Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

“I don’t know, and I am not saying you did.” I asked again, “What date was that rally, Hank?”

He blew out, making an exaggerated noise, and spread his hands. “How the fuck should I know? It was the first weekend of December, Friday through Monday.”

Dehan checked her phone. “Second to the fifth. What day was your fight with Zak and Lynda?”

“The last day. Man, I can’t believe you are trying to pin this on me. I fuckin’ walked away. You can ask Zak. Ask any of the fuckin’ bros. I walked away.”

“Where can I find Zak?”

He was silent for a while. “He’s got a club up in Maine, ’bout thirty miles west of Portland, on Sebago Lake. It’s called the Hellfire Club.” He looked at us fixedly, first Dehan and then me. “If you tell him I said where to find him, he will kill me. You’ll have my blood on your hands.”

“Don’t worry, Hank. We’re not out to get anybody hurt.” I pointed at the bike. “It’s nice work. Keep it up.”

He didn’t answer. He just watched us hunch through the rain to the Jag and climb in. As I fired up the engine, I glanced across Dehan. Hank was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, looking like a Viking in blue overalls.

The wipers set up their squeak/thud rhythm, and we eased our way out onto Surf Avenue again. Dehan looked around at the long, straight rows of dreariness and shook her head. “When I die, if I’ve been really, really bad, I’ll be sent somewhere like this.” I laughed and she glanced at me. “At least in hellfire, you can scream and shout because you’re in pain. You’re feeling something, right? But this! To eternally feel nothing but boredom…”

I grunted. “To feel nothing is more painful than to feel pain. You’re deep, Dehan.”

“So what did you think of him?”

“I thought he was a nice guy. I liked him.”

She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “You’re something, Stone. One of a kind.”

“What? You didn’t like him?”

“Like him? I’d like to whip his ass all the way back to Poughkeepsie.”

“You think the arms are the arms of his lover?”

“It’s at least possible.”

“Let’s see what Zak says tomorrow.”

Five

Dehan made contact with somebody at the Global Computer Shipping Company, so she went to talk to them and I drove out to Maine to see if I could find Zak and the Hellfire Club.

I took the I-95 all the way to Portland, following the coast, then Brighton Road and the Roosevelt Trail out to Raymond, on the lake. It took me a little over five hours, and it rained all the way. For my money, New England is probably the most beautiful place on Earth. In spring and fall, there is no probably about it. But in winter, there’s something sinister about the heavy, lowering clouds and the trees, like cold, naked hands reaching up with crooked fingers into an unforgiving sky.

It was two in the afternoon as I left Portland behind me and started west through dense woodlands of tall, dark pines that seemed to go on forever. At twenty past, I was skirting the lake outside Raymond, looking for Cape Road. The water was flat and gray, like a mirror reflecting the heavy clouds overhead. I finally found it just outside South Casco and turned left, winding through five or six miles of thick forest. After about fifteen minutes, I finally came to a fork in the road. The left fork was narrow and overgrown, and plunged down, like a track through dense jungle. A wooden sign with an arrow on it read This Way to the Hellfire Club.

The track led to a driveway, which in turn snaked through pines and came out at a broad grass clearing with an old, gabled house in the middle. It was big, three stories with a basement. At a glance, I figured there must be seven to ten bedrooms, if they had converted the loft.

I followed the drive to the front of the house. There were half a dozen choppers, an old Land Rover, and an early model ’90s Jeep sitting there. I parked where it would be awkward for them to leave, just in case, climbed out, and slammed the door. As I headed toward the porch, a man stepped out the front door and stood looking down at me. He was tall, six two or three, lean, and rangy, but you could tell he was hard and tough too. He was wearing jeans and cowboy boots and a black T-shirt, and he had a forked beard that reached down to his belt buckle, which was shaped like a skull. He was anything but original, but he was the real thing.

I said, “Are you Zak?”

“You come into my domain, you don’t get to ask me who I am. I ask you who you might be.”

I pulled out my badge and showed it to him. “Detective Stone of the NYPD.”

“You’re off your turf, NYPD. Why don’t you get back in your pretty, foreign car and get the fuck off my land?”

I sighed. Originality was clearly something I was not going to find at the Hellfire Club. “Because if I do, then I’ll have to come back with a warrant, the FBI, and guns. And all I want to do is to ask you a few questions about an investigation that probably has nothing to do with you in the first place. I’m getting wet out here. Why don’t you invite me in, give me a cup of java, and I’ll be gone in fifteen minutes?”

He smiled a smile that he probably intended to be cruel, but I was too wet to care. He said,