Made to Kill by Adam Christopher

Made to Kill by Adam Christopher

Author:Adam Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466867154
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates


19

Like I said, guns don’t worry me. I have a bronze steel chassis reinforced with titanium and some alloys that Professor Thornton invented and the federal government was pretty pleased with.

But while guns don’t worry me I was sure someone else in the building or the street outside would hear the shots and call the police and that I could do without.

But nobody called the cops because nobody heard the gun. Nobody heard the gun because it didn’t fire.

Charles didn’t seem to notice. He held it up and pulled the trigger and it went click-click-click-click.

“You’ve got the safety on,” I said.

Charles made a surprised expression and he turned the gun again to look at the side of it. He swore, fussed with a switch, then turned the gun back on me. But while he’d been fussing I’d moved closer and before he tried the trigger again I placed a big hand over the muzzle and pulled slightly. The gun slid out of his sweaty grip with the greatest of ease. His arm hung there in the air for a second or two. Then he let it swing by his side.

“Charles,” I said, “what’s going on? Did somebody put you up to this?”

Charles didn’t answer. Instead he grabbed his chest and moaned, and stumbled forward. I let him go. He hit the edge of the desk and leaned over it, gasping for air.

He was sick all right.

I went over and grabbed his shoulders and turned him around. He went with the motion, flopping like a dead fish. His dark glasses were pointed at me. I pulled them off and tossed them on the desk. He screwed his eyes closed and winced in pain, like the light in the office was just too bright.

“Charles, come on,” I said. I lifted the gun up, holding it by the barrel. Maybe that would jog his memory. “Is this thing yours or did somebody give it to you?”

He opened an eye. He looked at the gun. He nodded. “It was issued to me.”

“That a fact?”

“It is.”

“Issued by whom?”

Charles coughed. I let him go. He turned back around to lean on the desk. “The CIA.”

I frowned on the inside. “What, the CIA goes handing out firing pieces to movie stars, now?”

Charles laughed, and then the laugh turned into a cough that ended with a wet sort of slurping sound. He ran a hand over the back of his mouth. It came away bloody.

“I’m with them,” he said, wheezing. “They recruited me, about a year ago. I’m an agent. Undercover. Deep undercover. They had me investigating un-American activities in the motion picture business.”

Un-American activities?

Perhaps like, oh, a certain bunch of Russians meeting in the basement of a Hollywood nightclub? But since when did the CIA operate on American soil? Wasn’t that beyond their jurisdiction?

I was about to ask Charles about the very same but before I could he nodded at the photograph in front of his nose.

“Who sent you to find her?” he asked.

“The thing about being a private detective,” I said, “is that it’s private.



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