Three To Get Deadly (36 page)

In the movies, guys get hit on the head all the time. Usually with a gun. Their knees buckle, they say
oooh
, and they gently fall and go to sleep. It doesn't work that way. There's a thunderclap, a blaze of lights behind the eyes, and a shooting pain, a loss of equilibrium. Then a gray fog settling.

I didn't fall down. I stumbled across the room on shaky pins, a wounded buffalo, bouncing off cabinets. Roger was standing to my left, my right, and straight in front. I took a drunk's swing at the guy in front but it wasn't him. He pushed me to the floor. I hooked an arm behind his knee and brought him down on top of me. On a good day, I could bench press him twenty times, then throw him from short to first. This wasn't a good day. He was back up and I was on one knee like a fighter trying to make the ten-count.

Then I felt the jab in my upper arm.
Déjà vu
, his thumb pushing the plunger on a hypodermic. I swatted at it and missed. He emptied it into me and I tore away from him, the needle still stuck in me, the world's largest voodoo doll.

I came at him again and took a swing in slow motion, my arms bulky girders. I didn't hit him and he didn't hit me. I just sat down at the end of the punch, then rolled onto my side, my face resting on the cool, clean tile. Then, just like in the movies, I said,
oooh
, and went to sleep.

* * *

My mouth was dry and my head was filled with barking dogs. I was cold. My face was still on the tile. It could have been hours or days. It must have been hours. Roger was sitting in a swivel chair next to me, splotches of plaster in his hair, on his face, on his gown. From the floor, I could see only the bottoms of Melanie Corrigan's bare feet sticking out of the casts. Nice feet, finely arched, clean dainty lady feet.

The feet weren't moving. I didn't need to see the rest.

"I'll help you up," Roger said hoarsely. "Don't worry about the Pentothal. You'll just be groggy for a while."

I tried to stand but he had to boost me. If he wanted to, he could finish me right there. I finally looked toward the table. The face gone, wrapped from forehead to chin, a mummy. Only the ends of her hair stuck out from beneath the plaster.

I sagged against a metal cabinet. Roger said, "You didn't mean it last night, did you, Jake?"

"Mean what?" My voice was thick; my head weighed a ton.

"That you're no longer my lawyer or my friend."

"What difference does it make?"

He swiveled in the chair to face me, his eyes dancing to a silent tune.

"Because I need you, Jake."

"Now? You need me now. What for?"

"To prove it, Jake. That I'm one of the good guys."

The author of 14 novels, Paul Levine won the John D. MacDonald fiction award and was nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, International Thriller, and James Thurber prizes. A former trial lawyer, he also wrote more than 20 episodes of the CBS military drama "JAG" and co-created the Supreme Court drama "First Monday," starring James Garner and Joe Mantegna The internationally acclaimed "To Speak for the Dead" was the first of the best-selling Jake Lassiter series, which also includes "Night Vision" and "Riptide."

Jake Lassiter is appointed a special prosecutor when women in a sex-charged Internet chat room are targeted by a serial killer. Enlisting a brilliant female psychiatrist and assisted by retired coroner Doc Charlie Riggs, Lassiter wades into a maze of lies and corruption to discover and face down the murderer. http://amzn.to/rtzoZy

"Mystery writing at its very, very best." – Larry King,
USA TODAY

Lassiter chases a beautiful, deadly woman and $2 million in stolen bonds from Miami to Maui, where in an explosive finale, he learns lessons never taught on the football field or the courtroom.

"One part John Grisham, two parts Carl Hiaasen." –
Tulsa World

A billion-dollar lawsuit is at stake when a passenger jet crashes in the Everglades. In a legal thriller with echoes of Grisham and Turow, the defense is simple: Kill anyone, even a Supreme Court Justice, to win the case.

"Relentlessly entertaining." –
New York Daily News

And be sure to check out all of
Paul Levine's books!

 

 

 

A dead partner is bad for business, even if he dies in his sleep. But when he washes ashore on one side of a lake and his boat is found abandoned on the other side, it's worse. When the sheriff tells the coroner to "cut him open and see what we've got," it's time to dust off the résumé. And the ink was barely dry on Lou Mason's.

The time was seven thirty on Sunday morning, July 12. It was too early for dead bodies, too humid for the smell, and just right for the flies and mosquitoes. And it was rotten for identifying the body of a dead partner. These were the moments to remember.

Mason's dead partner was Richard Sullivan, senior partner in Sullivan & Christenson, his law firm for the last three months. Sullivan was the firm's rainmaker. He was a sawed-off, in-your-face, thump-your-chest ballbuster. His clients and partners loved the money he made for them, but none of them ever confessed to liking him. Though in his late fifties, he had one of those perpetually mid forties faces. Except that now he was dead, as gray as a Minneapolis winter and bloated from a night in the water.

Sullivan & Christenson was a Kansas City law firm that employed forty lawyers to merge and acquire clients' assets so they could protect them from taxation before and after death. When bare-knuckled bargaining didn't get the deal done, they'd sue the bastards. Or defend the firm's bastard if he was sued first. Mason's job was to win regardless of which bastard won the race to the courthouse.

The U.S. attorney, Franklin St. John, had been preparing a special invitation to the courthouse for Sullivan's biggest client, a banker named Victor O'Malley. The RSVP would be sent to the grand jury that had been investigating O'Malley for two years. Sullivan asked Mason to defend O'Malley the day Mason joined the firm as its twelfth partner. Mason accepted and Sullivan spoon-fed him the details of O'Malley's complex business deals.

Mason figured out that O'Malley had stolen a lot of money from the bank he owned. He was having a harder time figuring out how to defend him. Fifty million dollars was a lot to blame on a bookkeeping mistake.

Two days earlier, Sullivan took Mason to lunch and, over a couple of grilled chicken Caesar salads, casually inquired what would happen to O'Malley's defense if certain documents disappeared.

"Which documents?" Mason asked.

Sullivan studied Mason for a moment before answering. "Let's assume that there are records that show O'Malley and one of his business associates received favorable treatment from his bank."

Mason didn't hesitate. "That's what the whole case is about. There are too many of those documents to lose even if I didn't mind going to jail with O'Malley. Which I do."

"Lou, I only care about the documents with my name on them. Do you understand?"

Mason nodded slowly, wiping his hands with a white cloth napkin more than was needed to clean them.

"I'm not going to jail for you either. Show me the documents, and we'll figure something out."