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  HELL’S DETECTIVE

  A MYSTERY

  Michael Logan

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Michael Logan.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-171-3

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-173-7

  ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-68331-174-4

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-175-1

  Cover design by Andy Ruggirello.

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First Edition: June 2017

  For the real Urban Kat

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Let’s get one thing straight from the get-go: if ever anybody deserved to fester in Lost Angeles—that stinking pit masquerading as a city—it was me. Of the myriad sins disfiguring the souls of the damned, mine was one of the worst. I didn’t deserve a second chance. But I got one anyway.

  The night it all began, I was perched at the bar in Benny’s, nursing a Ward Eight cocktail and trying not to listen to the clock ticking down the seconds until the witching hour. The sun’s last hurrah illuminated eight booths, three of which were occupied by silent drinkers fidgeting on ripped seats. The clock was the sole decoration on the walls, unless you counted the cracks in the plaster. The place reeked of cheap booze, stale cigarettes, and acrid sweat—mostly radiating from Benny. The closest he came to a wash was when he dribbled whisky down his stubbly chin and wiped it off with his frayed shirt sleeve. There were hundreds of swankier places to drink in the city, but Benny and I went back a long way. Besides, prospective clients knew they could find me here if I wasn’t in my home office, and the dearth of other customers made it a private place to talk business.

  The bell tinkled, and a kid stumbled in. I could tell he was fresh off the boat. His brown eyes were shot through with angry red veins, his thick black hair stuck up in whirls, and a sweat-soaked plaid shirt clung to his pigeon chest. He looked around the booths, scrabbling for a sympathetic gaze. Everybody kept their heads down. Everybody except me.

  “You’ve got a customer,” I said.

  Benny turned his lugubrious face, all dangling jowls and worn-out eyes, kind of like a depressed spaniel, to the newcomer. “What the fuck you want? We’re closing soon.”

  “Real charming, Benny,” I said. “No wonder nobody drinks here.”

  “You do.”

  “Correct. And I’m a nobody.”

  The kid spotted me watching him and latched on like a drowning man to the hand that would stop him from sinking into the black depths below. He climbed onto the wobbly stool next to mine and ordered himself a double anything. Benny poured him a glass of the rotgut whisky he reserved for idiots with rocks for taste buds. Down the hatch it went. The kid wiped his lips with the back of one shivery hand. For a moment, I thought he was going to vomit the drink back into the glass. It probably would have tasted better the second time around. I couldn’t blame him for being a mess. I’d staggered in for the first time and sat on the same stool myself a lifetime ago. I was sure I hadn’t looked any better.

  “Give him another on me,” I said to Benny. “The good stuff. He’s going to need it.”

  “Thanks,” the kid said as Benny filled another glass, this time with his best bourbon. “I’m Franklin Johnson.”

  “Kat Murphy.”

  In the silence that followed, I could almost hear his brain whirring as he decided where to begin. There were too many questions, and he didn’t know there were no answers that would bring him comfort.

  “What’re you in for?” he said.

  “Jesus. Dive right in, why don’t you? Don’t ask, don’t tell—that’s the rule.”

  Nobody with any sense talked about their lives before Lost Angeles. There was no point. Everything we knew was gone, never to return. Any good we might have done in our past lives was irrelevant. Only our sins mattered, and we didn’t need any further opportunity to relive those.

  “Sorry.”

  “Everybody’s sorry. Mainly sorry they’re here.”

  He gulped his drink and stared through the bar top. I’d been around enough killers, goons, rapists, thieves, con artists, hustlers, and politicians to sense that the kid didn’t have a bad bone in his body, which was tough luck for him. Weakness bled into the rancid air of Lost Angeles like blood into the water, and the sharks would be circling soon enough. I didn’t need him to tell me what he was in for. I’d have bet my life, if it were still mine to bet, that he’d killed himself. At least we had something in common, although suicide was likely his only sin and definitely the least of mine.

  I tried to figure out how he’d done the deed. I’d always had a knack for figuring out people—at least, most of the time. Women’s intuition, my male rivals upstairs used to call it, their way of soothing their damaged pride when I one-upped them, as I often did. It made me laugh. Women’s intuition just meant not having a swollen dick to hijack rational thought every time cleavage bobbed into view. It meant paying a bit of attention instead of making everything about your enormous ego. It meant having enough empathy to put yourself in somebody else’s head instead of being perpetually astonished that not everybody thought the same way as you.

  I noted his high cheekbones, the sensitive sweep of his brow, and his delicate fingers and put him down for pills and booze. In his last moments, he’d probably pictured his dead body tragically slumped across the writing desk, as pale and beautiful as a marble sculpture, suicide note to his unrequited love in hand. It took a lot less romanticism than he possessed to press a gun barrel against the roof of your mouth, knowing your last thoughts would end up swirling around a bucket of red soapy water once the cleaner was done sponging the gore off the wall.

  He was close to weeping, leaning over his drink as his shoulders heaved. I could never stand to see a man cry, particularly if he was going to ruin a perfectly good glass of bourbon with salty tears.

  “First day?” I said.

  He nodded, shaking loose a single teardrop from his stubby nose. “I don’t think I can handle this.”

  “You don’t have any choice,” I said, nudgi
ng his drink out of the weepy firing line. “You’re in it for the long haul.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  That was another question nobody with half a brain in their head wanted to hear—or know the answer to. “Long enough to have stopped counting. Not so long to have forgotten there’re better places to be.”

  “There must be a way out. You’ve tried to leave, right?”

  Benny caught my eye, and a look of understanding passed between us. Either that or he was trying to encourage me to buy another round of drinks. There was no point telling the kid flight was impossible. He was going to try anyway. Everybody did. In my first week, I stole a beat-up old Buick Special I told myself nobody would miss much—the first time I’d stolen anything other than as evidence, but my scruples no longer seemed so relevant in those early days—and went on a bug-eyed tour of the city. Every side street and main road puked up its traffic onto Route 666, the north–south freeway that cut Lost Angeles in two. I trundled onto the asphalt and headed north, out into the white heat and red sand of the desert. I didn’t know what I’d find; I only knew it wouldn’t be here, and that was good enough for me. Ten minutes out, the city was small enough to fit in the rearview mirror. The Black Tower shot above the cityscape, a never-ending middle finger bidding me farewell.

  The desert that encircled the city, save for the stretch where the Dead Sea lapped at the stony shore, was itself bounded by sheer cliffs, but the road dropped into a crevice through the rock. The walls rose for hundreds of feet so the only thing visible other than the road ahead was a strip of burning sky. When I emerged on the other side, swirling dust filled the plain, backlit by the sun so it looked like a seething wall of flame. Rising above the shroud, and the faint outline of the city squatting inside it, was the Black Tower, this time raising its middle finger in welcome. I spun around, thinking maybe the crevice had taken a sneaky fold and bent me back on myself, but the road was as straight as a lawyer’s trouser crease. I put my foot down hard, dug my chipped nails into the hot plastic of the wheel, and roared back through the city to the south. Same crevice. Same plain. Same shithole city. I drove for five hours straight, through Lost Angeles after Lost Angeles. I could have zipped along that road forever and still gotten nowhere, so I stopped at the first bar that looked low-rent enough for somebody with not a cent to her name—Benny’s, as it happened—and handed over the car keys in exchange for booze. I drank until I couldn’t stand up, never mind drive.

  There was no airport in Lost Angeles. No train station. No bus service to zip you off to a rustic town in the shade of green hills where you could cool off and listen to the mellow buzz of bees dipping their snouts into flowers. Sure, you could walk into the desert, heading for the cliffs in the hope of scaling them. All that bought you was aching legs and sweaty pits before, blinded and disoriented by billowing clouds of wind-whipped sand in which half-formed faces teemed, you ended up back where you started. You could build a raft from the city’s flotsam and jetsam and attempt to row across the Dead Sea, but unlike its buoyant namesake upstairs, here the water was almost as unsubstantial as air, and you would sink. Flounder around in the depths for a while and guess what: you fetched up back on the beach, retching and trembling. There was no escape.

  “Look,” I said, “you’ve got to understand, Lost Angeles is just a name some joker gave this dung heap. It’s nothing like the real LA, save for the preponderance of assholes. That collective noun’s my own invention, by the way. Feel free to use it.”

  My sparkling wit didn’t perk him up, most likely because I’d answered his question by not answering it. I left him sniffling and went to the ladies’ room to splash lukewarm water on my face and waft a paper towel at my neck. That was as close as you came to air conditioning in Benny’s. I lingered, hoping the kid would scoot before I had to start giving it to him straight. No such luck. When I came out, sweating again in the crushing heat, the sharks had cruised in. I hadn’t seen these three specimens before, but I’d seen their like: mean men with threadbare souls, all twitchy eyes and fixed grins, looking to hand out some punishment before they got theirs. They were still at the foreplay stage: one of them had buried his fingers in the kid’s hair and was jerking his head around. Another was flicking him on the cheek. The third was leaning on the bar, brushing dandruff from his shoulder into my cocktail and watching the show.

  The other drinkers had developed a deep fascination for the grain of the warped wooden planks that passed for a floor. There was no point trying to help, and they knew it. This was going to be the first in a long line of hard lessons, and the sooner the kid learned, the better it would go for him. Anyway, these clowns were the least of his worries. Soon enough, the sun would slide below the horizon, and the countless hatches on the Black Tower would open to spew out the Torments. Soon enough, the kid would find himself back in his silent apartment, lamenting his loveless life and reaching for the pills. Soon enough, I’d be back in the motel room, staring at the body sprawled bloody at my feet and lifting the still-warm gun barrel to my mouth. No, the worst thing about Lost Angeles wasn’t that you were stuck here with the dregs of humanity. It was that you were stuck here with yourself.

  So I knew I should stand aside and let the dance play out. But he looked so helpless in the face of their raw brutality. Besides, I still had time to kill, and it wasn’t as if there was any other entertainment in Benny’s.

  “Hey, assholes,” I said.

  The three of them jerked their thick heads up on equally thick necks.

  “You calling me an asshole?” the leaner said.

  “I was making a general clarion call. You answered. You’re flaking into my drink.”

  He picked up my glass. It looked tiny in his hammy fists. “Cute umbrella.”

  “You never know when it’s going to rain dandruff on your beverage. I figure it’s best to be prepared.”

  He unfolded himself from the bar. He was a head taller than me, his eyebrows shook hands in the middle, and he was packing at least a C cup of pure muscle. Had this missing link been around in the nineteenth century, Darwin could have saved himself a whole lot of grief by parading him around lecture halls as conclusive proof that man was descended from apes.

  “Real funny,” he said with a snarl he probably practiced in the mirror. “I hate funny.”

  “With a face like yours, I’d have thought you needed a sense of humor. You know this place has protection, right, Benny?”

  “Paid my dues to Flo last week,” Benny said. His hairy-knuckled hand was spidering along the counter to where he kept the sawn-off shotgun strapped underneath. He wouldn’t use it unless they started smashing the bottles behind the bar.

  “Let me count the many fucks I don’t give about your protection,” the big goon said. “Besides, I’m not going to break anything except this turd’s face.”

  “The kid’s with me,” I said. “Do anything to him, I’ll take it personally.”

  He looked me up and down—and up again for good measure, in case he’d missed something that justified my tough talk. Upstairs, a lot of men had underestimated me, but with the judicious application of dirty tricks such as ball tweaking, shin scraping, and kidney jabbing, I was pretty handy in a scrap when I had to be. And most men, even the biggest douchebags, had tended to hold back in fisticuffs with a woman—in public, at least. Behind closed doors, when a wife or girlfriend got lippy, the fists swung faster. The rules were different down here. Most people had done something real scummy to end up in Lost Angeles, and there were plenty of deadly ladies running with the gangs. Everyone was a potential threat—save for the obvious cases like Franklin, who wore their fragility like a cracked windshield. If you were smart, you didn’t discriminate. This muscle-bound oaf didn’t strike me as the smart type, though. That suited me just fine.

  At five foot ten, I wasn’t a small woman, but I was still his physical inferior. Sure, I had a ropy strength, but my shoulders were narrow, and I had slender hands, which he pr
obably imagined would break on his big, dumb jaw should I try to punch him. His gaze settled on the gun holstered over my black blouse. He had his own piece, but he struck me as a hands-on kind of guy. He was probably wondering if I was fast enough to pull my weapon before he closed the distance between us. His eyes changed, sharpening with intent. He’d made his decision.

  I didn’t see the knife he’d palmed until he slid it into the kid’s eye, as casual as an Italian spearing an olive with a toothpick. The kid managed a short scream before the blade bit into his brain and silenced him. The goon pulled out the knife, sticky with blood and ocular fluid.

  “Oops,” he said.

  He came at me fast, blade at the ready. Not fast enough. He’d miscalculated. It wasn’t hand speed that mattered. It was how quickly you decided to act, and if Lost Angeles had taught me one thing, it was to shoot first and worry about the consequences later—which was ironic considering that the one time I’d done that upstairs, it had brought me here. I’d made my decision before Franklin’s skull thumped to the bar. The rest was just follow-through. I was far from a crack shot, but at that range it was easy to shoot him between his beady eyes. Nobody’s skull is thick enough to stop a bullet, although the moron probably ran it close. He went down so hard, the plastic clock fell off the wall.

  I held the piece on his two pals, freezing them as they belatedly reached for their own guns. “Get him out of here.”

  They grabbed the big lump by the arms and dragged him to the door. “We’ll see you around,” the one who’d had the kid by the hair said.

  “Be sure to buy a lady a drink when you do. But hold the dandruff. Gives me wind.”

  When they’d gone, I reclaimed my seat, sitting at an angle so I could monitor the door.

  “Couldn’t you have waited ’til they ordered drinks?” Benny said.

  “Saving up for a new clock? Let me make a contribution. Give me another double of the good stuff.”

  I set the glass by Franklin’s outstretched hand, lit a cigarette, and waited. Benny dumped a handful of cocktail napkins into the blood haloing the kid’s head and limped off to clean up the bloody mess on the floor. The bar fell quiet again except for the squelch of Benny’s piebald mop. No sirens sounded outside the window. Gunshots weren’t a rare commodity in Lost Angeles, and it wasn’t as if there was any law to do anything about them anyway.