Gabriel unbuttoned his shirt. The Death’s Head Key hung on a leather strap around his neck. He lifted it over his head. The blond man snatched the heavy bronze key with his free hand and held it up, eyeing it with satisfaction.
No one knew how old the Death’s Head Key was. It had been given its name in 1581 when the explorer Vincenzo de Montoya found it on a trip through Asia and noticed its bow was shaped like a skull, with concavities where the eye sockets might have been and a diamond-shaped groove between them. No one, not even de Montoya, knew what it unlocked—but whatever it was, Gabriel could guess from the look of the thing that it was no simple door. Most keys had a single blade that fit into the keyway of a lock, but the Death’s Head Key had three, one straight and the other two flanking it at forty-five-degree angles. De Montoya had reportedly worn it around his neck as a good luck charm, but it hadn’t kept up its end of the bargain. His luck ran out when he disappeared during an Amazon expedition a few years later, and the Death’s Head Key had been lost with him.
Lost, until Gabriel found it, still dangling from the broken neck of de Montoya’s skeleton at the bottom of a deep pit in the rain forest.
Now, watching the blond man stuff the Death’s Head Key in his pocket, Gabriel couldn’t help feeling it was about to become lost once again.
“Very thoughtful, Mr. Hunt,” the blond man said. “You’ve saved the custodians of this establishment quite a bit of mopping.” He backed slowly toward the lounge door, keeping his gun leveled at Gabriel. “Let’s go,” he said, and the three thugs holstered their revolvers and exited before him. The blond man gave Gabriel a final nod and disappeared through the doorway.
When he heard the front door open, Gabriel followed at a run, passing Hank, the League’s elderly doorman, where he lay slumped unconscious on the floor.
In the street outside, a pair of doors slammed on a gunmetal gray Cadillac and it peeled off, tires squealing against the asphalt. Gabriel raced out into the street and ran half a block after them, but they shot through a red light and vanished in the distance.
Gabriel walked back to the League building and into the lounge, where Wade was already dialing the police from the phone behind the bar. “Button up, young man,” he said, aiming a finger at Gabriel’s chest. “There are women pres—oh, hello, yes, I’d like to report an incident.”
There was only one woman present, and Gabriel lowered himself into the chair beside her, fuming. For weeks he’d meticulously traced de Montoya’s path through the Amazon, sweating through the jungle heat and all the days of false starts and backtracking, and for what? So the artifact he’d worked so hard to recover could be stolen by some skinny blond thug with bad taste in jewelry?
He looked up and noticed Katherine was still trembling. “Are you okay?” he asked her.
She stood slowly and walked to the bar, grabbed the scotch glass out of Clyde’s hand and downed it in a single gulp. Then she returned to the table where Gabriel sat. She put a hand on his arm.
“So,” she said, and Gabriel could tell she was trying to keep her voice steady. “Does this happen every time you take a girl out for drinks?”
Gabriel touched the cut on his cheek and winced. “Not every time.”
Katherine patted his arm. “Don’t call me,” she said. Then she turned and walked out. A moment later they all heard the front door shut.
“The police are on their way,” Wade said, handing Clyde another scotch. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out two twenty-dollar bills and handed them to Clyde as well. When he saw Gabriel watching the transaction, he said, “We had a bet.”
Gabriel frowned. “What kind of bet?”
“I bet Clyde twenty bucks you never lose a fight.”
“I could have told you otherwise,” Gabriel said. “What’s the other twenty for?”
“I also bet him that you always get the girl.”
Gabriel rubbed his sore jaw. “Sorry to disappoint,” he said. “And sorry about…” He waved his hand in a circle, indicating the room’s two overturned chairs, the painting that had been knocked askew, the shattered decanter still in fragments on the floor.
“How long have we known you, Gabriel?” Clyde asked, sipping his scotch. “We’re used to it by now.”
Chapter 2
Gabriel sat on the table in an examining room at Lenox Hill Hospital with the noise from the emergency room seeping in through the closed door. He fidgeted, the stiff paper that covered the table crinkling under his weight. The police officer standing by the door fidgeted too. He tapped his pencil against his notepad like he was marking time.
“This is ridiculous,” Gabriel said. “I told you I’m fine.”
“It’s standard procedure following an assault,” the officer said. He was a few inches shorter than Gabriel, maybe five-nine, with curly, close-cropped hair and a thin mustache. The nametag above his badge read jackson. “Most people appreciate being taken to the hospital after they’ve been beaten, slashed and pistol-whipped.”
Gabriel hated hospitals, especially the strong, antiseptic smell of ammonia that seemed to permeate every square inch of them. It was the same smell he remembered from the hospital in Gibraltar when he’d gone there in the early weeks of 2000 in the hopes of identifying his parents’ remains. Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt had been on a millennium-themed speaking tour of the Mediterranean when their ship disappeared. No visuals, nothing on the radar, just gone. Three days later it had appeared again out of nowhere, not a living soul on board, only the dead bodies of three crew members. Soon after, more bodies began washing ashore—crewmen, passengers, more than three hundred in all—but a dozen or so never did. It had been a bad few weeks, looking at corpse after corpse and not knowing each time whether to hope he wouldn’t recognize it or that he would. In any event, he never did. And nearly a decade later, the smell still got to him, still gave him an uncomfortable feeling of bad news and unfinished business.
“So this man,” Officer Jackson said, looking at his notes. “About your height, six feet, blond hair, slim build, gray blazer and slacks. And you say he was in charge of the others, the three other men?”
“That’s right. He gave the orders. The others didn’t talk at all.”
“Have you ever seen him before?”
Gabriel shook his head. “No. Never.”
“Are you sure? It’s easy to forget a face.”
“I tend to remember the men who hit me.”
“Have there been a lot?”
Gabriel rubbed his sore jaw. “One or two.”
“Well, you say this one knew your name, knew where to find you and knew you were in possession of this…this key he took from you.”
“That’s right.”
“So you think he’s been following you, or what?” “I’ve been out of the country for the past several weeks. I doubt he could have followed me where I was. But someone must have gotten word to him about what I brought back—one of the locals, possibly, or someone on the expedition.”
Jackson nodded and scribbled in his notepad, though that answer put it well out of his jurisdiction. “There anybody you can think of who might have it in for you?”
Gabriel sighed. “How much time do you have?”
The officer flipped his book shut, capped his pen. “Not enough,” he said. “You ever think of changing professions, Mr. Hunt? Maybe something a little safer, like firefighter or undercover narcotics officer?”
“I’d miss the flexible hours,” Gabriel said.
The door opened then, and a woman in green scrubs stepped in. She had straight black hair tied back in a ponytail, deep brown eyes and smooth skin the color of caramel. She clutched a clipboard to her chest and nodded at Officer Jackson. “Can you give us some privacy?”