The Desperate, The Dying, And The Damned: Alex Rourke, #4

By John Rickards

Phil Durand is a low level functionary within one of Boston's organized crime outfits. A delivery driver, nothing more. When his girlfriend Evie goes missing three days before they were due to leave town together to start a better, clean, life down in Florida, he turns to the only man he knows with a reputation for helping guys like him...

Alex Rourke was once a respected investigator, first with the FBI and then in the private sector. Now he battles a long-term mental illness that's seen him slide from doing respectable work to ekeing out a living helping those with no one else to turn to. Durand's missing girlfriend looks like just a bread-and-butter job for him and his sardonic, secretive assistant Kayleigh.

But they soon find that something's very wrong with what they've been told. Has Evie genuinely been missing for a few days? Was she really Durand's girlfriend? Is their client lying, or deranged? And how does what happened to the missing woman tie in to the outfit Durand works for, not to mention a rival boss in a neighboring part of town?

The race is on to find Evie, find the truth, and untangle the knots in Durand's story before one side, or another, does it for them...

Praise for John Rickards:

"Rickards is a master of tension and pacing. In Rourke he has created a brilliant anti-hero lead on a par with John Connolly's Charlie Parker." - Crimespree Magazine

"Rickards is one author who doesn't pull punches." - Spinetingler

"Rickards is definitely one to watch." - Peter Robinson (Watching The Dark, Aftermath)

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Rickards
• Release date: Sep 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781507024164

Book preview

Copyright & Credits

Copyright John Rickards 2013. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License. You’re free to share this work with others however you want, and to remix or create derivative works from it. Just give an attribution to the author, and don’t use it for commercial purposes. Enjoy!

Cover image:

This one by Luis Hernandez, used under a cc-by license.

1.

The man said his name was Phil Durand and I saw no particular reason not to take his word for it. He met me in a bar called Keenan’s that had two things in spades: a heavy atmosphere of contempt for the law, and TVs showing horse racing. It was one of those places that probably had a storied history, and most of those stories featured someone getting beaten to hell and back. No one gave me a second glance. My days as an agent of authority were far in the past and now I spent more time in dumps like this than I did in pleasantly drab offices with people in suits.

Thanks, Mr Rourke, he said when I reached his table. He was a wiry guy, maybe still just the good side of thirty, with a goatee and dark hair that looked like a few nights’ sleep had passed since it last saw a comb. He was knotting his fingers together on the tabletop. Jumpy. I got your number off Donohoe. He said you were OK.

You told me on the phone. But you didn’t tell me what it was you needed help with.

A beer arrived for me. I took a swig out of politeness. I didn’t look at the label. It tasted just like every other bottle of generic lager.

No, he said. I didn’t think I should.

"You also said that. You didn’t tell me why you thought it, though." I sighed. In the lifetime since I’d crashed out of the FBI with what I generally glossed over as ‘stress-related mental health issues’ and went into the private sector I’d dealt with a lot of people, many of whom assumed their particulars were so sensitive they couldn’t possibly reveal them over the phone. The reality was that in most cases — genuine, worrying and tragic as they might have been — the details weren’t anything requiring face time.

No one accepted that, though. You had to do the dance. It’s why even the smallest respectable outfits still had offices and PAs. I couldn’t, as a rule, afford or justify either of those things. Not any more. My cell phone was my PA, and my offices were coffee shops and bars like this one. Talking to the people no one else would.

I’d pegged Durand as either a petty crook with personal trouble or an ex-con with some kind of problem relating to the old days. I waited for him to get around to confirming my assumptions.

I didn’t think I should do that either, he said. You’ll understand, a guy like me—

I probably will, I told him. "I’ve been here before. Not exactly here, but in places like this, holding conversations like this, plenty of times. You talked to Donohoe so I guess he told you that I’m not interested in being the bad guy and I don’t do anything I couldn’t own up to in church, but also that I don’t care who you are and what you’ve done before, so long as your problem’s a genuine one and it’s the good guy thing to do to help you out. Does that make sense? Your daughter’s being stalked by someone and freaking out and you want to find out who’s doing it, I’m your man. You want me to beat the shit out of him or dump him in the harbor, sorry."

Sure. That’s what Donohoe said. He said you were a stand-up guy. People like us… well, it’s not like we can go to the cops, is it?

I’d probably been closer with ‘petty crook’, I decided. And you know the rates I charge? I said. And that I require a retainer up-front? I’ve got rent to pay the same as everyone else. He nodded, so I said, OK then. So what’s going on?

Everything I tell you goes no further?

Not unless there’s a good reason it needs to.

He considered that for a moment, then shrugged. OK, so it’s my girlfriend. I’m mostly legit— I let that pass unchallenged —but we’ve been planning on going straight and quitting town. It’s hard being here and staying clean, with everything and everyone you know. The past you’ve had. Evie and me, we want to start someplace fresh and clean and have just a normal life for ourselves. Raise some kids, a family…

His voice choked hard on that and he covered by reaching for his drink fast. What’s happened to her? I said.

She’s vanished. I can’t get hold of her. She hasn’t been home in days. We had tickets to Florida — I’ve got us tickets — and I’ve got a place set up for us, everything. We were supposed to be leaving Wednesday. If she’s not there… I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I can’t stay, not easily. I mean, everything could fall apart if we don’t make it out. Money’s tight, so if things fall through it’s all over, y’know? If she’s just having second thoughts, or she’s left me, at least I’d know. And if something’s happened to her…

"So what might have happened to her, specifically?" Meaning ‘who’, and he knew it. Today was Monday. Two days wasn’t going to be much time if