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AHMM, September 2012
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Mystery/Crime

Dell Magazines
www.dellmagazines.com

Copyright ©2012 by Dell Magazines

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Cover Art by Cynthia Sheppard

CONTENTS

Department: EDITOR'S NOTE: ESOTERIC KNOWLEDGE by Linda Landrigan

Department: THE LINEUP

Fiction: THE VAUDEVILLE DETECTIVE by Garnett Elliott

Department: MYSTERIOUS PHOTOGRAPH

Fiction: BEEHIVE ROUND by Martin Limon

Fiction: BIG WATTS by Doc Finch

Fiction: FOOL'S GOLD by Dee Long

Department: BOOKED & PRINTED by Robert C. Hahn

Fiction: BRUTAL by Robert Lopresti

Fiction: THE BEST LAID PLANS by Jim Ingraham

Mystery Classic: NIGHT AT THE INN by Georgette Heyer, selected and Introduced by Jane K. Cleland

Department: THE STORY THAT WON

Department: COMING IN OCTOBER 2012

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

Department: EDITOR'S NOTE: ESOTERIC KNOWLEDGE
by Linda Landrigan

Amateur sleuth stories are most effective when the protagonist brings specialized knowledge or habits of thought to the investigation. This month's issue features a vaudevillian mathematician, a retired Army sergeant, an energy industry consultant, and a gold-rush era gambler pursuing mysteries in their own realms. Two of these stories are written by authors new to these pages: Welcome, Garnett Elliott and Dee Long. In addition to a Georgette Heyer mystery classic, this month's stories also feature a traditional P.I., and a hit man who's having a very bad day.

We hope you'll apply your expert knowledge of mysteries to these seven fantastic stories!

—Linda Landrigan, Editor

[Back to Table of Contents]

Department: THE LINEUP

Jane K. Cleland's latest novel, her seventh in the Josie Prescott's Antiques Mystery series, is Dolled Up for Murder (Minotaur Books).

Garnett Elliott is a social worker in Tucson. His inspiration for “The Vaudeville Detective” comes from his own family “living and working in Cleveland during the industrial boom.” He is the author of several published stories in the hardboiled genre, inlcuding “Ransom and Red Fingers,” which appears in Beat to a Pulp: Round Two.

Retired from the U.S. Navy, Doc Finch has worked as an emergency planning consultant to nuclear power plants and has written scenarios for dozens of nuclear emergency drills and exercises. His last story for AHMM, “Watts Up,” appeared in the October 2011 issue.

Booked & Printed columnist Robert C. Hahn reviews mysteries for Publishers Weekly and New York Post, among other places.

Jim Ingraham is the author of Sahara Dust, published October 2011 by Five Star.

Martin Limon's latest novel to feature Army C.I.D. agents George Sueño and Ernie Bascom is The Joy Brigade (Soho Press).

Dee Long holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. He's hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Quebec, and currently works at a meditation retreat center in Vermont.

Robert Lopresti, a librarian at Western Washington University, is the author of Such a Killing Crime (Kearney Street Books, 2005). He blogs at SleuthSayers.org.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: THE VAUDEVILLE DETECTIVE
by Garnett Elliott

* * * *

Art by Robyn Hyzy

* * * *

The Starlight Theater, Cleveland, Ohio, 1922.

William Kreuz's two assistants wrote with furious scratching of chalk. The audience called out figures. One hundred and twenty-one. Five thousand, two hundred and fifty-three. Two million.

Stage left, an accountant from Foster and Price clacked away at his adding machine, trying to keep pace with the numbers on the blackboard. His breathing grew more ragged each time he yanked the machine's arm back.

Thirty-six. Twelve thousand, four hundred and fifteen. Eight.

William withdrew a handkerchief and swiped at his broad forehead. One part of his mind kept track of the audience's growing sum. The other part scanned out into the crowd. Counted seats. Multiplied at an evening weekend ticket rate and subtracted overhead. Projected revenues for the next few weeks.

Nine hundred and ninety-two...

He held up his right hand. The audience's chant subsided. Chalk skritch-skratched the final numbers. The accountant pounded keys and yanked even faster.

“Five million, two hundred eighty-two thousand, four hundred and twenty-nine,” William announced.

It took the accountant several minutes to check and recheck his figures. Finally, he let his shoulders slump. “Correct.”

The applause startled William, like it always did.

* * * *

He passed a miniature pony as he exited the wings. The female trainer wore a sequined costume with just enough feathers to keep her out of a burlesque venue. She gave him a taut smile. William, no stranger to stage fright, wished her luck.

His stomach tickled with mild pain. An ulcer. The years in this business were catching up. Seven, sometimes eight shows a day, traveling, his pay subject to the whims of borderline criminals who called themselves managers. But conditions were improving.

“You killed tonight, Willy.”

“Best act of the evening.”

“Keep ‘em coming. You're feeding us all.”

Hands clapped his shoulders.

“A scout's in the audience,” said Gerard, an oft-time actor and scenery hauler. Kohl still rimmed his eyes from a Pyramus and Thisbe sketch earlier in the evening. “Out of New York, I hear. He made a lot of notes watching you.”

William laughed. “I like Cleveland just fine.”

That got a chorus of approval from the stagehands. William waved them off and threaded a narrow aisle of tarp-covered props. His stomach started to burn. He ducked through a doorway screened by canvas, into the communal dressing room.

Greasepaint and stale booze assailed his nostrils. Marguerite Cellini, the aria singer, lay slumped over a vanity. Fast asleep or drunk. Or both.

He slipped off his jacket. The parlor glass with his ulcer medicine stood in its usual place, atop the armoire. A solution of bismuth and soda. He reached for it, anticipating bubbly-bitter relief. But when he brought the glass to his lips he saw it was empty. Chalky bismuth still clung to the sides, giving the impression of fullness.

He thrust the glass down next to Cellini with a clank. She must've drained it. The singer was a hypochondriac as well as a lush. Now he'd have to send down to the druggist for more.

“Marguerite,” he said, touching her plump shoulder, “you're on in fifteen minutes. And you owe me a soda.”

No response.

“Oh, for God's sake.” He shook her. The ruffles on her drab pink dress swayed. Her head lolled to one side and William saw that her eyes were open. Pupils impossibly wide, staring at nothing.

She didn't breathe.

The patina of smells seemed to rise thick from the floorboards, whirling his brain counter-clockwise while his feet danced their way right out from under him.

* * * *

Joe Bernstein revived him with a couple of hard slaps.

“You fought in the Great War,” the Starlight's manager said, lips wrapped around a cigar, “but the sight of a fat lady's corpse makes you faint dead away.”

He found that pretty funny.

But he wasn't laughing when the two tweed suits from Cleveland Homicide showed up. They shut down the theater and gathered the employees for questioning. William got first crack.

“How well did you know the deceased?” asked the younger of the detectives, a sober-eyed Slav named Wagner.

“Marguerite? Not very well. Talented, but she had a lot of problems.”

“Problems?”

“She drank too much.”

Wagner wrote that down. “The two of you ever, ah...”

“No,” William said, feeling himself blush. “I should say not.”

“We gotta ask,” said the older cop.

They made him show how he discovered the body. Twice. It felt strange with Marguerite still lying there. Wagner leaned down to sniff the rim of the parlor glass. His forehead wrinkled.

“You have enemies, Mr. Kreuz?”

“None who would want to poison me, if that's what you're getting at.”

“That's what I'm getting at. The coroner's going to be here soon, but I don't think it's too premature to speculate. I want to talk to your druggist. Also the delivery boy who brings the medicine.”

“I've got their names, somewhere...” William pawed through his jacket and retrieved a small address book. For all his facility with numbers, he had a hard time remembering people.

“Bring it with you,” Wagner said.

“With me?”

“To the station. We're going to need a full statement.”

He'd had to walk the twelve blocks back from the police department to his boarding house. At two o'clock in the morning the streetcars weren't running and none of the exhausted officers would give him a ride. Every alleyway he passed crawled with shadows.

Sleep was an impossibility. He knew that even as he gulped a double-dose of sedatives with warm milk. Too much stimulation. Marguerite's awful face staring at him whenever he closed his eyes.

The nightstand held a German copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Lying crosswise on the bed, he flipped through pages until the sky outside his window began to lighten.

* * * *

Bernstein loosed a smoke ring at the ceiling of his tiny office. “You look like hammered crap.”

“I didn't get any sleep,” William said.

“Take two days off. Your health is important to the Starlight. My recommendation is to drink yourself stupid. I know a speak two blocks from here, serves decent gin.”

“Alcohol's bad for my ulcer.”

“You're not taking this too seriously, are you? For all we know Cellini could've had a heart attack.”

William shook his head. “I spoke with the coroner's office this morning. Both the parlor glass and Marguerite's stomach showed traces of potassium cyanide.”

“Huh.” Bernstein snubbed his cigar in a coffee cup. “Someone's trying to kill my top act. I don't like it.”

“Do you think another manager could be involved? A competing theater?”

“Nah. Only real competition for the Starlight is Hans Modell's place, the Orpheum. Hans is a real bastard, sure, but not a murderer.”

Someone knocked at the door.

“Hold on.” Bernstein slid from behind the desk and helped a stagehand wheel a heavy cart inside. William had to press himself flat against the wall. The cart held an enormous black contraption with a lens on one side and what looked like a cellophane strip dangling out the back. The whole thing reeked of fresh oil.

“What is it?” William said.

Bernstein fiddled with the apparatus. “The future. Moving pictures.”

“Film's made out of silver nitrate,” the stagehand said, pointing at the strip of glossy material. “I wouldn't be smoking around that.”

“Thanks, Lou,” Bernstein said. “You can go now.”

William waited until the door had shut. “Can I ask you a serious question? Or are you too engrossed with your machine?”

“Ask away.”

“If someone wanted to kill me—professionally, that is—wouldn't they need permission from a local crime figure?”

“Mobster, you mean.”

William nodded.

“And what makes you think the attempt against you was a contract hit?”

“Something about the way it was set up. The timing. It seemed professional.”

Bernstein's grin showed gold inlays and nicotine stains. “Not professional enough, seeing as how you're still alive.”

“Joseph, could you help me? Arrange a meeting with whomever...”

“That would be Sandor Kovacs. Hungarian mob.” Bernstein pulled at his lip. “He runs everything around here. Not that I have a lot of truck with mobsters, you understand. But Sandor's something of a patron. Comes to the Starlight a lot.”

“Could I see him?”

“Possibly. You don't want to wait and let the police do their job?”

“It's the waiting that's killing me.”

* * * *

The next afternoon, William found himself seated in a teahouse off Eighteenth and Prospect. He never would have guessed the place was mob run. Meetings with gangsters made him think of billiard halls wreathed in smoke. He hadn't expected doilies, matrons dressed in turn-of-the-century frocks, and tablecloths set with Old World silver.

“Up, please.”

A woman hovered. Cheekbones made impossible right angles under a pair of gray eyes. When he stood, his forehead came to her chin.

“You have weapons?”

He shook his head. She searched him anyway, her bone-white hands probing between jacket and vest, finding only an old pocket watch. Customers at other tables looked elsewhere.

Those hands. The strength in her fingers. Faded blue dye traced each cuticle.

“Sveta was a washerwoman before I found her.” A blond man had seated himself across the table. Heavy-lidded eyes, like a libertine. He wore a Hart Schaffner Marx suit.

William leaned over to shake hands. “Mr. Kovacs?”

“Mr. Kreuz. Forgive the cliché, but you look taller on stage.”

“Everybody tells me that.”

“I've seen at least a dozen of your performances. Sit down. Sveta, bring over some chai and palacinke.”

Sveta left with a rustle of petticoats. William lowered himself into the chair, uncertain how to begin.

“They have a name for your talent, you know,” Kovacs said. “'Lightning Calculation.’ And I'd wager that's not all you can do.”

“Well ... it's esoteric, really.”

“Tell me.”

“I have photographic recall for numbers. Birthdates. Anything associated with a number. I can tell you the twenty-fifth of August two thousand and ten will fall on a Wednesday. Not that there's much practical application for such things.”

Kovacs steepled his fingers. “On the contrary. I can think of several applications.”

“I don't want to seem too forward, Mr. Kovacs, but I didn't come here to talk about my abilities. Two days ago someone tried to poison me—”

“And you were wondering if I had a hand in it. Your employer told me as much.”

Sveta reappeared, holding a samovar enameled in blue and white flowers. She began pouring tea while another woman laid out platters of food. Crepes dusted in powdered sugar. Slabs of bacon with paprika ghosting the crinkled edges. Preserves. Kovacs took a spoonful of black currant jam and swirled it into his tea. “I appreciate your forthrightness. The answer is no.”

“Ah.” William wasn't sure if he should feel relieved or disappointed.

“I'm much more of a businessman these days, Mr. Kreuz. The Prohibition movement has created many profitable opportunities. So really, contract murder is out.” He took a long sip. “But I am in a position to help you. My associates could make inquiries.”

“That's not necessary—”

“Just a moment. You went to some trouble to arrange this meeting, yes? And my time is valuable too. So consider. The police are bound by conventional methods. Your safety is not their priority. I, on the other hand, can offer substantial protection while I investigate.”

Protection. William rolled the word around in his head. “I don't have much money, Mr. Kovacs.”

“Sandor. Please.”

“I'm not sure what I can offer you.”

The gangster leaned close to fork a crepe onto his plate. “We'll come up with something.”

* * * *

A thunderstorm rolled in from Lake Erie. It spent the evening rattling windows and making flashbulbs go off in the murky distance. At midnight the clouds slid back out over the lake, only to return around three a.m. The rumbles jolted William awake.

He'd been dreaming. Mephistopheles had come to the Starlight in the form of a blond, well-dressed gangster. They'd discussed the price of his soul over tea.

Somehow he fell back asleep.

Hours later, trudging up the stairs from breakfast, he found a tow—headed boy waiting outside his door. A newsie, from the look of him.

“You William Kreuz?” The boy's Polish accent was thick as creamed wheat.

“I am.”

“I was told to tell you this: Icehouse. Eastside docks, number sixteen.”

“Who sent you?”

A pair of very blue eyes stared at him.

“Just a moment.” William went inside to get a tip, but when he came back out the boy was gone.

* * * *

The stevedores gave him rough looks as he searched the waterfront. French Canadians in overalls and long tasseled caps, hustling pairs of burlap sacks that must have weighed eighty pounds apiece. Lake Erie lapped at the pilings beneath their feet. Overcast, the water was the color of old coffee.

He found the icehouse by the number stenciled on its clapboard side. Half the structure had tumbled down. It looked like the kind of place where stewbums would flop, or worse. Not a building to enter alone. He was about to walk away when Sveta leaned her long body out the doorframe and beckoned. She held a pipe clenched between her teeth.

He went in. The floor was hard-packed dirt covered with rotting sawdust. Sveta kicked aside cans and mounds of less wholesome debris, causing rats to scatter.

“Watch your step here.”

She led him through another empty doorway. A kerosene lamp guttered on the floor, showing the confines of a small room. Less than five feet away a haunch of meat hung from a low-lying rafter. William blinked. The haunch was a human being. A shirtless, gray-haired man suspended by leather thongs wrapped around his wrists. He hung about an inch from the floor. A Slav with cheekbones broad as Sveta's sat on a nearby crate. He'd settled a long-barreled shotgun across his lap.

“What is this?” William said.

Sveta gestured with her pipe stem at the bound man. “Information.”

“I don't understand.”

“We asked questions. A man, at the theater where you work. He told us someone had been watching you. Every night. Came to see you and wrote notes in a little book. We found him.”

William looked at the creature hanging from the rafter. Bruises the size of a shotgun butt dotted his narrow chest and stomach. His eyelids kept fluttering open. He breathed in gasps.

“You tortured him?”

“We asked questions.”

“This man is a talent scout from New York. He's been watching all the acts at the Starlight.”

Sveta shook her head. “Detective. We found his papers.” She pulled a wallet from her skirts and handed it to him. A worn piece of onionskin paper had been tucked inside. He unfolded it, read the contents by the lamp's flame. Typewritten letters announced that a Mr. Harris Shields was licensed as a consulting detective in Nassau and Suffolk counties, New York.

“Who hired him?” William said, refolding the paper.

“He doesn't know. A man meets with him at different times and places, gives him money.”

“Did he say why someone would want me under surveillance?”

“We asked many times.”

“And?”

“He doesn't know.”

Shields let out a moan. William closed his eyes and asked in a soft voice: “You're certain he doesn't know these things? Or is he simply lying to protect his employer?”

“He tells truth.”

“Cut him down. I didn't ask Sandor for this. Cut him down and give him his wallet back.”

“As you say.”

“When you see Mr. Kovacs, tell him I don't require any more of his help.”

Sveta puffed, letting the gray smoke swirl past her lips. “Not so simple. He said you were under protection.”

“I don't want it.” The room, the smell of human fear beneath Sveta's sweet tobacco was too much. He turned to leave.

“Wait.” She said something to the gunman in liquid syllables. He shifted around on the crate, dug a slim book out of his back pocket. “We found this,” Sveta said, “along with the wallet. His notes. My English was better, I could make something from it.”

William considered the book. Outside, an approaching ship cut loose with its foghorn. The mournful sound masked Shields's labored breathing.

* * * *

He had no appetite, but ordered coffee at a crowded Rexall lunch counter anyway. The noise helped him not to think.

About one o'clock customers started petering out. Eventually, it was only him and a black-shawled spinster three stools down. The counterman swayed over and refilled his cup.

With a sigh, he pulled out Shields's notes.

The pages were covered in tiny, but readable scrawl. Everything pertained to William Kreuz. Length of his acts, timed to the minute. Approximate size of the audience. Descriptions of “mental tricks”

performed. Duration of applause. There was personal information, too, including his boardinghouse address and the name of his druggist.

That last brought cool sweat to the back of his neck. Had Harris Shields tried to poison him? Or had he simply furnished the information to his would-be killer?

“You want to keep sitting there, mister, you're going to have to order something more than coffee.” The counterman stood with his arms folded. William mumbled “chicken salad” and returned to the book.

Every few pages he found strings of numbers crammed between paragraphs. The digits ran from one to the mid-twenties and looked like this:

4 22 22 11 18 11 11 9 22 4 6 5 11 7 18 9 2

His confusion lasted only a moment. It was a cipher, based on a simple number-to-letter substitution. He figured the key in the time it took for his scoop of chicken salad to arrive. The digit strings, as he translated them, spelled out various addresses, dates, and times.

Meeting places? Sveta had told him Shields and his unknown employer would rendezvous periodically.

The last string gave today's date. Three in the afternoon. An address right outside the Tremont neighborhood, in Lincoln Park.

* * * *

Back in his room, he hauled down trunk after trunk from the closet shelves until he found his service revolver. Hands shaking, he loaded five .45 rounds and made sure the hammer was resting on an empty cylinder. He tried stuffing the gun in different places under his coat, opting finally for the back of his pants. The grip dug into his backbone and made him stand ramrod-straight.

All the while, a calm voice told him this was wrong.

He should take the notebook straight to Wagner. Let the police handle this. Storming off to confront his potential killer would just as likely get him killed.

But going to the police, convincing them to act, would take time. The three o'clock window was closing. And they'd want to know how he'd gotten the book in the first place. He could imagine their reaction when he told them about Sandor Kovacs.

* * * *

Three ten, by his watch. He'd hiked through Tremont to get to the park. Sprawling Victorian houses along elm-lined streets, giving way to an expanse of green sward cut by trails. An iron-wrought gazebo stood in the center.

Very peaceful. Only a few people sitting on the benches, or on blankets spread out over the grass. He breathed in a lungful of Sycamore and told himself to calm down. There was a bench nearby that afforded a lengthwise view of the park. A good vantage.

He sat. The gun bumped his lower back, making him hunch forward. Ten feet away a professor type leafed through a copy of The Plain Dealer. No one paid William any attention.

“Excuse me.”

He nearly jumped. A man had materialized out of the lazy afternoon air. William's brain registered a narrow face behind a pair of smoked lenses. Mid thirties. Thinning black hair. Gray overcoat.

The man sat down on the bench beside him.

“I see that you're armed,” he said. “I am as well. Make no moves for the gun. Don't cry out or otherwise indicate distress. The moment you do—” The stranger thrust a black-lacquered walking stick between them. He seized the handle, twisted, and drew out three inches of winking steel.

William nodded. The man slid the blade back with a click.

“Tell me what you've done with my detective.”

“I, ah...” William glanced over to see if the professor type was watching. He wasn't. “I've done nothing to him.”

“And yet you're here. Instead of Shields. Have you involved the police?”

“No.”

“Better for you, then. We need to talk, but not in this place.”

“Who are you?”

The polished lenses regarded him for a moment. “You're telling me you don't know, Mr. Kreuz?”

“I've never seen you before.”

“I doubt that. I doubt that very much.” The man rose. “Now come with me.”

* * * *

They climbed the same hill William had followed down into Lincoln Park. Sweat plastered his shirt to his skin, but it wasn't from exertion. Always, the stranger kept his hand near the walking stick's hilt. Three blocks up and they stopped abruptly in front of a slim Victorian wedged between two broader ones, its foundation canted on the upward slope.

“Just a rental,” the black-haired man said. “Not many comforts inside, I'm afraid.”

He led him across the portico and into a dusty front room. “You'll take that coat off now. Slowly, please. That's good. Turn around.” William felt the revolver being yanked from his pants. “Have a seat on the couch. We'll talk this over like civilized men.”

The stranger gestured toward a tasseled settee from the previous century. William sat. A chessboard rested on the cushion beside him. Another had been set up on the floor. All the pieces were locked in the final moves of endgame.

“I dabble,” the man explained, removing his glasses. The eyes underneath were shadowed with the bluish black rouge of the sleepless. His other hand held the revolver in a casual grip. “You play as well?”

“Chess problems from the paper, usually.”

“Had I known you were coming ... but I suppose a real match might take too long.” He kicked a stool next to the couch and hunkered down, keeping the gun's barrel pointed at William.

“I still don't know who you are.”

“So you claim.” The stranger made a flicking motion with his empty hand. A business card appeared between his index and middle fingers. He tossed it to William.

Gothic lettering read:

ARTYOM SOKOLOV

PRINCE OF NUMBERS

FEATS OF MEMORY *** CHESS EXHIBITIONS

MAGIC *** LIGHTNING CALCULATION

“I'm a musician, too, but it didn't fit on the card. I play the Palace in New York. Now tell me you haven't heard of me.”

“I've heard of the Palace.”

“I bet you have. An excellent venue. The best. Many talented people would kill for the chance to perform there. Literally, I mean.”

“I'm not that ambitious, myself,” William said.

Sokolov locked eyes with him. “I'll ask again: What happened to Shields?”

“He was detained, by associates of mine. Not my idea, really.”

“You're bluffing. You've probably paid him off.”

“Why did you hire Shields in the first place? Was he the one who tried to—”

“I'm holding the gun. I'll direct the inquiries.” Sokolov got up off the stool and paced over to a cabinet. Glass clinked as he rummaged inside. “I have a problem with my nerves. You too, I gather, from what Shields told me. What do you take for it?”

“Sedatives. And German philosophy.”

“I prefer laudanum.” Sokolov poured himself a shot of amber fluid from a patent medicine bottle and drained it. His eyelids shuddered closed for a moment. “I've never met another of our kind before. It's a strange experience.”

“Our kind?"

“Another mentalist.”

“I don't think of myself as very different from other people.”

“How egalitarian.” Sokolov snorted. “I consider our profession one step elevated from a circus freak.”

“You seem to be doing well enough.”

“Thank you. The Palace pays triple what you make here. But you must already be aware of that, surely?” His mouth curled upward at the corners.

“That's what this is all about, isn't it? You're afraid I'll usurp your act.”

Sokolov's knuckles had gone white, gripping the revolver. William figured it wouldn't be much longer. He'd already gotten him out of the park and into a secluded place. Another shot of laudanum, perhaps, to steady his hands.

A loud scraping sound echoed through the parlor.

Sokolov's head shot up. “Were you followed?”

“No.”

The noise was coming from the rear of the house. Sokolov swung the gun in that direction. William noticed the stiletto-cane leaning against the opposite wall, twelve feet away. Too far. He groped for the nearest solid object. A chessboard. Sokolov stepped past the couch, his attention focused on the frantic scraping. William stood, pivoted, and winged the board at his head.

Chessmen rained through the air. The board struck Sokolov's temple with a satisfying whack. His finger convulsed and sent a slug tearing into the floorboards. William lunged. His shoulder connected with Sokolov's hip and the two of them stumbled backward, William putting all his effort into seizing the gun. They crashed to the floor together.

The laudanum hadn't slowed Sokolov at all. He clamped his other hand around his wrist and tried to wrestle the barrel level with William's chest. William struggled to force the gun down. He could hear rustlings from the adjacent hall, but they seemed miles away.

Someone's fingers—it could have been both of theirs—brushed the trigger.

The revolver bucked and thundered.

Sokolov's mouth parted in a silent O. The barrel was pointing at his sternum. He had time to roll his eyes toward the ceiling, staring past William, before the strength melted from his arms. He lay still.

“I am not too late.”

William looked up to see Sveta emerging from the hallway. She held a buck knife covered with splinters. Her gaze took in the contents of the room, including Sokolov's stiffening form. “This the only one?” she said, gesturing toward the corpse with her knife.

William nodded.

“You are injured?”

He had to check the front of his shirt to be sure. There was a blood spatter, but not from him. Burnt powder stung his fingers. “I'm all right.”

“I followed you, from icehouse. Forced window open.”

“You probably saved my life.”

She pointed to Sokolov again. “Is this—?”

“I think so.”

“The shots will bring police. We must go. Give me the gun and I'll wipe prints.”

“No, Sveta.” William rose and staggered over to the settee, where he collapsed. His heart was still thundering.

“They will charge you,” Sveta said. “Murder.”

“Self-defense, I should think.”

“Mr. Kovacs would not want you arrested. You are still under protection. Come with me.”

William folded his arms across his chest and waited. The low keen of a siren sounded in the distance.

* * * *

He was acquitted three weeks later.

Bernstein celebrated with a bottle of Canadian whiskey. They sat on the Starlight's stage, legs dangling over the edge, and looked out at the shadowed and empty seats. William sipped milk from a glass warmed by the footlights. His ulcer had decided to quit throbbing.

“A toast,” he said, raising his drink toward the phantom audience. “To Marguerite. I've been so concerned for my own safety, I almost forgot about her.”

"L'Chayim.” Bernstein sloshed a measure of precious whiskey onto the floorboards. He fumbled through his vest pocket as if searching for a cigar, found nothing, and sighed. “If it'd been me, in your shoes, I would've taken that woman Sveta up on her offer. You could've avoided the whole trial.”

William shook his head. “Kovacs wanted me to work for him. He would've used the cover-up as blackmail.”

“Work for him? Doing what?”

“Memorizing ledgers, probably. Tracking his bootlegging profits. All of it kept up here.” William tapped at his skull. “He'd be that much harder to indict, with nothing committed to paper.”

“Clever.”

“But I don't think he's done with me, Joseph. He'll want some kind of repayment for nabbing Sokolov's detective. I hate to say this, but Cleveland's become too contentious for me to stay.”

Bernstein paled. “A change of venue?”

“Afraid so.”

“But where would you go?”

“There's lots of options,” William said, allowing himself a grim smile. “I've heard the Palace pays well.”

Copyright © 2012 Garnett Elliott

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Department: MYSTERIOUS PHOTOGRAPH

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Copyright © 2012 Laurel Fantauzzo

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BROUGHT UP SHORT

Everyone Here?

We will give a prize of $25 to the person who invents the best mystery story (in 250 words or less, and be sure to include a crime) based on the above photograph. The story will be printed in a future issue. Reply to AHMM, Dell Magazines, 267 Broadway, New York, New York 10007-2352. Please label your entry “September Contest,” and be sure your name and address are written on the story you submit. If you would like your story returned, please include an SASE.

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Fiction: BEEHIVE ROUND
by Martin Limon

Vern Kruckman felt the warm ondol floor beneath his feet and hurriedly pulled on his trousers. The room was dark with just a bare glimmer of starlight peeking through the partially open window. Pei Un-hui, Vern's wife, rolled over on her sleeping mat, blinked, and gazed up at him.

“Where you go?” she asked.

“Alert,” Vern said. Just then a siren from Camp Pelham, the 2nd of the 17th Field Artillery headquarters compound, let out another wailing moan.

“What's a matter you?” his wife said, sitting up now. “You no go.”

“'No go?’ What do you mean, no go? We have an alert.” Hurriedly, Vern slipped on his socks. “Hell, for all I know it could be a move out. Maybe even the real thing. Maybe Joe Chink is coming south.”

“Vern!”

“What?”

“No more Joe Chink. No more alert. You no army no more!”

Vern Kruckman froze, a wool sock slipped over his big toe. And then he dropped the sock and placed his bare foot back on the vinyl-covered floor. Un-hui was right. Vern hadn't thought of that. In the seconds after the alert siren startled him awake, he had forgotten that he wasn't in the army anymore. Now the memories flooded back. Memories of his retirement ceremony, which had been held only last week on the central parade ground of the 2nd of the 17th Field Artillery Battalion. Colonel Weldwright, the DivArty commander, had flown in by chopper to personally present First Sergeant Vernon R. Kruckman with the Meritorious Service Medal for thirty years of dedicated military service. In fact, the medal sat right now in its velvet-lined case on the inlaid mother-of-pearl table next to Vern's sleeping mat. For a moment Vern felt foolish. After thirty years—after enlisting as a teenager at the end of World War II and seeing combat during the Korean War and experiencing it again as a middle-aged man in Vietnam—Vern's wife was right. He wasn't in the army anymore. And that alert siren, the siren that called every active duty soldier in the area to report—on the double—to their post of duty, no longer called for him.

Vern was about to lower his trousers. Then, resolutely, he pulled them back up.

“I'm awake now,” he said. “I'll just take a walk outside. See how things are going.”

Un-hui groaned and rolled over. She'd known Vern long enough—she'd been his yobo, his live-in girlfriend, on three different tours—to know that once he made up his mind to do something there was no power on earth that could dissuade him. Let him walk around the quiet village, she thought, if that's what he wanted to do. He could watch the active duty soldiers file through the main gate, reporting to their firing batteries. In a few minutes, after Vern became cold and hungry, he'd be back.

Vern slipped on his socks and finished dressing. Then he slid back the oil-paper-covered door and stepped into the cold cement-floored kitchen. From a low wooden rack, he grabbed his shoes and opened the outer door.

“I'll be back,” he said as he slipped on his shoes and walked into the cold night.

Un-hui groaned and pulled the silk comforter over her head.

* * * *

Every door and window in the village of Sonyu-ri was locked and shuttered tight. The South Korean government had imposed a midnight-to-four curfew on the entire country for over twenty years, ever since the end of the Korean War. Up here, just two miles south of the Imjin River and six miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, the curfew was enforced with manic resolve. But the curfew was over now. Vern glanced at his watch: zero four thirty-one hours.

Shortly after curfew, the DivArty headquarters had called the alert. SOP. Standard operating procedure. But what they hadn't done is fire off the 50 mm alert cannon, which is usually done shortly after or just before the alert siren is sounded. Either the small howitzer was out of order or the staff duty NCO had been unable to locate the blank ammunition.

Vern wound through the dark, narrow pedestrian lanes. Brick and mortared rock leaned out of the shadows as if to envelop him. Wastewater gurgled through a gutter in the middle of the walkway, reeking of ammonia and filth. Earthenware kimchi pots lined rooftops and walls. The entire village smelled like the dust-filled interior of a garlic warehouse, although Vern's sense of smell had long since been desensitized to the omnipresent background odor. He emerged on the blacktopped expanse of the Main Supply Route, or MSR, the central road that sliced through the heart of the village of Sonyu-ri.

One soldier sprinted down the road, heading for the brightly lit chain-link fence that was the main gate of Camp Pelham. A straggler. Every soldier would be accounted for, Vern knew that. As soon as the last man had reported in for duty, Battalion Ops would be notified and the time recorded. That late young soldier could expect to have his butt reamed by any good first sergeant. Vern had reamed a few in his day. More than a few.

Vern waited in the shadows about fifty yards in front of the gate. No other G.I.'s appeared. They were all on compound now. The main drag of Sonyu-ri was quiet and dark. Unlit neon signs lined the road with names like the Kit Kat Club, the Silver Dragon Bar, Moon's Tailoring, Katy Kim's Brassware Emporium, and Oh's Sporting Goods. At dawn, Vern knew, old women would be outside with short-handled brooms cleaning up in front of their shops. Later, middle-aged men, some of them still in pajamas and slippers, would unlock and roll up the metal shutters protecting the front windows of the shops. The compound, meanwhile, would come to life with a bugle sounding reveille and the flags of the United Nations Command, the Republic of Korea, and the United States of America would be raised to signal the start of the duty day. Diesel truck engines would be fired up, filling the air around them with pungent clouds of burnt fuel. Soldiers would march four abreast to and from unit work—formations. Those soldiers wouldn't emerge onto the main drag of Sonyu-ri until about noontime when some of the men would return to their yobo's hooch and others would eschew the free army chow and order a bowl of hot noodles or a plate of ohmu rice in one of the eateries along the strip. Night is when Sonyu-ri really came alive. The neon blinked awake and dozens of scantily clad young Korean women appeared in the bars and clubs and teahouses as if by magic. The off-duty G.I.'s changed into blue jeans and sports shirts and nylon jackets with fire-breathing dragons embroidered on the back. Then, chomping gum, they would erupt out of the gate of Camp Pelham in packs of three or four, overnight passes shoved securely in their wallets, a packet of Military Payment Certificates bulging their pockets.

Vern loved the army and wished he hadn't retired, but after thirty years, he'd been forced to. Too old to make the grade. Or at least that's what they'd told him. Regulations are regulations. After thirty years, you're history.

Vern had watched Sonyu-ri prosper since the end of the Korean War. Back then, people were starving. Heating fuel, soap, canned food, antibiotics, these things were literally worth their weight in gold. Now, people were healthy and well fed. Instead of supplies pilfered from the compound, they wanted money. Military Payment Certificates (MPC), or greenbacks, if they were available. That's why Sonyu-ri existed, this little village amidst acres of frozen cabbage fields and rice paddies. It existed to mine the G.I. compound, to extract as much wealth from Camp Pelham as possible. And that's why Vern loved it and loved living here and why he'd chosen to retire here. With any luck he'd be buried in a grave mound two klicks to the north on a hill overlooking the Imjin River, flowing down from the dark heart of Communist North Korea.

The compound was quiet now. Vern wandered down the MSR, his hands stuck deep into the pockets of his overcoat, until he reached the big whitewashed arch over the main gate of Camp Pelham. The well-lit arch said: second infantry division, second to none. Vern remembered when the First Cav had been in charge of this compound, and before that the U.S. Marine Corps. But they'd all moved out, years ago, to Vietnam.

Vern stood quietly, waiting. And then he heard it. A low rumble. Diesel engines, dozens of them. Big deuce-and-a-half trucks, each hauling a half ton of high explosive artillery rounds and towing a 105 mm howitzer. The M.P.'s scurried to roll back the gate and then the convoy erupted out of the compound, G.I.'s in the front driving, G.I.'s up on top of the cab with M-60 machine guns pointed straight ahead, G.I.'s in back under canvas squatting on ammo crates, M-16 rifles pointing toward the sky.

As truck after truck and artillery piece after artillery piece rolled by, Vern felt proud. These boys had leapt out of bed and put on their gear and were now rolling out with enough high-explosive firepower to destroy a small city—all in less than half an hour since the first alert siren had sounded. Good work.

Without thinking about it, Vern clicked his heels together, assumed the position of attention, and saluted.

The last truck in the convoy was the mess truck. After it chugged out of the compound and turned left down the MSR, the M.P.'s closed and locked the gate. Sonyu-ri was quiet again. Not a single Korean citizen had roused themselves from bed to cheer on the American G.I.'s who were rolling out right now toward the DMZ to prepare to repel an attack from the North Korean Communists. An imaginary attack to be sure, conjured up to provide realistic training, but still, these young soldiers were ready to fight and die, at any time, to protect freedom.

At least that's the way Vern saw it. Others were more cynical about the far-flung American empire, but Vern saw it as a simple proposition: Communism versus freedom. The bad guys versus the good guys. He pondered these thoughts as he strolled back toward his hooch. The cold morning air bit firmly into his nostrils and he knew he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep now. Un-hui, begrudgingly, would fix a pot of coffee. He'd wait until the Armed Forces Korean Network came on at six a.m. and watch the morning news. Later, he'd walk to the PX and buy a copy of the Pacific Stars & Stripes, flown in every day from Tokyo. This is how his life had devolved: Instead of commanding men in the field, Vern plotted strategies to tick off the slow minutes of every slow day.

Retirement, bah! Vern decided to take a different route home. At least he could have that much adventure.

At the Seven Star Tea House, Vern turned left and followed stone steps to the edge of the river, the Sonyu-gang, a tributary of the Imjin. It was quiet along here. Water gurgled off to his left, the dark splintered wood of walled homes lined the high bank off to his right. Patches of reeds stuck out of the river. Occasionally, a fin splashed amidst listless ripples. Later, when the sun started to peek over the eastern horizon, Korean men older than Vern would cast lines into this stream and occasionally catch small fish.

That's when Vern saw it, up ahead, looking like a clump of rags.

Vern hurried forward. It was more than rags. It was clothing, jumbled up. A hand sticking out. Nearby, a baseball cap, seated firmly atop a skull. Something viscous oozed from beneath the head. Vern had seen it often enough to know what it was.

Blood.

Vern stopped for a moment, examining his surroundings, checking for booby traps. When he saw none he inched forward. And then, as he stepped around the pile, a face. White skin, a long nose, eyes staring up toward nothing. Whoever he was, he wore dirty blue jeans and sneakers, and the body was twisted far enough to its right that Vern could make out a map of Korea embroidered onto the back of a nylon jacket. A G.I. A young American G.I. A dead G.I.

In horror, Vern backed up.

Then he turned, and then he was running.

* * * *

Lieutenant Noh Hyong-mok was not glad to see Vern Kruckman.

Americans were always trouble, night or day, and at this hour of the morning whatever this sweaty-faced American was here for couldn't be good. Lieutenant Noh did not stand. He remained sitting behind the counter in front of the entranceway to the Sonyu-ri Police Station. He did manage, however, a nod toward the entering American. If his graying temples were any indication, the man was older than Lieutenant Noh and deserved some respect. He wasn't boyish and rude like most of the American G.I.'s Lieutenant Noh was forced to encounter. At least not so far. The American waited patiently for Lieutenant Noh to finish shuffling through the paperwork in front of him until he set it aside and finally stared up at the man. His splotchy white face and his long nose were flushed red. He must have been running. Lieutenant Noh waited for him to say something.

“You speaky English?” Vern said.

Lieutenant Noh continued to stare at him. Now he remembered him. This was the live-in boyfriend of the woman called Pei Un-hui who rented from the Lee family. It was said that he had put down a million won—over two thousand dollars U.S.—in key money. A record, as far as Lieutenant Noh knew, in the village of Sonyu-ri. Lieutenant Noh stared with new respect at the disheveled American. Still, he waited.

“There's a body,” the American said, pointing. “Down by the river. He's not moving.” The American looked away, confused suddenly. “Blood everywhere. Maybe I should've given him first-aid. I should've checked his breathing.” The American glanced back up at Lieutenant Noh. “But he looked dead. That's why I didn't do anything.”

Clearly, Noh thought, this American had seen something. Something that had upset him deeply. He sighed. In little more than an hour, the day-shift officer would report in and then he'd be off duty and wouldn't have to think of these foreigners at all. Instead, this big-nosed man barges into his quiet station just before dawn. Hadn't the American convoy just moved out? Shouldn't these rude foreigners be leaving him alone?

None of these thoughts showed on Lieutenant Noh's face. He knew they didn't. He'd spent a lifetime making sure that no one, especially his superior, Captain Pak, ever knew what he was thinking. Even his own wife didn't know what he was thinking. Lieutenant Noh liked it that way. It made him feel that in this busy world, with people constantly making demands on one another, he had a quiet space; a space for his own thoughts.

What he thought now was that this American might be drunk. Quickly, he decided against that. There was no reek of alcohol on him and the flush on his face was more likely from the cold and recent exertion. Whatever this man had seen, Lieutenant Noh knew that he had to investigate. Reluctantly, he called toward the back room.

"Na pakkei nagga!" I'm going out.

Two uniformed policemen, just out of the academy, rushed out of the back room, both of them bowing. One of them handed Lieutenant Noh his cap, the other helped him on with his jacket.

Thus attired, Lieutenant Noh turned to the American and with an open-palmed gesture said, in perfectly pronounced English, “After you.”

The two men marched out into the night.

* * * *

Vern searched the length of the walkway, pacing rapidly back and forth. At the same spot, every time he passed it, he pointed at the ground and said. “He was right here. I saw him.”

Lieutenant Noh searched the area with his flashlight. There was nothing, not even any moisture that would indicate blood, although the soil was porous and damp and would have absorbed telltale signs quickly.

“He was right here, I tell you,” Vern said.

Lieutenant Noh shrugged. “Maybe he got up and left.”

“He couldn't have,” Vern replied. “I saw the side of his head. It was bloody, practically caved in.”

Lieutenant Noh stepped forward, knelt, and examined the spot more closely. There was something here. A swirllike pattern, as if someone had taken a rag and cleaned up. But why clean by the side of a filthy pathway? And why right here? Lieutenant Noh continued to examine the area, not saying anything to the American. In the mud at the edge of the pathway, he spotted a footprint. A nondescript shoe, probably a man's, not too large, not too small, about average size for an adult. But that wasn't unusual. This was a well-trod footpath along the river, a shortcut that many residents of Sonyu-ri used, especially useful to bypass the frenzy of foreigners and prostitutes on the main road after nightfall. Just a footprint. Nothing to make a fuss about.

That's when Lieutenant Noh spotted it. A metal ring attached to a small clump of rough material. It shined as if it hadn't been weathering for long on this cold riverbank. Keeping his back to the American, Lieutenant Noh knelt and shoved the metal ring into his pocket. He'd examine it later, when he was alone. Lieutenant Noh climbed back up on the pathway. The American had stopped pacing and stared at him. Lieutenant Noh stared back.

“What do you think?” Vern asked.

Lieutenant Noh didn't answer.

“He was here, I tell you,” Vern said. “I saw him with my own eyes.”

Lieutenant Noh smiled at Vern. “Of course,” he said. “Would you like to make a report?”

Vern looked away. He knew that his wife, Un-hui, would go bonkers if he made a formal police report. Unless it was absolutely necessary, involving the Korean National Police is something Koreans are trained from birth not to do. It's expensive and often the trouble can rebound on the innocent person who filed the complaint in the first place.

“Not now,” Vern said. “Let me think about it.”

Lieutenant Noh nodded and returned to the station

* * * *

“Where have you been?” Un-hui said, sitting up from her sleeping mat.

“I've been out,” Vern replied, slipping his shoes off and placing them in the rack.

“I know that, but you've been gone for more than an hour.” Un-hui's eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“I saw something,” Vern said.

“What?”

“A G.I. Hurt. By the side of the pathway along the river.”

“Did you help him?”

“It was too late for that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he was dead.”

Un-hui barked a laughed. “You need new glasses,” she said.

Then she lay back down on her sleeping mat, rolled over and, once again, pulled the silk comforter up over her head.

* * * *

Vern sat at an iron table in front of the PX snack stand on Camp Pelham sipping a cup of coffee. The only G.I.'s on compound were the skeleton crew manning the battalion headquarters and the orderly rooms of each of the three firing batteries. The rest of the 2nd of the 17th Field Artillery Battalion was still in the field, still fighting an imaginary war with an imaginary Communist invasion force from North Korea.

Vern decided that he had to do something. He tossed his paper cup in the trash and ambled toward the Battalion Headquarters.

It was a long series of single-story Quonset huts, all painted green, and hooked together with wooden connecting hallways. A well-maintained jeep sat out front. Virtually all the other vehicles on compound had moved out on alert, but this jeep sat in the spot reserved to the staff duty officer. The tires were muddy. Old habits die hard. Vern leaned inside the open jeep and checked the gas gauge. Only three quarters full, not topped off as required by regulation. If Vern was still first sergeant, someone would have their butt chewed for leaving their equipment like that.

At the main entranceway, a fat badger yanked the lanyard of an exploding canyon, grinning while he did so. Bad Ass the Badger, the battalion mascot, was painted on the side of the door. Vern shoved past the gaudy mural and marched down a long hallway covered with cheap tile. At the end of the hallway he pushed through double swinging doors stenciled in black with the words BATTALION OPERATIONS CENTER.

A man Vern knew sat behind a gray Army-issue desk with a phone shoved tightly against his ear.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Understand, sir. Will do, sir.” Finally, after a few more affirmative comments, the man hung up and gazed at Vern.

“You ain't left yet?” the man said. “Why the hell are you still in Korea?”

“This is my home,” Vern said.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot. You're shacked up. I mean married or something. Right?”

Vern frowned. A lot of army lifers retire in Korea—or Germany or Japan or wherever they happen to be stationed at the end of their military careers. Thirty years of military service takes a toll on the personal life. Parents are usually dead, siblings married off or out on their own, scattered far from the old hometown you remember as a kid. The place where you enlisted so many years ago is not only no longer home, in most cases it is not even recognizable.

“Married,” Vern said.

“Yeah,” the man said. “Sorry.”

His name was Wallace Orting, he held the rank of major, and he was the battalion operations officer. The phone rang, he answered it, made a few terse comments, and then hung up again. Major Orting looked up at Vern.

“We're sort of busy here, First Sergeant Kruckman. Is there something I can do for you?”

“Yes, sir,” Vern replied. “One of your men. I found him down by the river.”

“Shit River?”

That's what the G.I.'s called the little stream that ran through Sonyu-ri.

“Sonyu-gang," Vern corrected. “He was dead.”

Major Orting shuffled through paperwork in front of him, as if searching for something. “Okay,” he said finally. “I have no reports of any men missing. He can't be in our unit. What was his name?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know? Why not.”

“I reported it to the KNPs. By the time we got back there, the body was gone.”

Major Orting stared at Vern, openmouthed.

“Gone?”

“Yes,” Vern replied. “Gone. I thought you might check your personnel rosters and see if you had a G.I. who didn't show up for the alert.”

Major Orting shook his head negatively. “A hundred percent. Everyone reported in on time and within less than thirty minutes. The report's already gone up to DivArty.”

Vern knew what that meant. Major Orting would be reluctant to change the report because then his butt would be on the line. Moving out without one of your soldiers was a serious breach. Soldiers are on duty twenty-four seven; well-trained units respond to alerts immediately and at full strength. Leaving a G.I. behind, and especially leaving a G.I. behind dead, would mean that heads would roll.

“Maybe he's in another unit,” Major Orting said. “Probably the engineers. Or the antiaircraft artillery.”

“Maybe,” Vern said. “But their compounds are a few klicks down the road.”

“Whatever,” Major Orting said. “But he's not one of ours.”

“Okay, sir,” Vern said stifling the urge to salute. Instead, he nodded and turned and walked out of the Ops Center. In the hallway, he studied the battalion bulletin board. According to the roster, a man named Jenkins, staff sergeant, had pulled staff duty NCO last night. Vern didn't know the man, still he pitied him. After the alert was called and Jenkins had been relieved by the regular headquarters personnel reporting to duty, he'd be required to report to his own unit and go out on the alert with them. No half day of rest as normally authorized after pulling the all-night staff duty detail. Bad luck for him.

It had happened to Vern a few times. Maybe, Vern thought, he didn't miss the army so much after all.

* * * *

Lieutenant Noh turned over his duty log to the day-shift officer. In it, no mention was made of the report by Vern Kruckman of the body of a foreigner being spotted on the banks of the Sonyu-gang. No sense bringing up embarrassing information from a confused foreigner. Still, the report bothered Lieutenant Noh. Vern Kruckman seemed intelligent and alert, unlike so many Americans. And when the body hadn't been where he said it was, he seemed genuinely surprised. As Lieutenant Noh walked home, past the shops just now opening their doors and shutters, he reached in his pocket and pulled out the shining metal ring. It was painted green, and where it shined was where the paint had chipped off. Attached to it was a thumb-sized shred of ripped canvas.

At the open-air Sonyu market, Lieutenant Noh stepped into a narrow pathway. Canvas lean-tos blotted out the dim morning sunlight, but a string of yellow bulbs hanging from wooden rafters glowed every ten yards or so. Cabbages and mackerel and white radishes glimmered amidst blue ice. The odor of ginger and sliced scallions permeated the air. Gray-haired women wearing woolen shawls nodded to Lieutenant Noh as he passed. He knew most of them by sight and nodded back.

Most of them were legitimate business people. But what Lieutenant Noh was looking for wasn't legitimate. He slipped down a crack in the fruit stands and ducked through a wooden doorway that led into a dilapidated shed walled with greasy wooden slats. A single bulb illuminated ancient wooden shelving. A gap-toothed old man, holding dirty, white-gloved hands in front of him, appeared out of the gloom. He bowed to Lieutenant Noh.

“Professor Kang,” Noh said. “Greetings. How's business?”

“Poor,” the old man replied. “Very poor. The country has grown too rich. No one needs my wares anymore.”

Kang, it was said, had been a highly educated professor during the Japanese occupation before the end of World War II. After the war, he'd been identified as an enemy collaborator and narrowly escaped execution by the North Korean communists. Now, after starting life as a member of the educated yangban elite, he was left with nothing but this grungy little shop.

The shelves were lined with crushed boxes of American-made C rations and woolen winter jackets and gloves, thickly padded-over pants, and large rubber boots. Everything G.I. issue. The resale of American military equipment was illegal, but the local KNPs turned a blind eye to the operation. As long as the pilfering from the U.S. base didn't cause the Americans to complain, and no actual armaments were bought or sold, Professor Kang's black-market operation was seen as harmless.

Lieutenant Noh pulled the ring out of his pocket.

“What does this belong to?”

Professor Kang studied the piece of metal, sticking his little finger halfway through the hole.

“Tent half,” he said in English.

“What?” Noh asked. He wasn't familiar with the term.

Kang handed back the ring and ushered Lieutenant Noh toward a back shelf. He pulled out a roll of dark green canvas and unfurled it. It was rectangular with two pointed triangles at the end.

“A tent half,” Professor Kang explained. “One American soldier carries one, another carries one just like it. At night, they unfurl them, string them together on poles, and stake the ends into the ground. Then they have shelter. A place to sleep.”

“Ingenious,” Lieutenant Noh said, examining the sturdy material. During the war, as a conscript in the South Korean army, Noh and his fellow soldiers had taken shelter wherever they could and more often than not slept in the mud and the rain.

“Our soldiers have tents now,” Professor Kang told him, “made of canvas that's almost as strong as this American material.”

Noh tossed the canvas back onto its shelf. “Who buys these things?” he asked.

Kang shrugged. “Housewives who want to keep the rain off their kimchi jars. Farmers who want to provide shelter for their animals. There are many uses.”

“Has anyone bought one of these from you lately?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“And you're the only one who sells them in Sonyu-ri?”

“The only one who sells them in this part of Paju County.”

Lieutenant Noh pocketed the ring, thanked Professor Kang, and left.

* * * *

The body was found early the next morning.

A South Korean patrol boat spotted it in the Han River Estuary, floating facedown amongst a clump of reeds. The flow of the currents made it clear that the body had floated out of the mouth of the Imjin River and into the estuary. Since the river flows fast it was surmised that the body hadn't been floating long and the physical condition of the body confirmed that. About twenty-four hours in the river was the estimate.

Vern Kruckman sat in a wooden chair in the back office of the Sonyu-ri KNP station gazing at a black-and-white photograph of the corpse.

“Is this the man you saw by the banks of the Sonyu-gang?” Lieutenant Noh asked.

“That's him,” Vern replied. Even with the bloating and the chunks of flesh missing, Vern recognized the pointed nose and the splotchy white skin. Even the clothing was the same. “No question.”

Noh sat down heavily. “His name is Rolandson. We've already reported it to the American authorities. They say he was stationed here, at Camp Pelham.”

“The second of the seventeenth?” Vern asked.

Noh nodded. Then he answered the unspoken question. “He was on leave. That's why they didn't notice him missing right away.”

When you're on leave you don't have to report in on alerts. Of course, the man was dead, Vern thought, and couldn't have reported in anyway.

“Do you know his rank?” Vern asked. “Which battery he was assigned to?”

Noh shook his head negatively. “The Americans only gave us his last name.”

“How are they classifying the death?”

“As an accident.”

“An accident?” Vern clenched his fists. “It couldn't be. The man I saw couldn't have walked to the Imjin River. It's two klicks north of here.”

Noh studied Vern for a few moments. “Do you want me to report your sighting?”

Vern hadn't considered that. He sat backed, trying to organize his thoughts.

Noh interrupted him. He pulled out the metal ring. “I found this near the body,” he said. “It is part of what you Americans call a tent half.”

Vern understood now. “While I was gone,” he said, “someone laid the tent half on the ground and rolled the body onto it. Then they dragged it away.”

“Or carried it, if there was more than one of them.”

“Maybe there's still some signs.”

“Maybe.”

The two men departed the station and hurried toward the Sonyu River. Disappointment struck quickly. There was too much pedestrian traffic along the pathway, too many feet kicking dirt, for there to be any signs left. From the path along the river, alleyways shot straight uphill toward the MSR, about ten or fifteen yards away. All of the passageways were too narrow for vehicles.

“Someone could've dragged the body here, to the first alley,” Vern said. “And then pulled it uphill to the MSR.”

“If he was alone,” Lieutenant Noh said, “he'd have to be very strong.”

“Or very determined,” Vern replied. “No one would have seen him. It was too early. And all the G.I.'s had already left for the compound.”

“But what then?” Noh asked. “It's two kilometers to the Imjin River.”

The two men climbed up the few yards and stood where the mouth of the alleyway emerged onto the MSR.

“Maybe a taxi?” Vern said.

“None were operating that early,” Noh replied. “I've already checked.”

Vern knew that there were only maybe a half dozen cab drivers who called the village of Sonyu-ri home, and the drivers from the city of Munsan wouldn't bother to come all the way out here that early in the morning.

Noh was staring at Vern.

“You want me to check the compound?” Vern asked.

“The Americans are calling it an accident.”

“They always call it an accident,” Vern replied.

“If you check,” Noh replied, “check quietly.”

“You mean discreetly.”

“Yes,” Noh agreed. “Discreetly.”

As Lieutenant Noh walked away, Vern turned and stared downhill at the slowly flowing Sonyu-gang. A hawk swooped low, caught a small fish in its talons, and flapped its wings toward the gray sky. It was then, watching the raptor fade from gray to blue, that Vern realized that he didn't need to check the compound. He already knew who had murdered the G.I. called Rolandson.

In a frenzy of excitement, Vern hurried home. All he had to do now was confirm it.

The woman wailed and gnashed her teeth, her eyes shut tight, tears streaming down flushed cheeks. Pei Un-hui patted the bereaved woman on the back as did the wife of the local pastor and the landlady who owned the complex of hooches. All four of them sat cross-legged on cushions on the warm ondol floor.

Her name was Kim Ryu-sook and she'd lived in Sonyu-ri almost three years. She was a poor country girl from the hinterlands of Cholla Province, and during the past years she'd shacked up with various G.I. boyfriends. Finally, she'd found one who was willing to marry her: Specialist Four Edward H. Rolandson.

The paperwork was in, already vetted by the battalion chaplain and the Korean Ministry of the Interior; only the second division commander was left to sign off on final approval. A formality, since almost two hundred marriages were approved in the Division area every year.

“We were going to leave Sonyu-ri,” the woman said. “I was going stateside. I was going to be able to send money to my mother.”

No matter how Un-hui and the other women commiserated with her and tried to assure her that she was young and attractive and she'd find a husband some day, the woman was inconsolable. Un-hui wished she wasn't here to view this pitiful scene, but Vern had been adamant. “You have to find out everything you can about her. And most importantly, about the G.I. she lived with.”

“What about your old boyfriend?” the landlady said. “What was his name? Jenkins. He was a good man.”

“He hates me now,” Kim Ryu-sook wailed. “When he came back to Korea, I told him I couldn't live with him this time. My paperwork was in and I was going to marry Rolandson. He cursed me. Called me a whore.”

Both the pastor's wife and the landlady patted her on the shoulder.

“He was just angry,” the landlady said. “He'll get over it.”

“Besides,” Kim Ryu-sook sputtered, breaking into tears once again. “He's already married.”

Even the pastor's wife couldn't come up with a solution for that.

* * * *

Vern Kruckman was nothing if not a man of action. For thirty years he'd faced down not only the enemies of his country but also fellow soldiers who refused to toe the line. A soldier's life is tough. There are a myriad of regulations that a soldier is required to follow, and it wasn't always easy keeping track of them all. More than once men had cursed Vern Kruckman for enforcing those regulations. They'd gone so far as to throw punches at him, and once one of them had even shot his rifle at him. Luckily, he'd missed. But Vern never backed down. He was a soldier first, and in the army, discipline is king. As a first sergeant—and as a damn good first sergeant—Vern never failed to enforce military discipline. But the worst breach of discipline of all is the murder of a fellow soldier. Vern knew he had to do something about it.

“Jenkins!” Vern bellowed.

After two days in the field, Charley Battery of the 2nd of the 17th Field Artillery had just pulled into Camp Pelham. The alert was over now and the 2nd Infantry Division had been victorious once again in the war game against North Korea. Staff Sergeant Jenkins was a gun crew chief and he and his men had uncoupled the 105 mm howitzer from the back of the deuce-and-a-half and were rolling it into its sandbagged gun emplacement when Vern found them.

Jenkins stopped what he was doing and stared at Vern. A shadow of understanding crossed his eyes. Hurriedly, he ordered his men forward, and after they dropped the gun into position he told them to grab their gear and return to the barracks. Most of them were more than happy to do just that. After two days in the field the first thing every soldier wanted to do was take a shower. The hot water from the big tank atop the barracks would only last a few minutes and then the drains would clog up with filth and all that would be left for the straggler would be a cold shower while standing in an ankle-high pond of scum.

The men scurried off, only a couple of them glancing back, wondering what business Staff Sergeant Jenkins had with the retired First Sergeant Vern Kruckman.

When they were alone, Vern said, “You killed him.”

Jenkins was a tall man, thin, with hip bones that pushed out his webbed belt. But there was a wiry strength to him and a cockiness that Vern had often seen in soldiers; a cockiness that said, I can get away with anything.

“When the alert went off,” Vern continued, “you saw your chance.”

Jenkins grinned and leaned up against the sandbags.

Vern stepped closer. “You were the staff duty NCO that night. It was your job to go outside and fire off the 50 mm howitzer in front of the flagpole. You went outside, all right, but instead of firing the cannon you jumped in the staff duty officer's jeep and drove out the gate to the MSR. Then you made your way through the alleys to the pathway along the Sonyu River, just a few yards outside of the hooch of your old girlfriend, Kim Ryu-sook.”

Jenkins finally spoke. “You have it all worked out, eh, Kruckman?”

“Yes. I do. When Rolandson came outside, hurrying up the path toward the compound, you smashed his skull in.”

“With what?” Jenkins asked, making a fist and raising it.

“No,” Vern replied. “Not with those scrawny little knuckles but with something a lot bigger. Probably your entrenching tool.” Jenkins flinched. Vern went on. “They can find even minute particles of blood on entrenching tools these days, Jenkins. Even if you cleaned it off.”

Jenkins struggled to make his face impassive but it wasn't working. Vern could see that he had him rattled. He continued.

“Then someone approached. Me. You hid back in one of the alleys until I passed. When I left, you pulled out your tent half, rolled Rolandson onto it, and dragged him uphill to the MSR. Somehow, you shoved him into the back of your jeep and then drove him to the Imjin. That's when you dumped him in the river and returned to Camp Pelham.”

“You can't prove that any of this is true,” Jenkins growled.

“No. Not yet. But I'll bet the M.P. investigators can. They'll turn your life inside out, Jenkins, and the truth will come out.”

Jenkins strolled slowly to the back of the deuce-and-a-half. He reached inside, rummaging around in a duffel bag. For a gut-wrenching moment, Vern thought he'd emerge with an M-16 rifle and start firing. Instead, Jenkins pulled out an entrenching tool. He brandished it in front of Vern. Vern backed away from the heavy folded shovel.

“Is this the entrenching tool you're talking about?” Jenkins asked.

“It might be,” Vern replied. “I came to you first, before going to the M.P.'s, because I'm giving you a chance to do the right thing. I'm giving you a chance to turn yourself in.”

Jenkins raised the entrenching tool and Vern stepped back quickly. Jenkins didn't follow. As Vern walked away, Jenkins cursed and flung the shovel at Vern. In landed in the dirt about five yards behind Vern.

Vern turned and hurried toward the battalion headquarters.

* * * *

As Vern told his story, Major Orting, the operations officer, sat next to Lieutenant Colonel Schuster, the commander of the 2nd of the 17th Field Artillery. When Vern was finished, Colonel Schuster lit the cherrywood tobacco he'd leisurely stuffed into his pipe. After puffing a few times and filling the small office with a cloud of sweet smoke, he spoke to Vern, staring directly at him.

“You have no evidence,” Colonel Schuster said.

“There's the mud on the tires of the staff duty vehicle,” Vern replied, “the mileage log, and if we survey Sergeant Jenkins's field gear chances are we won't find a tent half. By now, it's probably floating somewhere in the Yellow Sea.”

Colonel Schuster frowned. He wasn't used to being contradicted.

“Everything checks out,” Vern continued, “the timing, the vehicle, the fact that the 50 mm ceremonial cannon wasn't fired, and in all the confusion of an alert, no one noticed that the staff duty NCO was missing for a few minutes. Staff Sergeant Jenkins was jealous because Specialist Rolandson was marrying his old yobo, a woman he'd shacked up with on a previous tour. It's that simple. Jealousy. The oldest motive in the world.”

“Or,” Major Orting interjected, “what happened was what the official report says happened. Rolandson was wandering along the banks of the Imjin River, slipped off a rock, and fell in. The current is strong along there.”

“The current is strong everywhere along the Imjin,” Vern said. “But who wanders along the edge of a treacherous river at zero four hundred hours? Besides, his yobo will testify that he was with her and left only after the alert siren went off.”

“How do you know?”

“Someone I trust has already interviewed her.”

Colonel Schuster puffed on his pipe. No commander wanted to invite criminal investigators into his unit. And no commander wanted to admit that any of his men would resort to murder. Especially soldier-on-soldier murder.

Major Orting had one last objection. “We've never had a murder before in the 2nd of the 17th.”

He said it while glaring at Vern, as if it were Vern's fault.

Just then, while the two officers pondered the horribleness of it all, the bookcase behind Colonel Schuster exploded into a thousand pieces.

* * * *

“A beehive round,” Vern said.

He and Major Orting were crouched behind sandbags. Twenty yards away, at another gun emplacement, Staff Sergeant Jenkins stood next to his 105 mm howitzer, his hand gripping the lanyard. The barrel was pointed directly at what was left of battalion headquarters. The weapon was locked and loaded with another round, probably another beehive. High explosive rounds are lobbed from a distance and are designed to destroy bridges, buildings, armored vehicles, and anything unfortunate enough to be within their impact zone. Beehive rounds, however, are designed for direct fire. That is, they are aimed directly at an attacking enemy. After leaving the barrel of the howitzer, the beehive round explodes into thousands of tiny, razor sharp metal shards, designed to rip through human flesh and anything that stands in their way.

Vern peeked over the sandbags and shouted. “Let go of the lanyard, Jenkins! Back away from the gun.”

“I want to see her,” Jenkins shouted back.

“Who?”

“Miss Kim. She's the one who started all this.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Major Orting growled, still crouched behind the sandbags. “He murders a fellow soldier, blows up his battalion headquarters, sends Colonel Schuster to the hospital, and all for some camp—following whore.”

“That's love for you,” Vern replied.

“What are we going to do?”

“What else can we do?” Vern said. “Comply with his request.”

Vern stood up, holding his hands over his head. “Okay, Jenkins. You win. I'll go get Miss Kim for you.”

“Hurry. I won't wait too long.”

Jenkins's hand was quivering, and even though the morning was still cool, perspiration flowed off his forehead.

“Okay. I'll go get her. Where does she live?”

“In the village,” Jenkins replied.

“Where? There's a lot of hooches in the village.”

“Down the alley from the Kit Kat Club.”

“Come on, Jenkins,” Vern said. “There must be a hundred little alleyways winding behind the Kit Kat Club with hooches all piled up and jumbled behind them. It's like a beehive down there.” Vern stepped in front of the sandbags. “You'll have to draw me a map.”

“Okay,” Jenkins said. He patted his pockets. “I don't have paper and pencil.”

Major Orting, still squatting low, reached in his pocket and pulled out a small pad and a pen. He handed them to Vern.

“Here,” Vern said, holding them over his head. “I have something for you to write with.”

Vern walked toward Jenkins. When he was five yards away, Jenkins said, “Stop! That's close enough.” Still holding the lanyard, he said, “Toss me the paper.”

Vern did.

“Now the pen.”

Vern did that too.

Jenkins let loose the lanyard. While he wrote, he glanced suspiciously at Vern. “Don't try anything funny,” he said.

“I just want to find your girlfriend and get this thing over with,” Vern replied.

“Do you know her?” Jenkins asked gruffly.

“Never met her.”

“It's the second door on the left,” Jenkins said. Then his brow furrowed. “Or maybe the third.”

“What's her name?”

“Miss Kim.”

Vern sighed. “There are about a jillion women in the village named Miss Kim.”

Jenkins frowned. He wadded up the piece of paper and tossed it to Vern. Vern caught it on the fly. “You've got the map.”

Vern studied it. “But this doesn't make any sense,” he said, pointing at what Jenkins had scribbled. “After the first left, there are four hooches and then another road that goes right to a dead end, not left back toward the MSR. I know, I live not too far from there.”

Jenkins scowled at Vern. “Let me see.” He held out his hand.

As he did so, Vern stepped forward and handed the paper to him, then without stopping he sprang forward and leapt at Staff Sergeant Jenkins.

Frantically, Jenkins scrambled for the lanyard, but before he could reach it, Vern grabbed his neck and twisted with all his weight away from the howitzer. Both men landed on the ground with a crash.

Jenkins twisted his head downward and managed to reach Vern's forearm with his teeth. He bit. Hard. Screaming, Vern let go of his grip. Jenkins wriggled forward, reached up, and before Vern could recover the huge metal breech of the howitzer, he sprang backward and an enormous explosion erupted from the barrel, deafening Vern and emitting a small hurricane of acrid smoke.

Men screamed. Footsteps pounded forward, and then hands were on Jenkins and hands were on Vern and Vern was being punched and men were shouting and Vern was hoisted to his feet. Someone tripped and then they all fell in a jumble. Vern clunked his skull on the hot metal breechblock of the 105 mm howitzer.

* * * *

“I told you,” Pei Un-hui said to Vern, sitting beside his hospital bed. “You no army no more. You no go alert no more.”

They were in a four-man ward in the 121st Military Evacuation Hospital in the capital city of Seoul.

“Okay,” Vern said. “No more alerts.”

“And no more Sonyu-ri,” Vern's wife said. “We move Seoul. Everybody in Sonyu-ri taaksan mad. Lose face too muchey.”

“Why?”

“Because before Rolandson die, just accident. Now, murder. Not good for Sonyu-ri. Everybody feel bad. Korean police taaksan angry.”

“Why are they angry?” Vern asked.

His wife looked at him as if he were stupid. “Because you make them lose face.”

“I didn't make them lose face,” Vern answered. “Jenkins is the one who committed the murder. Lieutenant Noh is the one who refused to investigate.”

“He no refuse,” Pei Un-hui said. “You didn't file a complaint.”

“You didn't want me to.”

“No. I don't want you to. I want you stay in bed. No go alert.”

One of the medics had told Vern that Colonel Schuster would soon recover from his wounds. Staff Sergeant Jenkins was locked up down at Army Support Command in Pupyong and would be facing court-martial soon.

While Un-hui thumbed through a magazine, Vern thought of Specialist Rolandson and wondered what he'd been like. Only twenty-four years old, about to be married, his whole life ahead of him. Despite what he'd told his wife, Vern didn't regret getting up for the alert.

Next time he'd get up even earlier.

Copyright © 2012 Martin Limon

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: BIG WATTS
by Doc Finch

* * * *

Art by Tim Foley

* * * *

I finished my morning beach run-jog-walk, climbed a dune, and stepped into my garage. It sits below the stilt house that's designed to allow the occasional hurricane to push waves through the garage instead of through the house. It usually works. I sloshed some kerosene onto a rag and wiped the tar off my feet, the legacy of yet another offshore oil well blowout. As I started up the twenty-something-foot stairs to the house deck I heard the phone start ringing.

The call was from George Taylor, an old Navy friend who is some sort of high-level decision maker for the Lower Brazos River Authority, a power company that most folks in South Texas call LoBRA. It had started in the thirties by putting low dams in the Brazos River and making electricity when the river flowed. Now they use everything—water, coal, trash, oil, gas, wind, and uranium—to keep the lights burning in Texas. They recently built the biggest nuclear power plant in the United States.

The plant didn't impress everyone, according to George. LoBRA got a call from a man who said he wanted a great deal of their money. He wanted it soon or he would be inclined to blow away their new nuclear plant, he said. They hung up on the nutcase and the next day their largest cooling lake blew up. When the nutcase called back they took the call.

“It's not just the lake,” George told me. “But we lose more than generating capacity. All those alligators are looking for new homes. Hell, I've had to double the security force. And get ‘em bigger weapons too.”

I admitted that I knew nothing about alligator control. Even hinted that I didn't want to learn anything. George kept trying.

“No alligator wrestling, but I remember that you did the industry some good back when that bunch stole a load of uranium fuel. I thought maybe you still knew how to talk to them.”

“You know who them are?”

“Well. No, but I figured you'd still know who—”

“No. I don't.”

“Well, shoot, why don't you just come on up for a little visit? Talk about old times and I'll buy you lunch in the company cafeteria. What say?”

“Can't. Got a houseguest to entertain.”

“You can bring the guest along, and I'll get you a consultant fee just to listen to the problem.”

“What time should we be there?”

* * * *

I'm Vlad Hammersmith and I live fifteen miles up the Bolivar Peninsula from Galveston and a one sand-dune walk from the Gulf of Mexico. Maria O'Grady was my houseguest. She's a stunning woman with long black hair, bright green eyes, and a quick mind. She works as a forensic specialist for the Oklahoma State Police and did me a great favor the last time I ran into problems up there. So I invited her to come down and enjoy the beach. I forgot to mention the oil, so when she came back up from her first walk on the beach she had a lot to say about the little tar balls that seawater turns oil into. They lurk on beaches and ruin swimsuits and flip-flops. After her initial outburst she was fairly quiet, which worried me.

This time she was silent all the way down the peninsula, quiet across the ferry to Galveston, mum up past the Texas City refineries, and downright uncommunicative across the flats up to the big nuclear plants at LoBRA. She didn't even mention the trees growing parallel to the ground, a common Gulf Coast topic. As the nuclear plant containment structures came into sight, she sighed and turned to me.

“Do you think the whole Gulf Coast has those little tar balls on it?”

I saw a flicker of daylight and ran for it. “Of course not. Why, South Padre Island is probably just as sparkling white as it's always been.”

“You think?”

I hesitated. I hadn't been to Padre Island in years. I had no idea if it was white, gray, or brown sand. “If not,” I said, “we'll just fly over to a Pacific beach.”

“Oh, that would be nice,” she said, and gave me that “gotcha” smile.

At the plant, I noticed a number of black, official-looking cars filling the NRC spots outside the front entry, and a car with black sidewall tires, black windows and an antenna on every flat surface. It was a Texas Ranger vehicle and it was parked in the middle of the driving lane. There was only one of them, but then, someone had only threatened to blow up one plant.

Plant security made us do the full routine. Everything out of pockets and into the X-ray, all metal off the body or they felt you up, walk through the metal detector, then the explosive sniffer device, and finally around the radiation detectors—those wevisit on the way out. Far off on the other side of the security area I could see George Taylor, with a tight little smile, watching to see if we'd make it or not.

Finally they gave each of us a copy of the security rules, a small dosimeter, and a gaudy visitor badge to hang around our necks. I wondered if the badges contained a GPS tracking unit within their thin plastic sheaths.

“Good to see you again, Vlad,” George said when we finally reached him. He shook hands with Maria then slapped his palm down on a recognition device, tripped the gate open, and told us he had to go ahead of us. “Sorry for the extra security today,” he said. “Some fellow huffed himself to death just before you showed up.”

“Spray paints, solvents, or fuel vapors?” Maria asked professionally.

George blinked and said, “Actually, it was helium.”

“Interesting,” she said. “That happen often?”

“Fairly common in the industry. Engineering sites generally have inert gases around, or helium for welding, and some guys just gotta try it—get high, talk like a Disney character. Down this way to the cafeteria.”

We were joined in the cafeteria by a man George introduced as Rick Hightower, the assistant plant manager. He was a skinny, cadaverous man with heavy frown lines in his face. Lunch was standard cafeteria fare, but there was a wide variety and plenty of it. We ate at a corner table, away from the rest of the crew, and George used the time to talk about the extortion problem.

“They want ten million, all in fifties, with nonsequential serial numbers,” said George.

“A lot of money,” I said.

“Four hundred and sixteen pounds,” said Maria, without missing a beat.

“Anyway,” George said, eyeing Maria. “After they got our attention, they gave us a week to get the money together and said they'd call with delivery instructions after that. We want to use that time to find them or make very sure they can't really blow up the plant.”

Rick looked up from his lunch and frowned, or frowned more. “Waste of time calling in a detective. Oughta just pay them—get ‘em out of our hair. Too much at stake here to panic them into acting because they think we're trying to stop them.” He looked pointedly at me.

I looked at George. “That what they said? They would ‘blow up the plant'? It could be important.” I was thinking they could blow up another lake and call it the plant.

“Yes. They were quite specific. Said, ‘your big new unit.’ That would be Unit 3. Biggest in the country. Texas size.” George got a dreamy look in his eyes.

I leaned back and thought aloud for a minute or two. “They must know something about nuclear plants, so they probably know a high order nuclear explosion is impossible and a meltdown extremely difficult to orchestrate. Likewise, they have to know a steam explosion wouldn't do the job, so ... the security we saw this morning, it always on a par with that?”

“Best in the country,” said Rick. “But why take chances? Pay ‘em and get on with our work.”

George glanced at him and continued. “Pretty close. And it'll get tighter when I double the security shifts. And if you're thinking they smuggled a bomb in—delivery trucks are our specialty—nothing gets in without a complete shakedown and an escort until delivery is accomplished and the vehicle's gone.”

“So,” I continued. “No one's going to haul a bomb—or the parts to make one—into the inner perimeter. Could it already be here?”

George sat up straight. “You mean was it built in—put in when the plant was constructed. Man, you should've seen this place during construction. We had more inspectors and NRC overseers than we did laborers. No way anything non-standard or not on a planning document went into this plant.”

“What about high-pressure air or gas tanks, fuels, small construction explosives, hazardous materials?”

“Gases, especially flammable ones, are limited and tightly controlled. High-pressure air is in small tanks—like diesel starting air. Diesel fuel is in a bunker outside the perimeter and piped in to fifty-gallon day tanks for the diesel emergency generators. Hazmat is handled strictly in accordance with the federal regs, and the largest ‘small explosives’ on-site are ten-gauge shotgun shells, and they're held by the security people.”

“Good answers,” I said. “So either the extortionists have the bomb already here and very well hidden, or they intend to shoot it in on a rocket.”

George's head jerked up, then he decided I wasn't serious and relaxed. “I still think it's a bluff. We should be concentrating on keeping them from getting the money.”

“You don't intend to pay them?”

“No, we'll pay,” Rick snapped.

George stared into space for a long minute, sighed. “We just can't take the risk not to. It would kill the company, and cripple the industry, if they blew up this plant. But if we could be sure we had the bomb...” He trailed off and stared into space some more.

“Think we could take a quick plant tour?” I said.

George stood and held Maria's chair for her. “I can tour two people, but only if you promise to stay close to one another.”

Maria grinned at me and I muttered something about managing to do that and off we went. We walked around the access road until we came to a ground-level door that George carded and pulled open.

“Swipe your badges through the reader and step inside; I'll be right ahead of you.”

I raised an eyebrow and held up my badge. “It works?”

“Yours? Not to open a door, no. But it tells the central computer and security folks exactly who's in each building on-site.”

“Suppose they're not in a building?” Maria waved a hand at the access road we were on.

George smirked a little. “Then they're watching you on surveillance TV.”

The turbine building was the biggest I'd ever seen. It looked like a zeppelin hanger. The steam end had two turbines, a high-pressure and a low-pressure version, using the same steam in sequence, and both howled. George handed us ear protectors. A long walk took us to the production end and the generator. Its howl was less than the turbines, and lower in pitch, but it still stifled conversation. It sounded like they were making watts. Big watts.

At one time I had been intimately familiar with turbogenerators, but the sheer scale of this one put it in a different league. It sat in the large space like a monument to power, all its support equipment out of sight or built along the walls. One huge wall was nothing but windows, a few open to allow a faint gulf breeze to seep in and temper the heat.

“Gets right hot in here in the summer,” shouted George. “Even with the cooling systems. The cooling water is coming from both the small lakes. Good thing it isn't full summer, or we'd have to shut one of the units down for lack of cooling water.”

I pulled my soggy shirt away from my chest, wiped the sweat off my neck, and glanced at Maria. She glowed a little. George opened another door and waited for us to precede him, and we did, almost trotting to get out of the heat.

We went down a wide corridor between banks of monitoring boards and operating stations. It was by comparison cool and quiet. I pulled the ear protection free and shook the sweat off it. George was doing his tour talk and I'd missed the first few minutes.

“...only manned on startups and shutdowns. The rest of the time we try, and almost always successfully, to run between ninety-five and a hundred-percent power. Stockholders love those numbers.” He stopped to wipe the sweat from his face, and nodded to the other side of the room. “Over there is the room where the guy huffed himself to death this morning.”

“Can we take a look in there?” Maria waved her hand at the door. “It's the only thing here that's sort of in my field of expertise.”

George glanced at me. I kept a blank face. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

He swiped the lock and opened the door; we swiped at it and stepped in. I saw Maria's eyebrows rise fractionally. I figured she was looking for the crime-scene tape that wasn't there. The room was a large storage area, with a few operating panels on the outer wall. Shelves, mostly empty, lined the two side walls. On the floor lay a large plastic bag. A tan gas cylinder with no label lay on the bag. I saw her eyebrows creep a little higher but couldn't tell what she had seen. Or not seen.

She turned to George and showed a small, puzzled smile. “No crime-scene paraphernalia scattered around?”

George shrugged and I had an impulse to warn him, but decided not to.

“Why? There was no crime here—death by misadventure, at worst. It may wind up as an industrial accident when the insurance people get finished with it,” he said.

“Who decided it was accidental?” she said.

“The chief of security for LoBRA. And me, of course, as the senior executive on-site.” Her eyes were crackling with anger. I was surprised George couldn't hear them. “Police are in the control room, finishing up their report. NRC says ‘no event.’ We told the county sheriff, too, of course, and he'll let the coroner know there was absolutely no evidence of foul play.”

That did it. Maria came out of her slouch with a snap and marched across the floor. She nudged the big plastic bag. “You think he held this up with one hand while he opened that cylinder with the other, then held on—continuously—until he passed out and died? You think that bag just stood there over his head until he died? You think the gas cylinder rolled over onto the inflated bag after he passed out and turned loose of it?"

“He was huffing helium, for God's sake! It'd pull that bag upright. All he had to do was grasp it until he fell, then it vented away. Maybe someone kicked the cylinder when they took the body. What don't you understand?”

She glared at him. “A lot,” she said. “But I do know how huffers die, and I do know that's not a helium tank—look at the piece of red tag on the bottom. It held hydrogen or something flammable, and when you huff that, you throw up before you die, not to mention what the body does when it dies. Where's the vomitus? Over there where the scuff marks are on the floor? Did they pause in moving the body to clean up the floor? Any fingerprints on that plastic bag? It would take nice prints.”

George had to try one more shot, even though he could see my caution signal. “So what if it wasn't helium? Any gas except oxygen can asphyxiate someone. So maybe it was another inert gas that wouldn't leave physical signs. So he huffed himself to death on argon! Who cares what gas killed him?”

“Who cares? I care. I care a lot about being professional. And argon is much, much heavier than helium. It'd fall right out of that bag and probably bounce on the floor. Vlad, let's get out of here. These people are as bad as hick-town lawmen.”

“Look,” said George, “we don't need to argue about this. We know the man is dead and was alone when he died. I'll call and make sure an autopsy is done to find out exactly what killed him.”

“How do we know he was alone? Anyone check the tracking computer?” Maria was glaring at George.

“Yes, they did.” George looked pleased. “One other man, a man named Arturo, went in with him, but left after nine minutes. A crew chief found Jimmy's body forty-five minutes later.”

“And in what part of those fifty-four minutes did Jimmy die?” Maria looked as if she actually expected an answer.

George looked away, took a deep breath, said: “There's another man out here I'd like you to speak with. Perhaps he can suggest some way these people threatening us expect to cause an explosion.” He turned to Maria. “I apologize for shouting at you; you doubtless have a different view than I do and I should respect it. I'll personally hunt down Arturo, who was in with Jimmy for the first few minutes, and find out what they were doing. I'll let you know as soon as I find out. Can we go now?”

* * * *

The man George wanted us to see was the emergency planning manager for LoBRA. He was a tall, heavyset man named Philip Grayson and his office was in the LoBRA Administration Building, up above one of the remaining lakes. Grayson had a front office with windows looking in two directions, both away from the heavily reinforced concrete containment buildings.

I introduced myself and Maria and explained what we were looking for while George made his escape. Sitting, leaning back, Grayson was nearly taller than I was standing up. Still he leaned his head back, peering down at us through the bottoms of his glasses.

“You want to prowl through my past emergency exercise scenarios to see if you can find something that would really work—in your opinion—to blow up my place of work. That about right?”

“Not exactly the way I would have phrased it, but yes.”

“Hmm. Well, perhaps I can save you a tedious day or two of rummaging through all my past exercise folders. Suppose I summarize what's there?”

“I'm sure that would be helpful,” I said.

“What is the big event, the threat that you want to see if we ever used? A core meltdown perhaps? Or a meteor strike on containment when at full power? Perhaps a cadre of highly trained and ruthless foreign terrorists assaulting us and then running away with our fuel assemblies over their hearty shoulders? Any of those please you?”

I walked over to the window and stood looking at one of the lakes. There were a few alligators sunning themselves along the inner berm, a short run from the water. I turned and looked at Grayson.

“Mr. Grayson, I'm aware that we're asking for a lot of your time, but we are seriously interested in finding, and stopping, whoever is planning to blow your plant off the face of Texas. The more you amuse yourself by playing on our presumed ignorance of your importance and knowledge, the more time they'll have to make your job redundant. Now, can you help us, or shall we find another way to get the information?”

Still leaning back, Grayson said “Would I be right in thinking that if I amuse myself further, I might see more and more of you?”

“A certainty.”

He leaned forward, bringing his head back level. “An explosion, eh? Let's do it chronologically.... The first year we did a full exercise was in 1984, but they didn't do much terrorism or bomb simulations back then. They stayed with the more probable events—tornadoes, simultaneous equipment failures, hurricanes. First consideration of explosions was, oh, around 1990.” He spun his chair around and considered the bookshelf, then pulled a thick binder from the shelf. He flipped to the third tab and glanced at the page there.

“In the 1990 exercise they removed some of the guard force with simulated grenades. Then later on there was a simulated steam explosion—limited damage to the secondary plant, no effect on the primary side. Not that one, eh?”

I agreed, as did Maria. Nothing there for a model.

Grayson continued, sometimes touching a volume lightly, shaking his head and skipping it without comment.

“Now here, 2003 was a good year for antiterrorism. They postulated bringing in small amounts of plastique and TNT in the group's lunch boxes—you know sliced plastique looks a lot like cheese?—and assembled it at the end to destroy the cooling for the spent-fuel pool. Now that would have shut down the plant, but not blown it away.”

He finished, blew the dust from his fingers, and looked at us. “Anything?” he asked.

I looked at the shelves. The volume for 2007 was missing. I asked about it.

“That scenario disappeared last year. One of our emergency planners took it, along with all the copies. We think it was a man named Gruber. He was angry at us, claimed that we owed him a great deal of overtime pay for development of that exercise's data.”

Grayson sighed. “He was getting more and more radical. I finally had to transfer him to the corporate offices in Houston. Keep him from distracting the team, you know. I heard they finally had to fire him.”

“Do you recall what events were exercised in that one?”

Grayson waved a hand at the bookshelves filling the wall. “Afraid not. After a few years one tends to mix all the events together in one's mind. Someday I'll find another copy somewhere.”

He looked at us. “Did any of this help clarify your problem?”

“Nothing springs right out at me,” I said. “Maria?”

“No. I didn't hear anything that could do what was threatened.”

“Then...?” Grayson stood and held his hands, palms up, at shoulder level.

We also stood. I stared up at Grayson, who was looking down through the bottom of his glasses. “Thank you. Both for your time and your patience.”

He nodded and seemed more relaxed. When I stuck out my hand, he shook it. Then an escort arrived and we left. I was feeling pretty good about the day until Maria stepped into a blob of sun-soft tar in the parking lot.

* * * *

The next morning, before it got hot, we sat on the high deck and ate breakfast while we kicked around ideas on the LoBRA problem. After a few minutes we decided that we didn't know enough to even guess at answers, so Maria took to the Internet and I the phone, and we began looking for Mr. Gruber. I had just put down the phone when it rang. For her, and the voice sounded like Oklahoma.

She took the phone and began grunting and saying cryptic words back to it, ending with, “Two days max. If you can't clear it up by then there will be nobody left standing. No. Two days! Max.” She listened a bit more and said, “Tonight,” and hung up. She looked at me and said, “Crime wave in Tulsa. Five dead gangbangers. They think they need help confirming the mode of their deaths.”

She poured herself another cup of coffee and stared at the long, slow swells sliding almost to the dunes. Finally she said, “I need a ride to Hobby Airport.” She went back to staring at the gulf. “Can I catch a plane today?”

I thought about it. “Better wait until tomorrow. Might miss the ferry.”

“Oh. The ferry. Right, we'll wait. Play it safe.”

That evening we went up the peninsula to a restaurant that sat on stilts next to the Intracoastal Waterway and had seafood so fresh that I stabbed mine before I started to eat. Afterwards we sat on the restaurant porch, sipped Mexican beer, and watched the few tows and yachts slide silently along the canal. It was a good evening.

“Vlad?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn't that ferry run every hour?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks for not remembering earlier.”

“You're welcome. Shall we go home? I'll help you pack.”

“Not going. Gonna set up a teleconference every morning with the Tulsa team, and help you find out whodunit.”

* * * *

The work began. Maria set up a computer link with her team. In between questioning them and offering suggestions, she began tracking down the elusive scenario writer Charles Gruber. After Houston's office fired him, he had dropped out of sight. His phone had been disconnected they said, and his address abandoned. There were no police or hospital reports on him. The unemployment office had never heard of him. He had not signed up for gas, water, electric, or phone service anywhere near Houston or the nuclear plant. He was in the wind, she said.

I kept going out to the LoBRA nuclear plant and pouring over prints and the plant design specs, still looking for the invisible bomb that just had to be somewhere around. Even desperate criminals don't try big league extortion without something to back their story, even if it's a bluff. I took tours, when I could get an escort, and spent a lot of time looking in dark, hot corners. I even took a portable explosives sniffer around the plant. I found nothing, not even out near the generator, which was still howling at ninety-six percent power.

When I got home, more of my walls were covered with sticky notes. They all had cryptic statements on them. I read a few. “Res address not changed on driver's lic. Misdemeanor in Texas?,” “No new SS sign-up,” “auto registered in C. Gruber name—new vehicle added—an Airstream?” “No Gruber air flights—in or out.”

The phone in my den began ringing, interrupting my reading of the notes. It was George.

“Thought you'd want to know, we found Arturo, who was in the room with Jimmy. He was here all the time, out by the Colorado River pumping station, on the edge of the owner-controlled area. It's taken us several days to identify him, but we're now sure it's Arturo. Looks like he was shot in the back of the head.”

“What did he do?” I said.

“Hell, I don't know. Really annoyed someone I guess.”

“I mean, what did he do for your company?”

“He was a tech.”

“Come on, everyone out there's a tech. What did he do?"

“Oh. He worked with gases, all those we use around the plant. And he handled the plumbing and storage facilities for them, that kind of thing.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Anything else new?”

“Well, they found that Jimmy died of asphyxiation. And the coroner changed the rules on smoking in the autopsy room. Something about opening lungs full of hydrogen.”

“Ah-ha.”

“Why did you say ah-ha?"

“I could have said ‘Ah so,’ but I was afraid it would sound like an old Charlie Chan movie. I'll call you when I make some progress, but it looks like our extortionist is starting to cut back on overhead costs.”

I hung up and went back to the strategy room, my former living room, where Maria was standing and looking at the notes on the wall.

“Want to go out to dinner?” I said.

“What's an Airstream?” she answered.

“Sort of a smaller travel or camping trailer. Really popular some years back. Now, about dinner...”

“That's what I thought. I made sandwiches,” she said. “They're under the maps in the dining area. Wine's in the fridge.”

“Wine?”

“It's okay, it's a local variety.”

“Local?”

She nodded over her shoulder. “Mr. Bajinsky, up the beach about a quarter mile, he made it. He also loaned me his extra car for a couple days. He said he only keeps it in case his Harley breaks down. It's an electric.”

So we spent the evening eating sandwiches, drinking local wine—which wasn't bad after the first glass or two—and closely inspecting maps for a hundred mile stretch of the Gulf Coast.

“What am I looking for again?” I said.

“State Parks, National Wildlife Reserves, federal parks—anything that rents camping spaces. You have any idea how hard it is to find someone hiding in one of those?”

“I think I'm catching on,” I said, and shuffled another two or three unfolded maps aside so I could reach the bottle.

Around midnight she tossed the maps aside, looked at her notes, and said, “Brazos Bend. It's gotta be the Brazos Bend State Park. Or Lake Texana. But Brazos Bend is closer so I'll start there tomorrow morning. You take Lake Texana.”

“After I get some sleep and check out the last place at the plant I haven't looked at yet. Then I'll drive out to Lake Texana and capture our mystery man.”

* * * *

Maria called me just as I left the plant and headed west toward Lake Texana State Park. “I found him,” she said. “Space number one-twenty-one.”

“Great! Did he agree to see us?”

“I don't think so. Someone must have told him I asked for him and he went out the back way. Left fast too. The little trailer door was hanging open.”

“So you went in...”

“So I went in to close up—you wouldn't want wild animals to roam through your trailer way out there in the wilderness, would you?”

“Absolutely not. Find anything?”

“No snakes or crocs, but there was this scenario-looking book lying there, so I took it to keep the wind from damaging it.”

“Well, if it's for safekeeping ... I'll look at it tonight. And it's alligators, not crocs, in Texas”

“You can look at it when you pick me up. You know those little electric cars only get about eighty miles on a charge? And nothing here fits this car plug.”

When I finally opened the scenario late that evening, after recharging and returning my neighbor's car, it took me all of ten minutes to solve the mystery of how the plant was to be blown off the face of Texas. I called George at home, and before I could say a word, he said, “Glad you called. I know who one of the extortionists is. It's that guy from the Emergency Planning department—the one that they had to let go? Gruber.”

“How'd you find out?”

“One of the people in the EP department, who's in a position to know, told me.”

“Who, George? Who told you?”

“Can't tell you. I promised him anonymity. He's afraid one of the gang will shoot him in the back of the head too.”

It didn't sound right to me, but I let it go for the time being. I told him I wanted another plant tour, early the next morning. And I wanted an escort who would be an unshakable witness.

“What!” he said.

“A police officer would be ideal, if you know one with a plant clearance.”

“What!” he said again.

In the end, by telling him I had a hot tip, he agreed, so very early the next morning I went out to the plant and loitered around the entry gate. My escort turned out to be an NRC resident inspector, the junior one. We stood around in the parking lot, and I briefed him on what I intended to do. He nodded at all the appropriate spots; he already knew about the extortion scheme. When I finished, he grinned and said, “Just don't cause an incident or do anything that would make me shoot you.”

I laughed.

I quit laughing when he sent a nine millimeter Glock through the X-ray scanner, and he quit grinning when I sent through a pair of large diagonal cutters. I quit laughing because I didn't even know the NRC could carry weapons, and I think he quit grinning when he realized that I, too, was a tech.

We went into the zeppelin hangar-sized turbine building and on past the turbines to the generator section, where we stopped. I looked at the huge spinning bomb and prepared to climb all over it. I'd already told the resident inspector what I was looking for, so he stood back, arms folded, and watched me climb.

Turbogenerators of this weight and output generate more than electricity: They make a lot of heat. Hence the window wall to allow some heat to escape. It's also the reason for the cooling systems. The stator, which doesn't rotate but provides a path for the outgoing power, is cooled by water flowing through the center of its power-carrying conductors—and no, it doesn't short out.

Since it's difficult to feed water into something that's spinning at 1800 rpm, the rotor is cooled by a gas flowing through its space. That gas is hydrogen. Hydrogen is terrific for carrying away heat, but in concentrations between fourteen and seventy-five percent in air, it can also provide a hell of a fire, or an explosion. Power companies take great care to not allow hydrogen to mix with air. I was looking for something that was specifically designed to mix the two.

It took me almost thirty minutes to find it. It was a solenoid valve connected to the hydrogen supply line. I waved at the resident and he was there almost instantly. I pointed at the valve, the pipe it came from, and the large-bore vent pipe it would divert the hydrogen to if the valve activated. I pointed at the power wires to the solenoid. They led off in the direction of the nearby wall, zip-tied to an existing cable or two. A patch job, but everyone had missed it.

I pulled the cutters from my pocket and raised an eyebrow to the resident inspector. He shook his head and held up a finger. He inspected the solenoid valve, read its label and traced the power wires, then nodded.

I studied the power wires. Finally I leaned in and cut the blue wire. Then I shrugged and cut the other one too. Not much drama in this sort of thing when there's no countdown timer flashing at you. I bent the cut wires back out of all possible contact and put the cutters back in my pocket. The resident had traced a second set of wires coming from the wall-mounted intercom box back to the generator and waved me over.

The second set of wires fed a timer, set for ten minutes after power was applied to it, which would feed power on to a small device I had never seen before. I raised an eyebrow at the resident and he pulled the sound protector away from my ear and yelled “flare box” into it. Ignition source, I translated. I cut those wires too.

Back outside, where it was cooler and I could hear again, we sat down on a tall curb.

“Nice work,” he said.

“Same to you,” I said. “Suppose cutting that wire had vented all the hydrogen to the building?”

“Been an incident.”

“Could have asked the shift supervisor to lower the power.”

“Been a different incident.”

“Oh,” I said. “What if we hadn't found it?”

“Been an incident,” he said. “Right up there with Chernobyl.”

“Ought to track that intercom box power to its source,” I said. “Since the people doing this will show up there at least on the day after tomorrow.”

“Planned on it. Starting tonight, but we want the FBI to do it. It's their kind of thing; their responsibility. Besides, they'll probably want to set up a video filming site or two. Gather evidence of intent and all that.”

“Good plan,” I said. “They could probably get some good publicity out of it too. Tell them to start tracing that power at the box out at the pumping station on the Colorado River.”

The resident stood and stretched. “Why start way out there?”

“Because it's way out there. It's almost off the LoBRA property, has access from the river, and is a long way from where the explosion is supposed to occur.”

“Huh. We'll make it first on their list. See you there?”

“Wouldn't miss it,” I said, and allowed him to escort me back to the parking lot.

My cell phone was ringing when I got to the car. I quit wondering what I wanted to do with the rest of the weekend and answered.

“Forgot to tell you,” said George Taylor, “I'm having a barbeque here and you were invited. Wanta come over?”

“Sure, give me some directions and I'll be there soon. Anything I can bring?”

“That no-nonsense girl you were running around with? Bring her.”

“She wouldn't miss it.”

“You do any work this weekend? That deadline is creeping up on us.”

“Oh, a little. Drank some wine, found the bomb. I'll tell you about it when I get there.”

“Whaaat!” I heard him yell as I disconnected.

* * * *

Maria and I spent the next morning soaking up sun lying on my high deck. Neither of us mentioned white sand, but it was in my thoughts. I was also lazily considering making a pass when the damn cell phone rang.

“Mr., uh, Vlad?”

“Close. Who is this and what can I do for you?”

“Uh, I'm Chip. I used to work out at the nuclear plant, the big one, you know?”

“Chip?” A new player. I jotted his name on a notepad.

“Well, uh, I go by Chip. I saw a flyer somewhere that you were looking for a copy of the 2007 Emergency Exercise. And, I had one. In fact, I wrote most of that scenario.”

It took a moment to click. “Your last name wouldn't be Gruber, would it?”

“Why yes, it is.”

“Wonderful. Would you like to sell your copy? I can pay you well for it.”

“Well, that's the point. Someone stole it, but I remember all the details. Maybe, uh, I could brief you. For a lot less money than just buying it? If you're still interested?”

He was giving up, about to hang up.

“No, wait. Look, why don't you sell me one of the other copies? There must be dozens here and there.”

“No. There's no others. Bob, uh ... a friend of mine from the plant told me someone shredded them all a month or so ago. Every last one.”

“He say who did it?”

“No. Said it would be dangerous to talk about. I believe him—I mean, this morning's paper said my friend Arturo was shot out there.”

“How'd you know Arturo?”

“Oh, he was one of my system experts—for writing the details in the scenarios, you know—and we just got along. But I have no idea why he got shot. Nothing we were doing, I'm sure.”

Maria was sitting up and looking at me. I put the phone on speaker. “How's this?” I said. “You tell me what you remember about the scenario and I'll send you a fee to a general-delivery address. That safe enough?”

There was a long pause. Then he said, “You'd do that?”

“Sure, I trust you to tell me what I need to know.”

He cleared his throat and started. He gave me the reasons for the scenario, the number of tasks and skills that it was intended to test, and worked in the annual regulatory objectives that it had to meet. Then he outlined the action, hitting the evaluation coverage hard, and noting where all the exercise controller decision points were located in the script. I asked a few questions; few needed to be asked. It was an excellent briefing and it confirmed what I suspected: Chip was more interested in training than money.

“Is that enough?” he asked. “I can give you more details if you like.”

Maria was shaking her head. “No, that's more than enough. You seem to be pretty good at these things.”

“Well, the boss didn't seem to think so—he fired me right out of the blue, moved me all the way into Houston. I hated that place.”

“You working?”

Another pause. “Day labor. Just to get by. But I'm writing a book.”

“Good for you. Wanna give me a locality for that general-delivery post office now? I'll get a payment right out to you. And how about a phone number—just in case I've a question.”

He did, and we politely disengaged.

“So. Is he involved?” Maria said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“If this man were involved, he wouldn't have used an old script. He'd have worked out a whole new one, complete with an analysis of what could go wrong, then prevented anything from going wrong. He looks at the entire problem and removes the snags; he's a strategist. Whoever's doing the extortion isn't.”

Maria nodded. “Probably find out tomorrow for sure.”

* * * *

Early the next morning, we went to the plant and were escorted to a conference room. It was set up with recorders and phone tracing equipment linked to George's cell phone. The NRC was represented and the senior resident was briefing them. Several well-dressed, somber men were standing around. I took them to be FBI. There was a very large TV screen on one wall. It was currently showing several shots on split screen. One was an exterior shot, showing a wide brown river moving right along. Another showed a stretch of swampy land along the edge of the river. The others showed different angles of the pumping station: close-ups of the intercom box, the parking lot, and the station door. Nothing was moving in any of the shots except the river.

The resident inspector finished his briefing and walked over to us. We talked a little about the setup and he said, “You were right about the power feed to the bomb equipment—right there in the pumping-station box. First place the FBI looked. They think we're geniuses. We told them who the genius really was.”

“You didn't give them my name, did you?”

He frowned, “Sure. Credit where credit is due—why?”

“Once before, they thought I knew too much about a case they were working. If they make the connection...”

“Sorry. How did you know where the power feed would be, anyway?”

“It's what I would do.”

George came up, touched Maria lightly on the elbow, said hello, and added, “We've a favor to ask. Do you think you could piss off, uh, make the extortionist angry when he calls for us to release the money? We'd like to see if he really intends to do us harm.”

“Me?” she said, touching her breast, “Everyone loves me.” She waited a beat, and then said, “Of course I can.”

“George,” I asked. “Where's your pay-em-and-get-on-with-it assistant manager?”

“I don't really know. He called early this morning and said something about a ‘family problem’ he had to take care of.”

It was one of the FBI agents who saw the extortionist first. He jumped up and started talking fast and low to his hand and I followed his gaze to the screen and saw the boat where a moment before there had been no boat. A man had disembarked and was striding—long strides—toward the pump house. He worked a key in the door, swung it open, and stepped inside.

He stopped near the intercom box and took two cell phones from his pocket, inspected them, and selected one. He punched a button on it and George Taylor's phone rang. George picked it up, looked at it through a ring, and handed it to Maria. She stood and let it ring three more times, and then she answered.

“Can you hold just a second? Thank you.” She held the phone down and watched the sweep hand on the wall clock make two full circles.

“I'm sorry, what may I do for you?”

“You can put George Taylor on the line, bitch.” The voice was tinny. Voice-masking, I thought. Through some form of video magic, the caller's words were also showing up in a crawl line on the big screen.

“Oh. Is this about that financial matter?”

“Right for once. Now put him on.”

“I can't do that. My company has contracted me to represent them in that matter. You may make your offer to me now, or wait until I mail my limited power of attorney to you.”

“Get that money en route now! Right now, or I'll take out the plant.”

“Isn't that—” began someone in the back of the room.

“Shhhh!” said George, and the room grew quiet.

Maria waited twenty seconds, and then said, “I'm sorry, sir. We've done a stress analysis on your voice and feel that you are bluffing. There will be no money transferred.”

“Put Taylor on the line right now!”

Maria held the phone away from her as she watched the sweep hand on the wall clock. After forty seconds, she put it back to her ear. “I'm sorry sir, but he does not wish to speak with you.”

The screen image threw down the phone. We heard it hit. Then he stomped over to the intercom box and yanked open the door. He picked up a small, tape-wrapped pushbutton wired into the box and viciously jabbed the button. Then he glanced at his watch and went outside. There he stood and faced east—toward where we stood watching him. He checked his watch over and over.

Of course, I thought, he's waiting for the ten-minute delay to build the explosive mixture.

Twelve minutes after he had punched the button, the caller spun and headed for his boat, only to find a man in a blue windbreaker with yellow letters on it sitting on his gunwale, shotgun across his lap.

The extortionist turned and ran toward the station, only to see another blue jacket coming from behind it. He veered and plunged into the swampy area, his long legs pumping high and splashing madly. The camera focused there caught his actions going away. As he plowed through an area of tree and brush litter I saw movement and something lurched up from its nest.

It's never a good idea to run through an alligator's nest, but especially not this time of the year. The mama alligator stood swaying, looking after the long-legged beast that had destroyed her household as he moved farther away. Then she went after him.

“Geez, I didn't know they could move that fast,” someone said.

“Shhhh.”

George Taylor stood and took a step toward the screen. “Isn't that—”

“Grayson,” said several people around the room.

“Oh, my. She's got him,” said someone in the front of the room.

“Boy, has she got him,” said one of the FBI men.

When the alligator began dragging the body toward the deeper water, most of us got up and left. I met Maria in the hallway.

“You knew it was Grayson, didn't you?” she said, as she walked up to me.

“Well...”

“How did you know?”

“He lied to us. He told us all the exercise events got mixed in his mind, but he had been quoting details from twenty scenarios for a half hour or more—with hardly a glance at them.”

George walked up. “You guys are great,” he said. “Even if you did leave me without an emergency planner.”

“I might be able to help with that,” I said, and handed him a card with Chip's name and phone number on it. “Call this guy and ask him to come in for a job interview. I think you'll be surprised.”

George glanced at the card, nodded at me, and tucked it away. “Thanks, I'll do that. And the FBI just told me they matched the third set of prints on the plastic bag to Grayson. Easy to do if you're told where to look, I guess. Looks like you two were right all along—he used Jimmy and Arturo, then dropped them out of the equation. Anyway, you saved us a lot of money and damage today, so come by tomorrow afternoon and I'll give you a fee you'll remember a long time.”

“Could you mail it? We're catching a plane to Cozumel tonight; Maria needs a change in perspective,” I said, as we turned to leave.

As we walked out, the cell phone in my pocket began ringing. I heard Maria clear her throat. I took out the phone and dropped it in an industrial-sized shredder at the exit and continued out. Behind me, I heard Maria slap the shredder's start button, its starting roar, and the ring tone die.

Copyright © 2012 Doc Finch

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: FOOL'S GOLD
by Dee Long

It was spring. Like bears out of their caves, we'd all crawled out our shacks and come down through the pines. Some of us hadn't been off our claims in months, and we were all looking for a little antidote to the cabin fever that set in around the new year in Dark Timber and didn't let up until the snow melt. I squeezed my way in through the door at the Pole's and ordered a shot of the house rotgut. I sipped it as if it were a fine wine. The whole winter had passed, and I'd barely a dollar to show for it. After about ten minutes, Bea came over and made it clear that I had to either start drinking for real, start gambling, or start leaving, otherwise I was just taking up her real estate. It might have been the Pole's place, but Bea ran it.

I went over to the game. Doc was at the table, and that was usually a good sign. Everyone knew the Pole cheated, but when Doc was playing, the rest of us could usually get a straight game. This was because Doc was the only man in Dark Timber besides the Pole who was making any money out there—he owned the general store—and as a result, the Pole made a habit of fleecing him when he gambled. At that point, Doc was still winning, drinking, laughing. It'd keep on that way for a couple hours, until he was good and drunk, and then the Pole would start taking it all back. It'd end when the Pole said “closed,” the only word the Pole ever said.

Everyone knew the Pole cheated. Everyone knew, but we all played anyway. There were always a few winners—the Pole made sure of that—and the odds didn't really feel any longer at that table than they did on our claims, where a month of panning might get you a handful of dust.

I put down a nickel bet and Shaw called me tighter than a rusted screw. He had a jar on the table in front of him with what looked like a couple raisins floating inside. I asked him what they were.

“They're my good luck charms,” he grinned, showing me the toes he'd lost that winter. I wasn't sure how that constituted luck, but he did seem to draw a lot of doubles to split.

It was twenty-one. It was always twenty-one with the Pole. I don't think he knew any other game.

I played next to Vera. Vera never talked to anyone, but every now and then she'd shake her head or point that I should hit. I followed her advice and won more than I lost. More folks were coming in but nobody was leaving, and it got so that you couldn't turn sideways without spilling someone's drink. Once I got up a dollar I started drinking like Bea wanted me to, then McInney pulled out a nugget the size of a tooth and started buying rounds for everyone.

So I can't say when the stranger arrived. He was just there at some point, standing by the table, in a purple coat with tails and a big stovepipe hat. He had a watch on a gold chain tucked into the breast pocket of a vest that shined in the light of the room, and he was wearing pants that were almost skintight. Shaw took one look at him and started laughing till tears were coming out his eyes. When the stranger spoke, Shaw laughed even harder.

“Ma name eez Guy,” he said, “Pleeze, if I might have accommodation for the night.”

The whores were happy to accommodate him, but Doc waved them away, struggling to his feet.

“Monsieur,” he said, almost falling with a bow, “I will be happy to provide you with accomodations of the finest sort in Dark Timber, as soon as I have finished at this table.”

The stranger's nose twitched like a rabbit's. He was clearly nervous. The Pole watched him with narrowed eyes.

“What the hell are you doing here?” somebody asked.

“I come for gold,” the stranger said, plainly, at which point McInney let out a whoop and pushed a bottle into the man's slightly confused face.

“Well, then, drink up, Frenchie!” McInney commanded, “And tomorrow we'll all go out and get so much gold you'll buy the Eiffel Tower!”

Guy did as he was told, and pretty soon he was so lit that he was speaking to everyone in some other language that sounded like French. He had taken out a purse and picked up the tab for the house once McInney's nugget had played out, and so we all laughed and started toasting France, though I think he told us at some point that he was Belgian. Doc took him under his wing and endeavored to teach him twenty-one.

He lost of course. Round after round he lost, betting way too much and not even caring. All the rest of us were winning, though, and the Pole appeared to be willing to share the wealth of this particularly choice score, and so we all rejoiced and became Guy's best friends. Shaw and I told him we'd help put up his shack on the claim McInney was going to help him scout. Doc even pledged to set him up with a full prospecting kit in the morning, free of charge, “That's how Dark Timber is,” he said, which we all laughed at, including Doc.

I remember stepping outside to piss and spying the stranger's horse around the side of the shack. There was barely more than a bedroll on the animal. Of all the strange things about Guy, that probably struck me as the strangest. I didn't think too hard about it, though. It was after midnight, and we were all drunk, happy, and winning. On one particular hand, we all bet generously, but Guy bet immensely. Even in that state, we all took notice of the size of the bet. I saw a faint grin twitch across the Pole's typically stoic face.

The cards came. The Pole turned up an eighteen. The rest of us had nineteen or twenty, and we all raked in our cash and watched to see Guy bust again.

But Guy turned over an ace and a jack.

Twenty-one.

All the prospectors, Doc, and even some of the whores, cheered wildly. I glanced at the Pole. His face—it looked like he'd swallowed a turd.

Vera cashed out then and there. She left without a word.

Guy bet again. We all laid down our money.

Again, he won.

Twenty-one.

Most of the rest of us won, too, and the entire shack positively shook with our shouts. Only the Pole was silent, and he looked murderous.

On the next hand, everyone bet heavily.

This time, though, everybody lost.

Everybody, that is, except Guy.

When the current changed, it changed fast. Within a half dozen hands Guy was back in the black against the Pole while no one else had won a single hand. Everyone bowed out at that point, most of us up a bit, and simply watched the game. We cheered on Guy and watched the Pole's face became paler and paler as he lost again and again, a queer mix of nausea and rage flashing across it periodically.

And then Doc changed everything.

Instead of placing a bet down for himself, he put money on Guy, and challenged the Pole to cover.

The Pole hesitated, and in that moment the whole shack went silent. The Pole hesitated, and for the first time in anyone's memory there was weakness perceptible in his features, a fear. The expression passed in a moment and the Pole grimaced, as if such a sensation had been disagreeable to his pride. He let Doc's bet stand, and promptly began losing to both Guy and Doc.

A month in Dark Timber is a long time. I'd been there a year, but most of the folks at the Pole's that night had been there two or three years. Some had even been there as long as the Pole, who'd been there when the whole camp began, five years before. No one had ever seen the Pole lose. The whores, who'd merrily flitted about during the period of our collective prosperity, now dithered in uncertainty. Some of them hesitantly stayed with Guy, either because they figured the Pole would want them to get business, or because they felt the tide in Dark Timber was turning. Others rallied behind the Pole, who was livid and appeared to need support. Bea, however, stayed at Guy's side.

We all started putting our money down on the Stranger's hands, and the Stranger kept winning. There was very little conversation now, the game had taken on a different complexion. Before, it'd been joyous, a kind of celebration, now it had taken on a tone more akin to an act of vengeance. There was a general feeling that the Pole had had this coming for a long time, and we all placed our invincible bets and silently watched him bleed.

He could have closed. He could have swallowed his pride, licked his wounds and tried to build back from that day, and I think everyone expected him to do just that, but he refused. He just kept going until the sky had gone grey outside the windows and a mountain of money lay on the table. At that point, the question arose as to whether the Pole could even cover the bets. He'd sent Bea away three different times in the course of the night to return, each time, with an identical black iron box full of cash, but he couldn't send her away anymore, it was clear, because there was nothing left to get. There was a bead of sweat running down over the Pole's eternally smooth brow. He was chewing his lip with a nervous tic I'd never seen. I remember glancing at Doc, who some time before had left the Pole's only to return with a wad of bills as thick as his fist. He was beaming. Guy spread his hands.

“I tell you what,” he said, and it seemed to me, at that moment, that his accent wasn't quite as pronounced as it had been before, “You cover their bets,” and Guy pointed to all of us around the table, “you cover their bets, as best you can, and I'll make up the difference. To even it, though,” and here Guy held up a single finger, “You will wager this entire establishment,” and Guy's hand swept over the room, “including the women ... against my horse.”

Guy smiled a thin, polite grin. The Pole never looked at him. He stared only at the money. Years of savings were piled there, not only his own but those of many of the men of Dark Timber. But for the Pole there was only his money, and it was all his money in his estimation, and to part with that money by anything other than force would have been like him tearing out his own heart with his hands and tossing it out into the street.

He nodded, once.

He dealt.

The Pole showed a seven. Guy had twelve. The stranger grinned, leaned back, hooked his thumbs in his vest pockets. He took out his fine, gold watch, and glanced at the time. Then he leaned over, cut the deck, and tapped the table. He waited for his card.

The Pole's face was inscrutable, not even a trace of a smile as he turned over a ten.

Twenty-two.

The feeling of a big loss, it's like falling in place, like disappearing a little, collapsing on the inside. Everyone felt it. Everyone but the Pole. We'd all lost. We'd all bet too much, but Guy and Doc were in the worse shape of all. They were white as sheets. The whores began to gather in the money. Bea drew a dagger as thin as a stilleto heel and pressed it to Guy's throat. “About that horse...” she said. The two of them went outside together, she with the dagger at his back. McInney puked over the bar. Shaw was weeping over his dismembered toes. The Pole said, “closed.”

We were all backing away from the table, trying to accept the awful reality of the morning, when a gunshot sounded just outside the door. We heard someone shout. We all flooded outside just in time to see Guy galloping away with Bea. She was holding onto him with one arm, and under the other she held one of the Pole's black iron cash boxes. The Pole had come out with us and roared an inhuman bellow at the vision of a large portion of his cash, his prize whore, and his brand new horse riding away with the stranger, and inside of a half hour he had his entire brothel saddled up and sallying forth as a posse. He rode at their head with a rifle and a gun, and after they cleared Dark Timber that morning none of them ever came back.

We were all dumbstruck and wandered back up the slopes to our shacks to try and piece together in our heads just what exactly had taken place. We spent a lot of the summer talking about it, sipping whiskey on the porch of the General Store. No one went near the Pole's, which was abandoned and felt like a cursed place, and no one gambled anymore either. The whole camp folded up a year later and I kept on drifting west.

* * * *

It took me years to make California. I went from South Dakota gold to Nevada silver to a long, drunken haze in Reno. Finally, I made it out to San Francisco on my way to chasing gold again, this time in the Yukon.

The day I found passage north, I wandered into a place called Comrades just up from the wharf. He was a good bit older, of course, and a bit more stooped, but it didn't take me a minute to recognize the Pole, tending bar behind a nice, varnished oak counter complete with a real, brass railing. He remembered me. Of course, people like him never forget a face, but to my surprise, he was genuinely warm toward me. His vocabulary, apparently, had expanded to include “welcome” because he kept saying it over and over to me, clapping me on the back and even setting me up with a free shot of whiskey. It was good stuff, too, a good deal better than anything we'd ever known in Dark Timber anyhow. It was while sipping that drink that, to my surprise, I spotted Bea.

She was dealing a card game in the corner of the room. It shocked me so much when I saw her that I had to move closer just to be sure it even was her, but despite the years, there could be no doubt. Either she didn't remember me, though, or she didn't want to, because our eyes met for just a moment before her gaze passed on, neutral, back to the game before her.

It was twenty-one. There were a half dozen or so players. One of them, his back to me, was betting big and losing. The other fellas at the table kept laughing and patting this man on the back, and he seemed indifferent toward his losses. I saw him order a round for everyone at the table.

I didn't have to hear his voice to know who it was; even after I heard his voice, and there was no accent at all in it, I knew who it was, just the same.

For a moment, I was almost angry. I gulped the last of the whiskey and let it burn right down to my heart. It didn't last, though. I simply buttoned up my parka and walked out into the San Francisco fog.

Hell.

Everyone knew the Pole cheated.

Copyright © 2012 Dee Long

[Back to Table of Contents]

Department: BOOKED & PRINTED
by Robert C. Hahn

What can compare to the pleasure of discovery? To the joy of reading an author's debut novel and finding a unique voice and talent? And if that new author comes with authority in terms of subject matter, so much the better. This month we consider three debut crime novels by writers who write what they know; that is, their professional backgrounds include exposure to or experience with law and law enforcement.

* * * *

Elizabeth Haynes has served as an intelligence analyst for police in England, trying to determine patterns in criminal behavior that could be used to direct resources effectively. Her debut novel, Into the Darkest Corner (Harper, $24.99) is a chilling look at domestic violence.

At the beginning of this skillfully constructed novel, Lee Brightman is being questioned in court about his relationship with Catherine Bailey and denying that he harmed her. That brief court transcript doesn't include a verdict but it sets the stage for Haynes to compile two contrasting portraits of the same person. Before Brightman, a happy, outgoing Catherine Bailey enjoys clubbing with her girlfriends, drinking, dancing and occasionally hooking up with someone. Post-Brightman, Cathy Bailey is a frightened, obsessive-compulsive woman who shuns social contact and cannot leave her flat without checking five or six times that the door is properly locked. Haynes builds both pictures piece by piece as if the reader is seeing not one but two puzzles assembled simultaneously.

* * * *

* * * *

Catherine meets Lee at a club. At first, he is handsome, charming, and attentive, and he impresses her girlfriends as a “keeper.” Gradually he insinuates himself into every aspect of Catherine's life, undermining her self-confidence and asserting more and more control over her behavior. Soon, Lee is thwarting her increasingly desperate attempts to leave.

Cathy's timeline begins in 2007 after she has left Lancaster and moved to a flat in London, where she tries to cope with her insecurities with endless daily rituals. A new tenant, psychologist Stuart Richardson, moves in, meets Cathy, and soon realizes that she suffers from OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). He manages, slowly, to befriend the timid and fragile young woman. But Cathy's gradual improvement almost disappears when she learns that Brightman is being released from prison. Even though she has moved away, she becomes convinced that he is again stalking her.

Haynes has crafted a superb thriller that is agonizing to read at times as Catherine/Cathy fights to escape her abuser and to regain her sanity.

* * * *

Canadian David Whellams has spent more than thirty years writing criminal law and amending the Criminal Code in areas such as dangerous offenders and terrorism. In Walking into the Ocean (ECW Press, $24.95), he introduces former Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Peter Cammon who, from time to time, emerges from retirement to help on particular cases.

Cammon is a cerebral sort who prefers to work alone and whose methods are unconventional but usually successful. His erstwhile Scotland Yard superior, Sir Stephen Bartleben, asks him to go to the coastal town of Whittlesun, where it appears that Andre Lasker has beaten his wife Anna to death and then stripped himself naked and walked into the sea to drown. Almost as an afterthought Bartleben mentions that the local police have their hands full trying to find a serial murderer.

* * * *

* * * *

Initially, Cammon is asked to confine his investigation to the Lasker killing. Andre Lasker's drowned body has failed to turn up and after an initial examination of the situation, Cammon puts the odds of his still being alive at fifty-fifty. As Cammon visits the Lasker home and interviews those who knew them, he develops an understanding of their complex relationship and discovers reasons why Andre might have chosen to disappear.

But Cammon, inevitably, is also drawn into the search for the killer dubbed “The Rover” who is believed responsible for the deaths of at least three young women along the coast. In the course of both investigations he meets fascinating people such as Father John Salvez, a lone priest tending the crumbling ruins of Whittlesun Abbey; alcoholic Ellen Ransell and her beautiful epileptic daughter Guinevere—who claims to have seen The Rover; and F.R. Symington, a teacher and Community Theater director who knew Andre.

Both cases are complex and Cammon's methods—sometimes plodding, sometimes creative and exotic—are a pleasure to watch. Whellams has not just created an interesting detective; he has the ability to fashion many complex characters without resorting to outlandish eccentricities. Readers will be hard pressed to solve either crime before Cammon, though the opportunity is there.

* * * *

Andy Siegel, a New York City personal injury and malpractice lawyer, introduces Tug Wyler in his debut Suzy's Case (Scribner, $26) and Wyler shares both his creator's profession and location as he tackles a variety of cases, including that of a young girl who suffers severe brain damage while under hospital care. Wyler is a feisty, appealing character (except in his utter surrender to his shrewish wife).

When criminal attorney Henry Benson is forced to give up his injury practice because of a “civil litigation misadventure” (i.e. malpractice), Wyler inherits all twenty-one of Benson's ongoing cases with the two lawyers splitting fees fifty-fifty. Wyler refers to the cases as HICs (Henry's injured criminals) and while some of the cases are lucrative, others are mainly headaches and ALL of them involve bona fide criminals who have been tried, convicted, and jailed.

* * * *

* * * *

These cases provide Wyler with some of his best scenes in and out of the courtroom. But there is one case that is different. It involves a little girl, Suzy, who at age six was in the Brooklyn Catholic Hospital receiving treatment for sickle cell anemia when something went dreadfully wrong and Suzy, a child prodigy, was transformed into a spastic quadriplegic with severe brain damage. Benson tells Wyler there is no case, their own expert witness, Dr. Laura Smith, says there is no case, and the defendant has filed for dismissal.

Siegel does an excellent job of detailing the legal hoops that Wyler has to jump through since he is now the attorney of record for Suzy but it is Suzy's beautiful and determined mother, June, who really makes him jump and convinces him to look into the case more deeply. And Wyler finds enough to be sure that someone is covering up something and that there really is a case to be made.

While Suzy's case is the one that involves sleuthing and danger, as well as legal maneuverings, Wyler's other cases represent a delightful smorgasbord that illustrate his creative approach to lawyering both inside and outside the courtroom. Wyler's catch phrase for all his shortcomings is “at least I admit it” and it's hard not to look forward to future Tug Wyler novels. At least I admit it.

* * * *

ALL POINTS BULLETIN: Mark Billingham's latest Tom Thorne novel—The Demands—is just out from Mulholland Books. * Supernatural-noir thriller Faustus Resurrectus, a debut novel by Thomas Morrissey, is out in spring 2012 from Night Shade Books.

Copyright © 2012 Robert C. Hahn

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: BRUTAL
by Robert Lopresti

* * * *

Art by Kelly Denato

* * * *

When Domici walked into the office, Coyle stepped out from behind the door and hit him with a sap. The little man tumbled, face first, onto the cheap gray carpeting.

Moving fast, Coyle tore strips from a roll of duct tape and bound Domici's hands, then his eyes, mouth, and feet. After that he half dragged, half pushed the man over to the side wall.

He tore off one more strip of tape and attached it to a computer—printed sign he had brought with him. It read closed due to illness. Opening the door a few inches, he paused a moment to make sure there was no one in the hall. Then he put the sign up on the door.

Back inside, he opened his case and started to assemble the rifle. He still had almost half an hour.

He was checking the telescopic sight when he heard Domici moan. Coyle put the rifle down on the desk and knelt beside the gray-haired accountant.

“Hello, Mr. Domici,” he whispered. It was hard to recognize a voice by a whisper. “Nod if you can hear me. Good. Let me introduce myself. I'm an assassin. One of those people you've heard about, the kind who can kill a man with one finger. Do you believe me?”

Another nod.

“Excellent. Do you want to die?”

A pause. Then an urgent shake of the head.

“That's fine. I don't want to kill you. So, here's how we both get what we want. You don't try to see my face. You don't make any noise. You don't try to escape. As long as you follow those rules I won't have to hurt you. Understand?”

Another nod.

“Great. Lie there and try to relax. I just need your office for a little while. In an hour, two at the most, you'll be free. Tomorrow you'll be on TV telling everybody how brave you were.”

Coyle patted him on the shoulder. He stood up and went back to his rifle. He turned Domici's desk chair to face the window. All the shades were down except the one that faced the entrance of the Gallatine Hotel, across the street and three flights down. It was a four-star establishment, maybe a little embarrassed to share the block with this ratty old office building.

At five minutes before two a limousine pulled up in front of the Gallatine's entrance. The revolving door turned and a bodyguard in an expensive suit came out, not paying as much attention to his surroundings as he should have been.

He was followed by the target, a tall, bald man wearing a black trench coat, open to show a gray silk suit.

Coyle's first shot hit the senator above the right eyebrow. His second, as the man started to fall, went in just below the knot in his blue tie.

By the time the senator's body hit the steps there was an opening in one of the world's most desirable clubs.

The bodyguard was fast. He was pulling his pistol out of his jacket by the time Coyle's next bullet hit him in the shoulder. The guard spun around and dropped facedown beside his employer.

It wasn't a killshot, and hadn't been meant to be. No one was paying for the bodyguard to die. Coyle just wanted to inhibit pursuit.

For the same reason he fired one more time, putting a bullet into the hood of the limousine, to discourage the driver from trying to play hero.

Coyle turned around and dropped the rifle under Domici's desk. Less than ten seconds had passed since the senator had stepped out of the hotel.

When the shooting started Domici had begun to whimper. Coyle ignored him. He took off one latex glove and tucked it in the pocket of his bright yellow rain slicker. With his other hand he opened the office door and pulled it shut behind him. Then that glove went into the raincoat.

As he walked toward the elevator he saw a man and a woman chatting in front of another office. Coyle ignored them. His slicker and red tweed cap were memorable; his face was not.

The elevator took him to the parking garage. He had left the silver Toyota as far from the security cameras as possible. Coyle popped the trunk and removed a briefcase, black overcoat, fedora, and leather gloves. He opened a large black trash sack. It contained three bright blue medical waste bags he had removed from a suburban hospital early that morning. Lifting a large kitchen knife from the trunk he sliced through the three bags. When their contents began to mix together in the black trash sack he added his raincoat and tweed cap to the pile.

Coyle sealed the sack and headed toward the stairs. He dropped the bag into a dumpster as he passed. If the cops were lucky enough to find it, some evidence tech would have a miserable time trying to lift his DNA out of the mess.

The stairs took him to an alley behind the office building. He could hear sirens as he stepped into the back door of a luncheonette. Coyle walked past the office and restrooms and presented himself at the main counter.

“Pick a seat,” said the waitress. There were only a few customers, having a late lunch.

Coyle sat, facing the window but not near it. He ordered a salad and asked the waitress what the sirens were about.

“Maybe the TV knows,” she said, and turned on the local news channel.

By the time Coyle's food arrived the newscaster had an urgent bulletin. “We have just heard that Senator Charles Dowling suffered a brutal attack downtown today. We don't have any details at this time.”

And not knowing anything, they began to speculate as to why the senator was visiting the biggest city in his state unannounced.

Coyle hid a smile behind his teacup. The senator had been with his mistress at the hotel and there was a bonus if her name showed up within the first two days after the killing. This might mean his client had a grudge against the lady or it might mean that she was a convenient red herring. It was none of Coyle's business either way.

He left a good but not memorable tip. Outside, he headed toward a one-way street that led south, toward the site of the killing.

Two police cars rushed past, paying no attention to Coyle, who walked north toting a briefcase and holding a cell phone to his ear.

He had parked his getaway car, a blue Acura, in front of a taqueria five blocks from the hotel. By the time Coyle reached the familiar corner he hadn't heard a siren in two minutes.

He stopped. The car was gone.

“I don't believe this.”

“Believe it, man,” said a skinny Chicano in a fringed red cowboy shirt. “That's what they do when you park near a fire hydrant. They tow your car. You can't get it back till you pay the fine, and man, it's a big one.”

“What hydrant? I don't see any hydrant.”

“Right here, man,” said the cowboy. He backed up until he was standing next to a sandwich-board sign that advertised TRINI'S TACOS. There was a hydrant hidden on the other side.

“I'll be a son of a bitch,” said Coyle.

“You oughta sue Trini,” said the cowboy. “I tol’ him and tol’ him not to put his sign there but he always does. And you think the ticket lady would move the sign but she says it's not her job to do heavy lifting. You oughta sue her too.”

Coyle's getaway plan was simple. Drive to the commuter rail station; take a train to the next city. From there he could drive his own car two states to home.

But now what? He wasn't going to pay to get the car back and stealing one near the scene of the crime was a bad idea.

At that moment a cab appeared, heading toward him on the one-way street. The fare light was on. Coyle stepped into the street and waved. “Taxi!”

“Watch it, jackass!”

The bicycle messenger had gone the wrong direction on the one-way street to avoid the cop cars and ambulances that were sucking the life out of the main drags. He had been pumping along, making up for lost time and hadn't expected a pedestrian to pop out in front of him.

He got his front wheel past Coyle but the swerve unbalanced him and they slammed into each other.

Coyle fell forward and his head smacked the side of the taxi. The bicyclist kissed the curb. Both men lay still in the street.

The taxi driver, a bearded man in a turban, took one look at the situation and hit the gas. He managed to miss both men, but ran over the rear tire of the bicycle.

“Bastard!” yelled the cowboy. “Somebody oughta call the cops!”

Coyle got slowly to his feet. His head hurt and his eyes wouldn't focus. “What happened?”

“This loco ran his bike into you and that other loco ran his taxi into him. You oughta sue ‘em.”

What Coyle wanted to do was kill the bicyclist, but this wasn't the time or the place.

“No cops,” he said. “I have to get moving.” He staggered back onto the sidewalk. The cowboy picked up his briefcase.

A woman in a blue dress was helping the bicyclist to his feet. It was time to go before the inevitable argument started.

Coyle walked down the street without a glance back. He was a block away before he realized the cowboy had kept his briefcase. Oh well. It was just a prop anyway. All it contained was a few stock reports he had printed off the Web in case he needed to convince someone he was a real businessman.

Which way was the train station? He turned his head and the sudden shift made him dizzy again. This was not good. He needed to be at his best and most alert and he was anything but.

It was about a mile to the train station. The walk might clear his head.

Three blocks later a tall man with red hair stepped out in front of him. “Got a cigarette?”

“No.”

“Then gimme your wallet.”

Coyle stared at him. “What?”

“You heard me, grandpa. Gimme your wallet now.”

Coyle was at most a decade older than the red-haired man. He grinned. “Okay, sonny. You have two seconds to get out of my way.”

He was almost too slow in noticing Red looking past him. Coyle ducked and the blow from behind hit him on the shoulder. The attacker was a chunky black man with a hammer in his right hand. Who ever heard of a mugger using a hammer, for God's sake?

“Hand me the wallet, clown.”

Coyle heard Red behind him. He spun around, aiming a kick at the man's stomach. Red said “Ooof” and sat on the sidewalk.

The hammer hit Coyle on the right ear. “You son of a bitch,” he said.

Normally handling these jokers wouldn't have raised Coyle's pulse, but the collision with the car door had left him shaky. His timing was off.

He barely managed to grab the hammer away as the second guy swung it again. The chunky man stared at him in amazement, as if such a thing had never happened before in the history of the world.

“You want it back?” he asked, holding it at arm's length like a sword. He flipped it over so the handle was pointing toward the other man. “Here it is. Come and take it.”

Chunky made up his mind. He turned and ran.

Coyle laughed. He walked back to Red, who was still sitting on the sidewalk, taking deep breaths.

“Call me grandpa again,” he suggested, swinging the hammer lightly.

Red opened his mouth. “Help! I'm being mugged.”

Coyle heard noise behind him. Two middle-aged women in business attire had turned the corner and were staring wide-eyed at him standing over Red with a hammer.

“He mugged me,” said Coyle.

The taller woman was reaching into her purse. If she was going for a pistol he was too close to run, so Coyle moved forward and grabbed her arm.

The pepper spray hit him straight in the face.

Coyle jerked away and covered his face, screaming. His eyes felt like they were on fire. Someone tried to come near him and he pushed hard. A woman squealed.

He turned and started to run, but immediately tripped and fell flat.

“Sit on him,” said a woman. “I'm calling the police.”

Someone flipped Coyle onto his back. He guessed it was Red, which was confirmed when a heavy fist punched him in the gut.

“How do you like it?” said Red.

Coyle doubled up but his eyes hurt too much for him to concentrate on the pain in his stomach.

The next thing he was aware of was Red's hand in his pocket, removing his wallet. “You should have given it up when we asked nice.”

“Gimme that, you bastard.”

“Better spray him again,” Red shouted. “He's trying to get away.”

When the tall woman stepped forward, eager for another shot, Red swatted the spray out of her hand. Then he grabbed her purse and took off.

She screamed and chased after him.

The other woman was staring at Coyle wide-eyed. “Are you a good guy or a bad guy?” she asked.

Struggling to his feet, he staggered away.

Coyle knew there was a park somewhere ahead. If he could stay on his feet there should be a water fountain to sooth his eyes. He ran.

He found the stone wall of the park three blocks north. Beyond it he spotted a water fountain and stood for ten minutes, gratefully pouring water over his burning face.

It was getting dark. Coyle sat down under an oak tree.

Red had stolen his wallet. His face no doubt looked like he was a victim of second-degree sunburn. Very memorable.

He still had his cell phone, but he knew no one in this city. He could call his contact, the man who set up assignments for him, and ask him to wire some cash. But wire it where? And what would he use for ID to pick it up?

Coyle shivered. He couldn't stay here all night.

He got to his feet, stiff with chill and assorted pains.

He could mug someone for money, but you can't get on a train without ID these days. He'd have to steal a car, which might bring the kind of attention he didn't want. Taking the driver along would make sure the theft wasn't reported, but he disliked killing people unnecessarily, especially without being paid for it.

Damn that bike messenger.

He had seen a homeless mission a few blocks east of the park. He could rest there for a few hours and get started in the morning.

It felt good to have a plan, even one as slim as that. Coyle started to walk and instantly the headache returned.

He made it halfway across the park before he heard footsteps on the path behind him. Coyle stepped off the gravel path and turned around.

There were three of them, young men. Two wore sweatshirts from a local university.

“Hey there, pal,” said the blond one. “You're just what we were looking for. You need a place to sleep?”

“Just keep going,” Coyle said, loudly. He couldn't run so he didn't move.

“Now, that's no attitude,” said Blondie. He reached into his pocket. “Look. Forty bucks. You can probably get a room for that.”

“In a dump,” said the guy on the left. They were spreading out, surrounding him.

“Don't insult our new friend here. I'm sure he'd rather be inside than out. Wouldn't you, pal? What's your name?”

“Screw you.”

The sidemen laughed. “Not nice, pal. I'm just trying to show my friends what I learned in class. Don't you believe in education?”

“Looks like a dropout to me,” said the guy on the left.

Coyle was backing toward the woods.

“Tell him what class you're taking,” said the guy on the right.

Blondie grinned. “Martial arts.”

* * * *

Coyle blocked the first kick but the second knocked him on his ass.

The three men moved closer, waiting for him to stand up for the next demonstration. Blondie was irritated that he had managed to block the first shot. “On your feet, pal. You gotta earn your forty bucks.”

Coyle took a deep breath and turned over onto his hands and knees. The shortest of the three men was between him and the street.

He made an effort to get up, but fell back as if he were too weak to rise.

Blondie laughed and started to say something. Coyle jumped up and charged toward the shortest one, who tried to stop him. Coyle grabbed the man's left arm with both hands and broke it at the elbow, barely slowing down. The man shrieked and collapsed.

He could hear the other punks behind him as he ran past the stone gate and straight into the street.

It was a police car that hit him.

* * * *

“We'll be filling out paperwork for a week,” grumbled the black cop.

“Where's the damned ambulance?” asked the white one. “Mister, you still with us?”

“Biggest manhunt in a decade going on. Everyone else is chasing a damned assassin,” said the first cop. “And we're patching up a suicidal wino.”

“Is he gonna make it?” asked the ambulance driver as he moved into gear. Sirens wailed.

“Could be,” said the EMT. “Mister, what's your name?” The patient just stared at him.

“No ID, No money. Hey, why aren't we going to Taft Medical?”

“Closed to trauma. The governor or somebody got shot and that's where they took him. The feds are locking the barn door now. Until they're happy with security nobody gets in or out. So I'm headed up to Mercy.”

“No can do. You're forgetting our boy here has no insurance. Larry will cut off the free cigars if we start sending him street sweepings.”

“Damn. You're right. On to County General.”

“That's the ticket.” He patted Coyle's shoulder. “You won't mind, will ya, bud?”

The patient's lips moved.

“What's that?” The EMT bent down. “Jesus, did you hear that? He said he could kill me with one finger.”

“Ungrateful dude,” said the driver.

“Well, this must be my lucky day, friend, because most of your fingers are broken.”

The ambulance kept heading north, siren screaming. Tourists swerved out of the way. The locals mostly ignored sirens. They had heard them before.

Copyright © 2012 Robert Lopresti

[Back to Table of Contents]

Fiction: THE BEST LAID PLANS
by Jim Ingraham

On a warm October morning in Portland, Maine, I found a police cruiser half on the sidewalk in front of Doris Wilson's apartment house, another cruiser blocking the entrance to the parking lot. A woman in uniform told me I couldn't park there. I drove down the slope and pulled up to the curb and walked back.

Ernie Collins, a cop I had once worked with, stopped me at the elevator.

“Hey, Duff,” he said, grinning. “Ain't seen you in a while.”

“What's going on?”

“Something upstairs. What floor you want?”

“Third. I've got an appointment,” I said.

“What's the name?”

“What's going on?”

“We got a complaint. What's your party's name?”

“Doris Wilson.”

“Wait here.” He stepped aside, raised a portable to his ear. In a few seconds he told me I was wanted upstairs, third floor.

* * * *

I stepped off the elevator into a long corridor that smelled of cigarette smoke. Two detectives were waiting for me, one, a short man with bushy eyebrows and thick gray hair, used to work with my father. Name was Lionel Savarin.

“Duff Kerrigan,” he said, introducing me to his partner. “Known this guy since he was in high school—big football star in those days.” His buck teeth protruded when he laughed.

“Heard of you.”

“So, why are you here?” Savarin said.

“Is she okay?”

He shot a glance at his partner. The two of them walked down the hall and talked for a minute. Savarin beckoned me to follow him into a large room where a woman in slacks and a white shirt with an insignia on the sleeve was kneeling at a TV set examining a stain in the carpet. Savarin walked me around her into the dining room, then into a bedroom. A pink quilt was draped over the foot of the bedstead, a sheet half on the floor.

“This picture,” he said, holding up a framed photograph of two girls on swings in a garden. “Which one is Doris?”

“I have no idea. Never met her.”

“Why're you here?”

“Wanted to talk with her. Can you tell me what's going on?”

“Got a call from a neighbor, said he heard loud talk and doors slamming in here last night. This morning the same neighbor said her car was out back, but she was gone. It's probably nothing.”

I laughed. “I read that editorial,” referring to an article in the Press Herald criticizing the police for neglecting citizen complaints.

“Yeah, a pain in the ass. You on a case?”

“Mike knows about it.” Mike was Myron Kadish, his lieutenant.

He acknowledged the meaning of that. “This Doris probably just went off with somebody she had an argument with last night. Doesn't look like anything bad happened here,” he said, glancing around. “Bed's unmade is all.”

The police didn't bring a lab tech, two uniforms, and two detectives to check on a simple domestic complaint. Obviously something was going on that Savarin didn't want to share with me.

I noticed the closet door was open. Inside there was a big gap on the clothes rod, and one drawer in a dresser was slightly open.

“Maybe took some clothes to the cleaner?”

“Possible,” he said.

“Left in a hurry?”

He shrugged.

We went back through the living room. The tech, gaining Savarin's attention, shook her head, shying off looking at me. She didn't know who I was or what I was doing there.

I followed Savarin to the elevator.

Pretending I had noticed nothing strange, I said, “Glad to see you guys on the job. I'll tell my friends at the newspaper.”

“Check with Mike first,” Savarin said, giving substance to the concern that had crept into me. I didn't know much about Doris Wilson. But I knew more than I had let on.

* * * *

Twenty minutes later I drove into the alley outside my loft and saw my client at the end of the wharf looking across the harbor at an oil barge moving past the bug light on the breakwater. I pulled my Jeep into the shelter under my outdoor staircase and walked down the planks, listening to the cries of seagulls, the occasional bleating of a boat horn, and smelling asphalt that had recently been spread on the boat ramp at the Coast Guard station at the next wharf.

I called out: “You looking for me?”

A small man in bone-colored slacks and tucked-in blue shirt walked toward me. A white cap on his round head, his face looked drawn and sickly. His clothes looked expensive and new, maybe purchased for this visit.

“Any success?”

“A lead,” I said. “You have any reason to think she doesn't want to be found?”

He shrugged. “I don't know the woman.”

“But you're confident she's in the area?”

“I flew here to get a painting autographed,” he said, implying that the question was stupid. He didn't like me, maybe didn't like anyone. I wasn't too fond of him.

“But you haven't given me much to go on,” I said.

“All I have is a rumor from an artist she once studied with, who said she was researching places where Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth did their painting. Have you learned anything?”

“What can you tell me about Doris Wilson?” I asked.

His face stiffened. “I don't know that name.”

I was unconvinced by his abrupt response. “She and Veronique share an apartment on State Street.”

“Then you've found her?”

“Found where she lives,” I said, and waited.

When he didn't ask for an address I decided not to mention my meeting with the police. I didn't want to spook him. Possibly he was trying to involve me in something shady. He was a queer duck. I didn't believe he flew here to get a painting autographed. Veronique Pascal was an art teacher. Her work didn't have much market value. Technically correct but sterile was the general impression.

“If you'll give me your phone number—”

“I'll be here around noon,” he said abruptly, keeping his hands in his pockets and giving me a silent up and down, waiting for me to remove myself.

Remembering he had said he had flown to Portland, I asked, “You need a ride out of here?”

“No.”

When I looked down from the top of my staircase, he was gone.

* * * *

I parked way down Middle Street and walked back to the police station. Even at that distance I could smell the harbor and hear the cry of seagulls.

I picked up a tag at the inside window, hung it off my breast pocket, and went upstairs. Gretchen Stallworth, a fingerprint tech I remembered from the old days, came out of Mike's office and gave me a smile. A man I often worked with, Helmut Steiner, waved at me from his desk in the bullpen. There was some kind of chemical smell in the corridor, paint thinner maybe.

“Come in,” Mike said. He was a thick-bodied man in a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up, collar loose, and blue tie dangling over a brass belt buckle he once told me was a gift from one of his daughters—Whitney, I think. He wasn't the belt buckle type, but he was a hell of a father.

“So,” he said, “what is it about this Doris Wilson I'm supposed to know?”

“Savarin called you?”

“How else? What were you doing up there?”

“I just wanted to talk to her.”

“About what?”

“Actually, I'm looking for an art teacher, Veronique Pascal.” The name bounced off him without effect. “A client wants a painting authenticated ... or so he says.”

“You don't believe him?”

“No.”

“He have a name?”

“Calls himself Samuel Jones.”

“Fake?”

“It's the name he gave me.”

Mike let it go. My client, my business—or so I thought.

Just for the hell of it I asked, “Is your interest in Doris Wilson more than casual?”

“Your client mentioned her?”

“I think he knows her, or at least has heard of her, but I got her name from the art department at Cleeve College where Veronique teaches. She's on sabbatical right now. She and Doris share that apartment. Been there a couple of years.”

“And you thought this Doris Wilson might know...”

“Just a thought.”

“What'd your client say about her?”

“Nothing. He denied knowing her. But the mention of her name troubled him.”

“You notice anything odd at her apartment?”

“Only that Savarin was able to get in. How'd that happen?”

“The door was ajar.”

“With a little persuasion?”

“No, actually it was open, and the neighbor said Doris never left without locking it, called her nervous, afraid of being robbed or something.”

We stared at each other a few seconds, him sitting there, arms folded, reading my face. After a while he said, “Has anyone at the college heard from this Veronique?”

“Her department chair said she'd be surprised if Veronique contacted anyone. She's okay with strangers but doesn't make friends easily is what she said. Always ate alone in the cafeteria.”

“People you talked to seem worried?”

“I couldn't find anyone who gave a damn what Veronique was doing.”

For a moment he was distracted by something on his computer screen. He tapped a few keys, made a face of displeasure, growled about something.

“You haven't talked with the police in Portsmouth?”

“New Hampshire?” Where'd that come from? “There's a reason I should?”

Ignoring that, he asked for the third time, “And your client never mentioned Doris Wilson?”

“What's going on?”

“Lionel said you had an appointment.”

“Not really. I left a request for one on her voice mail.”

“What time was that?”

“Nine o'clock or so. Why?”

“It never got erased,” he said.

“Lionel picked up her phone?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “That would be illegal,” and gave that a small grunt. He lowered his face for a moment in thought. “I'd prefer you stay away from the newspaper on this.”

“I was just kidding when I said—”

“No, I mean asking questions about Doris Wilson.”

“Okay,” and I waited.

He did a lot of frowning, leaned back in his chair, hands in his lap, played with his fingers, tapped his wedding ring. “I'm sure you read about it—the homicide in that bakery in Portsmouth?”

“Doris is involved in that?”

“She apparently was the woman on the sidewalk the perpetrator ran into when he burst out the door. Your Doris was taking a one-week brush-up course down there in accounting. Only she quit and came back here with bandages on her face. Portsmouth police got her name from the hospital, talked with her. She said she didn't recognize her assailant. They had no reason to disbelieve her, but they notified us because she lived here and thought we might have a line on her.”

“You talked with her?”

“No reason to. The banged-up face is a good enough reason for quitting the program.”

“But would they notify you if they didn't suspect something?”

“They just wanted to verify her permanent address. Her name jumped off the computer when we got the complaint this morning. That's why Savarin went over there.”

“Those voices Lionel told me about. Were they male and female?”

“Female. Probably your Veronique and Doris came back to get something. They'd been gone two days.”

I spent a few minutes digesting that. “So I'm not interfering with anything if I keep looking for Veronique.”

“If you run into her or ‘Mr. Jones,’ let me know.”

“See a connection?”

“Where'd he fly here from?”

“I'll check the car rental agencies,” I said. “He'd have had to show ID. Do people fly here from New Hampshire?”

“All the time,” he said. “I'll put Helen on it. Stay in touch.”

* * * *

When I got back to my loft, I went on the internet to the Portsmouth Herald archive and read about the felony murder that had taken place one day before Doris Wilson had come home with bandages on her face. It was as Mike had said: The owner of a small bakery had been shot in an apparent robbery gone bad. A woman on the sidewalk was injured by a fleeing man who burst out the door. The woman—Doris Wilson from Portland, Maine—described him as young, maybe in his twenties.

No mention of Veronique or Samuel Jones appeared in the articles.

* * * *

Curiously, although Mr. Jones had given me a large retainer, he didn't visit me the next day or call me or make an attempt to reach me.

I spent hours contacting art colonies up and down the coast and even drove to Brackett Shores where Winslow Homer had painted a famous seascape. No one there had seen a woman down the shoreline. No one at the Portland Art Museum had seen Veronique. Because Winslow Homer's studio on Prout's Neck was closed for renovations, I didn't go there. No members of art faculties at any of the Maine colleges had been contacted by Veronique.

I considered telling my client I wasn't comfortable wasting his money looking for a ghost. But I couldn't find him.

Before meeting my girlfriend Sylvia for dinner that evening, I received a message from Mike's secretary informing me that a Samuel Grovner who had flown in from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, two days ago had rented a Ford Taurus for a week. The agent said he remembered the man, said he wore touristy clothes and looked sickly. She gave me the tag number.

* * * *

Next morning around ten when I got up, I found a note on the kitchen table saying Mike wanted to have lunch with me at Amato's. I drove to my loft, responded to a few messages, chatted with the chief petty officer from the Coast Guard station who had come over to borrow a book I had told him about, and found Mike at a table outside Amato's biting into an Italian sandwich. I picked up half a sandwich and a Bud and joined him.

* * * *

“Anything to accommodate the police,” I said, gazing across Mike's shoulder at a man I hadn't seen in years. He'd lived next door to us on Morning Street, had a daughter, Shirley Berry, I used to watch at night—her bedroom was just across the fence. She went to bed around nine thirty and never lowered her shade. My father was impressed by my willingness to go straight to bed around nine. Shirley was a college student. I was fourteen.

“Still looking,” I said. “Jones, or Samuel Grovner, hasn't fired me.”

A glob of sauce dropped off his sandwich, splashing his shirt when it hit the tabletop. “Damn!” He dipped a napkin into his water glass and scrubbed the stain, managing only to enlarge it.

“You can get little detergent pencils—”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, tossing the balled-up napkin across an empty table into a trash barrel. “Portsmouth police don't know much about Samuel Grovner except that he's the father of a Martin Grovner, whom they've had some trouble with.”

“What kind?”

“Kicked out of high school because he belted a teacher. Dishonorable discharge from the army after threatening an officer with a knife. He apparently is part owner of a suspected chop shop in Dover, a few miles north of Portsmouth. Hasn't been seen in two days. And apparently his father, who's a retired CPA, has also disappeared. Doesn't answer his phone.”

“They coming here to find him?”

“No, but they're interested.”

Before we left the restaurant I spoke to Mr. Berry who didn't remember me but said Shirley had three kids, was divorced, and lived in Atlanta, Georgia.

* * * *

Next day, while looking for Samuel Grovner in hotels and motels around Portland, I got a call from Mike telling me that Doris Wilson had been found dead of an apparent strangulation in a parking lot outside a convenience store in Thomaston. I used to associate that name with the state prison, which has since been demolished. Now it made me think of Andrew Wyeth painting his famous Christina's World just down the peninsula from there.

“Check with Sergeant Marcel Auclair,” Mike said. “Tell him I sent you.”

* * * *

I found Auclair at a convenience store filling station with a State Police trooper named Elroy Farson. Auclair, a one-time hockey player, was impressed by my mentioning Mike. Elroy wasn't. He wanted to know why I was in Thomaston looking for Veronique Pascal.

“She and Doris Wilson were friends,” I said. “I thought maybe...”

“You know the deceased?”

“No.”

He looked up from the papers I had given him—driver's license, registration, my P.I. card. “Just snooping around?” he said, twiddling the card in stubby fingers, dropping it. “Sorry.” He waited for me to pick it up. When I didn't, he bent down, scraped it across the asphalt and handed it to me. I made a show of examining the tattered edge he had left on the laminate.

A thin man with shirttails dangling over faded jeans strode past us, nodding as though he knew me. It was one of those nervous reactions, like if we made eye contact he was supposed to acknowledge it. I watched him go into the store, a streak of mud on his leg.

Elroy said, “You came all the way here from Portland to find somebody who was a friend of the deceased?”

I was tempted to say, “That's what I just told you,” but I contented myself with a nod. Most cops respect the work I do. Some don't. He apparently didn't.

He asked to see my license again. When I handed it to him, he asked Auclair to hold it so he could copy my name and address into his notebook. Must've looked odd to the man coming out of the store. He paused on his way to the pump to see what the trooper was looking at. I noticed mud on the wheels of his pickup, along with dirty fenders and rocker panel. It looked like he'd been driving in a swamp.

The trooper spent at least five minutes copying words off my license, the brim of his Stetson moving shadows across his long nose as he turned his head.

“And you were sent here by the Portland police?” handing my license back.

“I was given directions and a referral to Officer Auclair.”

“What kind of directions?”

“How to get here.”

Turning to Auclair, he said, “You know the guy he's talking about?”

“I do,” Auclair said, “and I knew Mr. Kerrigan's father, Captain Frank Kerrigan,” looking to me for agreement and maybe gratitude.

“Oh,” the trooper said, and disdain evaporated from his face.

“He got shot in the line of duty,” Auclair said.

Elroy took that in, searching my face for qualities he might have overlooked.

“There was a woman,” Auclair said, disregarding a possible protest from Elroy, “maybe the one you're looking for, seen with the deceased down in Cushing. We've been checking the motels. You can come along if you want to.”

Although the state takes precedence over local authority in homicide cases outside of Portland and Bangor, the crime had been committed in Auclair's jurisdiction and Elroy was not a detective.

Auclair followed the police cruiser and I followed Auclair as we visited four motels and one bed-and-breakfast. We found what we were looking for in the office of a string of cottages down the peninsular.

“Tall,” the woman said, squinting at us through thick lenses. “I knew you'd come here.”

“They stayed only that one night?”

“Claimed we had bedbugs. Refused to pay until I threatened to call the police. City people! I got no more bedbugs than she's got fleas. They just wanted a bigger bed for whatever they were doing in it.”

“And what was that?” Elroy said.

“Who the hell knows? They talked funny. A couple of schoolteachers. Come up here where nobody knows them. Who knows what's going on?”

I left with a description of Doris Wilson's companion—tall, gaunt, long straight hair with streaks of gray, no makeup, walked with a limp. And she drove a yellow VW Beetle.

“At least we know one of them was Doris,” Auclair said.

“If they was lesbians wouldn't that mean she was the male in the relationship?” Elroy said, looking to me for an answer. “I mean, if she signed the register?”

“I wouldn't know,” I said.

* * * *

Later, in a Thomaston diner drinking coffee with Auclair, I asked about Claudia Dupuis, a trooper I had worked with a while back on a missing persons case, and I learned that she'd been assigned to the Crisis Negotiations Team in Augusta. “It's when they moved Troop D out of here ... and sent us Elroy,” he added, laughing.

“Crisis negotiation sounds about right for Claudia,” I said. “A woman's voice...”

He nodded, impatient to get back to what we'd been talking about. “The parking lot was dark where Doris Wilson got strangled. Her body'd been pushed into some bushes. The clerk said he didn't know anything'd happened out there. He closed up around ten.”

“Didn't see her car in the parking lot? Those women had only the one car. Doris left hers in Portland.”

“Then...”

“Veronique was with her and drove off,” I said. “Or Doris was alone and someone stole her car.”

“If this Veronique was there, why didn't she call it in?”

“Maybe she got carted off by the murderer. Could've been two of them, the second one taking the Beetle.”

“All I know,” Auclair said, “is it wasn't a woman who called it in. It was Bobby Lancaster delivering milk. Said he stepped into the trees to take a leak and saw the body.”

We were puzzling over this when I noticed the thin man in the dirty truck saunter into the diner and park himself on a stool, his back to us.

I asked Auclair, “You know that guy?”

Auclair turned to see who I was talking about. “Don't think so. Why?”

I shrugged. “Probably nothing.”

He gave the man another look, got up, and walked to the counter. I watched him fumble with a napkin dispenser, causing the thin man to look at him. Auclair smiled, drew a few napkins from the dispenser and came back to the table. “Not from around here,” he said.

I laughed. “You know everyone?”

“Damn near. There's less than four thousand people in this town. Don't know every face, but I can spot a stranger.”

I believed him. Toyed with my drink for a while. “Who claimed the body?”

“Some controversy over that. We can't locate any blood relatives.”

“Crime scene roped off?”

“Waiting for people from Augusta. Said they'd handle it.”

Until Veronique's body was discovered, I had to assume she was alive and would want to claim the body. So I drove to Brunswick and spent a few minutes with a woman in a small hospital office who looked surprised when I said my name.

“Always wanted to meet you,” she said, tossing hair off her face, grinning. She had a kind of raspy voice, not unattractive. “Sylvia told me about you. Never said you were so big.”

“You worked with her?”

“At Maine Medical. You still...?”

“Very much,” I said. And not wanting to dwell on that, I asked, “Has anyone come here for the remains of Doris Wilson?”

“Oh,” and the grin was replaced by apology. “I can't say. Privacy rules.”

“I'm looking for her friend, Veronique Pascal. Thought she might—”

“I'd like to help you, Duff, but you know I can't.”

“Can you tell me whether the body's been autopsied?”

“The medical examiner's gone upstate, I've been told.”

“But any doctor can do it.”

She raised her shoulders in a pained shrug. With feigned innocence, she asked, “Does the woman you're looking for have a limp?”

I smiled, thanked her, and headed for the door.

After an hour of driving around the area, using a Chamber of Commerce road map that showed motel locations, I found a yellow VW in a carport outside a cabin a few miles south of town.

If Veronique had left the crime scene without Doris, she must have known what had happened. Wouldn't she at least have gone into the store, asked where her friend was? Did she witness the murder?

The question weighed heavily on me as I waded through crabgrass to a green cabin—the one farthest from the office. I hit the door with my knuckles and stepped back into the grass. The curtain inside the only window stirred, then parted to frame a pale, lean face staring out at me.

“Veronique Pascal?”

The curtain closed.

I waited for her to come to the door. After a few minutes I again knocked, half expecting a voice to say “Go away!” like in the movies.

I didn't go away. I yelled her name several times, and finally she opened the door.

She was tall and gaunt, as she'd been described, and her hair was a faded brown with gray streaks. She was wearing horn-rimmed glasses that made her eyes look small.

“You're Veronique Pascal, the artist?” I asked, sounding, even to me, like a summons server.

“What is it you want?” she said, like submitting to the demands of a fool.

“I need your help,” I said, feeling like one.

“Do I know you?”

“You may know a man I'm working for—Samuel Grovner.”

Her eyes narrowed but that told me nothing.

“He brought a painting here and wants you to authenticate it.”

She stared at me as though peeling skin off my face.

“Just what is it you want?” she said.

“You're a friend of Doris Wilson?”

“Go away.” She stepped back and closed the door.

I walked ten feet into the crabgrass so that I could watch the door and the yellow Beetle. Nothing stirred. After a few minutes I drove off, didn't want to explain myself to the cops.

A message from Sylvia on my voicemail announced that she had been ordered by the court to take a runaway child to his parents’ home in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, said she wouldn't be back in Portland until tomorrow afternoon. Disappointed that I'd have to spend the night alone, I had a serving of spaghetti at Lefty's, went back to my loft, dropped onto my cot, and leafed through an old paperback western by Elmore Leonard. I fell asleep and woke up fully clothed with sunlight warm on my face.

I called Mike and asked what he knew about Samuel Grovner's son. I didn't mention Veronique or the questions I had about her.

“Not much,” he said.

“They know where he is?”

“You got something?”

“A guy about that age's been following me around.”

“Give me a couple of minutes,” he said. I waited a half hour going through bills in my in-box before my phone rattled.

“Nobody seems to know,” Mike said. “Portsmouth couldn't locate him. But they want to know what you know, and so do I.”

“I'll get back to you. It's probably nothing.”

I killed part of the day chasing down a young couple who had left town with a suite of furniture: skip-chasing paid a lot of my bills. In my Jeep heading toward Sylvia's apartment, I received a call from Sergeant Auclair.

“We got your skinny guy with the pickup. Thought you might—”

“His name Grovner?”

“License says Isaac Petrovski, and he's from Dover, New Hampshire.”

“What you got him on? Can you hold him? It'll take me a while to get there.”

“Driving over the limit is all. He's agreed to join us in Placido's for coffee. That's just north of those red buildings on Main Street. That's Route One.”

I put in a call to Mike, gave him the man's name. Before I reached the outskirts of Thomaston, Mike got back to me. The New Hampshire police knew a lot about Isaac Petrovski.

“He owns the garage in Dover where Martin Grovner works.”

Armed with this, I strode past Auclair's Dodge Charger and the black S-10 into a small Italian diner that smelled of burnt cheese. A girl at the cash register smiled at me. Auclair waved from a booth past a row of bar stools. Isaac Petrovski turned and regarded me with anxious concern.

Auclair stood, gesturing me to slide over, leaving him free to jump if he had to—a cop on duty.

“You guys eaten?” I said, looking at Petrovski.

Auclair smiled. “That an offer?”

“Sure. Pizza okay?”

I called the girl over. “A large one. Everything on it,” glancing at Petrovski. “Okay with you?”

He gave me a timid nod, his face full of questions. Although the room was cooled by fans whirling over us, the ruddy skin on his neck looked oily with sweat.

“Mr. Petrovski,” Auclair said, after a pizza had been placed in front of us, each of us peeling off a slice, “hoped to see the old prison. Didn't know it'd been torn down.”

“You interested in prisons?”

“That movie,” he said, “Shawshank Redemption. Thought it might've been filmed there.”

“I liked that movie,” I said. “Big fan of Morgan Freeman. They called him ‘Red,’ didn't they?”

He gave that a cautious nod.

“That has a special meaning doesn't it? I mean in prison talk? It's not just a name, is it?”

“I don't know,” he said, shrinking from the question.

“You ever been in prison?” I asked.

Alarm hit his eyes. His hands trembled on the table, leaving sweat marks on the laminate.

“Oh, he's just making small talk,” Auclair said, playing good cop, patting the man's hand, wondering what I was doing. “Lots of people come here looking for the prison.”

“Why are you holding me?” Petrovski said, scared.

“We're not holding you,” Auclair said. “We just want to talk.”

I chewed on a pepperoni slice, swallowed it, took a sip of water. “Did Martin Grovner come here with you?”

Like he was slowly sinking into a hole he pondered my face, Auclair's, then stared across the room. Nothing over there but a curtained window and some boxes. He looked back at me, at Auclair.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Any reason you should be?” Auclair said, getting into it.

“We just want to know what you're doing here,” I said. “Is your partner with you?”

“I knew you were looking for him so I—”

“How'd you know that?”

“His father told me. Said he hired you.”

“To look for his son? That's what he said?”

He nodded, like wondering what was strange about that.

Auclair, to whom all of this was a surprise, said, “Maybe we ought to take this to the station.”

“Oh, no need for that,” I said, hoping he wouldn't insist. His eyes questioned me, but he let it go.

“After two and a half years in the state prison in Concord ... right?” grinning as I looked to Petrovski for agreement.

“I'm just looking for my business partner. I haven't done anything wrong.”

“As the sergeant said, Isaac, we're here just to ask questions. Do you know where Samuel Grovner is?”

“It's why I followed you ... to find him.”

“But you said you talked to him about me.”

“Two days ago. We shared a motel room.”

“Registered in your name?”

“It's where he found me.”

And that explained why Grovner's name hadn't appeared on any motel register.

“You became separated?”

“He took off when we heard Doris Wilson got killed.”

“Why? He told me he didn't know her.”

“What's the connection, Isaac?” Auclair said. Good cop or not, his uniform added weight to the question. “Don't stand in our way—”

“I'm just looking for my partner! I haven't done anything!”

“Keep it down,” Auclair said. He probably wanted to take Isaac to the station but that would give him time to think. Neither of us wanted that.

“If Martin Grovner has committed a murder—”

“I don't know that!”

“What do you know, Isaac? Go easy on yourself. You don't want to go back to prison.”

It took him a few minutes but he finally came out with: “All I know is it was Martin ran out of the bakery and hit that woman.”

Auclair and I swapped glances.

“Let's take this to the station,” Auclair said, getting up.

* * * *

Within the walls of a small conference room Isaac became a whipped child slumped in a chair, squeezing fingers in his lap, telling us a long story about Martin's coming home from the war and the two of them buying a garage with money Petrovski's grandfather had given him. Auclair was asking the questions. In the police station I was an observer. This was official.

“You knew him before you went to prison?” Auclair asked.

“He was with some people I knew.”

“And you don't think he killed ... Does that baker have a name?”

“Waldo Asker. I saw it on TV. I didn't—”

“So why are you here looking for Martin?”

“He's my partner. I want to help him!”

“Help him get away?”

Petrovski fished a wad of bills from his pocket, pushed it toward the sergeant.

“Three hundred dollars,” Auclair said, fingering the bills. “Then you must think—” He handed the bills back.

“No! He wouldn't kill anyone. But his record ... Who would believe him?”

“Why'd he go into the bakery?”

“I don't know. His father...” and the word died on his lips.

“What about his father?”

Petrovski hung his head, maybe troubled by revealing a confidence. Auclair gave me a questioning glance. I shrugged.

After a long silence, Petrovski looked up. “The reason Martin got into trouble, I mean before this,” and he paused, searching our faces. “It's when he came home and learned his mother'd been unfaithful.”

“His father told him that?”

“Said it's why his mother left. I know that looks bad for Martin. He didn't know who the man was. Sam didn't tell him. But when Sam got cancer...”

“Samuel Grovner has cancer?”

“He's dying of it. Pancreatic. He was lying in bed one morning crying and told Martin the man was Waldo Asker.”

Auclair gave me a look I took to mean: “That's it. That's all we need.”

* * * *

Later, on the phone in my Jeep in the parking space, Mike said, “What you're telling me is this Martin thought Doris recognized him, and he went after her, and the father was doing what Petrovski was doing—looking to help his son get away.”

“Or hoping to stop him going after Veronique.”

“Portsmouth's sending a woman up there. Can they hold Petrovski?”

“His legs are so wobbly he's not running.”

“Portsmouth police found a connection,” Mike said. “Martin Grovner was in the same accounting class with Doris Wilson. He knew who she was. She probably lied when she said she couldn't identify him, though she may not have known his name. He drives a Harley-Davidson, by the way. I'll send you the tag number.”

* * * *

With a different and more urgent reason for contacting Veronique, I headed toward her cabin and learned that she had checked out. I drove to the hospital. The Beetle was not in the parking lot. I left a message for Auclair, asking for help.

I could have driven around searching for the Beetle, but Mike had asked me to come to Portland. The woman from New Hampshire wanted to talk with me, he said. Tired of motels, tired of paying for them, I preferred to spend the night with Sylvia.

* * * *

Two people could have been on Martin's motorcycle. The passenger could have taken the Beetle, but that wouldn't explain the survival of Veronique. I could think of no explanation except that she had chased the motorcycle and been outdistanced. Why didn't she call the police?

* * * *

“If they are registered domestic partners,” Sylvia said, picking up the menu, idly turning pages, “Veronique is considered nearest of kin and has the right to dispose of Doris's remains however she sees fit, whether there are blood relatives or not. And if there's no will naming others, she can inherit Doris's estate.”

“Didn't that stuff get voted out?”

“Same-sex marriage was voted out, not the domestic partner law. That's been in effect since twenty-oh-four.”

“So Veronique could still be in Brunswick waiting for the autopsy.”

“She probably moved just to get away from you.” She looked up at an approaching waitress. “I know the feeling,” she added, laughing.

Earlier in our relationship, Sylvia threatened to move to California—not to escape me but to get away from her mother who constantly berated her for taking up with a shigetz—why Sylvia and I never married.

We enjoyed the dinner, spent the evening on her couch watching an English movie—one of those Jane Austen things—and went to bed shortly after midnight.

In the morning I learned from Mike that a psychiatric therapist from the New Hampshire Department of Corrections had taken Petrovski to Augusta to join an investigation by the state police Criminal Intelligence unit. They were able to hold Isaac because of conditions of his parole.

I wasn't allowed in on that; in fact, if I had tried to involve myself, I would probably have been locked out of the investigation. I still wanted to locate Veronique. Only now it was to protect her. If Martin Grovner had murdered Doris Wilson, he was probably looking for the roommate.

After waiting two hours next to the yellow Beetle in the parking lot at the hospital, I caught up with Veronique and had surprisingly little trouble coaxing her into having lunch with me—not that she smiled or was even friendly. But she wanted something from me and was cooperative.

* * * *

“I don't care about that,” she said, waving off my warning about Martin, holding a wet glass, wrapping thin lips around a straw. It wasn't hot in the diner or even outdoors, but when she ordered ice for her tea, I thought it symbolic.

She was cold. Her best friend had been murdered, but I found no sorrow in her eyes, no grief, no anguish, no suffering, just an intense look of determination.

Sitting across from her I felt the same discomfort I had felt standing next to a stone killer in a restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island, the bodyguard of a crime boss. He was just a guy leaning against a wall, no different from a thousand others, except that he looked lethal. I don't know why. He was a man without a soul, my father would have said. But he looked just like anybody else only you knew he didn't want to be approached: You wouldn't ask him what time it was.

“Do you know where he is?” Veronique asked.

“The police put out a BOLO on his father's car. That's all they've got.”

“That's a bulletin?”

“It means ‘Be on the lookout.'”

“What's his father's car look like?”

“It's a Ford Taurus is all I know.”

She examined my face, then looked away. I watched her bite into a tuna-salad sandwich, barely opening her mouth as her teeth sank into the bread. She wiped her mouth with the side of her hand.

“You should go to the police with what you saw,” I told her.

She gave me a reflective glance. “I want you to stop chasing me.”

“You could be in serious danger. If that man killed Doris...”

She picked something off her lip and flicked it onto the floor. “Are they looking for a motorcycle?”

“They may be.”

She thought about that, lifted a small handbag off the seat, and got up. I watched her limp toward the exit. I heard a car engine come to life in the parking lot and wondered whether the attendant at the convenience store had heard the motorcycle. He hadn't mentioned it, but Veronique just did.

* * * *

Sergeant Auclair called to tell me they had found the Taurus in a ditch on a country road north of Dexter. Although troubled by what I was getting into, I enjoyed the ride north. Fall foliage was past its peak, with yellow leaves and splashes of red in the hills that stirred memories of walks in the woods with my father—a soft-spoken guy whose sense of humor I missed. I went freshwater fishing with him a few times up this way, didn't like it; killing things for pleasure made no sense to me. We didn't talk much out in the boat, just shared the silence, and the sound of waves lapping the hull.

A young cop leaning on the front fender of his cruiser dropped a cigarette onto the pavement as I pulled off the road. I watched him grind the butt under his foot.

“Anyone hurt?”

“No sign of it,” he said, probably wondering why I had stopped. “I guess the driver took off, maybe hitchhiked a ride or something.”

“Or maybe ran into the woods,” I said. Pine trees and birches crowded the ditch. “A friend of mine from down the coast was up this way. Don't know what he was driving. He was sick, could've passed out or something. Okay if I look around?”

“All right by me. There's a wood road back there,” he said, pointing. “You can get your car off the road. Your friend wanders off?”

“Never know what he'll do. Gets confused. A little soft,” tapping my head.

I noticed tracks of burnt rubber on the asphalt and wanted to inspect the edge of the road but decided to look for footprints and maybe broken twigs where a man, or more than one, might have gone into the woods.

* * * *

I left my car a hundred feet into a narrow path and followed tire marks on stretches of gravel embraced by the fragrance of pines, remembering childhood fantasies of Indians running barefoot through the trees, boys my age in loincloth. I remembered taking my shoes off, telling myself I was standing where an Indian had stood, my feet on his footprints. Never thought about Indians except in the woods in the fall.

I found the motorcycle tilted against a maple tree at the edge of a pond. Martin and his father were sitting on a log, their backs to me. I managed to approach within a hundred feet before Martin turned abruptly.

He stood, not much taller than his father, more muscular, defiance on a surly face, rumpled brown hair, sideburns, a tattoo on his neck. His father twisted around to see what Martin was looking at. My appearance startled him.

“You've been paid,” he said.

“The police are looking for you, Mr. Grovner. This is your son?”

Martin stepped away from the log, glancing toward his motorcycle, walking around the log maybe to shield his father.

“They're holding your friend Petrovski,” I told him, my voice sounding flat out there in the clearing, carrying across the pond maybe, but without an echo.

Martin didn't seem to care. He kept stepping sideways toward the motorcycle, eyeing me like I was going to pounce on him. “I'm just here to tell you—” I glanced at the father. “—I've located Veronique Pascal.”

“You've been paid,” like that's what I was here for, like he didn't give a damn what I'd found.

“I have to tell the police I've found your son.”

Without warning, Martin sprinted across the grass to his motorcycle, raised it, mounted it, stomped on the pedal and, ripping gravel, roared across the clearing into the exit path.

“Marty!” the father yelled. “Marty! Don't go!”

Martin was gone.

For a long moment, Samuel Grovner stared at me as though hoping I had an explanation for what had just happened.

“My car's down there,” I said. “It'll be dark soon.”

“He won't leave me here.”

“Better wait out there than here.”

He stared helplessly across the clearing.

“It's getting dark,” I said.

The sun was in the top branches of trees. I gave him five minutes, then I started toward the path.

“Wait!”

I watched him lift a cane off the log and, without a word, stone-faced, come toward me. We walked in silence, side by side, out to my Jeep near the highway.

His car was gone. The young cop was gone.

“I'll take you into Dexter,” I said.

He didn't argue. He probably realized it would foolish to stay out there.

“Thank you,” he said, sitting next to me, the cane between his knees, both hands gripping the handle. He said nothing more until I pulled up in front of the building that held the police station.

“Drive on,” he said, eyeing the words Dexter Police Department under a shield on white clapboards.

I considered telling him he'd have to go to the police sooner or later, but he probably knew that.

“They can tell you where your car is,” I said.

“No, no. Just drive on.”

I brought him to a taxi stand outside a drugstore. He didn't thank me or say a word. Just got out and went into the store, leaning on the cane at every step, visibly exhausted.

Down the street, parked at the curb, I received a call from the woman at the hospital in Brunswick. She didn't identify herself, didn't have to. “She's here,” was all she said.

* * * *

In Brunswick I parked and walked past lighted windows of the hospital and went inside.

“I was told to give you this,” said an elderly woman at the front desk, handing me a sealed envelope. I opened it outside in my Jeep. It contained a business card, nothing scribbled on the back. It advertised the services of the Skillings Crematorium on Bacheldor Street.

The place was closed. I peered through thick glass at the darkened entrance and saw only a night-light down a hallway. Markings on the door told me the facility would open at eight o'clock in the morning.

I could have driven to Portland. I could have gone to a movie. I decided to rent a room rather than get up early to be back here by eight.

In the morning I was in the shade of an elm tree spooning applesauce off a plastic box when the yellow Beetle drove into the lot across the street. I'm not good at waiting—one of the drudgeries of this kind of work—but I managed to contain myself until Veronique came out the door, limping briskly to her Beetle.

I imagined she saw me following her and didn't give a damn. She sped south until she reached the curb outside a hardware store near the railroad station on the west side of the city. I watched her go into the store and come out carrying a small package. I nearly lost her in traffic on the freeway but found her circling down an exit in Scarborough. In less than a half hour she drove across an empty field to the parking lot of a motel and stopped next to a Harley-Davidson outside unit 108.

“Albert just peed on my leg!” I heard a child scream.

“I did not. She's lying!”

“Shut up, and get into the truck,” a woman said, carrying a child in a pink blanket out of a room, shooing the two bickering kids toward the truck.

“My leg's all wet and it stinks!” the girl said.

The boy's laughter stopped with the sound of a slap.

I was near an SUV watching blinds rising in the window of 108. I couldn't see a face. Lights came on. A man appeared in the doorway. As though invited, Veronique went inside.

I hurried across the asphalt, stepping on crumpled brown wrapping paper near the Beetle.

I crouched at the window and saw a knife in Veronique's hand, saw her drive the blade into Martin's belly. I watched him stagger backward in helpless astonishment. I saw him fall to the floor with Veronique standing over him, the bloodied knife trembling in her hand. I couldn't see her face.

I saw her limp to a large chair and sit down, looking expressionless at the dead man on the floor.

* * * *

“How'd she know where to find him?” I asked, sitting in Savarin's car a hundred yards down the street, hoping, while the crime scene techs worked the room, to escape the media people.

“Paid the manager fifty bucks to call her when he came back. I guess she originally found it looking for the name Isaac Petrovski. I guess we'll get all the details. She's not fighting us.”

“Until she gets a lawyer.”

“Yeah, there's always that.”

“They holding Petrovski?”

“He'll be available for the hearings. But he's not accused of anything.”

Because of my interest in the case and Mike's leniency, I was allowed to sit in on the questioning of Samuel Grovner, who had showed up just as his son's body was being loaded into the ambulance. They had lowered the sheet so he could identify his son.

He didn't ask for a lawyer.

“My son wanted to protect me,” he said, sitting across from us, eyes pleading to be believed. “I don't have long. I knew it when I shot the man. I didn't know Martin had gone there.”

“Martin didn't shoot Waldo Asker?”

“No! It was me. I shot him. Martin went into the bakery to see if he was dead. It was all so unnecessary. No one would have known. The police weren't looking for me. Martin was just trying to protect me.”

“But you told him you had shot the man.”

“So he wouldn't do it. He was very headstrong.”

“Eventually, the police would have found out about your wife and—”

“But I'd be gone by then! Don't you see? I had it all planned!”

Was he in pain because of his son's death or because his plan had failed?

“Ironic, ain't it,” Savarin said as we left the conference room.

“Not a big enough word,” I said, thinking that Martin Grovner and Doris Wilson would be alive and Veronique Pascal would not be going to prison if Samuel Grovner had only kept his mouth shut.

Copyright © 2012 Jim Ingraham

[Back to Table of Contents]

Mystery Classic: NIGHT AT THE INN
by Georgette Heyer, selected and Introduced by Jane K. Cleland

THE DARK SIDE OF THE REGENCY

Georgette Heyer was a master storyteller. She wove complex tales of love and hope, stories that have resonated with readers for more than ninety years. While Heyer is best known for her romances, she also wrote a dozen mysteries and several collections of short stories. “Night at the Inn” is one my favorites, featuring the recognizable and relatable characters Ms. Heyer is known for creating.

Those of us who love Heyer's work admire her meticulous research, her pitch perfect dialogue, and, most of all, how her characters interact with their settings so naturally it's as if you're there yourself, in the moment. More than once I have felt as if I were observing the incidents as they're happening, not reading the output of one woman's imagination. It's amazing how often her characters embrace the same kinds of opportunities and face the same kinds of dilemmas that we see in our lives today.

Most of Heyer's work, including “Night at the Inn,” is set in England during the period known as the Regency, a ten-year span that ran from 1810 to 1820, roughly two hundred years ago. The Regency was, by all accounts, an age of opulence and decadence, of strict rules and loose morals, of hypocrisy and heroism, of intellectual freedom and emotional restriction. Among the ton, the elite aristocracy, fortunes were made and lost at card tables; it was a lucky son who knew his father; and you could do anything you wanted—so long as you didn't create a scandal. Against this backdrop, Heyer's characters lived their lives, some testing society's limits of acceptable behavior, others living contentedly within those limits. Ms. Heyer also drew realistic portraits of the rest of society, from a penniless chimney sweep to maids and grooms and members of the new and burgeoning middle class.

In “Night at the Inn,” you'll meet John Cranbrook, a young man traveling home to England after doing well in his first job in Lisbon. Young Mr. Cranbrook is filled with the optimism and energy of youth. He's a delight! You'll think you know him, or you'll wish you did. Interestingly, Georgette Heyer wrote many irresistible young male characters into her stories. There's Nicky from The Reluctant Widow and the brothers, Felix and Jessamy, from Frederica, all as charming, mannerly, and exuberant as John Cranbrook, and all modeled, perhaps, on Ms. Heyer's own son, Sir Richard Rougier, whom she adored. Or maybe those wonderful young men were modeled on her brother, the person responsible for starting it all.

Georgette Heyer wrote her first novel, The Black Moth, to help distract and amuse her brother while he was convalescing from a serious illness. That was in 1921 when she was seventeen. Imagine that! She was only seventeen and she wrote a book that resulted in a business empire. There's an old business saying, that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Ms. Heyer built a better mousetrap, writing stories that struck a chord with readers around the world. The Black Moth was an instant success, and astonishingly, in the more than ninety years since that book was first published, it has never been out of print.

If you're new to Georgette Heyer's work, “Night at the Inn” is a perfect way to start. You'll see the countryside and milieu of Regency England spring to life and you'll meet characters you'll enjoy getting to know. If you're already familiar with Ms. Heyer's romances, you'll discover her marvelous capability as a writer of suspense. Certainly, you'll understand why this story was selected as a classic.

Copyright © 2012 Jane K. Cleland

* * * *

NIGHT AT THE INN

GEORGETTE HEYER

There were only three persons partaking of dinner at the inn, for it was neither a posting-house, nor a hostelry much patronized by stage-coaches. The man in the moleskin waistcoat, who sat on one of the settles flanking the fireplace in the coffee-room, gave no information about himself; the young lady and gentleman on the other side were more forthcoming.

The lady had been set down at the Pelican after dusk by a cross-country coach. Her baggage was as modest as her appearance, the one consisting of a bandbox and a corded trunk; the other of brown curls smoothed neatly under a bonnet, a round cashmere gown made high to the neck and boasting neither frills nor lace, serviceable half-boots, and tan gloves, and a drab pelisse. Only two things belied the air of primness she seemed so carefully to cultivate: the jaunty bow which tied her bonnet under one ear, and the twinkle in her eye, which was as sudden as it was refreshing.

The gentleman was her senior by several years: an open-faced, pleasant young man whose habit proclaimed the man of business. He wore a decent suit of clothes, with a waistcoat that betrayed slight sartorial ambition; his linen was well-laundered, and the points of his shirt-collar starched; but he had tied his neckcloth with more regard for propriety than fashion, and he displayed none of the trinkets that proclaimed the dandy. However, the watch he consulted was a handsome gold repeater, and he wore upon one finger a signet-ring, with his monogram engraved, so that it was reasonable to suppose him to be a man of some substance.

He was fresh from Lisbon, he told the landlord, as he set down his two valises in the tap-room, and had landed at Portsmouth that very day. Tomorrow he was going to board a coach which would carry him within walking-distance of his paternal home: a rare surprise for his parents that would be, for they had not the least expectation of seeing him! He had been out of England for three years: it seemed like a dream to be back again.

The landlord, a burly, rubicund man with a smiling countenance, entered into the exile's excitement with indulgent good humour. Young master was no doubt come home on leave from the Peninsula? Not wounded, he did hope? No, oh, no! Young master had not the good fortune to be a soldier. He was employed in a counting-house, and had no expectation of getting his transfer from Lisbon for years. But—with offhand pride—he had suddenly been informed that there was a place for him at headquarters in the City, and had jumped aboard the first packet. No time to warn his parents: he would take them by surprise, and wouldn't they gape and bless themselves at the sight of him, by Jupiter! He had meant to have put up at the Swan, in the centre of the town, but such a press of custom had they that they had been obliged to turn him away. The same at the George: he hoped he was going to be more fortunate at the Pelican?

The landlord, gently edging him into the coffee-room, reassured him: he should have a good bedchamber, and the sheets well aired, a hot brick placed in the bed, and a fire lit in the grate. The gentleman from Lisbon said: “Thank the Lord for that! I have had my fill of tramping from inn to inn, I can tell you! What's more, I'm devilish sharp-set! What's for dinner?”

He was promised a dish of mutton and haricot beans, with soup to go before it, and a dish of broccoli to accompany it. He rubbed his hands together, saying boyishly: “Mutton! Real English mutton! That's the dandy! That's what I've been longing for any time these three years! Bustle about, man!—I could eat the whole carcase!”

By this time he had been coaxed into the coffee-room, a low-pitched apartment, with shuttered windows, one long table, and an old-fashioned hearth flanked by high-backed settles. On one of these, toasting her feet, sat the young lady; on the other, his countenance obscured by the journal he was perusing, was the man in the moleskin waistcoat. He paid no heed to the newcomer; but the lady tucked her toes under the settle, and assumed an attitude of stiff propriety.

The gentleman from Lisbon trod over to the fire, and stood before it, warming his hands. After a slight pause he observed with a shy smile that these November evenings were chilly.

The lady agreed to it, but volunteered no further remark. The gentleman, anxious that all the world should have a share in his joy, said that he was quite a stranger to England. He added hopefully that his name was John Cranbrook.

The lady subjected him to a speculative, if slightly surreptitious, scrutiny. Apparently she was satisfied, for she relaxed her decorous pose, and said that hers was Mary Gateshead.

He seemed much gratified by this confidence, and bowed politely, and said how do you do? This civility encouraged Miss Gateshead to invite him to sit down, which he instantly did, noticing as he did so that a pair of narrow eyes had appeared above the sheets of the journal on the opposite settle, and were fixed upon him. But as soon as his own encountered them they disappeared again, and all he could see, in fat black print, was an advertisement for Pears’ Soap, and another adjuring him to consider the benefits to be derived from using Russia Oil regularly on the hair.

Searching his mind for something with which to inaugurate a conversation, Mr. Cranbrook asked Miss Gateshead whether she too had found the Swan and the George full.

She replied simply: “Oh, no! I could not afford the prices they charge at the big inns! I am a governess.”

“Are you?” said Mr. Cranbrook, with equal simplicity. “I am a clerk in Nathan Spennymore's Counting-house. In the ordinary way I can't afford ‘em either, but I'm very plump in the pocket just now!” He patted his breast as he spoke, and laughed, his eyes dancing with such pride and pleasure that Miss Gateshead warmed to him, and invited him to tell her how this delightful state of affairs had come about.

He was nothing loth, and while the man in the moleskin waistcoat read his paper, and the landlord laid the covers on the table, he told her how he had been sent out to Lisbon three years ago, and what it was like there—very well in its way, but a man would rather choose to be at home!—and how an unexpected stroke of good fortune had befallen him, and he was to occupy a superior place in the London house. He didn't know why he should have been chosen, but Miss Gateshead might imagine how he had jumped at the chance!

Miss Gateshead suggested that the promotion might be a reward for good service, which made Mr. Cranbrook blush vividly, and say that he was sure it was no such thing. In haste to change the subject, he enquired after her prospects and destination. Miss Gateshead was the eldest daughter of a curate with a numerous progeny, and she was bound for her first situation. Very eligible, she assured him! A large house, not ten miles from this place; and Mrs. Stockton, her employer, had graciously promised to send the gig to the Pelican to fetch her in the morning.

“I should have thought she might have sent a closed carriage in this weather,” said John bluntly.

“Oh, no! Not for the governess!” Miss Gateshead said, shocked.

“It may rain!” he pointed out.

She laughed. “Pooh, I shan't melt in a shower of rain!”

“You might take a chill,” insisted John severely. “I don't think Mrs. Stockton can be at all an amiable person!”

“Oh, do not say so! I am in such a quake already, in case I do not give satisfaction!” said Miss Gateshead. “And there are nine children—only fancy!—so that I might be employed there for years!”

She seemed to regard this prospect with satisfaction, but Mr. Cranbrook had no hesitation in favouring her with his own quite contrary views on such a fate.

The landlord came in, bearing the leg of mutton, which he set down on a massive sideboard. His wife, a decent-looking, stout woman in a mob-cap, arranged various removes on the table, bobbed a curtsy to Miss Gateshead, and asked if she would care for a glass of porter, or some tea.

Miss Gateshead accepted the offer of tea, and, after a moment's hesitation, untied the strings of her bonnet, and laid this demure creation down on the settle. Her curls, unconfined, showed a tendency to become a trifle wayward, but, rather to John's disappointment, she rigorously smoothed them into decorum.

The man in the moleskin waistcoat folded his journal, and bore it to the table, propping it up against a tarnished cruet, and continuing laboriously to peruse it. His attitude indicated that he preferred his own company, so his fellow-guests abandoned any ideas they might have had of including him in their chat, and took their places at the other end of the board. The landlady dumped a pot of tea at Miss Gateshead's elbow, flanking it with a chipped jug of milk, and a cup and saucer; and John bespoke a pint of ale, informing Miss Gateshead, with his ingenuous grin, that home-brewed was one of the things he had chiefly missed in Portugal.

“And what for you, sir?” asked Mrs. Fyton, addressing herself to the man at the bottom of the table.

“Mr. Waggleswick'll take a heavy-wet as usual,” said her spouse, sharpening the carving-knife.

It was at this point that John, suppressing an involuntary chuckle, discovered the twinkle in Miss Gateshead's eye. They exchanged looks brimful of merriment, each perfectly understanding that the other found the name of Waggleswick exquisitely humorous.

The soup, ladled from a large tureen, was nameless and savourless, but Miss Gateshead and Mr. Cranbrook, busily engaged in disclosing to one another their circumstances, family histories, tastes, dislikes, and aspirations, drank it without complaint. Mr. Waggleswick seemed even to like it, for he called for a second helping. The mutton which followed the soup was underdone and tough, and the side-dish of broccoli would have been improved by straining. Mr. Cranbrook grimaced at Miss Gateshead, and remarked during one of the landlord's absences from the room that the quality of the dinner made him fearful of the condition of the bedchambers.

“I don't think they can enjoy much custom here,” said Miss Gateshead wisely. “It is the most rambling old place, but no one seems to be staying here but ourselves, and you can lose yourself in the passages! In fact, I did,” she added, sawing her way through the meat on her plate. “I have not dared to look at the sheets, but I have the most old-fashioned bed, and I asked them not to make up the fire again because it was smoking so dreadfully. And what is more I haven't seen a chambermaid, and you can see there is no waiter, so I am sure they don't expect guests.”

“Well, I don't think you should be putting up at a place little better than a hedge-tavern!” said John.

“Mrs. Stockton wrote that it was cheap, and the landlady would take care of me,” she explained. “Indeed, both she and the landlord have been most obliging, and if only the sheets are clean I am sure I shall have nothing to regret.”

Some cheese succeeded the mutton, but as it looked more than a little fly-blown the two young persons left Mr. Waggleswick to the sole enjoyment of it, and retired again to the settle by the fire. The room being indifferently lit by a single lamp suspended above the table, Mr. Waggleswick elected to remain in his place with his absorbing journal. When he had finished his repast he noisily picked his teeth for some time, but at last pushed back his chair, and took himself off.

Miss Gateshead, who had been covertly observing him, whispered: “What a strange-looking man! I don't like him above half, do you?”

“Well, he is not precisely handsome, I own!” John replied, grinning.

“His nose is crooked!”

“Broken. I dare say he is a pugilist.”

“How horrid! I am glad I am not alone with him here!”

That made him laugh. “Why, we can't accuse him of forcing his attentions on us, I am sure!”

“Oh, no! But there is something about him which I cannot like. Did you notice how he watched you?”

“Watched me? He barely raised his eyes above the newspaper!”

“He did when he thought you were not looking at him. I know he was listening to every word we said, too. I have the oddest feeling that he may even be listening now!”

“I would wager a large sum he is consuming another of his heavy-wets in the tap rather!” replied John.

The door opened as he spoke, and Miss Gateshead's nervous start was infectious enough to make him look round sharply. But it was only the landlady who came into the room, with a tray, on which she began to pile the plates and cutlery. She remarked that it was a foggy night, so that she had tightly closed the shutters in the bedrooms.

“Get a lot of fog hereabouts, we do,” she said, wiping a spoon on her apron, and casting it into a drawer in the sideboard. “Like a blanket it'll be before morning, but it'll clear off. I come from Norfolk myself, but a body gets used to anything. It's the clay.”

“Who is our fellow-guest?” asked John.

“Mr. Waggleswick? He's an agent of some sort: I don't rightly know. Travels all over, by what he tells me. We've had him here two-three times before. He's not much to look at, but he don't give no trouble. I'll bring your candles in presently. Your room is at the end of the passage, sir: turn to the right at the top of the stairs, and you'll come to it. Fyton took your bags up.”

* * * *

2.

Waggleswick did not return to the coffee-room, and as no other visitors, other than the local inhabitants, who crowded into the tap-room across the passage, came to the Pelican, Miss Gateshead and Mr. Cranbrook were left to sit on either side of the fire, chatting cosily together. Miss Gateshead was most interested to hear about Portugal, and as John, like so many young travellers, had filled a fat sketch-book with his impressions of an unknown countryside, it was not long before she had persuaded him to fetch down from his room this treasure.

The landlord was busy in the tap, and Mrs. Fyton was nowhere to be seen, so John went upstairs unescorted, trusting to the landlady's directions.

Another of the hanging oil-lamps lit the staircase, and rather feebly cast a certain amount of light a little way along the passage above, but beyond its radius all was in darkness. For a moment John hesitated, half-inclined to go back for a candle, but as his eyes grew more accustomed to the murk he thought that he could probably grope his way along the corridor to the room at the end of it. He did this, not entirely without mishap, since he tripped down one irrelevant step in the passage, and up two others, slightly ricking his ankle in the process, and uttering an exasperated oath. However, he reached the end of the passage, and found that there was a door confronting him. He opened it, and peeped in, and saw, by the light of a fire burning in the high barred grate, his two valises, standing in the centre of the room. As he knelt before them, tugging at the strap round the larger of them, he glanced cursorily round the apartment. It was of a respectable size, and boasted a very large bed, hung with ancient curtains, and bearing upon it a quilt so thick as to present more the appearance of a feather-mattress than of a coverlet. The rest of the furniture was commonplace and old-fashioned, and comprised several chairs, a dressing-table, a wash-stand, a huge mahogany wardrobe, a table by the bed, and a wall-cupboard on the same side of the room as the fireplace. A pair of dingy blinds imperfectly concealed the warped shutters bolted across the window. Some attempt to embellish the room had been made, for a singularly hideous china group stood in the middle of the mantelpiece, and a religious engraving hung above it. Mr. Cranbrook hoped that Miss Gateshead's room might be less gloomy: for himself he cared little for his surroundings, but he could imagine that a lady might find such an apartment comfortless, and even rather daunting.

The sketch-book was easily found, and he went off with it, shutting the door of the room behind him. He remembered the treacherous steps in the corridor, and went more carefully, putting out a hand to feel his way by touching the wall. It encountered not the wall, but something warm and furry.

He snatched it back, his eyes straining in the darkness, his heart suddenly hammering. Whatever he had touched was living and silent, and quite motionless. “Who's that?” he said quickly, an absurd, nameless dread knocking in his chest.

There was a slight pause, as though of hesitation, and then a voice said in a grumbling tone: “Why can't you take care where you're a-going, young master?”

Mr. Cranbrook recognized the voice, which he had heard speaking to the landlord, and knew that what he had touched was a moleskin waistcoat. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, relieved, yet suspicious.

“What's that to you?” retorted Waggleswick. “I suppose a cove can go to his room without axing your leave!”

“I didn't mean—But why were you spying on me?”

“Spying on you? That's a loud one! What would I want to do that for?” said Waggleswick scornfully.

John could think of no reason, and was silent. He heard a movement, and guessed that Waggleswick was walking away from him. A moment later a door opened farther down the passage, and the glow of firelight within the room silhouetted Waggleswick's figure for a brief instant before he went in, and shut the door behind him.

John hesitated, on the brink of retracing his steps to lock his own door. Then he recollected that he carried his money on his person, and had packed nothing of value in his valises, and he shrugged, and proceeded on his way.

Miss Gateshead was seated where he had left her. She greeted him with a smile that held some relief, and confided to him that she hated foggy nights.

“There's not much fog in the house,” he replied reassuringly.

“No, but it muffles all the noises, and makes one think the world outside dead!” she said. She perceived that he did not quite appreciate this, and coloured. “It is only a foolish fancy, of course! I don't think I like this house. A rat has been gnawing in the wainscoting in that corner, and a few minutes ago I heard the stairs creak, and quite thought it must be you. Do you believe in ghosts?”

“No, certainly not,” said John firmly, resolving to make no mention of his encounter with Mr. Waggleswick.

“Well, I didn't think I did,” confessed Miss Gateshead, “but I have the horridest feeling all the time that there is someone just behind me!”

Mr. Cranbrook did not feel quite comfortable about the Pelican himself, but since it was plainly his part to comfort Miss Gateshead he adopted a bracing tone, saying that she was perhaps tired after her journey, and was suffering from an irritation of the nerves. She accepted this explanation meekly, and came to sit at the table, so that she could more clearly see Mr. Cranbrook's Peninsular sketches.

Shortly after ten o'clock the landlady came in with two tallow candles, stuck into pewter holders. She offered to escort Miss Gateshead up to bed, and since John thought he might as well go to bed too as sit on a settle beside a dying fire, he said that he would also go upstairs. He and Miss Gateshead had reached an excellent understanding by this time, and although nothing so blunt had passed between them as a declaration on Mr. Cranbrook's part that he meant to follow up this chance acquaintanceship with a view to extending it rather considerably, his intention was as patent as it was unavowed. Nor did Miss Gateshead make any attempt to discourage him in his resolve. She was even much inclined to think there was a good deal to be said for his vehemently expressed opinion that the life of a governess would not at all suit her.

They took up their candles, and followed Mrs. Fyton upstairs. The noise had died down in the tap; Mrs. Fyton said that they kept early hours in these parts, besides that folks were anxious to get home before the fog came down really thick. The light of the candle she carried threw wavering, grotesque shadows on the walls, and disclosed, upstairs, two other passages, leading off at right-angles from the one which ran the length of the house.

“You know your way, sir,” said Mrs. Fyton, nodding a chaperon's dismissal to John. “Come along, miss!”

John knew an impulse to accompany Miss Gateshead at least to her door. He thought she was looking scared, and guessed that this was probably the first time she had ever been alone in a strange inn. However, Mrs. Fyton seemed a motherly woman, who might be trusted to look after a young lady, so he said good night, and contented himself with lingering at the head of the stairs until he had seen which door it was that led into Miss Gateshead's room. It lay at the far end of the house to his, with Waggleswick's between them; an arrangement John did not much like—though what evil intentions a middle-aged man of business putting up at an unfrequented inn could harbour in his breast he was unable to imagine. He went on to his own room, leaving the door ajar behind him. His valises were just as he had left them, and until he heard the landlady go down the stairs again he occupied himself in unpacking such articles as he would require for the night. When Mrs. Fyton's footsteps had died away, he picked up his candle, and went softly along the passage, and scratched on Miss Gateshead's door.

“Who is it?”

Her voice sounded frightened; he said reassuringly: “Only me—Cranbrook! I wanted to be sure you are quite comfortable: I won't come in.”

Apparently Miss Gateshead had no dread of this new acquaintance at least. There was a step within the room, the door was opened, and she stood on the threshold, whispering: “I am so glad you have come! I have discovered that there is no key in this lock, and I know I shan't sleep a wink! Did you see that dreadful creature as we came up the stairs?”

“Waggleswick?” he said sharply, looking down the passage. “No! Where was he?”

“In the corridor that leads to the back stairs. I caught a glimpse of him, but he stepped out of sight on the instant. I told you he was spying on us!”

“It's impossible! Why should he?” Mr. Cranbrook said, in a lowered tone. “Shall I go down and ask Mrs. Fyton for a key to your door?”

“I am persuaded it would not be the least avail. I dare say it has been lost for years, for this is the most ramshackle, neglected place I ever was in! The dust under my bed—! Oh, I do wish Mrs. Stockton would have fetched me tonight!”

“So do I—at least, no, I don't, for if she had I should not have met you,” said John honestly. “But it is very uncomfortable for you, and I don't like that! Mind, I don't believe that fellow Waggleswick means any harm: ten to one it is all curiosity! but put a chair under your door-handle, if you are afraid.”

This suggestion found favour. Miss Gateshead wondered that she should not have thought of it for herself, thanked him, and once more bade him good night.

He went back to his own room, pausing at the entrance to the corridor that led to the back stairs, and peering down it. He could see no one, nor did any sound, other than those issuing from the tap downstairs, come to his ears.

* * * *

3.

He had a book packed in his valise, which he had meant to read in the chair by his fire, but this was reduced to glowing embers, and when he would have put more coal on it he found that there was no scuttle in the room. It hardly seemed worth while to ring for it, so he undressed, and got into bed, setting the candle on the table beside him, and thrusting his watch and his pocket-book under the pillow. The bed was a feather one, and though rather smothering, not uncomfortable. He opened his book, and began to read, occasionally raising his head to listen intently. His room was situated too far from the tap for him to be able to hear the murmur of voices there. He heard nothing at all, not even the stir of a mouse.

This dense stillness began presently to make him feel uneasy. It was not very late, and it would have been natural had some sounds broken the silence. In any inn one expected to hear noises: the voices of other guests; footsteps; the slam of a door; the clatter of crockery; or the rumble of wheels in the courtyard. The Pelican, of course, had no courtyard, and obviously did not enjoy much custom; but it did seem odd that he had seen no servant in the house other than the tapster. One would have thought that there would have been at least a waiter, and a chambermaid. He wondered who would clean the boots he had put outside his door, and whether anyone would bring him any shaving-water in the morning.

The silence was so profound that when a coal dropped in the grate it made him start. He was neither a nervous nor an imaginative young man, and the realization that Miss Gateshead had communicated to him some of her alarm vexed him. More than once he found himself lowering his book to glance round the room; and the creak of the chair in which he had sat to pull off his boots actually made him sit up in bed to make sure that he was alone.

When the candle was burnt down to a stub he began to be sleepy; and after finding that the printed words before his eyes were running one into the other, he closed the book, and snuffed the candle. A faint glow showed that the fire still lived. He turned on his side, the feather-bed billowing about him, and in less than ten minutes was asleep.

He awoke he knew not how much later, but so suddenly and with such a certainty that something had roused him that he was alert on the instant, and listening intently. His first thought was that Miss Gateshead must have called to him, but not a sound reached his ears. The glow from the hearth had disappeared; the room was in darkness.

He raised himself on his elbow. As he crouched thus, his ears straining, his eyes trying unavailingly to pierce the night, the conviction that he was not alone took such strong possession of his mind that the sweat broke out on his body. He stretched out his hand, and groped cautiously on the table for the tinder-box. It brushed against the candlestick, which made a tiny sound as it was shifted on the table, and in that moment it seemed to John that something moved in the room. He said breathlessly: “Who's there?”

As he spoke, his fingers closed over the tinder-box. He sat up with a jerk, felt the bed move as something cannoned into it, and, even as he flung up his hands to grapple his unknown visitant, was thrust roughly down again on to his pillows, a hand clamped over his mouth, and another gripping his throat in a strangling hold. He struggled madly, trying to wrench away the clutch on his windpipe. His hands brushed against something warm and furry; a voice breathed in his ear: “Dub your mummer!”

He tore at the unyielding hands, writhing, and trying to kick his feet free of the bedclothes, the bed creaking under his frenzied efforts. The grip on his throat tightened till the blood roared in his ears, and he felt his senses slipping from him. “Still! Still!" hissed Waggleswick. “One squeak out of you, and I'll land you a facer as'll put you to sleep for a se'ennight! Bow Street, clodpole!—Bow Street!"

He stopped struggling, partly from surprise at these last words, partly because the breath was choked out of him. The hand on his throat slightly relaxed its grip. He drew a sobbing breath, and distinctly heard the creak of boards under a stealthy footfall. It seemed to come from the direction of the wall-cupboard beside the fireplace.

“For God's sake, lay you still!” Mr. Waggleswick's breath was hot in his ear.

He was free, and heard the stir of the bed-curtains, as though Waggleswick had shrunk behind them. He lay perfectly still, rigid and sweating. If Waggleswick were indeed a Bow Street Runner, he ought undoubtedly to obey his instructions; if he were not, it did not seem as though he would have much compunction in silencing those who defied him in a manner highly unpleasant to them. The darkness seemed to press on his eyeballs; he had difficulty still in breathing, but his senses were quite acute, and he caught the sound of a key softly, slowly turning in a lock. This unquestionably came from the direction of the cupboard; a faint lightening of the gloom gradually appeared as the door of the cupboard opened, as though a very dim light had been concealed there. It was obscured by a monstrous shadow, and then dwindled, as the door was pushed to again.

A loose floor-board cracked; John's fists clenched unconsciously, but a warning hand coming from out of the curtains and pressing his shoulder kept him otherwise motionless.

Someone was coming inch by inch towards the bed: someone who knew the disposition of the furniture so exactly that he made no blunder. The heavy coverlet stirred over John's limbs, and, as his hands came up instinctively, smothering folds were over his face, pressed down and down over nose and mouth. He grabbed at this new assailant's wrists, but before his fingers could close on them the pressure abruptly left his face, and he heard a sudden scuffle, a strangled, startled oath, and the quick shifting of stockinged feet on the floor.

He flung the quilt off, groping for the tinder-box, which he had dropped on the bed.

“The glim! light the glim!” panted Waggleswick.

A chair went over with a crash; something was knocked flying from the dressing-table, as the two men swayed and struggled about the room. John's desperate fingers found the tinder-box, and as with trembling fingers he contrived to strike a light from it, a heavy thud shook the room.

The tiny flame flared up; the landlord and Waggleswick were writhing and heaving together on the floor, silent but murderous.

John lit the candle, and tumbled out of bed, hurrying to Waggleswick's aid. The treatment he had suffered during the last few minutes had considerably shaken him, and he felt rather dizzy, nor did a wild kick from one of Fyton's plunging legs do anything to improve his condition. The landlord was immensely strong, and for several minutes he made it impossible for the two other men to overpower him. He and Waggleswick rolled on the floor, locked together, but at last John managed to grab one of his arms, as he was attempting to gouge out Waggleswick's eye, and to twist it with all his might. Waggleswick, who happened at that moment to be uppermost, was thus enabled to drive home a shattering blow to the jaw. This half stunned the landlord, and before he could recover Waggleswick had vigorously banged his head on the floor. This deprived him of his wits for several minutes, and by the time he was at all able to continue the struggle a pair of handcuffs had been locked round his wrists.

“Bide, and watch him!” commanded Waggleswick, out of breath, much abraded, but still surprisingly active. “Take my barker and don't stand no gammon!” With that, he thrust a pistol into Mr. Cranbrook's hand, and dived into the cupboard, adding over his shoulder: “Hit him over the head with the butt, if he don't stay still! I don't want him shot: he's one for the Nubbing Cheat, he is!”

John found that his knees were shaking. He sat down, and curtly bade the landlord, who seemed to be trying to get up, to stay where he was. He had only just recovered his breath when a glimmer of light shone through the cupboard door, growing brighter as footsteps approached. Mr. Waggleswick came back into the room with a lamp.

“All's bowman!” he announced, taking his gun away from John. “Caught both the bites red-handed. She's as bad as he is, and worse! Get up, hang-gallows!”

He endorsed this command with a kick, and the landlord heaved himself to his feet. A settled, dogged expression had descended on to his face; he did not speak, but when John met his eyes he saw that there was so malevolent a look in them that it was almost impossible to believe he could be the same man as the comfortable, smiling host of a few hours earlier.

John shuddered, and turned away to pick up his breeches. When he had pulled these on over his nightshirt, and had thrust his feet into a pair of shoes, Waggleswick invited him to come down and see what had awaited him in the wash-house below his room.

“Jem and me'll lock the cull and his moll in the cellar till morning,” he said. “Taken me a rare time to snabble you, my buck, ain't it? You'll pay for it! Get down them dancers, and don't you go for to forget that this little pop o’ mine is mighty liable to go off ! Mighty liable it is!”

He motioned the landlord to go before him into the cupboard, grinning at John's face of horror. “Didn't suspicion what there was behind these here doors, did you?” he said.

“I never tried to open them. Good God, a stairway?"

“Down to the wash-house. Took me three visits to get a sight of them, too! Ah, and you'd have gone down ‘em feet first if I hadn't have been here, master, like a good few other young chubs! To think I been here four times, and never a blow come worth the biting until you walked in tonight, with your pocketbook full o’ flimseys, and your talk of no one suspicioning you was in England! Axing your pardon, you was a regular noddy, wasn't you, sir?”

Mr. Cranbrook agreed to it humbly, and brought up the rear of the little procession that wound its way down a steep, twisting stair to a stone-flagged wash-house, where a huge copper was steaming in one corner, and the tapster was standing over Mrs. Fyton, loudly protesting her innocence of evil intent in a chair in the middle of the room.

“My assistant—junior, o’ course, but a fly cove!” said Waggleswick, jerking a thumb at the tapster. “All right, Jem: we'll stow ‘em away under hatches now!”

John, whose revolted gaze had alighted on a chopper, lying on a stout, scrubbed table, was looking a little pale. He was left to his own reflections while the prisoners were driven down to the cellar; and his half-incredulous and wholly nauseated inspection of the wash-house made it unnecessary for Waggleswick to inform him, as he did upon his return with Jem, that it had been the Fytons’ practice to chop up the bodies of their victims, and to boil down the remains in the copper. “Though I don't rightly know what they done with the heads,” added Mr. Waggleswick thoughtfully.

John had heard tales reminiscent of this gruesome disclosure, but he had imagined that they belonged to an age long past.

“Lor’ no, sir!” said Waggleswick indulgently. “There's plenty of willains alive today! We've had this ken in our eye I dunno how long, but that Fyton he was a cunning one!”

“Ah!” nodded Jem, signifying portentous assent.

“You might have told me!” John said hotly.

“Well,” said Waggleswick, scratching his chin, “I might, o’ course, but you was in the nature of a honey-fall, sir, and I wasn't so werry sure as you'd be agreeable to laying in your bed awaiting for Fyton to come an’ murder you unbeknownst if I was to tell you what my lay was.”

A horrible thought crossed John's mind. “Miss Gateshead!”

"She's all right and tight! She was knowed to be putting up here, and Fyton never ran no silly risks.”

“'Adn't got no ‘addock stuffed with beans neither,” interpolated Jem, somewhat incomprehensibly.

Waggleswick said severely: “Don't talk that cant to flash coves as don't understand it, sap-head! What he means, sir, is she hadn't no full purse, like you told us all you had!”

“Not but what Fyton might ha’ done a bit in the body-snatching line,” suggested Jem.

Mr. Cranbrook shuddered.

“Well, he ain't snatched her body,” pointed out Mr. Waggleswick.

John looked at him. “She must not know of this! It is ghastly!”

Waggleswick scratched his chin again. “I dunno as she need. She won't be wanted as a witness—like you will, sir!”

“Yes, of course: I know that! I am very willing. Has that monster disposed of many travellers in this frightful way?”

“There's no saying,” replied Waggleswick. “Not above two or three since we got wind of it in Bow Street.”

“And before? It is horrible to think of!”

“Ah!” agreed Jem. “Dear knows 'ow many went into that there copper afore us Runners come down ‘ere!”

On this macabre thought, Mr. Cranbrook retired again to his interrupted repose, if not to enjoy much slumber, at least to employ his time profitably in thinking out what plausible tale he would concoct for Miss Gateshead's benefit in the morning.

* * * *

4.

They met in the coffee-room, still shuttered and unaired. Miss Gateshead was unbarring the shutters when John came into the room, and her comments on the lack of orderly management in the inn were pungent and to the point.

“I tugged and tugged at the bell, and who do you think brought me a can of hot water at last?” she said. “The tapster!”

“It is too bad! But the thing is that they were cast into a pucker by the landlady's being taken ill in the night,” explained John glibly. “Should you mind putting on your bonnet, and stepping out with me to partake of breakfast at one of the other inns?”

“Not at all!” replied Miss Gateshead promptly. “I am very sorry for the landlady, but she almost deserves to be taken ill for keeping her house in such a shocking state! I will fetch my bonnet and pelisse directly.” She paused, coloured slightly, and said in a shamefaced voice: “I am afraid you must have thought me very foolish last night! Indeed, I cannot imagine what can have possessed me to be so nonsensical! I never slept better in my life! Is it not odd what absurd fancies one can take into one's head when one is a little tired?”

“Most odd!” agreed Mr. Cranbrook, barely repressing a shiver.

Copyright © Georgette Heyer, 1960. Published in Pistols for Two by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks Inc. Originally published in the UK by William Heinemann Ltd. (1960) and by Arrow Books, a division of Random House UK.

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Department: THE STORY THAT WON

The March Mysterious Photograph contest was won by Randy DeWitt of Hudson, New Hampshire. Honorable mentions go to Jason Hunt of Hopedale, Massachusetts; Timothy Engelbrecht of Tampa, Florida; Timothy Hitchens of Middletown, Delaware; Cindy G. Brewer of Mount Pleasant, Michigan; Justin Fleischman of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania; Ed Farr of Brooklyn, New York; Archer Dales of Brethren, Michigan; Katie Brown of Garden City, Michigan; Jon Brunette of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

* * * *

Copyright (C) 2012 Smit/Shutterstock.com

* * * *

The Cable Job

Randy DeWitt

A white van with temporary magnetic signs of the area's cable provider pulled into the dirt driveway. The driver looked at the house, down at his clipboard, then back at the house. This cannot be the place, he thought.

“My name's Joey,” he told the man who met him at the front door, “I'm here to install cable.” Much to his surprise, the man showed him in. “Let's see here. You ordered our platinum package which includes all the premium channels and sports packages.”

The man nodded. Joey couldn't believe it. What the place really needed, before splurging on cable, was a television from this century. A nice flat-screen mounted to the wall would free up some counter space for a toaster or something. Some curtains—plural——and new furniture couldn't hurt either. Then, all the guy had to do was move out of this crap hole.

“Will I get all the cooking channels?” the man asked.

“You bet,” Joey answered. “Do you like to cook?”

He shook his head no. “Just watch. Mostly Ciao Italia."

Joey suddenly felt queasy. His last boss watched that show. Probably still did in Sing Sing thanks to Joey's testimony. His boss got a life sentence. Joey got a new identity and a job installing cable in the Midwest. He knew someone would be coming after him.

“So how do you like this place?” the man asked. “It's not much to look at, but it's great for trapping rats.”

* * * *

Editor's Note: Dell Magazines invites you to take a peek into the publishing world. Join our four fiction titles at the Brooklyn Book Festival, NYC's largest free literary event, for author signings, giveaways, subscription deals, writers’ guidelines, and more.

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Department: COMING IN OCTOBER 2012

CONSTABLE SMITH AND THE LOST DREAMTIME by Rex Burns

CRAZY EIGHTS by David Edgerley Gates

MAD DOG by Jas R. Petrin

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Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (ISSN:0002-5224), Vol. 57, No. 9, September 2012. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. Annual subscription $55.90 in the U.S.A. and possessions, $65.90 elsewhere, payable in advance in U.S. funds (GST included in Canada). Subscription orders and correspondence regarding subscriptions should be sent to 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Or, to subscribe, call ‘-800-220-7443. Editorial Offices: 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352. Executive Offices: 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. © 2012 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. The stories in this magazine are all fictitious, and any resemblance between the characters in them and actual persons is completely coincidental. Reproduction or use, in any manner, of editorial or pictorial content without express written permission is prohibited. Submissions must be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork. POSTMASTER: Send changes to Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. In Canada return to: Quad/Graphics Joncas, 4380 Garand, Saint-Laurent, Quebec H4R 2A3. GST #R123054108.

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