Dead Man's Hand

by Richard Levesque

  I’d learned a long time ago that working defense on a case sometimes meant skirting the law. The other side had an awful lot of resources, and sometimes those included rules and regulations designed to keep me from information that I needed. So I looked at the strategic computer hack, the occasional breaking and entering, the well placed bribe all as just a way to level the playing field. I could just as easily have looked at them as ways to get myself disbarred, but that was beside the point.

  The lock popped after a few seconds. I slid it out of the hasp, lifted the latch, and pulled the gate open slowly, my teeth gritted against the possibility of squeaky hinges echoing through the night. All stayed quiet, and I stepped through once the opening was just big enough, then pulled the gate closed and latched it, leaving the open lock hanging on one of the links so I could get out quickly if I needed to.

  Holding my phone low, I turned on its light and walked around the side of the building. The space was wide enough to drive a car through, and if it had been daylight I might have been able to pick out tire tracks in the dust, but for now I was content to assume Pete or someone working with him had driven Drea’s van through here and that I’d find it around the back of the warehouse.

  When I rounded the corner, my hunch proved itself correct, and I just stood there looking at the van. It had been backed into a smaller doorway, this one just big enough for a single vehicle to pass through. Its roll-up door was all the way up. Only the front half of the van stuck out of the building. From inside, white light shone out around the sides of the van, faintly illuminating parts of the area between the building and the back fence.

  Nervous that the van’s former cargo might have gotten the better of Neat Pete, I stood still for a few seconds, shining my light around the property at the back of the building to be sure nothing was lumbering around in the shadows. It didn’t take long to satisfy myself that I was the only person—living or dead—behind the building, and I let myself breathe again. In my sweep of the property, I saw two other cars and a black van parked against the fence and thought about walking over to feel their hoods to see if they were also recent arrivals. Drea’s white van, though, struck me as the more important object of investigation, so I crept up to it, looking and listening for anything amiss.

  The passenger door was unlocked, but I didn’t open it—just went to the front of the van to peer through the windshield. I could see nothing, no one living or dead or anywhere in between. Heavy metal mesh formed a barrier between the cab and cargo area in the van, the kind that would have been strong enough to keep the driver safe in case the zombies broke their restraints in the middle of being transported. Peering through the glass, all I could see for sure was that the van’s two back doors hung wide open, as though it had expelled its contents into the building.

  I squinted and then rubbed my hand against the window, hoping in vain to be able to see for certain what was inside the drug lab, but the mesh was too thick for me to be able to make out anything but what looked like large tanks or vats with a maze of multi-colored pipes running from place to place. My guess about the place being a drug lab seemed to have been right, and now I hazarded a new one.

  Given my area of professional expertise, the drug trade wasn’t something I knew much about. My clients tended to get themselves into trouble over other things. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t up on the latest trends. The drug lords, the Grommet brothers predominant among them, had started manufacturing a new product a few years back, and it had caught on among the normals in the city. The trick of this one wasn’t that it was an upper or a downer or a psychedelic or a euphoric but rather that it was all of those in one, a drug that would cycle from one effect to another to another, randomly and with equal intensity. It had a long chemical name, but the kids called it “roller” as in roller coaster, and using it was either “rolling” or “coasting.” The drug could be eaten, snorted, smoked or shot up. Total versatility, depending on individual taste.

  I told myself that I was looking into a roller lab, one that was now home to half a dozen zombies along with Neat Pete and maybe others. With a reassuring check of my back pocket to make sure I still had Drea’s antidote with me, I tried to decide if I should venture in or hang it up and tell Pixel it wasn’t worth the risk.

  And at the moment that choice ran its way through my thoughts, I decided to bolt. And not because of zombies. I don’t know if it was a shift in the breeze or some change in pressure inside the building, but I smelled something now, or maybe only just realized that I’d been smelling it already, just figured out the significance of the scent wafting out of the building: brown rice and bananas.

  Pixel was a roller. It didn’t mean she as an addict, or even that Pete was her connection. But what were the chances that the hacker with a little habit and the dapper killer with access to her drug of choice should just happen to hook up? Maybe the satyr attack had never happened. And maybe it had. It didn’t matter. Sure, Pixel had the dead man’s hand, but the story of how she’d gotten it suddenly looked shaky. And while I didn’t think there was any way she could have engineered my presence here just from our conversation the night before, I knew for sure that the steel mesh in the van wasn’t the only thing I couldn’t see all the way through. When you threw zombies into the mix, there was no way I was about to move another inch toward that doorway.

  In my head, I was already out the gate and heading for my car, the cold kiss-off I’d give Pixel already forming itself in my thoughts. But before I could get my feet in sync with my mind, I felt the hard steel of a gun barrel pushed up against the back of my skull, just to the right of my left ear.

  “See anything you like?” came the quiet voice, one I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Neat Pete, but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t have talked my way out of this even if it had been Pete. A few seconds later, I’d been frisked and was being pushed forward along the side of the van, toward the doorway into the drug lab and whatever else lay beyond.

  Six

  I’d never been anywhere near a roller lab, but I knew I was in one now. Across the room from me was a large open tank, the size of a modest aboveground swimming pool in the suburbs. Pipes ran in and out of it, leading to larger tanks and smaller ones, passing in and out of this main room and through the walls, no doubt to other vats and processors, eventually ovens and weighing and bagging rooms. The smell was only a bit stronger inside, and I would no longer have said brown rice and bananas—not quite. Still that odd combination was the closest I’d have been able to get.

  While the drug manufacturing equipment all around me did draw my interest, it was only to the degree that it made me wonder just what I’d gotten myself into and if there was any way I could use what I knew about rolling or about Pete or Pixel or the Grommets or even Drea and zombies to get myself out of this, to get the damned gun away from my head. The attempt at strategizing was fleeting though, giving way to disbelief as I saw how many bodies were scattered across the floor.

  Five wore tan coveralls; three of these were near the van’s back end, one slumped against the far right wall, and the last was on the catwalk that ran around the rim of the largest vat in the room, its head and one arm hanging over the edge. Two other dead men wore street clothes. One lay with his face away from me, slumped on the ramp leading up to the catwalk around the vat. The other was practically at my feet. Blood pooled on the floor around him, having spilled from the dead man’s throat, half of which was gone, the flesh around the wound ragged and torn. The dead man also had a single bullet hole in his forehead—his compatriots’ way of thwarting the virus transmitted in the bite that had killed him.

  Aside from the hum of machinery, the place was silent—no moans, no cries of alarm or pain. Other than my captor, I got no sense that any of Grommet’s boys were in the place, not even Neat Pete. I knew his couldn’t be the body on the ramp; its clothes looked too cheap.

  After a few seconds, the man with the gun to my head pushed me toward the ramp where the bo
dy lay. Soon, I could discern that the dead man had snow-white hair and dark age spots on the one arm that pointed up the ramp—looking like it was somehow trying to get away from whatever had happened to the body it was attached to. The dead man’s age and shabby clothes told me this had been Drea’s driver. By the time we were close enough for me to get a good look at the body, I could see that a huge flap of flesh hung down the side of his face and that there was a bullet hole in his head similar to the first corpse I’d seen.

  At first, I’d assumed that the bodies in coveralls had been lab workers caught in the crossfire, but now I saw more closely the body on the catwalk ahead of me. It was one of Drea’s zombies. More specifically, it was Lester Rincon. While the body’s left arm was hidden from view, hanging with its head over the edge of the vat, the right arm lay at its side, the hand cleanly sliced off with the white bone poking through the flesh. It was impossible to look at that neat stump and not think of the hand in Pixel’s run-down refrigerator.

  There was no way to know exactly what had happened here, but my guess was that the zombies had somehow gotten loose. The men in street clothes were Grommet’s boys—which Grommet I couldn’t say for sure, but I had a hunch. They’d been attacked. And when the dust had settled, the score was five former zombies, two dead gangsters, and one dead old man. The living had been bitten and put down, the undead dispatched with shots to the head. Doing the math left one zombie unaccounted for, sort of a word problem from hell, and I had to hope that the man who’d captured me had already dispatched the missing creature somewhere out of sight.

  And I still saw no sign of Pete. There was a chance he’d taken part in the melee, but it seemed more likely that my friend with the gun had done most or all of the work. Pete’s forte was blades, not bullets, and I guessed that he was hiding somewhere in a back room or closet, waiting for the all clear.

  I felt the gun barrel pushed harder against my skull, a silent command that I should keep moving. He wanted me to go up the ramp and toward Rincon’s body. I’d had about enough of complying and was starting to think of how best to talk my way out of this. There was a chance the gunslinger would respond well to a bribe, but I didn’t have much I could promise him, save free legal council should his boss ever get him into trouble more serious than what he’d just gone through tonight. If this guy really had been massacring zombies and then putting down his fellows for not being quick enough on the draw, he had regained his composure pretty damn quickly. A cool guy, maybe too cool.

  When I got to the top of the ramp, I could see the rest of Rincon’s body. I don’t know what was in the vat, or what the process was for cooking coaster, but I could see now that it was nasty stuff. The body couldn’t have been in the vat long, but the flesh was already melting away from the bone, stringy bits of muscle, skin and hairy scalp separating from the skull and bobbing in the fluid the head was soaking in. As for any plan involving salvaging the left hand—either to get Pixel a matched set or to let one of the Grommets enact the same plan Pixel had in mind—it was in equally bad shape. The hand and wrist floated in the pool, already reduced mostly to bone.

  “Looks like you guys had quite a party,” I said.

  “Shut up.”

  “Edward!” The voice came from behind us, and we both turned away from the vat.

  The Grommet brothers came shuffling across the floor, with another gun-toting thug behind them. I’d seen them before, but only from a distance. Now I wished it had stayed that way. The Grommets were repulsive, even aside from the fact that they were joined together at their heads. They were corpulent and short, bald and sweaty. Their skin was a sickly ashen color. The brother who faced me, and I assumed he was the one who had spoken, had a large mole about the size of a nickel above his right eye and age spots all over his scalp. It appeared that the brother with his back to me had his hands bound, and the thug’s gun was trained steadily on him.

  It took me only a couple of seconds to add up the angles. They didn’t quite make a whole circle, but I had most of it figured out. I still wasn’t sure how I was going to get out of this without being shot, but my chances were suddenly better.

  “Yancy Grommet,” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes at me in a way that told me I’d guessed correctly. He didn’t deign to reply, though. At this point, I was nothing more than an unimportant detail in an already complicated situation.

  “What are you doing, Edward?” he asked, his voice bubbling up through his jowly throat.

  “This guy was nosing around,” Edward said with another nudge of the barrel to the back of my head. “Figured we didn’t need any live witnesses.”

  Grommet nodded, making his brother’s head nod along. “Were you going to bother finding out who he is first?”

  Edward had a moment’s embarrassed hesitation, then started feeling for my wallet. Now would have been a good time to duck and roll and hope he had bad aim, but his boss put a stop to things before they could get going.

  “Edward!” he barked. “Why don’t we just ask him, for God’s sake?”

  The fumbling at my backside stopped immediately, and I heard Grommet mutter, “Idiot.”

  Edward likely heard it, too, as he gave me a sharper nudge.

  “Ace Stubble,” I said.

  Grommet narrowed his eyes at me. “Lawyer,” he said.

  “Guilty,” I answered.

  That almost got a grin.

  I figured the best thing I could do was to play my hand and play it strong, no bluffs, no fakes, not even a hint that I wanted to get up from the table and walk away. Showing my cards would either prompt him to let Edward finish me off—which would surely happen anyway if I just kept my mouth shut—or cause him to see me as something of an asset, someone he could use. I didn’t like putting myself in that category, but it was better than ending up in the vat, blending my molecules with Lester Rincon’s.

  “How long has Neat Pete been taking pay from both you and your brother?” I asked.

  A raised eyebrow, nothing more. So far, so good, I thought and threw down another card.

  “I don’t expect you planned on moving on your brother just yet, though, did you? Pete was supposed to lay low, gather information. That right?”

  Silence still.

  Finding Yancy here and in charge amidst the carnage, his brother a captive and Pete off somewhere cowering, had told me a lot about Pete. He was the lynch pin, the key part in this whole mess that made it make sense. Even though I was figuring it all out even as the words spilled out of my mouth, I laid it all out for Yancy as though I’d known about it all along, not unlike a courtroom speech after an unexpected discovery. Never let the judge or jury know you’ve been in the dark, ever. They’ve got to think you sleep with one eye open, and that’s how I played it for Yancy.

  “And then your brother ordered Pete to kill Rincon. And Pete followed through, thinking he was also following your orders to lay low until you were ready to strike at Clancy. Only Rincon was your keystone, wasn’t he? Without him hacking into Clancy’s operation, you weren’t going to be able to pull off your little coup. So you figured you’d cut your losses and move on your brother now, and maybe get a version of Rincon back while you could.” I paused for a few seconds. “That about sum it up?”

  “You strike me as a man who likes a good puzzle,” Grommet finally said. “Not surprisingly, though, you’ve left one piece out.”

  “And that would be?”

  “You.”

  Of course. He wanted to know how I knew so much, and I really didn’t want him knowing, didn’t want to have to walk him back through it all from Drea to Bascom to Pixel to Pete. That would be laying down too many cards, mostly other people’s. So I just fired away with a lie, following through with the same self-assuredness I’d used in telling him the truth.

  “I’ve got a client,” I said. “Got into some trouble with information systems. I picked up a rumor that Rincon’s corpse might be had for a price. A little creative re-animation and I
could maybe get what was left of his brain to hack into a system or two, fix my client’s situation.” I shrugged, making it seem like this was the kind of thing I ran into every day. “Then, when the natural process caught up to the corpse, I’d just let the evidence rot away and be done. Expensive and risky, but better than dealing with a living hacker who could be subpoenaed.”

  Grommet failed to look skeptical or convinced, just kept watching me, sweat beading on his forehead. I decided that even his eyes looked fat. “And you somehow thought Lester’s body would be here,” he finally said.

  “I played a hunch. A little late, apparently.” Then I glanced at the one-handed corpse with its head in the vat. “Looks like finding him hasn’t done me much good.”

  I could see Grommet follow my eyes, and his own narrowed just a touch as he processed what I said.

  “I see you lost out, too, though. Now Rincon’s no good to either of us.”

  “Yes,” Grommet said. “A shame. I want to know about your hunch. I need to see if I’ve got a hole that needs plugging.” His eyes shifted to Edward, and I supposed he would have turned to look at the man guarding Clancy if doing so wouldn’t have involved turning his non-compliant brother’s body all the way around.

  This was bad, mainly because I could think of no way past this one that didn’t involve giving up someone’s name. The longer I remained silent, the more impatient and distrustful of me he’d become. The next words out of his mouth were likely to be the order to kill me, and I tensed to spring, not knowing what good it would do me but determined not to just stand here and take one in the back of the head.

  But before Grommet could pull the lever on me, there came a noise from the shadows behind them—a growling, snorting sound that I knew couldn’t be good. Yancy Grommet turned his head and forced his brother to turn with him. I couldn’t help following his gaze even as I tried running scenarios that would end with my head spending at least one more night on my pillow.