BEAT to a PULP: Hardboiled 2 Read online

  "Oh, Dan. Ohh, Dan! Ohhh!"

  Dan?

  Oh, no way, I thought. I pulled out my iPhone and did some searching on the Internet. Yup. Friggin' southpaw mook from Allentown, Pennsyltucky? It sure as shit was.

  Dan Mooney.

  * * *

  Two days later I rapped on the frame of Dodge's open office door and folded a stick of cinnamon gum into my mouth.

  "Hey," I said.

  Dodge looked up from a couple of spreadsheets and blinked. "Charlie B., my man." He coughed into a fist. "Hey, thanks for coming by. What's going on? What's happening? Come in, come in. What do you got for me?"

  "What I have is not so good, Dodge."

  "How's that?"

  "You were right."

  Dodge's face fell, and it was some of the worst acting I'd ever seen.

  "Damn, really? It's true? Damn."

  "Yeah," I said, adding, "she's quite the little slut, that niece of yours."

  Dodge jerked back like I keyed his car. He snapped out a finger. "Hey, watch your mouth. We might not see eye-to-eye, but Janae's still my family, motherfucker, so don't be talking about my blood like that. Show some respect. Talking nasty like that, I might be old, but I sure as hell can kick your bony ass."

  I held up a hand. "Sorry."

  Dodge huffed. "Goddamn better be."

  I eased away from the door frame and stepped into his office. "So, which part do you want me to break to Diego first, Dodge?"

  "What? What do you mean which part?"

  "The fact that Janae had her dainty heels pointing toward the ceiling while her and Dan Mooney hipped the light fandango or the fact that you're setting poor Diego up to rage all over Mooney in the octagon?"

  "Setting up who to do what? What're you talking about?"

  "Jesus Christ, Dodge. This is my job, man."

  "Your job?"

  "Yeah. It's my job, don't you get that?"

  "I'm confused."

  I rubbed a hand over my stubble. "Look, after the other night on the phone something didn't feel right to me. You seemed genuinely bummed out that I didn't have any dirt on Janae and got pretty insistent. And that, for my money, seemed hinky. For the record, Dodge, people normally like hearing good news."

  "So?"

  "So, I mulled things over and the next morning I went back and scoured Janae's cell phone bill. I saw the number for your gym here more than a few times, so tell me something. Are you always open at three in the morning? Didn't think so. Then I remembered how you said you never talked with Janae because of some beef you had with your sister."

  "I didn't say that."

  "Oh, so we're full on lying to each other's face now?"

  "I didn't!"

  "Please. Plus the fact, this is Atlantic City, Dodge. Christ, even if it's an amateur card, don't you think I'd check the line on the Diego-Mooney fight?"

  Dodge's lips tightened. "What're you talking about? You're crazy, Charlie. This is totally crazy. Nuts."

  "Maybe," I answered, and then gestured around the room indicating the gym, "but this place? Your bank is suing the living shit out of you, Dodge. Hell, if I was insolvent and bleeding cash, I'd want to bet on a sure thing too to dig myself out of that kind of hole. Same with your niece, Janae. I mean, how the hell does a twenty-one-year-old run up forty plus grand in credit card debts? Boy oh boy, I can picture you two hatching this scheme right now. What the hell, fire up some of that, what did you call it? That crazy Latin blood of Diego's? Make sure he goes in for the slaughter on Mooney? Hard to prove, yeah, but why the hell not? The thing is you wanted to use me to sell it legit, and I dig that. But dicking around with the angles on an amateur fight, some people in this city might not like that."

  Dodge shoved back from his desk.

  "It's cool, Dodge," I said. "Really. It's all cool. You can make a killing, tell Diego whatever you want, and even pimp out your hottie of a niece all the livelong day, but leave me out of the equation, all right? Man, I don't like being used like this. I've enough low self-opinion issues. Jesus, what did I ever do to you, huh?"

  "In exactly five seconds, I'm going to bust open your skull," Dodge growled.

  I shook my head and stepped to the side. "Go ahead then."

  Before Dodge could launch himself on me, a brown blur streaked past my right side and chopped Dodge down with a crippling three-count combination. I slipped back to the office doorway and watched the young cub take down the old lion.

  Dodge was right. Diego did listen and, man, was he ever fast. A follow-up right cross threw a splotch of Dodge's blood across the spreadsheets on his desk, and a crunching knee to his balls splashed the older man to the floor with a gasping whoosh of air.

  I waited until only Diego was moving before I said enough was enough.

  Twice nominated for the Story Souths Million Writers Award, Kieran Shea recently signed with the Donald Maass Literary Agency. He lives outside of Annapolis, MD.

  THE LOVELIEST TAIL

  (A Joe Hannibal Story)

  Wayne D. Dundee

  AUTHOR'S NOTE: As he approaches his 30th year in print (making him one of the longest-running, still-active PIs currently on the scene), Joe Hannibal's present home base is No Name Bay on Lake McConaughy, west central Nebraska. This tale takes place near the close of his Rockford, Illinois, years, not long before the murder of his two closest friends turned his life upside down and ultimately led to his relocation to the Cornhusker State.

  When Clyde Grammercy peeled the skimpy halter top off his strawberry blonde playmate, exposing a pair of World Class breasts between which he eagerly buried his face, I should have been a reasonably satisfied fellow. A minute or so later, after the rest of her minimal attire had been removed and the playmate had in turn tugged down Clyde's trousers to better facilitate the frantic coupling they then began to engage in—all graphically captured by the telephoto lens of my camera—I should have been practically ecstatic. Not as ecstatic as the two love-birds, to be sure, but relatively so.

  After all, I had just verified pretty damned convincingly that ol' Clyde was guilty of trying to work exactly the kind of insurance claim scam that the company who'd hired me suspected him of.

  My name, by the way, is Joe Hannibal. I'm a licensed PI and documenting the activities of Clyde Grammercy and his anonymous playmate was being done strictly in the line of duty, not as some sicko pastime I engage in for my own purposes.

  The whole insurance claim bit was wrapped in a tangle of legal mumbo jumbo about casual negligence and criminal culpability and so on and so forth, but the bottom line was that Grammercy had suffered a mishap at work resulting in alleged injuries for which he had filed a mega-bucks lawsuit. Nobody disputed the occurrence or the details of the mishap, not even that managerial incompetence was involved. The battle lines were drawn over the exact extent of the injuries.

  Grammercy, a glorified go-fer at a sprawling corporate headquarters building in downtown Rockford, Illinois (our mutual home base), had been instructed by his supervisor to use a freight elevator previously reported to be malfunctioning. With Grammercy aboard, the car snagged on its first attempted descent, trembled violently for several seconds, then plunged a story-and-a-half before catching again and jolting to a stop between floors. Although initially diagnosed as "only shaken up", it didn't take long for Grammercy to begin complaining of headaches, insomnia, extreme body aches, and on and on. It reached a point where he claimed to lack feeling or function from the waist down. He got a doctor to confine him to a wheelchair. The inevitable lawsuit came next. Backed by a quasi-reputable team of lawyers, shrinks, and physicians, Grammercy laid it on thick, blaming the elevator mishap for "severe psycho-traumatic damage" that brought on the partial paralysis and all the rest.

  With his lawyers at the helm to keep the legal action on course, Grammercy fled to Minnesota to stay with his parents in rural St. Cloud for a time, reportedly seeking relief from all the stress he was under. When he went, I followed. One of the insurance carrier
s who would be footing a big chunk of the bill if he won his case sub-contracted me to keep track and see if he continued to act as disabled a couple hundred miles away as he was claiming to be in his own back yard.

  It took less than forty-eight hours for him to ditch the act, apparently (and stupidly) believing he was far enough away from any prying eyes for it not to matter. After only one quiet night on the farm with mom and pop, he went lead-footing in a borrowed car—sans wheelchair—to the Twin Cities where he hooked up with the strawberry blonde, obviously by pre-arrangement.

  That had been yesterday. I had dogged the two of them through the balance of that day, as much of the night as I could, and into today. In that time I had snapped several shots of Grammercy standing, walking, going up and down stairs, and one beauty of him with his girl wrapped in his arms, whirling her, lifting her feet off the ground. Now, in the late afternoon, the clincher—this obligingly spirited rendition of the horizontal rumba performed right on the balcony of their getaway luxury hotel suite within range of the camera I had aimed from a neighboring window.

  So now that ol' Clyde had demonstrated for my lens and for posterity just how bogus his injuries really were, his goose was cooked and my job was finished.

  There was only one problem, one nagging little thing that was keeping me from considering the matter successfully wrapped up .... That bothersome detail being the fact that, while I had been tailing Grammercy and his playmate, somebody had started tailing me.

  The somebody was female—strikingly so. Very blonde, very shapely, very lovely. In fact, she was by far the loveliest tail I'd ever had attached to me. Intriguing as that aspect of it was, however, it didn't necessarily offer any comfort. Nor did it offer any clues as to the motive behind the surveillance. Okay, so it wasn't the first time I'd been followed by somebody and probably wouldn't be the last. But why now, why here? Was it connected in some way to the Grammercy case? Was it a spillover from a previous case, some old trouble getting ready to re-visit? Or was it the first hint of something brand new getting ready to hit the fan?

  Those were the questions still bugging me as I closed the flap on my camera and retreated back into my room. But now that I'd completed the job I'd been sent to do, I promised myself I wasn't going to leave the rest of it unanswered much longer.

  * * *

  I had booked myself into the same hotel as Grammercy and his girlfriend. Neither of them knew me, there was no risk of being recognized. It kept me conveniently close to my work and, as it turned out, made possible this afternoon's hot bonus shots of the bout on the balcony.

  At a desk in the corner of the room, I connected my borrowed laptop to the hotel's internet service, downloaded the collection of photos from my camera, and then e-mailed them to my insurance company contact back in Rockford. After that I stretched out on the bed and phoned him to let him in on the good news that was heading his way via cyber space. I also informed him I would deliver a detailed follow-up report when I returned to town but not to look for me for a couple of days because I had some personal business to take care of here before leaving.

  It was near dusk by the time I'd showered and changed and left the room again.

  The street out front of the hotel was well-lighted and busy. Four lanes of vehicles streaming back and forth in both directions; neon-splashed pedestrians milling on the sidewalks in the warm evening air.

  The side street that ran between the hotel and its tall parking garage was a different matter. Dimly lighted by older-fashioned street lamps, a high percent of its curbing marked off for loading zones only, at this hour it was quiet and basically deserted except for the lengthening shadows that crowded in with the close of the day.

  My lovely tail was parked there in one of the few legal spots, seated behind the wheel of a fairly new Monte Carlo. Exactly where she'd been since I followed Grammercy and his playmate into the hotel earlier in the afternoon. It was a vantage point from which she could see all the necessary entrances and exits.

  Her surveillance of me for the most part had stuck to that pattern. The first time I spotted her had been inside the hotel bar where Clyde had gone to rendezvous with his eager girlfriend. The next day I'd seen her meandering along behind as I followed my quarry on a hand-holding stroll with his honey along Minneapolis's heralded riverfront. The rest of the time my shadow had been content to observe from some stationary post at a relative distance—apparently only interested in keeping track of my general whereabouts without needing or wanting to know my specific activities. It was almost as odd as it was annoying.

  At any rate, it was about to come to a head.

  I exited the hotel with an extra bounce in my stride, spruced up, slicked back, looking like I was all ready for a big night on the town. I angled across the street toward the garage where my own car was parked.

  I could feel her eyes on me.

  I did a casual scan of the street until I got to her, let my gaze linger for a moment the way any red-blooded male's would. I kept it cool, kept it loose, though, softly whistling a snappy little tune as part of the act. I was just a guy giving her an appreciative once-over, a schmuck without a clue he had a tail pinned to him. No harm, little girl. Heh heh heh.

  I let my gaze take in her car, too. Then, part way across the street, I let the bounce go out of my stride and slowed to a near halt. An exaggerated frown pulled at my face and the tune I was whistling faded in mid note. I altered my direction and approached where she sat with her window down in deference to the warmth of the evening. I made a catch-all gesture and said, "Looks like you got trouble."

  She shook her head. "No. I'm okay. Just waiting for someone. He'll be out in a minute."

  "I wasn't asking," I said, layering on my own fabrication. This time I pointed more specifically. "I'm telling you—you've got a big stain spreading under your car. Fluid of some kind. Transmission maybe, or brake or power steering. Could be serious."

  "That stain must have already been there when I parked. I keep this car fanatically maintained. Really. Hard to believe it has suddenly developed any kind of serious leak."

  I rolled my shoulders in a fatalistic shrug. "Suit yourself. Stain sure looks fresh to me, though. Looks like whatever's making it is still dripping."

  She held me at bay with a guarded smile, all the while studying me carefully, gauging me. A looker like her was no doubt experienced at getting hit on just about every way imaginable. Part of her had to be wondering if that's all this was. Another part—the part in sync with the tail job she was doing on me—had to be wondering if I'd somehow tripped to what she was up to, if this was an attempt to turn the tables, gain the upper hand.

  But the part I kept playing to was the basic core trust that resides in most of us, the part that wants to believe not everybody is out to do nothing but take advantage.

  I checked my watch, as if concerned about the time, then held up both hands, palms out. "Okay. But at least have your friend take a look when he comes out, will you?" I started to back away, angling again toward the garage. "Promise me, right? No sense taking unnecessary chances."

  That sold it. I was clueless and harmless, just a guy trying to be helpful. So, having swallowed that, now she suddenly had to be worried about what was wrong underneath her car. Especially in view of the fact I appeared to be getting ready to take off somewhere and she'd have to be able to tag along.

  Scowling with irritation, she shouldered open her door and started to get out. As soon as she did that, I reversed my direction and moved back in on her. I caught her poised half-in, half-out of the vehicle and leaned my weight against the door, effectively pinning her in that awkward position. For added effect, I slipped the .45 semiautomatic out from under my blazer and put the muzzle against her rib cage. "Just take it real easy," I said, "any nobody'll get hurt."

  "What the hell is this?" she wanted to know.

  "I'll ask the questions. What you'd better do is answer them. Do what I say and tell me what I want to know. Otherwise this .45
might have to fix it so there is a stain on the ground by your car."

  I snapped a quick glance up and down the block. Everything remained still, the shadows deepening around us. If anybody noticed the two of us standing like we were, we'd just look like a pair of lovers doing a little preliminary public pawing.

  "You don't scare me." Her pink-tinted lips sneered the words from beneath cobalt blue eyes flashing defiance.

  Up close, she was every bit as extraordinary as she'd appeared in the more distant glimpses I'd been getting for the past day and a half. Not just trim and shapely, but hard-bodied, buff. A real 21st Century kind of chick. She was dressed in matching denim jeans and vest, glossy black cowboy boots, a silver conch belt, sleeveless skintight tank top that accentuated the swell of her breasts and the flatness of her stomach. Her bare arms were deeply tanned and rippled with sleek musculature.

  "You'd better be smart enough to be scared," I told her. "I don't take kindly to being spied on, so you've already got me good and pissed. You asked for this confrontation, not me."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Sure you don't."

  "You really think you can get away with using that gun on a public street?"

  "If I have to, yeah. If I didn't, it wouldn't be out of its leather. I don't play around when it comes to guns."

  "Look, whatever this insane notion you seem to have—what you're actually doing is interfering in something a great deal more serious than you realize."

  "Maybe I've got a better idea of what I'm interfering in than you think. Out of the car."

  I eased the pressure on her just enough to allow her to straighten the rest of the way up. I kept the gun in her ribs, though, the closeness of our bodies hiding it in shadow. I looked up and down the street again. Everything still okay, still quiet. But I intended to play this scene out all the way and didn't want to press my luck by continuing it right there in the open.