Free Black Dove by Steve Hockensmith Page B

it didn’t slow me, either. It was the
stench
that did that.
    With each step I took up the stairs, the putrid aroma grew more potent. It was one of those scents you can taste as much as smell . . . which was mighty unfortunate, since it smelled like a bucketful of buttermilk and hard-boiled eggs left out all day under an August sun.
    “What
is
that, anyway?” I coughed out.
    “Ain’t quite right for a bloated-up body,” Gustav said. “But it’s close.”
    “It’s gas from the pipes, actually,” Diana said without looking back atus. “It has no smell in its natural state, so the gas company adds chemicals to give it an easily detectable odor.”
    “Oh, that’s easy to detect, alright.” I swiped off my straw hat and gave it a wave under my nose. “Any easier and I’d pass out.”
    My brother’s only response was a vexed grunt—and I figured I knew why. The buildings he knows best are lit with oil lamps, candles, or the simple glow of a fire, not gas. If Diana hadn’t been there to set us straight, he might have “deduced” that somebody upstairs had been breeding skunks. The stink of that gas was just the kind of thing I’d been riding him about the day before: a city clue . . . the kind he couldn’t catch.
    Old Red stomped to the top of the stairs with such booming clops I almost feared he’d splinter the steps.
    Up on the second floor was a small, dimly lit flat through which the noxious vapors swirled so heavy I could practically feel them flowing around me like water. That wasn’t what stopped me dead in my tracks, though. The bed in the corner did that. Or the man stretched out atop it, anyway.
    It was Dr. Chan, alright—though not the same Dr. Chan we’d talked to just the day before. His clothes, normally so neat and sleek, were rumpled, and his round-rimmed spectacles were gone. He was lying on his back, eyes half-lidded, mouth half-open.
All
dead. And all grayish-blue, too, to judge by the darkened tinge to his hands and face.
    I’d seen skin that color before—when I’d buried the last of my family, aside from Gustav. Like my kin back in Kansas, Chan had died for the simplest reason there is: He couldn’t breathe anymore. The only difference being their lungs had filled with floodwater and his had filled with gas.
    I grabbed a sheet bunched up at the foot of the bed and pulled it over the body.
    “There’s a lady present, case you hadn’t noticed.”
    “Sorry,” Sarge said with all the sincerity of a cat apologizing to the mouse it was about to stuff in its mouth. “I hope the
ladys
not upset.”
    I turned and got my first good look at the man in his entirety. He was stocky, thick-necked, and clad not in a bull’s blue frock but a businessman’s brown tweed.
    And he wasn’t alone. Behind him was a tubby Chinaman sporting such a jutting gut he could make even a bulky fellow like myself feel like Jack Sprat. A neatly trimmed mustache and chin whiskers adorned his jowly face, and he dressed himself American fashion, though not in the starchy formal attire Chan had favored. Instead, he was wearing a white seersucker suit with matching hat. If not for the man’s Oriental features, he could’ve passed for a Southern gentlemen on his way to the veranda for a sip of mint julep.
    “You needn’t worry about me,” Diana said to Sarge, her voice hushed but remarkably calm. “I probably saw more dead men before I was four than you’ve seen in your entire life, Sergeant . . . ?”
    Sarge gave the lady a smirky half-smile, unimpressed by her bravado.
    “Mahoney,” he said. “Cathal Mahoney.”
    “Ahhhhh.” Diana nodded. “ ‘The Coolietown Crusader’ himself.”
    Mahoney waved off the nickname with a swipe of his paw—though I could see he was pleased the lady knew it.
    “Oh, that’s just newspaper bunk. I’m only doing my job.”
    “Which is?” I asked.
    “Sergeant Mahoney recently took over the police department’s Chinatown Squad,” Diana explained. “He’s