“Tomorrow. The only reason I’m even staying in this rattrap tonight is because the man was supposed to come this afternoon and postponed at the last minute.”
“But the treasure—”
“Go, Mrs. McClure. It’s time for you to leave, before I call the police and have you arrested.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” I muttered. “Not again.”
CHAPTER 19
Maybe I did have a taste for death. Maybe I liked it too much to taste anything else.
—Mike Hammer in
by Mickey Spillane, 1951
“DAMN THOSE WEATHERMEN! Slight chance of rain, my rear!”
The precipitation had been light when I left Prospero House, a pacific patter on the roof. I’d slid behind the wheel of my Saturn, started the engine, and once again negotiated the twisting turns of Roderick Road.
By the time I reached the highway, however, the skies opened up. Sheets of rain transformed my windshield into a mini Niagra. The road was awash in water, and I half expected to see men with beards and yellow slickers trolling for cod.
“No jokes?” I thought. “No jibes?”
That’s when I realized Jack was as worried for me as I was. I tried to calm down and concentrate on the driving, but it wasn’t easy. My mind was still racing with the revelation that Nelson Spinner had been working with Peter Chesley and he hadn’t bothered to mention it. In fact, it seemed to me, he’d gone out of his way to hide it.
And then there was Raymond Chesley. So hostile to his biological father that it made me want to cry. The guy looked pretty hardy. Was he capable of murder and assault?
I shook my head. “Peter Chesley must have been a real bastard at one time. Certainly, his own son seems to think so. I found him sweet and eccentric…but then, I only spent an hour or so with him.”
“She’s struggling with a lot of regrets about what happened between them. She says their squabbles all seem petty in retrospect, but I know my aunt. She’s made of pretty stern stuff and she’s got a lot of fight. The man must have been a real jerk for her to have wanted the relationship to end.”
“What’s that?”
“Sounds like my marriage.”
“What gave you your first clue? The swan dive?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a thought. If Peter was anything like Claymore at the same age, then I can see why his relationships went south.”
The highway was slick, and there were very few cars behind me. When the single car ahead of me turned onto an exit, I flipped on my high beams for better visibility. A minute later, I saw the illuminated road sign for the Comfy-Time Motel rest stop, and I exhaled with relief. Quindicott was just around the next dark corner.
“Jack, that ‘dame’ you quoted a minute ago, why do those words sound so familiar to me?”
“Wait! That was Mindy Corbett who said that. I dreamed she said it to you the night before she was murdered—”
I was slowing the car down, anticipating my exit’s tricky off-ramp when I felt a violent bump.
“Whoa! What the heck?!”
I checked the rearview and saw bright headlights bearing down from behind. The car was big and black—an SUV, for sure—but I couldn’t see anything more than the dark silhouette of a man in the driver’s seat.
“What the hell does this jerk think he’s doing?!”
I never got an answer.
The impact came just as I’d turned onto the exit ramp. The SUV slammed me from behind but not full on. He hit me at an angle, driving me off the road and into a shallow ditch. The front end bounced down then up, and smashed into the massive trunk of a very old tree.
Like a ragdoll, my body had been thrown forward, then back, then forward again. With an exploding hiss, my airbag deployed, and I felt the painful impact of the bag’s cold inflated material smacking my face.
Dazed, close to passing out, I heard the sound of a car door slamming somewhere nearby. The jerk, I realized. The jerk is coming to pull me out.
But he didn’t.
I heard a car door opening and realized the man had entered my car through the back door. He was searching the back seat for something. Then he opened my door and felt around the floorboard for the trunk release. I was strapped in and nearly unconscious, but I willed my head to turn out of the bag. The night was so dark, the rain still falling. All I could see was the silhouette of a man in black, a ball cap shoved low on his head, a dark scarf tied around his face.
“Who are you?” I murmured, the words jumbled gibberish to my own ears.
The sound of the trunk popping open was the only reply. Then the man’s dark image was gone; the cold rain continued to pelt the windshield, and my eyes fell heavily closed.
New York City
October 22, 1946
My eyes opened.
I stood in a dim alley between two run-down tenements. Dingy brick walls rose five stories on either side of me; rusted black fire escapes clung like dead vines to their dirty sides. Laundry hung from frayed ropes between the buildings. The faded clothes fluttered over my head like dejected flags—patched and repatched, the sort of threadbare garments I’d seen people wearing in histories of the Great Depression.
I heard shouts and followed the sound out of the dim tunnel until I reached the sidewalk. Like a period movie, I watched the street action play out in the day’s waning light.
Kids with grimy faces in dirty pants, fraying sweaters, and flat newsboy caps were playing some sort of dice game on a stone stoop, next to a passed-out man clutching a bottle in a brown paper bag. A taxicab driver and a bicycle messenger were shouting their heads off at each other. And impossibly huge cars, not boxy like SUVs, but antique Packards and DeSotos, long and wide and heavy, rumbled down the one-way street.
The smell in the air was a combination of putrid garbage overflowing from cans lined up at the curb and a strong, stinging smell that I guessed was unleaded gasoline.
I started down the block and noticed the cross-street signs. “Tenth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street?” I recognized the address, but nothing else.
In my time, this Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood wasn’t notorious or scary—just an extension of Times Square’s
