Blaze Tuesday and the Case of the Knight Surgeon (Standard Edition) Read online

  Blaze Tuesday

  and

  The Case of the Knight Surgeon

  Published by Kai Kiriyama at Smashwords

  copyright 2014 Kai Kiriyama

  Cover art copyright 2014 Cho Shimayuki

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, organizations or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be reproduced or redistributed to others. If you enjoyed this book, please consider purchasing other titles from the author and encourage your friends to download their own copies from their favourite authorized retailer.

  Thank you for your support.

  To Second Chances.

  Slainte.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  …And then the asshole tried to run from me.

  “Oh, you rotten son of a…” I growled. I was pretty sure that he’d paralyzed my kidney with a lucky punch, which meant that tomorrow would be hellish and I couldn’t drink tonight if I wanted to keep the pain of the paralysis wearing off to a minimum. I hauled myself back to my feet from where I’d stumbled and took off running after him.

  My name is Blaze Tuesday. I'm a private investigator in New York. I used to be a cop, but I gave that shit up five years ago. The corruption in the system made me wanna puke, so I quit. Now, I run a fairly successful P.I. firm with my partner, Jackson Early. I'm nothin' special; I'm about five foot ten, blue eyes, grey hair that I keep cut fairly short. I'm skinny... kind of. I try to keep myself in pretty good physical condition since chasin' perps down dark alleys isn't the easiest thing in the world. I like to think that I'm pretty good lookin'; I haven't got any body mods or clockwork though, so I'm not everyone's cup of tea, but I wouldn't call myself rugged or nothin'. Modesty is my biggest virtue... Sarcasm is probably my biggest flaw.

  I’d been investigating a case for the past week and a half and I was finally getting to the point where I could call it in, give the family who had hired me some closure and stick it to the cops, again, but the kid I’d cornered just wouldn’t go down without a fight. The kid was lowlife mafia wannabe scum. It wasn’t uncommon in the city, things had always been lean and mean on the streets of New York, but things had started to get a little leaner and the people had to get a little meaner to make ends meet.

  This kid was just a nobody, trying to become a somebody in the world of organized crime. Not usually my division, but you don’t start goin’ into upscale New York residential areas and openin’ fire on a buncha unarmed civilians who may or may not have mob ties for very long before you start to get noticed.

  And this guy had been noticed by the wrong sorts of people.

  Before you start gettin’ all worried about me, lemme set the record straight - I’m not workin’ for the mob. I don’t take corporate cases. This guy had the wrong house number and he went and opened fire into the wrong family. It wasn’t a mob hit, it was a goddamn slaughterhouse. The cops were baffled, as usual. There was nothing to make the case stick out, nothing to even suggest that this was a targeted attack.

  The mob was unhappy, to put it lightly and they had put the word out that there was going to be a manhunt for the bastard trying to move into their territory. There was a reward big enough to move a family of five out of the slums and set ‘em up real nice in a proper house for anyone who could turn the guy responsible for the shootings in. Alive, of course. Boss Caivano wasn’t one to let dead bodies be made an example of. It sent the corrupt cops into a frenzy, but the corruption seemed to make their effectiveness go by the wayside and it wasn’t like anyone was getting anything done anyway. The word on the street was gettin’ around and it was a full-out manhunt in the slums. Things were getting messy real fast and I wasn’t surprised when more bodies of lowlife gangsters from the Kitchen started showin’ up in the morgue.

  Luckily for the cops, the family was actually pretty well-to-do and they were able to seek out and hire the best private eye in New York to give them some closure. I was honoured to be asked to take the case. They were frustrated by the senseless death of their young son and the cops weren’t giving them any answers, what else were they supposed to do? I didn’t blame them, they got stuck with some of the jerkwads from the Fourteenth precinct and man, I thought the corruption was bad at my old shop? These guys made the corruption I uncovered in the ranks of the Seventeenth look like bullies stealin’ lunch money in middle school.

  So I got to work. It took me almost two weeks to track the son of a bitch down, and now I was limping after him in the alleys of upscale New York, trying not to piss my pants as the kidney paralysis started to wear off, or get arrested for trespassing. I sure as hell didn’t look like a respectable citizen and it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least if some wiseass decided to call the cops on me. Again.

  I didn’t understand it, the kid was actually from pretty good stock. He wasn’t heavily modified and he lived in a suburban home. His family had no mob ties and for all intents and purposes, he was actually a well-adjusted kid. I say kid, but really, he was college age. Twenty-seven, I think? I mean, shit, he coulda almost have been my son had my life taken a different turn.

  So I ran after the kid, what else was I supposed to do? The mob had a hit out on him, the cops looking for him were more corrupt than I had ever seen, and even the cops on the other side of the damn city were looking for this kid. Everyone wanted the payday from Caivano.

  I just wanted to see some justice done that wasn’t the kind bought with mob money and the sharp end of a knife. I’m a jaded old bastard, but I’m not that jaded.

  I had no idea where I was. I wasn’t familiar with this part of the city. It was getting late. I was tired and the ache in my lower back was starting to turn into the kind of ache that you get when you wait too long to go to the head.

  “Dammit, just stop running already!” I shouted. “I’m not going to hurt you!”

  I saw the kid stumble ahead of me and I put every ounce of effort I had left in me to close the gap between us. He yelped as he saw me coming up on him and he shook his head, flipping me the bird. What a little shit.

  “No, seriously!” I shouted. “Stop running now and I promise this won’t end as badly for you as it will if someone else catches up to you before I do.”

  He flashed his middle finger at me again. “Suck on that, Pig!” he snapped.

  “Little bastard,” I muttered under my breath. I pulled back my canvas duster and reached beneath the folds of fabric to my shoulder holster. My fingers wrapped around the butt of my gun and I drew without hesitation. I took a deep breath and put on one last burst o
f speed, raising my gun and aiming at the kid’s back. I shook my head and moved my aim up and to the left. The kid was right-handed, the chances of him dodging unexpectedly left were slim to nil so I took my chance.

  The report of the shot echoed through the suburb, setting off a close-by car alarm and driving the dogs that were out for the night into a mad barking frenzy. I didn’t even know car alarms were still a thing that existed. Guess you learn something new every day.

  The gunshot did the trick though. The kid skidded to a halt, crouching with his hands over his head. I slipped my gun back into my holster and adjusted the fabric of my coat back over it. I stomped up to the kid and grabbed him by the scruff, hauling his sorry ass to his feet.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I demanded, snarling into the skinny kid’s face. “Do you always run when someone tells you to stop?”

  “You attacked me!” the kid whined.

  “Bullshit, I attacked you,” I snapped back. “You tried to hit me with a metal pipe.”

  “You were following me!”

  “Yeah, dumbass,” I pulled my badge from my pocket and flashed it in his face. “That’s what private investigators do.”

  “You’re not a cop?”

  “You’re a straight-A student ain’t ya?” I sneered, shaking him in my impotent rage.

  “You shot at me!”

  “I missed.”

  The kid let out a little whimper. “Oh God, what are you gonna do to me?”

  “What do you think?” I asked, more rhetorically than anything, but I was secretly hoping for an answer.

  He shrugged and whimpered again in response. I sighed.

  “You know you’ve really pissed off a lot of people, right?” I asked.

  The kid nodded and went limp, barely standing, he probably would have fallen over if I wasn’t holding on to his hoodie. I looked him over as we stood there in the dark with the barking dogs and wailing car alarm going off half a block away. He was scrawnier than I had thought, like he had no meat left on his bones. His eyes were sunken and they looked black in the shitty orange glow of the streetlights. His features were sharp, like he’d never known a moment of softness and there was a dangerous air about him, like a cornered dog. He didn’t try to fight me though, like he’d given up when he realized I wasn’t a cop. He looked like he was maybe half-Italian, but definitely not Goodfella material.

  “Walk an’ talk, buddy. You’ve got a lot of answering to do.” I demanded, shoving him ahead of me. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  He shrugged under my hand. “You mean like the cancer that’s eating me up?”

  Well, shit. No wonder he’d do anything to get a little attention. For all our medical miracles, cancer was still the bane of our existence. We could replace almost any organ with a ticking mechanical version of it, but we still couldn’t cure the most common diseases.

  “Do your parents know?” I asked, softening my tone just a little.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I ain’t a beneficiary,” he explained, sneering the word like it was a curse. “And I ain’t got insurance for myself, you know that shit don’t come cheap.”

  I bit my tongue, trying desperately not to correct his grammar. “But you were in school?”

  Another shrug. “Was.”

  “You flunk out?” I asked.

  “No, but student loans don’t cover medical bills.”

  “So what made you think that shootin’ up a bunch of mobsters would get you anywhere good?”

  He sighed, a long, sad exhalation. “There’s been word of new mobsters moving in on Caivano. They say the old man is dyin’ of cancer, or some shit. The families all want a piece of the action and there’s room for new blood to come in and get a piece, y’know?”

  I did know, but what he was saying didn’t make any sense. Caivano was fit as a fiddle from what I could gather and he was planning some sort of mass takeover from some of the smaller street gangs to bolster his own numbers, and to put a bigger stranglehold on the streets of New York. There was no big underground mafia movement, unless you counted the influx of new Italians coming over, or the smear campaign that the Clockwork manufacturers were running to boost loyalty as reports of defective products and religious abandonment of all things ‘unnatural’ slipped into social consciousness and made people more hesitant to let themselves be operated on. It was the same sort of scares that happened with organ transplants and vaccinations, and we were still doing those without as many complications as there used to be. There wasn’t much happening in the criminal underground as far as I knew.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry you got messed up like this, kid, but there’s got to be a better way to get the treatment you need?”

  He shrugged again.

  “You ever look into getting into one of those test groups that Wayside always runs when there’s a new drug or whatever on the market.”

  He snorted derisively. “Wayside doesn’t do cancer, you know that.”

  “Always worth a shot,” I offered.

  “Whatever, Pig.”

  I shoved him a little harder than I needed to and he stumbled but he kept quiet as we walked. We got six blocks before he opened his mouth again.

  “What’s the matter, copper? Don’t you got a car?”

  “My name’s Blaze,” I grunted. “And that’s none of your damn business.”

  I could hear the grin creeping through his voice when he answered me. “My name’s Danny, and that’s an obvious no.”

  I didn’t justify his snark with an answer.

  “So where are you walking me to?” Danny asked after another few blocks. “You gonna turn me into the family for vigilante justice?”

  “God, no. I’m not a monster.”

  Danny made a noise that might have been him trying to stifle a laugh, but I wasn’t entirely sure. “All right, so then mister good guy private eye, where are you taking me?”

  “Cop shop,” I replied flatly.

  “Oh because that’s so much better for me, isn’t it?”

  “It will be,” I promised. “I ain’t taking you to the Fourteenth. I’m takin’ you to the Seventeenth.”

  “Cops are cops,” he grumbled, bitterly.

  “Yeah, but I’m in good with the cops at the Seventeenth. Where the guys down at the Fourteenth would turn you over to Caivano to make a quick buck on that ransom that’s on your head, the guys at the Seventeenth will put your pathetic ass in a cell and make sure you get a fair trial.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I used to be one of them, and the chief there owes me big.”

  “I knew you were a pig.”

  I snorted. “Not anymore.”

  Danny walked quietly the rest of the way. He didn’t ask any more questions and his demeanour grew colder and more sullen the closer we got to the precinct. It wasn’t a particularly long walk, but by the time we got there, I felt like I’d just run a marathon.

  “Hey, Bobby!” I called to the night clerk. “I’ve got a delivery and I need the chief in here right away.”

  Bobby was a good guy, a bit younger than me, but he was solid. Never took a bribe, never even jaywalked. He nodded and waved me through, flashing the number two with his fingers. I nodded in return. Interrogation room two was open and I led Danny through the precinct to the interrogation room.

  “Sit down,” I demanded, closing the door behind us.

  Danny did, without hesitation. I took the spot across from him and we simply stared at each other for a long damn time.

  “So,” he asked finally. “What’s next?”

  I blinked. The honest naivety and worry in his voice shocked me. This wasn’t the same kid who had tried to beat me to a pulp in an alley. This was definitely not the same kid who had killed an innocent child when attempting to whack mobsters for fun. This was a kid who had lost all hope and didn’t know what was going to happen to him.

  It broke my damn heart.
>
  “Next, you get a lawyer. You give your confession, everything, The cancer, that fact that your parents don’t know, the bit about the mob rumours that spurred you on to this. All of it. But wait ’til your lawyer gets here. You’ll get a deal, hopefully. Manslaughter instead of murder one, since it was an accident.” I shrugged. “You’ll go into protective custody. Your parents will be notified. Then it’s all up to the lawyer, the DA and your jury, I’m afraid.”

  Danny nodded silently. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too, kid,” I replied with a sigh. “Me too.”

  Chapter Two

  The case with Danny ended up blowing up in my face. I did my due diligence, but having him put in protective custody wasn’t enough, and all the pretty words in the world from Chief Fredricks wasn’t enough to stop the corruption from getting to him. I got the phone call in the middle of the night. I was sleeping off a shot of whiskey or three and it took me longer than it should have to piece together what the frantic voice on the other end of the line was saying.

  From what I understood, the security detail was lax, or corrupt, and either way, Danny was beaten, mistreated and ended up with a bullet in his head before he could go to court. It was a load of crap, and Fredricks had apologized immensely to me but it didn’t help, a kid was dead after I’d promised he’d be safe until they could get him to court.

  What a downer.

  I wish that I had a more awesome description to start this story off with. You know, “it was a dark and stormy night” or something similar. The problem is that I don’t, and I’m not really one for talking in fancy words. I’d solved a case and gotten the closure the family was hoping for, and then I was left holding the bag when the kid got killed anyway. I mean, it wouldn’t have been so bad if the cancer got him, but now I was down an innocent kid, a kid who got messed up and ultimately paid the highest price for his mistakes, and up two grieving families. All they’d wanted was some answers. Danny’s family seemed worse off than the family of Danny’s victim. They didn’t get any final goodbyes. They didn’t even know that Danny was in trouble, hell, he hadn’t told them about the cancer. It was bullshit. It wasn’t fair and I wasn’t in the mood to be bothered. I wanted to dwell on it. I didn’t take loss very well, and I was definitely a sore loser.