Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

except the labored and panicked breathing coming from myself and those around me. After a minute the guy with the shaved head got up into a crouch, ready to stand, ready to fight. He held his gun with both hands, the muzzle pointed upward.
    “Stay down,” I whispered.
    He shot me a look as if to tell me to shut up. He was wired, his eyes wide.
    The kid was still on the floor beside me. He hadn’t moved since he took his hard fall. I was about to reach down and take his revolver away when I felt something warm under my hand. I lifted it fast and saw that there was blood on my palm.
    I scrambled up into a crouch. Blood was spreading all around the kid. He was flat out on his back, his eyes open and blinking, his mouth working as if he were trying to speak.
    Only he wasn’t trying to speak. He was trying to breathe. I heard small gurgling sounds come from him then, and deep wheezing. Fine streams of blood were spurting into the air. They rose, arced, then fell in long drops down to the floor.
    I could see that a bullet had sliced his throat open. Where blood wasn’t gushing, it flowed, running fast like hot motor oil.
    “Fucking shit,” I said. I went to him and knelt beside him and pressed both of my hands against the open wound in his neck, trying to stop the flow. I felt warm blood spray against my palms and spread between my fingers. But I stayed there, leaning with my weight on the wound.
    The blood wouldn’t stop flowing, though. I was kneeling in it, it was everywhere now, it just kept coming.
    I said to the one with the shaved head, “Get me something to stop the bleeding.”
    But he didn’t move. I looked at him. He was frozen, breathing fast, a glaze of sweat covering his face.
    “I need something to stop the bleeding,” I told him. “A towel, anything. C’mon, don’t just sit there, do something. You want your friend to die?”
    It took him a moment, but then he crawled to the couch, pulled off a blanket and brought it to me.
    I told him to fold it up. He did, then handed it to me. I grabbed it and applied it to the kid’s throat, pressing my bloodied hands on it and leaning forward, my elbows locked.
    “Call an ambulance,” I said.
    Again, he didn’t move. He just looked at me.
    “Call an ambulance!”
    He watched my face and shook his head from side to side. “I can’t be here when the police come,” he said. “Neither can you, right?”
    I said nothing. He was not at all familiar to me, and yet he seemed to know about me. I was thinking this when he said the strangest thing to me.
    “I think this makes us even, man. Take care of yourself.”
    He looked toward the broken window, then rose and moved, bent at the waist, to the front door. He paused there, his .357 held in both hands, and looked back at me. Then he broke into a run, bolting out the door.
    I listened to his hard run across the grass till I could hear it no more. I braced myself for more gunshots but none came. All I could hear was the sound of the bay tapping the shore fifty feet down the sloping lawn and the last few feeble breaths of the kid.
    His face was expressionless, his mouth hanging open dumbly, his eyelids half closed. His skin was white, his forehead already waxy. I eased back on the compress and removed my hands. Whoever this kid was, he was dead, and whoever the guy with the shaved head was, he was long gone. It was time for me to go, too.
    I pulled off my T-shirt and wiped down the desk and the filing cabinet. Then I used it to wipe my hands. I got them as clean as they would get for now. I picked my flashlight up off the floor, then grabbed the bloody blanket and went to the front door. I paused there to listen.
    The yard was still, quiet. I listened for a good minute, listening for the sound of someone in the woods, for the sound of sirens approaching. But I heard neither of these things, just a night so quiet I couldn’t tell whether to feel at ease or rise to my toes.
    Eventually, I did what the guy with the shaved head did. I bolted through the door and out into the night. I ran down the lawn toward the street. Before I got into my car, I took off my blood-covered sneakers, wrapped my shirt around them, then folded the blanket over that. I sat the bundle on the floor beneath the passenger seat and flung my flashlight over the high grass and out into the bay. The water swallowed it with a gulp.
    Back in my apartment, I tossed the blanket and its contents into a garbage bag, then removed my jeans and