Dead Fall by Matt Hilton

 
    D EAD F ALL
    A Joe Hunter Story
    T HERE WAS ONLY one way up to Mick O’Neill’s penthouse apartment on Davis Islands, South Tampa. Two ways down. You could take the express elevator up, which required use of a key to access the private floor. Coming down you could also use the elevator. Or—option two—fall sixteen stories to the unforgiving sidewalk if O’Neill’s protection team tossed you off the roof. No one but a suicidal fool would choose option two, but it appeared that this was the case with William Murray.
    Murray was a fool but I’d never tagged him as being suicidal. He enjoyed life too much. It was because he valued his hide that he’d made the mistake of answering the summons to O’Neill’s lofty pad. Murray had angered the Irishman, but thought he could charm his way out of a kneecapping. Sadly, when he’d hit the ground at one hundred and twenty miles per hour, his kneecaps were the least of it. He’d burst on impact and there was little left of him that was recognizable. Apparently, if the Medical Examiner’s report was to be believed, he’d broken ninety-two percent of the bones in his body. CSI examiners had used tools akin to snow shovels while removing him from the sidewalk.
    Not a pretty image.
    William Murray was a low-level street hawker, his wares not entirely lawful, and beneath my usual circle of friends, but he was likable in his own way. He didn’t deserve ending up as sidewalk pizza for Mick O’Neill’s amusement.
    It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened up on the sixteenth floor.
    Murray had gone in, cap in hand, tried to lighten the mood somewhat with a self-deprecating joke or two, but his geniality hadn’t won him any friends. Mick O’Neill was someone I’d been hearing a lot about lately, and none of it had anything to do with his humanitarian ways. Murray would have been slapped around, threatened perhaps, and then O’Neill would have lost any patience he had with the man and ordered that Murray take an impromptu swan dive from the roof.
    That’s the way the cops believed that events transpired, and I for one was with them. However, there was no evidence, no witnesses coming forward to offer their support. In fact, all four men and two women in O’Neill’s penthouse at the time of Murray’s death swore that they hadn’t seen him. The first they knew of his “suicide” was when the sirens of the first responders arrived on the scene and one of O’Neill’s “home helpers” took a look over the balcony. O’Neill had extended his assistance to the police investigators, throwing open his home to them, and no trace evidence had been found to place Murray in the apartment. The cops knew O’Neill was lying, and even pulled him—plus his pals—in for questioning, but with no evidence to incriminate him or any of the others in Murray’s death, they were released without charge, and O’Neill was offered a humble apology for wasting his valuable time.
    The police moved on.
    They understood that they couldn’t make anything stick to O’Neill, and to try was a waste of their resources, their time, and their energy. Their best strategy was to hope that O’Neill would slip up another time, and they’d send him down for this future crime. Typically, I didn’t have the patience to wait.
    I’ve never been known to keep my peace. I’m impulsive. When something bites me, I bite back. And right now the fact that O’Neill was smirking over the crushed body of a friend was gnawing at me like a junkyard dog on a bone.
    My initial response was to front the Irishman in his lair, then beat the truth out of him before letting him feel the breeze in his thick mane of silvery hair as he plummeted to earth. To do that I’d also have to send his protection detail off the roof, because no way would they be blind