The Nice Guys Read online

  The one with a .38 in his hand.

  Someone in the crowd screamed as Healy grabbed the guy’s arm and the gun went off, the bullet caroming off a railing overhead. More people screamed as they really got into it, Healy landing a solid punch on the guy’s midsection. What he wouldn’t have given for his brass knuckles now. The man may have been older, but his gut was like a fucking rock. They wrestled for the gun and it went off again, taking down a passing waiter.

  March looked back over his shoulder from the foot of the stairs as the first few screams escalated into a full-on panic, people climbing over each other to get the hell out of the path of the bullets.

  He saw Healy grappling with the other man near the hot tub while the people in the tub leaped out of the water like seals at the zoo, one man sporting a shiny pair of bikini briefs and another nothing but an erection. Jesus. March was so glad he’d sent Holly home. He was a good father.

  Was he a good detective, though? That was his client up there, possibly fighting for his life. He had an obligation to him, or maybe he did, March honestly couldn’t remember all that much of his licensing exam, and his sense of ethics was squashy. He kind of thought maybe he should go help, but… Broken arm. That’s got to be a free pass, right?

  And Healy was a big guy, he could handle himself. March waved for the valet.

  At that moment, Healy wasn’t handling himself so much as being handled. The older guy had an iron grip to go with his gut of steel, and he was using it to force Healy’s head back, one palm pressed against Healy’s chin. Healy bit down hard, getting a mouthful of fingers, and the man howled in pain. They swung around, grappling, and struck the rim of the hot tub. The gun went off again, and this time the bullet went over the side and straight into the shoulder of the stilt walker, who fell like a chopped-down redwood.

  Healy strained to turn the other man’s hand, slowly angling the gun back toward him. If he could get it pointed at him and squeeze the guy’s finger on the trigger—

  But the guy was having none of it. He landed a barrage of punches on Healy’s face that left him reeling. The guy got his gun hand free, aimed at Healy. In desperation, Healy swatted at the gun and it went flying, right into the hot tub, where it sank to the bottom.

  Healy kicked out brutally, catching the older guy in the belly and sending him stumbling back toward the stairs. But the guy was a pro and recovered in an instant. He slipped a hand into his pants pocket and came out with a switchblade that opened with a flick of his wrist. The long blade gleamed under the deck lights.

  Healy whipped off his jacket, wrapped it around his arm, and waited in a crouch by the hot tub. The guy came forward, blade swinging, his stare merciless. Healy met him forearm-to-forearm as the knife came down. He tried to land a punch or two before the guy could get the blade free for another swing, but the guy was fast. The blade slashed, cutting through the jacket and drawing blood. Healy shoved him off. “Fuck!”

  Which happened to be exactly the word escaping March’s lips at that instant, as he watched, neck craned, from the driveway below, his escape halted halfway to the valet’s station. He kept repeating it to himself—“Fuck, fuck, fuck”—as he stupidly turned and ran back toward the stairs.

  Who the fuck was Healy to him, that he’d put himself in danger to help him? Huh?

  But there he was, racing for the stairs while everyone else was still pouring down the other direction, trying to get away. He could sit down and have a good long think about it later, but right now, he was gonna fucking get up there.

  * * *

  In the back of the limo, Holly was terrified.

  In another thirteen-year-old that might have produced paralysis, but she’d been fending for herself for some time now and wasn’t about to let some blue-faced psycho take her for a ride without a fight. She reached for the door handle again.

  “I need to go right now,” she said, firmly, and when the guy tried to pull her hand off the door, she shoved him back, hard. “Get away from me,” she shouted, and scrambled for the door. This time she managed to get it unlatched before he lunged at her.

  The door swung open, and through it they both saw the valet at his station, and next to him a scared-looking brunette in a canary-yellow dress. “I need my car, I need my car,” she was saying. “Hurry!”

  Under their blue lids, the guy’s eyes lit with recognition. He shoved Holly back against the seat with one arm, held her there while he leveled a gun out the door with the other. “Don’t fucking move,” he growled at her.

  He sighted, his finger tightened on the trigger.

  Holly fucking moved. She reached under his arm for the door handle, and swung the door shut on his hand. She heard bones crunch as the gun went off, the shot missing the girl and shattering the valet’s key stand instead. A hundred car keys jangled to the ground in a heap.

  “Fuck! Motherfucker! My fucking hand!”

  Holly didn’t wait around to hear more. She tumbled out of the car shouting, “Amelia! Run!”

  * * *

  March heard the gun go off, turned back to look, saw the girl from the woods—yellow dress, brown hair, it was Amelia, of course it was, fuck—and behind her, another girl, younger, smaller, slimmer, go racing after. They vanished down the slope of a hill leading to the highway.

  The younger one had looked familiar, too, somehow.

  No, wait. It couldn’t be. That was impossible—

  “Holly? Holly!” Fuck Healy. He put his head down and barreled back through the crowd, whacking people aside with his elbows, with the cast, with his shoulders, he didn’t fucking care, that was his goddamn daughter out there. He wasn’t a detective anymore, he wasn’t even a father, he was a goddamn guided missile. March had already lost one of the only two women he’d ever loved, he was damned if he was going to lose the other.

  He whipped past the valet, who pointed at the departing taillights of the limo as it tore off down the road. “Hey, man,” the valet called, “that girl in your trunk? She was in that car. With the guy who was shooting.”

  March nodded as he ran. Car. He needed his car. He needed a car. Now. At the foot of the driveway, a man was climbing into the driver’s seat of his red Camaro, and then he wasn’t, he was sprawled on the pavement, and March was climbing in, tearing off after the limo.

  * * *

  Up by the hot tub, Healy had the situation under control in the sense that he wasn’t bleeding to death. But not in any other sense. He was bleeding, for one thing, even if no major arteries had been nicked, and the man who’d made him bleed was still at it, swinging that goddamn switchblade around like a refugee from West Side Story, only with less dancing and finger-snaps and Lenny Bernstein on the soundtrack.

  Healy ran at him, caught the other man’s arm with his, and squeezed tight, trying to break his grip, but no dice. He’d lose if he ever arm-wrestled this guy. Brute force wasn’t going to win the day. Healy glanced around for anything he might be able to use to his advantage. There wasn’t much out here. The hot tub, the lights mounted on the walls. Some overturned furniture, none of it within reach.

  The knife was slowly inching down toward Healy’s face. With a grunt, he bent his knees, tightened his hold on the man’s arm, and pivoted. They spun, winding up against the hot tub again, Healy’s back painfully pressed into a corner of the power box that brought electricity to the whole set-up.

  The power box?

  Healy grabbed the other man’s wrist in both hands and wrenched it forward, toward him. This caught the man off guard and he overbalanced. It was just enough of a lapse to give Healy the chance to squeeze to one side and jam the point of the knife blade deep into the guts of the power box.

  A fury of sparks exploded and the man was literally blown off his feet, landing flat on his back two yards away, the knife sailing out of sight behind him. Healy had escaped the brunt of the charge, but he’d gotten some of it. He fell against the tub and held onto the rim, breathing hard, trying to clear his fried brain. His hair f
elt like it was standing up.

  And you know what else was standing up? Behind him, he heard the guy standing up, too.

  What the hell? What did it take to stop this son of a bitch? He tried to turn to face him, but he was too slow. The guy was on him, steel grip at the back of his neck, forcing his face down toward the still-swirling water of the hot tub.

  Healy tried to fight back, struggled to keep his face up, but he was forced down into the water. His lungs instantly started aching. On a good day, maybe he could hold his breath for half a minute. And this was not a good day.

  He whipped his arms back, elbowed the man in the ribs, forced his head up above the surface, gasping for breath. Then the bastard had shoved him in again, and he was drowning.

  He looked around in desperation. Water, water everywhere. There was a poem that went like that, wasn’t there? He half remembered it from grade school in the Bronx, being made to recite it while Billy Mehl behind him kept sticking him with the point of a pencil, the little bastard. Funny, the things you remember at a time like this. Water, water everywhere—

  But there wasn’t water everywhere. There was something else down here too, along with all that water, and Healy reached for it, strained to get his fingers around it. At first he thought he wouldn’t be able to, and then he felt it in his hand, closed his trembling fingers around it, and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet exploded out of the .38, punched through the side of the hot tub, and blasted a hole the size of a small lemon in the older guy’s leg. Water gushed through one of these holes, blood from the other. The guy fell back, letting go of Healy’s neck, and Healy roared to his feet, gun in his hand, his face flushed, water spraying everywhere. He wanted to sit down and just breathe for an hour two, just enjoy the beautiful sensation of air going in and out of his lungs, but what he did instead was barge forward and slug the guy once, twice, again, pummeling him in the face with the gun until he went down.

  Healy dropped to his knees beside him, gave him another for good measure. The guy’s face was a bloody mess—not quite as bad as Shattuck’s, but nothing you’d want to take a picture of and send home to mom. But Healy didn’t feel an ounce of remorse. The bastard had tried to kill him.

  The guy was saying something, mumbling as Healy raised his fist once more for a knockout blow. The guy lifted his hands weakly. “No…please…my leg…”

  Healy hesitated. Looked down at the guy’s leg. It wasn’t gushing anymore, but it sure didn’t look pleasant.

  The man was trying to sit up.

  “I swear to god,” Healy said, leveling the gun at him, “you get up, I’ll shoot you in the cock.” The man lay back down again.

  “I can…I can pay you,” the man whispered through his mangled lips.

  “You trying to negotiate with me?”

  “You’ll never see me again…”

  Healy thought about it. This one was a pro, unlike his blue-faced friend, who was just a goddamn psycho. Pros he could work with. “Where you gonna be?”

  “Michigan.”

  Healy stood. “Michigan works.”

  He tossed the man’s gun back in the hot tub, grabbed his jacket from where it had fallen. The sleeve was pretty much ruined, he could throw the whole thing in the garbage. One more thing to chalk up to this fucker’s account. But what the hell. He could buy a new jacket. The guy would have to buy new teeth.

  Healy looked over the edge of the balcony as he slipped the jacket on. Down past the driveway with the milling, agitated crowd, past the hill and the highway curving around it, he saw two figures running, two women. They sprinted over the asphalt and under the glare of the magnesium lights. Healy squinted. Holy shit—he knew both of those women. And the cars squealing around the bend in pursuit? It looked like a black town car and, a quarter mile behind, a red Camaro. One of them might be March. But the other—

  Healy turned and ran back through the house. No way he could catch up following on foot. But if he took a shortcut through the woods where they found Shattuck…

  Maybe. Maybe he wasn’t too fucking late.

  25.

  Holly had Amelia’s hand in hers as they ran. The girl was barefoot, Holly didn’t understand how she could keep running, her feet must be bloody by now, but she didn’t question it, just kept trying to put more distance between them and the limo. If they could make it into the trees…

  But two girls on foot are no match for a 180-horsepower engine, and they were still in the middle of the road when the black Cadillac came tearing around the curve. It squealed to a stop on the shoulder and the back door opened. They were caught like deer in the proverbial headlights, only the headlights weren’t proverbial, they were real, and so was the gun in the blue-faced guy’s hand.

  Suddenly they heard the sound of another car engine, loud and getting louder, and the gunman spun to face it. Holly pulled Amelia by the hand and they hared off into the trees, running blindly toward the next bend in the road. If they could flag someone down, another driver, anyone—they might just possibly survive this.

  Behind them, Holly heard gunshots split the night, but the bullets didn’t seem to be hitting anything near them, so she just kept her head down and ran.

  * * *

  What the bullets had hit were the front windshield of the car her dad had stolen, and then the driver’s-side door and the trunk as the Camaro had skidded past the gunman on its way toward a fucking enormous tree. The front bumper crumpled like a gum wrapper and March took the steering wheel right in the sternum, his forehead banging down for a glancing blow. “Ow,” he said, blinking to clear his vision. He was seeing double—two gunmen racing down into the trees after his daughter, two Healys scrambling out of the woods on the other side of the highway and down the steep incline to where March was.

  Two Healys?

  March raised an unsteady hand toward the figures in the cracked windshield. “Hey…”

  “You okay?” the Healys said, in unison. Their outlines were moving together and apart, together and apart. Right now they looked like Siamese twins. “Car still go?” the Healys wanted to know. March shrugged. “Stop fucking around! Come on!” The Healys didn’t wait, they just ran off into the woods.

  Well, good, at least that evened the sides up a bit. Two gunmen, two Healys. Two girls. Fuck. The Healys were right, what was he just sitting there for?

  March threw the car into reverse and stomped on the accelerator. The engine burned, trying to pull away from the tree. He groaned with frustration, fed more gas to the engine, and tried not to think the worst when he heard the loud bang in the distance below. Come on. Finally the car took off, and as he drove, for the first time in a long time, March started praying.

  * * *

  What March had heard had not been a gunshot, though it could have been one and very nearly was. The blue-faced gunman had emerged from the woods thirty feet away from where Holly was holding Amelia up with one arm around the waist and trying to flag down a passing car with the other. She’d had no success. And now—the gunman laughed to himself—now she never would.

  He paced slowly toward them, gun dangling down by his side. He wasn’t in any rush now.

  “Freeze!” he shouted, but it was a joke, ’cause they were already frozen, right? Like little bunny rabbits, like the ones he’d first learned to shoot with, god almighty had his brother squealed when he’d found ’em all dead by the well, but hey, little bro, that’s what animals were for, wasn’t it? You killed ’em, you skinned ’em, you ate ’em, you didn’t fucking cry over them, boo hoo, like a little girl. He’d never managed to toughen the boy up, thought for a while maybe he was one of them switch-hitters like you saw on TV sometimes, but no, the prick was married now, four kids, so he must’ve learned to put it in sometime, but fuck almighty, the boy had been a pussy growing up. Anyhoo—

  “Wow,” he said, “you guys are fast! Woo!” He laughed loudly. Then he raised the gun. Enough. Time to get paid and back to Detroit and his cover job as co-head resp
onsible for Troop 782. We’re loyal to purpose and integrity/Pledged to the Scout oath eternally…

  His finger found the trigger, stroked it gently, then started to pull.

  The girl, the younger one, looked really anxious now, which was how he liked it, but weirdly she wasn’t looking at the gun. They always looked at the gun, especially little girls. But this one was looking up over his shoulder, and she was saying something: “There’s a—”

  He whipped around, just in time to see the front grill of a speeding van from two inches away.

  Then he was lifted off his feet and slammed through the air, his jaw and shoulder pulverized, his gun hand snapped backward so the knuckles lay flat against his wrist, his pelvis fractured in five places. He felt blood filling his pants, his socks, his chest. And then for just an instant he felt the road under his back. He didn’t feel anything else from the neck down after that, because his spine had snapped.

  The van pulled to a stop a few yards down. The girls ran up to it, waving, hoping to get in, but seeing the heap lying in the middle of the road, the driver just shouted, “Holy shit!” and tore off. Leaving Holly and Amelia shivering and alone in the darkness. Well, almost darkness—the road was dotted with lights here and there, and there was one not too far away from where they were standing. And almost alone. The heap in front of them was still breathing.

  Holly started to go to him, but Amelia held her back. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “He’s hurt!” Holly shook her arm free, started toward the gunman again.

  “Are you crazy?” Amelia said. “Get away from him!”

  “Just hang on. We need to help him.”

  Amelia watched as Holly gingerly approached the fallen man, but only for a few seconds. Then she turned tail and ran, vanishing into the trees.

  Holly knelt down, took the injured man’s hand. You could still see traces of the blue paint, even under all the blood. His hand was shaking. She tried to steady it. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “You’re going to be all right. I’ll—I’ll get help.” She realized that she was crying. For what? For this man who’d tried to kill her? Who would have killed her for sure? But the next word came out of her throat all the same, and she meant it as much as she’d ever meant anything she’d said in her thirteen years: “Sorry.”