The Double Vice: The 1st Hidden Gotham Novel by Chris Holcombe (ebook reader for laptop .TXT) 📗

“Oh no,” Dash moaned.

He ran down the stairs and out into the rain. It took another ten minutes to find an empty cab in this weather. Time was ticking, and Walter was cleaning up all the loose ends from his brother’s betrayal.

“Please, please,” Dash kept repeating to himself in the back of the cab.

The cab driver glanced back at him with uneasiness, but Dash barely registered the movement. He kept thinking, please let me be ahead of Walter Müller for once.

The cab roared up to Tammany Hall. Dash paid the driver and ran through the downpour to the offices of Meyers, Powers & Napier. The flashing neon of the Olympic and the Central Hotel felt mocking and absurd given the tragedies of the night.

At the law firm, the door hung open, nearly ripped off its hinges. The wrath of Walter Müller. Dash waited a moment outside. If he saw another mangled body, he didn’t think he’d be able to withstand it.

He took a deep breath. His only hope was that Pru wasn’t here; that Walter had just found the ledger in Pru’s safe. And he had no doubt that’s where it was.

If any one of us could open it, it would be him.

Dash wouldn’t have been surprised if the German used dynamite. Walter was beyond stealth at this point. He was a blunt battering ram, leaving destruction and debris in his wake.

Dash stepped through the law firm’s doorway. The storm continued to rage outside but inside the office, the noise level dropped by half. Dash kept the door open in the hopes a good citizen would come along and report a break-in.

The front room was dark. The air was still. Only loud, ragged breaths could be heard. Dash looked around, trying to find their source.

Pru? Where are you, Pru?

It took half a minute for him to realize the breaths were his own.

“Thank the Lord,” Dash muttered to himself.

“The Lord is not here.”

Dash froze in place. At the end of the hallway that stretched behind the secretarial desk stood the shadowy figure of Walter Müller. He had been searching Pru’s office. A gun was aimed at Dash’s chest.

Dash’s hands rose up slowly. “Mr. Müller. Fancy meeting you here.”

Walter raised his other hand. The missing ledger was in it.

“I found my ledger. So strange seeing one’s work like this. Filed and documented.”

“Where is Pru?”

“I’ve spent the last few days wondering how I got here.” The shadowy figure started toward Dash, inching its way down the hall. “I’ve had a lot of time for self-reflection, as they say.”

Walter entered the front room. He gestured with his gun for Dash to move to the side. Dash did as instructed, carefully sidestepping, never taking his eyes off the German. Something inside Dash told him to keep Walter talking. Talking was time.

And I may not have much of it left.

Dash focused on keeping his voice steady and strong despite the fear flowing throughout his body. “I know everything, Walter.”

The two men had circled until Dash was on the other side of the room with the secretary’s desk behind him and Walter ahead of him, blocking the front door.

Walter smirked. Lightning flashed behind him. “Do you, Mr. Parker? I told you not to go snooping into my business.”

“Your business was quite clever. Using your brother to find pansy and bulldagger speaks so you can have them raided and the occupants blackmailed. Quite inventive.”

Dash looked around for a weapon. He could grab the desk lamp and hit Walter over the head with it. Yet he doubted he could move faster than Walter’s bullet.

Walter’s voice was slick with derision. “Those so-called men and women would pay anything to keep their secrets hid.”

Another low growl of distant thunder and the tabloid flashbulb of lightning. Could Dash duck behind the secretary’s desk before the bullets would fly? Would the desk even stop the bullets?

“A creative solution for being fired from the Committee,” Dash said. “I bet that anonymous phone call was a surprise.”

“My brother’s indiscretion costed me my job. And so, I would punish him.”

Now it was Dash’s turn to feel disgust. “You used your brother in the most horrible manner possible.”

“I disciplined him.”

“You tortured him!”

“Sin is not to be rewarded, Mr. Parker. Our God is a vengeful God, and sometimes he uses one of us to carry out his judgment. That is what I was doing. Administering judgment. To my brother. To those despicable, disgusting sodomites.”

“Really? I thought you profiteering.”

“Enough!”

“But something unexpected happened. Something that threw a wrench into your ‘judgment.’ Karl fell in love.”

“He did not love him!” Walter’s face was red with anger. Veins protruded from the sides of his neck. “You people are incapable of love! What you do is not love! It is perversion! It is sickness! It is disgusting!”

Dash waited for him to finish his tirade. When Walter finally quieted, he said, “What you didn’t count on was Karl asking Tyler—the man he loved—for help. Tyler went to Paul, who got Pru involved. They would document your blackmail, collect evidence, and have you put away.”

Walter smirked again. “They thought they could stop me. How foolish were they?”

“They must’ve been some threat to you. Otherwise, why have me track them down?”

“Which you did beautifully. And now, I have my ledger.” He shook it once in his hand. “No more evidence. And soon, no more witnesses.”

Dash stared down the barrel of the gun in Walter’s hand, the icy fingers of fear working their way down his spine.

Death does not forgive. Death does not forget.

The charcoal metal flashed brightly with the lightning outside. One of the flashes illuminated the figure of Prudence Meyers crouched just outside the doorway. In the next lightning flash, Dash saw her blue steel pistol clutched in her steady hand.

Walter cocked the hammer of his own gun, the motion making a sick-inducing click. “Mr. Parker,” he said, his voice calm and serene.

Dash hoped Walter hadn’t seen the surprise he felt on his face. He needed to stall