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  THE GIN PALACE

  Daniel Judson

  Book One of

  THE GIN PALACE TRILOGY

  THE GIN PALACE

  All Rights Reserved © 2002 by Daniel Judson

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

  or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including

  photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the

  written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Daniel Judson

  The Poisoned Rose was a stunning and wondrous debut, and The Bone Orchard only confirmed Daniel Judson’s artistry and unique style, but those two dark gems do not prepare the reader for the huge leap forward that is The Gin Palace. The final outing of Declan “Mac” MacManus, one of our most compelling PIs, shows an author at the very height of his dizzying power. Fresh, vibrant, startling, and beautifully rendered, Judson’s The Gin Palace Trilogy breathes a whole new energy into the genre. -- Ken Bruen, author of Headstone

  Daniel Judson is so much more than a crime-fiction novelist. He’s a tattooed poet, a mad philosopher of the Apocalypse fascinated with exploring the darkest places in people’s souls. --Chicago Tribune

  Daniel Judson is a thoroughly accomplished writer. --Kirkus Reviews

  for Wendy

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  PROLOGUE

  We are on the edge of the reservation, in the clearing by the bay, struggling for control of the .45 in his hand. There is hate between us, raw and violent hate. It is like a storm. I grab hold of his gun hand and go for a wristlock and disarm, but I am injured, so he is faster and stronger than I am now. I miss my chance, and the instant I do, he lands two blows into my right side, sharp hook punches with all of his body weight lined up behind them. I nearly black out from the pain. My legs weaken. He can sense this and quickly grabs the collar of my jacket, spinning like a discus thrower, turning on the heels of one foot, tugging me with him. I try to run with him, to stay on my feet, but I can’t keep up with him. He is too strong, moves too fast for me. I stumble, and when I do, he releases me and flings me away from him, out into the darkness.

  I am aloft with no real sense of the earth passing just feet below me. But that doesn’t last for long. I land, hitting the frozen ground hard, skidding across it. When I come to a stop, I am facedown, my elbows and knees ringing with pain. I taste blood. I can’t stay this way, I know, so I gather what I have left and pull myself into a seated position. My head is spinning, I am disoriented. I move slowly. He is standing over me before I have time to do more than sit up. I can sense his mass and strength and hatred. I don’t need to see him now. I can feel him, feel his presence, his long shadow spreading over me.

  He wants to shoot me pointblank, to put a bullet through my eye, to see my face as he does it. He wants that satisfaction. He is driven by such things. I am the only being left alive who knows what he knows, knows what he wants kept secret, what he needs to keep hidden. I know what he has done, the people dead because of him. My death is his freedom. It is as simple as that. But I am not ready to die. There is someone who needs me to live.

  Without looking up I lunge for his knees. But he quickly spreads his legs, widening his base, breaking my embrace before I can lock it tight. I feel the butt of his .45 slam into the top of my head. It hits a second time, and then once more. I slump, sliding down his legs to the ground. I am on my back now, looking up at the black sky. He stands over me, eclipsing the night, and aims the .45 at my left eye. His finger curls around the trigger.

  “Say hello to your father for me,” he says.

  A gunshot ruptures the night then, the sound like a slap against both my ears. I flinch. But I know it isn’t the gun in front of me that has gone off.

  I watch as his gun hand drops to his side. He turns and faces in the direction from which the shot has come. I look past him and see her then, see her standing in a perfect shooter’s stance, like her father had taught her, holding his gun with two hands. It looks huge in her grip. She squeezes off a second shot. It hits Frank Gannon just above the collarbone. The force turns him till he is standing with his right side to me. She pulls the trigger once again, barely blinking. This round cuts through Frank’s gut. His hand is hanging useless at his side, but the piece is still in it. The force of the bullet hitting him causes him to buckle a little. His .45 fires. That bullet punches the ground just inches from me. I hear another shot and look toward her. Frank is a bull of a man, with a torso like a keg. He staggers like a drunk but remains on his feet. He raises his right arm and points his .45 in her direction. She fires yet again. Where this bullet lands I do not know.

  Moments later, standing over him with no expression on her face, she takes aim at his head. There is no time for me to do anything more than witness what I do not seem at all able to forget …

  I awoke, moved to the edge of my mattress and sat there for a while. I had no idea what time it is. It was still night, and that was all that matters. My bedroom was cold, the only radiator in my apartment out in the living room, beneath my three front windows. But I stayed where I was. I had dreamed about that night often enough to know that I needed to be still for its effects to pass. I wrapped my wool blanket around my shoulders and waited for my heart to stop pounding. All I could hear was my breathing. All I could think about was her.

  Eventually, I realized I wouldn’t be going back to sleep. I picked up my watch from the nightstand. I had less than an hour before I needed to leave for work. Giving up all hope of sleep I walked into my living room and stood at my front windows, watched the empty street below.

  I saw nothing move, nor did I hear a sound, for a long time. Then dawn began, and I got dressed and went down the two flights of stairs and out into the cold .

  Chapter One

  It was during the last moments of twilight that I got my first glimpse of the man I mistook for Augie Hartsell. The streetlights had only just come on, and the sky had bled out fast, the way it does this time of year, suddenly wet-black and freckled with faint stars straight up but holding pale-blue still along the low horizon, beyond the skeletal trees and the line of small brick buildings, all fashionable shops and restaurants, that made up this part of Southampton. I had picked up Tina at her doctor’s office in Hampton Bays and was heading back with her through town in my cab, turning from Job’s Lane onto Main Street, when I saw him, or what for a heart-wrenching second I thought was him, a giant of a man in jeans and a worn-out military field jacket crossing the empty winter street against the light.

  The collar of his jacket was worn high against the cold, obscuring his face. So it was really the way he walked that caught my eye and not so much how he looked. He had, or so it seemed to me in that brief glimpse, a hint of a limp in his right leg. The initial resemblance was startling to my mind dulled by a long day of driving, and I felt my left foot suddenly lifting, poised to hit the brake. But I caught my error fast enough, caught this foolishness before it completely took hold of my reason like some kind of mirage. Of course I knew Augie had been killed months ago, shot while saving Tina, his daughter, from a madman’s bullet. And the man who upon crossing Main Street entered the Village Hall was clearly in his early twenties, or maybe even younger, not his mid-fifties, as Augie had been. I didn’
t need to see his face to know this. He wore his hair in a buzz cut, like Augie had, and it was even the same color, shoe brown. But it wasn’t touched with gray at the temples, and though he was clearly big enough to have worn Augie’s clothes, the sense of power that came off Augie like a glow——the power of a circus strongman——just wasn’t coming off this man.

  No, I told myself, easing my foot back to the floorboard, Augie was dead. He had made his way out of this world and would have the good sense never to come back. This bad joke I was playing on myself was only one of those tricks of the eye that mourners must endure till they finally find themselves no longer looking——out of habit or need, or a blend of both——for their lost loved ones to reappear.

  Tina was sitting in the back seat, watching me in the rearview mirror. She was sixteen, and long before her father died we were already close, already family. In the months since, I had let us drift apart some, made certain that we didn’t see too much of each other. It was for the best. Still, regardless of the distance I had put between us, I knew I had to mask the complicated idea that had rushed into my mind when I caught that glimpse of the man in the army jacket. If I had let it show, let my confusion and alarm and grief, any or all of it, cross my face, Tina would have read me, easily. She would have seen my eyes and asked me what was wrong. And if I hadn’t come up with a lie fast enough, she might have followed my line of vision out the window and seen the same thing I had seen for an instant, would have had the same chain reaction of emotions.

  She wasn’t herself these days, hadn’t been since her father’s death, and I didn’t need her acting any more strangely than she already was. More than that, though, I didn’t want her going through any more pain that she already had. I was her guardian now, responsible for her well-being and education, as well as for the quarter-million dollars her father’s life insurance had paid to her in trust just two months ago. We were all we had left, she and I, the only survivors of our respective families.

  It had been a brutally cold day, and with the sun gone the wind shifted, coming in now off the ocean. Even before the change the wind had been bitter. All day long I had felt it on the back of my neck whenever anyone opened the door of my cab. I was at the end of a twelve-hour shift and looking forward to getting out of the cold, for a while, anyway. I was thinking about heading home for the night when a call came over the radio.

  Angel, my partner Eddie’s wife, was working the dispatch. The fare she was calling me about was to Montauk, to the very end of the island, and my first instinct was to tell her that it was too late, that I had gone off-duty. Montauk was a long haul, a good forty-five minutes each way. Eddie generally worked the end of the island, leaving me free to take the lucrative flat-fare runs to the airports in Queens, and into the city and back. My cab was newer than his and could take the miles and abuse. I knew, though, that if she was calling me with a Montauk run that Eddie was probably busy elsewhere and couldn’t take it. Still, that didn’t change my first instinct, and I was thinking of telling her that I was going off for the night. But before I could speak, Angel’s voice came over the single radio speaker again with a phrase that cut me off at the knees.

  “It’s supposedly an emergency,” she said. “The woman’s car is dead, and she’s supposed to meet someone out at the Point.”

  Tina’s eyes were on me. I could feel them. I looked ahead and rebuilt my resistance as quickly as I could. I said into the handset, “Tell her to take the train.”

  “She says she has to be there now. She says she’ll pay whatever you want.”

  I muttered, “Shit,” but didn’t bother to press down on the talk button.

  Angel waited for me to respond, and when I didn’t, after a moment, she said, “I’ve got her on the phone still, Mac. I could tell her to wait for Eddie. I know you’ve been out all day.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He had to pick up a fare at East Hampton. He’s taking them out to Jessup Neck.”

  “Yeah, that’ll take a while, won’t it?”

  “You could probably hit her with a fifty dollar flat rate and make it worth your time. It’s up to you, Mac. I can always refer to her to Paul’s.”

  Paul was our rival. He owned a three-person operation out of Hampton Bays: himself, his son Dig, and a dark-haired woman named Liv. Paul’s was the only other cab company in the Southampton area, and the competition was what had kept Eddie running day and night before I came aboard three months ago.

  “I don’t think giving this to Paul would make Eddie all that happy, Angel, do you?”

  “Like I said, it’s up to you, Mac. Whatever you want.”

  I was hungry and tired. More than that, though, I wanted to sack out on my secondhand couch and let my back work free of knots. Sitting all day is a grind. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I didn’t imagine myself laying there on my couch and feeling particularly badly about this woman not getting to Montauk as quickly as she needed. I didn’t see myself feeling anything in particular about it at all. There were worse things in the world that could happen. I knew this. But, in all fairness, too, there were worse things that could happen to me than having to add another hour or two to my workday to help someone out of a jam. And it was cold out there, too cold for anyone, friend or stranger, to stand around and wait for a ride.

  I clicked the handset and told Angel I was in. It was as simple as that. She gave me the address where the fare was waiting. It was just two blocks away from where I was, in the direction I was already heading. But I had to get Tina to her friend Lizzie’s house first, where she was living these days, so I told Angel to tell the fare I’d be there in five minutes, and hung the handset.

  I looked straight ahead, gripping the wheel with both hands. I was tired, but I was used to that. I had no plans for the night other than sacking out, and after the relatively slow day I’d had behind the wheel, the extra fifty sounded good to me.

  It was almost full night and the village was empty. We rode through it, heading north. I didn’t need to glance at my mirror to know that Tina’s eyes were still on me. I could feel them. But after a moment I looked anyway.

  She wasn’t a beautiful girl. She had a raw, unfinished look, as if her face, which was heavily boned like her father’s, didn’t yet know what it wanted to be. She had the dark skin of her Colombian mother, and her hair, thick and black, shimmered like silk. What was striking about her, though, were her eyes, which were turbulent and steely, like the Atlantic in winter. In the mirror they held my own eyes with a focus and steadiness you wouldn’t expect from someone her age. But I knew what she had seen, and what she had done. I didn’t really expect her to be any other way.

  She was wearing loose jeans and a green thermal shirt and work boots tonight, her usual gear. Over it all was a navy surplus pea coat at least two sizes too big. It wrapped around her like a shroud.

  I steered us onto North Main Street, and two blocks later pulled into a driveway and parked. I shifted into Park but kept the motor running for the heat. I looked back at Tina.

  “When’s your next appointment?” I said.

  “This Friday.”

  “I’ll pick you up again.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Do you like your therapist?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s important.”

  “Yeah. She’s nice.”

  We listened to the idling engine. I thought of the woman waiting for me in the cold. But Tina didn’t seem to want to get out right away. I could tell there was something on her mind. I watched her, waiting for her to speak. You could count on Tina to always speak her mind.

  “I don’t seem to see you much anymore. The last two weeks you’ve only come around to take me to my appointment.”

  “I need to drive seven days a week this time of year just to make enough to pay the bills, or close to it.” That wasn’t exactly true. I didn’t want Tina to depend on me, but more than that, I didn’t necessarily want her to be seen with me too
often. I had enemies, and I didn’t want Tina to have nowhere to turn if something happened to me. Nor did I want her close to me when the hurt started up again, which I knew it would, sooner or later. The less time Tina spent with me and the more time she spent with Lizzie and Lizzie’s parents in their nice house on North Main Street, the better for all involved. I paid Lizzie’s parents a generous monthly stipend out of Tina’s trust fund, to cover her expenses as well as any incidentals there might be. I had also paid for an updated security system when they’d moved into their new home two months ago.

  “You don’t have to work, you know,” Tina said. “Take what you need out of my father’s money.”

  “That’s yours, Tina. I know you think it’s a lot of money, but it really isn’t. It can go faster than you think. Besides, I need to work.”

  “My therapist told me to tell you that I need to see you more.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I’m not supposed to hide my feelings. I’m supposed to let my grief show. It’s normal.”

  Tina’s agreeing to see a therapist was the only thing keeping her from being expelled from school. Twice in the past month I had been called into the principal’s office because of fights Tina had gotten into with boys. But I’d hardly call them fights. Both incidents involved Tina being bothered and her responding to it by kicking the offending boy in the balls, dropping him to the floor. The school psychologist believed Tina was struggling with issues of grief and loss. But of course that was only half the story, and twice a week when I picked Tina up from her appointment, she looked all worn-out, half-dead. I couldn’t be certain what was going on inside her doctor’s office, what was and wasn’t being said, but I knew what was going on inside Tina. I knew what she was really struggling with.