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  TWO IN THE HEAD

  A Thriller

  Eric Beetner

  PRAISE FOR TWO IN THE HEAD

  “Two In the Head is a straight shot between the eyes. A gangbusters plot, punch-drunk pace, and gut-punch action propel this black hearted thriller from Eric Beetner.” —J. Todd Scott, author of The Far Empty and Lost River

  PRAISE FOR ERIC BEETNER

  “If Beetner had been around in the 1950s, he could’ve had a nice career writing for Gold Medal or Dell First Editions, and that’s a high compliment from me.” —Bill Crider, author of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series

  “Eric Beetner is the standard by which all current hardboiled and noir writers should be judged.” —Paul Bishop, author of Lie Catchers

  “Beetner is an old school talent, a crime writer’s crime writer like Gil Brewer (although, in my humble opinion, he’s better than Brewer), who writes stuff that is fast and funny and dark all at once.” —Jake Hinkson, author of Hell on Church Street and No Tomorrow

  “Few contemporary writers do justice to the noir tradition the way Eric Beetner does. Others try to emulate and mimic; Beetner just takes the form and cuts his own jagged, raw and utterly readable path.” —Gar Anthony Haywood, author of Assume Nothing, Cemetery Road and the Aaron Gunner series

  Copyright © 2021 by Eric Beetner

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Eric Beetner

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Two in the Head

  About the Author

  Books by the Author

  Preview from Final Cut by Colin Campbell

  Preview from Wrecked by Tony Black

  Preview from Suicide Squeeze by TG Wolff

  I should have died that night, and in a way…I did.

  THAT NIGHT

  The blast did a hell of a lot more damage to the wall I parked my car next to than it did to me. Well, sort of.

  I pushed a pile of bricks off my chest and tried to sit up, my legs still buried under a bricklayers nightmare of jumbled and broken rectangles. I must have blacked out, but it couldn’t have been for more than a minute. My car spat big orange whips of fire and dust still fell from the remains of the carport wall. From my back I could see the slumping sunshade overhang take another dip toward the ground with a crack of masonry and I didn’t feel all that safe underneath.

  That would suck to survive a bomb explosion only to be killed by poor roof construction.

  My head pounded, my ears rang and my body ached all over, especially my breasts which took a hit from what I think was a hubcap right as my car exploded. Parking so close to that brick wall saved my life. It acted as a sort of blast shield and although I got covered in heavy bricks and dust, their attempt to kill me was a failure.

  I pushed the bricks off my legs and forced myself to my knees. Something dug into my ass and I reached around into my back pocket and pulled out my cell phone. Cracked case, shattered screen, no numbers to enter my passcode and wake her up. That’s when I saw two things: a pair of guys walking from the far end of the parking lot looking at me like I was a zombie or something, and another figure, a woman, standing on the other side of the burning car and looking about as dazed as I felt.

  She was the same size as me, same hair, same build. I knew I should be worried about the two guys walking toward me because even through the smoke I could see the confusion on their faces, wondering why I wasn’t dead. But I was too interested in the woman.

  She turned and her face lit up in the firelight, bending in warps of heat. Somehow the fire glow looked good on her, like it was the only lighting she should ever have. As I looked at her face I started to think about concussions and brain damage. Something sure as hell went wrong with my head, my eyes, the whole shebang.

  The woman standing in a red-orange pool of color—was me.

  Well, she looked like me. A whole hell of a lot like me. She even had my same outfit on. But, I knew it was crazy. Just the brain injury talking, or seeing. Hallucinating after a head trauma was a bad sign, right?

  I set down my hands so I was on all fours. Too early to be too upright. I lifted my head and looked at her again. Through the fire her image wavered and I knew it had to be a trick of the light. I didn’t have time to work it all out. My brain was working slow, if it was really working at all. And more urgently—our two friends arrived.

  Young Latinos, mid-20s, dressed casually as if planting a car bomb was something they did alternating Saturdays of each month. Blow some lady up, go catch a flick. No big deal. Fat semi-automatics sprouted from the waistlines of their low-riding pants inviting jokes about over-compensating for something.

  They didn’t act like they had seen the other lady. All eyes on me, the rage of their failed bomb. I tried to stand, but my legs weren’t quite into the idea. I spit, trying to clear the masonry dust from my mouth.

  The two men looked down on me with utter confusion. I looked back at them like, hey I’m as surprised as you I didn’t die in the blast, but wait until you turn around and see another of me. Please tell me you see it too. I don’t want to have permanent ghosts in my vision.

  “You are one tough cockroach to kill, lady,” said the fat one on the left. He said it with something resembling respect.

  I tried reaching into my bottomless bag of retorts and insults I saved for scum like him, but I came up blank. The needle skipping grooves in my brain was different than regular blanking out. A feeling I can’t describe, but it was as if I couldn’t insult him. Not that I couldn’t think of anything bad to say, but my mouth wouldn’t have let me say it even if I did have the perfect zinger. Even a not-so-perfect “fuck off” caught somewhere deeper than my throat, down around my intestines or something.

  I got to one knee so I looked less like a sorority girl barfing up a night of too much vodka and more like a soccer player taking a knee to get bitched out by a coach. As my brain cleared a little I remembered my gun. Standard issue—all DEA agents carried them. That came back to me too. I am Samantha Whelan, special agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency. I have a gun and I know how to use it.

  Of course that gun sat in the glove box of my car. I knew better than to walk in to a meeting with Calder and Rizzo packing a Beretta.

  I moved toward the car, reaching out for the door, and then my muscles stopped obeying orders. At first I thought my arm was caught on something. I tried again. Move fast or these guys will finish the job up close and personal. Old school cartel style.

  But I couldn’t. I froze up solid as Lot’s wife. That damn feeling again. My body wouldn’t let me reach for my gun.

  And it wasn’t just that. In some deep and cobweb-filled part of my brain where you keep all the stuff you know you know but don’t have to think about knowing, right next to riding a bike and saying excuse me after you burp, my brain understood something new. Shooting people is wrong. And I couldn’t do something wrong. Instantly I knew if I did something as small and stupid as raising a middle finger to these two, my body would intercept the mess
age and set a match to it, drop it in an ashtray and never let it get through the dark catacombs of my mind.

  I was worried. Some connection in my brain seemed to have severed in the blast. Maybe that hubcap hit more than just my chest. Maybe it and a few bricks zinged off my head and knocked loose a few wires.

  Understanding didn’t do me a lot of good against the two guys who were drawing their guns on me. I got the impression how I died wasn’t important, only that I did. The car bomb wasn’t any sort of big construct, just what they happened to pull out of the hat today. A .45 round to the brain would do fine.

  But they didn’t figure on the imaginary lady.

  I don’t know what part of the car she hit them with but it was long, hard and on fire.

  The fatter guy on the left got it first. The flaming metal sword slapped the side of his head and he tipped into his partner, knocking him off balance. I sank down on my butt in my nest of broken bricks and watched her work, thinking again how much she looked like me. My brain seemed to be projecting some sort of wish fulfillment. This badass girl was what I wanted to look like. Cracking skulls on some bad guys and looking like she was walking a Paris runway while doing it. Apparently violence was not off limits for her. She really seemed to enjoy it.

  Her foot came down on the fat guy’s face, pinning him to the concrete while his hair burned and sent noxious fumes into the air. The toe of her black boots pinched his cheeks so his cries of pain and pleas to extinguish his hair were muted and easily ignored. She stomped her other boot down on his gun hand, pinning him at the wrist and rendering his weapon useless.

  Using fat boy as a stage, she raised the flaming hunk of car and plunged it down, Xena Warrior Princess style, into the skinny one’s chest. He squawked and then quickly went quiet.

  She let go the strip of metal and it stood up straight, his chest making a perfect Christmas tree stand for what looked like a post-holiday disaster. She bent down and took the fat guy’s arm, which still held the gun he was too panicked to use, and bent his elbow back towards him. That would have hurt enough, but then she wrapped her hand around his and made him fire six rounds, point blank, into his own chest.

  I flinched with each pop of the gun. I could feel the heat from the car part which had caught the skinny guy’s clothes on fire.

  For the first time, she looked at me. She didn’t speak. I hadn’t fully accepted that she was real. What she did to those guys was real enough, but maybe I’d conjured them too. I wondered if every woman I saw from now on in life would have my face. They’d write medical journal articles about me, like the man who thought his wife was a hat.

  The hate came off her hotter than the burning man in front of me. Not hate for me, hate for everything. I felt an odd kinship with her, whoever she was, and not only because she’d saved my life. And not only because my brain was tricking me into thinking we looked the same. There was an unspoken radio connection between us. The moment I felt it and realized what it was, I grew scared of it. The intensity of her anger. The unbridled rage came off her like the flames from the bomb. Then I realized, it was the flames from the bomb. Of course I felt heat, I was surrounded by it. I shook my head to clear the fog, but it did nothing.

  Something popped on the car and a new bloom of flame lit the underside of the carport, bathing us both in a white-orange glow. The tiny explosion pushed enough air upward so the tenuous roof gave way and started to fall. I reached out a hand for her to help me up.

  She turned her back and began walking away.

  I forced my leg to obey and crouch-ran out of the rubble like a Cro-Magnon woman first leaving the cave. Behind me the cinder block and masonry carport collapsed. More cement dust rose, becoming an orange glowing ball in the firelight, as the fatter of my two would-be assassins was buried along with the rest of my car and my gun inside the glove box. Hey, at least it put the fire out on that guy’s hair.

  I stumbled forward no more elegantly than the roof had come down. I willed myself to stand upright and I watched her march across the parking lot back to the building we stood outside.

  Surely this was all a split second mind trick as I lay dying in the pile of bricks. The falling roof would have crushed me for good and I could stop living this purgatory nightmare and be done with it.

  But my body still ached, the fire still burned and she still walked. And I knew exactly where she was going.

  That’s gonna take some explaining.

  TIME TO EXPLAIN

  Any DEA agent worth a damn, meaning they’ve spent some time in the field and not an entire career chained to a desk, has someone in the world gunning for them. Unless you totally suck at your job, I guess. If you’ve put someone away or somehow stood between them and the bundles of cash on the far side of a drug deal, they want you dead.

  I get it. Totally understand. If someone was extending a hand to me with, oh, say half a million dollars in it, and then some asshole comes along and snatches it away and tells me not only are they keeping the money but, by the way, I’m going to jail—yeah, I’d be pissed.

  Those people are out there, with me in their sights, because I’m damn good at my job.

  But that’s not why they wanted me dead that night.

  Two years in the army to get my basics and then straight into the academy. I’d been thinking FBI all along but when I met with a DEA recruiter it sounded so much more, I don’t know, front lines I guess. This country’s got a drug problem in case you didn’t know. I’d never in a million years be downsized out of a job. Much more likely to catch a bullet than to retire at sixty-five.

  Just the way I like it. (I’m my Daddy’s girl, what can I say?)

  So I join at 22 and now it’s six years later and I’m what they call a rising star. An agent with promise. I’ll take it. Getting any kind of praise from your superiors around here is harder than castrating a bull with a butter knife. Did I mention I’m originally from Texas?

  Also a given in this job: the pay is shit considering the work we do and you will be offered bribes, deals, kickbacks, payoffs and hush money.

  So fine, I took some. Not at lot…at first.

  Okay, I’ve done some things I’m not too proud of. My major benefactors are a pair of brothers. Calder and Rizzo. Twins, but they couldn’t be more different. They run a rather large offshoot of a Mexican cartel; Calder and Rizzo in charge of the North-of-the-border operations.

  They’re well know in DEA circles and we can never catch them with anything firm enough to prosecute. So, tell me, am I the only one on the payroll? Are you stupid?

  They got to me first they way they get to most of us. I went in on a bust, they got the upper hand and before they killed me they offered me a deal.

  Before that they offered my partner a deal. Picture both of us strapped to chairs in an under construction hi-rise after hours. Cement floors, stacks of drywall waiting to be installed, sleeping table saws and nail-guns umbilically connected to hydraulic pumps. There we were in what was to be a corner office for some desk jockey middle manager who would never know underneath his industrial carpet were blood stains on his subfloor.

  My partner’s name was Jimmy. Notice I said was.

  It wasn’t Calder and Rizzo themselves offering up any deal. They never get their hands dirty. I’d be willing to bet they don’t even wipe their own asses the way they’re so paranoid about getting any stink on themselves. It’s two middle managers of a different stripe offering us the chance to save ourselves if we agree to go have a sit down with the two top dogs and see what we can trade for our lives.

  Jimmy—team leader, twelve-year vet, Captain America in a Men’s Warehouse suit—says no. I end up with tiny bits of Jimmy on my jacket, a two hundred dollar leather bolero number I loved and made me look badass. Fuck what you’ve heard, sexism is alive and well in our government institutions. I can outshoot, outfight, outfuck and outwit ninety percent of the DEA agents with a dick. Of that ninety percent, a hundred percent think
I can’t.

  Minus one because of Jimmy.

  So my fate is written up the arm of my jacket in flecks of blood and one nasty bit of skull with hair still attached. When they asked again, what was I supposed to do?

  I had a meeting. It went well. Sort of like a job interview, sort of like a deal with the devil. Sign here and I’ll make you famous. More like, agree to fuck over your agency and we won’t kill you, but we will pay you more out of our pocket change than you can make in a year with your cute little alphabet job.

  So I snitched. Little stuff. I hardly even felt bad at first.

  I’d tip them to a raid here, a phone tap there. I’d conveniently lose a file or fingerprint records from time to time. They even threw me a bone or two and gave out a few quid pro quos in the form of guys they wanted to be rid of who I got to bust to keep my record up and who almost always died suddenly while awaiting arraignment.

  It became a lovely arrangement.

  Then two things happened. I met a man. Then Calder and Rizzo upped the ante.

  The man I met is Lucas Royston, my fiancé. He works in the DA’s office on the drug task force. His main target—Calder and Rizzo.

  We met in the line of duty. He deposed me and two nights later I deposed him of his clothes. (wink) A roll in the hay, a romp in the sack, call it what you want but I saw it as temporary, not exclusive and not meant to last. A few things though: he’s hot. Abs like an underwear model. Oh, and he literally modeled underwear in college. For a cheesy catalog and they were awful tighty-whiteys, but still.

  Then, on top, Lucas is simply the best guy I’ve ever met and one of the first real men, y’know? He romanced me. He listened to me. He thought I looked sexy when I did my Krav Maga. He wasn’t a pussy and didn’t let me win when we played racquetball. Can’t tell you how much of a turn-on that is.