Read Made to Kill for Free Online Page B

inch away from it.
    “Is that what you were looking for, detective?”
    “Maybe that it is,” I said.
    “Are you going to open it?” he asked. He stood tall and then when I didn’t move he waved his hat at the spike.
    I unscrewed the end. It was on pretty tight but when it was off it revealed the spike to be a hollow tube. There were some documents in it.
    “Well I’ll be…” said the man from the Parks Department.
    I had even less to say, so I tipped the tube out instead. The documents slid out.
    They consisted of four photographs and some papers that were folded in three. Letters, maybe.
    The photographs were all portraits. Head-and-shoulders, soft lighting, the subjects posed with shoulders turned just so and gazes carefully directed into the elegant middle distance. The kind of photographs you’d find in a glossy magazine. I didn’t know who any of the people were but the man from the Parks Department was able to fill me in and he did so without me even having to ask.
    “Hey now,” he said and he pointed with a finger covered in dust. “That’s Fresco Peterman.” The picture to which he was referring showed a thick-necked man with a chiseled jaw and chiseled hair and a smile showing more teeth than an angry shark. The dust from the ranger’s finger fell onto Mr. Peterman’s charming face. I flicked it off and shuffled to the next one in the deck. A woman, long white hair with a wave to it. Skin smooth as silk.
    “Alaska Gray. Boy, she’s a looker and no mistake.”
    Photograph number three. Big eyebrows. A moustache worthy of a police commissioner somewhere on the East Coast where it got cold in the wintertime.
    “Erm. Ah.” The man from the parks department added some dust to his beard as he rubbed it. “Ah. Silverwood? Silverman? Can’t remember. Not keen on his pictures. Kinda, y’know.”
    I looked at the man and he looked at me.
    “Y’know,” he said. “What’s the word I’m looking for. Erm. Ah.” Then he clicked his fingers. “Y’know. Boring.”
    “Oh.”
    The last image was another man. His hair was curly and too long for my taste, as were his sideburns. They stuck to his cheeks like two furry lamb chops.
    “Rico. Rico Spillane. He’s funny,” said the man from the Parks Department. “Say, what else you got there?”
    I unfolded the papers. It was a set of five or six sheets. Invoices of some kind. I didn’t follow the numbers but it all looked like bills for food and drink, ordered in bulk. Each page was from a different supplier. All were addressed to the same place.
    The man from the Parks Department had stopped talking. He stood there with a frown on his face that was deep enough to send for sleigh dogs and extra supplies.
    “The Temple of the Magenta Dragon,” I read aloud. “Any ideas?”
    My new friend shook his head and rubbed his beard.
    “No, no sir. What are these? Stolen, maybe?”
    “Could be. Don’t rightly know yet.”
    The man backed away a little and he waved his hand with the cap in it at me.
    “Well look now, I don’t much like that idea. This is city land, mister. I think I’m going to need to call my boss, Mr. Overington.”
    “You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I’m a licensed PI—”
    The man shook his head. I watched as some dust drifted off it and into the sunlight.
    “No, no, this needs to be by the book. You can talk to Mr. Overington yourself. You just wait there, mister, I’ll call him from the hut. Won’t be but a jiffy.”
    He walked away from me, and quickly too.
    I curled the documents from the tube and slid them into my inside coat pocket, and with the hollow spike in one hand I followed him.
    The man from the Parks Department was about to make a telephone call he really shouldn’t.
    And I’m afraid I had no choice but to stop him.
     

 
     
     
     
7
     
     
    I left the body of the man from the Parks Department in the front seat of his lime-green pick-up. Seemed as good a place as any. He would be missed