Dark and Stormy Knights

by P. N. Elord

  “What do you need me for?” I could guess, but she’d worked herself up to it, and it wouldn’t be polite to take it from her.

  “I was hoping you could go with me to see Gordy. I—I don’t think I could get the story out with Gordy watching me.”

  Gordy was intimidating as hell to guys who killed for a living, never mind the effect of his steady gaze on this plump little seamstress. But with or without me, she had a bad night ahead.

  “I’ll go along for moral support, but understand that Joe’s in for it. I can’t interfere with how Gordy does business.”

  “But don’t you work for him, too? You ran the club and—and the other things. . . .”

  I’d reluctantly filled Gordy’s big shoes for a brief and terrible time while he recovered from a case of lead poisoning caught during a botched assassination attempt. “Just the once, and I wasn’t in charge so much as a target. Some of those guys still hate me for it.”

  Desanctis was one of them, but he’d been smart enough not to act on it at the time. He’d kept his distance to watch and wait for me to fall on my face, which didn’t exactly happen. He wouldn’t appreciate me putting my nose into this, though.

  “You think they’ll kill Joe.”

  “I couldn’t say.” There was a remote chance that they’d beat him to hell and gone and kick him out of Chicago, but I didn’t want to get her hopes up. An execution was far more likely.

  “But if he gives back the money, wouldn’t that make a difference?”

  “It’s not about the money, but the fact he took it in the first place. They can’t trust him. Crazy as it sounds, the gangs run on trust same as any other business. If a clerk steals money from the till, they’re gonna fire him, no matter if he returns everything.”

  She looked down, visibly crushed, fingers brushing the sides of the parcel.

  “What d’ya have there?”

  “Joe left it for me. It was outside my door this evening. With a note. He explained what he did and why and what I had to do. I tried calling him, but I guess he’s hiding. It’s the money—all of it. He wrote that if I took this to Gordy, it would make things right. He doesn’t dare go in himself.”

  “May I?”

  She handed it over with no hesitation, a gleam of hope in her gorgeous dark eyes. I felt bad for inspiring that kind of trust. In my heart I knew hers was a lost cause.

  The box felt a little heavy. Even eight hundred one-dollar bills wouldn’t weigh much of anything. Maybe some of it was in coin. I shook it, but nothing shifted or clinked.

  “Here,” she said, pulling the loose ends of the bow. “He told me to wait for Gordy to open it, but you should check—”

  The bow did not come undone; the twine slipped an inch and caught. She automatically gave it a strong yank with me reflexively tightening my grip on the box to brace it, and suddenly the string dangled free in her hand, a large metal ring looped fast to the intact bow.

  In the space between one of her heartbeats and the next, I glimpsed a slit in the paper where the ring had popped out, and a dreadful understanding jolted me to panicked action. I lobbed the parcel behind the couch and flung Emma bodily through the doorway so quick and hard, she didn’t have time to blink.

  I can move fast, but even my unnatural speed wasn’t enough for me to follow and pull the door shut behind. Instead, I used my momentum to slam it closed and vanished just as a hideous flat BANG clubbed the room into perdition.

  A discharge of countless tiny things gusted through the space I’d occupied, the concussion flattening my invisible and formless self against the door, which shifted violently in reaction to the blast. It was like an army of machine gunners firing in unison for just one second. A Thompson can spit a dozen slugs in a single tick of the clock.

  I’d been through this before, believe it or not, an experience I’d thought never to repeat.

  But it was over. One horrible explosion and dusty silence.

  It was safe. I could re-form and go solid.

  Any time now.

  No hurry.

  No hurry at all.

  A faint whimper from the hall drew me out of hiding. Emma.

  I forced my terrified self to ooze back into solidity.

  The office door was wood veneer over thick metal, specially made to keep intruders from breaking in to find me apparently dead on the sofa during the day. The thing was heavy and required an extra-strong metal frame to support the weight.

  In the wake of the explosion it hung loose by one twisted hinge, steel showing through where the wood had been flayed off. I made a grab just as it gave and propped it against the wall with no small respect. The door had done its job of protection, just not in a way I could have anticipated.

  Emma was facedown across the thin hall rug, moving feebly, glory hallelujah. Bruised and breathless and paralyzed with shock was a good state to be in. By the grace of God, an armored door, a four-second fuse, and yours truly having damned fast reflexes, she’d not been shredded into a bloody corpse by her fiancé’s parting present.

  The sheer wickedness of it—and I’d seen more than my share in the last two years—sickened and infuriated me. I wanted to put a fist right through Foxtrot Joe’s face. I nearly put one through the wall, but there was enough damage to the joint.

  Shaking as well from unspent adrenaline, I helped a violently trembling Emma to the washroom and put her on the toilet seat before her legs gave out. The light was gone, but I kept flashlights in every room in the place. Myrna’s predilection for playing with the electrics made them a necessity. I found the one under the sink and clicked it on. I can see fine in the dark, but I need help in windowless spaces like this one.

  Emma was drained white, her breathing down to little panicky hiccups. I told her everything was all right, because that’s what we both needed to hear, and gave her a glass of water. I had to help her hold it. She got one sip, then turned away, coughing. Wetting a towel, I made her put her head down and eased the towel onto the back of her neck. When I was sure she wouldn’t fall over, I went to check the remains of my office.

  The walls were pocked and holed, lath and plaster exposed, dust everywhere. The desk was riddled with shrapnel. The lights were out; anything made of glass was shattered. The liquor cabinet in the corner leaked like a boozy Niagara. It hadn’t been hit, the concussion had been sufficient.

  The sofa was inside out, with stuffing all over. Just as well that I’d vanished. The metal shards of the grenade would have gone right through my body—hellishly painful—but wood was deadly. Even if a piece missed my heart or didn’t tear into my brain through an eye socket, I could bleed to death with dozens of splinters piercing my skin.

  The two windows overlooking the street had been open to air out the office and had allowed some of the force of the blast to escape. Both swung outward and were wire reinforced and bulletproofed, so they were intact, but the blinds and curtains were shredded. I crunched across the debris-choked floor and checked the neighborhood.

  The shops and other businesses were closed and Sunday-night quiet a block either way. There were no residences in the area, so no out-of-place cars or startled pedestrians caught my eye. No watchful bad guys lurked in the false security of alley shadows.

  I heard a click from the radio, the sound it makes when you switch it on. The dial remained dark. The speaker had shrapnel stuck in it, and every tube inside the case must now be junk.

  “I’ll get you a new one, Myrna,” I said aloud. “Are you okay?”

  Not that I expected a reply, but she had ways of making her presence known.

  Nothing. Which worried me.

  I’m nuts. There was a live dame in my washroom in need of help, and here I was anxious about a dead one. But Myrna was a friend, even if I had never seen her.

  “It was a grenade, honey. That’s why I’m asking.”

  Total silence clotted the room like a physical thing. For a second I thought I’d gone deaf; it was that profound. The temperate air drifti
ng through the windows turned deathly cold and still. I breathed in to speak again, and it was too thick to use. I had to make do with what was left in the bottom of my lungs, and my voice came out high and wheezy.

  “Myrna, honey . . . you okay?”

  The chill got colder and colder still. Gooseflesh galloped up my arms and pinched the back of my neck. The feeling in the room turned oppressive, the weight of it so great that if my heart could beat, it might have stopped from the excess pressure. I’d never felt anything like this from her before. Though fairly immune to cold, I gave in to a sudden shiver.

  “Myrn—”

  Icy wind howled to unexpected life around me, blowing outward through the windows. A terrific cloud of plaster dust and stuffing whipped past, stinging my eyes.

  “M-Myrna—calm down!”

  Now that was stupid. Never tell an angry female to calm down. It just makes things worse. The lady rattled me through and through.

  The door, propped at an angle, suddenly shifted and toppled like a tree, making a heavy, oddly musical whannnng when it struck the floor. The ventilated desk shifted as though being shoved by an invisible Charles Atlas, shooting broadside across the floor until it slammed the wall behind. My sturdy chair, caught between, broke into sticks.

  Papers swirled; I grabbed what I could reach, then gave up and fled before any wood shards got picked up in the storm and started slicing me.

  “Jeeze,” I muttered, getting out of the line of fire from the gaping doorway. Papers fluttered out and sifted down. All the wind was confined to the office.

  The ghosts in movies and plays weren’t like this. They moved ponderously slow or stood in place, looking unearthly. Myrna was throwing things around like an invisible, intelligent tornado.

  After all this time, she’d finally scared me.

  I shouldn’t have mentioned the grenade. Considering how she’d died, she was bound to be sensitive about that kind of thing.

  I hustled toward the washroom, thinking to get Emma out until things settled.

  She still had the wet towel on the back of her neck and her head between her knees. She began to straighten.

  “It’s just me,” I said. “How you doing?”

  “What’s all that noise?”

  “Wind. Looks like we might get some rain.”

  She didn’t question it and kept her head down, asking if I was all right. I made sure she hadn’t broken anything from being pitched out and told her what had prompted the action. She wanted to know how I’d escaped.

  “I dove behind the desk. Got lucky.”

  “B-but a bomb? There was a bomb in the box?”

  “Not a big one,” I said, glad she couldn’t see me wincing. If I could still hypnotize people, I’d have eased her right over this part of things.

  Myrna must have tuckered herself out: the office-sized cyclone abruptly ceased. The building went silent again, the normal sort, not the pending disaster kind.

  “J-Joe left that for me? . . .” Emma straightened, tears spilling from her eyes. “He meant for me to take it t-t-to Gordy and kill us. . . .”

  Another stupid thing to do is to tell a female to not cry. I knew better. My girlfriend was not the kind to turn on the waterworks gladly or often, but she’d taught me how to deal with them. There were five thousand other matters I had to see to before dawn came, but I put an arm around Emma, offering her one end of the toilet tissue to unreel to soak up her tears.

  She cut loose, loud and ugly, but I couldn’t fault her for it, not one damned bit. I wanted to kill Foxtrot for doing this to her.

  Maybe I would.

  Emma’s initial reaction eased, and she lurched up with determined strength, spun in place, and yanked up the toilet lid just in time.

  I’d done my duty holding her while she cried, but Bobbi hadn’t said a word about what to do when a lady is being sick. I backed off, glad I didn’t need to breathe, and looked the other way. Some instinct told me to start the water in the sink, so I did that, then backed the rest of the way out of the little room.

  Right into Gino Desanctis, Foxtrot Joe’s boss. He looked as surprised as I felt.

  I glared at him, an intruder in my territory and indirectly responsible for Foxtrot. Hardly aware of the action, I slugged Desanctis square in the gut.

  He folded and dropped, but he wasn’t alone. The two guys behind him surged forward to teach me manners, and I took them out just as quick.

  There was a third man behind them, but he stayed in place, calmly regarding the rumpus.

  “Greetin’s to ye, Jacky-lad,” he boomed cheerfully. That Irish accent . . .

  He flipped open a lighter, the little flame overwhelmed by the gloom of the hall, but enough to show his face.

  “Riordan?” I returned, unpleasantly surprised. He was supposed to be a private investigator but was happy enough to ignore the law when it suited his bank account. We’d had a few run-ins, none of them good. The first time we met, he’d broken my shoulder with a tire iron. He had been aiming for my skull. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  He held the lighter with a steady hand. Me punching flat three of Gordy’s best didn’t deserve so much as an eye twitch. He’d seen me cut loose on bigger and tougher guys and not break a sweat. “Those fine lads strewin’ the floor are looking for Emma Dorsey.”

  Riordan had an egg-shaped balding head under a rakish hat, plenty of teeth, and brown eyes topped by arching brows. They gave him an ingrained expression of perpetual naïveté that he wholeheartedly exploited when he thought he could get away with it. In truth, he was as clever-brained as they come, but certifiably insane. If some head doctor locked the Irish bastard in a booby hatch, I’d have been glad to lose the key.

  “You’re looking for Foxtrot, you mean,” I said.

  “They are for certain. The lads an’ me were havin’ such a nice game of billiards when Gino came by wantin’ ’em to earn their keep. Seein’ that one owes me three dollars and the other owes me four, I’m keepin’ an eye on ’em till we finish our game. Have ye seen our Foxtrot?”

  “No.”

  “What about the lovely lady we followed here?” He pulled out a cigarette.

  “She’s not feeling well. Foxtrot tried to scrag her with a grenade rigged in a box. It was meant for her and Northside Gordy.”

  Riordan let the lighter burn a fraction longer than needed to fire up his smoke. “So that was the mighty flash and bang we saw from the street. A grenade, y’say? Sure?”

  I glanced at the floor where Emma had landed. The twine bow and the ring with its attached pin lay almost at his feet. I pointed at it and at the now quiet office. “What do you think?”

  He picked up the twine, then peered in the room. Not much glow from the streetlight came in the windows, but he saw what he needed to see. “Damn. You’re one lucky mother’s son. The lady’s all right?” His tone changed, losing its usual sardonic grate, his accent softening.

  “Shaken but in one piece.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He switched back to what I had thought was his normal voice. “Y’say that was her fella’s doin’?”

  “She thought she was returning the money Foxtrot took. He left her a note to take it to Gordy, but we opened—”

  Desanctis lurched from the floor, favoring his bruised middle, and pulled a revolver from his shoulder holster a second short of getting his full balance. I was on him and grabbed the gun away, my hand freezing on the barrel to keep it from turning. He was startled, then swung a fist, but I stepped out of range, too ready pop him again. It had felt good to have a target.

  “Oh, now, Gino. Leave the man be,” said Riordan, a little sharply. “We’re all friends here.”

  Desanctis put the brakes on, glaring. “You saw it, he busted me.”

  “This hall’s darker than the inside of Satan’s arse. He didn’t know ye.”

  I went with his lead. There was more going on here than Riordan looking after his pool hall bets. “I thought you were Foxtrot come to lo
ok at the blood.”

  “Gimme my piece. I’ll show you blood.” The man was not interested in explanations and clearly not used to coming in second in a fight. I am tall, but on the lean side; he had an inch and fifty pounds on me, all of it muscle. Most guys never challenged that combination; the others rarely lived to regret it. Desanctis was one of those specialists who knew all the finer points about how to turn people into fish food.

  “That’s over, Gino.” Riordan’s voice had gone ominously low and level, his eyes narrow and razor sharp. He got a surly grunt in reply.

  “Keep it put away,” I told Desanctis, handing the gun back butt first. “This is my place; only I am allowed to shoot people here.”

  He snorted contempt and called me a goddamned punk, which was an accurate description, so I let it pass. We were about the same age—late thirties—but I look a lot younger. I’ve gotten used to hearing “punk” flung my way.

  “How’d you get in?” I asked Riordan.

  “Picked the back door lock.” He inhaled deeply from his cigarette and blew the smoke to one side. “Took a few minutes. That’s good-quality brass you got for keepin’ out the riffraff.”

  I accepted the compliment with mixed emotions and vowed to find a locksmith who could install something better. “Thanks for not breaking the door down.”

  “Seemed best not to irritate the landlord. You’ve quite the temper, or so I’ve seen.”

  There was little point discussing his lack of haste to get inside. He knew something about explosions. If you don’t hear screaming afterward, chances are high that no one survived, and you don’t want to see what’s left.

  “I’m thinkin’ we should take this news to Gordy, along with the lady,” said Riordan.

  Exactly what I planned to do.

  “We keep looking for Foxtrot,” said Desanctis, helping one of his men up. “I’m not running to the boss every time something don’t work out. We got the dame. She’ll know where Foxtrot is.”