“Don’t worry, darling—”
Kenneth pulled his hands free of her grasp. “Stop it, Shelby!” Kenneth cried. “What’s done is done. It’s over now. All of it.”
Shelby stared at him in silence for a moment. I waited to hear what would come next, but a mechanical roar drowned out her words. A large truck, its driver most likely lost, thundered around the corner and down Cranberry—and I was standing in the street.
For a moment, I froze like the proverbial trapped deer as the glare of headlights bared down. I blindly leaped, falling into a shadowy stairwell just under the fire escape of Lew’s Plumbing and Heating Contractors, Inc.
I had successfully avoided being flattened by the truck or detected by my marks—unfortunately, I’d also landed face first in a puddle of water. Spitting in disgust, I rose to my knees, crawled up the steps, and peeked above the edge of the stairwell. But the rain-swept sidewalk under the streetlight was now deserted. Kenneth and Shelby were gone.
CHAPTER 15
An Open Book
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves . . . far distant in time . . . speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
—Gilbert Highet
AFTER I RETURNED to the bookstore, I locked the door behind me, shut down the lights, and went straight to the second-floor bathroom to clean up and dry off.
Several times, I tried addressing Jack to discuss what I’d overheard between Shelby and Kenneth, but he wasn’t there—or wasn’t answering. So I kissed my sleeping Spencer and went to bed.
For a good fifteen minutes, I lay uncomfortably stiff in the dark, wondering vaguely if my ghost had any interest in me—in this particular position. But I assumed he didn’t. Or else he’d chosen to honor my request that he not haunt the second floor—or else he was here and had clammed up for fear of the grief I’d give him.
Such were my thoughts as I tossed and turned. Finally I gave up, reached to click on the bedside gooseneck, and grabbed Shield of Justice off my nightstand.
To my surprise, even though my eyes were burning from fatigue, I couldn’t put the book down. Page after page went by with exhilarating ease.
Brainert had told me he thought the last three books, and especially this one, represented a marked improvement on the older entries in the series, and I had to agree.
Whatever his faults as a human being, Timothy Brennan had, in his waning years, revived his skills as a writer. The story structure of Shield of Justice was more sophisticated than in novels past. The expected hard-boiled patois was there, but the speech patterns that had once felt dated and at times corny were now portrayed with a kind of bravado—a false front erected by the world-weary characters to hide their damaged souls. More like the Shamus Award-winning Dennis Lehane than the retro purple prose of Mickey Spillane. In fact, the overall use of language was more refined—adjectives in particular were restrained. And the characters felt richer, deeper.
As one critic had recently put it, where the first sixteen entries in the Shield series felt canned and stale, like warmed-over leftovers from tales already told, these latest offerings felt fresh, like the first time Brennan ever put ink to paper:
“Close the door, doll,” barked a gruff voice. “You’re ventilating the room . . .”
I rubbed my eyes. It was nearly 2:00 a.m., and I had promised Aunt Sadie I would be up for church.
“One more chapter,” I told myself, even as I yawned and my eyes half-closed. Readers of these books had their favorite parts, and I had just reached mine. The ingenue had entered the story—and the lady was about to enter the lair of Jack Shepard, er, Shield. . . .
“Close the door, doll,” barked a gruff voice. “You’re ventilating the room . . .”
I wanted to read more. I really did. But about then, my eyelids closed completely, and my limbs went limp. . . .
I OPENED MY eyes. Startled, I looked around.
I was no longer lying in bed. I was standing in the doorway of an office—a cluttered and dingy office, with a battered, ink-stained wooden desk and scratched, fading file cabinets. An old typewriter with large, round keys and the word “Underwood” branded across the front sat in the middle of that desk.
I turned to leave. Behind me I saw a narrow hallway with a stained marble floor and fading industrial green paint on the walls. At the far end of that hall an elevator with heavy glass doors and black iron trimmings closed its doors. With a clang, the car began to descend.
One other office door stood open. A fat man in suspenders, leaning against the frame, picked his teeth and stared suspiciously at me.
I turned back toward the office I’d been facing and stepped inside.
The box was tiny and hot, despite the black table fan spinning on the window ledge. Street sounds were muted and far away. In the middle of the room, a gum-chewing brunette wearing a jacket with padded shoulders tapped the keys of the ancient typewriter on her battered desk. Her hair looked odd—and I realized she was wearing her bangs in a roll, like actresses I’d seen in movies shot in the forties.
A naked lightbulb dangled from the ceiling, but it wasn’t on, since the sun was shining brightly. Through the half-open window and the yellowing venetian blinds, I spotted a rust-encrusted wrought-iron fire escape. Beyond that, I saw the Manhattan skyline—but it wasn’t quite right. Although the Empire State Building stood clearly visible in the distance, its Art Deco facade dwarfed every other building around it. This wasn’t the New York I remembered; it was an older city, a city long gone.
A drawer slammed in the next room, and I jumped. A masculine arm encased in a gunmetal gray sleeve had sent a violent shudder through a heavy file cabinet. The arm waved me over. I hesitated.
“You want to talk, don’t you?” said a masculine voice. “Move those gams, then.”
I stepped forward, into the man’s private office. Once inside, the arm reached out and shoved the door closed. “Let’s not make it too easy for the chump in the next office to listen in. Let the bum mind his own business.”
The man’s voice was deep but not smooth, and there was not a trace of lightness to the monotone. The voice, at least, was familiar to me. I turned and stared up into the iron-jawed grimace of Jack Shepard.
His features appeared chiseled out of unmeltable ice. A flat, square chin held the slash of a one-inch, dagger-shaped scar. Granite-colored eyes stared with unnerving intensity, while shadows beneath suggested a long night—of work or play, I couldn’t guess. The gunmetal gray suit was typical forties double-breasted fashion. It flattened his physique, but I wasn’t about to believe his shoulders were so ridiculously broad, his waist so trim and narrow.
The overall impression was one of confident virility. He did not appear cheerful in the least, yet there was nothing weak or neurotic or depressive about him. His eyes, his posture, the very energy around him radiated vigor, vitality—life.
A firm hand touched my back, very firm. And rather brazen, I thought with mild irritation. The fingers were boldly splayed, sending heat through my clothing and into my skin. Jack pressed me toward a wooden chair across from the battered desk.