Start Screaming Murder

Talmage Powell

• Publisher: Prologue Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781440536946
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

My name is Ed Rivers. I live in Tampa, Florida, where I work as a private cop. I'm six feet tall, weigh in at about one ninety, and am forty years old.When I look in the mirror I see a heavy, bearish face, dark-tanned and creased, the thick lids giving the brown eyes a lazy look. Women either get a charge from that face or want to run from it. Men fear it or trust it to the hilt. It isn't a face that ever meets a neutral reaction.I'm not always happy about that, but it's my face and I have to do the best I can with it.

Chapter One

She was hiding in my apartment when I got back there that night. She didn’t use the windows or doors. She had her own way of getting in—and her own brand of trouble.

The evening had started with a minor annoyance. At 10:03 a burglar alarm went off in a Franklin Street jewelry store. Four cops, courtesy the city of Tampa, Florida, checked the corners and cracks and found nobody in the place.

I was called because I’m the agent in charge of the southeastern office of Nationwide Detective Agency. Part of our bread comes from installing and servicing burglar alarms.

The system was independent of city electricity, operating on a six-cell, series-wired dry pack. A defect in one of the cells had gummed up the works. I’d brought my kit along. I replaced the cell, chinned briefly with the city cops, pushed my way through the rubber-neckers on the sidewalk, and headed for home.

I was hot, tired and thirsty as I ran the car into the long, ramshackle shed behind the beatup apartment building on the edge of Ybor City, Tampa’s old-worldish Latin quarter.

I started down the scabby, brick side of the building. I didn’t know he was there until he brought the sap down right where my brown mat is thinning on the crown of my head.

Six feet, a hundred and ninety pounds, and forty-odd years of Ed Rivers pitched face foremost on the dirty crushed shell of the alley.

The loose-shell paving ground my cheek. I fought off unconsciousness, snarling for breath. I heard him breathing, quick and hard. His hands pummeled my body, trying to find my pockets. He passed up the wallet. When my keys rattled, his hand quickened.

The first spectacular burst of fireworks cleared out of my head. I reared around and shot the heel of my shoe straight at his groin. It connected, like my shoe had connected with tough, tight-stretched cowhide.

He grunted softly and rocked back. The sap came whistling at me again.

His first blow had been without personal feeling. He was sore now. The purpose of the blackjack was to lay my brains in the alley like scrambled eggs in a steaming pan.

I pitched to one side. The plaited leather over the coil spring handle of the sap nipped my ear. The weapon slapped across my shoulder. My left arm went numb, as if it had been detached from me.

I got a quick impression of a guy who topped me by four inches and twenty-five pounds. Wearing greasy ducks, T-shirt, and a dirty yachting cap, he was solid as a prairie steer.

I saw the glint of his teeth, the redness of his eyes. He was swinging the sap again, a short curse in his mouth. I went in under the blackjack. When I felt him slam against the building I knew my numb shoulder had connected. His curse was smothered by the air tearing out of him.

His first deadly speed was braked a little. He grabbed for my throat with his left hand, trying to get my head in sapping position. I hit him in the face with my right hand, heard the back of his head hit the brick. His knees caved for a second.

If he hadn’t had the advantage of that first dirty blow, I’d have got him right then. He knew it. As I went in, he lost his head and began swinging the sap wildly, lashing me across the back and buttocks.

Grogginess had my timing off. The sap was plenty rough. I had to get away from the punishment pouring across my ribs.

I rolled back, and he thought he had me. In the wan light filtering from the street, I saw his face. His lips and chin were wet with spit. The red hunger in his eyes was like a flame.

I let the eagerness of the blackjack bring him nice and close. Just as the sap poised, I brought my right fist straight in from center field. For an instant, he didn’t have a nose, just a big, flat, bloody mess for a face. He bounced like a crazy cue ball in a bank shot. He did a cross between a jitterbug step and Virginia reel, halfway across the alley.

Most men would have gone down and stayed for awhile. This guy didn’t. He caromed off the building and started out of the alley. He moved like a drunk who wakes up to find the building on fire.

He turned the bloody moon of face toward me, throwing quick glances. Every time I stretched my legs, his stretched a little further. As he rounded the corner, he was gaining momentum with every slap of his feet.

I slowed down, staggered to a halt. Sucking at air, my mouth open, I knew I couldn’t catch him. Right then, it wouldn’t have been smart to start searching for him. There were too many other alleys and dark places—for me to try with one arm and half my senses.

I put my hand against the building to keep the world from rocking too much. Reaction hit the bottom of my stomach. I stood swaying, waiting for the sickness to pass.

My left arm started welding itself back to my body, an operation without benefit of pain killer. Sweat broke on my face. I gathered up the left forearm with my right and hugged it to me.

This time I got sick for real.

Five or six minutes later, I hauled myself inside the building. The heat, musty age, and lingering spice of Cuban cooking closed over me. The building had taken no notice of what had happened in the alley. There was an old, quiet creaking tiredness in the swayed floors and walls and ceiling. The gloom was almost inaudibly accented by the sorrowful, muffled whisper of a Spanish guitar in the bowels of the building. The guitar murmured of a man alone in half-darkness with yearnings peculiar to the Latin heart.

A dim bulb was burning in the second floor hall. I saw that the ancient wicker hall table had been pushed close to my door.

I didn’t think anything of the table being there. It roamed the building, as tenants had guests for cards, dominoes, or arroz con pollo.

I fished out my keys and gave them a look. The punk had seemed to want those keys. In fact, he’d been desperate enough to try to sap me to get the keys.

I couldn’t figure it. There was nothing in the apartment worth stealing. If he was after something out of my office in downtown Tampa, it would have been a lot more sensible for him to break in.

I keyed the apartment door open, stepped inside, and turned on a lamp. The apartment was a lot like my office. Not much. There was a daybed for sweat-washed sleep, a TV I didn’t watch often, a kitchenette, a huge old bathroom with gargling plumbing.

I made for the bathroom first. I ran the water until it was cooler than tepid, soaked my head, and washed the grit off my face.

In the medicine-cabinet mirror, the face stared back at me, heavy, bearish, dark-tanned and creased, the thick lids giving the brown eyes a lazy look. Women either get a charge from the face or want to run from it. Men fear it, or trust it to the hilt. It isn’t a face that ever meets a neutral reaction. I’m not always happy about that, but it’s my face and I have to do the best I can with it.

Right now, I was interested in the damage done to the face. It could have been worse. The bits of crushed shell had hamburgered the skin on my cheek, but the skin on my head hadn’t been broken.

I started cold water into the bathtub. While it was running, I soaked a wash cloth and laid it gingerly on the tender swelling on my skull.

Continually working my left arm and shoulder against the subsiding pain and creeping stiffness, I headed toward the kitchen where cold beer waited in the refrigerator.

I opened the refrigerator door—and right then, I wasn’t alone again. I knew it. with that quick tightening around the heart, the squeezed-up feeling at the nape of the neck.

I pitched my head compress into the sink, dropped in a crouch as I spun toward the sibilant softness of another person’s breathing.

For a second, I thought I must be hearing things. There wasn’t another soul in the kitchenette with me.

Then she came walking from the cave of shadows underneath the kitchenette table.

“Ed …” she said. “Take it easy! It’s me—Tina La Flor.”

I wiped my sleeve across my forehead and stared at Tina the Flower.

When I say she was a living doll, I mean it literally. She had a calendar-girl figure, sunny-reddish hair that rippled to her shoulders, green eyes with a tiny up-tilt at the corners, and a face so mistily beautiful that you had to look twice at the porcelain perfection of it to make sure it was real.

And after that second look, along about the third or fourth look, you felt your heart break a little on her account. Because all that perfectly proportioned, out-of-this-world loveliness was a sleek package that stood slightly over three feet high when she cleared the table top and straightened up.

In a doll-sized ...