Dead Man's Hand by Richard Levesque Page B

me
had already dispatched the missing creature somewhere out of
sight.
    And I still saw no sign of Pete. There was a
chance he’d taken part in the melee, but it seemed more likely that
my friend with the gun had done most or all of the work. Pete’s
forte was blades, not bullets, and I guessed that he was hiding
somewhere in a back room or closet, waiting for the all clear.
    I felt the gun barrel pushed harder against
my skull, a silent command that I should keep moving. He wanted me
to go up the ramp and toward Rincon’s body. I’d had about enough of
complying and was starting to think of how best to talk my way out
of this. There was a chance the gunslinger would respond well to a
bribe, but I didn’t have much I could promise him, save free legal
council should his boss ever get him into trouble more serious than
what he’d just gone through tonight. If this guy really had been
massacring zombies and then putting down his fellows for not being
quick enough on the draw, he had regained his composure pretty damn
quickly. A cool guy, maybe too cool.
    When I got to the top of the ramp, I could
see the rest of Rincon’s body. I don’t know what was in the vat, or
what the process was for cooking coaster, but I could see now that
it was nasty stuff. The body couldn’t have been in the vat long,
but the flesh was already melting away from the bone, stringy bits
of muscle, skin and hairy scalp separating from the skull and
bobbing in the fluid the head was soaking in. As for any plan
involving salvaging the left hand—either to get Pixel a matched set
or to let one of the Grommets enact the same plan Pixel had in
mind—it was in equally bad shape. The hand and wrist floated in the
pool, already reduced mostly to bone.
    “ Looks like you guys had
quite a party,” I said.
    “ Shut up.”
    “ Edward!” The voice came
from behind us, and we both turned away from the vat.
    The Grommet brothers came shuffling across
the floor, with another gun-toting thug behind them. I’d seen them
before, but only from a distance. Now I wished it had stayed that
way. The Grommets were repulsive, even aside from the fact that
they were joined together at their heads. They were corpulent and
short, bald and sweaty. Their skin was a sickly ashen color. The
brother who faced me, and I assumed he was the one who had spoken,
had a large mole about the size of a nickel above his right eye and
age spots all over his scalp. It appeared that the brother with his
back to me had his hands bound, and the thug’s gun was trained
steadily on him.
    It took me only a couple of seconds to add
up the angles. They didn’t quite make a whole circle, but I had
most of it figured out. I still wasn’t sure how I was going to get
out of this without being shot, but my chances were suddenly
better.
    “ Yancy Grommet,” I
said.
    He narrowed his eyes at me in a way that
told me I’d guessed correctly. He didn’t deign to reply, though. At
this point, I was nothing more than an unimportant detail in an
already complicated situation.
    “ What are you doing,
Edward?” he asked, his voice bubbling up through his jowly
throat.
    “ This guy was nosing
around,” Edward said with another nudge of the barrel to the back
of my head. “Figured we didn’t need any live witnesses.”
    Grommet nodded, making his brother’s head
nod along. “Were you going to bother finding out who he is
first?”
    Edward had a moment’s embarrassed
hesitation, then started feeling for my wallet. Now would have been
a good time to duck and roll and hope he had bad aim, but his boss
put a stop to things before they could get going.
    “ Edward!” he barked. “Why
don’t we just ask him, for God’s sake?”
    The fumbling at my backside stopped
immediately, and I heard Grommet mutter, “Idiot.”
    Edward likely heard it, too, as he gave me a
sharper nudge.
    “ Ace Stubble,” I
said.
    Grommet narrowed his eyes at me. “Lawyer,”
he said.
    “ Guilty,” I
answered.
    That