Excerpt: Gamble

Gabriel Mills had never seen a severed head before.

It was in the most unlikely of places, too. Just sitting there on the beach, a dingy seagull pecking out one of its eyes. Between the dull wind and waves of lake, a thick mountain of sand had formed under its neck and began to spill out of its mouth.

Gabriel shuffled awkwardly up to the thing and crouched down beside it, scaring away the seagull in the process. He fumbled through one of the pockets on his tattered coat and withdrew a small notebook. The gloves he wore gave him a little trouble as he attempted to leaf through the pages, but eventually he came to a crumbled photograph stapled to one of the pages.

Yep, this was the guy.