Apparently I'd counted wrong.
Two were young, muscular, brandishing knives. The third was the guy who'd worked me over the night before. The one who called me a bald son of a bitch.
They were on me before I could rack the shotgun again.
The first one slashed at me with his pig-sticker, and I parried with the barrel of the Mossberg. He jabbed again, slicing me across the knuckles of my right hand.
I threw the shotgun at his face and went for my Glock.
He was fast.
I was faster.
Bang bang and he was a paycheck for the coroner. I spun left, aimed at the second guy. He was already in mid-jump, launching himself at me with a battle cry and switchblades in both hands.
One gun beats two knives.
He took three in the chest and two in the neck before he dropped.
The last guy, the guy who broke my nose, grabbed my shotgun and dove behind the couch.
Chck chck. He ejected the shell and racked another into the chamber. I pulled the Glock's magazine and slammed a fresh one home.
“Hijo calvo de una perra!”
Again with the bald son of a bitch taunt. I worked through my hurt feelings and crawled to an end table, tipping it over and getting behind it.
The shotgun boomed. Had it been loaded with shot, it would have torn through the cheap particle board and turned me into ground beef. Or ground hijo calvo de una perra. But at that distance, the granules didn't do much more than make a loud noise.
The banger apparently didn't learn from experience, because he tried twice more with similar results, and then the shotgun was empty.
I stood up from behind the table, my heart a lump in my throat and my hands shaking with adrenalin.
The King turned and ran.
His back was an easy target.
I took a quick look around, making sure everyone was down or out, and then went to retrieve my shotgun. I loaded five more shells and approached the downed leader, who was sucking carpet and whimpering. The wounds in his back were ugly, but he still made a feeble effort to crawl away.
I bent down, turned him over, and shoved the barrel of the Mossburg between his bloody lips.
“You remember Sunny Lung,” I said, and fired.
It wasn't pretty. It also wasn't fatal. The granules blew out his cheeks, and tore into his throat, but somehow the guy managed to keep breathing.
I gave him one more, jamming the gun further down the wreck of his face.
That did the trick.
The second perp, the one I'd blinded, had passed out on the bathroom floor. His face didn't look like a face anymore, and blood bubbles were coming out of the hole where his mouth would have been.
“Sunny Lung sends her regards,” I said.
This time I pushed the gun in deep, and the first shot did the trick, blowing through his throat.
The last guy, the one who made like Pavarotti when I took out his knee, left a blood smear from the hall into the kitchen. He cowered in the corner, a dishrag pressed to his leg.
“Don't kill me, man! Don't kill me!”
“I bet Sunny Lung said the same thing.”
The Mossberg thundered twice; once to the chest, and once to the head.
It wasn't enough. What was left alive gasped for air.
I removed the bag of granules from my pocket, took out a handful, and shoved them down his throat until he stopped breathing.
Then I went to the bathroom and threw up in the sink.
Sirens wailed in the distance. Time to go. I washed my hands, and then rinsed off the barrel of the Mossberg, holstering it in my rig.
In the hallway, the kid I emasculated was clutching himself between the legs, sobbing.
“There's always the priesthood,” I told him, and got out of there.
#
My nose was still clogged, but I managed to get enough coke up there to damper the pain. Before closing time I stopped by the bakery, and Ti greeted me with a somber nod.
“Saw the news. They said it was a massacre.”
“Wasn't pretty.”
“You did as we said?”
“I did, Ti. Your daughter got her revenge. She's the one that killed them. All three.”
I fished out the bag of granules and handed it to her father. Sunny's cremated remains.
“Xie xie,” Ti said, thanking me in Mandarin. He held out an envelope filled with cash.
Ti looked uncomfortable, and I had drugs to buy, so I took the money and left without another word.
An hour later I'd filled my codeine prescription, picked up two bottles of tequila and a skinny hooker with track marks on her arms, and had a party back at my place. I popped and drank and screwed and snorted, trying to blot out the memory of the last two days. And of the last six months.
That's when I'd been diagnosed. A week before my wedding day. My gift to my bride-to-be was running away so she wouldn't have to watch me die of cancer.
Those Latin Kings this morning, they got off easy. They didn't see it coming.
Seeing it coming is so much worse.
Taken to the Cleaners
Harry is my favorite character to write for. I love the idea of an idiotic, selfish jerk as a protagonist. He's too obnoxious and unsympathetic to carry a book on his own, but I think he makes a great foil for Jack, so he appears in every novel. Some readers hate him. Some readers adore him. This story sold to The Strand Magazine in 2005.
“I want you to kill the man that my husband hired to kill the man that I hired to kill my husband.”
If I had been paying attention, I still wouldn't have understood what she wanted me to do. But I was busy looking at her legs, which weren't adequately covered by her skirt. She had great legs, curvy without being heavy, tan and long, and she had them crossed in that sexy way that women cross their legs, knee over knee, not the ugly way that guys do it, with the ankle on the knee, though if she did cross her legs that way it would have been sexy too.
“Mr. McGlade, did you hear what I just said?”
“Hmm? Yeah, sure I did, baby. The man, the husband, I got it.”
“So you'll do it?”
“Do what?”
“Kill the man that my husband—”
I held up my hand. “Whoa. Hold it right there. I'm just a plain old private eye. That's what is says on the door you just walked through. The door even has a big magnifying glass silhouette logo thingy painted on it, which I paid way too much money for, just so no one gets confused. I don't kill people for money. Absolutely, positively, no way.” I leaned forward a little. “But, for the sake of argument, how much money are we talking about here?”
“I don't know where else to turn.”
The tears came, and she buried her face in her hands, giving me the opportunity to look at her legs again. Marietta Garbonzo had found me through the ad I placed in the Chicago phone book. The ad used the expensive magnifying glass logo, along with the tagline, Harry McGlade Investigators: We'll Do Whatever it Takes. It brought in more customers than my last tagline: No Job Too Small, No Fee Too High, or the one prior to that, We'll Investigate Your Privates.
Mrs. Garbonzo had never been to a private eye before, and she was playing her role to the hilt. Besides the short skirt and tight blouse, she had gone to town with the hair and make-up; her blonde locks curled and sprayed, her lips painted deep, glossy red, her purple eye shadow so thick that she managed to get some on her collar.
“My husband beats me, Mr. McGlade. Do you know why?”
