A Friend in the Dark Read online

  Table of Contents

  About A Friend in the Dark

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Quote

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Sam Auden and Rufus O’Callaghan return in:

  About Gregory Ashe

  Also by Gregory Ashe

  About C.S. Poe

  Also by C.S. Poe

  A FRIEND IN THE DARK

  By: Gregory Ashe and C.S. Poe

  Rufus O’Callaghan has eked out a living on the streets of New York City by helping the police put away criminals as a confidential informant. But when Rufus shows up for an arranged meeting and finds his handler dead, his already-uncertain life is thrown into a tailspin. Now someone is trying to kill Rufus too, and he’s determined to find out why.

  After leaving the Army under less than desirable circumstances, Sam Auden has drifted from town to town, hitching rides and catching Greyhounds, until he learns that a former Army buddy, now a police detective in New York City, has died by suicide. Sam knows that’s not right, and he immediately sets out to get answers.

  As Rufus and Sam work together to learn the truth of their friend’s death, they find themselves entangled in a web of lies, cover-ups, and accelerating danger. And when they witness a suspect killed in cold blood, they realize they’re running out of time.

  A FRIEND IN THE DARK

  By: Gregory Ashe and C.S. Poe

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Friend in the Dark

  Copyright © 2020 by Gregory Ashe, C.S. Poe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law. For permission requests and all other inquiries, contact: [email protected]

  Published by Emporium Press

  https://www.cspoe.com

  [email protected]

  Cover Art by Reese Dante

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  Edited by Tricia Kristufek

  Copyedited by Andrea Zimmerman

  Proofread by Lyrical Lines

  Published 2020.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-952133-21-3

  Digital eBook ISBN: 978-1-952133-20-6

  I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than alone in the light.

  CHAPTER ONE

  At 2:45 p.m. Rufus O’Callaghan stood outside the freight entrance of 619 West Thirty-Eighth with nothing but a burner phone, a lifted pack of spearmint bubblegum, and a certain sense of dread in his gut.

  At 2:46 p.m. it started to rain.

  Rufus grabbed the handle of the heavy door, yanked it open, and stepped into a long, narrow hallway. The pseudoalley was like a hotbox. Dumpsters lined the right-hand side, the stink of uncollected garbage overwhelming in the late-July heat that’d been cooking New York City. To the left was an elevator, likely utilized by building staff and delivery services. The doors were caked in enough dirt and grease to leave a tag on. Water drip, drip, dripped from somewhere overhead, writing an urban symphony as it echoed against asphalt and bare brick.

  Rufus pulled his phone from the pocket of his jean jacket, entered the passcode, and scrolled through a short list of text conversations. He stored no names in the address book, just memorized the necessary 212s and 917s.

  619 W. 38, 7 Fl

  3:00

  Pickup job JB

  Pocketing the burner again, Rufus approached the elevator and used his knuckle to jab the Up button.

  The rain picked up, pinging off the tin roof overhead. Thunder cracked and muffled the sounds of Midtown like a television heard through the other side of a motel wall. Taxis honking, jackhammers and shouts from the construction crew across the street, dogs barking, startled pedestrians caught in the storm—they all clotted together and formed a throbbing headache at the base of Rufus’s skull.

  The elevator door slid open, metal grating against metal. The fluorescent light in the car flickered wildly, which didn’t instill much confidence in routine maintenance being performed. Rufus stepped inside, once again used his knuckle to press the button for the seventh floor, then leaned back against the wall as the door groaned shut. Someone had taken a key to the metal interior at some point in the past. The word vaguely resembled FUCK. Rufus hoped the little shit hadn’t dropped out of art school to pursue a street career, because he was no Banksy, that was for certain.

  Through the scratchwork and tacky residue, which was as prominent on the inside of the car as the outside, Rufus’s reflection stared back behind cheap plastic sunglasses. He was a tall kid. A skinny kid. But most importantly—not a kid. Rufus was thirty-three, but the carrottop red hair he hid under the frayed and worn slouch beanie still got him carded. At least, he figured the hair had something to do with being asked—more times than he could remember—if he was old enough to hold that bottle of gin. There had been a study published by Erasmus University in Rotterdam that suggested the mutation of the MC1R gene—responsible for his hair and self-evident nickname, Freckles—did also contribute to the younger appearance of gingers.

  The elevator lurched to a sudden stop.

  Rufus straightened. He took the sunglasses off and hung them from his T-shirt collar while shifting from foot-to-foot as he waited for something to happen.

  His gut was dropping the same way it had when Alex Mitchell, the thirteen-year-old bully who’d been held back a year, had called Rufus an ugly little pussy and pushed him down the stairs of PS14, causing him to break his arm. It was that same sick lurch of being airborne, of gravity taking hold, of the pop and snap of bone. But Alex had been shipped off to his grandmother’s somewhere upstate after seventh grade when Children’s Services intervened. Rufus never saw him again. So he took a deep breath and reminded himself that it was Jake who had texted him, not the ghost of a bully long since passed, and when Jake texted, Rufus came.

  No matter what.

  Because in this city of nearly nine million, Jake had been the only one to give Rufus the time of day in over a decade. Had been the only one who talked to Rufus like he had half a brain. And Jake had been the only one to notice that the mouthy redhead ate Maruchan ramen for dinner and that 190 calories didn’t go very far for a six-foot adult male.

  The elevator door noisily opened onto the unlit seventh floor.

  So if it was only Jake, and Jake was safety and security, why did Rufus feel like he was about to upchuck?

  Rufus took a step forward, angled his body to be shielded by the call button panel, and peered into the dim expa
nse. There was a scattering of abandoned furniture—outdated office desks, a chair listing to one side on broken wheels, and a few obsolete Apple computer monitors. The floor was littered with the garbage of a hasty office move—pencils, crumpled papers, dust bunnies, a stray power strip. Rufus got down on the floor of the elevator car in order to see beneath the small gaps of erratically placed desks.

  No one hiding.

  He sat up on his knees.

  No one waiting.

  The elevator door began to close. Rufus thrust his hand out and forced it back.

  Rain pelted the bay windows on the right. Gray shadows, fragmented and erratic, crept about the floor in time with the clouds rolling across the sky.

  The elevator door tried to shut a second time. It let out a loud beep when Rufus blocked it. Getting to his feet, Rufus took a cautious step into the unoccupied space.

  The door groaned shut behind him, leaving Rufus alone.

  Except that was a problem.

  Because Jake had texted him.

  Where was he?

  Rufus tilted his head and studied the linoleum at an angle. Whatever business had vacated the seventh floor had done so recently. There hadn’t been enough time for dust to settle and pick up any sort of shoe tread impressions after the fact. No splotches of wet either, which meant Jake had arrived before the rain.

  Right?

  Rufus walked on the balls of his feet toward the only visible door—back right—faintly illuminated by the overhead windows. His Chucks, so worn out, didn’t even leave a whisper in his wake. He counted the windows as he moved—one, two, three—six in total. Rufus pressed himself against the wall as he reached the far corner and studied the crack under the door.

  No light.

  And no living sound except the beating of his own heart in his ears, and to be honest, Rufus was only half-alive on his best days.

  He felt that suspension in his gut again. That brief weightlessness and freedom again. Then the world grabbed Rufus by the throat and threw him to the asbestos-ridden linoleum of PS14 again and he was sobbing and vomiting and cradling a broken arm.

  Rufus took a deep breath, wiped his palms on his jeans, then pushed down on the door handle with his knuckles. It opened noiselessly. He nudged the door with the toe of his shoe and peered into the darkness within. The initial smell to waft out was that of chemicals and waste, like sewage backing up into a safety shower. But then Rufus was hit with a stink that, once experienced, could never be mistaken for anything other than the inevitability of mortality.

  Rufus’s hand shook as he felt the inside wall for a light switch. Finding it, he flicked it up.

  Jake was sprawled in the basin of the emergency shower, his head reclining where the corners came together at a ninety-degree angle. His face was a mess of broken bone and torn tissue—entrance the third eye, exit the entire fucking back of his head. A bright splatter of blood and brains painted the wall, giving Rufus a rough idea of how Jake had been sitting before a trigger was pulled.

  Rufus dropped into a crouched position to hug his knees. “Jesus Christ,” he choked out.

  Jake was dead.

  Just like that.

  A finger snap.

  Here and gone in the space of a breath, a heartbeat, a crack of thunder over Manhattan.

  Rufus gasped and shuddered, inhaling a soggy breath. Heavy tears burned his eyes. His hands shook too much as he tried to wipe his face.

  I know you’re smart, Rufus.

  That’s what Jake would say. And Rufus could feel the other man beside him—not dead in that basin—but squeezing the back of Rufus’s neck with one of those big, capable hands. Jake would move his hand a bit lower, settle it between Rufus’s bony shoulder blades—that contact searing through his jean jacket and T-shirt, offering a starved body barely enough touch to survive another episode.

  I need you to take a breath. I need you to be smart.

  Pallor mortis, Rufus thought. That was the first onset of death. It occurred within the first thirty minutes, as a result of the collapse of capillary circulation in the body, and led to livor mortis. Livor mortis was Latin. It meant “bluish death.” Named for when blood settled in the body and discolored the skin. It typically wasn’t visible until a few hours postmortem.

  Forensic Pathology, Third Edition, copyright 2008, Richard Stewart, M.D.

  Rufus had checked out the textbook from the New York Public Library last summer. It’d been 618 pages on determining cause of death in sudden, violent, or suspicious circumstances. In 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 s
hot 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 bitches that way, and he didn’t like to think of the same happening to him. He worked the loose thread in the seam, pulled out the cash, and bought the ticket.

  The woman who sold it had her blonde hair in a do that Mrs. Brady would have been proud of. Sam figured he breathed a few pounds of hairspray just in the short time it took to buy the ticket. Then, because some women seemed to have a sixth sense for strays, she asked him if he needed a place to stay for the night. Her church, clean cots, breakfast but no showers. Sam did what he always did: he waited until she ran out of things to say, and then he thanked her and sat on the bench until the bus was ready to leave.

  Travel time: thirty-six hours and seventeen minutes. It should have been less, but they got stuck at a railroad crossing outside Memphis, and then again when the Greyhound’s engine started overheating.

  Thirty-six hours and seventeen minutes to think about Jake.

  Sam was a traveler. A walker, by preference. When walking wasn’t enough, a bus. Or hitching. Or a train. Travel meant time, an abundance of it. And, usually, quiet. Time and quiet were the things he had bartered everything else for.