The Second Assassin by Christopher Hyde

Author:Christopher Hyde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

It was getting dark by the time Jane climbed up out of the subway. Most of the shops were closed and the streetlights were already flickering on. It was the weekend, so the Flatiron Building was dark, but the Walgreens was still open and lit up. She crossed Fifth, ducked under the striped canopy and went into the drugstore.

She ignored the leers from a couple of cab hacks having dinner at the lunch counter, picked up a tin of Golden Bear cookies in case she got hungry later on and then asked Ricky the soda jerk to make her up a Dixie of coffee. Ricky had a heartrending crush on her and she always tipped him double and gave him her best smile, even though he had a farmer’s field of pimples on his forehead and God knew where else. Let the kid have a few furious dreams—if she could boost his confidence a little, why not? She carried her purchases back across Fifth and let herself into her own, dark building, juggling her keys, the coffee container and the bag with her fattening can of bridge assortment inside.

Riding up in the cranky, clanking elevator she tried to put the puzzle pieces together once again, trying to keep the sadness down and concentrate on the facts. Howie the low-end Mob lawyer led to Shalleck the high-end Mob lawyer, who in turn led to one of Joe Kennedy’s companies, and that in turn fit in with Bushy’s proposition that the Democrats were involved in whatever was going on, which also fit in with a Democrat police commissioner warning off one of his homicide detectives from anything to do with Howie. Full circle, but what a far-reaching circle it was, and even with the pieces all put together, what the hell was the picture she was looking at?

The elevator came to a thumping halt and Jane made her way down the gloomy corridor as much by habit as by sight. Reaching her office door she put the paper bag and the coffee cup down on the floor, took her keys out of her shoulder bag and unlocked the door. She bent down, retrieved the paper bag and the Dixie full of coffee, turning sideways to push open the door with her shoulder.

As the door opened the string wrapped around the inside knob took up the slack, tightening through the small eyebolt that had been screwed into the jamb, the taut string in turn jerking the pull ring out of the homemade spring-loaded striker that had been pushed into a half-pound charge of safecracker’s explosive left on Jane’s desk. The striker, jury-rigged from a piece of copper tubing and the firing pin of an old Remington automatic pistol, smacked down onto a .38-caliber percussion cap, which in turn set off the main charge.

Jane’s brain barely had time to register what was going on before she was mercifully knocked unconscious. The massive concussion from the explosion blew the door back into her face, throwing

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