Paid in Spades

Helms Richard

Description

Paid in Spades is a 2020 Shamus Award Nominee.

Thriller Award-winning knight-errant Pat Gallegher (Juicy Watusi, Wet Debt) returns in this steamy, action-drenched New Orleans tale. A failed seminarian, retired forensic psychologist, and disgraced college professor, Gallegher left security behind to become a jazz cornetist in a dive bar off Toulouse Street in New Orleans. To balance the flimsy scales of his brittle karma, Pat Gallegher now finds the irretrievable and protects those who have nowhere left to turn.

Gallegher owes Cabby Jacks a debt that can never be repaid, and now Jacks has disappeared. The only clues to his whereabouts are scribbles in an appointment book-a name and a time. At the same time, Gallegher's girlfriend, social worker Merlie Comineau, has asked him to find a young girl's father who needs to give permission for minor surgery, or the girl might be placed in foster care. Juggling two cases, Gallegher encounters an itinerant guitarist with a dangerous past, opportunistic federal agents, a shotgun-toting landlord, hostile oil pipeline workers, Brazilian smugglers, a bumbling private eye, manipulative billionaires, and a diabolical conspiracy. With only his dwindling luck to protect him, any step in this minefield might be Gallegher's last!

Sujets

• Nueva Orleans
• ACTION
• Hardboiled
• New Orleans
• Mystery
• Richard Helms
• Thriller
• La Nouvelle-Orléans

Informations

• Publié par: American Blackguard, Inc.
• Date de parution: 12 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780978842765
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Contents
Praise for series
Prologue
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
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
About the Author


Praise for series
“For fans of noir mysteries, Joker Poker offers a hearty concoction of violence, intrigue, sex, and even a little articulate humor!”
- The Library Journal
“Richard Helms can spin a tale, and he’s created some truly intriguing supporting characters in Joker Poker , well worth a return visit!”
- Thrilling Detective

“The seminary-trained Irish musician-cum-profiler Pat Gallegher steps out of retirement to smartly solve his third mystery in Richard Helms’ tale of serial murder, Juicy Watusi . The plot is solid, traditional hardboiled fare, and even better is the middle-aged investigator’s snappy observations about the French Quarter’s characters.”
- Publishers Weekly
Wet Debt is fast-paced and well-written with the gritty kind of straight-up dialogue one expects in noir detective fiction. Readers will notice echoes of Hammett here! There’s no lack of mystery and action. For readers of the hardboiled genre, I recommend Pat Gallegher and Wet Debt !”
- Mystery Scene Magazine



PAID IN SPADES

Published 2019 by Clay Stafford Books
Paid in Spades . Copyright © by 2019 Richard Helms.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Front cover image by Isabella Negrotto
Book design by Clay Stafford Books
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictiously.
Inquiries should be addressed to:
Clay Stafford Books
P.O. Box 680686
Franklin, TN 37068
www.ClayStaffordBooks.com
ISBN: 978-0-9788427-3-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-9788427-6-5 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number 2018960147
Printed in the United States of America.




PAID IN SPADES
A Pat Gallegher Novel
by
Richard Helms





Other titles in series
Joker Poker
Voodoo That You Do
Juicy Watusi
Wet Debt


For Jerry Healy
Paying it forward . . .



Prologue
One thing about being in a recovery program, you meet the most interesting people.
Cabby Jacks and I couldn’t have been more different. I had come up a child of privilege, in a decent home and a decent neighborhood. I’d had a great education—several of them, in fact. I’d had a chance, squandered as it might have been, to make something of myself.
Cabby, on the other hand, was always from the wrong side of the tracks. His own mother told him he was the kind of kid she didn’t want her other kids hanging with.
Out of school at sixteen, Cabby worked the back end of a boxing gym handing out towels during business hours and polishing the boxers’ knobs after hours, all before age eighteen. Did his first tour in the slam a year later—after cutting up a guy during a bad dope deal over in the Desire housing projects—and sweated out the entire fourteen months bent over at the waist.
Cabby tried to pull things back together when he got out at twenty-one, but by then the call of easy, sleazy money was too loud for him to screen out with yearnings for a straight and narrow life.
Maybe it was some kind of luck that paired him with Mookie Schneider and got him into the mobile poker game business. Mookie set up the games, contacted players he’d heard were visiting New Orleans, and let them know there was good money to be won in a certain hotel room off Poydras Street. Cabby was hired to make sure the players got to the game. That was how he got the name Cabby.
Eventually, Mookie let him into the room to help keep the table clean, refresh the drinks and make the sandwiches, sometimes order up some real food from room service. These games could go on for two or three days, depending on how the cards were falling.
For a long time, Mookie wouldn’t get into the game. He was more like a host, assuring all the players were well-tended. Cabby became his number one guy after a year or so. The money was good, the work was easy, and the games got bigger and longer.
That was how I met Cabby. I hit New Orleans about eight years ago at the end of a long downward spiral and in the grips of the worst midlife crisis in human history. I’d been a seminary student, a forensic psychologist, and a college professor—three tragically failed careers in twenty years.
Maybe I had big ideas of making a living as a gambler.
Maybe I was a little delusional.
In any case, I’d had a good, long run of luck at the green felt and had begun to light up the radar screens of guys like Mookie, who approached me one night as I strolled off the Flamingo riverboat, my jacket pockets stuffed with hundreds and twenties.
Next thing I knew, I was sitting in a penthouse room at the Hilton, knocking back Chivas like it was lemonade and watching some real pros gobble up my stake at the rate of five large a hand.
This was months before I was stupid enough to believe I could cover a big marker. I was in the early stages of the gold fever. I still had enough sense to know when the pockets were empty, the night was over.
Oh, well.
Easy come, easy go.
Two years later, I’d advanced to Stage Three Addiction. I’d allowed myself to start piling up some serious gambling debts. Each time, I told myself I’d hit another streak and pay everything off.
There were plenty of stories. Eddie Sakatch had gone in the hole a hundred grand to Lucho Braga. A year later he bought a whole building in the Quarter, turned it into a bed and breakfast, and retired from the game. Guys like Eddie were legends. Every guy like me who was nothing but double-down fodder knew , in his heart of hearts, it was only a matter of time before he hit it the way Eddie Sakatch had.
The loan sharks could see us coming a mile away.
I attended my first Gamblers Anonymous meeting one week after I went to work collecting debts for Justin Leduc. I was in to him for twenty thousand, with no real hope of ever paying it down. I figured the only way I could put a positive spin on the situation was to see to it I never— never —hit the tables again.
I sat through tale after pitiful tale of wasted opportunities and broken lives, becoming more despondent as I saw my life reflected in each new speaker. Eventually, things wound down and the meeting broke up. I hadn’t stood to speak. I figured I could sit in the back, see how things worked, and maybe participate a few meetings down the road when I felt more comfortable.
It was a long meeting. I’d skipped dinner. I was supposed to go on stage at Holliday’s, the bar where I play a jazz cornet, in a little more than a half hour, so I dallied at the cookies and punch table waiting for my stomach to quit complaining.
That was when I met up with Cabby Jacks again.
He tugged on my shirt sleeve, trying to get my attention. I looked down at him. Cabby went, maybe, five-seven. He hadn’t gained a pound since his stretch in the joint. I put him at a conservative hundred and fifty pounds. I, on the other hand, go six and a half feet and haven’t seen the shy side of two-seventy since grad school.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“I know you,” he said.
“You look familiar.”
“Di’n’t you used to play in the games over to the Hilton?”
“That’s why I’m here, in part,” I said.
“Some kinda Irish name, right?”
“Gallegher.”
“Right. Pat Gallegher. Useta live over some dive bar down offa Toulouse.”
“I still do. I remember you now. You worked for Mookie. Cabby something . . .”
“Jacks. Cabby Jacks. That’s me. You got a good memory, Gallegher. I mean, I wasn’t no player or nothin’. I gave rides to the games and helped out in the room.”
“You did a good job, Cabby. I remember people who do a good job.”
“So, why di’n’t you get up and talk or nothin’?”
“My first meeting. I wanted to get the lay of the land, figure out how things worked.”
“Oh, man, that ain’t gonna do. I mean it. You don’t get up and jump right in the first time, you might as well k