Tightrope

by Amanda Quick

  He opened the door of a small room and pulled a cord that dangled from an overhead fixture. A weak bulb came on, illuminating an office that was nearly buried under years of clutter. Papers, notebooks, manuals, and catalogs advertising engineering and scientific supplies were stacked on the floor and piled on top of an old metal desk. The bookshelves that stood against one wall were crammed with heavy manuals and thick tomes.

  “Are you responsible for this mess?” Amalie asked.

  “No, it was like this when I got here the first time,” Matthias said. “I don’t think anyone, except me, searched the place. There’s a thick layer of dust on the stacks of books and the drawings. Norman Pickwell was not a man of neat and orderly habits.”

  Amalie turned on her heel. “Where do we start?”

  “I’ll take the desk. You can start with the papers and drawings piled on the floor.”

  “What about the filing cabinet? Isn’t that where most people put important papers?”

  “We’ll save the cabinet for last. Judging by the condition of the workshop, it’s a good bet that Pickwell was the kind of inventor who would have kept anything related to a current project conveniently at hand.”

  “Good point. You’ve had some experience with this sort of thing, haven’t you?”

  Matthias opened a desk drawer. “Some.”

  “What am I looking for?” she asked.

  “We’re interested in any papers or notes that look new or recent. Ignore anything that has turned yellow with age or has a coat of dust on it.”

  “That means we can ignore ninety percent of the stuff in this office.”

  “Yes, I think so,” Matthias said.

  Amalie hefted a copy of Mechanical Engineers’ Handbook and picked up the drawings that it had anchored on the floor. The title of the first one was “Ball and Roller Bearings.” The next one was “Spring Relief Valve.”

  “This is going to take a while,” she said.

  “We’ve got time.”

  Twenty minutes later Matthias closed the last drawer in the desk. He had a large envelope in one hand.

  “This looks new,” he said.

  He dumped the contents of the envelope onto the desk. A familiar stillness came over him.

  “Now this is interesting,” he said softly.

  Amalie moved closer to the desk and watched Matthias flip through some drawings.

  “That’s Futuro,” she said, “the robot that shot Pickwell. Those drawings don’t look anything like the robot out there in the workshop.”

  “No, they don’t. I wonder what inspired Pickwell to change the final look so drastically.”

  “Maybe he was a fan of some of the science fiction magazines, like Astounding Stories,” Amalie suggested. “They feature robots and alien monsters on the covers all the time.”

  Matthias looked around. “There’s no evidence that Pickwell read fiction of any kind.”

  “Well, he could have gotten his inspiration from a cover of Popular Mechanics, I suppose. Regardless, this version of Futuro is a lot better-looking than the original.”

  “There is nothing in this workshop that indicates that Pickwell cared about design,” Matthias said. “He was not particularly creative in any way, as far as I’ve been able to determine. So what could have made him devote so much energy to a fancy new look for Futuro?”

  Glass shattered somewhere in the workshop. Amalie yelped in surprise. She looked through the open doorway and saw a small, rounded object rolling across the floor.

  Matthias wrapped a hand around her upper arm and hauled her out of the doorway.

  “Under the desk,” he ordered. “Move.”

  He shoved her into the open area under the metal desk and squeezed in beside her.

  “Someone threw a rock through the window?” she asked.

  “Not a rock,” Matthias said. “Fingers in ears. Do it.”

  She obeyed.

  The explosion boomed in the adjoining room, so loud and disorienting that Amalie knew she would have been deafened if she had not obeyed Matthias’s orders to block her ears.

  The shock of the blast reverberated through the walls and floors. The entire building shuddered. More glass shattered. Some of the flying shards came from the pane set into the office door. She and Matthias would have been lacerated, quite possibly blinded, or even killed had they not been wedged into the space under the desk.

  An eternity passed before an eerie silence fell. Matthias took his fingers out of his ears and reached inside his jacket for his gun.

  Amalie lowered her hands and discovered that even though she had managed to partially block her ears, they still rang. Cold chills sent shiver after shiver through her.

  “What just happened?” she managed.

  “Grenade.”

  Chapter 29

  A car engine roared in the street. Tires shrieked.

  Matthias got to his feet, gun in hand, and looked down at Amalie.

  “Stay where you are,” he said. “He might be waiting outside to see if we survived.”

  “I just heard a car,” she said. “It sounded like whoever was driving was in a very big hurry to get as far away as possible.”

  “Odds are it’s the bastard who threw the grenade but I want to be sure he’s gone.”

  “A mysterious tire blowout last night and a grenade blast today,” Amalie said. “The next time we go on a date I’m going to bring my own gun.”

  “My social life is not usually this exciting,” he said.

  “Neither is mine.”

  He moved cautiously out of the doorway, watching the shattered windows for any sign of a shift in the shadows that might indicate someone was circling the workshop in search of fleeing targets.

  The interior of Pickwell’s shop had looked like a junkyard before the explosion. Now it resembled one that had been struck by a tornado. Tools, chunks of metal, instruments, and equipment had been swept off the workbenches and strewn around the room. Shards of glass crunched beneath Matthias’s shoes as he made his way through the outer room to the front door.

  He got it open. No one fired at him. He took that as a good sign. But he was too late to get a look at the vehicle that had raced away from the scene a moment earlier.

  Three men dressed in shabby clothes emerged from behind a boarded-up structure and gathered in the street in front of the workshop.

  Matthias slipped the gun back into its holster and moved outside. Alarmed by the sight of him, the three turned to run.

  “It’s all right,” Matthias said. He reached inside his jacket again. This time he took out his wallet. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  The sight of the wallet riveted all three men.

  “You okay, mister?” one of them asked. His long hair was tied back with a strip of leather. “Sounded like somethin’ blew sky-high in there.”

  Another one of the group stared at Matthias with wild eyes, as if he was fighting to control a nightmare that was threatening to swamp his senses. He trembled visibly.

  “Grenade,” he rasped. “Thought I was back in the trenches.”

  “It’s all right,” Matthias said. “No one was hurt.”

  He tried to keep his voice quiet and calm. It was not the first time he had met a veteran of the Great War. Not all battle wounds were visible. Far too many of the former soldiers looked out at the world with the eyes of men who had witnessed what no decent man should have to witness. The term that had been coined for the condition was shell shock.

  “Somethin’ went wrong in that crazy inventor’s workshop, didn’t it?” Long Hair said. “Always figured he’d blow himself up someday.”

  “Did any of you get a look at that car that just drove off?” Matthias asked.

  “I did,” Shell Shock said. “Black Ford sedan. Looked new. Why?”

/>   “I’d like to ask the driver some questions,” Matthias said. “Did anyone see him?”

  “Didn’t get a good look at him,” the third man said. “He parked his car behind that garage over there. We kept our heads down. We were afraid that the owner of one of these old warehouses had sent him around to run us off.”

  Long Hair spit on the ground. “Probably a mob man lookin’ to dump a body.”

  “Did you notice his clothes?” Matthias asked.

  “Had a hat pulled down real low so I couldn’t see his hair or his face,” Third Man said. “Looked like a quality coat, though. Dark brown. I used to have a coat like that.”

  So much for a description, Matthias thought.

  He asked a few more questions, probing for details, but it was obvious that the three transients had not seen much.

  He handed around some bills, waved off a lot of effusive thanks, and turned to go back into the workshop.

  “I’ll tell ya one thing,” Shell Shock called out.

  Matthias stopped on the doorstep and turned back. “What?”

  “I saw him throw that grenade. Pulled the pin. Waited a couple of seconds before he tossed it through the window. He weren’t no amateur. He knew what he was doing.”

  Chapter 30

  “That grenade was intended to kill us,” Amalie said.

  They were sitting in a booth at a roadside diner on the outskirts of Playa Dorada. There were a mug of coffee and a toasted cheese sandwich in front of her. She had yet to take a bite of the sandwich. Matthias, on the other hand, had just polished off a large plate of fried chicken accompanied by mashed potatoes and gravy and some overcooked green beans. Evidently the excitement back at Pickwell’s workshop had given him an appetite.

  She had yet to decide exactly how she was feeling. Words like nervy, jumpy, and disoriented sprang to mind but did not quite capture the essence of the emotions that were still shivering through her. For the second time in her life someone had tried to kill her. If the tire blowout the previous night had, in fact, been another attempt, that made three tries. How many lives did a former trapeze artist have?

  She picked up the coffee and then immediately put it back down. The last thing she wanted to do was stimulate her already overstimulated nerves.

  A short time ago Matthias had called Luther Pell from the pay phone booth outside the entrance of the diner. He had returned with the news that Pell would be making inquiries at the Burning Cove gas stations to see if anyone driving a black Ford sedan had filled up a tank in preparation for the hundred-mile-plus drive to Playa Dorada. It was a long shot, Matthias said, but it was all they had at the moment.

  He picked up his coffee mug and looked thoughtful.

  “It was a spur-of-the-moment attack,” he said. “He saw an opportunity and took it. But he couldn’t hang around to make sure we were dead. Too many witnesses.”

  “Those three transients.”

  “Right.”

  Amalie sat back in her seat. “Who carries a grenade around to keep it handy in case he might need it?”

  “A professional gunrunner, like Smith or someone working for him.”

  “If you’re right about Smith, if he really is trying to do one last big deal before he leaves the country, he has a lot at stake. That makes him very dangerous.”

  “Yes,” Matthias said. “It also means he’s willing to take more risks. That can work in our favor.”

  “With luck he’ll think we’re dead.”

  “Maybe for a while. But he won’t be convinced of that for long. We have to get out ahead of him.”

  “You were right,” she said. “He’s sticking around because he didn’t get what he wanted the night the robot shot Pickwell.”

  “We have to go with that theory. Otherwise, he would have left the country with the Ares machine by now.”

  Matthias radiated an ice-cold determination. Amalie knew that he would not quit. She wondered if the unknown Mr. Smith understood that simple truth about Matthias Jones, as well.

  “What do we do next?” she asked.

  Matthias’s jaw tightened. “Before we discuss that, I want to tell you I’m sorry for dragging you into this situation.”

  “I’m not thrilled to be involved, either,” she said. “But it’s not your fault that Pickwell chose to stay at the Hidden Beach Inn, and you aren’t responsible for the break-in that occurred the other night. We’re in this together.”

  “Yes,” Matthias said. “It’s possible you would be safe if I walked away and left you alone, but I doubt it.”

  “You think that Smith would come after me.”

  “He would want to know whatever you could tell him about me and about my conclusions,” Matthias said. He gripped the edge of the table very tightly with both hands. “No, I can’t walk away, Amalie. You would still be in danger.”

  Amalie folded her arms and studied him for a moment, trying to read him. It was a fruitless task. She finally gave up.

  “I understand,” she said. “What happens next?”

  “You want a list? We need to get back to Burning Cove so that Chester Ward and I can take the robot apart. I have to study those drawings that we found in Pickwell’s office. I’d like to talk to someone who knew Charlie Hubbard here in Playa Dorada—”

  “Wait,” Amalie said. “Why do you want to talk to one of Hubbard’s pals?”

  “Because Hubbard was involved from the beginning of this thing. That means he was recruited. Whoever convinced him to assist with the theft of the cipher machine has links to Smith.”

  “So much to do, so little time.”

  “We’ll start with Hubbard.”

  “How do we go about locating someone who knew him?”

  “Hubbard bunked under his employer’s roof. He could not have met with Smith’s agent there. Whoever he was in contact with had to rendezvous with him at some other location.”

  “Such as?”

  “Most working men have a favorite diner or bar where they feel comfortable. It’s always someplace that’s convenient to wherever they live.”

  “That neighborhood looked mostly deserted,” Amalie said. “I doubt if there’s a diner or bar in the area. There wouldn’t be much local business.”

  “There was a streetcar stop a few blocks from Pickwell’s shop. Probably the last stop on the line. We’ll check it out after we finish here. Shouldn’t be too hard to find the diner or bar where Hubbard was a regular.”

  Amalie looked at her uneaten sandwich. “I think I’m finished.”

  * * *

  Matthias was right. It didn’t take any great investigative work to locate the diner where Charlie Hubbard liked to drink coffee and chat with a waitress named Polly. But Polly wasn’t available. She had taken the day off to visit her ailing mother. She was not due back until the morning shift.

  It was late afternoon by the time Amalie and Matthias left the diner.

  “We’re not driving back to Burning Cove tonight, are we?” Amalie said. “We would just have to turn around and come back to Playa Dorada early tomorrow morning to catch the waitress.”

  “You’re right.” Matthias opened the passenger side door of the Packard. “We’re going to spend the night somewhere near Playa Dorada. We’ll find a hotel. Sorry about this.”

  Amalie paused, one stacked-heel sandal on the floorboard, one still on the ground. She glared at Matthias.

  “Stop apologizing,” she said. “I told you, it’s not your fault that I got caught up in this mess.”

  Matthias cleared his throat. “That’s not what I was apologizing for.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was apologizing because I’m afraid that, regardless of where we stay, we’re going to have to check in as Mr. and Mrs. Jones.”

  “Oh.”

  Chapter 31

  “The honeymoon
suite?” Amalie stopped in the middle of the richly appointed room and folded her arms very tightly under her breasts. “I knew this situation might be awkward but what in the world were you thinking when you told the clerk that we were newlyweds who had just eloped?”

  “Give me a break,” Matthias said. “I had to explain the lack of luggage and the fact that neither of us is wearing a wedding ring. The clerk needed a reasonable excuse for ignoring those little details. I gave him one, along with a twenty. It was his idea to give us this suite.”

  She opened her mouth to tell Matthias what she thought of his reasonable excuse—and closed it again when it dawned on her that he was right. She sighed.

  Besides, she thought, she could hardly complain about the accommodations. The hotel was far and away the most expensive one in which she had ever stayed. It was tucked into a wealthy enclave on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The grounds were lush and green. Palm trees lined the drive and masses of flowering plants offered privacy. In addition to the main building, there were a number of exclusive little cottages, like the honeymoon suite, scattered around the grounds.

  The interior of the suite was done in fashionable shades of green and gold. It boasted a sitting area with two cushioned chairs and a sofa. There was also a large, luxurious bath that glowed with elaborate tile work.

  But by far the most impressive object in the space was the massive four-poster bed. It was certainly large enough for two people to sleep without making physical contact but Amalie found the thought of actually spending an entire night in the same bed with Matthias disconcerting. And maybe a little thrilling. She decided not to explore that realization.

  “My turn to apologize,” she said. She was aware that she did not sound particularly gracious but it was the best she could do under the circumstances. She searched for a way to change the subject. “I think the clerk actually believed you.”

  “He did.” Matthias peeled off his jacket. “Or, at least, he wanted to believe me, and that’s usually all it takes to get someone to go along with a lie.”