The Blood of Saints (Tom Connelly Book 2)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and not intended.

  Copyright © 2020 Nick Dorsey

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

  First ebook edition: April 2020

  Cover design by Rich Ross

  Links to the Tom Connelly Series:

  Bleeding Levee Blues

  The Blood of Saints

  Links to the Unique Tales Series:

  The Jupiter Man

  Super Cowboy VS Everyone

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  For my father

  Who taught me

  There are two types of men in this world:

  Men that wear their hats

  Straight

  And those that wear their hats

  A little crooked.

  THE BLOOD OF SAINTS

  Nick Dorsey

  CHAPTER ONE

  She walked across the parking lot in the pouring rain, no umbrella or anything. Tom Connelly wondered what she needed so badly that it couldn’t wait until after the weather passed. Two days ago, heavy iron clouds had settled over the city and refused to move. Instead, they began dumping their payload in a slow and steady barrage. Now they blacked out the afternoon sun and gave the city an unmoored feeling, a rain-soaked island where time had stopped.

  From inside his office, Tom watched as the woman ran in heels, splashing through puddles and clacking up a few steps. Then Tom was there at the door, holding it open as she rushed in, closing the door behind her. When she got inside the near-drowned woman asked Tom two questions: Could she smoke in the office, and would Tom kill her husband?

  Tom hesitated for a moment, then decided to take the easy question first. He said, “You can light up if you want. As for the other, I’m going to have to give it some thought.”

  She smiled then, a playful thing under running mascara and tangled, sopping hair. So at least she wasn’t serious about hiring someone to execute her husband. That was good. Tom directed her to sit at his secretary’s desk. She lit a cigarette and Tom went back into his office to find her a towel.

  He had been cleaning up the office all morning, wearing the purple LSU sweatshirt his son Dennis had given him for Christmas. The hoodie was a size too big, but Tom didn’t mind. Christmas had been a bright, peaceful end to an otherwise dreary year. He had made the drive to Houston to spend the holiday with his son, which meant he had to spend hours on end interacting with his ex-wife and her new husband. No easy task, but it had all gone smoothly, even Christmas Day had passed in a surprisingly congenial manner. That was all for Dennis’s sake, Tom was sure. He knew he had been on his best behavior. When Lesley turned her nose up and fixed him with that look she had and asked how business was, baiting him, he told her it was good and getting better. Wonder of wonders, she left it at that. When Tom took Dennis out to see the Christmas lights in River Oaks on his own, just Dennis and him, she hadn’t said a peep. If that wasn’t progress, Tom didn’t know what was.

  Then Tom came back to New Orleans. Back to his apartment, small and empty. Smelling like dust and old wood rather than a place where humans lived. Back to his strip-mall office where a framed certificate from the Board of Private Investigator Examiners was hanging on the wall, collecting dust both figuratively and literally. His secretary had hired a cleaning service that came twice a month, but the secretary’s desk had been unmanned for two years now and the cleaning service hadn’t been called in months. The office was looking more and more like a bachelor pad, greasy Rally’s bags still holding a french fry or two and empty Coke cans had been accumulating until this morning. That’s when he decided he couldn’t live like a college kid anymore. Cleaning the place up made him feel like he was living his life right.

  Sarah, his old secretary, was long gone and she hadn’t been replaced. Another relationship Tom had managed to dismantle completely. Now Tom didn’t see the need to replace her. The landline had been disconnected last year. His cell phone would do in the meantime, but it wasn’t ringing off the hook. He had the P.I. certificate, but lately, he didn’t have the business. As much as his landlord appreciated Tom and all the work he did around the building, rent was still due the first of every month, and every month it was harder to come by.

  Tom found a clean hand towel in the bathroom and a coffee cup the woman could use as an ashtray and went back into the main room of the office. He slid the cup on the table and offered her the towel. The smoking woman took it with one hand, drying her hair and puffing at the same time. She was looking good, if he was being honest. There were dark spots on the cigarette paper where moisture had been transferred from her fingers and was now bleeding through to the tobacco.

  Tom sat on the edge of the desk and said, “I’ve decided I’m not going to kill your husband for you.”

  She cracked a smile and stopped drying her hair. Peered out at him from under the towel. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  She shrugged and took a long puff. “I guess I’m not trying to kill the bastard.” Now listening to her, Tom recognized an accent. A lilting, Nordic tone. The woman herself was blonde, almost as tall as Tom. She let the towel hang around her neck. It hadn’t done much good. Her hair was damp and stringy. She was wearing a leather jacket, but her blouse and the grey slacks underneath were soaked.

  He said, “Let me see if I can find another towel.”

  “Do you think you could find me a drink?”

  Tom walked back into the depths of the office and returned with another towel and two bottles of sparkling water.

  The woman took a bottle and peered at the label. “This isn’t what I was thinking when I said a drink.”

  “It’s mineral water.”

  “Minerals. The hard stuff.” She set the bottle aside and took the second towel.

  Tom took a swig of the mineral water and felt the carbonation fizz. There was a time when he would have had an array of beer in the mini-fridge and whiskey on a top shelf somewhere and he would have been more than happy to share, but he was done with that. He still kept to the spirit of the AA meetings he attended last year, even if he didn’t go down to the house on Jeff Davis anymore. Still, Tom would admit, the mineral water wasn’t an adequate substitute for the Miller High Life and Jameson diet he had once kept. It just gave him something to do. He considered the woman. “So, I have to ask. He’s a bastard, your husband? Right? What sort of bastard? He’s cheating?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “I only ask because the people that normally come in here, they want proof of an affair.”

  “No. He’s a different sort of bastard.”

  Tom thought about that. Go for it, he decided. “The type of bastard we should be calling the cops over?”

  She looked surprised. “Cops? No. Cops aren’t a good idea.”

  “But you came in here looking for a hitman. Things must be bad.”

  “I said, I don’t want him dead. But they’re bad.”

  Tom paused, figuring out which way to take the conversation. Wanting to keep it light but still take her seriously. “But not call-the-cops bad? You drove here in the pouring rain to ask a stranger to kill him, so things are worse than bad, I think. But you don’t want to call the cops?”

  She tossed the stub of the cigarette into the coffee cup and it hissed in the dregs. Then she began using the towel to rub her bleeding mascara off her chee
ks but she was just moving it around, smearing the stuff. It made her look like she was wearing clown makeup. “I guess I was thinking if I kill him, or I get somebody to kill him, that’s it. That’s the end. But if I call the cops? Then I’m some sort of rat, right? And now he knows I did something. Even in jail, he’d still be around.” She considered this, then resumed, her accented voice halting now. Slow. Resigned. “He’d figure it out. He’d point a finger at me eventually. I’d never be safe.”

  “All the reasons you’re saying you shouldn’t call the cops? Those are all the reasons why you should. I should tell you now that I used to be a police officer. I still know some people on the force. If you’re afraid for your safety, I can give someone a call. Let me ask you again; do you want me to call the police, Ms..?”

  She held the towel to her lips, her eyes focusing on the empty place over Tom’s shoulder. Like she was making a tough decision. “My name is Sofia Adelfi.”

  “Ms. Adelfi. I can call someone. It will be discreet.”

  “No.”

  “If he’s…Ms. Adelfi, if he’s raising his hands, if there’s abuse, there are places you can go. Programs in place. There’s the Women and Children’s Shelter, the Crescent House.” Tom stopped and sipped. Adelfi. That felt familiar. Adelfi. What was it? Delphi, that was a Greek thing, a temple or something. But where had he heard Adelfi?

  She said, “It’s not that kind of abuse.”

  Tom met her eye. She was either lying or Tom was dealing with a different animal altogether. He said, “Okay. Do you want to tell me about what’s going on?”

  Sofia pushed the towel over her eyes and dug it in, curling her fingers into the cloth. For a moment Tom thought she was breaking down, sobbing. But when she spoke her voice was clear. “I’m an idiot.”

  “Nobody said that. You came here. You came for a reason.” Tom gave her a moment to respond, then said, “You have any family close by, aside from Mr. Adelfi?”

  She hesitated. “No.” Probably a lie, Tom decided. He let it slide.

  “You have a friend you can stay with for a while?”

  “I might be able to find a place.”

  Tom nodded. He pulled three cards from his pocket. He had grabbed them when he went back to get the mineral water. He held them out to her. “There’s a counselor, that’s the first one there. And that one is the Crescent House if you need a place to stay. And the last one is me. Okay?”

  “This one is you?”

  “My cell.”

  Sofia took a drink from the bottle of mineral water and licked her lips. “Okay.” She dropped the towel and immediately stood up, took a few steps towards the door, and saw the bottle of water in her hand. She slid it back onto the desk. “Thank you. For the water.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I overreacted. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for. Just be safe.”

  She gave him a sad smile. Like she had heard that one before and knew it wasn’t an option. “Okay.”

  “You’ve got the cards?”

  “I’ve got all three.” She turned and that was it, she was gone. Back out into the rain, even though she had just dried off. Leaving behind only a half-empty bottle of water and a few wet towels to testify that she had ever existed in the first place.

  Tom looked at the puddles on the hardwood and drank his mineral water and thought about how weird that had been. In and out, with the rain and everything. If she had been wearing a red dress and had a snappy Continental accent instead of that Scandinavian lilt, and if he was still drinking, they could have had a real Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall style fling.

  He looked at the dead cigarette butt in his coffee cup, then brought it into the back to rinse the thing out. Hoping she figured out what she needed and didn’t get hurt on the way there.

  CHAPTER TWO

  T he sun was setting by the time he made it downtown. He walked across the street, his leather shoes dodging a sizable puddle that reflected the pink and gold glow from the casino. Tom had finished cleaning his office and gone back to his apartment to change. Then he made his way down to the end of Canal Street. The entrance to the casino squatted behind an army of palm trees with its back to the Mississippi River. Walking between those palms and up to the glass doors of the place made Tom feel like maybe he had made it to the End of the World. Now he could either turn around and try to figure out where he had taken a wrong turn, try to find some reason why he ended up here, or he could walk through those doors and see what the End would bring.

  Who was he kidding? He wasn’t in a reflective kind of mood. End of the World it was. Tom took a breath and went inside.

  He spent three hours manning the side doors in a gold sport coat, eyeballing tourists and waiting for the action to start. It was mid-February, a few weeks until Mardi Gras hit in full force. Now the city was still bustling, a frantic month-long party until it dove into the city-wide hangover that came after every Ash Wednesday. The tourists would come like psychic vampires, feeding off of the goodwill of the city and leaving it hollowed-out. Tom had discovered the lethargy never really extended to the casino trade. The real gamblers never left, and the hobbyists would be back in a week or two. The addicts would keep their Lenten promises a little longer than that, but not much.

  While scanning faces, Tom thought about Sofia Adelfi. Their whole interaction had been so strange. There was a time when he would have gotten into the car with her, driven back to her house, and had words with her husband. More than words, probably. But she didn’t want that, that had been obvious. So he listened to her and let her go. But something hadn’t been right, then, and it still didn’t feel right, now.

  He took a smoke break before ten, though he didn’t smoke. He went upstairs past the half-empty poker tables and into a door marked Private. The woman at the report writer’s desk had close-cropped grey hair and a stern look for Tom when he entered. She saw the gold of his sport coat, marked him as a security guard, and went back to her reports. The report writers were part of security but not exactly friendly. Tom guessed they wrote reports for just about everything at the casino, including accidents, fights, and stubbed toes. Everything was documented for insurance or posterity’s sake.

  Beyond the report writer’s room was the office for the Emergency Medical Technician, the in-house doc. Tom knocked on the door and someone inside cleared his throat. “Yeah?”

  Tom pushed into the room. The walls were covered in posters reminding everyone to wash their hands and to use the Heimlich maneuver in certain situations. There was Ray Duval, rising from the stretcher pad and rubbing his eyes. Tom said, “You’re not worried somebody will catch you sleeping?”

  “Nobody’s coming here. Nobody that matters anyway.” Ray grinned, the smile stretching out the thin strip of beard that bordered his face. “No cameras in here, man. Privacy. HIPPA and shit.”

  “I’m on break, you ready?”

  “I’m on it.” He stood and smoothed his black shirt out over his barrel of a stomach, “But I could go back to sleep and still beat your ass.”

  “You always wake up talking shit?”

  “Every day so far.”

  In the basement cafeteria, Tom sat across a folding table from Ray. There was a cardstock chessboard on the table between them. Tom had been at the casino for almost half a year but Ray was the only person who had warmed to him. Other security guards distrusted anyone new, always waiting for the new hire to quit or screw up. The report writers kept to themselves and Risk Management saw every employee as a potential threat, like Tom was going to pull an Ocean’s 11 style robbery.

  The unit detailed from the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Department had an office in the basement, but they were wary of him, too. Tom had left the New Orleans Police Department after shooting an unarmed teenager. It was a bad shooting that had occurred during Hurricane Katrina, while the eyes of the nation were focused on the city and all of its dirty laundry hanging for everyone to see. He hadn’t been removed fr
om duty, but Tom left the force of his own accord. Many within the department thought that was the wrong move. That leaving was an admission of guilt. Some of the guys in the Sheriff’s department felt the same, and the guys detailed to the casino knew him on sight. The border between NOPD and the Sheriff’s Department was a porous one, besides that the shooting had been in the paper. He wasn’t exactly infamous, but Tom was known and not well-liked. The Sheriff’s Department gave him a wide berth and he returned the favor.

  Ray, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less who Tom was in a past life. Ray liked to talk and Tom could stand listening. When Ray told Tom that he had been in a chess club in high school, Tom squeezed him for more information, which led to these short, brutal lessons in the cafeteria over a cigarette and lunch breaks.

  Ray swooped his bishop across the board and shot Tom with finger-pistols. “Check, bitch.”

  Tom studied the board and tried to figure out his next move. He never had a mind for chess or, to be honest, much of an interest in the game, but that had changed over Christmas. While visiting Dennis in Houston, they took a day trip down to Galveston to see the Tall Ship Elissa, a merchant ship from the 19th century that was moored there and was now a historic landmark. Dennis hadn’t cared for the ship, but while walking the streets of the historic downtown they found a huge chessboard sporting pieces four feet high. Just about the same height as his eight-year-old (eight and a half, he heard Dennis say). They played the giant’s board game for almost an hour, and later Tom bought Dennis a board and tried to teach him. Tom realized then how little he knew about the game, but he formulated a plan.

  Dennis loved to play games on his mother’s smartphone. Tom found a chess app and installed it on her phone, then he had forked over the obscene amount of cash required to buy a new phone himself. That had hurt, but now they could play one another in chess a few times a week. They could chat over the app, even if it was just “Hi,” and “Bye,” and the game itself gave them something to talk about. It wasn’t the same as living in the same city, but it was something.