It’s a helluva way to wake up. I mean, there you are, sleeping the sleep of the pure and innocent, and suddenly there’s an industrial-strength, four D-cell flashlight beam burning through your eyelids.
What happened next wasn’t any gentler. A huge paw emerged out of the darkness and grabbed the collar of my pajamas and gave me a good shake.
I groped for an intelligent response, but all I came out with was "Wha..?" Which earned me another shake.
"Where’s Herman Thigpen?" The source of the voice was invisible behind the blinding light, but the quality was not something you want to hear in your worst nightmare, which maybe this was. The voice sounded like a vise was closing on his larynx, forcing the words out as guttural spitballs.
"Who the hell’s Herman Thigpen?" I asked foggily, still trying to get a grip on reality. All I could think of was the four locks on my apartment door. So much for security.
Another shake, this time setting my head bobbing on the top of my spine. The next one might find me holding it in my lap.
"You was seen talkin’ to him in Marco’s Bar tonight," the bodiless voice croaked.
"We want him."
It wasn’t very long ago that I had been in Marco’s, and my incipient hangover wasn’t being improved by the head shaking. But the mention of Marco’s also restored my addled memory.
"You mean Piggy" I asked. "Why didn’t you say so?"
From Payback
He sat quietly in the stolen Buick, the engine idling and his gloved hand resting lightly on the steering wheel, A fine mist was falling, and the wipers made an intermittent sweep across the windshield. His eyes were intent on the door of a pre-fab building that rested on concrete blocks 20 feet across the parking lot. In about two minutes, all hell was going to break loose.
He felt himself tensing as the seconds ticked by, but even so he wasn’t prepared when the "whoop! whoop!" of the alarm shattered the stillness. Automatically, his hand grasped the gear-shift level and his right foot hovered oner the accelerator.
From Silenced Witness
Lt. Henry Zaaf pushed open the door to Mary-Ellen Rafferty's cubicle office and stuck in his gray-thatched head.
"Got a minute, M-E?" he asked. "Somebody you should meet."
Zaaf stepped aside to usher in a tall man with granite chin, wavy brown hair and blue eyes. He was dressed in a conservative single-breasted gray business suit with a snowy white shirt and a red-and-navy rep tie.
FBI, Mary-Ellen silently bet herself.
"M-E, I want you to meet Matt Philbin, special agent of the FBI," Henry said. "Matt, this is Sergeant Mary-Ellen Rafferty."
"Hi," she said. She stood up behind the battered desk and offered her hand. She was wearing brown slacks and a white turtle-neck sweater with the sleeves pushed half-way up her arms. Since a recent near-fatal car crash in the line of duty had necessitated her auburn hair being cut, she was wearing it in a gamin style that made her look about 18. Which, being on the flip-side of 30, she decided wasn't all bad.
Philbin shook her hand perfunctorily. "Uh-huh," he said in a tone that suggested they get on with it.
"Matt's here about the Harley Thomason killing," Zaaf explained. "We've been asked to cooperate with the Bureau."
"Oh, yeah, the guy in the witness protection system," Mary-Ellen said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. "I thought that would be a Federal Marshal responsibility since they run the program."
Philbin shrugged. "It's still a Federal crime to kill a Federal witness, and the Bureau was asked to investigate. I'd appreciate it if you'd send your files on the case over to our offices in the Federal Building."
He turned to go.
"Just a minute," she said sharply. Philbin turned around. "You sound like you're taking over the case."
From Nature Study
Walter Murdoch was certain that someone would try to kill him. What's more, he thought he knew who would make the attempt.
Irene Murdoch told him he was crazy. In the first place, she said, it was absurd to think that members of FPNE -- the Friends and Protectors of the Natural Environment -- now on a cruise along the Baja California peninsula of Mexico would harbor an assassin. In the second place, she added, Gerald Dykstra, the man Walter had picked out as his suspect, was about the last person in the world to perform such an act.
To be fair about it, Walter had some grounds for paranoia. As a bank executive, his recent court testimony about money laundering had sent to prison not only the bank president but also an assortment of hard-eyed individuals of questionable pedigree. From their sinister stares at him all through the trial, they were sending a message that all were exceedingly upset with Walter for disrupting their life styles and would welcome an opportunity to redress their complaint.
From Hotwire
"It's a messy one, M-E." Jose Ortega's voice crackled over the police radio in Mary-Ellen Rafferty's car. "Really messy."
"Thanks for the warning, Jose," she answered. "I'll be there in a few minutes. Ten-four."
Aborting her trip from the Federal building to police headquarters, Mary-Ellen reached out the window and clapped the magnetic base of the blue flasher to the roof of her unmarked car. Turning on the light and the siren, she began weaving through what downtown Valleyport would call heavy traffic.
If Jose, a veteran of the robbery-homicide division, considered this one "messy," she thought, it must be bad.
From Friendly Fire
As time passed, the wound bothered Damon Forsythe less and less. In the early years, he sometimes woke up in a cold sweat, reliving not so much the impact of the bullet hitting him as the pain that pervaded his body when the initial shock wore off. Now, it was only on a particularly cold and damp day that he might feel a stiffness in his shoulder.
The wound, itself, had healed nicely. There was a quarter-size scar just under his right shoulder blade where the bullet had entered. The torn muscles had knitted, and his tennis game, not great in the first place, didn't get any worse over the 20 or so years since the shooting occurred.
That was the physical side of the trauma. The mental residue was something else.
More than the pain and the weeks in the hospital, Damon would remember the circumstances of the wound. He had been a young infantry lieutenant leading a patrol on a scout of some nameless Vietnamese hamlet in the Highlands looking for Viet Cong presence. It was a hot day, and the men had followed the usual practice of leaving behind their sweltering, mildewed flak jackets.
From Press "Enter" for Murder
"So, why aren't you calling it suicide?" the reporter from the Journal asked.
Mary-Ellen Rafferty grimaced at the question. But Chief Prentiss Percy handled it with his usual aplomb: he tossed it to her.
"We're working very hard to get all the facts," Percy said smoothly, "but I'll ask Sergeant Rafferty, who's in charge of the case, to respond in more detail."
She permitted herself a swear-word which, if audible, would raise public doubt about Chief Percy's parentage. The press conference had been a lousy idea at this stage of the investigation, and she had so told her immediate boss, Lt. Henry Zaaf, head of Robbery/Homicide. She assumed Henry had passed on her concerns, but Prissy Percy was never one to avoid the limelight, especially when it was such a high-profile case. After all, Valleyport's leading industrialist didn't die by gunshot every day, and even area reporters for the New York City dailies were covering the story.
From Nightmare on Bonaire
Webster Bolton stood with his hands resting against the railing of the large covered balcony, wondering whether what he saw was real or just a movie set. The sky was crisply blue with white fluffy clouds drifting in the easterly trade winds. A rainbow, residue of an early-morning rain, plunged into the blue waters of the Caribbean with such clarity that he was tempted to believe the story of the pot of gold at its base. Nearer the shore, the water turned brilliant aqua, reflecting the sunlight off the varied coral formations just beneath the surface.
Below him was the swimming pool, inactive now except for the workman pushing a vacuum cleaner on a long rod. Beyond the pool, the covered, but open-air, dining room was serving its late-breakfasting patrons, and at the dock, the dive-boat crew was loading compressed-air tanks for the first scuba expedition of the day. Mockingbirds flitted through the bougainvillea and palm trees that dotted the compound, and the air carried their songs and the scent of wild gardenias.
Webster sighed as he drank in the vista and the sounds and scents, too much aware that this was his last day on the island of Bonaire. In just a few hours he and Joyce would be boarding a plane on the first leg of their return trip to Chicago, nearly 2,500 miles to the still-cold north, and by this time next week, they would have only their fading tans and photographs to remind them of the occasion.
From The Key
Mary-Ellen Rafferty stared with distaste at the crime scene. Her aversion was not so much to the corpse sprawled in the middle of the threadbare rug in a sea of blood from a surprisingly small hole in its chest, but rather to the fact that the event had taken her away from luncheon with the neat new assistant district attorney.
It was not that she objected to business over pleasure. A good murder was a challenge, and she was paid to solve it. But this one -- in a seedy motel on the outskirts of Hudson River town of Valleyport, where the rooms usually were rented by the hour, hardly looked as if it would compensate for ruining a promising lunch.
Moreover, she wasn't dressed for the job. She had exchanged her heels for sneakers in the car, but her clothes were another matter. Instead of her businesslike blouse and slacks, she wore a pale green silk suit with a bolero jacket and a frilly white blouse with a strategically-cut V-neck. And the length of the skirt did not encourage kneeling beside strange bodies or searching for clues in remote corners. Her auburn hair hung softly to her shoulders, framing her oval face with the wide-spread eyes and faintly turned-up nose, rather than being gathered in an on-the-job bun at the base of her neck.
From Thunderstorm
Thunder rumbled across Lake Michigan, too distant to pose an immediate threat of rain. The sun no doubt had risen in the East as usual, but there was no sign of it behind the heavy overcast. And while storm advisories hadn’t yet been posted, rain was forecast and sensible boaters were unlikely to venture through the channel from Sauble Lake to the Big Lake on a day like this.
Despite the weather, Marie Trainor opened up early on this late-Spring Friday morning and prepared for a busy day. Perversely, the poorer the weather, the harder she seemed to work. Absentee boat owners up from Lansing or Grand Rapids for a long weekend on their craft, or the local summer-cottage people with boats in the marina slips, tended to use a non-sailing day to polish the brass, sort out the rigging, work on balky engines and perform other maintenance chores. These tasks usually required purchase of some kind of gear at her store. On a sunny day, however, while fuel, ice and beer sales were good, the marina would empty out early, and the boats wouldn’t be seen again until the five o’clock martini ritual.
From The Island
The Island may once have had a name, probably something unpronounceable bestowed by ancestors of the local Passamaquoddy Indians a few centuries ago. If so, it is long gone from the history books, and even the navigation charts leave it unlabeled, showing only an uninhabited speck in the North Atlantic with dangerous currents, rocky outcroppings and a warning that shipping should give it a wide berth.
But it is not without an official appellation. In Washington, D.C., in the files and budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it is recorded as Site J-743W. But for those who are familiar with the place -- and there are few -- it is just the Island, 30 square miles of rock and forest about 40 miles off the coast of northern Maine.
Site J-743W was the latest experiment in a long line of futile efforts to reduce crime in America. When "three-strikes-you're out," designed to put the thrice-convicted felon away for life, failed to stanch the soaring crime statistics, the government reduced the formula to "two-and-you're-through."
Even that, however, did not register even a slight blip in the statistical curve line. Incumbent politicians, battling against a continuing barrage from opponents for being "soft on crime," grew more frantic in their search for Draconian approaches to the problem.
From Deathbid
The bar was not the kind of place that Mary-Ellen Rafferty would have entered on a social occasion. Located on a side street between a working-class neighborhood and the industrial area of the Hudson River town of Valleyport, it was a squat, one-story building flanked by two tenements. The board-and-batten exterior was stained almost black. What once had been a rectangular window facing the street was covered with plywood supporting neon script that spelled out "Cocktails - Beer". Two pickup trucks were parked at the curb.
The fact that it was afternoon in broad daylight failed to ease Mary-Ellen's apprehension, and she wished she had either Tubby Davidson or Jose Ortega from her robbery-homicide team with her. Maybe both. Gathering her resolve, she pushed open the door.
Daylight or not, the windowless interior lived in perennial semi-darkness. A half-dozen light bulbs under industrial metal shades dangling from the ceiling barely cut the fuggy atmosphere that was a blend of years of tobacco smoke and stale beer. The only bright areas were over a pool table in the corner and the long bar that occupied one side of the single room.
When her eyes became accustomed to the gloom, Mary-Ellen saw that the room held maybe 10 male customers scattered among the tables. Behind the bar was a beefy man wearing a soiled dress shirt open at the collar and a spattered apron. Every eye turned toward her as she reluctantly closed the door behind her. Shivering slightly, she drew her navy pea jacket closed and approached the scarred mahogany bar. A scarf covered her auburn hair, and she was thankful she was wearing slacks. Even so she felt she was being undressed.