the time I found a song I liked, I was three-quarters of the way asleep.

  Some asshole DJ trying to be funny woke me up sometime after dawn. I hit the off switch, made a note to myself that if I ever met that DJ, I’d sock him in the mouth, and then flopped out of bed with all the grace of a hundred year old man. After pissing, I padded over to the dresser and took out my mug and jar of instant coffee. I filled half the mug with coffee crystals, and then topped it off with hot water from the bathroom sink.

  I’d never eaten shit, but it couldn’t have been much worse than the coffee. But I choked it down anyway, letting the caffeine work its magic as I dressed.

  I took a new pair of beige Levi’s Dockers, a pair of boxer-briefs, and a white T-Shirt out of my dresser, pulled off their assorted tags, and put them on the body parts they fit. Some Reeboks rounded out my ensemble. I eyed myself in the mirror and wasn’t impressed by the overall effect.

  A coke-head’s version of Mr. Clean. All I needed was a gold hoop earring.

  I flicked off the lights and left my room, locking the door behind me. A wino had fallen asleep on one of the guest’s cars in the parking lot. I walked to him, broken glass from a decade’s worth of broken 40oz malt liquor bottles crunching underfoot like packed snow.

  Though it was unsaid, my tradeoff for living rent-free was occasionally acting as security guard. That included keeping the homeless off the property, since they scared away guests. It was the least I could do.

  The last time I moved a wino, the least I could do got me hit in the head with an empty bottle of Night Train.

  This one looked like the last one. I suppose they all look the same. Black, white, or Chinese, they wear dirty clothes that stink of sweat, urine, and muscatel, they have the same unkempt beards and the same greasy hair, they all have that shell-shocked stare in eyes that have seen too much and now only look for the next handout, the next bottle of booze. This one was black, sleeping in the fetal position on the hood of a Lincoln Continental when they still made them big. His filthy hands were curled around a bag-wrapped bottle of something.

  I was halfway to him when the owner of the Lincoln burst out of room 115. I assumed he was the owner because he went straight to the Continental and began hitting the bum with a belt and screaming, “Get off my goddamn car!”

  The wino, when he realized he was being attacked, raised one hand up to protect himself and used the other to tuck the bottle into his armpit, protecting that. After the fifth or sixth blow I was next to the man and I grabbed his swinging arm by the wrist. I stopped him, but not without considerable effort on my part. Dude was big. Football player big.

  His head whipped around and he squinted at me. “This ain’t your bidness, asshole.”

  “Let it go,” I said. “He’s just a harmless drunk. I’ll move him. “

  The attacker twisted his wrist and got it free.

  “You want me to beat your bald ass, too?”

  An overweight woman, wearing a bra and panties that didn’t match and a bandage on her nose that probably wasn’t rhinoplasty-related, appeared in the open doorway of his room. She looked fearful.

  “Baby, what’s goin’ on?”

  “Bitch, get back inside.”

  She quickly closed the door. The wino was whimpering, still curled up on the car.

  I said to the big guy, “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

  Big Dude laughed. It wasn’t a challenging laugh. It wasn’t a fake laugh. It was the laugh of someone who heard something really funny.

  In the middle of his laughing he swung the belt at my right side. It connected, and probably raised one helluva welt, but I don’t have any feeling in my side. I took the hit without flinching.

  Big Dude stopped laughing.

  Then I snapped my left elbow up and clipped him under the chin. I followed this with a hard right jab below the belt, and he didn’t know whether to fall backward or forward. I helped him make the decision by grabbing his ears and yanking him around me, flinging him face-first onto the parking lot.

  He hit the pavement and screamed. Probably landed in a big pile of broken glass.

  When he turned over I saw I’d guessed right. Shards of multicolored glass were drawing blood from his upturned palms, and he stared at them with his eyes wide.

  Then he did something I wouldn’t have expected. He clenched his fists.

  I didn’t even stop to think that he might have been on something. But anyone who clenched his fists with two palms full of broken glass had to either be high as a kite or a major contender for the Badass of the Year Award. The look in his eyes made me vote for the former.

  He reached for the belt on the ground next to him. I stepped on his hand before it got there, irritated that I chose to wear gym shoes rather than combat boots. I ground my foot down on the wrist, hoping to break something anyway, but his free hand locked around my ankle quick as a cobra.

  He didn’t have the leverage advantage, but he lifted my foot up anyway. Another vote for drug-induced strength. My guess was Hydro; a relatively new street drug that combined the worst qualities of speed, angel
dust, and codeine. Even I stayed away from Hydro. Angel dust made you nuts.

  It also made you super-human, because the next thing I knew, Big Dude had gotten to his feet while still holding my ankle, and flipped me onto my back. I didn’t have time to determine if I had landed on glass or not, because he swarmed on me like flies on a turd.

  His hands pinned my shoulders down and I found myself staring at a rabid dog, complete with bugged-out, bloodshot eyes, straining neck, spit flecking out of his bared teeth, a low growl in his throat; all he needed was a collar.

  Big Dude ground a knee into my gut, hit a tender spot, and I yelped.

  Flexing my hands into claws, I raked my fingernails across his eyes, trying to rip the lids off. He reflexively brought his hands up to his face; not the brightest move because he gave himself a face full of glass. I arched my back and shook him off.

  “My eyes! Ahhh, Jesus… my eyes!”

  He screamed, much like a man who got glass in his eyes. I crawled to the tailgate of my Bronco, yanked out Mr. Louisville, and slammed it against the pavement over and over until I got my rage under control. You don’t crap on your own dinner table, and you don’t kill a man where you live. Based on the treatment of his girlfriend and the homeless guy, Big Dude probably deserved death sooner than most. But I wasn’t in the mood to look for a new motel, so he’d have to find his karmic retribution elsewhere.

  Rather than split his head open, I gave him a very restrained whack on the kneecap. He passed out, either from the pain or the Hydro, and I quickly went through his pockets. My efforts produced a cell phone, a wallet containing sixty two bucks, and a baggie of white powder. I did the man a favor and kept the baggie; he wouldn’t want that on him when the cops came. He got his wallet, cash, and cell phone back. After all, this was a street fight, not a mugging. Tough to plead self-defense when you take someone’s stuff.

  I waved at the motel, knowing his girlfriend was watching from the window, and turned my attention back to the wino.

  He was sobbing, his bottle cradled in his hands. It was a pint of Imperial Napoleon French Brandy. The bottle label claimed it was imported, and the fine print said it was bottled in Chicago. Maybe they imported the glass.

  I touched the man’s shoulder, aware of the lice on a corduroy jacket ten years out of date. He wailed a meek protest, the tears on his face leaving streaks in the filth.

  “No one’s going to hurt you,” I said.

  Then I scooped him up in my arms and carried him out of the parking lot. Lice didn’t bother me. There was no place on my body they could live.

  He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, half of that being the multi-layers of clothing he had wound around him. It was like carrying a bundle of sticks wrapped in a blanket.

  I leaned him against a rusty dumpster in the alley behind the motel. He shivered, his glassy eyes regarding me dully, an awful wet cough escaping his mouth.

  Probably didn’t have that much longer to live.

  Who did?

  “Thank you,” he whispered.

  I gave him the required response. “Stay the fuck out of my parking lot.”

  Sirens, in the distance. It was too early in the morning to deal with cops, so I walked over to State street and hung a right. There was an old Marathon gas station on the corner of State and 26th that had one of the last remaining phone booths in all of Chicago. That was my destination. Kenny’s undying gratitude obviously ended with paying phone bills, because I had no phone in my room. Even the Chinese have their limits.

  I walked into the booth, which smelled like someone took a piss in it. Probably because someone took a piss in it. I pumped some change in and tried not to breathe as I dialed the number on the letter. A woman answered with a light, musical Indian accent.

  “This is Phineas Troutt,” I said.

  She paused for a beat, and then said in a worried tone, “How can I be sure it’s you?”

  “You could come over and look at my Driver’s License.”

  Mr. Comedy, putting the lady at ease.

  “I’m sorry,” her voice relaxed a bit. “I’ve never hired a… well, whatever you are, before.”

  “You haven’t hired me yet. First I want to meet you and discuss the problem and the payment. Who is this?”

  “Oh. This is Bipasha. Bipasha Kapoor. When do you want to meet? “

  “How about in an hour, Ms. Kapoor?”

  “From now?”

  “Yeah. Will that work?”

  “I suppose. I don’t really know how to do this.”

  “Well first, you give me your address.”

  “I don’t know if…”

  “You are the one that contacted me.”

  “I know. And that was weird. Don’t you have a phone?”

  I didn’t carry cell phones, because whores always stole them when I passed out.

  “This is how I do business. If you want someone with a phone, you can hire a private investigator. I know a guy named Harry I can send your way. I don’t need the work that bad.”

  The hell I didn’t. Every minute I wasn’t coked out of my gourd was a minute I realized I was dying a painful death. And that shit wasn’t cheap.

  “Okay,” she said after an uncomfortable silence. “I guess I don’t really have a choice.”

  She gave me the address of her apartment. That was a gutsy move, which gave me a hint of how much trouble this lady was in. Isn’t smart to tell strange men where you live.

  “There will be people who know you’re coming over,” she said.

  “Don’t worry. I’m harmless around women. See you in an hour.”

  I broke the connection, stepping quickly out of the booth and taking a big gulp of fresh, city air.

  Time to work, Phin. Go solve someone else’s problems.

  Because you do a real shit job solving your own.

  I stopped in a bakery, picked up a few banana rolls, and scarfed them down. They were rice pastries filled with red bean paste, and no banana came near them. But they sort of looked like bananas, hence the name.

  The paramedics had arrived at the Michigan Motel, along with a patrol car. They had Big Dude, still unconscious, on a stretcher. His girlfriend wasn’t around. Maybe she’d wised up and left him.

  I headed for my door when one of the cops called out to me.

  “You see what happened here?” he barked.

  I shrugged. “Could have tripped while practicing his floor exercise routine.”

  No one laughed. Maybe my delivery was off.

  I went into my room and lifted the floorboard to my secret stash, where I kept weapons, drugs, disguises, and various other tools of the trade. I reached inside, removing two guns wrapped in old towels.

  The first was an AMT 45 ACP Hardballer Long Slide; a .45 semi-automatic with a 1911 frame and a ten shot magazine. I liked it because it sported a seven inch barrel, compared to the five inch barrels most automatics had. This extra two inches gave the weapon better accuracy, added velocity, and a lessened recoil. It also intimidated the hell out of people, more so than guns usually do. At ten and a half inches in length overall, it looked like a cannon. Just waving it around got questions answered.

  The other gun I pulled out was a Seecamp. This was a little twenty-five caliber auto that weighed only ten and a half ounces, the overall length being a hair over four inches. It had a six shot magazine, plus it held a seventh round in the spout, and I had a pair of cowboy boots with a hollow heel that this little baby fit into perfectly.

  I checked the guns to see if they were cleaned and oiled. They were. Both also had full magazines. As far as serial numbers went, all of my guns were registered in the name of a banker from Sheboygan Wisconsin who has been dead for ten years. I have a FOID Card, which allows me to use and purchase firearms, but I don’t have a concealed carry permit. If it looks like the law is going to shake me down, I ditch the weapon.

  Earl made his presence known. I shook some oxycodone tablets into my palm—they were t
wice as large as the Xanax—dry-swallowed three, and pocketed the bottle. Then I went to the closet and found my boots, and put the Seecamp in the right heel. But first I made sure the safety was on; I didn’t want to blow a hole in my foot if I hit the brakes too hard. My shoulder holster was also in my closet. It was made out of nylon, so it was much lighter and more flexible than a leather one. Cheaper too. Years ago I bought a leather holster for a Ruger 9mm I used to have, and it cost more than the gun. I wound up having to ditch the Ruger, and the holster was languishing in my trunk at my old apartment. Or at least, that’s where it used to be. I assume the landlord sold everything I owned since I left and never came back.

  Maybe Annie has it. I don’t expect to ever know.

  I put on some knee-high cotton socks, and then the boots. They were a battered gray, made from elephant skin. It didn’t bother me when I bought them, but now every time I put them on I feel guilty about the poor, huge bastard, killed for a lousy pair of boots. Shoot me, skin me, and stitch me into footwear. It was a damn shame.

  They really are a sharp pair of boots, though.

  I put the Hardballer and holster in my Snoopy and Friends lunchbox, along with two extra mags. Nobody would ever expect you to have a gun in a Snoopy and Friends lunchbox. I chose not to take a change of clothes, figuring I would be back later that night. After replacing the floorboard and carpeting, I flicked off the lights and exited my room, lunchbox in hand.

  I got on I-90 going northwest just as the codeine buzz kicked in, like an old friend dropping by to reminisce. After a few minutes of pleasant, analgesic warmth, rush hour came swinging hard and beat my ass and made me its bitch. I played stop-and-go and radio roulette at the same time, and eventually found a Neil Diamond song that reminded me of a happy childhood I didn’t have. Looking back on my thirty-odd years, my life had been pretty shitty. Hell until I left home at sixteen. Odd jobs, some white collar, some blue collar, in my teens and twenties. I eventually drifted into being a bouncer, then security work, and eventually problem solving.

  Then Earl showed up, and along with devouring my pancreas he chowed down a side dish of my remaining morality.