GRAVE WALKER: A gripping noir thriller (Thomas Blume series of Hard-Boiled Mysteries)

by PT Reade

  “Now gentlemen,” I addressed the three Russian mobsters crouched in front of me. “Those nice officers are going to take you in for a few questions. Don’t try anything stupid, and you’ll avoid a trip to the morgue. Da?”

  “You don’t have the balls,” the one in front spat. I suddenly noticed his hand creeping lower to his waist…and the knife at his belt.

  I fired a shot into the thug’s leg, and the man howled in agony, dropping the blade.

  “I do have the balls,” I said. “But try anything again, and you might not.”

  The two uniformed cops finally approached the table slowly. “Are you backup?” the one in front asked me.

  “Something like that,” I replied. “Listen, I need you to cuff these guys and hold tight. More officers are on the way. I have to get into that apartment, it’s important that—

  My words were suddenly cut off by a muffled scream.

  And a gunshot.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I burst into Lem’s apartment. Calling out to his guard.

  “I’m coming in, don’t shoot!”

  But it wasn’t necessary. I spotted the sagging form in the corner. Mr. Pin-stripe was slumped against the wall with crimson seeping through his shirt. I raced over and placed a dish cloth against the wound. Outside I heard sirens.

  The man blinked slowly, and I saw he was hanging on, for now. His partner in the black tee shirt wasn’t so lucky. I saw him face down in the kitchen, surrounded by a pool of blood. The apartment was riddled with bullet holes and broken furniture. These men had done well to hold out as long as they did against Victor’s forces.

  “Hold the pressure here. Help is coming,” I said as I climbed to my feet.

  Another shout sounded from deeper in the apartment. I could hear two voices. They were speaking urgently, one man and one woman. It was hard to tell from the muffled quality of their voices what it was about, but I had a feeling I knew.

  I moved as quickly as I could through the living room with my gun raised. A long, expansive hallway fed off to the right. The voices were coming from that direction. As I took another step towards the conversation, the male voice, Mickey Lem, I assumed, shouted a single curse.

  Without making any noise, I finally came to the midway point in the hallway. A door was just ahead of me, partially open. The voices were coming from inside, and now that I was right on top of it, I recognized the female inside. She was doing everything she could not to cry as her speech cracked with emotion.

  “I don’t understand,” Lem was saying. “This was your deal!”

  “Me? This-this is all your fault!” the woman cried. And when she said it, I knew that my hunch was correct. Everything made a sick sort of sense now.

  I gripped the Glock and wheeled around to the door, pushing it open.

  There she was; the reason for the mob war outside.

  Zoe Holland stood pointing a small revolver at a wide-eyed Mikhail Lem. He was backed against the window and held his own weapon, a pistol, back at her. The room was apparently Mickey Lem’s office. A desk and several bookshelves filled the space.

  Seeing me, Zoe burst into tears, and her aim on Lem faltered.

  I raised my own gun, but uncertainty gripped me. She had gotten into it deep…too deep, but could I pull the trigger after everything we had been through? Zoe had made her mistakes, sure. I had made plenty of my own too, but in the end did any of that matter?

  After all, the woman standing before me was not Zoe Holland…not by a long shot.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I looked back and forth between them and knew that this was a powder keg waiting to explode.

  Maybe I was the fuse.

  I lowered my gun a little and shook my head, “Why did it have to go down like this? The Darcey I knew was a good person.”

  The woman looked at me and frowned. “I don’t think the dead can hear you, Blume,” she sniffed.

  “I wasn’t talking to the dead.”

  A look of sadness washed over her face. She wiped a tear away with a free hand, and again I saw the irritation around her eyes. “What- what are you talking about?” she asked, voice trembling. “My sister is gone.”

  “She is,” I replied. “But Darcey Holland isn’t.”

  Her eyes widened, and I knew I’d hit the mark. Lem looked baffled.

  No, the woman in front of me was not Zoe Holland. Yes, she wore the right clothes, carried the right face and even had a penchant for manipulating men like her sister. But this was not Zoe. This was a dead woman.

  This was Darcey Holland.

  ***

  “I know it’s you, Darcey. I finally figured it out. But that begs the question…why did you do it? Why kill the real Zoe?”

  “What the hell is going on here?!” Lem yelled, “And what are you doing in my apartment?”

  “I’m a detective, not a vampire. I don’t need an invitation,” I remarked. “And this woman is responsible for the shitstorm outside so if you’d prefer I leave her here to finish you off, that’s fine with me.”

  “Stay out of this, Thomas,” Darcey snapped. “You’re no boy-scout yourself.”

  Here she was about to execute this poor bastard, and I realized it; she was correct. I wouldn’t know right from wrong if one was helping the poor and the other was selling drugs to kids. Lem was no saint either; the legacy of a family that built its name on murder and corruption. Perhaps he did deserve to be punished. Perhaps we both did.

  But not today.

  Lem seemed to consider her words for a moment, but I didn’t give either of them the chance to ruin my momentum. I looked back to Darcey and saw that she was trembling as her world fell apart. The gun wavered in front of her, and I needed to tread carefully.

  “I figured it out,” I continued. “There were clues. Things most people would not have picked up on…unless they once knew you intimately. For instance…the red eyes. Where are your glasses, Darcey? I bet those contacts you’re trying to pass off are playing hell on your eyes, aren’t they?”

  “It’s not,” she blurted. “You don’t think that I…”

  “Oh, I’m just getting started,” I said, still holding my gun but keeping it low.

  “The dumped body—your dumped body—had jewelry on it. Darcey never wore jewelry, so that was a red flag. But it would take someone smart to know that marine life is attracted to shiny objects in the water. How the fish would eat away any evidence, making it almost impossible to identify the body. Tell me, Darcey, how is that ex-boyfriend of yours doing? You know, the marine biologist.”

  Lem looked between the two of us, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

  I continued my deduction. “With the body mutilated, and any evidence of identification eaten away, all you had to do was show up to play the grieving sister and correctly identify her as ‘Darcey.’”

  Tears now streamed from her face as I continued.

  “Hell, you two looked so similar that it was easy. Some hair color, contact lenses, and a new wardrobe. Something a little more provocative. But it wasn’t just the look, you became Zoe; her mannerisms, her flirting. You had me fooled, you had us all fooled. But in the end, you didn’t know that Zoe had turned things around. She wasn’t the woman you thought she was.”

  People change.

  I could literally see the moment where Darcey finally gave up, shrugging off the assumed identity of her sister. She grimaced in an expression of sadness and rage. “You don’t understand,” she sobbed.

  “I’d like to,” I said. “For starters, why Mickey? What’s going on here?”

  “He…he and Zoe…he left me for her,” Darcey stammered.

  “It’s not that simple,” Mickey said, distracted.

  “It never is, look, let’s put the guns away,” I replied. But Mickey wasn’t listening. With Darcey’s attention focused on me he was eyeing a second door, one that presumably led out onto the hallway overlooking the staircase outside.

  “No, wait!” I called
out. But he was already in motion. Mickey dashed from behind his desk and threw himself at the door. Darcey, startled by the sudden movement, wheeled her gun around and fired a shot.

  I saw blood spray against the wall as Mickey threw himself through the door and into the hallway beyond.

  “Darcey, stop!” I shouted. But whatever fire still burned in her veins drew her in Mickey’s wake. She dashed for the exit door, gun outstretched, and I couldn’t bring myself to shoot her.

  “Damnit,” I cursed.

  I knew she was dangerous, and Lem was too. But at least in the apartment there was just the three of us. A situation I could keep control of. Outside I knew we were no longer alone.

  THIRTY

  “On the ground!”

  “Drop it! Do it now!”

  I slowly stepped out in pursuit of Darcey and raised my hands in the air, knowing what I would face.

  The water-logged top floor of the Chelsea hotel was now filled with police officers. Uniforms, detectives, even SWAT had responded to the gunfire. They had been waiting outside, giving me a chance to diffuse the situation in the apartment. Now that chance was gone, and an entire army of New York’s finest had their guns trained on the woman in front of me.

  Mickey had taken a round to the neck. It didn’t look fatal, more of a graze, but he was bleeding a lot, half-slumped against the wrought iron railings of the stairwell.

  Darcey stood wild-eyed with her revolver still pointing at the man. She almost seemed not to notice the cops all around. Rain continued to pour through the shattered skylight, showering the scene below in a steady stream.

  I holstered my weapon and raised a hand to calm the officers all around me.

  “Darcey, take it easy. Tell me what’s going on here.”

  “I…I tried,” Darcey sniffed, water streaming down her face. “I tried so hard to be the bigger woman. But Zoe, sh-she had it all. Things came so easy for her, and I would always be left picking up the pieces.”

  “What happened, Darcey? Tell me,” I said softly.

  “Zoe, she-she just didn’t care because she didn’t need to. She was sexy, popular, and men did anything for her, so why worry about the mistakes she made? She just cruised through life, fucking things up for everyone else. I mean, at the hospital she-she—”

  “It’s ok, I know,” I said, recalling the events from St. Stevens.

  Darcey wiped a sleeve across her eyes, while her gun wobbled in front. Mickey was bleeding onto the carpet and the cops all around me were tense.

  “I kept trying to intervene,” Darcey continued. “To make sure my baby sister could straighten her life out and make something of herself. When you’re under thirty and making those mistakes, that’s one thing. But I was worried that she’d wake up one day, find that she was suddenly forty-five, and that everything she’d done in her past was still haunting her. But after a while, it was just too much. She didn’t care, and it was obvious. So I stopped caring too—more than that—I became resentful, and all I could do was let Zoe live her life. I stayed away from her as much as I could.”

  She stopped here to catch her breath and to wipe more tears away. Part of me wanted to comfort her with something as simple as an arm around her shoulders, but the past was the past. I wasn’t about to go down that road, not now.

  “So I moved on,” she said. “I met Mikhail,” she nodded to a pale-looking Mickey Lem on the floor. “We started seeing each other. We hit it off,” she said with a smile.

  Mickey nodded weakly. “We did,” he whispered.

  Darcey shifted her attention, staring directly into my eyes. I sensed her desperation. She spoke calmly then, as though she needed me to understand what brought her here. “I fell for him, it’s true. We had so much in common, and he was so kind and sweet. We got engaged in secret, and it seemed that…” Darcey paused, searching for the right words. “By leaving Zoe to her own devices, my life had gotten much better. Things were really working out for once. But then, as she tended to do, my sister came back to screw everything up. It was like she could sense that I was happy, and she couldn’t tolerate it.”

  I could see Darcey’s eyes, glassy with emotion as she recalled the events.

  “Right around the time when Zoe resurfaced, Mikhail started to get really distant with me. For about a month, he was basically a stranger. And then he calls out of the blue one night and calls off the engagement over the phone. I didn’t…I couldn’t understand.”

  “Then I remembered. The tail ends of conversations, snippets of emails and the extra security. Mikhail always tried to keep me from the business, but I knew Victor, his father, was dangerous. Mikhail was a good man though. I was sure he was trying to protect me by pushing me away, but whatever danger there was, I wanted us to face it together. I got it in my head that I was going to come here, to this apartment, and convince him to stay.

  “I got here just after 1:30 in the morning. God, I was a wreck…but then I saw her. I saw Zoe. She was leaving the building and didn’t notice me across the street. I was furious. Zoe and my Mikhail. I had been so stupid! She had done it to me again, but I knew it would be the last time.”

  Darcey lowered her gun slightly as resignation seemed to overtake her.

  “So I followed her home that night, and that’s where I…that’s where I lost sight of myself. Every lousy thing Zoe had ever done to me came back. Every time she had taken advantage of me. Every guy she had ever stolen from me. Decades of hurt and frustration came pouring out of me. Everything.”

  On the floor, Lem croaked in pain as he finally pieced together what had happened. “You… you did it. How?”

  “I knocked on her door; it was almost too easy,” Darcey explained as is if was the most natural thing in the world. “Zoe let me in and when she did, the syringe was already in my hand. Just a pin prick, but I must have used too much. I tried getting her to confess about having an affair with Mikhail, but she gave me nothing. I snapped, Thomas…I don’t know how else to explain it. Before I knew it, I was slapping her, but she couldn’t fight back, she couldn’t do anything. I was so frustrated, so blinded with rage…and before I knew it, I had my hands around her neck. Oh god.”

  Darcey gasped here and wept hard for the better part of ten seconds.

  “I didn’t stop until she wasn’t breathing. I was a mess, and I couldn’t think straight. All I knew was that I had to get rid of the body and…and…”

  “You headed for the river,” I surmised.

  “…I was so blind. The past was repeating itself—Zoe had betrayed me, again. So I did what I had to.”

  “No,” Mickey croaked from the floor. “The deal…it was-

  “It was to keep you safe.” I shook my head and cut in. “I’m sorry, Darcey, but Zoe wasn’t having an affair with Mickey. She was sent to work out a deal. A deal to bring down Victor’s operation…and protect you. It was all to protect you, Darcey. Your sister was looking out for you in the end.”

  Darcey’s eyes widened as the truth dawned on her and the tragedy of her actions hit home. My words had stung, and I almost regretted saying them out loud. But after so much deception, she deserved the truth.

  “Wait, no. It can’t be. Mikhail, this – this isn’t true is it?” Darcey looked desperately at the man on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” Mickey rasped, clutching his neck. “I did it for us.”

  “Just put the gun down, Darcey,” I pressed. “It’s all over. Let’s talk about this.”

  Darcey nodded blankly. “It’s over. Yes. I…I- murdered my sister, and all she was trying to do was protect me? She finally turned her life around. She was doing something good for once, looking out for someone besides herself, and I-, oh God.”

  “Sorry, Darcey,” I said. “Look, if I can just exp –”

  She moved quickly…so quickly that it caught me off guard. She raised her gun again. I dived forward, determined that Lem would not die, then I realized that he was not her target.

  Darcey placed the gun benea
th her own chin.

  “No!—”

  THIRTY-ONE

  The rain stopped almost as quickly as it started. Just thirty minutes after the heavens opened, they were closed again. The oppressive closeness of the last few days was gone though, and it finally felt like I could take a breath.

  Shortly after Darcey had attempted to take her own life, the twentieth floor of the Chelsea Hotel was filled with bustling paramedics, cops, and a few remaining SWAT officers. I was standing in the living room of the apartment with Mickey when one of the paramedics stepped in hurriedly.

  “I just thought you should know,” he said, “that all we can tell for certain is that the bullet entered her skull. It likely grazed her brain at least, but even if she makes it out of this, there’s been so much damage done that she’ll have a long road to recovery ahead of her.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  When Darcey had reached up to blow her brains out I hadn’t been able to stop the gun going off but I had deflected its aim. Whether she would pull through was anyone’s guess, but a part of me was glad that another life hadn’t been lost today.

  I was surprised when Mickey offered his own thanks too. “I owe you, Mr. Blume, for everything.”

  The paramedics had finished patching up Mickey’s neck wound and staunched the bleeding. His voice was ragged, but Mikhail Lem seemed strong enough to continue.

  When the room was mostly empty, I sat down on the opposite side of the couch from him. “I’ll be damned if I’m filling out the paperwork for all this shit,” I joked, referring to the rain-soaked, bullet-riddled hotel around me. “But I do have to ask, what happened with you and Zoe?”

  “Nothing,” Mickey replied hoarsely. “At least not like Darcey thought.”

  He sighed and glanced at some of the men milling around his house. He looked like a man having a very surreal dream.