Maybe I was on to something. I moved my glass of bourbon to the side and set the cocktail napkin on the newspaper. Using my pen, I copied down every eight Letter. EEHLNCOM. That wasn’t it. I tried every eighth letter starting with the second letter, then the third, and so on. No dice. I tried every other letter, then every third letter, but came up empty doing that as well.
Sherlock Holmes might’ve called this a “three pipe problem.” All I had was Lucky strikes, so I slid another one out of the pack and lit it. C’mon, nicotine. I walked to the bar and took a stack of napkins. Back at my table, I balled up the first napkin and tossed it to the side. 8X8. There was something to that, otherwise the Colonel would’ve just written 64. I started copying the message. IGAVETHE. After eight letters, I stopped and started another row. EXTRAONE. if I kept doing this, I’d end up with a square of letters, eight by eight!
I started copying more quickly. After a minute, I had the entire message written down:
IGAVETHE
EXTRAONE
TODAVIDH
ESEEMSEL
ATEDCOUN
TINGEXAC
TASPERPO
LICYNORM
It looked like a word-search puzzle. Unfortunately, at first it didn’t play like one. After several minutes, I hadn’t found any significant words except the ones in the original message. Then I saw it. Running diagonally from the lower left corner to the upper right corner were the words land mine. There was a dance club in the new city called The Land Mine. From what I’d heard, it was something of a college hangout. It wasn’t in my Happenings book, so I’d never gone there.
I checked the other diagonal.IXDECXPM. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I probably would have missed it. Adding a few dashes made it IX-DEC–X-PM. 9 December, 10pm.
There it was. A planned meeting. I had the time and the place. The Colonel was supposed to meet someone at The Land Mine the following night at 10 o’clock. He wouldn’t be there… but I would. Now the question was, who was going to be waiting there? And how was I going to find them?
UAKM — CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was 9:30-in the morning-and I’d already showered and shaved. My teeth were polished, and my fingernails were trimmed. My cuticles were impeccable. I was wearing a clean, cream-coloured long-sleeved shirt, my good olive trousers with the perma-crease and pleats, and an understated burgundy tie with a chess-piece motif. I was lean, neat and smelled spicy. My wallet contained all of twenty-two dollars, and I wasn’t on anyone’s payroll, but I was fresh from a 19 hour coma, and it was a good day.
I collected my tan trench from the coatrack and slipped it on. I then picked up my cocoa-brown fedora, removed a mysterious twig from the brim, and set it on my head at a sassy angle. I checked for wallet, keys, smokes, and lighter, and then set out with intentions of breaking my fast.
As I locked the office door behind me and stepped out onto the fire escape landing, I tried to put my finger on what had changed my outlook. It had to have been breaking the code from the Colonel’s notebook. Maybe I’d been afraid my lost month had turned my brain into pickle juice, and actually figuring something out was proof that it hadn’t. And, even though I wasn’t getting paid for tracking down the Colonel’s killer, at least it was more exciting than my last project before I started drinking: constructing the world’s largest ball of cigarette foil.
For the first time in weeks, the sun was out. It was still a few degrees below comfortable, but it felt pretty good after the clouds and rain of the past several days. As I trotted down the fire escape, I noticed Chelsee at the newsstand. She was wearing a bright red sweater and a bag-like, though attractive, hat with a flower in it. With any luck, my businesslike attitude of the morning before would have her intrigued and eager to talk to me. Immediately, my fancy turned to thoughts of amore. The old Murphy charm seethed and boiled inside me. I could feel it coiled like a cobra, ready to hypnotize his victim, then strike.
I strode jauntily across the street. Ever since I’d met Chelsee, right after moving into the Ritz, we’d always gone through the same little ritual every time I’d visit the newsstand.
I’d strike up a conversation, we’d flirt a little bit, and then I’d ask her out and she’d turn me down. She always claimed it was irritating; I preferred to think of it as foreplay. This morning, however, the ice would break. Chelsee smiled and waved, completely unaware of her impending doom.
“Hello, stranger.”
“You know, Chelsee, I can’t keep it inside any longer. Every time I see you, you break my heart.”
A malicious glint flashed in Chelsee’s eyes. “Why? Because I’ve got a steady job?”
Oof.
“No. You’re just so beautiful it makes me ache.”
Chelsee pouted most attractively. “Poor baby.”
I leaned onto the counter. “Let me buy you a drink, and I’ll tell you where it hurts.”
Chelsee raised an elegant eyebrow. “Gee, Tex, that kind of talk could get you into trouble.”
Her come-hither tone had me up on my hind legs like a Wiener dog begging for a piece of jerky. I clasped my hands. “That’s all I’m asking for. Just a little bit of trouble.”
My dream girl wagged a finger at me. “You know I don’t drink with customers.”
“Don’t toy with me, Chelsee. I’ve seen you and Louie shooting tequila at the Brew and Stew.”
“Oh, Louie doesn’t count, and you know it.”
I could sense she was about to change the subject on me, but I wasn’t about to break off my pursuit. Maybe if I sweetened the deal… “C’mon. Let me buy you a drink. I’d be happy to throw in a chilly dog-“
“Well, an offer like that is hard to refuse… but no, thanks.”
Her tone implied firmly that, once again, her snowshoe-hare love had eluded my panting-wolf yearning. I’d also wasted my chili-dog gambit, which I had used previously with great success. She was truly a strong-willed woman.
“Well, I’ll leave you to your work. Doesn’t hurt to ask, does it?”
Chelsee flashed her perfect smile.
The Brew & Stew was always more peaceful in the mornings. The nighttime sounds of inebriated laughter and clinking glasses were replaced with a rustle of newspapers, yawning, and loud stretching. A majority of the folks in the surrounding neighbourhood relied exclusively on Louie’s Armageddon to stimulate their synaptic functions and get their heart rates out of the single digits. On most mornings (or, more often, early afternoons) I, too, was a card-carrying member of the Coffee Generation. Today, though, felt different. Not that I would dream of skipping the Armageddon-it was just that I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t woken up bleary-eyed and lethargic.
I sat down at the counter as Louie burst out of the kitchen through the swinging doors, his stubby arms balancing half-a-dozen plates piled high with breakfast fare. He gave me a wink and steered his girth around the end of the bar. A newspaper was sitting unused on the counter. I dragged it over and started to scan the front page as I lit up an appetizer. The lead story was about the Capricorn bombing. I read the article and was interested to see that Interpol had taken over the investigation, though it didn’t appear that they were close to making any arrests.
I inhaled the sweet tobacco taste and wondered if there was a connection between the Colonel’s death and the Capricorn bombing. In my mind, they were obviously linked in some way. I thought about the rendezvous the Colonel had planned for that evening. Did it have anything to do with Capricorn? I went over the things I’d seen on the Colonel’s videodisc. The killer seemed to think that the Colonel was in cahoots with Capricorn, and that he had this thing they referred to as the Winter Chip. Maybe the Colonel’s contact at The Land Mine was someone from Capricorn. It seemed as likely as anything else, but why would they have to be so clandestine about it?