Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Action/Thriller
ISBN-10: 150044474X
Type: Fiction
Pages: 256
Copyright: July 17, 2017
ISBN-13: 9781500444747
Price: $5.99 (eBook)
Private investigator Matt Salewski thought he'd met the perfect woman -- until she ended up dead. Now the deeper Salewski delves into her death, the more he realizes how little he really knew about her.
Private investigator Matt Salewski thought he'd found the perfect woman in Erin Ferrell: funny, easygoing and beautiful. But when Salewski is hired for what he thinks will be a routine divorce case, he discovers that his perfect woman is a little less than perfect. For starters, she neglected to tell him she was married. She's also been going by two different names. And she's just turned up dead. As more bodies pile up, Salewski must navigate a web of sex, deceit, and murder to find out what Erin Ferrell was running from ... and how it finally caught up to her.
Excerpt
The room was standard hot-sheets hideaway. Ragged carpet that had once been brown, worn thin in front of the double bed and accessorized here and there with food, coffee, and semen stains. TV vintage 1989, bolted to the top of the dresser. All illumination provided by lamps bolted to walls which had originally been off-white but were now yellowed with the tar of untold thousands of cigarettes. I didn’t pay much attention to any of that, though. I was too busy concentrating on the flat, coppery smell that hung in the stale air. I walked across the room on numb legs, looking for what I already knew had to be there.
She was on the floor between the bed and the wall. She didn’t look peaceful and even the part of her face that was still there was no longer pretty. Dead isn’t peaceful and dead isn’t pretty. It doesn’t matter if dead punches a hole in you with a bullet or gnaws away at your insides with tumor teeth or smothers you quietly in your sleep when you’re a hundred and seven, dead is never peaceful and it’s never pretty and it’s never profound. Dead is the ultimate banality. Dead is just dead.
With all the blood it was hard to tell how many times she’d been shot, but it had been several. One bullet had caught her high on the right side of her forehead and had excavated a gaping trench in her skull. Her half-open eyes glittered. Her mouth was slack. She didn’t look afraid, but that didn’t mean anything. Facial muscles relax after death, no matter what the cheap detective novels say. Her right arm was thrown above her head, the hand half-curled around nothing. Her left hand rested demurely on her stomach. Blood had welled up between the fingers and ran in congealing trickles over her knuckles and down toward her wrist. It stained a small diamond on her third finger, a diamond I’d never seen her wearing before.
I looked at her for a long time. Looking at her wasn’t telling me anything. I turned away from her and surveyed the room. There were two cigarettes stubs, her brand, in the ashtray on the bedside table. Nothing in the drawer but the inevitable Gideon Bible and a phone book two years out of date. I held both of these by their spines and gave them a shake. No scraps of paper bearing cryptic clues fluttered from between the leaves of either. The bedframe was one of those solid-block hotel jobs that leave no space for you to slide anything under the bed. I stripped the bed and flipped the mattress anyway and found nothing. I tried the drawers in the bureau. For some reason I couldn’t begin to fathom, motel management had seen fit to glue them shut.
I went over to the microscopic closet and looked inside. There was nothing on the shelf above the coat rod, but a small overnight bag sat on the floor. I retrieved it from the closet and took it over to the bed and opened it up.
There was a change of clothes and a box of condoms inside, which made me wonder. Erin, or Teresa, or whoever, had surely known she and I wouldn’t be spending the night together. Under the clothes I found two cell phones, an expensive 4G smartphone and the cheap little Virgin Mobile prepaid I’d always seen her use. I flipped through the contact list on each. There wasn’t a single duplicated name. My name and number were on the Virgin phone. Dave Tanner was in the smartphone. I dropped the prepaid phone in my pocket and put the 4G job back in the overnight bag and unzipped the bag’s side pocket. I reached in and withdrew a ziplock bag filled with white powder.
I pondered that for a while. I’d never seen Erin use anything stronger than tobacco and alcohol, and this amount of coke would go for a couple of grand in this county – far too much product for personal use. I was still pondering when I heard the sniff.
An icicle formed high in my throat and reached down to spread freezing tendrils through my chest. The sniff, like someone snuffling mucous back into his throat, had come from behind the closed bathroom door. There was no other sound. Just that one sharp intake of breath. I’d spent twenty minutes tossing the bedroom and hadn’t even considered the john. I wondered which coatcheck room I’d left my brain in before coming here.
I stood absolutely still. I glanced around the room for a weapon. The most lethal-looking item in view was the television remote. I had a miniature Swiss Army penknife in my pocket, but its tiny blade was barely adequate for slicing an apple, let alone slicing whoever was cooped in the bathroom. Perhaps I could slide the little plastic toothpick out and poke him in the eye.
I kept on standing absolutely still for a while. I made no sound. The guy camped out in the john made no sound. While we were each busy not making sounds I tried to formulate a plan of attack. Two ideas occurred to me. Number One: Turn around and walk as quietly as possible out of the room and call the cops. Number Two: Walk as quietly as possible over to the bathroom door, then throw it open and leap into the bathroom flapping my arms and yelling “Booga booga booga” and hope it shocked the guy long enough for me to think of a Number Three.
Number Two was perhaps the single stupidest thought that had ever occurred to me, and probably anyone else, so that’s the one I went with. I walked over to the bathroom door as slowly and quietly as I could. I didn’t breathe the whole way there. I wrapped my hand around the knob and then it occurred to me that I was going to feel pretty stupid if the door was locked. Oh, well. Too late now. I clamped my teeth together and coiled my legs to spring and jerked my wrist to the right.
The knob turned easily. I threw the door open and leapt in. I was yelling, yelling something, I don’t know what. Whatever it was, it died in my throat. Didn’t matter, really, because the guy sitting on the bathroom floor didn’t seem shocked by my sudden entrance. He barely seemed to notice me at all. I stood gawping at him. He became aware of me by stages. After spending some time contemplating my shoes and my jeans and my shirt, he finally glanced up at my face with too-big eyes that looked vaguely wounded. They would always look vaguely wounded.
“My wife’s in the other room,” Dave Tanner said in a dazed voice. “I think she might be hurt.”
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