Read Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 for Free Online Page A

newsreels about the war. That cop had been blowing smoke, was all, playing for time.
    One the west side of Las Lomas, at Groceria El Portal, they turned up Calle Huerta. Metzger’s place was a middle-sized stucco, three or four rooms, flat-roofed, painted bright green. In the yard were citrus and avocado trees, a cactus garden, no goats, chickens, or pariah dogs. A middle-class neighborhood, rare as a blizzard in Mexico. There were screens on the windows and a screened front door. Hickey knocked at it.
    A beauty appeared. Young, tall, a little stocky yet with good curves, and slender, with angular features like a Yaqui or Aztec, along with Spanish grace and hot eyes that met Hickey’s straight on, telling him she was protecting somebody, or something.
    Hickey asked for Juan Metzger. She opened the screen door cautiously, looked beyond him to the street. In perfect English she introduced herself as Consuelo Metzger. She ushered him to one of two padded chairs, and disappeared. Besides the chairs, a small table and desk were the only furnishings. Nothing on the walls. Two children peeked around a corner. Finally Juan Metzger stepped in.
    He was a smallish, pink-faced, bulb-nosed man. He could’ve played the butcher or baker in a Dickens novel, Hickey mused. But his accent was thickly Germanic. He smelled of hard liquor, and carried a beer. Consuelo brought them each a Suprema and disappeared again, as if she only existed when they needed her, a guardian spirit.
    “I got your name from Herman Frick,” Hickey started. “Asked him for somebody who’d know the Germans around here. You guys probably stick together, being in a new place and all?”
    Metzger took a long gulp of his Suprema, and tried politely to muffle his belch. Hickey began the story of Wendy Rose. He told about Clifford, the police chief, the Club de Paris with its German employees and clientele. He told Metzger he might need an insider’s help. Say from a German who wanted his ticket north. If he’d help spring the girl, Hickey could buy him passage over the border, set him up with papers and everything—a guy who owed Hickey a favor worked for Immigration.
    Metzger swallowed the rest of his beer, held the bottle out in front of him as if finding the table required too much thought, so he’d wait for the table to appear. He gazed at the floor and out the window, as though nothing Hickey said called for answers. Either the girl was no surprise to Metzger, or he was too drunk or weak to pity anyone but himself. Anyway, questions and propositions seemed lost on the man.
    Just get him talking, Hickey thought. “What brought you folks up this way?”
    Consuelo materialized, rescued the empty bottle from Metzger’s hand, delivered him a full one. She stood with her back to the wall and listened to her husband launch his story.
    In the remote Mexican state of Chiapas, on Metzger’s coffee finca, New Year’s day, he woke up thinking about Nazis. He’d tried to hold his thoughts far from Germany and its wars. But in December his cousin Franz had arrived, to give speeches for the Reich. New Year’s eve, the German planters had gathered for a party, and Franz told them why the Reich would soon rule the world. He explained that their Fuehrer and the High Command had captured an icon, the sword that had pierced Christ’s body the day of his crucifixion and had become, through Christ’s blood, a vessel of power. It had belonged to Charlemagne, to all the Holy Roman Emperors. Now the Fuehrer held it.
    While most of the Germans had laughed and derided Franz, many others praised him. By midnight, two fistfights and a near-brawl had started, and Metzger had drunk a gallon of beer.
    New Year’s morning, while Metzger’s head still reeled, there came shouts from out front. The door rattled open. Boots stomped over the wood floor and the big, dark Federale, with whiskers like a bush, tromped into the bedroom. Perez, the jefe from Villa Flores. Consuelo jumped up