Luke Murphy - Dead Man's Hand

“You worry too much.” Pitt ground his cigarette into an ashtray and took another sip. His bleary eyes suggested he’d been sipping on scotch all evening. “We both have much invested in Grant’s death. For as long as I’ve known you, I’ve learned that you leave no detail out. That’s why you’re rich and about to get even richer. We have nothing to worry about.”

Because Pitt had been talking and drinking continuously, he hadn’t noticed that Ace was now standing behind him. He couldn’t see Ace pull on a pair of black leather gloves.

But Ace knew the man sensed him. He saw Pitt’s back hair rise.

“You are right. I am a rich man because of my attention to detail.” He dropped a gloved hand firmly on Pitt’s shoulder and kneaded the tight ball. “You’re too tense, Donald. Relax a little.” He massaged the bookie’s fat shoulders and neck.

Pitt tightened up more and gripped the arms of the chair.

“You like poker?”

The question seemed to catch the bookie off guard. “What?”

“Poker. I love it. I know that Texas Hold ‘em is all the craze right now, but I’ve always been a fan of Primero, or as rookies know it, Straight. This was the very first game of poker ever played, the root of the game. This is what they played in the Wild West.”

“What’s with the gloves?” Pitt asked with a tremble in his voice.

“Oh, you know me. Always the cautious one. Shall we try your luck?”

When Pitt attempted to get up, Ace wrapped an arm tightly around Pitt’s throat, squeezed and raised his chin to expose the esophagus. The man struggled to breathe, so Ace tightened his grip, obstructing the air passage. Pitt tried to call out but couldn’t.

“Sorry, Donald. No loose ends. Wrong place, wrong time.”

The cards were gone. With his right hand, Ace pulled a new hunting knife from his jacket and with precision and speed swiped the blade across the bookie’s throat.

Pitt instinctively grabbed at the wound, but it took only seconds for his body to go limp.

In a calm, easy manner Ace cleaned his knife on Pitt’s already blood-stained white boxers. As he was about to slide the knife back into its sheath in his pocket, he heard the toilet flush in the office bathroom. A sliver of light showed beneath the door. The light flickered.

Moving with great speed and agility, he flipped the knife from his right hand to his left to get a better angle on the person coming out of the bathroom. He slipped behind the door, waiting for it to open.

A small, thin woman stepped out. He moved in behind and grabbed her around her wiry neck, the knife ready to strike. He flexed his arm, stifling any scream, and breathed in her heavy floral perfume, but the woman tore at his grip. Her nails cut into his bare right wrist.

“You bitch!” he roared. Saliva spit from the corner of his mouth.

He overpowered her with ease. Sliding his arm down to her shoulders, he slashed the blade across her throat. Blood squirted from the gash as he let the woman drop to the floor.

Again he wiped his knife clean on his victim’s limited clothing and put it back in its sheath. He looked down at the two bodies and smiled.

Now to get what he came for and make it look like a robbery.

He’d known for years where Pitt’s safe was and how to unlock it. That kind of information was always easy to buy, for the right price.

Ace pulled open the cheap framed painting hanging on the back office wall and looked at the hidden safe. As he was about to start spinning the heavy combination lock, he heard a loud thud in the back alley. It might have just been a stray cat, but he couldn’t take that chance.

“Shit!”

After making sure he had left no evidence, he quickly surveyed the area and closed the painting. He exited through the front and locked the door on his way out.

Chapter 19

Calvin left Rachel in a motel until he could return. He didn’t want her to see what might happen when he confronted Pitt.

He couldn’t see Pitt pulling off an elaborate scheme to set him up alone and he wasn’t leaving the office without a name.

The bookie’s Cadillac was parked out front. Calvin used his key and let himself in, locking the door from the inside. Pitt wasn’t getting away.

He marched back where he knew he would find Pitt, a good chance screwing one of his working girls. The thought of a sweaty, hairy Pitt on top of a young streetwalker turned Calvin’s stomach.

As soon as he entered, he picked up the unmistakable, repugnant odor of blood even through the usual stench of the back office. When he followed the scent and saw them, he grabbed the wall. His torture and cruelty hadn’t prepared him for the blood spatter and damage that had occurred in the tiny room. Calvin bent over at the knees.

There was no point checking for pulses—Pitt and the woman were dead. He still had to find out who worked with Pitt to set him up.

As he stepped over the woman’s body, he heard something or someone fumbling at the front door lock.

“Fuck!”

He couldn’t be found there.

With no time to search the office, Calvin jumped a pool of blood and bolted through the office and out the back door.

The front door was locked, of course, so Pitt could engage in activities Dale didn’t want to imagine.

After he picked the cheap lock on Pitt’s door, he walked inside. He saw no one in the front office and kept moving to the back room. The faint fluorescent lights were dim and made the corners of the room difficult to see. He couldn’t hear any noise so, hoping to do a brief search before Pitt heard him from another area, he used a bright compact flashlight to examine the room.

Pitt’s files looked out of order. Drawers were open, magazines lay open, papers were everywhere and opened food wrappers and containers had stained many of the documents. A coffee mug had been overturned and the liquid had absorbed into a sheaf of papers. A bottle of Jack Daniels was still uncapped.

By the looks of it, Pitt hadn’t kept his files up to date or in any kind of order. Standing in front of Pitt’s disorganized desk, Dale swiftly examined all the scattered papers on top but found no clues in the disarray.

He moved around the side of the desk to search the drawers and saw Pitt’s body sprawled on the floor, his face frozen in shock, his throat slashed almost as deep as Grant’s had been. The blood had splattered his head, upper body, waist and thighs and pooled around them.

He pulled his gun and crouched behind the desk. Seeing and hearing nothing, he looked again at Pitt’s corpse. From the thinness of the pooled blood, the murder had happened not long ago. Old blood would have thickened.

He then saw the woman on the floor just inside the office bathroom. Sidestepping a pool of blood, Dale ran to the girl’s side, holstering his weapon. Like Pitt, she had been sliced at the neck and suffered the same massive blood loss.

She was no more than seventeen, a dark-rooted blonde with soft features and freckles over the bridge of her nose. She had a ring in her lower lip and her pupils were severely dilated, pinhole pupils telling Dale she’d been high at the time of her murder. Her overwashed T-shirt and white thong were soaked in blood.

He raised her hands and saw what he thought was skin underneath her fingernails.

Dale did one more search with his gun drawn, turning on every light as he went, but found nothing before calling dispatch for the crime scene teams. Then he called Jimmy.

“I thought I told you I was going home for the night.”

“Two people were just murdered, Jimmy.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m tired, but I’ll be there.”

“I’m sorry too. Please apologize to Tina for me. Some things are beyond our control. And call Mark and get him down here too.”