Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

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    I drew a deep breath and swung the door open enough for me to slip through it. I entered but left the lights off. I didn’t need them to see that the house had been trashed.
    Furniture turned over, picture frames pulled from walls and smashed, the contents of shelves and drawers scattered across the floor.
    The television lay on its side on the floor, the VCR beside it. Across the room the stereo lay upside down beside a broken lamp.
    I took a few steps into the room, careful of the bits of broken glass that littered the floor, and looked toward the kitchen and small dining room.
    Cupboard doors were opened, canned goods and boxes of food covering the countertop and tile floor. Appliances were broken apart, a tray of tableware had been dumped out in the sink. The dining room table had been turned on its side, chairs toppled around it.
    But this wasn’t a robbery. It was, I knew, a hasty search.
    I listened for creaking wood, fabric brushing together, matter moving through space—anything. Then I stopped listening for a moment. A presence can sometimes be felt before it’s detected by the five senses. But I could pick nothing up. The house seemed almost serene, which was odd considering its state, and the violence necessary to get it there.
    I took a few more steps deeper into the house. Moonlight coming through the windows was all I had to see by, but my eyes were adjusting quickly. To my right was a narrow hallway that led to the bathroom and two bedrooms, beyond which was Augie’s study. I looked down the hall and saw that all the doors were open except for the door to his study.
    I moved carefully down the narrow hall, pausing to look into each bedroom before passing it. These rooms, too, had been searched. In Augie’s bedroom his Sharper Image answering machine lay on top of his overturned mattress, unplugged.
    I came to his office door and saw that it, like the front door, wasn’t shut all the way. I pressed the door open with my shoulder and looked inside.
    This room had been hit the hardest. More than searched, it looked as if it had been taken apart by a wrecking crew.
    Augie’s desk had been broken into several pieces, and there were sledgehammer holes in the walls. Even the floorboards had been pulled up in places. The only thing unmolested in that room was Augie’s gun safe. It was held securely in place by two heavy iron brackets bolted into the floor. But by the look of the boards immediately surrounding the brackets, someone had tried unsuccessfully to pry them free with a hammer or wrecking bar.
    There was debris all over the dark room, piles of broken plaster and desk parts and pulled-up floorboards mixed in with the contents of the desk drawers and closet. It was like a scrap heap. It took me a moment of looking at each of these heaps, though, before I detected among them a shape that did not belong.
    I whispered, “Shit,” and felt along the wall for a light switch. I found it and flicked it up with a panicked hand.
    There was Augie, half seated, half slumped against the wall directly across from me, his arms hanging at his sides like an exhausted boxer resting between rounds. His face was battered, little more than raw meat. Blood oozed freely from countless cuts that reminded me of divots in grass. His head was slick with blood and sweat, the scalp beneath his buzz cut dinged and shimmering.
    “Christ!” I said. I went to him, knelt and checked the pulse in his neck. It was weak. His skin was cold beneath my fingers.
    I stood and started searching through the rubble for a telephone. I began to dig, throwing debris around. I moved quickly, working my way toward the center of the room. After a few seconds I found the handset to the phone. I pulled it out from under a pile, then reeled in the rest of the unit by the coiled cord. I put the handset to my ear fast but there was no dial tone.
    I tossed the phone to the floor, bolted through the door and headed down the hallway. There was another phone in the kitchen. My heart was slamming itself against my rib cage and chemical reactions buzzed deep inside my head like alarms.
    I think I heard their footsteps over the sound of my own, but not in time to eliminate the element of surprise they had over me. One minute I was the only conscious being in that house, and the next two men were there beside me.
    They came out of Augie’s bedroom as I passed it, scurrying one right after the other. The first was a big guy, ugly, balding. The