Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (23 page)

The blond man cocked his head and knit his brow. “Why? Because I am the man with the gun, Mr. Hunt.”

“Why do you
want
it?” Gabriel said. “It’s not that valuable. It’ll fetch maybe five, six grand on the black market, if you’re lucky. It hardly seems worth your time.”

The blond man stepped nearer. This close, Gabriel got a good look at the man’s eyes and could see the brutality he concealed beneath his veneer of civility. The man opened his mouth to answer, then changed his mind and swung his Magnum, slamming the heavy butt into Gabriel’s jaw. Gabriel’s head snapped back. At least this time he managed to stay on his feet.

“The key,” the blond man repeated.

Gabriel narrowed his eyes. He tasted blood and spat red-tinged saliva onto the carpet. “You better hope I never see you again.”

The man cocked the Magnum. “You will never see
anyone
again, Mr. Hunt, if you don’t hand over the key.” And when Gabriel failed to do so: “For heaven’s sake, Hunt, what difference does it make to you? What were you planning to do with it, stick it in one of these cases? Photograph it for
National Geographic
? Give it to the Metropolitan? What a colossal waste. You don’t even know what the key unlocks.”

“And you do?”

The blond man leveled the barrel of the Magnum at Gabriel’s forehead and said, “Five.”

“Tell me,” Gabriel said. “Tell me what the key opens.”

“Four.”

“Gabriel, for God’s sake,” Clyde muttered from his barstool. “My ice is melting. Just give the man whatever he’s looking for, and I’ll buy you and the lady a round.”

“Three.”

The blond man swung the gun to point it at Katherine. Her hands shot up as though they might be able to deflect a bullet. “Two.”

“Gabriel!”

“One—”

“All right,” Gabriel said. “All right. Just…put that thing away.”

The blond man took the gun off of Katherine and swung it to face Gabriel instead.

Gabriel unbuttoned his shirt. The Death’s Head Key hung on a leather strap around his neck. He lifted it over his head. The blond man snatched the heavy bronze key with his free hand and held it up, eyeing it with satisfaction.

No one knew how old the Death’s Head Key was. It had been given its name in 1581 when the explorer Vincenzo de Montoya found it on a trip through Asia and noticed its bow was shaped like a skull, with concavities where the eye sockets might have been and a diamond-shaped groove between them. No one, not even de Montoya, knew what it unlocked—but whatever it was, Gabriel could guess from the look of the thing that it was no simple door. Most keys had a single blade that fit into the keyway of a lock, but the Death’s Head Key had three, one straight and the other two flanking it at forty-five degree angles. De Montoya had reportedly worn it around his neck as a good luck charm, but it hadn’t kept up its end of the bargain. His luck ran out when he disappeared during an Amazon expedition a few years later, and the Death’s Head Key had been lost with him.

Lost, until Gabriel found it, still dangling from the broken neck of de Montoya’s skeleton at the bottom of a deep pit in the rain forest.

Now, watching the blond man stuff the Death’s Head Key in his pocket, Gabriel couldn’t help feeling it was about to become lost once again.

“Very thoughtful, Mr. Hunt,” the blond man said. “You’ve saved the custodians of this establishment quite a bit of mopping.” He backed slowly toward the lounge door, keeping his gun leveled at Gabriel. “Let’s go,” he said, and the three thugs holstered their revolvers and exited before him. The blond man gave Gabriel a final nod and disappeared through the doorway.

When he heard the front door open, Gabriel followed at a run, passing Hank, the League’s elderly doorman, where he lay slumped unconscious on the floor.

In the street outside, a pair of doors slammed on a gunmetal gray Cadillac and it peeled off, tires squealing against the asphalt. Gabriel raced out into the street and ran half a block after them, but they shot through a red light and vanished in the distance.

Gabriel walked back to the League building and into the lounge, where Wade was already dialing the police from the phone behind the bar. “Button up, young man,” he said, aiming a finger at Gabriel’s chest. “There are women pres—oh, hello, yes, I’d like to report an incident.”

There was only one woman present, and Gabriel lowered himself into the chair beside her, fuming. For weeks he’d meticulously traced de Montoya’s path through the Amazon, sweating through the jungle heat and all the days of false starts and backtracking, and for what? So the artifact he’d worked so hard to recover could be stolen by some skinny blond thug with bad taste in jewelry?

He looked up and noticed Katherine was still trembling. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

She stood slowly and walked to the bar, grabbed the scotch glass out of Clyde’s hand and downed it in a single gulp. Then she returned to the table where Gabriel sat. She put a hand on his arm.

“So,” she said, and Gabriel could tell she was trying to keep her voice steady. “Does this happen every time you take a girl out for drinks?”

Gabriel touched the cut on his cheek and winced. “Not every time.”

Katherine patted his arm. “Don’t call me,” she said. Then she turned and walked out. A moment later they all heard the front door shut.

“The police are on their way,” Wade said, handing Clyde another scotch. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out two twenty-dollar bills and handed them to Clyde as well. When he saw Gabriel watching the transaction, he said, “We had a bet.”

Gabriel frowned. “What kind of bet?”

“I bet Clyde twenty bucks you never lose a fight.”

“I could have told you otherwise,” Gabriel said. “What’s the other twenty for?”

“I also bet him that you always get the girl.”

Gabriel rubbed his sore jaw. “Sorry to disappoint,” he said…

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