LITMIR.BIZ

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man’s neck. She knew what blood like that meant. It was a gunshot wound to the back of the man’s head.

      This job was turning into a nightmare!

      Kate forced herself to touch the man’s wrist, even though her fingers shook. His skin was warm and she felt hope shoot into her blood. Then everything inside her recoiled.

      No pulse. Kate tried again, and her heartbeat took off. No pulse!

      The blonde’s cries changed to howls. Kate did the only thing she could. She stepped around the dead man and slapped the woman hard.

      When the blonde’s wails had subsided to hiccups, Kate ran to find a telephone. She fumbled with the buttons twice before she managed to punch in 911. A voice answered immediately—cold, detached, almost mechanical. Kate cleared her throat.

      “Uh, yes. Please send someone immediately. There’s a dead man in my salad.”

      Lieutenant Detective Raphael Montiel preferred to think of adrenaline as something hot and sharp that hurt the underside of his skin. It was rarely a pleasant feeling.

      It drove him hard as he shot his aging Explorer around the corner of Third into Willings Alley. His left shoulder rammed against the window when he jerked the SUV straight again. He didn’t have to look for the address. He knew the brownstone without the police cruisers that hurled red and blue light up against the walls of brick that bracketed the alley. He’d had his eye on the home’s owner for a while.

      Phillip McGaffney was dead.

      Raphael cursed roundly, most of his fury aimed at whoever had taken McGaffney out—not that the killer had done so in the first place, because that had been inevitable for months now—because the SOB hadn’t waited three hours and forty-two more minutes to do it. Raphael’s suspension from the force lifted at midnight. Now, twenty minutes after the 911 call had come in, his dashboard clock remained stubbornly stuck at eight thirty-eight.

      He’d flatten the man who called him on it. McGaffney was his. Two warring factions of Philadelphia’s powerful Irish underground had just begun sniffing around each other thirty days ago when Raphael had taken his suspension in the teeth. He’d spent the last month staving off boredom by continuing to track every move the family made. Lou O’Bannon, the mob’s kingpin, had died ten days into Raphael’s suspension—of cancer, a virtual anomaly in his world. It had been a slow, natural death that had given Phil McGaffney and Charlie Eagan plenty of time to begin recruiting their supporters. Both of them fully intended to take over O’Bannon’s throne.

      It had been only a matter of time before full-fledged war broke out between the groups. But Raphael hadn’t expected it to start this way, with Eagan’s boys shooting right for the other guys’ top dog.

      He drove the Explorer into half a space between two black-and-whites. The SUV braked to a hard stop, and Raphael was out before it had settled back on its shock absorbers. He jogged across the alley and up the steps to McGaffney’s front door.

      “Where’s Plattsmier?” he demanded of the cop manning the entrance.

      “Not here yet.”

      But his captain would probably be here soon, Raphael thought. “Who’s in charge?”

      The officer grinned. “Fox.”

      Some of the constriction eased across Raphael’s chest. Having C. Fox Whittington catch this stiff was good. It was very good. Fox was his partner.

      Raphael passed the cop and went inside. He began stalking the first floor of the brownstone looking for Fox. Then he stepped into the dining room and his jaw sagged.

      It was a long, narrow room with a cherry-wood table in the center. Dark wainscoting traced around the ivory-papered walls. The chandelier in the center of the ceiling was heavy with too much bronze that robbed the sparkling white light of its innocence. There was a door to the kitchen on one side of the room, a door to a hallway on the other.

      McGaffney was facedown at the head of the table.

      The blood that seeped from the gunshot wound at the base of the man’s skull was congealing now, going tacky and brown. It was nothing Raphael hadn’t seen before. The scene on the floor, however, rocked him a little.

      The woman at the bottom of the pile was leggy—very leggy, he thought, given that the metallic fabric of her dress was pushed up nearly to her backside. It was all Raphael could see of her because there was a brunette sitting on top of her, deposited right on the small of the other woman’s back. Her knees were drawn up and her chin rested in her hand. Every once in a while, the leggy woman kicked, but the brunette wasn’t budging.

      Raphael had no idea if the brunette was leggy or not. She wore navy blue trousers and a starched white shirt. Raphael had spent his childhood in parochial schools. He hated starch, despised it on mere sight.

      “What the hell?” Raphael muttered.

      The brunette’s head came up at the sound of his voice. He had never seen hair like hers in his life, Raphael thought. It was a million shades of onyx shimmering to deep copper in the chandelier’s light. He thought maybe it was supposed to be tied back or something, but who could tell? It was wild, with corkscrews zinging everywhere.

      She reached a hand up to smooth it as though reading his opinion of it in his eyes. “She’s bigger than me,” she muttered. “It was a fight.”

      Raphael cleared his throat. “Come again?”

      “It was a fight to keep her away from the table. From him. To keep her from messing up your evidence. Aren’t you a cop?”

      “Yeah.” He’d even be an employed cop in another three hours or so.

      The woman gave a heartfelt sigh. “It’s about time you got here. She’s all yours.” And with that statement, she stood. The woman beneath her let out a yowl that stirred the hairs at Raphael’s nape. Then she rolled onto her back, sat up and sprang to her feet.

      “Philip!” she cried.

      Finally, too late, Raphael understood why the brunette had been sitting on top of her. This came to him in the split second before he recognized the other woman. He should have known her from her legs.

      Allegra Denise.

      She hurled herself in the general direction of McGaffney’s corpse in that long, ankle-length dress that draped her like a second skin and caught the chandelier’s light. Raphael stepped quickly to block her. She hit his chest like a battering ram, and she had arms and legs that were everywhere.

      “Whoa,” he murmured. “Let’s ease up here.”

      “That’s what I told her,” said the brunette.

      “Phillip!” the blonde wailed again.

      Raphael took an elbow in his gut, and one knee came perilously close to his groin. He tucked one of Allegra’s arms behind her. He used it to lever her into a dining room chair, then he leaned close enough to her ear to inhale the sweet, clinging scent of her perfume. “Quiet now, or I’ll let the lady sit on you again,” he whispered.

      “Phillip,” Allegra whimpered.

      “Cut me a break. You had dinner with Bonnie Joe Donnelly last weekend. How attached to Phil could you have gotten in, what, six days?”

      Allegra blinked up at him, her eyes swimming. “How do you know?”

      “I know.” Raphael straightened away from her and looked at the brunette again. “And who the hell are you?”

      He watched everything about her draw up and in. She couldn’t be more than five foot four, but for a second she reminded him of his second grade teacher—a behemoth, stern, unforgiving and wicked with a ruler. Then he blinked, and she was petite again.

      A voice came from behind him. “She’s the caterer. Allegra here was having an intimate dinner with our pal.”

      Raphael turned to find

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