Dead Wood - By Dani Amore Page 0,59

the homes are so packed together, like, you guessed it, heads of cabbage in a field. Grosse Pointers are sooo creative.

At first, when the stripper had told me to look for a porch with a fridge on it, I thought it’d be easy to spot. But now, driving down the shitty street, I see she should’ve been more specific. Was it a side-by-side? Automatic ice maker? Freezer on the bottom?

Plenty of bikes and chairs and tables and air conditioners and a car bumper and a body (sleeping I hoped) and plenty of dogs without leashes. Dogs without leashes. Sounded like a punk band.

I finally spotted a house with a lovely avocado colored Frigidaire on the front porch. I stopped the Sunbird well shy of the house and put it in Park then got out and walked up onto the front porch. The fridge was in worse shape than it looked from the street. There were garbage bags piled inside. There were more garbage bags on the floor of the porch. I saw that quite a few of the plastic bags had jagged holes chewed in them. Rats. Lovely.

The door was cheap and flimsy. Big surprise there. I thought about what to do. Legalities. Options. Should I call Ellen or not? What if she came and the house was an abandoned rathole?

I thought some more and pressed my ear to the door. I didn’t hear a thing. I pressed the doorbell but didn’t hear any corresponding sound. I pressed it twice more with the same lack of result. So I pounded on the door for a good three or four minutes. Still nothing.

Goddamnit. By now, I was about to piss my pants. I pounded on the door again and noticed that when I hit it really hard, the latch came all the way out from the door. Hmm. I leaned my shoulder into it and now I could get a thin glimpse of the room. Already, I saw a story formulating in my mind. Indefatigable P.I. checks out a lead. Walks up the front porch stairs, trips, crashes into the door which opens up. He “accidentally” finds himself inside the house! Frickin’ brilliant!

Excuse in hand, I lowered my shoulder to the crap-ass poplar frame and plowed my way forward. There was a loud pop and a crack and the door gave way. I stumbled straight into the living room and the working end of a .357, held in the firm, unwavering hand of none other than Laurence Grasso.

“You took long enough you little fucking punk,” he said.

• • •

He’d changed his appearance from his mug shot. Bleached hair, a bleached goatee. But it was the same guy. The same little predatory weasel eyes, coupled now with breath reeking of cheap wine.

“You just keep comin’, don’t ya?” he said.

“Like a fly with a nose for shit.”

He pulled back the hammer on his revolver. If I had to guess from the aroma of his breath, he’d been partaking in a local wine, probably a merlot. A 2003, perhaps.

“You know what a punk is?” he said.

“Kill him and let’s go,” a woman’s voice said from the kitchen. I didn’t know what startled me more, the voice, or the utter lack of emotion it carried. Unlike me, Grasso paid the advice no attention whatsoever. He was focused on me.

“Let’s go,” the woman said again. Wherever she was, I couldn’t see her. I didn’t recognize the voice. The calm authority, the bored indifference in her tone, however, was unmistakable. I was more scared of the person attached to that voice than I was of the ex-convict with the gun pressed to my forehead. Which isn’t to say I wasn’t scared. Quite the contrary, actually.

Grasso moved around behind me, sliding the muzzle of the gun across my forehead and around my scalp, like he was tracing the line of a bowl to give me a haircut. He stopped behind me and then I felt his forearm go around my throat. He pressed in against me and either he had a screwdriver in his front pocket or something very bad was going to happen to me.

“I used to fuck guys like you in prison,” he said.

“I’m married,” I said.

“Goddamnit, we don’t have time for this,” the woman in the kitchen said. “He probably called the cops already.”

I tried to see, leaning forward slightly and looking from the corner of my eye. All I could see was a doorway and a kitchen cabinet and countertop. I heard the sound