Matt Hilton
Dead Fall
There was only one way up to Mick O’Neill’s penthouse apartment on Davis Islands, South Tampa. Two ways down. You could take the express elevator up, which required use of a key to access the private floor. Coming down you could also use the elevator. Or — option two — fall sixteen stories to the unforgiving sidewalk if O’Neill’s protection team tossed you off the roof. No one but a suicidal fool would choose option two, but it appeared that this was the case with William Murray.
Murray was a fool but I’d never tagged him as being suicidal. He enjoyed life too much. It was because he valued his hide that he’d made the mistake of answering the summons to O’Neill’s lofty pad. Murray had angered the Irishman, but thought he could charm his way out of a kneecapping. Sadly, when he’d hit the ground at one hundred and twenty miles per hour, his kneecaps were the least of it. He’d burst on impact and there was little left of him that was recognizable. Apparently, if the Medical Examiner’s report was to be believed, he’d broken ninety-two percent of the bones in his body. CSI examiners had used tools akin to snow shovels while removing him from the sidewalk.
Not a pretty image.
William Murray was a low-level street hawker, his wares not entirely lawful, and beneath my usual circle of friends, but he was likable in his own way. He didn’t deserve ending up as sidewalk pizza for Mick O’Neill’s amusement.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened up on the sixteenth floor.
Murray had gone in, cap in hand, tried to lighten the mood somewhat with a self-deprecating joke or two, but his geniality hadn’t won him any friends. Mick O’Neill was someone I’d been hearing a lot about lately, and none of it had anything to do with his humanitarian ways. Murray would have been slapped around, threatened perhaps, and then O’Neill would have lost any patience he had with the man and ordered that Murray take an impromptu swan dive from the roof.
That’s the way the cops believed that events transpired, and I for one was with them. However, there was no evidence, no witnesses coming forward to offer their support. In fact, all four men and two women in O’Neill’s penthouse at the time of Murray’s death swore that they hadn’t seen him. The first they knew of his “suicide” was when the sirens of the first responders arrived on the scene and one of O’Neill’s “home helpers” took a look over the balcony. O’Neill had extended his assistance to the police investigators, throwing open his home to them, and no trace evidence had been found to place Murray in the apartment. The cops knew O’Neill was lying, and even pulled him — plus his pals — in for questioning, but with no evidence to incriminate him or any of the others in Murray’s death, they were released without charge, and O’Neill was offered a humble apology for wasting his valuable time.
The police moved on.
They understood that they couldn’t make anything stick to O’Neill, and to try was a waste of their resources, their time, and their energy. Their best strategy was to hope that O’Neill would slip up another time, and they’d send him down for this future crime. Typically, I didn’t have the patience to wait.
I’ve never been known to keep my peace. I’m impulsive. When something bites me, I bite back. And right now the fact that O’Neill was smirking over the crushed body of a friend was gnawing at me like a junkyard dog on a bone.
My initial response was to front the Irishman in his lair, then beat the truth out of him before letting him feel the breeze in his thick mane of silvery hair as he plummeted to earth. To do that I’d also have to send his protection detail off the roof, because no way would they be blind witnesses this time. Admittedly that plan was a bit too harsh. Plus, to do such would ensure that I was the one that the police sent to prison for the rest of my life.
My friend, Jared Rington, had cautioned me against doing anything rash. But then Rink’s always more level-headed than me. He prefers to think things through, formulate a plan, and initiate it when the time is right. I’ve always been the go for broke, fly by the seat of my pants, kind of guy. And in the past, what I’ve lacked in subtlety I’ve gained in a healthy dose of luck and daring. But Rink was correct this time: if I went to O’Neill’s penthouse carrying this much anger, then the inevitable ending would see one or all of us taking a fall — quite literally for some.
It was an effort to dampen down the urge to take violence to O’Neill, but I managed. I soothed my ego with the old adage that revenge is a dish best served cold. It worked for a while.
Then Candice Berry turned up dead and the rage surged afresh through my veins.
“What are you doing here, Hunter?”
I pursed my lips at Detective Holker’s question, didn’t bother with an answer because whatever I said wouldn’t soothe him.
“Stay back behind the line, goddamnit, this is a crime scene.” Holker waved over a man-mountain of a uniformed cop. “Make sure this asshole doesn’t step a foot nearer my scene.”
“Nice to see you, too, Detective Holker,” I said.
The uniform posted himself in front of me, crossing arms like hams on his chest. He was a humorless kind of guy, I could tell, and big enough to ruin most people’s day. He wasn’t large enough to block all of the view. Candice Berry was under a white sheet, but I could tell from the blood seeping through it that her death hadn’t been easy.
“What happened to Candice, Detective?” I asked.
Holker shook his head wearily. He shoved a latex-gloved hand through his salt and pepper hair and approached me. He placed the same hand on the big uniform’s shoulder, squeezing reassuringly. “I’ll handle this, Buck.”
The big cop grunted in monosyllables, but moved aside.
“Joe, you being at my crime scene isn’t helping.” Holker was shorter than I, but not by much. His Cuban heels helped balance the disparity and he studied me eye-to-eye. “How’d you even know what happened to Candice? I’ve only been here minutes.”
“News travels fast on the streets,” I said, “especially when it’s bad news. Candice Berry was much loved by her friends and neighbors.”
“ ‘Much loved’ being the operative words. She was a hooker, Hunter.”
“It was her way of making a living, supporting her kids,” I corrected. “Being a hooker doesn’t make her a bad person.”
Holker shrugged, but the move didn’t do much to stir the shoulders of his overly large suit. Holker had lost some poundage since last I’d seen him. Didn’t look in the best of health. But then, when you make a living from violent death and chasing down the scumbags responsible, you could be forgiven for not looking your best.
“You scanning the police channels, Hunter? Tell me you’re not like those other ambulance-chasing parasites who call themselves private eyes these days?”
“Never chased an ambulance in my life, and I don’t call myself a private eye, neither.”
“But you’re not denying scanning our radio traffic?”
I held up my empty palms, shook my head. I was telling the truth. It was one of my work mates at Rington Investigations, Raul Velasquez, who’d given me the heads-up on Candice’s murder. “I just happened to be passing,” I said, and this time I was lying through my teeth.
Holker squinted around the grimy alleyway between two warehouses off Guy N. Verger Boulevard, close enough to McKay Bay that the occasional breeze carried the tang of brine, and close enough to Causeway Boulevard that the exhaust fumes of vehicles passing to and from Clair Mel practically overwhelmed the smell of the sea.
“And what brings you to Palmetto Beach,” the detective asked, “or rather this end of Palmetto Beach? It’s not as if you’ve chosen the nicest lookout over the bay. I’d have thought Desoto Park was more your kind of place for passing time.”