Richard Hawke - Cold Day in Hell

“Fuck!”

I grabbed hold of the lamp as if it were a baseball bat and gave it a sharp tug. The plug came out of the wall, the wire arcing in the air like an animal’s tail. As the man started to his feet, I charged forward and took my swing, aiming for the fences. Unfortunately, he saw the swing coming and lurched to the side so that the lamp took him on the shoulders and not the head. He wheeled around, and his fist caught me just below my ear. There was muscle behind the hit. As he came at me for another blow, I brought the lamp up and smacked it against his ear, then released it and got off a double set of hard jabs. I felt his nose collapse under the second one. As he staggered backward, I came after him, landing a pair of punches to his throat. He made a hollow swing that I easily avoided, and before he could get off another, I raised my foot as high as I could and slammed it down on his left knee. He howled. I whipped my gun from my holster, and as the man collapsed to the floor, I staggered backward, safely out of his reach.

“Stay down!”

My arms were aching, and the last thing they wanted to do was be held straight out. But I wanted him to see the gun, and I wanted him to see that it was aimed right at his bloody face. “Stay down,” I said again as he made a halfhearted move to get up. He stopped. Blood from his damaged nose fell to the tiled floor.

“I can’t…breathe,” he said in a choked voice, then began coughing.

“You can breathe.” I lowered my arms halfway, still keeping my aim. “Lie down on the floor.”

He didn’t move, so I stepped over and swept my leg under one of his arms, taking out his support. He landed on his chin and then complied, lying out flat on the ground. I moved around behind him and pressed the barrel of the gun against the back of his head. “Give me your hands.”

He obeyed, bringing around his large paws to rest at his lower back. Using the cord from the table lamp, I bound his wrists, yanking the knots as tight as I could. I requisitioned a second lamp and used its cord to secure his ankles. It was crude but sufficient. I dragged an upholstered chair over and upended it on top of him, not unlike a turtle shell. Then I went into the kitchen and splashed my face with water, gulping several mouthfuls in the process. I ran a glassful of water and fetched a tea towel from a magnetic hook on the refrigerator door and went back into the front room. The man hadn’t budged. I wet a corner of the tea towel and knelt down and dabbed at the blood on the man’s nose. He stared at me sullenly, saying nothing. He was wheezing a bit-his mouth was dropped open like a gulping fish-but he was breathing.

I returned to the kitchen, fetched a fresh glass, and filled it, this time for me. I went back out and pulled the chair off him and slipped his wallet out of his pants pocket, then helped him squirm up to a seated position on the floor, leaning against the wall. There was a driver’s license in the wallet. It told me that his name was Danny Lyles and that he lived in Long Island City, not far from Charlie Burke’s neighborhood. I told him not to get any ideas as I went through his other pockets. I found an electronic pass card and two key rings. In the down coat that Lyles had taken his detour into the front room to grab, I found a vial of pills and a baggie of pot. Thick. No stems, no seeds.

“Are you familiar with the Rockefeller drug laws, Danny? A stash like this can ruin your day.”

He wasn’t impressed. From the looks of things-especially his nose-his day was already ruined. I kicked an ottoman over to where the man sat wheezing on the floor, and took a seat. I took a long, satisfying sip of the water.

“Okay. I’m ready.”

DANNY LYLES WAS Marshall Fox’s former driver. Also his bodyguard. Not a towering sort but plenty of muscle. A free-weights guy. He’d held the position for a little over a year, a year he described to me as one of the wildest of his life. In addition to being Fox’s driver and protector, Lyles had also been his occasional night-crawling buddy. Lyles described himself as “a party hound” but admitted that he held a backseat to Marshall Fox in that department.

“Marshall was dangerous hungry, man. You’ve got no idea.”

Roughly a month before Cynthia Blair’s murder, Lyles had taken on additional duties, though in a completely unofficial and secret capacity. He became Rosemary Fox’s lover. Lyles told me that he’d had no illusions the evening when Rosemary first came on to him. He knew what she was all about. After a separation of eight months, Fox had recently started making overtures to his wife; he wanted Rosemary to take him back, to give the marriage another go. Rosemary had Marshall on the hook and she knew it. Lyles said that he’d gotten a phone call from Rosemary asking that he come by the apartment. He did, and she sat him down on the living room couch and demanded that Lyles fill her in on all of her husband’s escapades over the months of their separation. Lyles balked at first. He played the loyalty card. But Rosemary trumped it easily. She possessed her own set of cards, and she knew exactly how to lay them out to her own best advantage.

“Right behind you, man. Right there on the couch. She’s one superior pain in the ass, no question about it. But I’m telling you, you’ve never met anyone’s got the goods like that, I swear.”

Lyles admitted to me that he had known all about Fox’s affair with Cynthia Blair. He was pretty certain he’d been the only one who did know.

“I drove the guy everywhere. I knew everything he did. I’ll tell you, when he found out she was pregnant, he got more drunk off his ass than I’d ever seen. The man was out of his gourd, he was so pissed off. It was all pretty trippy for me. Even though I’m shagging his old lady on the side, we’re still partying together. I mean, he was clueless. I was also seeing this other chick at the time. Tracy Jacobs. You’ve seen her. She’s all hot shit now on that show. Century City ? She plays the clueless wife of that older guy? Perfect casting, man. Girl couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag, then she lands a plum role in a show like that. Anyway, one night right after Marshall’d found out about Cynthia and how she was planning to have the kid, he tagged along with me and Tracy. He ended up going way over the top. He was drinking like no tomorrow, popping uppers. The guy was a mess. This is all before Tracy’d gotten her show, by the way. She was nobody at this point to Marshall. Just another bad actress all goo-goo to be hanging out with Marshall Fox.”

As Lyles described it, somewhere along the way, Marshall had started getting nasty with Tracy. At first he argued with everything that came out of her mouth, but soon he was trying to put the moves on her.

“He’d do that sometimes, man. Show his mean side, then start trying to get in their pants. It kind of freaked Tracy out. Marshall got a real bug up his tail about Tracy, and I had to pull him off her before he hurt her. He’s got this ugly streak, man. You don’t want to see it. It all sort of cooled down, but the evening was pretty much tanked. Then when I was dropping her off at her place, Marshall suddenly got out of the car and went after her again. I’m telling you, though, it was the whole damn Cynthia thing. He just needed someone to take it out on. Anyway, I had to pull him off of her and shove him back in the car and all that crap. Tracy cut things off with me after that. That’s how it goes, I guess. Thing is, though, she ended up getting me fired. How’s that for fucking irony?”

I went back into the kitchen and fetched more water. I tried Megan’s number but got no answer. Lyles was tugging against the lamp cord when I came back out.