The Devereaux File
Page 22
Natasha Gorky took his face between her hands, looking up at him with starry pale-blue eyes. She said, “Let’s make it in the morning.”
78
Their previous morning had been harrowing, their trip long, their evening eventful and revealing, the hours prior to their final Chicago dawn emotionally and physically exhausting. They’d slept. They hadn’t gotten away in the morning, or in the afternoon. They’d gotten away at eight o’clock that night.
Natasha had driven south to the Eisenhower Expressway, swinging east to bore through the lower end of downtown Chicago, then south again. They’d just passed the 35th Street exit when Lockington said, “Would you pull over for just a moment?”
Natasha said, “Why—is something wrong?”
Lockington said, “Nothing that I can’t fix.”
She whipped the Mercedes onto the shoulder, stopping. Lockington got out, leaning against the car, looking back to the north. There she stood, the old whore—Chicago. She was silhouetted against the starless night sky, wearing her glittering diamond tiara of skyscraper lights, her long gray skirts of smog concealing her disease, her crimson sores, her seeping pustules. Lacey Lockington lifted his hand to her. He’d never come back, he knew that to be a fact. He just didn’t love her anymore.
A southbound blue-and-white slowed to pull behind the Mercedes. A policeman shoved his head through the window. “Trouble, buddy?”
Lockington swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, Chicago memories billowing over him. He said, “No problem, officer—I was just saying goodbye to Mrs. O’Leary.”
The cop said, “Mrs. O’Leary?”
Lockington opened the door to the Mercedes. He nodded. “Yeah—Mrs. O’Leary—she owned a cow—”
More from Ross H. Spencer
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Full of laugh-out-loud comedy and the darkest of intrigue, the author of DEATH WORE GLOVES draws together femme fatales, a not-so-saintly nun, and a gumshoe willing to do anything to help an old flame.
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When the CIA chooses Birch Kirby, a mediocre detective with a personal life even less thrilling than his professional one, no one is more surprised by the selection than Birch himself. But the Agency needs someone for a secret mission, and Birch may be just the clown for the job. Going undercover as a circus performer, he travels to Grizzly Gulch to investigate the source of daily, un-decodeable secret messages that are being transmitted to the KGB. Birch interacts with wildly colorful characters while stumbling through performances as well as his assignment. With the clock ticking, Birch must hurry to take a right step toward bringing the curtain down on this very important case.
The Lacey Lockington Series
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Detective Lacey Lockington always gets the job done, but making the omelets of solved cases usually involves breaking a lot of eggs. So when Lacey gets suspended after tabloid columnist Stella Starbright names him as a “kill-crazy cop,” he has to find new work as a private investigator. It’s a step down, for sure, and one of his first cases is an unlikely one: former “Stella Starbrights” are turning up dead on the streets of Chicago, and the current one, the reputation ruiner herself, turns to an unlikely source for protection.
Going against his gut, Lacey agrees to keep tabs on Stella to keep her from sharing the grisly fate of her former namesakes. In the midst of all the madness, Lacey hunts the real killer, someone looking to silence gossip columnists for good. But can Lacey crack the case before another victim makes a different section of the newspapers?
Sex…violence…booze! This deadly mix will keep you on the edge of your seat in Ross Spencer’s jaded-but-jaunty tale about a hardened cop with nothing but his reputation to lose.
The Fedorovich File
The Cold War heats up when trouble comes knocking on the door of ex-cop turned Private Eye Lacey Lockington. Lacey is hot on the trail of Alexi Fedorovich after the high-ranking general publishes a controversial exposé detailing that Glasnost/Perestroika is a hoax. Federovich goes into hiding in the last place he suspects someone will look for him—somewhere in Youngstown, Ohio.
For someone who’s pretty much seen and done it all, Lacey’s unnerved when he starts dealing with Russian spies, Federal Agents, a man who doesn’t want to be found, and an increasing body count of all his leads. Will Lacey, along with former KGB agent and live-in lover Natasha, get to the bottom of it all before Fedorovich finds himself on the wrong end of a firing squad?
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A quick and easy buck sounds good to Private Investigator Chance Purdue. But the paycheck seems to be a bit harder to earn when the job entails more than just looking into the a minor league baseball team in southern Illinois. His new client, the gangster Cool Lips Chericola, is definitely leaving out details. Enter Brandy Alexander, whose unexpected appearance in Stranger City, Illinois complicates things. Then throw in the Bobby Crackers’ Blitzkrieg for Christ religious crusade, and you’ve got a super-charged powderkeg of a caper, with Chance holding both the match and the barrel.
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The Radish River Caper
Private Investigator Chance Purdue and Brandy Alexander work in tandem on a case that finds them traveling to the Illinois town of Radish River. The CIA continues to need help putting a stop to the DADA (Destroy America, Destroy America) Conspiracy, a terrorist organization whose latest plot is completely under wraps, except that it promises immense destruction. Things prove difficult for Chance and Brandy as they do what they can to remain focused on the task at hand. But it’s hard when distractions from football-playing gorillas, chariot races, copious booze—and especially each other—weav
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