“The true test of a man is not what he’s capable of denying others but what he’s capable of denying himself.”

  —UNKNOWN

  CHAPTER ONE

  Elijah Crowe awoke from a horrible sleep. His head was throbbing and his stubble-dusted jaw ached as if waking after being cold-cocked. His tongue slid around his mouth, tasting cheap alcohol on rotting breath. His hands smelled like he’d been handsy with a cheap hooker. The residue on his fingertips reeked of rosewater perfume. He hated rosewater. The smell of it repulsed him.

  Patting himself down, he was in tattered slacks and work boots, a stained wife beater and not much else. He felt something soft and metallic sliding against his throat. Reaching up, he found a silver chain with a large crucifix pendant hanging from it. In his front-left pocket there was a wallet. Flipping through it briefly, he found his driver’s license—a few months expired as of February 1925—and a single photo of him and Mia Wolfe in the alley behind a local speakeasy. She was a brooding brunette of a dame. A hot property. A good time.

  He flipped the photo over, and Mia had scribbled a note on it:

  You’re the worst thing that ever happened to me.

  -Mia

  As his senses centered sharply, his eyes rolled about the room. A gaudy, shoddy motel with chipped plaster walls. The bed beneath creaked and groaned. The springs were sprung and several tears in the mattress revealed rusted metal coils. Blackened splotch marks on the walls made it look like someone took one of those flamespitters the GIs used in the big war to dab the place up nice and crispy. The carpet had suspicious stains soaked in.

  Elijah had been in burnt out joints like this before. He called them ‘princess palaces’, havens for one-night stands where he’d get to be Prince Charming for a special princess, but he’d have to hurry because the magic died at midnight. He was one of Mia’s regulars—practically under contract with her, but he wasn’t an exclusive player. The two of them put miles on beds like this. Sometimes she wore a busted lip. It perplexed him since he was a gentlemanly crook and never the type to lay hands on a dame. Must’ve been one of her other clients. He wondered which one as he wanted to put a fist through the rat’s skull.

  Elijah tried to put the pieces together and discern where he was and how he got there. His head rolled with muddied marbles. He was known to throw down drinks and heat up his heels on the dance floor if an eye-friendly dame was within arm’s reach, but he couldn’t recall the previous night’s events.

  He scanned the rest of the room; it was a minimalist deal: four walls, a ceiling, a floor, all sparsely furnished. There was the bed upon which he currently laid, a simple bulb light fixed to the ceiling, a ratty felt chair in the corner and a lone, barren wood table slid against the other corner. Not a particularly inviting space. You came to these joints to do half-hour kinds of business. Discretion not luxury.

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  The only curious feature of the room was an inconspicuous fixture about the size and shape of a shoe box mounted high up on a wall adjacent to the only door in the room. There were no windows, either. Disarmingly bland. All he had were questions. His foggy mind had nothing to offer.

  “Elijah Crowe!” a gravelly male voice blared over the beige box fitted to the wall near the ceiling. The sound popped, squeaked and grumbled through the speaker.

  The confused man slowly rose from the bed, eyes tuned to the growling box.

  “Wakey, wakey,” the voice muttered with a mirthful derision.

  “Who are you? Where am I?” Elijah barked.

  “I’m your Broker and you’re in my house. House rules are this: get to the ground floor and out the front door. Sounds simple, right? Well, there’s five floors between you and freedom. Problem is that this building isn’t empty. You’ve got a few hundred friends that have been here a loooong time. They’re hungry and it’s been awhile.”

  Elijah’s brow sank in concern and he stood still, concentrating to better focus his hearing. Through the walls, he heard distant, indistinct clamor. It was an arrhythmic surging, sliding and thumping. Stitched within the slithery groans, he could’ve sworn he heard some kind of animalistic muttering. He couldn’t place it, but knew it wasn’t natural. His imagination failed to visualize what could be on the other side of the wall.

  “What the fuck is that?” he whispered.

  “The other pieces of the board, Mr. Crowe.”

  The Broker’s voice pestered him as a niggling pebble in a shoe. “Don’t know what greases you, sir, but I ain’t playin’ your game.”

  Elijah popped off of the bed and ran to the door, grabbing the knob. The steel knob boiled in his grip, causing him to pull his hand away and wince as he staggered back.

  “I told you, Mr. Crowe. You will do as you’re told. Collect your belongings in the suitcase and then you may proceed,” the unseen Broker commanded.

  Elijah clutched his clawed hand which still reeled from the burn.

  “What the fuck is this?!” Crowe shouted in inconsolable rage, veins pulsing against the corded muscles in his neck.

  For the moment, he had no other recourse but to obey the formless voice in the speaker. He turned away and made towards the suitcase which sat innocently atop the ratty chair.

  “The suitcase. Open it,” the Broker commanded.

  The tattered man flipped open the case and inside sat two modified M1911 .45 longslide pistols. They were unlike anything he’d seen before. Their barrels were pointed inward, facing each other as if placed for effect. The pistol on the left was pure white with a polished ivory handle and a slide which was furnished with a swooping flourish which started at the front and glided in a wind-swept pattern back to angel wings engraved on either side of the rear of the slide. The pistol on the right was constructed of burnished silver with a molded marble handle and a cherubic face engraved into the rear of the slide.

  A momentary lapse in focus overcame Elijah as he fawned over the implements of war. Elijah was a simple man in simple times, but these pistols seemed the product of divine engineering. He knew that his hands were unworthy to wield them. He’d leveled Tommy guns into two-bit thieves, pickpockets and button men and split them in half. He’d fed sidewalks with the blood of mouthy street toughs who thought they were above the law of the wild. He lobbed grenades at Krauts during the War. He’d fired every kind of firearm a civilian could get their hands on and many a common Joe had never heard of, but he’d never seen anything like the angelic hand cannons beaming up at him from that shabby suitcase.

  The Broker’s snarling, mocking voice shattered the transitory serenity. “Your two best friends. Michael and Gabriel. Better to have two angels in your hand than a devil on your shoulder, hmm?” the Broker jabbed.