Ransom, P.I. ( Volume Three - La Mort de Tous): Ransom, P.I., #3

By Luke Shephard

Volume Three of the Ransom, P.I. series

Things just keep getting worse for private eye Daniel Ransom. After the death of his client and one-time lover led him to become embroiled in a terrifying new religious ceremony where pretty much everyone and everything wants him dead, he now has to try to stop a human sacrifice and get to the root of all of the evils that are befalling France in the wake of World War II. No simple task, indeed.

What his investigation turns up, however, may be too much for even the most hard-boiled detective to withstand.

Can Daniel crack the case and find the missing person before it’s too late? Find out in this thrilling finale to the Ransom, P.I. series!

Fans of John Locke, Russell Blake, and James Patterson will love this quirky detective thriller series with clever characters and suspenseful settings.

Praise for Ransom, P.I.
"I love a good crime drama but it's even better when there is a hint of something more. That's what I loved about this book and I want more from the author. I wasn't exactly sure what I'd get when I picked up Ransom P.I. but I was more than pleased with my choice...The dialogue was great and the noir mood of the book really creates a great atmosphere."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Our Pack Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502298775

Book preview

Ransom, P.I.

Volume Three – La Mort de Tous

Things just keep getting worse for private eye Daniel Ransom. After the death of his client and one-time lover led him to become embroiled in a terrifying new religious ceremony where pretty much everyone wants him dead, he now has to try to stop a human sacrifice and get to the root of all of the evils that are befalling France in the wake of World War II.

What his investigation turns up, though, may be too much for even the most hard-boiled detective to withstand.

I

I’m beginning to hate the French.

Just to recap, if you came in late or skipped ahead or have a ridiculous, terrible memory or are very drunk: My name is Daniel Ransom. I’m a failed novelist turned private detective. I live in Paris, though live might be a pretty strong word for the meager, mostly meaningless way I shamble through most of my days. A few nights back, I was hired by the one-time love of my life, Nicole Faure, to find her younger brother, Alexander. He had gone missing after falling in with a group that, I’ve now learned, is half drug cartel, half neo-religion, half sex cult and all bad news. It’s worth pointing out at this time, probably, that I am very bad at math.

During my investigation I discovered a new drug called The Eyes, a green, powdery bit of horror that drives men insane with terrible speed and stunning brutality. Alexander was hopelessly deep in the thrall of The Eyes and believed in its power so completely that he made it a gift to me, in a manner of speaking. He knocked me out cold, tied me to my own bed and shoved a syringe full of the stuff into my veins. Since then it’s getting hard to discern what is real and what is an army of mutated, disfigured, deformed demons chasing and trying to eat me.

What is real, I’m nearly certain, is that a man named Pierre Dupont murdered Nicole right in front of me, in her own home. I guess he’s something that fancies himself to be a crime boss, though if his delusions of grandeur stop there I couldn’t say. I don’t know Dupont very well, but I do know that he threatened my life and my family if I don’t find Alexander for him. I know Alexander owes him a significant amount of money. And I know that, one way or another, before this is over, I am going to execute Pierre Dupont.

Dupont sent me down to an awful, creepy little town called Coins Sombres in the south of France. It’s a place I’ve never seen on any maps and, trust me, that’s for the best. If you find yourself here, do yourself a favor and correct that just as quickly as you can. Two of Dupont’s goons, a couple of elephants in cheap suits called Manon and Bedel escorted me here and I promptly drugged them with their own poison and escaped. I believe that is what one calls paying it forward.

After speaking with one of my connections back in Paris, a longtime friend and owner of an underground opium den, I located a war criminal here in town named Bernard Ferguson, a fat, blustery ex-pat from England with a particularly troubling past in Hitler’s INTERPOL. I helped Bernard find his daughter, who was also caught up in the church of The Eyes, and sent them both back to Paris where I hope a doctor friend of mine will be able help her find her way back to reason and sanity. Or something close enough. I’d like to think that it was a good deed, something I’m not particularly known for, but in the end, I wanted her to be my doctor’s lab rat. I wanted him to run the tests on her, figure out how to correct the course of madness and terror this drug has set her on so that he’ll know what he’s doing when I ask him to fix me. Though, at this point, frantically writing down these thoughts from behind the high walls of an ancient, drafty castle, the idea that I’m going to live long enough to worry about a cure is starting to feel like a bit of wishful thinking.

So where we are in the story, now, is that I’m at an orgy at an old, bombed out Basilica. I have found Alexander, or he found me, again, and the two mercenaries I escaped from earlier are hot on my trail. Oh, while I was in The Dark Corners I also met and befriended a very confusing Hansom Cab driver named Lonnie. We met at a bar, he drove me around, his wife stabbed him in the arm, he didn’t tell me why, and now he’s trying to kill me with my own gun. Well, I say my gun. It became mine when I stole it from Manon. Or maybe it was Bedel. I stole both of their guns. I stole their pants and shoes, too.

I haven’t had a chance to talk it over with Lonnie, but my guess is he pulled the gun on me because I clearly objected to the fact that a teenage girl at this orgy is currently being strapped to a pile of wood that will, in the very near future, become a bonfire and, a few moments later, a funeral pyre.

It’s sunrise, now, and I think that pretty much catches you up. Welcome to the party.

Lonnie, I said, the cold, steel barrel of the pistol pressed snugly and a little painfully against my ear. What’s happening?

Don’t feel the pressure to move so much as a beetle’s bottom, said Lonnie. You should have just come back to the Happy Trout with me. This is no place for Americans with guns. This is a place for a new world to be birthed from the womb of the heavens.

I was lost.

Alexander sprang into action, as much as a ninety-nine pound, heavily intoxicated French artist can spring into anything.

Monsieur! he shouted at my cabbie, Danny is one of us! And he is my friend. He’s only still learning, but he will see with the eyes I have given him. He needs but a little time. Please release your weapon. This is no place for a Frenchman with guns, either, brother.

The ritual is sacred as a peanut in a bath tub, Lonnie said. And I was beginning to think he was being purposefully ridiculous. Though I did have to question if it was all The Eyes running amok inside my already difficult brain. Maybe he was making perfect sense. Or maybe he wasn’t speaking at all. It was a fair question, of this there can be no doubt, but it was also a question without an answer. I couldn’t necessarily trust any sensory input, or my judgment, or anything at all for that matter, but at that moment there was quite simply nothing for it.

The girl on the woodpile, she couldn’t have been more than fifteen, was securely tethered to the central post of the pyre by that point. She was beautiful in her youth, vibrant, even, despite all the blood and torn, ivory flesh that marked her as part of that unholy congregation. And she was smiling.

Doing my very best, which isn’t all the great, to channel Sherlock Holmes, the greatest detective that never existed, I ran through a hundred possible approaches for dealing with my current predicament. Most of them, I decided, ended with me being shot in the face, which was an unacceptable outcome for one clear, precious reason: I could not die until I had killed Pierre Dupont. After that I could die peacefully, if that is what the universe had in mind for me. And after that, well, apre moi le deluge.

Any sudden movement could have set Lonnie off. Or any subtle movement, for that matter, but he was obviously a believer so appealing to his reason seemed utterly impossible. And, as is so often the case with my silly life, time was not on my side. Any minute now that poor teenage girl was going up in flames and it was plain to see no one but me was going to stop it, because everyone else in this sprawling, crawling mass, this exhausting, exuberant mess, was celebrating it.

Alexander was gone. Far, far gone. But he was my friend once and I believed that he loved me, still. I believed, and still believe, that he did what he did to me, that he poisoned and maybe, in the end, ruined me because he wanted to share the glory of his newfound insanity with me. He could have killed me if he just wanted me stopped, I was at his mercy, but, in his way, he asked me over to his side instead. So I appealed to him.

Alexander, I began, the gun still firm against my skull. "Religious freedom is a natural, God-given right. It is the most fundamental soil on which my nation was founded. I applaud you for finding something that brings you peace. But not like this. It can’t be like this. Human sacrifice is a bridge too far. Too far from