Murder City Blues by Scott Bell

Author:Scott Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Noir, Mystery, Sin City, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Thriller, Revenge, Vigilante Justice, Hard Boiled, Hard Case
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Published: 2024-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

St. Vincent de Paul Hospital straddled the border between the Coate’s Mill and Bonifest neighborhoods. The staff there claimed they saw more casualties of violence than all the corpsmen who stormed Iwo Jima. Charlie Tackle thought that a boastful bit of hyperbole... but not by much.

The hospital ward consisted of a long room with a dozen beds, six to a side. Each bed was separated by curtains but open to the central aisle, giving the doctors and nurses easy access to the patients. A pair of nurses in white dresses and peaked caps bustled with bee-like intensity from bed to bed. Their white shoes squeaked on the tiled floor. The gangster Benson “Benny” Dewhurst had died during the night from multiple gunshot wounds, which meant there remained but one survivor of the Bonifest shoot-out. Tackle found him in the third bed on the left.

“Pettus Monroe,” he said to the bandage-swaddled figure. A pair of greenish-blue eyes under sandy brows tracked onto him and locked in like a pair of gunsights. Morphine hadn’t made a dent in this kid’s danger sense.

White gauze wrapped the man’s head and torso, and an IV tube was spiked into a vein in the back of his hand. Pale as a ghost and thin enough to need snowshoes to stand in the shower, Pettus Monroe didn’t look like much of a killer—until you looked in his eyes and saw beneath the homely aw, shucks face. Monroe had seen some shit. In fact, according to the records Tackle had dredged up, the boy had mustered out of the army a PFC, having served in the 101st Airborne Division. Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

Tackle pulled up a chair next to the bed and sat. “What’s a good boy like you doing mixed up in kidnapping and murder?”

Pettus looked at the ceiling and fixed his mouth in a mulish line.

“Witnesses say,” Tackle continued, “that a young lady named Edith Ann Watts—stage name Tiffany Blue—was grabbed up by some goons and dragged off to a car. And that you and another fellow shot it out with Rezek’s boys in what appeared to be defense of the fair maiden. Or dusky-hued maiden, I should say. Now, the fellow you were with? That boy was arrested and is being held for questioning. I wonder what tales he’s telling.”

Tackle sat back and plucked a toothpick out of a tin he kept in his pocket. He let the silence build. The bustle and rattle of nurses at work echoed through the ward, which smelled faintly of something nasty buried under industrial disinfectants. Monroe held his peace, though Tackle thought he might be breathing a tad harder than before.

Tackle stuck the toothpick in the corner of his mouth. “Nasty habit, chewing on toothpicks. I get these splinters in my teeth. But I can’t abide the smell of tobacco smoke, and chaw makes me sick. Anyhoo, where was I? Oh, yeah. How well do you know a big ol’ boy named Killebrew?” Tackle smiled to himself when he caught the flicker in Monroe’s eyes.

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