A Friend in the Dark - Gregory Ashe Page 0,2

the same visit, he’d also checked out The Three Musketeers and Huge F*cking Tomatoes: Grow Your Own Damn Garden.

Jake had laughed at him.

Death, justice, and tomatoes.

One of these is not like the others.

And sure, maybe the tomato-growing techniques weren’t really relevant at the moment, but Dr. Stewart’s text was. Jake was slumped on his back—T-shirt yanked up—and there wasn’t any sort of bluish discoloration where blood would naturally pool. That gave Rufus a timeline.

Jake had texted him to meet—a pickup job—at 12:25 p.m. So naturally he’d been alive when sending that message. If afterward he’d, what, shot himself? There’d be, at most, two hours for nature to set in and begin the breakdown process. But there was no sign of livor mortis.

What happened next?

Rufus closed his eyes and referenced Dr. Stewart again. Rigor mortis. But that generally occurred between two and four hours after death and began with the stiffening of muscles in the face and neck.

The face.

Rufus’s eyes snapped open and he was staring at the fucking hole in Jake’s face. His vision blurred again, and he felt hot and cold all over as the panic set in.

Be smart, Rufus.

Something about this was wrong.

All sorts of wrong.

Jake had had a pickup for Rufus. Pickups were important. And so Rufus had arrived on time—early, even. But from what he could see, there was nothing in the stinking closet that would have been related to Jake’s request. Which meant Jake needed something picked up. And he’d likely meant to supply the details in person.

But now he was dead. And who the fuck shoots themselves in the middle of the forehead? If Jake was looking to tap out on the travesty called Life, he would have put the gun to the side of his head or swallowed a bullet, like any other person.

Where was the gun?

Rufus scooted forward on his knees and took a more careful look around the shower stall—around Jake—but there was no weapon. What’d the pistol do, get up and walk away? For that matter, why were Jake’s knuckles puffy and glossy with fresh blood, like he’d been in a scrap recently? Rufus knew those hands. Had long ago memorized every scar, every crease, every tendon. Never once had Jake used his fists on another person. That’s what made them such attractive hands.

He fought.

Rufus felt the hairs on his neck rise. His underarms began to sweat.

It’s a trap.

He got to his feet, stumbled as he tried to work his numb legs, and fell against the doorway. The shot that followed was loud, like a canon had blown up in Rufus’s face. The wooden frame exploded in a shower of splinters, nicking his cheek like a dull razor pulling on whiskers.

“Motherfucker,” a man shouted, and then another shot clipped the frame.

Thirty-three years of staying alive kicked Rufus into overdrive, and he ducked down low while moving away from the threshold. The anemic tungsten light spilling out of the closet behind him cast a dim and dirty landscape before him, and there, getting to his feet from behind an aluminum work table lying on its side, a man.

Thick neck. Thicker arms. Baseball hat. Fuck—a goddamn Yankees fan. The illumination hadn’t been strong enough to reveal more minute details of the shooter, but in the half-second Rufus spared to analyze him, he’d thought black, or maybe dark brown hair.

But then Rufus was running. He didn’t even consider waiting for the death-trap elevator as a third shot cracked the air like the thunderstorm had been invited inside through the bay windows. He ran to the right of the elevator and slammed his hands down on the safety bar of the staircase door.

No alarm wailed.

Down, down, down seven flights. Rufus came out on the ground floor, his lungs bursting, his long legs stumbling as he overreached. He ran past the dumpsters and out the freight door into the hot summer rain. Rufus pulled up the collar of his jacket, hunched his shoulders, and quickly made his way to the corner of Thirty-Eighth and Eighth. He removed the burner phone from his pocket, tossed it into a trash can, and vanished into crowds.

CHAPTER TWO

The ticket from Bald Knob, Arkansas, to the New York Port Authority on Eighth Avenue cost a little shy of two hundred bucks, basically a steal. Sam always kept five hundred in the lining of his jacket; he didn’t like ATMs, didn’t like marking himself on a map, not if he could help it. He’d run down too many stupid sons of