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  DRAWING DEAD

  A novel by

  JJ DeCeglie

  PRAISE FOR ‘DRAWING DEAD’

  “A terrifying portrait of a man destined to lose, Drawing Dead is at once stark and lyrical, with the ghosts of Jim Thompson and James M. Cain whispering all over the pages. Keep an eye out for JJ Deceglie, a stunning new voice in crime fiction.”

  --Jon Bassoff, publisher of New Pulp Press

  “An impressive, memorable voice, with dark echoes of Bruen and Sallis and Ellroy. You won’t soon forget this book.”

  --Charles Ardai, publisher of Hard Case Crime

  “Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia’s most exciting new novelists.”

  --Adrian McKinty, author of “Dead I Well May Be”, “Fifty Grand, “Falling Glass” and “The Cold, Cold Ground”

  “Drawing Dead is classic pulp with some generous fucking helpings of despair, graphic sex, and dark humor, a tight neo-noir that’s not afraid to go full-dark when it counts. If that sounds like your piping hot cuppa, dear reader, go and fucking get yourself some.”

  --Nerd of Noir, Spinetingler Magazine

  “JJ DeCeglie’s ‘Drawing Dead’ is a whirlpool that drags you down into a delirious take on a classic private eye story, as told through the bleary eyes of a half-mad barfly. Smart, funny and completely addictive, Drawing Dead is like staggering into a booze and piss stinking alleyway for a knee trembler and a mugging all at the same time. Yes. it’s that good!”

  --Paul D. Brazill, author of ‘Drunk on the Moon’ & ‘Brit Grit’.

  For Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford & John Dahl.

  Jim, a wonderful, wonderful, awe-soaked, throat-grabbing introduction.

  Chuck, you showed me that there was even more than I thought there ever could be.

  John, please man, please...make a couple more huh.

  Drawing Dead

  Word type: verb

  To be in a position such that no card that falls on any street could give a player the winning hand. For example, a player who held Q-Q against his opponent’s A-K on a board of A-A-2-2 is said to be “drawing dead” against his opponent’s aces full deuces. There is no card in the deck that can give him the pot.

  Spring slipped like a virgin into the bed of the valley. Now cloying, now rebellious, she struggled and wept against the brown giant. She touched him with fearful fingers that lingered more and more with each touching; she stroked him, brazenly. She gasped, then panted against him, and at last sighed and her breath came warm and even. And the harlot winter slunk from the couch, jeering.

  Jim Thompson – Heed the Thunder

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER 1

  I wasn’t always an asshole.

  Not at all. There were times when the world burnt bright brother.

  Golden glowing days of pure delight, of cool breezes, cooler beer, the sweetest, blondest girl you ever knew and cigar smoke that tasted even better than the expensive coffee you drank down with it.

  Oh yes sir, the sun was syrup.

  The earth dark chocolate melting in your mouth, wonderfully fecund in your nose.

  Her hair, I’ll tell you, it was the palette of an afternoon sky exploding into neon confetti, shining in flashes as the heavens turned dim, raining down on me in warm spooled ribbons like youth never lost, her saliva tingling on my tongue and buzzing on my cock.

  But like everything else, those days are in the past.

  The good of your life usually is.

  That’s just the way it is, no use in fighting it.

  In existence, this one anyhow, well mine at least, it’s always odds against. The house forever wins. King a minute, better off buried the next. You can say I’m wrong. You can say it all you like. Won’t change a thing.

  Never has.

  Never will.

  It’s just one long run to the grave, everyone grabbing what they can on the way, ignoring what is more obvious than perhaps anything else. Even if you win you lose. And if you don’t understand that then you never will nothing.

  I suppose the best place to start is a month before I turn thirty. Heady days of drunken solitude and debauch brought on by a tragedy that struck me like a sledgehammer in my sleep. I never saw it coming, you never do.

  It lodged in my skull prearranged, a tumour no doctor could cure. Following it I passed my days quietly, cruelly, effortless in a fit of quiet dread, bothering nothing but the furthest reaches of my deadened soul, and pushing the limits of my numbed tissue.

  An animal in its filthy and deserving cage thrashing.

  A waking nightmare sloshed through waist deep, in a continuous hangover remedied every morning by my favourite drink of them all, the next one.

  Sleeping badly during days, drinking hard nights. Mostly naked and barely eating. No phone. Few friends. I smoked cigars by the window and when told not to by the landlord went off the handle about it. There was pornography. In time there were low-priced hookers.

  If I did go out it was only to gamble, only just down the street and only at night. If I’m honest with you, I don’t really remember most it. It sits mostly blank in my mind, flashing intermittent as a warning light on the dark sea would. Distant, yet distinct, and completely and utterly unavoidable.

  All I ever saw was her pretty young face. It hung in my eyes the way the sun does after you look at that son of bitch for a few seconds too many. Most all of her did this. Those breasts sculpted in lifelike flesh from her neat and skintight ribs. Her lips like swollen glossed jewels. That perfect little silken pussy. And the litres of blood in the ever still and pinkened bath water. The way she’d run a three-inch cut up each wrist and how the blood had stop pulsing but now sat in thick strings from the wounds coagulated like the underwater incomplete webs of a murderous wounded spider.

  How the first spurt had shot from her and landed some on the bath and some on her luscious left thigh. How it had run with gravity down and into the waiting fluid. Slicing with her right hand she firstly took to the left one. And by God, how even after the horror of that, of the appalling hemorrhaging fountain she’d created, she took care to do exactly the same to the precious and petite right one. A little more jagged and gory than the left. No spurt 'cause the pressure had run itself out during the first sluicing, instead seeping thick throbs trapped between her bent knee and the bath in a gruesome deep red dam. And how she’d broken into my place by shattering a window, and how she’d performed the severe procedure in my bath, with my knife, all naked and young and wonderful and dead.

  CHAPTER 2

  I’m a gambler. I was that way before she was gone and I stayed that afterward. There’s no use not telling ya, in fact if I don’t we can’t move on ahead with this insipid heap of words. The world had gone to smash. After the cops and the parents and all the crying and wailing and sobbing, after the funeral I never went to and the blood spots I’d find every now and then in the clearest morning light, yeah, outside of the booze and the pussy I paid for the card-room was my one and only solace. The teat I sucked at when oblivion threatened to yank me under.

  I owed already. About ten grand give or take. I�
�d walked there every other night, drunk as a sailor on shore leave. Nights of serious drinking. It was about six blocks down and maybe three over. Down the highway a stretch, then a right turn, settled in among the workshops and tenements. The room sat in the back of strip joint that doubled as an illegal whorehouse. Motherfuckers made you get into the room via the back of the joint, across a shitty bare-assed gravel car park, weeds and rubbish mostly. Potholes too, I almost broke my god-damned neck at least ten times getting my sorry ass through that minefield. Wouldn’t even give you a peek at the girls on the walk through, no way, no day, the degenerate gamblers could only enter through the asshole of the joint. And sure it made sense 'cause of security reasons and whatever else, but I was drunk, and had a dick, and therefore it pissed me off even worse than I usually was.

  Inside were a dingy four walls painted bruise purple and couple of felt tables where you did your balls. You could still smell the condoms and sweat and the suggestion of pussy and cheap perfume. It obviously used to be a fuck room. They should have let you smoke in there to cover that shit up, but in some ass backwards twist of red-tape fate the proprietor deemed this unsafe. He ran the risk of unlawful poker and whores but smoking a cigar while you lost your money was wholly untenable. Don’t think I didn’t bring this up with the prick either. But I think I would have had a much better chance making my finely worded argument had I not owed like a stuck pig, so I just called him a duplicitous shit-stain and went on swaying and smiling back to the siren call of the tables. The joke as always was right the fuck on me.

  You didn’t see the card room straight up: there was the anteroom, half the size of the other one which you had no choice but to trail through first. This was where you traded up money for chips on entry, with a bit of luck the opposite on exit. It was also where you sniveled and begged and hopefully eventually borrowed. The vig was a fucking nightmare, but I was a drunk, past caring and didn’t really plan on losing.

  You got past Jimmy at the front door and then you dealt with the Croatian Sensation and the snarling bitch he kept by his side. The night I’m speaking of right now had some subtle differences running to its usual flavor. One – I owed ten large, and just showing my face there was running me the very likely chance of catching a well deserved and somewhat wanted beating, and two - the bitch was gone, the Sensation didn’t have his hot as hell stripper girlfriend by his side waiting to play her usual “kick-you-while-you're-down” flirting bullshit that made the Sensation stare through me like he was planning where to dump my body and had been at it for weeks.

  Instead of the bitch with her vodka infused Eastern European accent and that shadow of hair running up to her bellybutton from her panties, there was a younger girl, carrying on her an out of place sweetness, just sitting there with her eyes flicking about all nervous, wearing denim cut-offs and a bright yellow tank-top with no bra. She smiled at me when I walked in. The Sensation must have been out back and I took the chance to smile as best as I could back at her. She sat beside the counter on a bar-stool and looked at the ground and then back at me smiling at her like I’d just discovered El Dorado. I gave her one of the best I had. She was bustling with it. They do that. With me they do. Young and dumb, their cunts just aching to be full of my rousing cum.

  Thank the lord for all this goddamned pussy.

  Did I mention I’m as handsome as a motherfucker? Did I? Well I should have…and my name is Jack.

  Yeah she was like sunrise over the Garden of Eden. I was guessing eighteen years of age, with eyes of sapphire. Cool as melting glaciers right there before me. Every bit of her set and or pushing as it should. Liquorish colored shining hair and skin like vanilla fucking ice-cream. The Sensation wrenched me from my reverie. I could have punched him in the damn throat for doing it too.

  Well if it isn’t my favourite fucking loser.

  Sensation I’d thought we’d been over this.

  He was a very tall, well-built guy, sorta good looking I guess, like most Croatians he took pleasure in drinking, laughing and fucking, so we had much in common. Sensation was a name I’d made for him. He didn’t care for it, which was the only reason I went on calling him by it.

  Over what?

  If I want your opinion on anything, I’ll just beat it out of you.

  I stole that from some obscure z-grade Chuck Norris flick I’d watched whilst drunk with a semi-conscious whore at beginnings of a stale dawn. Sensation was too stupid to know this, or much anything else.

  You didn’t come here to be a smartass did you Jack? I know you didn’t do that…Come on. Please.

  I got nothing for ya. Not a thing pal. I’m tapped.

  You owe ten Jack.

  He let that sit for dramatic effect.

  Ten.

  Then added that to top it the fuck off.

  Yeah well, I got a proposition for you Sensation.

  A proposition? Whaddaya wanna do? That sounds a little intimate Jack, you wanna fuck me? Pay me back in homosexual activity and the like. No. You owe ten, and that’s not even figuring the fucking juice.

  Give me another ten. Let me back in game. Another ten…

  Another ten?

  I could tell that my brazen ability to be an asshole had piqued his interest. He was either pondering the possibility of giving me the money, or thinking to himself just how easily he could kick my ass.

  What can I tell you Sensation? They’re my fingers, my legs.

  Jack, if you don’t pay us back our money in a timely and orderly fashion, it won’t be fingers and legs. It’ll be a life.

  He was talking tough but straight. He hesitated a moment but I was pretty sure he was gonna go for it. What I wasn’t sure of, but was pretty pleased about, was that he hadn’t mentioned that he thought I was mondo drunk. Bourbon bombed and cut loose of the fury. That said I do hold my liquor like a muscle bound bull in heat.

  Whatever you win on the ten tonight comes straight back to me and we subtract from the principal, plus any of the ten you may decide to give back on top of that. Conversely, if you fuck it up and lose it all then you owe twenty straight. We'll make the first collect in three days, just to see if you get it and if you have nothing we'll fuck you. Stiff us twice and we'll fuck you again. Three times and you're out Jack. Nothing will ever hurt again.

  That was a real nice speech Sensation, you must practice that shit in mirror...Can I have the money?

  He laughed at that. It was amusing to him how much of jackass I could be.

  Yeah. Daisy…

  Daisy, made sense for her to be called that, a flower fulsome and dazzling against the heaped up piles of refuse.

  This is Jack. Get him ten large in chips, and add it in the owe column before you get back here.

  Daisy walked off into a small further back room, couldn’t have been three metres away but the Sensation knew what I knew.

  Love watching her leave.

  All I could do was nod in like sentiment. Watching her every slight swing son. He went on unabated.

  You drop ten of mine three days ago and then come back asking for ten more to win it all back. You either got a huge set of balls or you’re just some sort of asshole.

  It’s the same thing.

  Well yeah, it can be…

  He saw me watching Daisy leaning over the table, counting out chips, her ass jutting out like God himself, and he took a long look too and then whipped round and came back at me again.

  My main concern here is that maybe you don’t give a shit if you live, or if you die, 'cause I’ve seen that, it happens. I don’t know exactly what your story is Jack, but you could be there, you could. If that is the case, my money is in jeopardy, and my money is king here. You understand? So my question to you is…Do ya?

  How’s a man to know to know a thing like that?

  He just does Jack.

  What are you… looking out for me?

  I’m looking out for my money.

  I took a breath and weighed up which way to play it. Over his shoulder
Daisy was still bending over that table, blonde see-through sparks fizzing off her forever legs, sprouted out those red heels she wore then settling into the gleaming twin fleshy wholesomeness, the purity of it shone through in my polished speech.

  I recognize, I do, it's business, and you know what I sometimes do for a living, you know so I won’t pretend like you don’t, I find guys like me for guys like you when they miss those important payments, you know that, what can I say to you, man to man, let’s try this, when I look at her, back there, ass out and hair down over her unclothed shoulders, it warms me, you know what I’m saying, I find it enthralling…that sound like a man about to cut his own wrists.

  As soon as the words had left my mouth, a dreaded pain shot up through me, like poison being gushed into my vessels unwilling. The Sensation didn’t seem to notice, probably he didn’t care. He just looked back over his shoulder once more and gawked as Daisy wandered back on over. Chips in her pretty sky blue finger-nailed hands and a drop dead gorgeous smile on her maw.