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David Greene’s Detonate (Tyrone King) is Featured in Today’s Thriller of The Week Free Excerpt

On Friday we announced that David Greene’s Detonate (Tyrone King) is our Thriller of the Week and the sponsor of thousands of great bargains in the thriller, mystery, and suspense categories: over 200 free titles, over 600 quality 99-centers, and thousands more that you can read for free through the Kindle Lending Library if you have Amazon Prime!

Now we’re back to offer our weekly free Thriller excerpt:

Detonate (Tyrone King)

by David Greene

4.0 stars – 2 Reviews
Or currently FREE for Amazon Prime Members Via the Kindle Lending Library
Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
Here’s the set-up:

The FBI hunts private investigator Tyrone King after he’s implicated in a plot to blow up a train on the border between Canada and the United States. Hoping to prove his innocence, King chases the real terrorists from Niagara Falls to New York City with the help of Sarah, a passenger on the train.

King goes undercover to try to stop the next bombing. But after he gets to know one of the terrorists, he realizes he wants to save him.

As the FBI, King, Sarah, and the terrorists all converge in New York City, the fate of the Statue of Liberty hangs in the balance.

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

Detonate

By David Greene

First Four Chapters for Preview

Detonate

Copyright ©2012 by David Greene

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”

– Oscar Wilde



Chapter 1

At 10:30 AM Amtrak train number 64, the Maple Leaf, traveling from Toronto to New York, pulled into the last station on the Canadian side at Niagara Falls, Ontario. The train was eight minutes late.

King sat in a regular coach class seat. A couple sitting across the aisle from him gave him the once-over. He was used to that. Some people thought his dreadlocks meant he was a drug dealer. Other people wondered if he sang reggae. But the couple sitting across from him wasn’t an ordinary couple.

Two hours earlier, King had watched them when they boarded the train. The young man had pulled a black roller bag, the young woman a pastel pink one. Cute, King had thought. Gender-coordinated luggage colors.

They’d climbed aboard the train and made their way down the aisle to the seats across from him. While the man heaved the pink and black bags up to the overhead bin, the woman took off her shawl. After the man sat in the window seat, the woman placed her purse beneath the aisle seat, then sat down beside him.

The woman wore a lime green hijab that covered her head in a crinkly, crepe-like fabric. The man wore jeans and an olive green t-shirt. His hair was curly jet-black. His beard, also black, was on the verge of being scruffy. But his clothes were wrinkle free, as if he’d just ironed them. His posture was formal. He held his head steady and erect. He stared forward. He appeared to be deep in thought.

Since boarding, the couple hadn’t spoken. But now, as the train came to a stop at the Niagara Falls station, the young man turned to the woman and said, “The time has come.”

The man spoke in Arabic, but King understood what he said. Five years earlier, he’d been a U. S. Army interpreter/translator. He spoke Arabic. But the man across the aisle had no way of knowing that.

“Jasmeen,” the young man said gently. “You must get off now.” He put his arm around her shoulder. “Before the child is born.”

Jasmeen frowned. A curl of raven hair peeked from beneath her scarf. Her eyelashes and brows were thick and dark. Her eyes, like her scarf, were emerald green. She did not look pregnant.

“If the child is not born, they will take you off the train,” she replied, also in Arabic. “You’ll have trouble on the American side.” She pulled his arm off her shoulder. “Kareem…” She fixed her eyes upon him. “The child must come before that.”

King tried to place where they were from. The dialect sounded like Iraq, he thought. Or possibly Syria.

Kareem nodded. “Do not worry,” he said. “The child will be born on time. I will call you from the caves at one o’clock.”

Jasmeen stood and bowed. “Allāhu Akbar,” she said. Then she picked up her shawl, which hung on the back of the seat, and wrapped it over her shoulders. She reached beneath the seat in front of her and pulled out her handbag. Without another word, she turned and made her way to the back of the car.

A moment later, King saw her step onto the train platform and walk toward the station. Then she stopped. She looked back at the train. She opened her handbag and dug around. She pulled out something that looked like a phone. But then she put it back, turned, and walked into the station.

To King, it looked like she was leaving and not coming back. He looked up at the overhead shelf across from him. The pastel pink roller bag was still there. Something is wrong, he thought.

King stood and stepped into the aisle. He leaned over to speak to Kareem. “Excuse me,” he said. “I wonder if your companion has forgotten her suitcase.” He pointed up to the overhead shelf.

Kareem was startled by the interruption. His face was expressionless, but he blinked several times. He glanced up at the pink bag on the overhead shelf. He shrugged. He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them, and said. “Thank you, but she did not forget the bag. I am taking the luggage to New York for her. She will join me there in two days.”

King nodded, and then sat back down in his seat. OK, fine. He looked out the window at the station. The woman, Jasmeen, was gone. The station platform was quickly emptying out. King looked at his watch. The train was due to leave in less than a minute.

King was puzzled. He mentally replayed the couple’s conversation. She’d spoken of a child coming soon—but she didn’t appear pregnant. She’d warned Kareem that he’d have ‘trouble’ on the American side and that the child must be born before that. King thought he heard Kareem say he’d call her from the caves at one o’clock. Maybe his Arabic was getting rusty. But he doubted it.

The train began to move. Soon the Maple Leaf would cross the bridge over the Niagara River and enter the United States. King looked across the aisle at Kareem. He had something in his hand. It looked like a mobile phone, but it had a thick short antenna and bore the word Cobra on it. King had seen a device like that before. It was a GMRS radio, a two-way radio, like a walkie-talkie, but higher quality. In the U.S., a person who wanted to use a two-way radio had to get a license. But in Canada, anyone could use a short-range device.

The last time King had seen one of those radios was in Afghanistan. A Taliban insurgent had used a GMRS to detonate an improvised explosive device that blew up the Humvee traveling in front of him. Why would a man on a train need a walkie-talkie instead of a cell phone? King thought about the security admonition he’d heard hundreds of times. If you see something, say something. Perhaps he ought to say something to the conductor. But what would he say? There was nothing incriminating to report. But King couldn’t just disregard his suspicions. If you see something, say something.

On impulse, King stood again, put one foot into the aisle and faced Kareem. With a pleasant smile, he said in Arabic, “I hope you aren’t planning to blow up something with that.”

Kareem’s face went ashen. He stood and said, “Excuse me.” He set the two-way radio on the window seat and stepped into the aisle. King stepped back out of the aisle. He relaxed a bit when he saw the device was out of Kareem’s hands.

Kareem pivoted toward the overhead shelf that held his luggage. He pulled the black roller bag down, and set it on the aisle seat. He turned his back to King, unzipped the outer pouch of the bag, and pulled something out of it. He picked up the two-way radio from the window seat. Then he turned around to face King. He held a handgun. He pointed it at King’s chest.

King raised his eyebrows. Before he’d joined the army, he’d trained in Aikido, the Japanese martial art also called ‘the Art of Peace.’ It emphasized the ability to relax the mind and body, even in the stress of dangerous circumstances.

King stood six feet tall—which was four inches taller than Kareem. He kept the smile on his face, even when Kareem said, in English, “Don’t move.”

King assessed the situation. The two-way radio was in Kareem’s left hand. The gun was in his right. King had studied Aikido, but this called for improvisation. He glanced around the car at the other passengers. There were only a few. Most had already left the train on the Canadian side of the falls. A woman with a boy sat three seats away. She stared at the gun with a look of incomprehension. King spoke in her direction, “Don’t worry, ma’am,” he said. “He won’t use it.”

Kareem turned his head for a split second toward the woman and the boy. In that moment, King executed an Aikido technique called nikyō, a pronating wristlock that torques the arm and applies painful nerve pressure. He silently counted his breaths.

One. He dropped down and to the left. With his right hand he knocked the barrel of the gun down and to the right. Instantly Kareem fired the gun. With a loud report, the bullet ripped into the velvet blue fabric that covered the padding on the seat cushion. The woman nearby screamed.

Two. Coming back up, King gripped Kareem’s right wrist with his left hand. Using nikyō torque, he applied nerve pressure until Kareem could no longer hold onto the gun, which fell to the floor.

Three. Extending leverage to Kareem’s wrist and arm, King bent him down and to the side. Kareem swung out his right arm to try to keep his balance.

Four. King spun and gripped Kareem’s right wrist, which held the detonator. King applied pronating torque to the wrist until the detonator clattered to the floor.

Five. King pushed him all the way down to the right and pinned him on the floor.

Once on the floor, Kareem grunted. King could tell his wrists and arms were hurt. He waited until Kareem lay completely still. Then he focused on the roller bag on the aisle seat. He considered the various ways a bomb inside it could be detonated. Kareem’s two-way radio was on the floor nearby. But King had also seen Jasmeen remove something that looked just like it from her purse. Maybe she was the backup plan. She could use her detonator if she was anywhere within a two-mile range. They might also have rigged the bomb with a timer. King decided he’d better get the luggage off the train and away from people as soon as possible. But he couldn’t think of a way to do that and subdue Kareem at the same time.

He made a snap decision. He released Kareem from the pin. He picked up the pistol from the floor with his right hand. At the same time, he used his left leg like a shuffleboard stick to push the detonator and shoot it down the aisle.

He cradled the gun in the palm of his hand. It was a Sig Sauer P220. He hefted it, gauging its weight. He had to decide what to do with it. He had only an instant to decide. It would be easy to point it at Kareem, but it was a matter of principle with him. He’d renounced the use of weapons. Although he wasn’t willing to use the gun on Kareem, he had to be sure no one else could use it either.

He stood and removed the magazine from the gun. Then he ejected the round from the chamber and stuffed the magazine in his pocket. He put the empty gun back into the open compartment on the bag and re-zipped it. He grabbed the handle on the roller bag and pulled it off the seat. He stepped over Kareem and put the bag on the floor.

Kareem had flopped onto his stomach. He held his sorest arm, his right arm, out in front of him. King stood between him and the roller bag. Kareem rolled onto his back, holding his right arm, and grimaced. He said in English, “What are you going to do?”

King said in Arabic, “I’m going to look inside your bag and see what’s in it.”

Kareem blinked. He rolled onto his stomach to look for the radio. King had kicked it a good distance down the aisle. It had come to rest near a young woman. The woman stood at her seat, frozen in place, with one foot in the aisle. She stared at King. She had headphone earbuds in each ear. She pulled one of the wires until the earbud popped out of her left ear.

King pointed to the radio on the floor. “Pick that device up right now,” he said to her. “But don’t push any buttons on it. Keep it away from this man, and bring it to a conductor.”

The young woman popped the earbud from her right ear, but didn’t move. She looked at the radio. “What is it?” she asked.

King sized her up. Her clothes looked expensive. She wore a blue satin blouse with black silk crepe pants. A gold ankle bracelet glistened above the sandal on her foot. Her toenails were painted with pale lavender polish. He focused on her eyes. He tried to gauge her ki. In Aikido, ki was synonymous with life energy. He had a sense of strong ki from her. Would she have the courage to do what he needed her to do? He hoped she would. But she’d have to trust him. He knew it was a good idea to address a stranger by name if you wanted his or her trust.

“What’s your name?” King asked her.

She looked at him, then at the man on the floor, and then back at him. She waited a moment before answering. She was obviously sizing him up. Then she said, “Sarah.”

“Sarah, that device is a two-way radio,” he said. “It might be a detonator. There might be a bomb in this suitcase.” He held the suitcase up. “I’m going to get rid of the suitcase. While I do, you need to keep that thing away from him. If he gets to it, he’ll explode the bomb.”

Sarah looked back down at Kareem, who was crawling along the aisle, inching toward the detonator.

“Sarah, do it now,” King yelled. “Do you understand?”

She nodded. She looked at the object at her feet, and then around the train car. There was no one else. The woman with the boy had already scuttled away. Sarah bent and picked up the Cobra radio. She held it out at arm’s length in front of her. Her arm trembled.

Kareem had crawled close enough to her to reach out and grab at her leg. He closed his hand around her ankle bracelet, but his damaged wrist was in pain. He flinched.

Sarah felt him pull at her ankle. She let out a short, startled cry. She pulled back hard, and yanked her leg out of his grasp.

“Sarah, run,” King shouted. “Run now.”

King, Kareem and Sarah were in the second from the last car of a seven-car train. Sarah ran toward the front of the train. She ran without looking back. Within a moment, Kareem was on his feet, running after her.

Chapter 2

King was not sure if the bomb might be in the black or the pink bag—or maybe there were bombs in both bags. He changed his mind about opening the bags to look inside. There might not be time. He pulled the pink bag down from the rack, then looked out the window. The train was moving faster, but they were still in Canada.

He was strong enough to hold both bags up at once—one in each hand. He held the pink one in front of him, the black one behind him. He marched them carefully toward the rear of his car. He stepped into the passage that joined his car with the café car, the last car on the train. He saw a yellow stool, used to bridge the gap between the bottom train step and the platform.

He studied the doors on both sides of the train. He looked at the door mechanism to see how it worked. The design of the door allowed the top half to open separately from the bottom half. He put down the bags, the pink one on the stool, the black one on the floor. He grabbed the lever on the top half of the door, and pulled it up until the lock disengaged. Then he swung the door’s top half open. Air rushed in from the opening. The train was rapidly gaining speed.

The train was traveling too fast for him to jump off. He wanted to get rid of the bags, but he had to be careful about when to eject them. At any moment, Kareem might catch Sarah and grab the detonator. He had to be sure the bags went out at a safe spot. He lifted the pink bag off the stool, and put his foot in its place to steady himself.

 

Sarah had cleared the fifth car, but still hadn’t seen a conductor. Now she ran into the fourth car. She was heading toward the front of the train. In the fourth car, three people stood in the aisle, blocking her way. She shouted at them. “Watch out. Let me through.” Then she turned and pointed behind her. “Stop that guy!”

The people in the aisle, two men and one woman, turned to look at her. Without speaking, they ducked out of her way. But as she passed by, she could tell none of them was going to step in the aisle to block Kareem. He was going to get past them.

She continued to run. As she ran, the long thin wires from her earbuds dangled from her right pocket. The wires flailed and slapped against her pant leg. As she passed the restroom at the end of the fourth car, one of the wires lassoed out. It hooked on the lever of the handle to the restroom door. Her iPhone was upside down in her pocket with the wire wrapped around it. When it caught, the phone pulled up and snagged in her pocket, which jerked her to a stop.

She pulled hard against the cord, but couldn’t move. It took her a moment to realize she had to stop pressing forward. She had to back up enough to put slack in the cord so she could get the phone out of her pocket. She fumbled the phone out of her pocket, and yanked it toward her. But the earbud cord, still snagged on the handle, popped out of the phone jack. Now she had the two-way radio in her left hand and the phone in her right. She heard Kareem coming up behind her. He was very close.

She decided to drop the phone to divert him. But she panicked. She looked at her hands. She couldn’t remember which device was which. She stared at each hand—first one, then the other. The object in each hand was about the same size. Her heart was racing.

She looked around and saw the headphone buds dangling from the doorway to her right. Just as Kareem lunged to grab her, she dropped the device in her right hand onto the floor. When he saw the device fall from her hand, he knelt down and snatched it up.

King felt an abrupt change in the roadbed as the train rolled onto the bridge over the Niagara River. He looked at his watch. It was 10:38 AM. The Maple Leaf crossed the Niagara River at the point where the rapids began. The deep gorge that held the river as it streamed away from the falls narrowed at this point. The narrowing canyon forced millions of gallons of water in the river into an accelerating trough that formed dangerous white water rapids.

King held the pink bag against his knee. It was a Samsonite hardside spinner. He made an instinctive assessment. He concluded that Jasmeen wouldn’t have left the pink bag behind had it not been meant for a purpose. He got up on the stool and brought the bag up to waist height. He propped his right foot on the ledge of the unopened bottom half of the door. He saw the trestles holding the bridge sliding sideways before him. He calculated he’d have to aim carefully to hit the open space between the girders, or else go high and throw the bag above the upper beam of the structure. He went high. He steadied his leg on its perch on the door. He swung his arms back and lobbed the Samsonite—up and over the top of the beam. Then, without waiting to see what happened to the first bag, he jumped down, grabbed the black bag, and did the same thing with it.

This time he watched. The black bag fell 300 feet from the top of the bridge down into the gorge and splashed into the rapids behind the pink bag, which was already rushing downriver like a raft.

Along the boardwalk at the White Water Walk tourist attraction on the Canadian side, a little girl tugged her mother’s arm. She pointed at the pink bag. Her mother smiled when she saw the pink and black Samsonites racing down the rapids. A group of tourists on the boardwalk moved toward the railing and leaned over the railing to watch the roller bags cascading down the rapids.

Kareem punched at the surface of the phone until he realized it was the wrong device. He threw it on the floor. He screamed at Sarah, “Stop, I have a gun. I will shoot you if you do not stop.”

She stopped. She was too frightened to turn around. Kareem came up behind her. He didn’t have a gun, but he snatched the two-way radio from her left hand. Then he fell to his knees and concentrated on punching buttons on the device. Breathing hard, he stopped and stared at the key pad. He slapped his hand on the floor and swore. He hit the cancel button.

The bags weaved and bobbed. The raging cascades hurled them forward until giant boulders in the river knocked them like pinballs. They ricocheted from rock to spray and back to rock, all the while zigzagging downstream. Some of the tourists raced along the boardwalk to keep in line with the floating luggage as it coursed alongside them twenty feet away. The bags were rushing toward the massive whirlpool that was half a mile beyond the boardwalk at a hairpin bend in the Niagara River.

Kareem pushed the buttons again. This time he pressed them slowly and deliberately. He entered the detonation code numbers on the Cobra keypad. When he was done, he opened his eyes wide. He punched on the “Call” button. The device emitted a chatter of fast high-pitched beeps.

More than a mile from the bridge, an enormous explosion erupted in the gorge. The roller bags had traveled at thirty miles per hour past the end of the white water boardwalk. But they hadn’t yet reached the whirlpool rapids. The bombs exploded from deep in the gorge somewhere between Ferguson Street on the Canadian side and Findlay Drive on the American side in a gigantic blast of water and rock, which flew up hundreds of feet into the air above the river, and then clattered back down to the rocks with a torrent of water. The shrapnel fell entirely within the chasm, causing a monstrous noise. A piece of it fell on a teenage boy who had run to the end of the boardwalk to watch the luggage. The projectile sliced open a gash in his right arm above the elbow. It took him a moment to process what happened. Then he cried out. All around him, the other tourists had ducked beneath an overhang on the canyon side of the walk just as the debris rained down. No one but the boy was hurt.

Kareem looked up when he heard the explosion. He shouted, “Muhammad,” and clasped his hands together as if in prayer. He whispered, “Peace be upon Him.” But then he lowered his gaze. He wasn’t sure how to interpret the magnitude of the explosion. Something was off. The sound was too far away. He rushed to look out the small window in the exit door of his car. He pressed his face to the glass. Within a moment, he saw what had happened. His mission had failed. He dropped back down to his knees and bowed his head into his hands.

King stared out through the open space of his exit door. He saw that the bombs had gone off past the end of the boardwalk. He heard footsteps and turned to see the uniformed Amtrak café attendant standing across from him at the doorway of the café car.

“What the hell are you doing?” the man yelled.

“Had to get some fresh air,” King said. Then he turned from the attendant, and began to run back toward the front of the train. It was obvious Kareem had wrested the two-way radio from Sarah. But he wasn’t sure what Kareem would do next.

Chapter 3

When the Maple Leaf finished crossing the bridge over the river, it arrived in the United States. The train approached the depot in Niagara Falls, New York. The Amtrak conductor had heard the explosive sound that echoed like booming thunderclaps, but that didn’t stop him from making his standard announcement.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our next stop will be Niagara Falls, New York. Before we arrive at the station, U. S. Customs agents will board the train to conduct a border inspection. You must remain in your seats at this time. Have your passports ready and available for inspection. Please remain in your seats until the Customs agents have completed their inspection and cleared the train.”

King did not sit down in a seat. He made his way to the third car, where he saw Sarah, sitting near the back of the car, her body rigid. King asked her, “Are you all right?”

She nodded. “Was anyone hurt?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The bags landed in the rapids. They blew up down river in the gorge. They were past the boardwalk when they exploded. I think they were far enough away so that no one was hurt. But I’m not sure. It could have been much worse.”

She stared at him. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m Tyrone King.”

“What are you? A cop?”

“No.”

“Who’s that guy?”

“His name’s Kareem.”

“Is he a terrorist?”

“No doubt,” King said. “But thanks to you, I think he’s only a would-be terrorist.”

She had retrieved her phone. She held it up now in her left hand, then grabbed her left wrist with her right hand to steady it. “He got the detonator away from me. He set off the bomb. He told me he had a gun. But he didn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter,” King said. “You kept him away from the detonator long enough to keep him from blowing up the train. You were brave.”

She grimaced. “Then how come my hand is still shaking?”

King shrugged. “That’s how bravery works. Feel the fear and do it anyway.”

“Now what happens?”

“Difficult to say,” King said. “It depends on him.”

“Won’t they catch him? The border agents?”

“If he stays on the train. But I have a feeling he won’t.”

King looked out the window. The Maple Leaf was slowing as it entered the railyard. Multiple sets of tracks fanned out into the yard. A quarter-mile away, at the far end of the yard, a line of seven tanker cars sat on a track. An engine began to push the tankers. It pushed them 200 feet, and then stopped abruptly. All the cars stopped except the seventh car, the one farthest from the engine. The seventh car uncoupled from the train, then kept going. The decoupled tanker rolled down the track until it shunted off onto a sidetrack and kept rolling.

A minute later, the engine began to move again. It pushed the remaining tanker cars another 200 feet, then stopped. Once again, the last tanker detached and kept going. King realized the freight crew was using this technique to sort the tanker cars onto different sidetracks.

Meanwhile, the Maple Leaf had come to a complete stop. King turned from Sarah and made his way cautiously toward the front of the train. As he crept down the aisle, he glimpsed something moving outside the window to his right. Kareem was running across the railyard, headed toward the tanker cars. King looked out the window on the left side of the train. There he saw a group of U. S. border agents preparing to board.

King spoke to the passengers sitting near the end of the second car.

“How’d that man get out?”

A boy in a Yankee’s baseball cap pointed to an emergency exit window on the right side of the train. The window dangled outward, unanchored from its frame. Kareem must have jumped off the right side of the train while the customs agents were boarding from the left. King hesitated as he considered what to do. He could go right now to the border agents and tell them what had happened, tell them about the man who was getting away on the other side of the train. He knew they’d detain him and question him. At best, it might take them twenty or thirty minutes to realize that they should pursue Kareem.

He looked out the window. Kareem was headed across the railyard toward the tanker cars. If he got on the other side of those cars, he’d be out of sight. In twenty or thirty minutes he’d have disappeared completely. And once he escaped, he’d be free, free to try to blow up something else.

King decided he couldn’t let Kareem get away, no matter the consequences. He went to the emergency exit window and pushed it out. He folded his body and perched himself on the window frame. He looked down. He gauged it to be a seven-foot drop onto a paved surface. Should be easy.

He jumped out the window, but he landed wrong. His feet hit the ground first, out ahead of him, then his knees snapped back. He flung his arms backwards to break the fall. He came down hard on his hands, which took the brunt of the impact. Small bits of gravel in the pavement gashed his palms and ripped the skin of his fingers. He eased himself forward and sat on the ground, staring at his bloodied palms. His hands stung. Blood rushed from his head as he tilted his head back. He looked up at the open window.

Sarah stuck her head out the window above him. “Are you OK?” she yelled.

“I think so.”

“That jump was not too graceful.”

“Thanks.”

“Now he’s getting away,” she said.

“I know.”

King looked out toward the tanker cars. Then he looked back toward Sarah. “Tell the agents what happened,” he shouted. “I don’t want to get shot out here.”

He tried to stand up. But when he did, his legs wobbled and gave way beneath him. He fell back down to the ground. His right knee hurt. The blood rushed from his head again, making him dizzy. He leaned forward, hung his head below his knees, and closed his eyes.

Then King heard the sound of metal clanking. He turned to look over his shoulder at the door on the end of the second car. The door swung open. An arm dropped the yellow stool out. Then he saw Sarah. She carried a lavender Prada handbag. She stepped down onto the stool, paused, then gently hopped from the stool onto the pavement. She ran over to him.

“What are you doing?” King asked. “The border agents don’t like it when a passenger jumps off.”

“I’m not the one who jumped off,” she said. “I think I detrained quite gracefully.”

“Why? Why’d you get off the train?”

“Because you’re obviously hurt,” she said. “And meanwhile the guy is getting away.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Can you stand?”

“I think so.” He started to stand up again. She grabbed him by the arm to help lift him up. She steadied him on his feet.

They both looked across the railyard. There were four cars left on the tanker train. Kareem had climbed onto the side of the fourth tanker car. He was climbing up the rungs leading to the top of the tanker. They watched as he went up over the top and onto the other side. He was no longer visible from the Maple Leaf.

“Uh oh,” Sarah said. “I think he got away.”

King started to move toward the tankers. But his knees still felt weak. He had to hobble. Sarah moved with him, half-holding him up.

“He can’t have gone too far. You should go back,” King said.

She shook her head. “You can’t walk on your own.”

“I’ll be all right in a minute.”

“He’ll be long gone by then.”

They kept moving toward the tankers, King hobbling and Sarah propping him up by his left arm. After a few minutes, when his knees had stretched out some, he felt better. He pulled away from Sarah. He tried to walk on his own. He tottered forward.

The engine maneuvering the tankers began to move. It pushed the tanker cars forward. As before, after two hundred feet, the engine stopped abruptly. The fourth tanker, with Kareem hanging on its far side, detached from the train and kept rolling down the track. It shot off to the right side of the main track.

King and Sarah shuffled quickly toward the third tanker car. When they got there, King reached up, grabbed the lowest rung, and climbed onto the side. Then he twisted around and called to Sarah. “Go back to the train.”

But she stood still and watched him. The tanker engine started up again. It pushed the last three cars 200 feet forward, then stopped. The third car shot loose, with King hanging onto its side. It shunted off toward the left sidetrack and rolled slowly forward. King leaned out as far as he could from his car to see what had happened to Kareem. But he couldn’t see him or his tanker.

Meanwhile three border agents and two other men in dark blue jackets imprinted with “Homeland Security” in bright yellow scrambled off the train at the exit door that Sarah had opened. All the men hit the ground running. The two men from homeland security had their guns drawn.

 

Chapter 4

When his tanker car began to slow, King jumped off it. He gauged he had traveled at least a quarter mile. As the car rolled past him, he looped around the back of it. Then he saw Kareem running toward a gap in the fence at the far side of the railyard. King looked back toward the Maple Leaf. The border agents and security men had stopped for a huddle near the tanker engine. One of the men was talking into his phone.

Then King saw the second tanker car—the one that had been next in line after his—coast to a stop along the same track onto which Kareem’s car had gone. Coming round the side, he saw a flash of gold near the ground, then above it the black crepe, and then the blue satin. Sarah was running toward him, waving her purse.

He stood and waited for her to catch up with him.

“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled. “You should go back to the train.” King waved his arms toward the train like a traffic cop. “Go back right now. Put your hands in the air. Walk slowly toward the agents with your hands raised. Then tell them what’s going on here.”

“I can’t,” she said. “It isn’t safe.”

“No, listen. It’ll be safer for you if you go back. They won’t shoot you.”

“Oh really? They just did shoot at me,” she said. “Several times.” Her voice mixed anger and fear.

King looked back toward the agents. The two from Homeland Security were running again, with guns out. “Damn,” he said. “They must’ve already had a report about the bombs exploding.”

“Seeing as how they’re shooting at us,” Sarah said. “I think we better run. When we’re in the clear, we can call somebody and explain what happened.”

King turned toward the gap in the fence. It opened onto a city street. Kareem was at the end of the street, moving out of sight.

“There he goes again,” Sarah said. “He keeps disappearing.”

King and Sarah ran after him. They ran through the gap in the fence and onto the street. They ran along the sidewalk, then turned right where they had seem Kareem turn. But when they got around the corner, he was nowhere to be seen.

“He must’ve gone between the houses,” King said.

They hurried a few hundred feet, then dashed across the street toward a parking lot that sat between a house and a one-story industrial building. At the back was an alley. The far side of the alley opened onto the backyard of another house. There was no fence, so they ran through the lot, across the alley, into the yard, past the house, and out onto another street.

Then they repeated the same pattern. They continued moving between houses as they made their way in a straight line away from the railyard. They crossed two more streets. When they got to the third, King waved his hand to signal Sarah to turn right.

They turned onto the sidewalk and stopped running. Kareem was nowhere in sight. A middle-aged woman sat on her front porch across the street. She had a book in her hand, but she looked up when she saw King and Sarah.

King reached out and took Sarah’s hand.

“We should act like a couple,” he said.

She looked at him doubtfully. “Yeah. OK. I guess.”

They walked hand in hand down the street. A busy intersection was just ahead of them. “We ought to catch a cab or get a bus,” King said. “Do you have any American money?”

She nodded, and lifted her purse. “I’m rolling in it.”

When they got to the intersection, the signs told them they were at the corner of Ontario and Hyde Park Boulevard. On the other side of Ontario was a Sunoco gas station. There was also a bus stop. The sign said the Route 52A Hyde Park bus went to the Niagara Transit Center. A paper schedule was taped to the sign pole.

King studied the schedule. “What time is it?” he asked.

Sarah had a watch that looked like a bracelet. The watch face was so small she had to bring her wrist close to her eyes to read it. “It’s 11:15,” she said.

“A bus stops here in five minutes.” He looked down Hyde Park Boulevard for signs of the homeland security agents. They weren’t in sight.

A helicopter buzzed up in the sky. They both looked up. A large blue helicopter was circling above the railyard. Without speaking, King yanked on Sarah’s hand and pulled her toward the Sunoco.

“Would you stop pulling me along like some luggage?”

“There’s a chopper up there. Don’t you understand? They’re looking for us.”

“Yeah, I understand. I get it. But let’s walk normally—no one dragging anyone else. It reads better from the air.”

“OK. Fine.”

Inside the gas station, King asked the man at the cash register, “How much is the bus?”

“Where you headed?”

“All over. We’re sightseeing,” King said.

The man nodded. “You want an all-day pass. They cost four bucks. You can buy one on the bus.”

“Do we need exact change?” Sarah asked.

The man smiled at her. “The drivers don’t make change,” he said. “But I do. You need some singles?”

Sarah had already taken a ten-dollar bill from her handbag. “How about a five and five ones?” she said. To King she said, “I’ll pay for us both.”

The man took the ten, pushed a button on his cash register and counted out the bills. He looked up. “You better hurry,” he said, and pointed out the window. “The bus is coming now.”

King and Sarah ran back to the bus stop. The blue helicopter circled low in the sky half a mile away, then turned in their direction. The bus belched a sound from its brakes when it stopped in front of them. They climbed in. The helicopter passed overhead as the bus doors closed. Sarah stuffed eight dollars in the cash box, and the driver gave her two passes. They made their way down the aisle and sat near the exit door.

They sat in silence looking out the window as the bus traveled down Hyde Park Boulevard. Then King said to her, “I was just thinking, I told you my full name, but I don’t know yours.”

“I’m Sarah Gaber,” she said. She extended her hand toward him. “You said your name is Tyrone King, right?”

“Yeah, but hey…” He shook her hand. “Fellow runaways generally call me Ty.”

“Do they?” She smiled, but then she withdrew her hand, and tilted her head. “OK, Ty. Do you have any kind of a plan?”

“I think we should go where there is a crowd—somewhere with plenty of witnesses.” King lowered his voice. “They won’t shoot at us in that case. At least I don’t think so. And then we ought to call the FBI to explain.”

“What about Kareem? You think he got on a bus too?” As she spoke, she looked around to assure herself that he wasn’t on their bus.

“Kareem had a plan,” King said. “I overheard him tell the woman with him called Jasmeen that he would call her from the caves at 1:00 PM. What time is it now?”

Sarah held the tiny watch up to her face again. “It’s 11:29,” she said. “Is that like a joke? Terrorists don’t actually live in caves, right?”

“That device Kareem had is a two-way radio. It’s a walkie-talkie. It has a range of only a mile or two. That means he has to be close enough to Jasmeen to be within range when he contacts her. But she got off the train before we crossed the border. So he’s going to have to get himself somewhere near Canada, while staying on this side of the river. My guess is he’s going to the Cave of the Winds.”

“Cave of the what?”

King leaned forward in his seat and faced her. “It’s a tourist attraction on the American side called Cave of the Winds. I went there when I was a kid. You go down an elevator. They’ve built wooden walkways so you can walk out from the base of the cliff close to the falls. From anywhere out on those walkways he’d have a clear range to Jasmeen on the Canadian side of the river.”

Sarah stared at a poster above the window touting a business school degree. “OK, but wouldn’t people see him?”

“They’d see a guy talking on his phone. Everyone on the cave tour is given a raincoat to wear because of all the mist and splashing from the falls. The raincoat would help him blend in with the crowd. It would help us blend in too.”

“Us?” She looked at him in disbelief. “You want us to chase after him?”

“It would be easier to prove what happened, if we nabbed him.”

“If we nabbed him?” She made a face.

“Well OK, if I nabbed him.”

“But you said you’re not a cop, right?”

“No, I’m not a cop. I was in the army. In an earlier life I worked in counter-intelligence in Afghanistan.”

She leaned her head back and studied the ceiling of the bus. “I don’t know,” she said. “It seems too dangerous.”

“He doesn’t have a weapon. I can take care of him.”

The bus stopped at a red light. Sarah looked at the woman across the aisle who was staring ahead blankly. She wondered if the woman could hear any of their conversation. “You’d take care of him how?”

“The same way I took away his gun. Using Aikido. It’s a martial art.”

“You mean like Kung Fu?”

“Kung Fu is Chinese. Aikido is Japanese. You learn how to defend yourself while protecting your attacker from injury.”

Sarah thought about that. Protecting the attacker seemed counterproductive. “You protect the attacker?”

“Absolutely.”

This made no sense to her. “Why?” she asked. “Why would you want to protect your attacker?”

“Aikido is non-violent—even in the face of violence. The point is, if you believe in non-violence, you don’t change your belief just because someone else is violent.”

“That reminds me,” said Sarah. “Why the hell didn’t you use that gun to keep Kareem in line instead of letting him chase me and the detonator all over the train?”

“I don’t believe in using guns.”

“That’s it? You don’t believe in using guns? What if someone was hurt in that explosion? A lot of people could have been hurt or killed. You risked all that just because you don’t believe in guns?”

“It wasn’t an easy decision.” King lowered his head. “I didn’t have much time to think about it. I had a picture of myself being able to get rid of the suitcases before he got to the detonator. And I had faith that you’d keep the detonator away from him.”

“Oh, that’s reassuring. You had a picture.”

“If I’d had more time to think about it, I might not have handled it that way. I don’t know.”

“Don’t you think you have to use force against violent people like Kareem? You have to threaten people like that with violence. Otherwise they don’t get the message.”

“I think they do,” King said. “It’s just not the message they expect.”

Sarah thought about that for a moment. Then she said, “I think the message they get is that you’re weak.”

King remembered when he first saw her. Strong ki. He wasn’t going to argue with her about guns. He let it drop. “Maybe,” he said.

Neither of them spoke. Then Sarah asked, “So are you good at this Aikido thing?”

“I’m just a beginner. I have a lot to learn.”

Sarah looked at him and nodded. “I guess in Aikido they don’t teach you how to jump from a six-foot high train window.”

“That jump was at least seven feet,” King protested. “I lost my balance on the ledge. The window was small; I had to fold myself in two like a clamshell cell phone. But you’re right. I screwed it up.”

Sarah said nothing. She sat in silence staring out the window as the bus pulled into the transit center. She thought about what King had said. His ‘protect the attacker’ thing was idealistic and impractical. And the gun thing was foolish. He’d put people’s lives in jeopardy. His idealism might be noble, but it was going to get him in trouble. He needed someone to look out for him.

“OK,” she said. “Let’s go nab him. But I can’t believe I’m doing this. And if you get hold of a gun again, give it to me. I won’t have a problem using it.”

 Continued….

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Detonate (Tyrone King)

by David Greene

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Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
Here’s the set-up:

The FBI hunts private investigator Tyrone King after he’s implicated in a plot to blow up a train on the border between Canada and the United States. Hoping to prove his innocence, King chases the real terrorists from Niagara Falls to New York City with the help of Sarah, a passenger on the train.

King goes undercover to try to stop the next bombing. But after he gets to know one of the terrorists, he realizes he wants to save him.

As the FBI, King, Sarah, and the terrorists all converge in New York City, the fate of the Statue of Liberty hangs in the balance.

One Reviewer Notes

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About The Author

David Greene’s creative life has evolved from film to photography to writing. He wrote and directed the film, Pamela and Ian, in which the characters grapple with the fact that they are shadows of light and that the film must end.

His show of photographs, called Shameless, was exhibited in Berkeley, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Zurich, and includes work in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection.

David began writing fiction after being guided into a hypnotic trance by a researcher documenting past life memories. David’s memories from that past-life regression session were the genesis for his first novel, Unmentionables, about slaves who lived and loved during the Civil War era.

David’s most recent novel, the thriller Detonate, an homage to Hitchcock, employs a classic “wrong man” plot. Detonate is the first of a series of novels featuring private investigator Tyrone King who is half white, half black, half straight, half gay. He’s a hero who seeks to get the bad guys without using guns or violence.

David is the spouse of painter James Stephens. They live in Chicago.

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There were two blackbirds

Sitting on a hill;

The one named Jack,

The other named Jill.

Fly away, Jack! Fly Away, Jill!

Come again, Jack! Come again, Jill!

—English Nursery Rhyme

 

Chapter One

 

Kensington would have been more fashionable, I suppose. Chelsea would certainly have been tonier, or Hampstead or Carnaby Street or wherever the hell the beautiful people had been blown this year. I braced my hands against the window sill and stared out at the rain coming down in the usual English way, squeezed out of the dirty gray sponge of the sky in an endless drizzle. Beneath the window a trailer truck ground its gears together, grunted, and coughed black diesel smoke. Then it turned slowly at the comer, and dowdy old Bloomsbury Square reappeared below me in the rain, a dim green face staring up.

Bloomsbury. The Levittown of George the Third. You can’t find many sights like it even in London anymore: three full sides of a city square bordered by uniform eighteenth-century red-brick townhouses, still trim, shapely, and calm, built to a human scale that left no room for air conditioners, TV antennas, or any of the other dental frontwork of modern architecture. I liked it better than, say, the new Hilton, which I couldn’t afford anyway, despite Carlo Angeletti’s expense account. Besides, the oldest structures I ever see in California are Chevrolets with running boards.

An old lady with a black umbrella stumped across the square. Just ahead of her, on the east side facing my window, rose the block-long Great Northern Assurance Company, ten stories high, a pale twentieth-century mass of squinting windows and granite facade. A neon sign ran all the way around the top. In the square the hackberry trees swayed with an invisible breeze, and on the sign the dull red letters ASSURANCE came and went, just like the real thing.

I turned around and yawned at the untouched bed. I needed a nap. I needed a two-day nap. The flight from New York had taken seven hours, and the flight from San Francisco before that had taken five. But Carlo Angeletti was paying me to find his missing lady, not to stretch out and sleep. Cherchez la goddamn femme. I shoved my suitcase to one end of the bed and sat down to make a phone call from my list of numbers. When I hung up I yawned again and read the little folded card on the nightstand that said the White Horse Hotel was not responsible for lost valuables, theft, fire, flood, or anything else unpleasant that might happen to you in the city. Cheers. I patted my empty jacket pocket where the gun would go and locked the door behind me.

 

Soho is never entirely deserted, day or night. But at ten a.m. on a rainy Monday morning, the signs of life along Rupert Street had dwindled to two cats skulking in a broken food crate and the tired flashing lights around the doorway of Raymond’s Exotic Revue. As I faced Shaftesbury Avenue, a heavy-set redhead swinging a light paisley suitcase in one hand came briskly in my direction from, a side street. A stripper, probably, with her change of costume in the suitcase, heading for Raymond’s. By some quirk of British unionism, only a dozen or so women make up the whole Soho strip force, and you can see them at all hours hurrying from club to club, making the same dreary rounds six or eight times a day, sometimes just ahead of the same dreary customers. An endless grind, my partner Fred would say.

She sailed past me with a professional look of contempt for loitering men in slightly faded raincoats, but her red hair had already reminded me of Dinah, and I stood in the drizzle a little longer being reminded.

Dinah had driven me to the San Francisco airport two days before, when I thought I was only going to New York and when my ancient blue Mercedes was in the shop for one of its periodic cures. While we had waited at the curb in. front of American Airlines, a low-rider had driven slowly past, eyeing us and gunning his motor with a sound like a Howitzer clearing its throat.

“Do you see his bumper sticker?” Dinah asked in fascination. “It says ‘Kill Them.’ Just ‘Kill Them.’”

“Probably left over from Christmas,” I said. The driver had a steering wheel made out of links of stainless steel chain. What looked like a real bone was hanging from the mirror where the plastic bootie should have been. “He looks like raw material for you,” I said as he slammed the car into second and drove away. We crossed into the terminal. Dinah is a psychiatrist at the Washington General Hospital. She is also short and plump and redheaded and the other half of what her older brother, the last square peg in the mellow round state of California, uncomfortably calls our “relationship.”

“Or you, Haller,” she said. I am a private detective, a specialist in missing persons. I am also an uneasy transplant from the east, from Cotton Mather’s Boston, though I’ve been in California long enough for my brain to have turned into a hot tub like everybody else’s. In the plate glass window beside the long counter, while the clerk checked the credit line on my VISA, our Mutt and Jeff reflections shimmered and wobbled like two transparent shadows. Once upon a time I was a newspaperman as well, and a security cop, and a college dropout. Dinah’s medical colleagues, who put a premium on stability and high credit lines, tend to think I should be her patient instead of her relator. Dinah herself just smiles and introduces me as an incurable romantic.

My ticket stamped and bags checked, I led her upstairs to the sky lounge where we could watch the planes take off and land and the luggage cart drivers dash around like finalists in a bump-car derby.

“You don’t have to stay,” I told her as we followed a 747 lifting off the runway. “I can’t even board for another half hour.”

“I want to check out the stewardae on your plane,” she said, watching the plane climb. “You’ve been such a grouch for the last month that I want to size up the competition.”

“Won’t Mendelsohn be annoyed that you left the office early?” Shirley Mendelsohn is the senior resident in the department of psychiatry. A three-time divorcee and mother of five, she specializes in marital problems and once wrote a book called The Nuclear Family Must Be Shut Down, which had been published by a vanity press in Berkeley.

“Mendelsohn is with her women’s action group against sexism today. I have the rest of the day off.” Dinah sipped her Brandy Alexander through a plastic straw. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. “They’re debating a revised version of the Lord’s Prayer for the Berkeley schools,” she said. “It begins, ‘Our Resource Person who art in heaven.’”

“I may have to go on from New York,” I told her. “I don’t know where. Maybe even Europe. I could be gone for two or three weeks.” I don’t know why I was trying to give her a hard time, but I was. I had in fact been a grouch, and there was a part of me that thought she might be the reason. She and I. Us. There was another part of me, of course, that looked at her round face and warm eyes and realized that if I were tired of her I ought to see a psychiatrist.

“Is Goldilocks going to take a long time to find?” she asked. She had seen the photograph of the missing girl that Carlo Angeletti had given me and promptly called me a cradle snatcher. I shrugged. “If I didn’t know you were an aging and prudent youth,” she said, “I would figure that you have gone temporarily gaga over that girl. Over the picture of that girl.”

I shrugged again, annoyed, and pulled out a cigarette. “A routine case,” I said. I don’t know why I lied. This particular Goldilocks had skipped out of the house too fast, and one very large, very dangerous papa bear wanted her back. It looked about as routine as heisting the Golden Gate. I don’t know why I kept quiet about the picture either, since Dinah was obviously right. My tongue picked up a shred of tobacco from the end of the cigarette, bitter and sharp. Aging youth, she had said. They age whiskey and ham to improve them, not unmarried men trotting out of breath toward forty. What compulsions were stirring beneath my surface, like massive, shadowy sea beasts crawling along an ocean floor, I couldn’t say. I had had glimpses of them before, and would again. Goldilocks’ face had floated out of a forgotten dream.

“A routine case,” I repeated pompously.

“A witchhunt,” Dinah said. “While you’re gone I think I’ll drive over to El Cerrito to see Daisy.” Daisy is her brother’s teenage daughter, “But I’d better read up on angel dust and the more exotic forms of marijuana first, Billy tells me. He’s worried about her.” She finished the Brandy Alexander with a slurp.

“You don’t do drug therapy,” I said in surprise. “She ought to go to some teenage drug center.”

“Mike, anybody who does psychiatry today does drug therapy, just the way any internist in San Francisco does alcoholism counseling. It’s the ’80’s.”

I grimaced and watched a single-engine plane take off in the wake of a big jet. It wobbled in the tailstream like a baby bird pushed out of the nest. Then it banked and vanished into the cold, gray fog that was billowing over the city, as gone as the girl in Angeletti’s picture. I pushed back my chair to get up. There is always cold, gray fog in San Francisco in August, and I would be glad to get away from it.

 

In the cold, gray rain of London the redhead turned off Rupert Street and started down Shaftesbury Avenue. I raised my raincoat collar and walked past the West End Adult Bookstore (“Rubber Goods a Specialty”) to a grime-blackened building that had been new when Queen Victoria was a tot. On the ground floor lurked an Indian restaurant named, like every third restaurant in London these days, the Taj Mahal. In the window a greasy, villainous-looking slab of lamb—or possibly cat—turned slowly on an electric spit, accompanied by a few flies enjoying the ride. Underneath a white silhouette of the Taj Mahal itself somebody had hand-lettered the word “Kebab” over and over across the length of the glass. And underneath that, “E. Hamid, Prop.”

I took a deep breath of street air, pushed the door hard against the. wet frame, and went right on in.

It was darker and damper inside than out and completely deserted, but I took a chair along the wall, like a real paying customer, away from the roasting flies, and eventually a morose young waiter with a turban came over and worried a few things into place on my table.

“Lunch, sir?”

“A pint of bitter, and tell Hamid that somebody wants to chit-chat, will you?”

“Thank you, sir.”

The pint came right away. Hamid took his time. I was aware of eyes peering through bead curtains at the back of the room and occasional singsong murmurs. I drank my beer and opened a pack of Players.

When Hamid appeared, he sat down without a word. I pushed the cigarettes toward him.

“Bloody back again, mate?” Hamid grinned.

I loved hearing him use his fake Cockney accent. It fit his narrow olive face and heavy-lidded eyes about as well as a Santa Claus suit, an insolent little tribute to his adopted country. Or just the nervous tic of a bom mimic. He claimed to be Pakistani, though I had heard more than once in the old days that he was a Berber Arab who had slipped out of French North Africa in an illegal hurry and used a borrowed visa to scuttle into England. He certainly spoke French, and people who knew said he spoke Farsi and Kurdish as well. I had first met him fifteen or sixteen years ago, when I was trying to squeeze a living out of UPI by writing features about English lowlife and he was widely regarded as the best-informed petty criminal in London, a cheerful tutor for any reporter with cash in hand. Now seventy at least, and smooth-skinned as a gypsy baby, he still knew most of what went on in the expanding Pakistani and Indian underworld; but ever since the Middle East had brought its violent politics to town and stirred up the Metropolitan Police, he had dealt mainly in girls and guns, staying cautiously away from the center of action. Both police and terrorists considered him more useful than dangerous, so far.

I thumbed my lighter for his cigarette. “Can’t keep away from the food, Hamid. How’s tricks?”

“Nice enough till I see your bloody mug again.”

It was three years since I had been in London and we had done business. He probably remembered his profit to the penny. We exhaled blue smoke together over the table, and he smiled the way I imagine a hornet would.

“Still playing crime stopper then, Haller?” He deepened his voice and went into his Indian Basil Rathbone imitation. “Bloody Giant Rat of Sumatra, hey? Good God, Watson, it’s the shadow of a bleedin’ gigantic hound!” Gales of laughter, white teeth bursting against olive skin, finally wound down into a spasm of coughing. Meanwhile the young man with the turban brought us plates of prawns, brown glop sauce, and fried bread. Hamid thumped his chest with one hand to stop his coughing and with the other hand waved away some curious flies.

“Still playing, Hamid,” I told him. “But I need more toys. You can’t get anything bigger than a paper clip through the buzzers at Heathrow these days.” I took a prawn with my fingers and bit one end gingerly, like a man testing a coin. Hotter than sin.

His eyes narrowed theatrically and the fake Cockney accent returned, thicker, part of the act. I had never heard him speak in a normal voice. “Christ, Haller, why should I ’elp you? You picked the bloody flesh off my bones last time you came around here. Bloody flesh off my bones. Besides, the fucking Irish have got every bobby in London pissing down his leg. Dropped another bomb in a letter box in Bayswater yesterday. You can’t just pick up hardware on call anymore. They’ll twist your soddin’ balls off.”

A careless fly circled his plate and paused for an instant on an edge. Hamid clapped his hands together in a blur, then slowly wiped his palms on the dark table cloth.

“They take off bloody backwards, you know that?” he said.

“A Smith and Wesson .38,” I said through the prawn. “I can get wildlife lectures at the zoo. With a box of ammunition and a shoulder holster. Don’t bother with a pillow.” For some reason, silencers were a standard item with the English sporting set, usually thrown in without asking, even though the best ones in the world are no good after two or three shots. A nation of good manners. “And I’d like it this afternoon.”

“I’ll put in a requisition with Margaret bloody Thatcher,” Hamid sneered.

“For seventy pounds.”

“One hundred.”

We settled on ninety, and he wrote an address in East London for me on a paper napkin.

“What is it?” I asked as I got up. “One of your kinky specialty brothels? Lounge chairs and leathercraft?”

“You’ll feel right at ’ome, cocky,” he grinned. “Take a cab back if you get winded.”

 

I took a cab both ways, because of the rain and because I was impatient. People will argue that a London taxi is the most civilized form of public transportation in the world. But then people will argue that everything about London is civilized, that she’s still the grand old lady of cities, lifting the hems of her skirts and tiptoeing reluctantly into the squalid twentieth century. The cab got bogged down in the thick mid-day traffic heading toward Temple Bar, and I tapped my fingers on the seat and wished that this time it weren’t so civilized and sluggish.

Why the hell did I think I needed a gun anyway? Not to chase down one erring bride, hardly old enough to have bought the license. A girl half my age. Goldilocks. But she had run too fast from California. And from New York. And people who worked for Carlo Angeletti probably got in the habit of wearing guns.

On my left the Bank of England sailed impressively by in the rain. Threadneedle Street. The next signs were for Eastcheap and Comhill. I sat back in the cab and relaxed a fraction. Anyone who speaks English starts out with a feeling for London, I suppose, when every street sign seems to pop out of a nursery rhyme or a novel. For me it had the added attraction of nostalgia, since the two years of my UPI stint were long enough ago to seem perfect and unrenewable. I managed a smile to myself. It had also been raining on the day I first arrived in London, nineteen years old, fresh off the boat train from Paris, and I had stood on the ramp outside Victoria Station with a map and a guidebook asking stranger after stranger how to get to a bed and breakfast house in Russell Square. I knew perfectly well how to get there, of course—the map in my pocket had it circled—but I couldn’t believe that all those people really had English accents, and I kept asking just to hear them talk.

I shook my head. Nineteen years old, as innocent and empty-headed as a guppy. And now I was being chauffeured to a brothel to buy a pistol. Freud or Dinah would have a field day.

The meter ticked off ten pences like a clock in a hurry. The streets grew narrow and ugly, even in the obscurity of the black rain, as we left the financial district of the City and entered the part where the tourist buses never run, the immense warren of East London, explosively crowded with a few million dark-skinned immigrants of the empire and a few million more resentful whites. Misery doesn’t like company. East London is a melting pot that regularly boils over into gang fights and race riots. It is also the birthplace of Punk. I leaned forward and wiped condensation off the window. Row after twisted row of blackened stoops and bricks. There were parts of London it seemed impossible anybody ever found twice.

The cabbie turned and circled purposefully for ten minutes more, then pulled over in front of a nondescript block of flats as impassively as if we had stopped at Claridge’s for tea. Nobody was on the street, and a pair of open garbage pails let the rain drum in monotonously.

“Number sixty-three,” he pointed. “Want me to wait, guy? Nearest tube is five minutes’ walk.”

“Keep the meter running. I won’t be long.”

He nodded doubtfully and took a five pound note as security. I got out into the bleak rain.

It looked like a brothel, all right, but not for the jet set. From the sidewalk I saw a door with three sets of locks, sooty brick walls that ran like cheap mascara in the rain, a double window discolored with unidentifiable smears, and a tattered Playboy foldout taped to one pane. Next to it, in a plastic candle holder, somebody had stuck an oversized red light bulb, Christmassy or tumescent, depending on your mood. I climbed the steps and stood jamming the bell-press with my finger until an overweight Indian woman in a dirty orange sari opened the door.

“Too early for girls,” she said with a giggle. “Not till two o’clock.”

“Hamid called about me. Mike Haller.”

She glanced over her shoulder into the dark hall, squinted and then bobbed her head five or six times.

“You have to wait a little time.” She grinned. “He just called. We have a special room.”

“I bet you do.”

But the special room turned out to be in the back of the building and nothing more than an airless plasterboard cubicle where the customers could lounge. Its furnishings consisted of a stack of folding chairs, like a funeral parlor, and a line of unemptied plastic ashtrays on the window sill. Near the chairs somebody had abandoned a cheap cup and saucer still half-filled with coffee. The whole place smelled of wet dogs.

The woman gestured vaguely with another giggle and went out. I pried a Players from the pack to deaden my nose and waited. In the hallway outside a blond young Englishman was vacuuming intensely, bumping the wall molding rhythmically as he rolled the machine over and over the same small space. He wore a bra and panties.

Two cigarettes later I had learned that flies do take off backwards, just as Hamid had said, and I had unfolded one of the rickety chairs for what was beginning to look like a long wait.

“You agreed with Hamid for a hundred guineas?”

An Indian man about my own age stood in the doorway, gripping a plastic Marks and Spencer shopping bag in front of his belt with both hands. Giggles peeked over his shoulder. I got up gratefully.

“I agreed with Hamid for ninety. Pounds, not guineas.”

He shrugged with the air of the perpetual small-time loser and handed me the shopping bag. I gave him a packet of ten-pound notes, which he counted slowly twice while I looked at the pistol and checked the date on the ammunition box. Then we nodded at each other distantly.

“Cheers,” Giggles said with a smile.

 

Chapter Two

 

“Which part of Angeletti’s story don’t you believe?”

Magnus had just sent back a bottle of wine—something I had never actually seen done before—and asked the waiter for Chateau Lynch-Bages ‘64 instead.

“I don’t suppose the club lets you take it home in a doggy cask,” I said, buttering a stony dinner roll and wondering whether to send it back.

“My dear Michael,” Magnus murmured with that forgiving air so many Englishmen take on when they talk to Americans. We were bent over New Zealand lamb and frozen vegetables in the Reform Club, his club, just off Pall Mall, though the heavy oak woodwork and thick dark drapes muffled the outside world so effectively that we might have been miles away in the country. The Reform Club, Magnus had told me, was founded in 1832—making it one of the newer ones—by supporters of the first Reform Bill for Parliamentary elections, raving democrats according to the standards of the day. Not the slightest taint of democracy, however, had reached the room where we sat, a long handsome dining hall mostly filled, like a taxidermist’s showroom, with elderly men in gray wool suits and neckties of rousing colors like black and olive green. Why the English male still flocked to these mausoleums I couldn’t say, unless it was the wine. No women belonged—Reform has to stop somewhere—and apart from Magnus the membership so far seemed limited to the better class of zombie. The waiter returned with surprising quickness, before I could figure out a truthful answer to Magnus’ question, and started to pour the new wine reverently, frowning at the sediment that drifted up the neck of the bottle.

“‘And Time that gave does now his gift confound,’” Magnus recited with an apologetic quaver in his voice to let me know it was poetry. The waiter twisted the bottle at the last moment, so that the sediment just reached the lip, then stopped.

“Auden?” I tried.

He shook his head.

“I dropped out of college around Beowulf”—I shrugged—“as you know.”

“My dear Michael, drop out you did indeed. But you have probably read tnore books of this and that than half the dons at Oxford. Unsystematically, of course. You are not a systematic man.” He sipped the wine and nodded dismissal at the waiter. “Shakespeare,” he said, turning the full force of his smile on me. “One of the sonnets. We don’t quote modern poets in the club, you know. Godawful lot of corpses, aren’t we?”

Magnus Harpe. The least likely zombie in London. He pushed my glass along the table with another smile, and I took a sip. When I first met Magnus I had been on a summer vacation in Europe after my freshman year of college. The trip was a present from my father, a reward for making it through the first year of his Ivy League alma mater without disgracing him, and the Harpes were old family friends I was supposed to look up. For three days I had resisted calling anybody in London remotely associated with Boston, but on the fourth night, homesick and lonely, I finally picked up the telephone. And Magnus to my surprise turned out to be a figure of great glamor then—fifteen years my senior, dashingly handsome in a blue-blooded way, an Oxford bachelor with the run of Mayfair debutantes (“a free hand,” he called it) and a famous general for a father. Dazzling stuff to a nineteen-year-old an ocean away from home. “We are going to knock the rough edges off,” he had announced, inspecting my clothes and my haircut. “Starting with the opera,” he had said after inspecting my empty head, and the next night I found myself bundled in the back of a long blue Bentley and deposited with Magnus at Covent Garden. The rough edges were there to stay, but if the world held anything more beautiful than the duet at the end of the first act of La Bohème I had never heard of it, and I spent the rest of my time haunting all the other operas in London and tagging along after Magnus for more revelations. On my last day in England he had driven me to a celebrity charity shoot in Essex, where potted earls tried to blast flying crockery out of the sky; then to Keats’ house in Hampstead, where he made me read “Ode to a Nightingale” in the garden where it had been written; and finally to a black-tie casino and whorehouse in Grosvenor Square, where he had given me fifty pounds and a pat on the back. England in a nutshell, he had called it. The result, of course, was that when I should have boarded the boat to Boston and my second year of college, I had stayed back and taken up La Bohème in earnest, living with a second string blond soprano in Paris and ignoring my father’s unhappy letters. A year later I came back to London to work for UPI.

“Big nose,” Magnus said, twirling the wine in his glass. Some old friends you meet awkwardly and never seek out. But Magnus’ was the first number I called when I came to London. My worldly tutor, who still sometimes made me feel like a clumsy younger brother around him. The perfect, unrenewable past.

But time sticks out his foot for all of us. Although Magnus had kept his considerable charm, at the age of fifty-two his good looks had started to crumble in wrinkles and patches, eroded by drink and inactivity. The tall, elegant body had started to look angular instead of lean, the wide shoulders had begun to droop like the wings of a heavy plane. A new moustache was in compensation for the hair, I suppose, a flight officer’s clipped brush that made him look a little like Terry Thomas with his teeth fixed; and he was dressed more than ever like a Jermyn Street dandy, creating an effortless patrician effect with a clubbable gray suit cut to perfection, a powder blue tie that puffed out over the Turnbull and Asser silk shirt, shoes from the dark rippled leather of some extinct beast. In the middle ages he would have been an up-and-coming cardinal, a pope’s emissary, traveling his diplomatic rounds with the easy security of the quick and well-born. In the declining years of the twentieth century he was something called a consulting architect. A troubleshooter, he had once explained indifferently to. me, a fixit man who flew off at a moment’s notice to Manchester or Reading or Surbiton-upon-Crawley or wherever a big project like a shopping center had suddenly run into trouble. His specialty was evidently electrical circuitry, the care, feeding, and rerouting of it, though I had always thought his success was probably due more to his ability to manage people than to technical wizardry.

“Now,” he said, leaning confidentially toward me, wine and food all properly arranged. “Now. Which part of Angeletti’s story didn’t you believe?”

He really wanted to know. The family connection had been fathers—my father had worked for his father in the war, running small-time intelligence operations from various anonymous flats near Hanover Square—and Magnus had always considered that I was carrying on the paternal line of work, while he had lapsed into the inelegant world of commerce, letting us all down. Besides, like everybody else, he thought a private detective mixed with a far more interesting class of people, slept late in the mornings, and shared his trenchcoat with Lauren Bacall. I need my illusions too, so I sat in his club, drinking his wine, and I told him about Carlo Angeletti. And Caroline.

 

“Angeletti. Kind of a snake,” Fred had announced two weeks before, after spending an afternoon checking with whoever it is he checks. I’d sat back to listen as he’d paused to roll his cigar into the comer of his mouth. Willie Mays never swung a bat as big as one of Fred’s cigars. When he had retired from the San Francisco PD three years ago, I had talked him into helping me out as part-time personal assistant, gadfly, and grandfather figure. He had argued for a while—tracking lost kids was too depressing, he just wanted to loaf—but he had finally come around. You can be an ex-cop, but you can’t be an ex-Irishman. He missed the talk, he had explained, more than the money; the talk and the life on the streets. I watched him tip his pork pie hat up from his big Irish nose and hook one thumb under his belt.

“Angeletti’s got some riceland in the Delta near Stockton,” he said. “Angeletti Farms. But he’s not a farmer. Most of his dollars—and there’s five or six million—come from three oil tankers that he works freelance all over, but mainly in Europe.” He looked at a brown envelope covered with notes. “Marseilles, London, Bremen. Like that. Makes him kind of an absentee owner, but apparently that’s the way a lot of small tanker people operate. Set up an office in Monrovia where the boat buys its flag, then you go retire to the Alps and bank by mail. He’s a widower, late sixties. Came across in 1947 from the old country on a French visa—Italians sometimes did that after the war if they had political problems—never been back, which means either he likes it here or he had problems. Got bad asthma and a gimpy leg. Got one son, twenty-four, went to Stanford, bums around now. Got two Sevilles he buys every October, always dark blue, same color as Nixon’s suits. Got a houseboat, a powerboat, an office in the Wells Fargo building on Montgomery Street, and a permanent suite at the Mark Hopkins. But the houseboat is where he lives, maybe on account of the asthma, maybe on account of the Federal Reserve bank inspectors.”

“Is that the snake part?”

“Yeah. He’s got controlling stock in a couple of Valley savings and loans, and the Feds have been wondering for years why so many guys come from so far just to open accounts there. And why they usually make their first deposit from a grocery bag.”

“He runs a laundry?”

Fred shrugged. “It’s not against the law to accept cash in your bank,” he said. “You know that, Mike. You can take anything from anybody. You just got to make a report to the FDIC on any cash deposit over $10,000. Angeletti’s banks make ten, twelve reports like that a quarter. Mostly hippies, the Feds figure, bringing in the hash money, or whatever.” He rolled the cigar to the other corner. “Hell, there’s a lot bigger operations than that. There’s a couple of banks in Miami don’t deposit ten personal checks a year. ’Course they’re holding hands with the Cubans, who grow more goddamn dope than sugar cane under Castro. Now Angeletti, he’s not Family, or hooked in with the racket, but he’s not a softball player either.” He had taken out the cigar and sucked his teeth noisily. “I can’t imagine what you got that he ain’t already bought.”

Three hours later I was stopped on a narrow asphalt road in the heart of the Delta and staring at a simple wooden signpost that had “Angeletti” painted neatly across the top. Parallel to the road on the left ran a high bank of brown earth, fifteen or twenty feet high. On the right the roadbed slumped into brackish mud and tall, coarse pampas grass, then rose abruptly into another levee. Beyond that were the endless mazes of brown dikes and green waterways and locks that make up the five hundred square miles of the Delta, the swampy mass of roads and canals just east of San Francisco, where the Sacramento River meets the bay. After the sample of its convolutions that afternoon I felt like a laboratory rat that couldn’t find the cheese.

In the gold miner days there used to be Mississippi-style gambling boats floating up and down the Delta from San Francisco to Sacramento, and more than one floating brothel. Now there are a few bait shops and package stores, a few settlements of tubercular Chinese, descendants of the ones who came to build the railroads, and some scattered hippie communes that live on fish and herbs and bootleg drugs. Them and Carlo Angeletti. The cheese stands alone.

I sighed and started to nurse the Mercedes along the road, wondering if its 1958 paint job was going to blister and peel in the August sun. The last temperature I had seen was on a bank in a little town with the wishful name of Winters, ten miles back. 102, it had read. When I came to another signpost I stopped again. Next to it sat a small white guardhouse, like a bus stop shelter, and a ten-foot cyclone gate in the levee.

I leaned out into the fierce heat. Overhead, in a sky the color of chromium, a few black shadows circled. Hawks.

“Haller? Michael Haller?”

A rangy man in sports shirt, slacks, and his early thirties bounded out of the guardhouse, much too energetically, and walked to the car, bending toward me with a bright, toothy, professional smile. Even the little alligator on his shirt was smiling.

“Haller,” I agreed.

“Right on time.” I was half an hour late. “Mr. Angeletti can see you in about five minutes.” He peered into the car, not carelessly. “Mind if I ride up to the house with you? It’s damn hot out here.”

He waved to the guardhouse before I could answer, and a dark-skinned man in a security uniform emerged to swing open the gate. I watched the barbed wire glint along its top while the smiling man got in.

“My name’s Hunter Merriman,” he said pleasantly, pumping my hand and smiling again. “Mr. Angeletti’s attorney. Just drive straight ahead and pull up by the left side of the house. We’ll go right to his office.”

On the other side of the levee was a deepwater channel, black and sparkling. Maybe a quarter of a mile across it stretched a long line of grass, beyond that other lines of grass crisscrossing, and finally the distant shadows of the coastal range mountains, humping out of the black water like gigantic shadowy fish. The road, all mud and rut now, ran along the channel to another gate, left open, and then to a flat, beautifully tended lawn.

“Just park right there with those others,” Merriman instructed, and I sailed us in next to a snarling Maserati convertible that looked as if it needed to be defanged. Merriman’s, I figured. People who smile that much usually want to bite. Next to it stood somebody’s Buick, then a little apart, looking straight ahead like solemn watchdogs, was a pair of dark blue Sevilles. On the grass in front of them some grackles browsed. Then a hedge of bottlebrush, a short dock, and at the end of the dock, smug and white as a Georgia plantation house, floated Carlo Angeletti’s houseboat.

“A beauty, isn’t it?” Merriman said, swinging his door open. “Mr. Angeletti can’t take the damp in San Francisco anymore—arthritis—so he had this custom-made.”

“Who was the architect? Robert E. Lee?”

Merriman squeezed out a chuckle. “It does look Southern, doesn’t it? He had one of those old Sacramento riverboats converted. The paddle wheel was his own idea, and the steampipes. It never leaves the dock, though.” The grackles took off with a squawk as we slammed our doors. “The office is on the second floor.”

Angeletti made us wait five minutes, to keep things clear. Meanwhile Merriman dealt me a cup of coffee from a sideboard and I looked around admiringly at the office, a big room comfortably stuffed with desk, leather club chairs, bookcases, filing cabinets, and expensive knick-knacks. The floor was covered with a red and blue Mishkin rug like the one in Shirley Mendelsohn’s office, the kind the Iranians won’t sell to us anymore. The walls had a few paintings of landscapes and castles, beautifully framed in carved wood, and a big travel poster of the Coliseum in Rome, probably hiding a wall safe full of Confederate money. Half a cup later, somebody coughed outside, the door whispered open, and Carlo Angeletti himself limped in, followed by a tall young man in a suit.

If I had been expecting the godfather, I was disappointed. Angeletti turned out to be a bony, horse-faced old man, tanned the color of cardboard, a harmless Italian papa in Hawaiian shirt and khaki trousers. He bobbed his head and shook hands with a smile, showing a gap on the right side of his mouth where the teeth used to be, and hobbled on the bad leg to his desk. The young man went to the other side and sat down. What hair Angeletti had was neatly trimmed in a gray wreath around his ears. His face was furred with a two-day stubble of beard. The mouth kept smiling as he sat down, pink and moist like a baby bird’s beak.

“Merriman is here to see that everything is arranged right,” he said in a thick accent that sounded as much French as Italian to me. Merriman slid an espresso cup in front of him. “Money, travel, whatever. I want you to find my boy’s wife.”

He jerked his hand toward the young man who had come in behind him. Piero Alberti, but known as Peter A. at Stanford, according to Fred. Less of a snake, apparently. An economics major of no particular academic distinction, graduated two years ago with a varsity letter in gymnastics, swinging on the rings. All set to take over the tanker-banker business one of these days, maybe sooner rather than later. He was already dressed for the part, beige tropical suit, brown loafers, checked sports shirt, and one of those very trim haircuts. If he wore a tie, it would probably light up and say “preppie.” Right now he just wore the sullen look of the very young and wealthy. Merriman let him get his own coffee.

I glanced at Peter A. and sat still. People talk more, Fred is always saying, if you don’t.

“She disappeared on July 28.” Merriman took over. “Last week. She drove into town to do some shopping, at the J. Magnin’s on Arden Way. In Sacramento. She took Piero’s car, the Maserati”—I sloshed coffee in my cup—“which we found the next day at the Sacto airport in the short-term parking lot. But no Caroline, not a trace.”

“Did you call the police?”

Angeletti spread his hands wide in a Mediterranean gesture of fraternity, and I looked back at him.

“Mr. Haller.” He smiled, very serious, very friendly. “Mr. Haller, I’m the old school, you know? You see how I live out here.” The hands took in Mt. Vernon, the glistening water outside, the long flat horizon of canals and scrub vegetation. “We like our privacy, Mr. Haller. You know?”

I nodded back fraternally. He probably had millions of good reasons in the bank not to call the police.

“And so naturally you prefer a private operative.”

“Prego, Mr. Haller.” The hands fell back. “I prefer you.”

“Did you try to track her?”

“Merriman did.”

“She took an Air West flight at 11:30 to San Francisco,” Merriman said. “After that—zero. She could have flown off again, she could have gone into town. We didn’t check any airlines or limousines. That’s not my kind of work.”

Prego. He made it sound menial and distasteful, which isn’t far wrong sometimes.

“Did she take anything with her?” I asked. Merriman cocked an eyebrow and I explained: “Cash? Jewelry? Traveler’s checks?”

“Oh. She had a little over eight hundred dollars with her. Pocket money.”

“Sure.” I enjoy lawyers. “Credit cards?”

He looked at Angeletti.

“I give ’em both American Express,” Angeletti said with a flip of his hand toward Piero.

“We won’t know if she used it until the bills come in.” Merriman again. “This is her picture.” He handed me a manilla folder. “Vital statistics, background.”

I held it unopened in my lap and shifted slightly toward Piero. “Was there a quarrel between you two? Bad feeling? Any kind of immediate cause for her to leave?”

“Nothing like that.” Merriman answered for him too. I was getting a little tired of Merriman. “Caroline was a girl Piero met in South Tahoe working as a cocktail waitress in one of the clubs.” He smiled as cheerfully as if she had been a debutante from Hillsborough.

Piero said, “Yeah,” and stroked his chin in embarrassment. Not so great in the Stanford alumni news.

“The marriage was fine,” Merriman said. “They had the usual spats, but Mr. Angeletti was content.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Six months,” Piero mumbled.

“January 19th,” Merriman said.

“So why me?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Why not Bums or Pinkerton or somebody with a big organization that can work ten airports at a time?”

“We’ve heard of you, Mike,” Merriman said. Angeletti showed his gums in approval of this friendly informality. You get first names only in most of California now, anyway. Some say it defuses hostility. Dinah says it’s because of short attention spans.

“Michael,” I said, just to be a snot.

“Michael.” You could bounce rocks off Merriman’s smile. “You’ve built up quite a reputation for finding missing persons. It seems to be your specialty, right?” He didn’t expect an answer. “And you have the qualifications for this. Caroline is English, you see, and Mr. Angeletti and Piero have the idea that she might have returned to England. Homesick, maybe, some problem back there she didn’t want to talk about. They wanted somebody who has experience in Europe.” He gestured toward a pile of papers on Angeletti’s desk. My folder, I assumed. “You spent one year working in France, then two more working in London for the wire services. You spent a year with Interpol, some time in the Army, then three more years in LA before you came up to San Francisco and opened your own office. You left LA because of a fist-fight with another reporter, Carlton Hand, over a woman. You spent your year with Interpol on the French-Italian border.”

“Uh-huh.”

He tapped the papers with his finger. “You scored 590 out of 600 on the State Department French exam in 1972, but never followed it up.”

“There were two gold fillings in 1958 you missed.”

“Mr. Angeletti likes things thorough”—smugly. He folded his arms across his chest, indicating that he was going to talk about money. “Mr. Angeletti is prepared to pay you a three thousand dollar advance, two hundred dollars a day, and expenses. Within reason.”

Mr. Angeletti was just then toying with a foot-long polished mahogany model of an oil tanker that must have cost twice the advance. It would make a wonderful cigarette lighter, I figured, or you could just use it to spill oil in the bathtub. The brass plate on the hull said “Luchon.”

“Two fifty,” I said. “And I have two questions.”

Merriman didn’t even glance at the desk. “All right. Your questions?”

“First, why do you want her found? You could have any marriage less than a year old annulled under California law, no community property, no financial liability. Second, what do you want me to do if I can find her?”

Piero flushed. Papa turned the model tanker around and pointed it toward the far wall, as if he could give it a push and watch it float through the air. Merriman tilted his head significantly toward the manilla folder I held. I turned the cover and looked at the first picture of Caroline Angeletti.

She looked back from beside a swimming pool at somebody’s house, one hand on the diving board, one hip cocked and aimed at the camera in a gesture she meant to be provocative. But she was much too young to carry it off—no more than twenty—and the effect was oddly beguiling, innocent, like a little girl in lipstick and playing dress-up. Medium height, long blond hair. Small high breasts. No smile, just the too-wide, heartbreaking curve of mouth you often see in the English, sensual and sad. A colt.

“She’s a lovely girl,” Merriman said.

“She’s a beauty,” Angeletti growled. He was holding the tanker extended between his palms now, the way you might measure a fish. “Piero wants her back.” Piero squirmed. “I’m the old school,” his father continued. “These are just a couple of kids, that’s all. But I don’t like to see them break up a marriage. You marry, you stay married.” The accent sounded more Italian every minute. I nodded to show I would remember. “And I don’t like my boy to be unhappy,” he said, tipping his head toward Piero.

“All right. What do you want me to do if I find her?”

“You should report to me,” Merriman said, “every two days. My office and home numbers are in there; an answering service will always reach me. We—Mr. Angeletti—wants no action taken. Simply report where she is.”

Angeletti put down the boat and stood up. We all stood up too. “She’s not a bad girl, Mike,” he said. I looked around at the indentations on the backs of the chairs, hoping I could give Piero my empty coffee cup to put away. Merriman took it instead. “You find her,” Angeletti said, “we talk to her, get her back home. That’s all. Very reasonable.” Merriman swung the door open for me. “But hey!” Angeletti’s voice went hoarse, holding me a moment longer. “You be damn sure you don’t find her with somebody else.”

He showed me his empty gums and laughed to take the bite off, but on the way out I still wondered if that was an instruction or a warning. I also wondered what a nice young Stanford graduate was doing wearing a pistol holster in the small of his back.

Continued….

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Master of Uncertainty

by Richard L. Noble

5.0 stars – 2 Reviews
Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
Here’s the set-up:
A timid, sixteen-year-old orphan, Mark Acanth, comes to Manhattan with a promise to be considered for priesthood under Pope Pius XIII. In search for records of his birth, Mark discovers a hidden passage and a mysterious book. No time to puzzle them through, he finds that he is at the center of a massive global conspiracy, hunted by the Hierarchy, an ancient secret society within the Catholic Church, which believes he may be a messiah.

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

Prologue:

 

 

The infant screamed from within the tiny coffin.

The sound was so desperate, even the trees seemed to shudder, losing more of their leaves to a singular, almost life-like wind that picked up suddenly. This current of air morphed somehow and grabbed the newborn’s wail, protecting and nurturing it in the eddies of the skies. Soon a great chorus of a storm rose up from behind to amplify and then next to drown out the fragile sound, concealing it as though in a blanket, in low grumbles of thunder.

It was three middle-aged professors that had first heard the call and who were now frantic in their search beyond the school’s grounds for the crying that had miraculously carried unexpected distances to reach them. The oldest of the three stopped to listen and cocked his head to the side, straining to gauge direction and distance. He turned his portly frame to his two companions to shout over the nearly horizontal rain. “We need to hurry,” he cried. “It’s coming from there.”

“The cemetery?” asked his dark-haired colleague.

“Lord, I hope not,” the first said, unsuccessfully wiping rain from his brow with the muddied sleeve of a raincoat that only minutes before had been a crisp, bright yellow. “If so, we might be too late.”

“Too late for what?” a third academic panted as he caught up. “Why are we even out here?” Barely able to keep his balance climbing the muddy hill, he had to press down on his knee with every step. “We’re not trained for this. We should go back to the school and get help. Carl or Philip would be much…”

“There’s no time-,” the oldest interrupted, glancing back down the dirt trail that now ran like a river toward the centuries-old school. All the leaded windows were dark, confirming that no one else had heard the call. “–if it is what we think.”

“It can’t be,” the dark-haired one said, “The storm would have drowned it out. It has to be a radio. Or a machine.”

Just as the words finished leaving his mouth, as if summoned, a great web of bolts in the clouds flashed to illuminate the metal gate to the graveyard.

For a few brief seconds they huddled closer to one another before the third, tallest companion threw his arms in the air. “If we’re doing this, let’s get it done. I have exams to grade and  students to…” The sounds of his voice trailed away as  he went to the spiked portal and swung it open with a pitiful screech.

“Should have grabbed a flashlight,” the dark-haired one muttered before following.

“No time,” the oldest said as he caught up to them both standing before a weathered tombstone, apparently knocked over in the squall.

“You can’t be serious?” the tallest asked, shivering as the horror dawned on him. “Buried? Impossible.”

Suddenly, shimmering movements in the mud around the toppled headstone caught their eyes. They jumped back when they realized three giant snakes, thick and many feet long, were coiling in upon themselves as if marking the borders of a triangle. Their tongues flickered lazily in the downpour.

“Dear God!” the tallest and thinnest said. “Snakes!? Here?”

“Death Adders,” the second breathed, hugging his raincoat tighter.

“Bigger than usual,” the oldest said, “but definitely adders.”

“They’re native only to Australia.” The thin one raised his voice as the deluge worsened. “They shouldn’t be able to survive in this cold.”

“Besides, snakes hate rain. They’re cold-blooded, they–” His companion moved toward the serpents. “Careful, they’re extremely poisonous.”

The second man faltered. “How poisonous?”

“One of the most in the–”

The slicing, pitiful cry pierced the night again–the sound that had lured them into the foul weather.

“Who would do something like this?”

“Some sick devil.”

“Wait, there in the middle,” the second rattled through clenched teeth while his finger danced toward the headstone. “See it?”

“Yes, something’s buried there.” The oldest stretched his neck and wiped at his glasses with a sleeve. “I see an edge in the ground.”

“That’s where the sound is coming from, but how do we get past them?”

The snakes, acting as if they heard, suddenly softened and moved aside. Their fully extended bodies were sluggish and rippling while creating an opening for the professors to approach.

“Unbelievable,” they all said together, crossing themselves in unison.

The oldest took a faltering step and as he advanced, the adders continued to retreat as if giving their permission to approach. “I don’t know how or why,” he said, turning back to his companions, “but I think we’re safe.” His eyes were suddenly haggard, sullen, rheumy.

The other two inched closer too, but stayed wary, glancing at the reptiles. The oldest dropped to his knees and scraped at the wet earth to reveal a stone sarcophagus. “Watch the snakes,” he called back, “while I open this.” His arthritic fingers gripped hard on the lid of the chest, his muscles straining at the weight, slipping from the wetness.

“Need help?” the tallest asked, bending forward, but not too far, his eyes darting to the slithering creatures and their vigil only a few feet away.

“I think,” he grunted, “I’ve almost…got it.”

The stone lid raised enough to scrape off and land in the mud with a wet thud. Inside, nestled in a bundle of straw, was a baby with a ring on a leather cord around its neck.

It was now silent.

* * * * *

At the same time, half-way around the world, another man’s every step disappeared into two feet of white powder. The blasting winds of the frigid terrain, though, quickly obliterated the sunken holes as if nature wanted no life here, not even its impressions.

He too, searched for something.

All around him, in every direction, there was nothing but pasty drifting plains, reddened by the sun dangling at the edge of the horizon as if pressed by the sky to disappear forever. He knew he should have brought warmer clothing, but he had been too eager, too quick to find out about the boy. Besides, the world itself had nagged at him suddenly to come here.

Forced to abandon his shoes miles ago, frostbite had swelled his feet to darkened, purple pineapples. They would surely need to be amputated when he got back to Rome.

Such a nuisance, he thought.

The traveler was no longer careful with each step because he knew he was close. He could feel that the lair was nearby so he no longer bothered to tuck his blue-tinged hands beneath his armpits to keep them warm. Instead, they dangled with every step, plunging carelessly into the snow, coming out like white-frosted mitts, becoming as black as his feet, just as frostbitten, the physical sense of touch in them long gone.

He didn’t relish the pain he would endure when they warmed back up–the shattered cells of his skin and muscles would be like microscopic glass daggers cutting at the now fractured nerve endings. If he could find the place soon, perhaps he could still save his arms and legs.

“This damn body, so frail,” he mumbled as he stopped to scan and get his bearings. It had been many years since he’d been here last, the birthplace of the Aryans–the superhumans who had retreated to this frozen landscape after being defeated during the Second World War.

Now they waited patiently until summoned to fight again.

It became clear to the traveler that there were no points of reference here. The shifting environment changing minute by minute let alone since he’d last traveled here in 1935. He knew relocating the subterranean temple would be difficult–part of the reason it lingered in human mythos and was never discovered.

“Hyperborea,” he breathed as if willing it to be near him.

The sun would be setting soon and he didn’t want to have to search in the dark for the secret sanctuary built long before humans roamed this Earth. He was too anxious to wait. Besides, those damn stars grated on him–sleeping under them–clear and festive as they twinkled, reminding him how alone he was on this planet…

Wait, he thought. A rumbling.

He cocked his head at it. He had been too preoccupied to notice that indiscernible thrum that he knew to look for. He twisted his extended arms out in front of himself as if dowsing for the sensation that belonged to the crystals themselves, pulsing in their place, calling out as they always did.

The slightest taste of a smile brushed against his lips. Not far now. He only had to find–ah, there it was. A depression in the snow.

Using his bare hands, he clawed at the many layers, some soft and fresh, some hard as concrete, packed by time. Hours later, the sun finally gone for its winter hibernation, he carved out a stone door with a black, faintly luminescent swastika emblazoned in its center.

The swastika instantly brought back fond memories of glory.

He grimaced as he remembered his failures, recalling that he had been too overzealous, too brazen that his former prodigy was the One. He was sure that he would fulfill the prophecy, he had all the qualities–charisma, adept with the use of Vril, willing to torture and execute without thought or remorse–except one.

How could he have been so wrong?

The explorer turned a levered handle and the door swung inward. He cursed as a patch of skin tore away from his palm with a sound like pulled Velcro as it stuck to the metal . With a final jerk, the flap ripped free, dangling from the hardware, the gash exposing muscle beneath, blood too frozen to flow.

Because of that one costly mistake with his student, it all ended, he thought to himself. This time he had to be sure. He had to be cautious. The Cardinal’s new boy, he looked so promising, but looks were oftentimes deceiving. No, he wouldn’t let thousands of years of work be for naught because he was eager. He’d waited this long.

Stepping through the doorway, the crashing winds abated. The subzero cold still attacked him, though he didn’t really care. At least he was here–

Hyperborea.

As he traversed the place of worship that he knew so well, he contemplated lighting a candle to find his way before getting the generators running. No, he would be fine in the dark. He enjoyed the dark.

And it wasn’t until after passing through a maze of countless rooms and passages, arriving at his destination, that the traveler finally decided that he wanted to see this place with his human eyes. He brought match to wick and the séance chamber flickered to life.

It was so–untouched, he thought. Exactly as he had left it over sixty years ago. No dust, no movement, the cold hindering even the idea of decay. Adorning the yellow plaster walls and rough-hewn table were numerous banners emblazoned with their beloved symbols–the swastika, the sig rune, and the sonnenrad–each of them all-important to the Hierarchy and the Lord of Light.

Beyond the table was the door to his private laboratory and as he walked toward it, a spring in his gait hinted at a joviality to his demeanor, uncommon for him. Not that he was incapable of happiness–he just didn’t quite understand its significance or appeal. This was the closest he could ever come.

In the center of the portal, he flattened his hand into an impression which, as swollen as it was, had still obviously been formed to match his own. The explorer’s shoulders lifted when he heard the click that meant the mechanism still worked after all these years–the sound only his hand could create–and the portal swung open to where he had created the master race. Where, after thousands of years, and countless mistakes, his labors had come to fruition.

He inhaled and remarked how after all this time, the smells still draped the room–boiled bodily fluids, scorched organs, embalming liquids. And there was that something else, driving him to near-frenzy–

The stench of fear.

The participants–he liked to call them that–they had all been afraid. Every single one. Without fail. Perhaps they collapsed under torture at differing times, but they always succumbed whether from the mere mention of the knife or the actual sawing and hacking of their limbs.

Yes, they had always cried out.

The traveler stepped down into his laboratory and lit more candles–if it wasn’t for these damned eyes, he thought. How he couldn’t wait to be free–when the Lord of Light ruled this Universe.

He retrieved a pair of pincers from the wall and scraped a blackened fingernail along its edge, closing his eyes, breathing deep as bits of his last victim caught under his nail. He set it down. No, he wasn’t here to reminisce. The boy, he reminded himself. That’s why he was here. The Cardinal’s boy.

From the center of the workbench, he cradled the object they had unearthed in the Second World War. He wished he could tune in with it the way the Prophesied One was supposed to be able to–its melody almost perceptible to him. He knew its full power would be magnificent, especially when both were brought together. He acknowledged that his disciple hadn’t truly failed. At least he had delivered them this.

The man carefully wrapped the object in green metal foil before placing it in the knapsack lying next to it. If what he suspected of the boy was true, they would need this soon. He would bring it back with him and then they would search in earnest for its counterpart.

From an ebony cabinet imbued with an unnatural polish like wet obsidian, he withdrew a square mirror and set it in a stand on his desk. In moments, the mirror took on new form–a shimmering mercurial plate–like viscous silver. A crackling hum filled his human ears as the liquid metal contoured into the vague outline of a face lacking any substantive details but hinting at masculinity. When a mouth moved, a thunderous voice reverberated throughout the chamber as if harmonizing with itself.

“YOU HAVE COME. GOOD.”

“Master?” The traveler bowed his head. He hadn’t expected the Lord of Light to be waiting for him. “The Cardinal has been training a boy.”

“I FEEL A NEW PRESENCE IN YOUR WORLD.”

“The Prophesied?”

“PERHAPS. PERHAPS NOT. I AM INTRIGUED. THIS SOUL IS POWERFUL ENOUGH TO HAVE STRUCK ME HERE.”

“The crystals will lead me to him?”

“YES. AND WHEN YOU FIND HIM WATCH HIM. TEST HIM. FIND OUT WHAT HE IS. THIS IS MOST UNEXPECTED.”

“Then the Cardinal’s Italian boy, he isn’t the One?”

“I KNOW ONLY THAT OUR CHAMPION HAS FINALLY ARRIVED, THOUGH YOU MUST DETERMINE WHO THAT MIGHT BE. REGARDLESS, YOU WILL MAKE THE CARDINAL THE THIRTEENTH PIUS.”

“So it is time? We are ready?” He would have liked to have been giddy, but not in front of the Lord of Light, even if he knew how.

“WITH THE THIRTEENTH YOU CAN TRULY MANIPULATE THE HIERARCHY AND THE SECOND GUARDIAN WILL SOON FALL. HE AND HIS MALAKIM WILL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO COME OUT OF HIDING TO FACE HIS BROTHER.”

He bowed his head. “I will do as you command.”

“GOOD. OUR VICTORY HINGES ON YOU.”

“I will not fail.”

“NO, YOU WILL NOT.”

The sheet of liquid metallic glass went placid then, resuming its mirror-like state, leaving in its wake a lingering reverberation before going stiff.

The explorer was noticeably bothered. There were two out there in the world? He hadn’t expected this. It had taken him months to get here for this cryptic, short conversation?

Shaking his head, clearing his thoughts, he focused on what the Lord of Light had commanded of him. He sat down at the desk to write the letter that would ordain the Cardinal, the thirteenth Pius. The twelve before had been experiments, shadows of this culmination of leadership. The thirteenth would be the Hierarchy’s pinnacle achievement. He had been all but ready to bestow the thirteenth in the 40’s, but their failures saw an end to that.

Finishing the letter, he stamped his sigil into melted wax. Below it, he began to sign Dietrich Eckart–but then reeled back his bloated, bruise-colored hand. He had given up that name when he faked his own death in 1923 to further the Nazi cause without hindrance.

“Fool,” he sneered. “You have a new name now.”

For a moment, his previous name begged him to lament how his greatest student could have been the Prophesied, could have ruled the world. But ultimately his disciple had failed him, had failed them all.

For shame. Such talent, now gone from this world. The man pressed his pen back onto the document and signed the new name to go with his new body–Clementi Boole.

Chapter One:

 

 

Mark awoke.

He glanced at the clock on the nightstand. It was three in the morning and it was time. Everyone would be asleep. He exhaled, sat up and rubbed a hand on top of his buzz-shaven head, his calluses catching on jet-black stubble.

Here he was, finally in New York with his dreams laid out before him, yet he still couldn’t shake that sense of unease that he was the fish about to nibble on the delicious hook. He’d been brought to New York after his graduation to be further tested–

Or so they had said.

Chewing a fingernail, Mark wondered if he should really go sneaking about. St. Peter’s was the seat of the most prominent Catholic diocese in the nation and its Records Room was rumored to house secret files on the Kennedy Assassination and Roswell and Area 51. He couldn’t simply go in there, besides, if he was caught, he’d lose forever this opportunity. Here he could make a difference. Here he could be somebody. Did he want to throw all of that away?

Setting a robe around his shoulders, he winced as his bare feet touched cold stone and he walked to his sink to question himself in its mirror–

In the center of his boyishly handsome face, his sapphire eyes were bright and intelligent, but with a softness at their edges that told they were still untested, unproven. It was as if he had the potential to do incredible things but lacked the wisdom to know how. He leaned in closer, groaned when he saw that they were also weighed down by a curiosity that prodded him to do what he was about to.

He turned away, embarrassed by his own reflection, to glance down to the ring he always wore on his left hand. He thought it was lead when he bit into it. Couldn’t be though, since he never removed it and his lead levels were normal–the lab technicians downstairs had tested for that too. Father Gregory had said the ring was from his parents–his only connection to them–parents he’d never met.

Mark pulled down on his cheeks, stretched down his eyes. Unfortunately, he could no longer tolerate the strange experiments they were conducting on him–that’s why he had to do this. He splashed water on his neck, wiped his hands on a washcloth, took a breath and sneaked from his quarters to the hallway beyond.

St. Peter’s Cathedral in central Manhattan with its gothic architecture had made Mark uneasy since he and Father Gregory had first arrived a month prior, but even more so since the arrival of the new Administrator, Clementi Boole. Mark hadn’t met the man yet, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

It felt like–dread–hung in the church now.

Mark was aware of something newly macabre about the place, as if he was being watched all the time, not by the clergy, but by the building itself. The cathedral had become cold and dreary all of a sudden, colorless, as if haunting specters had taken up residence. Even the normally spiritual torchieres were now casting demonic shadows along the soot-draped corridors.

He shivered, told himself it was only in his head, but he broke into a run anyway until he reached the electronic keypad. He hastened to check both directions. Hurry, he told himself, swallowing as he stared at the glowing numbers.

It hadn’t been particularly difficult for Mark to figure out the code. Only four numbers were covered in fingerprints and stains–9, 8, 5 and 1. And after a few hours of research, putting together all the clues, he learned that construction on St. Peter’s Cathedral began in 1859.

With shaking fingers, Mark reached out to punch in the digits, but then reeled his hand back. He noted the inscription above the door:

At its portals, the world seems left behind and every advancing step brings Heaven nearer and deepens the soul’s union with Divinity.

What would God think of this?

“God,” he said to himself. “I have no choice.” He took a breath, steeled himself to jab in the sequence. With the final beep there was a soft rush at the lock.

Stepping inside, he saw books along one wall and a boxy, mahogany desk sitting squarely in the center of a Persian rug and a third wall housed filing cabinets from floor to ceiling. A tapestry covered most of its opposite.

He scanned the filing cabinets he’d come for. Opened one–A-Ammerman–rifled through to–there it was. A fat folder–the biggest in the drawer–on him, Mark Acanth. As he spread it on the desk, he hadn’t realized he was so important.

Since he and his mentor, Father Gregory, had arrived from Saint Francis School for Boys in Vermont, things had seemed a bit suspicious. He truly believed a conspiracy lurked in his latest life in New York, especially when he was more likely to see white lab coats and clipboards than cassocks and bibles. Perhaps this folder was proof.

Why would a cathedral have a medical laboratory anyway?

There were pictures of him taken every year since he was born. School and what looked like surveillance photos. A piece of his hair was taped to the binder. There was a close-up shot of the splotchy birthmark around his navel, a form of the vascular skin disease, port-wine stain. He fingered it beneath his shirt as he read, self-conscious that his namesake was being so scrutinized.

He found lists of his grades, his exam scores, his teachers. His aptitudes, his proficiencies. There were charts and graphs with notes and questions. Someone had made a note, concerned he was learning too fast, that everything was too easy for him.

Jesus, he thought, he was an experiment.

He found a piece of paper with a hand drawing of a sideways eight within a circle. Then he found a fact sheet with three headings: parents, birth date and place of birth. All three were blank. The pain bit instantly and he was reminded again that he had no identity. That was what he’d come to find. A name. Maybe an address. Some connection to his past.

Yet, now he was puzzled at how extensive this file was, but no information on his parents or his birth. Something must have happened. Murdered? A cover-up? A fact sheet stated how much he weighed each year, how much he grew over time. Somebody was going through a lot of trouble to have monitored him for his entire life.

Reading on, it said he was an introvert. He had social anxiety. That he liked apples and had no friends, never met a girl. That he had never left Saint Francis School for Boys before coming here. He aspired to become a priest. That last entry was circled with a giant red exclamation point next to it.

They knew more about him than he did.

Within his folder, there were three subfolders, one with Father Gregory’s name and two others–Rajeev Umashankar and Spencer Freeman. All three had been teachers at Mark’s former school. And then, on the last page, written in an edgy, angular script that hinted at the author’s frustration, ink pooled at the corners of the letters–

IS HE THE ONE?

Mark slammed the file closed. Let out a ragged breath before putting it back in the cabinet. Wiping his hands on his pants, he realized that he was more confused than he had been before. He should’ve left things as they were. He mimicked his mentor’s Irish accent, recited one of his favorite quotes–

“In much wisdom is much grief–and he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.”

As he turned to leave, Mark found himself turning toward the tapestry. It nagged at him, and he couldn’t help staring at the scene of a church nestled amongst gnarled trees. He leaned in. There was a dark-robed figure there with a face hidden in shadow, pointing to the moon at the edge of the fabric.

Was it pointing it at the moon, he wondered or something behind it?

He pulled back a corner of the weaving and barely made out a slight deviation in the wall as if there might be a doorway behind. He traced a finger along an edge.

“Where is the catch?” he breathed..

He let the wall-covering fall back into place, to slide and pivot books. He ran his hands up the legs and underneath the desk. He swept inside drawers, moved the lamp, turned knobs. Yanking open the filing drawers, he traced the insides with stretched fingers.

Nothing.

Maybe there wasn’t a secret door at all. Could be where a painting hung at one time or a foundation was repaired.

“You’re doing this to yourself,” he whispered. “You want there to be something special in your life.”

Then Mark saw it. The silver candelabrum that had been converted to hold an electric bulb had fingerprints all over its base and burned onto the sepia-colored glass. With a careful twist of the sconce, the murmur of moving stone stewed from behind the wall-hanging. He shook his head with a flat smile.

When the secret wall opened entirely what he found was nothing more than a closeted bookshelf and another doorway which he inched open to a dark tunnel that ran straight well beyond the reach of the room’s light source. His eyes flicked to either side and noticed that there was no light switch.

He’d explore this later, he thought. When he had more time. He wasn’t afraid, he told himself. Besides there was no light and he didn’t have a flashlight.

He turned instead to examine the books. He found one on ancient Assyrian catacombs, another on medieval weapons and torture devices. He grimaced. Who would read these? Why were they hidden behind a secret door, he wondered.

Soon he came across a jet-black tome with no title. Turning it over he found no words or pictures, nothing but again that strange circle circumscribing a sideways number eight embossed in the center of its cover, drawn in a coppery red. This symbol had to mean something. Twice now he’d seen it.

The book’s aged leather was coarse like callused skin, cut crude unlike any he had handled before, as if the tanner had been rushed. Carefully opening it, Mark saw that the pages were faded and worn, containing hand drawn words and pictures. The writing was characteristic of the quill and ink sort, yet fluid, written in a combination of Egyptian hieroglyphics and…was that…Hebrew?

Every other page, on the left side, contained a picture. Flipping a few, he thought they might have been done with both watercolors and ink, appearing crisp almost like a photograph. The artist was skilled. Very skilled. The pictures however were fantastic. They represented the artist’s view of another world or another time.

Some were of mysterious gardens with unearthly plants and vegetation. Blue trees with giant orange crystalline pods. Strange alien buildings. Human-like figures wearing exotic clothes and heavy armor, riding dragon-like beasts to fight giants. Creatures that were half animal and half man.

Others, however, were horrible scenes of death and war. Beams of light shot from the clawed fingertips of grotesque beings as they destroyed structures and burned fields. Odd, horse-like creatures burned in pools of liquid fire. Men and women were locked in battle with unknown weapons. Fields of lifeless bodies were sorted by the survivors.

Flipping through, Mark was mesmerized. He wanted to go to this place, explore this world. It felt real. The pictures were so clear, so vivid, so wonderfully crafted.

So alive.

This was a land of magic and he wished he could be there, to live an adventure. His life was so boring. He wanted to be a hero, to fight for good, destroying evil, aspired something bigger out of life.

As he continued to turn pages, a piece of parchment fell to the floor. He brought it to his nose and it smelled like ripe mushrooms. Creases tore as he unfolded it carefully, the paper old and brittle. Hundreds of years old, he guessed, for it to be that fragile. On it was written a message:

November 12

Weird. That was today’s date.

Mark-

Someone reading this, perhaps a century ago, with his same name? He pursed his lips as he nodded. Even stranger.

The time has come for you to know who you are. You are one of them now. The transformation is complete. The end is near and I’m afraid you must find it soon. I can help you as much as I can but you must provide your own awakening, this book is only the key.

The signature at the bottom was blurred by a reddish-brown stain that punctuated the paper in a random pattern. It flaked as he scratched at it with a fingernail. Was that…dried blood? He could only make out the last part of it.

–zarus.

Then, suddenly, the morning bell rang throughout St. Peters and Mark nearly dropped the tome, been here longer than he realized. He folded the note as hurriedly as he could without it tearing and shoved the volume back on the shelf. Only after putting everything back the way it had been did he head for his room, puzzling where the secret passage led and what the note had meant by the one.

Continued….

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Richard L. Noble’s MASTER OF UNCERTAINTY>>>>

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Master of Uncertainty

by Richard L. Noble

5.0 stars – 2 Reviews
Text-to-Speech and Lending: Enabled
Here’s the set-up:
A timid, sixteen-year-old orphan, Mark Acanth, comes to Manhattan with a promise to be considered for priesthood under Pope Pius XIII. In search for records of his birth, Mark discovers a hidden passage and a mysterious book. No time to puzzle them through, he finds that he is at the center of a massive global conspiracy, hunted by the Hierarchy, an ancient secret society within the Catholic Church, which believes he may be a messiah.

About The Author

Mr. Noble is a coffee-steeped author born in the United States and currently residing in the Midwest. When not writing, he will often travel and can be seen listening to tall tales and searching for trolls under bridges. To keep himself sane, he often makes wishes on the first star of the night, believes in magic and follows rainbows to their ends. Occasionally, Mr. Noble gets his drink on at the Marvel Bar, where he normally leaves mistaking fiction for fact. Don’t hesitate to contact him via email at richard.l.noble@me.com.

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‘Black’s star just keeps on rising’ – Evening Telegraph

‘Sean Black writes with the pace of Lee Child and the heart of Harlan Coben’ – Joseph Finder, New York Times Bestselling Author of Paranoia

‘This is a writer, and a hero, to watch’ – The Daily Mail

And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:

Prologue

Near the end of every month, Bert Ely got up an hour earlier than usual, fumbled into his clothes in the dark so that he didn’t wake his wife, clambered into his beat-to-hell Chevy Impala and drove the eighteen miles from his house in Van Nuys into downtown Los Angeles. Getting on to the 101 freeway at six rather than his usual seven o’clock shaved about twenty-five minutes from his commute, although saving time wasn’t the real issue. The time he spent in the car on these particular days was something he looked forward to all month.

He loved the ritual of his routine as much as he enjoyed what lay at the end of it. As with any indulgence, half the fun – at least, as far as Bert was concerned – lay in the anticipation.

The 101 took him out of the San Fernando Valley, through Hollywood, the city’s degenerate heart, finally depositing him via the Broadway off-ramp into downtown Los Angeles where he worked as a real-estate appraiser for Citicorp. It was a mind-numbing job, based in a soul-crushing grey office building full of good little corporate automatons. Along with the fact that his wife no longer had sex with him, and his kids probably couldn’t have cared less whether he lived or died, Bert used the utterly mundane nature of his job to justify his end-of-the-month routine.

This morning, as he turned from North Broadway on to West 1st Street, a Los Angeles Police Department cruiser pulled out behind him. He found his heart rate quickening a little, although he had no real reason to feel guilty – certainly not yet, anyway. He supposed that technically what he would do today was against the law, but that was more to do with the thick streak of Puritanism that still ran through American society than anything else.

The rack of stop lights next to the Japanese American National Museum was at red. The LAPD cruiser pulled up alongside him. Bert glanced at the two cops riding up front. One was half twisted round in his seat, talking to a young Hispanic woman who was perched on the rear bench seat. Judging from her clothes, and her cratered complexion, over which she had smoothed a rough veneer of foundation, she was a street walker.

She saw Bert looking at her and stared back at him, like she knew what his secret was. Bert’s heart rate elevated again. The middle finger of her left hand popped up as she flipped him off, then the lights changed and the cop car continued down 1st Street as Bert made the right turn on to South Central Avenue, his heart still pounding.

He shook the image of the Hispanic woman from his head as he pulled into the parking lot, a sleepy-eyed attendant handing him his ticket as soon as he exited the car with his briefcase.

The sidewalk was still dewy with the water from early-morning street cleaning as he took a left heading down towards Starbucks on the corner of South Central Avenue and 2nd, passing the Cuba Central Cafe, and Yogurtland. Outside Starbucks a few chairs and tables were already stacked on the patio, ready to be deployed. Bert walked quickly past the three banks of newspaper vending machines next to the kerb, crossed the little patio and pushed the door open. He went straight to the counter and placed his order without glancing up at the board.

‘Skinny latte, no foam,’ he said, to the barista. ‘Oh, and gimme a blueberry muffin.’ The muffin was an everyday treat for Bert.

As he waited, he studiously avoided looking outside towards the final bank of newspaper vending machines, their metal posts planted in the sidewalk. A black one, a brown one and two red ones, the last of which held the key to his treat. Inside that machine were copies of this week’s LA Xclusive newspaper, although the term ‘newspaper’ was a bit of a misnomer. There was no news inside, only page after page of adverts for escorts, predominantly female but with a scattering of men and transgender prostitutes, all selling limitless variations of the same thing: sex.

It was the endless variation on a theme that captivated Bert. Not just in terms of all the different physical types, ages and races, but in the array of services they offered, some so outlandish that even the thought of them made Bert queasy. Sometimes the ads had pictures too, although he had learned from a couple of disappointing liaisons that they couldn’t always be relied upon to be accurate.

Still, contained within the pages was a wonderland of possibilities, like a huge candy store for grown-ups. Inside those little boxes was an array of women, all of whom would have sex with Bert in return for money. From corn-fed Midwestern runaways, who no doubt told themselves that what they were doing was no different from what they’d done at home in the back seat of a car on a Saturday night, through the twenty-something MAWs (Model/Actress/Whatevers), with their gravity-defying silicone boobs and jaded air of disappointment that they weren’t even going to make the Z-list, all the way to the hardened professionals, women who had long ago reconciled their hopes and dreams with the reality of making a living by lying on their backs. Over the years, Bert had sampled them all.

Recently, though, he’d begun to find a sameness to the experience, and to feel a dark, lonely emptiness once the encounter was over. Where once he’d felt satiated, now his monthly liaisons left Bert hungry for something other than sex. For intimacy, maybe?

Last month, in the awkward post-coital moments and with ten minutes still officially on the clock, he had lain in bed with a young redhead in a condo in Playa Del Rey. He’d asked her if they could spoon, cuddle in together, his arms around her. She’d looked at him like he was nuts and asked him to leave, reaching into a bedside table and producing a hand gun to emphasize that she wasn’t kidding.

Strangely, he had never felt much guilt about paying women to have sex with him, rationalizing that a real affair, one with emotions and feelings, would be far more upsetting to his wife. That was part of the reason he never visited the same woman twice. Well, that and the fact that he liked the variety. Living in LA you could sample all that the world had to offer in the way of women without leaving the city boundaries. As long as you didn’t want a hug at the end.

‘Sir? Is this to go?’

The barista’s question snapped Bert back to the tiny coffee shop, which was starting to fill with office workers.

‘Yeah, thanks,’ Bert mumbled, handing over ten dollars and waiting for change. He put the two single dollar bills into the tip jar and kept the coins, which he’d need to pay for his copy of the newspaper. Then he picked up his coffee and the brown paper bag holding his muffin and wandered back outside into the early-morning California sunshine.

He stood for a second, sorting through his change and trying to get back a little of the good feeling he’d left the house with that day; the good feeling that came from his little secret.

At lunchtime he’d sneak to the men’s room, peruse the women on offer that week, then make a phone call. With his department offering flexible working hours, he’d reclaim the time he’d banked by getting into the office early, and drive over to the woman’s apartment. He was thinking that maybe he’d try someone a little older today, someone who might not find it strange that a man of his age would trade sexual gymnastics for a hug. Or, maybe, he thought, smiling to himself, he’d find a hot little spinner and screw her until her eyes popped out of her head.

It was only then, standing on the sidewalk, lost in his own thoughts, that he noticed the stack of newspapers sitting at the far end of the vending machines, the pages of the top copy fluttering in the breeze as the beginnings of a hot Santa Ana wind funneled its way from the natural canyons of the LA basin to the concrete canyons of downtown.

‘Huh,’ he said to himself, bending down slightly. Someone, a kind of perverted Good Samaritan, must have opened the machine and dumped all the copies out on the ground. With his knees still bent and his head down, Bert grabbed one from the middle of the small pile. Then, as he raised his head, he saw something that sent a jolt of adrenalin surging through him, stealing his breath and leaving a tingle of pins and needles in his fingertips.

Normally, if all the newspapers had been taken, he would have looked through the smeared glass display window to see ‘SOLD OUT’ printed on a screen at the back of the compartment that held the papers. But that wasn’t what he was looking at right now.

Instead he was seeing blood – a lot of blood. And in the middle of the sheet of blood, a pair of eyes were staring back at him.

A head. Someone had taken out the newspapers and replaced them with a human head.

Still gasping for air, Bert straightened up and looked around. A clutch of middle-aged white women dressed in pant suits walked past. One glanced at the paper still clasped in Bert’s hand, and gave him a look of disgust. None seemed to look at the vending machine and what was in it.

Maybe it was a prank. Yeah, thought Bert, that had to be it. A mannequin’s head and a tube of fake blood. Must be some goddamn feminists trying to make a point about the exploitation of women or some shit.

He looked back to the head. Sweet Jesus. If it was a prank, they’d made it look really convincing.

The initial shock had passed to the point at which he was starting to think about what to do next. He should just get the hell out, he knew that. Then another thought struck him, keeping him there.

If there were cameras on this intersection and the prank was found later, the police might think he had something to do with it and want to speak to him. They might even come to his home.

However, if he alerted the police right now, he could tell them he was walking past and just happened to notice it. He’d be a vigilant citizen rather than someone with something to hide.

He took a step towards the machine, and had a better look at the head. Although it was obscured by the blood spattering the panel he could make out enough of the features – soft, full lips, blue eyes, a small button nose and dyed blonde hair running down the cheeks in limp, tangled strands – to see that it was a woman’s.

Get it over with, he said to himself, jamming two quarters into the vending machine as quickly as he could and yanking at the handle to open it.

The stench hit him like a truck. Even holding his breath the sickly sweet cloying odor clawed its way to the back of his throat, making his stomach spasm and sending the little that was left of last night’s dinner spilling over his shoes and splashing on to the sidewalk. Behind him a woman screamed so loudly that he thought his ear drums might burst.

Still gasping, he looked down at the copy of LA Xclusive he was holding in his left hand. On the cover there was a young blonde woman, perfectly made up and airbrushed: collagen-full lips, a button nose, deep blue eyes with silky platinum curls. It was the same person.

Slowly, reluctantly, Bert Ely looked again at the front cover of the paper and the headline above the girl’s face: ‘MEET CINDY CANYON’.

 

1

Her body slick with baby oil and sweat, Raven Lane whiplashed her neck, sending a thick mane of jet-black hair flying into the air, arched her back and smiled at the three hundred men crowded around the tiny platform, as Motley Crue’s heavy-metal anthem ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ pounded out from two huge speakers mounted at either side of the stage.

Dollar bills cascaded across the metal barrier, which, along with two steroid-pumped bouncers, separated Raven from her public. Ignoring the money, she wrapped herself around the stripper’s pole, suggestively pistoning her left hand up and down the cold metal, her mouth open, her head thrown back again, her eyes closed in an expression of erotic abandon.

After years on the road, she had her routine down cold. Every gesture, every pout, every spin around the pole and every hair-flick was choreographed to the second, specifically engineered so that every single man in the club went away feeling that somehow Raven Lane had danced solely for his gratification.

She opened her eyes again, ready to move into the next part of the routine. At the edge of her vision she caught sight of a scrawny weasel of a man with a ratty beard, wearing a John Deere baseball cap, squeezing under the barrier and heading straight for her. Somehow he’d found his way past the two lunkhead bouncers and was now careening towards her at top speed.

Raven tensed as she adjusted her feet, one hand wrapping around the pole for support. Judging the speed of his approach, she took one final twirl and brought up a razor-sharp heel straight into his solar plexus. The man stumbled backwards clutching his chest as the crowd signaled its approval with a primal roar. One of the bouncers jumped on top of him and he was pulled back over the barrier by his hair before being propelled through the crowd by another member of the club’s security staff. Despite his obvious physical discomfort, he had an inane grin on his face, as if a kick in the chest from Raven was some kind of come-on.

Raven swept the incident from her mind, working through her routine, her hands running across her bare breasts, her backside thrust out towards the crowd, seemingly lost in a state of rapture. All the while the downpour of dollars cascaded towards her until she almost lost sight of the faces of the men who’d already paid twenty bucks at the door just to see her naked body.

Eight minutes later, and almost as many thousands of dollars richer, she was escorted back to her dressing room, a dingy cupboard at the back of the single-story roadside saloon. She toweled herself off, reapplied her makeup, put on a short, red silk robe from Frederick’s of Hollywood and headed back out to have her picture taken with fans and to sign T-shirts.

The T-shirts cost fifteen dollars; her signature was another ten. Having their picture taken with her cost the men an additional fifteen. Alongside her cut of the door money and the bar, plus all those dollar bills tossed on to the stage, an appearance like this netted her around fifteen thousand dollars. Not bad for a few hours’ work by a twenty-eight-year-old who hadn’t even graduated from high school, she thought, as another loser stepped forward to have his picture taken with her.

After almost a decade of shedding her clothes on-stage and in movies, Raven still couldn’t quite understand why men would turn up to see her. With her long black hair and near flawless body, she knew what the obvious attraction was, but she still didn’t quite get it. She always thought it must be like visiting the most amazing restaurant in the world but contenting yourself with standing outside, your nose pressed against the window, as other people ate the food.

Maybe, she guessed, what attracted these men was exactly that: her unattainability. That she was a fantasy made flesh. Someone they could think about when they got home and had to bang the overweight domestic drudges of wives that they themselves had created. Yeah, fantasy was what she sold, she thought, rolling the tension from her shoulders and flicking back her hair; that had to be it.

 

Two hours later, her right hand aching from several hundred scrawled signatures, her ass numb from perching on so many overexcited laps while they got their picture of her, she was finally back at her dressing room. As she opened the door, she saw a huge bouquet of red roses sitting on the table. How original, thought Raven, plucking the envelope from the centre and tossing it down next to the flowers.

The way it bulged at the corners suggested it contained more than just a note. It was probably a roll of money and a phone number. Guys, usually rich local businessmen, often assumed that a thousand dollars in cash would somehow secure a night of passion for them to regale their buddies with at the local country club when they next played golf.

She dabbed at a bead of sweat running down between her breasts with a towel. These days, her body ached a lot more than it used to when she’d started out. The hair flicks gave you bulging or degenerative discs. Working the pole played hell with your shoulders. You started to damage cartilage from contorting your body into so many unnatural positions, and your sacrum, the large triangular bone at the base of your spine, which most people had never even heard of, started to swell up so bad that you had to sleep on your side. And those were just the physical maladies.

She could have written a book about the psychological damage the job would do if you weren’t careful: the suitcase boyfriends who saw you first as a trophy and then as a meal ticket; the constant temptation to drown your feelings in booze or drugs; the hundred and one small indignities you had to suffer on a daily basis, especially from other women.

She reached over and opened the envelope. Inside there was a wad of paper, folded over multiple times. Here we go again, she thought, recognizing the carefully measured printed lettering and the faint whiff of cheap perfume.

She took out the note with a long, manicured fingernail and held it up to the light, scanning the words.

 

Please remember, Raven, I did this for you. It’s what you wanted. Even if maybe you didn’t realize it yet.

You’re always in my heart, baby.

 

Did what? Raven asked herself. Right now all she wanted was for this freak to stop sending her notes.

She dropped the paper on to the table next to the flowers, and looked up, half expecting to see in the mirror someone standing behind her. But the room was still empty.

She was no stranger to freaks, stalkers and weirdos. In this business you tended to collect them like most other women collected shoes. She already had a restraining order out against one ex-boyfriend, and she’d been in contact with the police in Los Angeles about this creep who’d been calling and writing to her for the past few months.

Knowing that the cops would want evidence, Raven took a couple of pictures of the flowers with her cell phone and put the note into her purse. Then she got dressed as quickly as she could.

Once she’d picked up her money from the club owner, she’d asked him about the flowers but he was short on details. They’d arrived at the club while she was out doing her meet-and-greet. The person who’d dropped them off had seemed like a regular deliveryman. No, he hadn’t seen the guy before. He gave a description that narrowed down to maybe a quarter of the male population: white, five feet eleven, brown hair, brown eyes. In other words, Mr Average. Yes, he’d take a look at the CCTV they had at the entrance but he doubted it would show anything.

With the best part of fifteen thousand dollars in her bag, and accompanied by two bouncers, she walked to her car, a midnight blue BMW 5-series sedan. The parking lot was emptying as they threaded their way through the pickup trucks and family vehicles (some complete with child seats) towards Raven’s.

She dumped her bag in the front passenger seat, got in and clicked the button that locked all the doors. She sat alone in the car, weighed down by the silence, as the two bouncers turned back towards the club. Raven closed her eyes, trying to centre herself. She had a long drive ahead of her and knew better than to start out in an agitated state. She took a couple of long, slow breaths, visualizing her fear and anxiety as a series of small clouds drifting from her mouth with every exhalation.

There was a loud thud.

Her head snapped round and she saw a pair of eyes staring at her through the black slits of a ski-mask. He grabbed at the handle of the driver’s door, trying to get it open. That was when she noticed the long sheathed hunting knife dangling casually from his belt buckle. His eyes held hers for a moment, the intensity of his gaze paralyzing her. Thick pink lips rimmed by the wool of the mask mouthed something she couldn’t hear above the roar of the engine as her foot stabbed at the accelerator.

Then he blinked. The flutter of his eyelids was enough to break the spell. She threw the car into gear, and reversed at speed out of the space, only braking when the beeping of the parking distance control flat-lined to a near-constant tone. She put the BMW into drive and it shot forward, the headlights framing the man’s broad outline.

Yanking down hard on the steering-wheel, she narrowly avoided hitting him with the hood. Keeping her foot on the gas pedal, she pulled out of the club’s parking lot and on to the street.

She checked the rear-view mirror: the street behind her was empty. No one was following her. Her hands were still shaking – in fact, her whole body seemed to be vibrating with fear, her heart pounding in her chest. She grabbed for her cell phone, which was next to her on the passenger seat, thought about calling the cops, then decided against it. She wanted to go home, not stand around in a parking lot talking to the police.

She dropped her phone, switched on the radio and turned up the volume, hoping the music would blast away the fear that was settling like a thin film over her skin. She slammed her palms hard against the steering-wheel, rage edging out her anxiety, and pulled over into the driveway of a gas station about a thousand yards from the club’s exit, picking a spot near the out-of-service car wash that was pitch black. Then she waited, taking deep breaths, trying to gather herself.

A few seconds later she watched a pickup truck pull out of the parking lot and make the same turn she had. Raven took a deep breath as she caught a glimpse of the driver. It couldn’t be him. It just wasn’t possible.

The pickup wove across the centre median and, for a moment, she thought she might be about to glimpse some divine justice. But the driver righted the car and continued on his way, like nothing had happened.

She pressed the button to lower her window, lit a fresh cigarette and started the car. Trembling, she pulled out from the darkness of the gas station and back on to the road.

 

2

Carved pumpkin jack o’ lanterns with jagged teeth and diamond-slit eyes stared blankly at Raven from the front stoops of her neighbors’ houses as she turned into the quiet residential street nestled in the foothills south of Ventura Boulevard. Still shaken by what had happened outside the club, she’d used the long drive back to calm herself. Now she was clear about what she had to do.

As she pulled into the driveway, she pressed the garage-door opener, which was clipped to the BMW’s sun shield. The door swung up. She took a minute before she drove in, idling on the street, checking to make sure the garage was empty.

Satisfied that it was, she nudged the BMW inside, purposely leaving the door open behind her, then got out and walked to the front of the house. The street was quiet. A couple of cars were parked at the kerb but they belonged to neighbors

She walked back into the cool of the garage, opened the passenger door and took out her purse and the holdall that contained her stage outfits. As she closed the door, she glanced back at the BMW, a habit she’d developed when she’d had a bad night and needed to remind herself that her career had its compensations. It had been a gift from a man who had confused what Raven saw as a business relationship with something else. She had waited until he had given her the pink slip that transferred ownership of the car to her before letting him down gently. She couldn’t be bought, she’d said to him, with a smile; not in the way he wanted to buy her, anyway. She could only be leased, and even then you never got the full package.

Over the years, she’d learned that you had to keep something back, some small piece of yourself. If you didn’t, you got your heart broken, and Raven had experienced enough heartbreak to last a lifetime. She had shut herself off and focused instead on making a life for herself and Kevin, and no one was going to take that away from her now.

Rolling her shoulders to ease the crick in her neck, she walked through the door that led from the garage into the hallway at the rear of the house, then into the kitchen. She put her purse on the counter, took a bottle of water from the refrigerator and drank half of it.

She pulled her work outfits from the holdall and jammed them into the washing machine, then went back outside to collect the mail, leaving the door open so she could get back in quickly if anything happened. Nothing did, and the mail held no nasty surprises either. There were no handwritten envelopes, no death threats, nothing weird, just the usual junk mail and bills.

She walked back into the house and suddenly remembered something. She’d lost her sunglasses earlier in the week – she’d looked all over the house but hadn’t found them. Now she went back into the garage to check the car. Leaving the mail on the hood, she peered into the glove box, then under the seats. Nothing.

She stopped, trying to think where she might have put them down. It came to her. She had been unloading groceries from the trunk the day before and, unable to see in the gloom of the garage, she had taken them off. Maybe she’d forgotten to pick them up again.

She clicked the button to open the trunk, and walked to the rear of the car. The interior trunk light was faulty so she crossed to the light switches on the far side of the garage. The fluorescent tubes flickered into life, throwing fragments of harsh, savage light into the trunk. A horrific still image flashed in front of her. Then the lights steadied and she could see it clearly.

She stared into the maw of the trunk at a semi-clothed body, the stump of the neck covered with clean plastic sheeting, the ends wrapped tightly with string. Then she started to scream.

 

3

The minutes dragged as Raven waited in the kitchen for the cops to show up. She smoked a cigarette, then lit a second from the fading embers. She thought about going next door or across the street to one of the neighbors but decided against it. Since moving in she had kept her distance from them, scared that they would work out who she was and what she did for a living. Anyway, no one had come when she had screamed. Not one person. The thought brought her close to tears.

She could have waited outside on the patch of front lawn, she guessed, but she was sure that no one was inside the house. There were no signs of anyone having broken in – no forced locks or smashed windows. Nothing out of the ordinary – apart from the decapitated body in the trunk of her car.

She reached over and turned on the tap, extinguishing the burning red tip of the second cigarette with the jet of water, then rinsing the flecks of wet black ash down the drain, jamming the stub into the waste-disposal unit and turning it on. Then she walked to the front door to wait for the cops.

Another minute passed. A long minute. She rubbed under her eyes, staining her fingers with mascara.

A flashlight swept across the glass pane in the front door, and she started. Then the bell rang. Raven took a couple of deep breaths and opened the door. A lone female patrol officer stood on the threshold. A cruiser was parked at the kerb, its lights dappling the neighbors’ lawns and splashing red over the gaudy Halloween decorations that sat in people’s front windows.

‘Ma’am, you called to report finding a body?’ the patrol officer asked, as her partner came into view from the side of the house.

Raven pulled the door wide so they could come in, noticing as she did so that her hands were still shaking. Suddenly everything tunneled in on her. The red and blue lawn seemed to suck itself up from the ground and race towards her, the silhouetted paper cutouts of spiders, witches and goblins to start dancing at windows. She felt the strength disappear from her legs, and heard, from far away, a woman’s voice: ‘Ma’am? Are you okay? Ma’am?’

 

Raven was sitting in the back of an ambulance, an oxygen mask covering her mouth and nose. A paramedic crouched next to her. ‘Take it easy. You had a shock,’ he said.

Behind him, the street she lived on had magically transformed into a carnival of flashing lights and uniforms. Neighbors stood on the edges of their perfectly manicured front yards in their robes and slippers watching the show. The Hallowe’en decorations were still there but they seemed more festive than frightening. At the centre of the carnival, the main attraction was Raven’s house. People in paper suits walked in and out of the front door and yellow crime-scene tape was festooned around it like bunting.

For a second Raven wondered what they were all doing there and then the events of the last few hours came back to her in a series of flashes that made her feel lightheaded all over again. She closed her eyes, and sucked hard at the oxygen.

‘She good to talk to us?’

This time when she opened her eyes a man and a woman, both dressed in business attire, were standing next to the ambulance. The guy was African-American, mid-fifties, and had a face that wasn’t so much lived in as forcibly occupied: heavy, hooded eyelids gave way to a wide boxer’s nose, which was offset either side by sports-trophy ears. The woman was a little younger, late forties maybe, her blonde hair cut in a short bob. She had bright blue eyes.

‘This is Detective Brogan,’ said the man, ‘and I’m Detective Wilkins.’

‘We’re from Van Nuys Division of the Los Angeles Police Department,’ said Brogan, finishing off what seemed like a well-rehearsed introduction.

‘Where’s Officer Stanner?’ Raven asked.

The two detectives looked at each other, puzzled.

‘Stanner?’ Wilkins asked.

‘From the Threat Management Unit? Someone’s been stalking me. He’s the one I’ve been talking to.’

Another look passed between Wilkins and Brogan, then Brogan turned away. ‘Just going to speak to the watch commander. Be right back,’ she said, her hands dipping into her pockets as she walked off.

Wilkins watched his partner’s departure, then turned his car-crash face back to Raven. ‘You feel ready to take me through what just happened?’

‘Where do you want me to start? Finding it in my trunk or before that?’

Wilkins cocked his head very slightly to one side. ‘Something happened before you found the body?’

‘Kind of, although I don’t know if it’s connected,’ she said.

She took him back through events at the club. When she said she was stripping, he didn’t react at all. Normally guys, regardless of their profession or in what capacity they were talking to her, showed something. Apparent disgust. Discomfort. A barely concealed excitement. But all Wilkins had said was ‘Uh-huh’, like she’d told him she was a waitress in a diner, then moved her on to the next part of the story. She’d liked him for his lack of reaction, even though the whole time she was speaking he seemed to be studying her, like she was a specimen under a microscope.

When she’d told him about the man who’d banged on her window in the parking lot he’d asked a lot of questions. How tall was the guy? What weight? Any tattoos? Once he was satisfied that she’d given him everything she could remember he’d moved her back on, skipping the trip home and getting to the moment when she’d popped the trunk.

By then the female detective, Brogan, was back and they went into a huddle before pulling in a couple of uniformed cops. Then they wandered over to the house where they stood outside talking.

Raven took a deep breath. She reached up and massaged her temples with the tips of her index fingers. At least Kevin hadn’t had to witness any of this. For that one small mercy she was grateful.

 

Brogan and Wilkins traded a look. They’d been partners for five years, long enough to develop a shorthand that didn’t require words. They called themselves Minority Report after the science-fiction film. It was a running joke because, between their race, gender and, in Brogan’s case, sexual preference, they’d figured they ticked just about every diversity box the LAPD had.

Finally Brogan spoke, pushing a loose strand of hair behind her right ear. ‘You buying any of this?’ she asked Wilkins.

He looked skywards for a second. ‘Nope, but I don’t see why she would make the call herself if she’d killed the vic. Why not just dump the body somewhere? Drive down to Baja and stick it in a culvert.’

Brogan thought about it for a second. ‘How many of the assholes that we deal with do stuff that actually makes sense?’

Wilkins smiled. ‘Expressed as a percentage?’

Brogan nodded.

‘Between zero and none.’

‘Probably too early to be jumping to conclusions anyway. At least, before we speak to this guy from TMU,’ Brogan said.

‘Gotta work out who the vic is too,’ Wilkins added. ‘And what happened to her head.’

Brogan glanced across to the garage as a camera flash went off from one of the forensics photographers. ‘Think I can answer that one. Buddy of mine from Central told me they had a caper yesterday morning where they found a woman’s head stuffed into a newspaper vending machine down near the Federal building. They thought it was maybe some Islamist shit but it turns out the vic was a porn star. I’ll give him a call, let him know we found the rest of her.’

Wilkins gave his partner a grim smile. ‘This buddy down in Central tell you the vic’s hair colour?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Well, if the carpets match the drapes then we know for sure it’s the same broad.’

Brogan grimaced. ‘I doubt her carpet would help us much. Those gals are usually clean as a whistle down there.’ She paused for a second. ‘Were you on the force for the “Four On the Floor” case?’ she asked.

‘That was the caper with the porn-star guy, right?’

‘Yeah, John Holmes was the dude’s name. He was working as a porn actor, doing well, but word on the street was he got into some heavy drugs. Ended up with him and three of his buddies dead in an apartment. Then there was that whole machete-attack deal a year or two back. Those were porn people too.’

‘What’s that got to do with this?’ Wilkins asked.

‘Nothing directly, but it’s one messed up way of making a living. Drugs, disease, a lot of lowlifes. You survive in that world you ain’t no innocent,’ Brogan said.

Wilkins’s eyes narrowed as he glanced back towards Raven. ‘Which means that she knows a whole lot more than she’s telling us.’

‘I wouldn’t sweat it either way,’ said Brogan.

‘Why’s that?’ Wilkins asked.

Brogan gave another little shrug. ‘Body falls in Van Nuys, head falls in Central. That means the whole package is probably going to land on someone’s desk down at the Police Administration Building. That means this whole caper is NOP.’

‘NOP?’

Brogan smiled at her partner. ‘Not our problem.’

Continued….

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GRIDLOCK: The Third Ryan Lock Novel by Sean Black>>>>