Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

his chest. Blood poured down his sides, spilling from deep gashes under his arms. His left nipple was sliced completely in half, exposing yellow globules of fat. The water at his feet turned rusty red.

He grabbed the shower curtain with his free hand, pulling the flimsy rod down on top of him. Collapsing, he sat on the edge of the tub, blood pulsing from between the fingers of the fist that held the soap. He opened his hand tentatively, moving it under the stream of water to wash away the blood. A deep cut at the base of his thumb smiled back at him, pulsing geysers of blood. He gagged, not so much at the sight of his wounds, but from fear. Who would do this? If they were going to kill him, they should just kill him. It took a special kind of sadistic mind to put razor blades in a guy’s soap. He could have cut his junk off…

Dollarhyde. It had to be Dollarhyde. That guy was a psycho, always licking his lips, watching everyone else’s pain. You could see it in his eyes.

Schimmel kept his arms down, his hands clenched into fists. This controlled the worst of the bleeding. Blood spurted from his thumb when he grabbed the crusty bath towel and held it against his chest.

He had to get out of here. But for that, he’d need money.

He knew a woman at a gallery downtown who would buy the bone rattle. She’d pay him shit, but at least she’d pay him…

He lifted the towel away to examine the wounds. Thin, scalpel-like lines crisscrossed his chest. He gagged again at the sight of it. Not life-threatening, but still bad. Whoever had sunk razor blades into his soap hadn’t cared if he died or not. Curtains of blood cascaded down his chest and belly, dripping onto his naked thighs. He pressed the towel back to his flesh, wincing from the acid pain under each arm. He struggled to keep from hyperventilating.

Tape. He needed tape. Lots of tape. And gauze.

And he needed to get the hell out of Juneau.

Chapter 27

Ephraim Dollarhyde’s desk at the main offices of Valkyrie Mine Holdings suited his personality. The rich mahogany was polished to a reflective sheen and smelled slightly of lemon and tung oil. Imported wood seemed sinful with all the beautiful cedar and spruce in the area.

Inside the desk, locked in a flat metal safe, were files that could burn down the company and put Grimsson in prison for a very long time. Using them would implicate Dollarhyde as well, of course, but he’d been to law school. He knew the first rat to the table got the best deal – and he had a lot to bring to the table. It was far too early for that – but it paid to have insurance. Especially with the informant still out there.

The irony of the situation was not lost on him – trying to ferret out this informant before he was forced to turn informant himself in order to save his own skin.

There were only a few people to choose from. His money had never been on Dean Schimmel. The buffoon was hardly smart enough to hide his intentions this long. No, Schimmel was a perpetual screwup, but he wasn’t the type to be setting up secret meetings with the US Attorney’s office. The timeline didn’t work out for that anyway. The same went for Dallas Childers, though he was mercenary enough. In some ways, Childers reminded Dollarhyde of a younger version of himself. More intense on the outside maybe, fortunate enough to have been able to exercise some of his baser passions in war. Dollarhyde had always had to operate in the shadows, convincing some employer that a heavy hand was necessary to keep order. Still, the timing was all wrong for Childers to be the snitch. He’d been waiting to take out the prisoner transport when the meeting with the AUSA was set up.

Dollarhyde tapped an unsharpened pencil on the desk, racking his brain.

One of the senators? Maybe. But they both had a hell of a lot to lose.

The phone rang. It was Fawsey, speaking ninety miles an hour.

“My son has been arrested,” the senator said, breathless. “JPD has him now, but I’m told the Troopers are pursuing charges on suspicion that he murdered his girlfriend.”

“Did he?” Dollarhyde said, processing, looking at this from all angles.

Fawsey gasped. “Of course not.”

“I have to ask, sir,” Dollarhyde said.

“Levi’s not like that!”

“Ah,” Dollarhyde said. “But how would you know?”

“I would,” the senator said. “Believe me.”

Fawsey ran down everything he did know, which wasn’t much, then dropped the bombshell. “My contact with the Troopers office said the FBI is coming over to speak with him.”

“The FBI?” Dollarhyde mused. “They have their hands full with this other murder…”

“They want to hold him as a material witness,” Fawsey said.

“To what?”

Dollarhyde’s office door flew open and Harold Grimsson barged in, both hands planted on the desk, glowering. He obviously also had a source at the Troopers, or JPD, or somewhere.

“What in the—”

Dollarhyde cut him off. “I have Senator Fawsey on the line right now, sir.”

“Put him on speaker!” Grimsson boomed.

“Harold,” Fawsey said once Dollarhyde hit the button. “I will fix this. I only wanted to make sure we’re all on the same sheet of music.”

“Oh, we are,” Grimsson said. “But what about Levi? What music is he singing from?”

“What do you mean?”

“If the FBI wants to talk to him, then they think he knows something about that AUSA’s murder. Does he?”

“No…” Fawsey said, sounding hollow. “I mean, how could he? I don’t know anything about it.”

Dollarhyde went back to drumming the pencil. “He hasn’t told them anything. Otherwise, it would be raining red lights and sirens. If they don’t have a body, it’ll take them a minute to make a murder charge stick. The feds may try to hold him, but a material witness has the same rights as anyone arrested for a crime. You have