Mulholland Dive

by Michael Connelly

Genres: Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Three never-before-collected short stories from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly

In "Cahoots," a backroom poker game turns deadly when a cheater is exposed. In "Mulholland Dive," a man who deciphers the hidden codes of accident scenes investigates a fatality off L.A.'s most fabled roadway. In "Two-Bagger," an obsessed cop tails an ex-con he believes is about to carry out a contract killing.

Together these gripping, unforgettable stories show that Michael Connelly "knows the workings of the LAPD and the streets of the City of Angels like he knows his own name" (Boston Globe).

[Word count: 14,054]

Release date: September 4, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 57

Sample

McMillan has the deal. The game is five-card stud, nothing wild. And McMillan, the bastard in the porkpie hat, is cheating us. There are six of us at the table. There’s him, then Swain, then Harrington, then Anderson, then me, and then, most of the time, Boyd. I don’t know if that’s a first or last name. He’s just Boyd. And at the moment he’s in the back room with the woman who makes the coffee and serves the whiskey. The bedroom. Her name is Vera Sims. Only McMillan keeps calling her Vera Similitude and he laughs uproariously when he says it. I don’t know what this name means but his high horse laugh is getting to me. That and the cheating.


This is a journal. I write it in what my partner who read it up to now calls present tense. Like it is happening right now. But everything I write down here has already happened. It’s too late. It’s the past written in the present tense. You know what I mean? I’m saying you can’t change it. It’s done.

You play long enough and you pick up the patterns and then you look for the tells. I am a man of principle. My principle is, if you cheat me, you are taking something from me. You are stealing. Maybe not my money but the chance for me to make my money. Yes, and if I let you take from me what is mine, then I am a fool. I am letting you think of me and treat me as a fool.

I don’t allow that. My principle is, if you take from me, then I will take right back from you. Only I will take more from you than you took from me. One time I took a man’s finger off when I caught him turning his ring inside to use as a shiner. One time I took a man’s woman. It’s a rule I have. I never break it. Even if it is the man with the plan.

We have been playing for four hours. McMillan has been slowly telling us his plan for what he calls the greatest heist of all time, all at the same time that he’s cheating us and taking our money. Maybe the others know this and they look at it as the price they pay for the plan, to be a part of it. This is not how I look at it. In four hours I have lost a lot. Almost enough to pay rent in one of these Bunker Hill boardinghouses for a month. I need that money back. I need to take from McMillan and his partner what they have taken from me.

McMillan has this habit I’ve been watching. He has his silver halves in a neat stack on the table in front of him. He keeps raising the stack with two fingers and then letting all the coins drop back down to the table. Ching, ching, ching, like that. I’m watching and counting the sounds and counting his coins. Every time he deals, there is one less coin in the stack.


“Hey, Boyd!” McMillan yells to the back room. “You in or out?”

“I’m in,” says the voice from the back room.

Boyd comes out quick, notching his belt just so we can see if we care to look.

“Deal it,” he says.

McMillan smiles.

“Gettin’ yourself a little Vera Similitude, eh?”

And then that laugh again. That lazy horse laugh that’s getting to me. Boyd puts a silver dollar into the center of the table with the others and says he is in. I’m starting to see McMillan with a hole the size of a silver dollar in his forehead.

McMillan starts to deal and I watch his hands while I light a Camel. I lean my head back and blow the blue smoke toward the yellowed ceiling. I see the butterfly moving on the ceiling, winking at me. Nobody else has seen it. Everybody else thinks that to catch a cheater you have to keep your eyes on the cards.

Everybody picks up their cards and my hand’s a stiff. I throw in right away but everybody else stays for the ride. I ask McMillan about his grand plan. Just to keep him thinking, to see how he handles two things at once.

“How are you going to know where they’ll be and when we can go i. . .