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centimeters from your hand, and your skull smashed in. There had been other tracks, but my men...” He trailed off.
    â€œYou’re men screwed the scene.”
    The captain shrugged. “We don’t get many murders in Innsbruck. Once in a while a domestic. Maybe a bad drug deal. It’s rare though.”
    Which is one reason Jake had decided to move there for a while. He was sick of crime and murder. He thought he’d take the money from the reward he received from his last case, maybe do a little computer consulting. Not this.
    â€œWhat about the guy who knocked me out? The fat guy from upstairs?”
    â€œThere was nobody else in the alley.”
    Figures. Nobody but the bozo who bashed his head in. “Those bruises on Murdock’s neck. Someone snapped it like a twig.”
    â€œWe know that.” The Tirol cop handed Jake his card and a plastic bag with Jake’s wallet. “Go home, Mr. Adams.”
    â€œWhat about my passport?”
    Finally smiling, the captain said, “You live here now. You won’t need that for a while.”
    That was true, but Jake didn’t like someone with that kind of control over him. What the Tirolean Criminal Commissioner, Herr Martini, didn’t know, was that he had two other passports under different names hidden around town. That was one consolation, even though he wasn’t going anywhere before he found out who was screwing with him.
    Suddenly, outside the door there was a burst of gunfire, followed by two thumps as bodies hit the tile. Instinctively, Jake reached for his gun. It wasn’t there.
    Herr Martini pulled his Glock 19 from inside his coat, started for the door, and stopped. He grabbed Jake by the arm and nodded his head for him to follow.
    They rounded the exam table and hurried toward a dark corner of the room. They went through a door into another room which was dark, except for a dim red light ahead. There were coffins lined up in two rows.
    Jake had been right. This wasn’t a hospital.
    When they reached the end of the room, Jake yanked on Martini’s jacket, pulling him to stop next to an exit door with the red light above it. “Give me my gun.”
    The Polizei man’s face seemed uncertain. Finally he reached inside his coat and retrieved Jake’s CZ-75 9mm, handing it to him. “Officially you don’t have this.”
    â€œRight.”
    Just then the door burst open across the room and a dark figure dove to the floor. Immediately, flashes broke the darkness followed by sharp, hollow blasts and the sound of fine wooden caskets chipping away. Jake returned fire with five quick shots and then sunk behind a coffin, his head reverberating from the sound.
    An alarm squawked as the exit door flew open. “Let’s go, Adams,” the Austrian polizei captain yelled. He was already outside holding the door for Jake.
    Jake crawled out just as a second round of automatic gunfire broke the air.

5
    Jake Adams dropped Herr Martini off at the polizei headquarters at Number 8 Kaiserjagerstrasse, a block from the Hofgarten. They had barely gotten away from the shooter, found a phone a block away, and called in the problem to his people. Then they had worked their way back to the funeral home and found Martini’s two men severely wounded. Both were currently in surgery and not expected to recover.
    Martini had some paperwork to fill out, he had said, and Jake had his own problems, with his head still killing him. He had tried walking off his pain along the river, but the pounding in his head had been too much. He thought about his normal exercise routine back in Oregon. The run around the lake. The push-ups and crunches. Anything that didn’t require expensive, bulky apparatus that usually ended up as strange clothes hangers. Traveling so much, he needed to keep things simple.
    He went back to his car and drove to a bank five blocks away. He had deposited some money there the first day he