So Long, Chief by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Private Investigators, Fiction / Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

I stretched out in my shirtsleeves on the black leather couch in my inner office. When I’d got back around dusk, I left the lights off, took the carryout paper bag to my desk, and sat there making a corned beef sandwich and a cup of coffee disappear.

Soon I was on the couch in the near dark, the city outside the window behind my desk fighting the night with a million lights. I could have shut that out by adjusting the blinds, but I wasn’t anxious to go to sleep. Now, on my back with my suit coat and shoes off, I lay there staring at a ceiling I could barely see with my .45 on the floor next to me.

Was the key to the mystery the key in my pocket? Was the only way to figure out who killed the Chief to find out what that little scrap of ancient metal unlocked?

Were the two men who had searched the Chief’s nursing home room looking for that key, or did they even know of its existence? Did they seek instead whatever evidence the Chief had hidden away, for the key to unlock?

One thing I did know was why someone had bothered murdering a man who was already inches from death—they needed to silence the Chief while looking for the key or what the key represented. The contents of that metal box had been strewn around, that inspector said, indicating the Chief’s only slightly premature death had bought his killer or killers time to toss his hospital room.

Where there had been nothing to find.

Because I had that key, didn’t I?

But whatever it unlocked seemed out of reach—in an old locker somewhere, at a golf club maybe…if it wasn’t under tons of concrete. Possibly at some other locker or storage facility—who the hell knew?

That’s for you to find out, the Chief had told me.

Which meant Velda and I should be able to track it down. The Chief had lived a lot of life, and lives could always be sifted through—we did it all the time. Of course, most of the people the Chief had shared that life with were gone.

So we were facing a long investigation both exhaustive and exhausting, with no guarantee we’d come up with a damn thing. But what other option was there?

There was one.

I could camp out here in my office and wait for the answer to walk through my door. That I had been the last to see the Chief alive before his killer—or killers—was no secret. The hospital knew. The cops knew. The press would probably know by now.

I would almost certainly have after-hours visitors.

Despite my best intentions, I did drift off, but nothing deep, nothing with dreams in it, and I sure as hell wasn’t dreaming when a click announced somebody picking the lock on my office door.

I reached down for the .45, its cold rough grip comforting in my grasp.

They were talking out there, too muffled for me to make out, but they weren’t bothering to whisper.

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