Cold Hard Steele (Daggers & Steele Book 2) Read Free

natural cynic I am, I assumed some lucky contractor got a steal of a deal on the garish bricks, but I couldn’t be sure. The city of New Welwic was so old that fashions and tastes had changed dozens of times over the centuries. For all I knew, banana-yellow was coming back into style. I’d know for sure if the building was full of pipe-smoking bohemians wearing plaid shirts and glassless spectacles. Damn, stupid bohemians.
    One of the bluecoats standing outside the door spotted me and flagged me down. He had a smile plastered across his face and seemed far too eager given the early hour. To be fair though, it was almost eleven.
    “Detective Daggers,” he said. “Good to see you again.”
    The guy’s youthful face seemed familiar, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember his name. “Hey…you. How’s it going?”
    “It’s Phillips, sir. And I’m well.”
    I tried to play it cool. “Phillips. Yeah, yeah, right. I remember. So why do they have you on nanny patrol here? Something dangerous up at the crime scene?”
    “Not exactly, sir,” he said. “It’s just an…interesting scene, I guess. You’ll have to see it for yourself. Detectives Steele and Quinto are already up there.”
    Given a slack leash, my mind took off like a greyhound, coming up with ludicrous ideas for what could’ve occurred at the murder scene. I couldn’t help it. My and Shay’s last two cases were cut-and-dried stab and runs, orchestrated by idiot savants of the criminal kind who happened to be lacking in the savant part of things. I needed something interesting to focus my restless mind on.
    “Is everything all right, sir?”
    I deglazed my eyes. “Oh…yeah Phelps. I’m fine. What room was it again?”
    “Two twelve, sir. And it’s Phillips.”
    I gave him a nod and headed in. A couple of middle-class human families milled about in the building’s lobby, pursing their lips and talking in hushed tones as I took the stairs. Who could blame them? This wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where people got axed frequently. By the looks of things, it wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where anything interesting happened ever. That wasn’t a bad thing, at least not for families with kids. Boring and safe beats exciting and dead any day in my book.
    I stomped my way up the stairs and found the apartment in question. A flatfoot at the door let me through into the pad’s living room. As I took in my environs, I suddenly understood the nervous commotion downstairs.
    The place was trashed. Not tossed, as a place would be if some ne’er-do-well had been searching for something, but utterly, completely, hopelessly wrecked. A thick oaken dining table in the middle of the room lay in pieces on the floor, as if a muscle-bound thug had delivered a flying pile driver to its midsection. Next to it, a green corduroy couch heaved its last breaths, huge gashes in the fabric displaying its innards to the world. Clumps of fluffy white cotton puffed from the tears like popcorn spilling from a hot kettle. Both windows in the space were smashed, and bits of glass, cotton, and variegated scraps of cloth littered the floorboards.
    At the sides of the room, tall bookshelves full of hardbacks, paperbacks, and serials had been knocked to the ground, spilling their contents across the floor in a tide of cardboard and paper. I walked over to the pile and selected a couple random paperbacks. Sam Simon and the Trolltown Beatdown by Marcellus Pinkerton read one. The other was titled The Beast with Twelve Arms by Collette Plumlee. Both were frivolous pulp novels, and both sounded awesome .
    I started to thumb through the Sam Simon book when Quinto’s big bass voice made me jump.
    “Daggers! There you are,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”
    I stood and turned. Folton Quinto was a good guy and a better cop but not someone you’d want to mess with unless your lifelong dream was to understand how muddled fruit at the bottom of a cocktail felt like. He was about