Way of the Wolf by E.E. Knight

Author:E.E. Knight
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Adolph’s Bunker looked like a transplant from the Maginot Line. Whatever its original purpose, its builders had wanted it to last. They constructed it from heavy concrete, with narrow windows imitative of a castle’s arrow slits. The bleached white of the concrete and the irregular rectangular slits gave it the countenance of a toothy skull. It lay on the lakeshore, set well away from the dead and empty buildings frowning behind.

“Why is it called Adolph’s Bunker?” Valentine asked as they approached the squat, brick-shaped building. The ten-gallon cask grew heavier with each step.

“The guy who runs it is a dictator, for starts,” Captain Doss said.

Silvertongue turned and looked at the men, each laboring with a cask on his shoulder. “There’s a feeling about the place. It’s a piece of sanity in an insane country. Or maybe a slightly different insanity within the insanity, take your pick. It’s popular with the Quislings. When we found out we had to meet you this week, we contacted a Chicago big shot, so we could kill two birds with one stone this trip.”

“As long as our bags get delivered,” Valentine said, trying not to breathe too hard under his awkward burden.

“This trade will make getting your bags through a lot easier,” Doss said.

The building seemed hollow and dead as a shucked oyster. Valentine surmised that the clientele liked to do their drinking in dark and quiet, when he realized that music, too loud to be the product of any instrument, was filtering up from somewhere beneath the building. He switched to hard ears and listened to the beat of ancient rock and roll and the gabble of voices echo up from a stairwell. Captain Doss turned to a set of narrow concrete steps that disappeared along the side of the building down into the earth. A knobless metal door opened out onto a small landing. Doss squatted down and said something into the hole. It swung open.

As he descended the stairs, Valentine plastered a drunken smile across his face, trying to live up to his role of eager sailor. The captain entered, nodding to someone. Valentine looked at Harper, and the two Wolves exchanged shrugs. Silvertongue turned to the men. “Don’t worry, they’re going to frisk you for weapons and smokes. Just put your hands on the wall and read the sign.”

A Grog roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle barred their way. Over its yard-wide shoulder Valentine watched the captain and then her mate being frisked and sniffed by a dog-man right out of an H. G. Wells nightmare. When it finished with Silvertongue, the smelly roadblock at the door stepped aside and Valentine passed into the noise of the Bunker.

He mimicked Silvertongue’s stance, placing his feet twice his shoulder width apart and putting his hands to either side of a sign, stenciled in paint onto another concrete wall just inside the door. To Valentine’s left, a sumo-size man sat inside a wire cage, idly scratching his stubble with a Saturday night submachine gun.

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