Dark Men Read Online Free

voice.
    “Can you help me move this?”
    The back of the chest and the wall behind it have the same hole. Risina watches, fascinated.
    “You got a little knife on you?” I say to Smoke.
    He immediately shakes his head, but then thinks. “Hold on a second . . .”
    He scampers back to the kitchen and Risina smiles and nods, rocking forward on her toes. “I’m impressed.”
    “In this job, you have to look at a scene of violence, the aftermath, and read it like a book. I want you to try to visualize what happened in this room. On your own, no help from me.”
    I hear Smoke rummaging around in kitchen drawers, but I focus on Risina. Her eyes trace the room, drinking it in, and I can see her gears turning.
    “I don’t know. There was a fight, and someone was shot.”
    “Not shot. I don’t think so. We’d see a different blood pattern on the floor, on the walls. When someone takes a bullet, a part of his insides usually comes out. So you’d see some other matter besides blood.”
    “Then what do you think? He was stabbed?”
    Before I can answer, Smoke returns holding a small kitchen knife, a screwdriver, and a letter opener, presenting all three items like a kid excited to please his teacher.
    “The opener,” I say. A few minutes later and I fish the bullet out of the wall, then toss it to Risina. “That’s a .22 slug. Look at the size of it and try to commit it to memory. It’s a low caliber round out of a small gun. An assassin’s weapon. I’ll get ahold of some other calibers so you can compare them.”
    I turn to Smoke. “Archie have a .22?”
    “Yeah.”
    “He keep it under the mattress?”
    “Yeah.”
    I lift it up, but the gun isn’t there.
    “Well, he got one shot off before they fought over the pistol. I’m saying ‘they’ ’cause I’m guessing it was at least two guys.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, I could be wrong, but I think one held him up while the other one went to work on his face. That’s why you have the blood here, in a circle, after they broke his nose and most likely knocked him out. They held him up while his head hung. It’s hard to hold an unconscious guy still, and his head lolled a bit. That accounts for why there is so much blood on the floor. A stab wound would pour straight down and soak the victim’s clothes. A broken nose? That’s a gusher, and if they’re holding him upright, it’s just going to get everywhere.”
    It’s Smoke’s turn to ask a question. “Why would they do that?”
    I shrug. “They wanted information on me and the muscle went too far? They wanted to beat on him for putting up a fight, pulling a gun? Who knows? But they were careful not to step in the blood, which means the fist work happened after the initial fight. Anyway, none of this matters all that much until we figure out who’s holding Archie and why they want me.”
    Risina turns the bullet over in her fingers and holds it up close to her eye like a jeweler examining a diamond. “But we know now it was more than one guy.”
    “We know it was more than one guy here in the room. But maybe they were only hired muscle . . . not necessarily the guy looking for me. Either way, the person who wanted Archie snuck two or more guys into this place, which is no easy feat, I know from experience, and got them out of the building while transporting an unconscious resident.”
    “They’re professionals. Like you.”
    I nod and chew my lip. I had come to that conclusion within five seconds of entering the room, but I wanted Risina to arrive at it on her own.
    “So what now?”
    “Now we bang on a door.”
    Bo Willis is a big man, not quite forty, who looks like his monthly trip to the pharmacy includes a permanent prescription for Lipitor. He was a Chicago cop for twelve years but quit when he didn’t make detective the second year in a row. Being a cop means taking a lot of ribbing from your fellow officers, and I’m sure he received his fair share after failing his detective exams or getting