Dead Man's Hand Read Free

it into gear. I’d never heard word one about Pixel
being anything other than she appeared, and there’d been no
shortage of men she’d been linked to. None of them seemed the worse
for wear. If there was anything worth worrying about, I’d never had
a better chance to find out than I did now as we sped away from the
curb, leaving the lights of the Gaudy Mirage to fade into the night
behind us.
    “ Do you know my dad?” she
asked almost right away.
    It seemed an odd place to start, but I went
with it. Pretty much everybody on this side of the city knew Max
Patterson and his loud, wild ways. “By reputation,” I said.
    “ Which is pretty
bad.”
    I shrugged. She seemed to catch the gesture
even though she watched the road, taking a left at 3rd and pushing
the accelerator to be able to make the next light a short block
away.
    “ He wasn’t always trouble,”
she said. “It’s just been the last few years the gambling’s got the
best of him. He hits it big and then drops down to nothing. Deep in
debt and then king of the hill.”
    “ And right now?”
    “ Right now…” She hesitated.
“Deep in debt. Way deep.”
    I was trying to guess where this was going,
what she could possibly think a lawyer with friends among the
city’s paranormals could do for her or her old man. I was coming up
zero and figured I’d keep letting this play out before I slammed
the door on whatever Pixel had in mind.
    “ To?” I asked.
    She waited a beat and then said, “Clancy
Grommet.”
    I raised my eyebrows as she slowed for a
stoplight. The way she gripped the wheel, I could tell she really
wanted to run it, probably would have if she’d been in the car
alone.
    And I couldn’t blame her, the thought of
Clancy Grommet making me feel jumpy even though it wasn’t my old
man who owed him.
    Clancy Grommet was not a good man to owe.
The same was true of his twin brother Yancy. Together, the Grommets
ran vice in the city—drugs, prostitution, gambling, smuggling,
extortion. It didn’t matter to them if their clients or victims
were normals like me and Pixel or children of the night like the
werewolf who’d almost done me in twenty minutes before. The thing
about the Grommets, though, was that they hated each other. Each
employed bodyguards to keep his brother from unpleasant behavior.
And their mutual hatred was compounded by the fact that they were
conjoined twins, connected at their skulls. They faced opposite
directions, the left side of one’s bulbous, bald head fused with
the right side of the other’s, and they stood with their left and
right shoulders touching. For all anyone knew, their brains were
fused as well, but nobody asked. Nobody dared.
    You’d see the Grommets leaving their office
building downtown, first Clancy fighting to walk forwards and then
Yancy. Sometimes the power struggle ended up with them walking in
circles, cursing each other, and looking like something out of a
Bosch painting—if Bosch had painted people square dancing in hell.
If they’d gotten along, it would have been easy enough for each to
wrap an arm around his brother’s front and coordinate their
efforts. As it was, though, the position of their heads forced each
to angle himself just enough to give the other an opening, and
they’d poke and kick at each other until their bodyguards figured
it was enough and would step in to calm them down. Then they’d move
on until it started all over again.
    It made for a rough administration of their
competing criminal enterprises. At some point in the past, they’d
agreed to split the city with Clancy taking the north and east,
Yancy taking the south and west. Rumor was that they couldn’t talk
to their operatives since each brother’s rival was always in the
room, so they let their will be known through texts or paper notes
that they shredded the second their minions knew what the Grommets
wanted of them.
    “ Sorry to hear that,” I
said. “But I don’t see how I can…”
    “ It’s not