A preview of:
NO BLOOD, NO FOUL
By BILL RAETZ
I
once read a statistic that thirty-three percent of gun owners get shot
with their own weapon. I always thought that was a little inflated, and
something probably ginned up by the anti-gun crowd. But then again
my biggest flaw is that I tend to give people too much credit—especially
when it comes to having common sense. What kind of an idiot loses
control of his piece and gets shot with it? Well, there was Mort Karel.
Karel was a publicist who represented some of the best-selling
authors in the United Kingdom, only he lived and worked out of his home
office in Madrid. He was always on a mission, that bald gnome with the
most over-developed case of short man’s syndrome I’d ever seen. His
face was always screwed up and burning bright red like he was going to
explode at any given moment. He would have made one hell of a trial
lawyer. Mort Karel got shot with his own gun in his apartment because
he’d left it on the kitchen table while he plugged in his percolator. Karel
had no idea someone had broken in until it was too late, and he was on
the floor before he heard the first shot. He writhed around with his knee
to his chest, clamping down on it to control the bleeding. He tried to
crawl to the phone once or twice, but never made it. The intruder shot
him a total of three times over the course of an hour, so went the medical
examiner’s report. That’s when I got involved.
I thought it strange at first when I found out that Mr. Karel had
been packing to begin with, but then I read the rest of the text message
on my phone and saw that he had Sergey Kuznetsov as a client. Sergey
had been getting death threats for months because of a book he’d
written. I was assigned to protect him.
I finished a tall glass of dark beer so thick that it was like drinking
a loaf of bread at a bar close to the train station at Bismarkstraße. It was
a cold night in Berlin, and I was dressed in layers—dark pants, a dress
shirt with a heavy sweater over it, and a black leather jacket. I started a
cigarette and oozed up to a pay telephone just inside the station, looked
at my watch. The story about Karel hadn’t hit the news yet, but it soon
would. The news about Mort Karel would hit big, and that would give me
even more work protecting Sergey. He was already a tin duck without his
publicist getting whacked. As I waited for the phone to ring, I could only
think about Karel. Three shots sustained over an hour meant that the
perp was an expert in torture and interrogation, and knew how to cause
the right amount of pain while still keeping someone alive. The shooter
had probably been trying to get Sergey’s schedule out of Karel. But he
could have found that on the Internet. No, this guy wanted something
deeper.
The phone rang and I grabbed it up.
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“Yeah.”
“Take the train to Kaiserdamm,” the caller told me. “Get on the one
leaving in seven minutes. No matter what happens, don’t look behind
you.” He hung up and I listened to a dial tone while I finished my
cigarette.
I went to a kiosk and bought a cup of coffee and a pack of smokes,
and I carried them down to the lower level of the station where I waited
by the tracks. I tried to ignore the McDonald’s sign I saw on the way
down. I got on the train when it pulled up and rode it standing for the
short trip, my left hand lazily gripping the cold bar above me. I felt my
Beretta in my shoulder holster tap against me when the train turned and
pulled ahead. The trip lasted a little longer than a couple of yawns, and I
was expecting something to happen at each stop, something that would
make me want to turn around. But nothing happened except that I made
eyes for a little while with a red-headed dish sitting a few rows over from
me. A bum got on and brushed me on his way to a seat. I looked down
and saw his half-eaten shoes, and then I saw a leather duffel bag by my
feet. I leaned down and made sure it wasn’t ticking as the train rolled to a
stop. I picked up the bag and carried it out.
I finished drinking my coffee while I walked to my hotel, which was
nothing more than a glorified hostel situated in the middle of a not-so-
nice block. I walked up three flights of stairs as quietly as I could, stuck
my key in the door, and turned it. I went in and locked the door, poured
two fingers of Stoli into a squatty glass and had another cigarette as I
opened the bag. I sat on a bed that was about as comfortable as a Futon
sofa. I jerked when the phone rang.
“I’ll get it,” Ashli Sterling called out from the bathroom. She walked
out on bare feet wearing only one of my undershirts that just swallowed
her. Ashli went for the phone in the kitchenette and fixed a drink as she
answered it. Her chestnut hair spilled over her shoulders in curls and
smelled like apricot shampoo.
Ashli brought the receiver to her ear and said, “Ja?” while she
started a cigarette.
I kept going through the bag. Inside it I found a slick .38 revolver
that looked like it had never been fired, but I knew better. Even if I’d had
a cold I could’ve smelled the fresh residue of gunpowder. I made sure the
piece was empty, and then I put it on an end table and went back to
working on my drink. Ash was yacking away in the background, speaking
German and speaking it pretty damn well considering it was her third
language. Ashli had a way with languages, had a way with lots of things.
“Yes,” she wrapped up. “I understand. Yes, of course.” Ash clicked
off and joined me on the bed. She didn’t look so hot. “CNN just broke the
story on Mort Karel, Bryce.”
“I’m surprised it took ‘em this long.”
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“You seem so flippant about it.” Ashli crossed her mile-long legs
and drew on her cigarette. “It’s going to be all over the news.”
“I’m not flippant…I’m just not worried. I have the murder weapon.”
I looked over at the gun.
It was good to have it back.
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