Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

the truck door—legs were still in the cab, head and torso on the pavement. I looked back at Marie quickly, then rushed to the truck.
    I saw the blood first, a pool of it. It was still spreading. Then I saw Scully’s face. He was on his back. He’d been beaten. His eyes were opened wide. He looked both weary and surprised. I could see two gunshot wounds in his head.
    There was no point in taking his pulse. I knelt, though, and looked closely at him. Some of the cuts on his face had begun to heal while others appeared to be fresh. I thought about what Jean-Marc had said about negotiating with someone who could bring them to Marie. Could this—trying to beat the information out of Scully—be what he had meant? If so, was Scully taking his licks while Bishop, Long and I were having our chat on Bishop’s back patio?
    I looked at the blood and knew by the way it was still spreading that Scully’s murder had occurred not too long ago, possibly even just minutes. I also knew not to stand around and attempt to make any sense of all this.
    Scully was dead, and this was all I needed to know. I would pass this news along to Augie when I next saw him in person, and that would be that.
    With this clear in my mind, I stood and turned to leave.
    But then something on the pavement caught my eye and I stopped dead.
    It was almost directly below me, almost underfoot. I looked down at it for a bit before finally moving closer for a better look.
    There were two bullet casings on the pavement. I knew just by looking at them that they were .32s. I studied both casings closely, then searched for more. But there were only the two. I stayed there and thought about a lot of things before I finally picked them up, using the cuff of my shirt sleeve like a glove. I stuffed the casings one at a time into my back pocket, then stood and turned again to leave.
    This time I was stopped by the sight of Marie Bishop. She was standing just behind me, looking past me toward the truck.
    I knew that from where she was standing she couldn’t see Scully’s face. She took a few uncertain steps forward, but I went to her quickly and stopped her. She looked at me without expression and said, “It’s him.”
    “Yes.”
    “He’s dead?”
    “Yes.”
    She nodded but said nothing.
    There wasn’t time for any of this. We had to get out of there, fast. The killer could still be around.
    I told Marie this. She looked at Scully’s body, then back at me.
    “We need to go somewhere safe, Marie. Somewhere no one will find us.”
    “Okay,” was all she said.
    I led her across the lawn and back to her car. I drove this time, and it wasn’t till we had pulled away and were heading back toward the village that I asked her where we were going.
    She looked straight ahead, through the windshield. In a flat voice she gave me a Montauk address and asked me if I knew where that was.
    “Yeah. But what’s there?”
    “My place. No one knows about it. Well, no one who’s alive, anyway. We’ll be safe there.”
    Her apartment was a large studio above a pharmacy in the only two-story building in all of Montauk Village. Her bed was on the far side of the room and stood between two floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Main Street. We entered and she went straight to the bed and sat with her hands folded in her lap. She looked out one of the windows and kept perfectly still, breathing gently, her back straight and shoulders stiff.
    I stood by the door and watched her for a while, then eventually looked around the apartment. There was her bed and a bureau, a television, small couch and steamer trunk. That was it, that was all she owned. The rest of the apartment was open space. There was a small walk-in kitchen and a bathroom by the door. The ceilings were high, and two electric fans hung from them, one above the bed, the other not far from where I was standing by the door. Marie hadn’t turned on any lights; she didn’t need to. The red and blue glow of the neon pharmacy sign outside her windows filled the room with a kind of perpetual twilight.
    Eventually I took a few steps toward Marie. She gave no indication as I approached that she was aware of me. I knew she was in shock, and I didn’t want to disturb her, but there were things that we needed to talk about, and time was ticking away.
    I reached the foot of the bed and watched her for a moment, then looked past her to the nightstand on the other side of it. There was clock on it, a half-filled glass of