Read Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose for Free Online Page A

checked his eyes. He looked at me, and there was a degree of cognition.
    “We have to move. We have to move now.”
    My words seemed to reach him then. I could see it in his eyes. He nodded again. This time there was more certainty in it.
    “Let’s go,” I said.
    “My 1911. Where is it?”
    I looked at the glove compartment. It was open. The gun was nowhere to be seen.
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “Find it.”
    “We don’t have time. We have to move.”
    I grabbed the passenger door handle and jerked it up. The door swung open on a creaking hinge. I slid out and reached for Augie. He was looking around for his gun, feeling the seat covered with broken glass. I grabbed him by his jacket and pulled him toward me. My rib protested sharply. Once he was across the seat, I pulled him through the door. It became clear to me fast that I wasn’t going to be able to hold him. But before either of us could do anything he fell. I went down with him. He was as heavy as a refrigerator and landed on top of me. Most of his weight was on my legs. I was pinned and couldn’t move.
    We heard two voices up on the street then and waited where we were, listening. The voices belonged to the driver of the Caddy and the driver of the car that had rammed us from behind. I could hear only some of their words clearly through the rain.
    “It went down this ditch … Over here … They saw the whole fucking thing … No … Over here …”
    I scrambled out from under Augie and got up. I tried to pull him to his feet. He did what he could to help. We fumbled but he finally got up. I moved in next to him and wrapped his left arm around the back of my neck. Side by side we stumbled through the mud and around the truck. Augie was still too dazed to walk well, and he was too heavy for me to shoulder and carry. After a few feet we dropped to the ground again behind the tree into which the pickup had crashed. I landed on a root and felt it dig hard into my side. I was out of breath already, my chest heaving. Augie seemed to be struggling toward consciousness, like someone trying to wake up quickly from a deep sleep. There was nothing we could do but lie there together in the mud by the base of that tree and wait.
    I looked around the tree and spotted the first man as he appeared at the top of the bank. He was just a silhouette in the rain. He looked down at the truck, then glanced over his shoulder and waved someone behind him to follow.
    “Hurry,” he called.
    A second man appeared then. He held a flashlight in his hand. The first man took it, switched it on, and shined it down at the wrecked truck.
    The drops of rain looked like tiny blurs in the beam of light. The first man shone it on the opened passenger door and into the cab. The inside of the truck seemed evenly divided between bright light and sharp shadows, both of which moved with each motion of the man’s hand. He led the second man down the mud bank. They looked inside the cab, then under it. It only took them a minute to spot the foot prints. I saw then that the second man had a gun in his hand. I saw small drops of rain bouncing off it. But I couldn’t see either of their faces, only the shapes of them in the night, the flashlight, and the gun.
    I looked at Augie and held my index finger to my lips. He nodded. One of the men whispered, “They couldn’t have gotten far.”
    The other said, “Forget about ‘em.”
    “They saw the whole fucking thing.”
    I was unarmed, and Augie’s .45 was somewhere in the truck. For all I knew it may have flown through the shattered windshield. But either way there was no time to look for it. I felt around the muddy ground for a stone but found nothing but the soft earth. I scrambled up to my hands and knees and searched more. I found nothing. I had no way of knowing which side of the truck the men would come around, the front, the rear, or both. I looked back and forth between the two frantically. I found a few pebbles but nothing that would