The Rockabye Contract, page 13
“I know him. A trifle spirited, but he’ll get over it.”
“Possibly. But perhaps I won’t. The dumb bastard got to Saint Louis and decided to cut the butter. Chartered a lightplane and, to practice his sky-diving, jumped into the field beside my house.”
Neal whistled down the line and was silent for several seconds. “That wasn’t smart,” he admitted.
“No,” I said, “it wasn’t. Then after I had frog-marched him into the house, he showed me a contract that was also a crock. It called for me to go after several Vietnam protest groups who have been picketing the Andrade Chemical Company’s Wisconsin plants, where they manufacture napalm. Not only was I supposed to infiltrate these flower-power groups, which is ridiculous if you’ve got a recent snapshot of me, but I was also ordered to stave off several hippie threats to blow up Port Victoria on the West Coast. The town where the Navy stores and ships the napalm.”
“Now, Joe,” said Pearsall calmly. “I knew about the assignment, but I didn’t know it had been given to you. I approved the idea when it came across my desk.”
“Then, old friend, your memory is seriously impaired. On two points. Completely outside of the fact that at my price this would be the most expensive heckling of psychedelic goofs in history, my contract says that I always have the right of refusal, without prejudice. Also, I am never required to accept an assignment inside the States. Not since that stirring fiasco when Asmodeus made assholes out of all of us. Or don’t you remember?”
“I remember it well, Joe. I nearly quit the agency because of it.”
“All right. Don’t send me any more of these fink things like infiltrating the Pot Set. Those people might just be right when they say don’t trust any sonavabitch over thirty years old. And I want no more parachuting couriers.”
“Are you through complaining?” he asked. I thought things over, to check my bottled-up bile.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Okay. I’m sorry about the boy’s heroics, and we’ll put the assignment through to a routine agent. That should have been done in the first place. What number are you calling from?”
I looked at the number on the pay phone and told him.
“Stay there five minutes, please,” he said, and hung up. I stepped out of the booth and lighted a tiny cigar. They are just as dangerous as cigarettes but cause stomach cancer instead of the lung type and thus take longer. Less than three minutes later the lonely suburban phone rang and I stepped back into the booth and palmed the receiver off the hook.
“Yes?”
“I’ll be in Tulsa tomorrow,” Pearsall said briskly. “Three o’clock in the afternoon. Same suite, the one where we met before you made the Mexican trip. Do you remember the number?”
“Yes. Will you bring the potables or shall I buy them?”
“Joe,” he said haughtily, “we don’t buy our booze. Like the ladies from Boston, with their hats, we have our booze.”
“Good to know,” I said, laughing, “Adiocito.”
Chapter Three
The suite in the downtown luxury motel in Tulsa was like scores of others the agency maintained on a year-round basis. Since we were not supposed to operate inside the U.S., I had often wondered how they hid this enormous housekeeping item, but I guess nobody had ever questioned it. I drove my Rover up the oval ramp to the fifth floor, parked it, and pushed through swinging doors into the air-conditioned hallway.
Neal was in the second bedroom of the suite, as he had been the other time, and once again newspapers were strewn all over the room. Although hundreds of people in agency headquarters did nothing else except break down every publication in the world, that wasn’t good enough for Pearsall. He was afraid they would miss something. He claimed that you could learn more about a strange town by pricing used baby carriages in the want ads than by reading the news stories and editorials. And he had once assured me, solemnly, that you could tell how much class a place had by examining the toilet paper for hallmarks.
The big man hadn’t changed much. The balding head was fringed by more gray and his gut was more pronounced, but at several inches over six feet he could carry it. Regarding me over the top of a paper, he looked like an old bulldog who hadn’t made best of show but wasn’t going to be surly about it. His right leg didn’t exist below the scars on the lower thigh, and the complicated prosthesis was propped against a chair, its leather fittings sweat-stained.
He had lost the leg while trying to chivvy a freezing Marine Company back out of the Changjin Reservoir ambush in Korea.
“Colonel,” I said, “you receive just like Marie Antoinette.”
“Frig that chatter, Joseph,” the reclining giant said amiably. “Had you the ordinary decency to bring dancing girls, I would have strapped on the peg and danced all night.”
The maimed bastard was right. Fake leg and all, he had once beaten me at handball, and I was not the softest touch in the world. That was the day I gave that game up. There was ice on the coffee table and two bottles of Black Daniels, so we toasted absent friends. Straight and thoughtfully, because there were a lot of them. After the third drink I mentioned the napalm surveillance assignment, which had been so stupid, and Neal said “Yes, yes” irritably. That he had already stopped up that rathole; it wouldn’t happen again.
We didn’t reminisce long. Our business is a closed and subterranean fraternity and its losses are continuous in this age of undeclared wars. Men like me, and the others controlled by Neal Pearsall, were kept busy justifying the high-minded declarations of our governments. We were nonreasoning malcontents without conscience who had to tidy up diplomacy in the back alleys of the world.
I had been at the business for a long time and was one of its most highly paid practitioners. But the strain and the abnormal relation to ordinary society was always there. My name is Joseph Liam Gall, ex-Marine Major, ex-many-other-things. I held the hidden rank of Brigadier and was high on the Civil Service pay ratings, but that was only part of it. In addition I had well-defined “perks”; these included all expenses and a free call on all military hardware and personnel to operate them when on assignment. I also had the right of refusal on any assignment and did not have to give a reason.
I had joined the agency soon after being invalided out of the Marine Corps toward the last of War Two. Not counting four decorations earned in Pacific combat, I had been awarded three other medals by the agency. These medals, while authentic, were called “jockey-strap” awards, and I would never be able to wear them. The pay was good, however.
We had drink four and I sipped it morosely, staring at the wall machine that brewed chemical coffee. I had had a drink of that ersatz coffee, complete with powdered chemical cream, in this same room just before Neal Pearsall had ordered me to the Fort Worth Federal Hospital. To pick up a deliberate addiction to body drugs. Before the Mexican assignment, where I trapped an ebullient Texas millionaire who was about to be appointed to an important ambassadorial post in the Far East. Because of the monkey grinning on his back, he didn’t make it.
“All right,” I said, and Neal nodded and stubbed out his cigar.
“You know Cairo, Khartoum, and South Africa,” he stated. “You’ve hunted in the Kenya highlands and been to Addis Ababa on assignment for us. That right?”
“You’ve got the files,” I said. “And during the Second World War, while only a zeal-inflamed lad, I ferried new Douglas transports from Natal, South America, to Ascension Island, Lagos, Fort Maidugari, Aden, Masira Island, and Karachi. They were replacements for the China National Airlines on its Himalayan flights.”
I remembered those flights well because they were continuous. CNAC lost 100 percent of its fleet every eleven months. Most of all I remembered the stench of the African stops.
“Good, a bonus,” said Neal. “What we’re going to do is smuggle you into the Congo from the east side. Not only into it but into a jail in Bukavu, where you’ll sweat your guts out. You will be under sentence of death from Mobutu’s Government in Kinshasa.”
“That’s dangerous,” I commented. “Those goddamned simbas eat people. Have I any guarantee that they won’t get loaded on corn beer and eat me? Or shoot me in a forgetful moment?”
“It’s all worked out with Mobutu. His Elite Palace Guard will be in Bukavu solely to protect you. If he doesn’t produce that protection, he forfeits all American aid. And he needs it badly now.”
“I’ll remember that in case I get eaten,” I said. “Why am I to be cast into this stinking Congolese can?”
“There are four white men in it now. Mercenaries who used to work for Tshombe. They were stranded when Colonel Schramme flew the main body of mercenaries out of Kabembe. That’s in Rwanda, just across the border from Bukavu. These four fall guys are also awaiting execution, but you will break out and take two of them with you.”
“And the other two?”
Neal shrugged. “Not involved with us. They’ll have to run for it.”
“Why will I take the other two?”
“Because they are brothers, Altschul and Jorg van der Groot. They were born and raised in Great Namaland, in South-West Africa, and know the Skeleton Coast there intimately. They also have certain other knowledge we need.”
I had another drink, without relish, and stared at the sterile, fake-elegant room in the Tulsa motel. Everything in it had been mass-produced and placed in hundreds of thousands of other fake-elegant rooms. The next question was the big one.
“Why do we need that knowledge?”
“Because, Joseph, they are going to help you find a cache of uncut gemstone alluvial diamonds on that coast. With their help you will transport these diamonds to Bulawayo, in Rhodesia. Without, of course, being detected by the Government of South Africa, which controls South-West Africa.”
I lighted a small cigar, staring at him. The diamond-bearing beaches of South-West Africa were by far the richest source for those gems in the world. Their annual output exceeded that of all the other African fields combined. The beaches had an ice-cold surf, and the Syndicate patroled the area constantly, covering every foot of it by plane, ground transport, and offshore craft.
“Man,” I said slowly, “this must be a pretty big cache.”
“It is,” said Neal. “Nearly eighteen hundred pounds.”
I looked at him in real surprise. “Pounds? Nearly a ton of gemstones?”
“That’s right.”
How many carats could you cut out of 1800 pounds of rough stones? A carat was .2 of a gram. I tried to figure it out in my head but couldn’t.
“Neal,” I asked, “do you know how far it is from that Skeleton Coast to Rhodesia? And what kind of terrain is involved? Are you aware that another country, Botswana, and a little something called the Kalahari Desert, separate these two points?”
“I’m well briefed on it, Joe.”
“And you’d risk my life for a lousy ton of diamonds?”
Pearsall looked at me closely, then fell back on the pillows and began roaring with laughter. His lonely left foot shook from the force of it. I watched him impassively until the convulsion lessened, and he sat up and poured another drink. Wiping the tears from his eyes with a corner of the sheet.
“Yes, Joe,” he admitted. “We would do that. You’re a valuable man, but this cache should produce over three million carats after cutting. That represents a market value of over nine hundred million dollars.” He took another set of blue-backed instructions from the bed table and handed it over.
“You’ll get no more goddamned Christmas cards from me,” I said, rising. “How long have I got to decide?”
“Noon tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be back in the office by then.”
“I’ll let you know,” I said. He nodded and I walked back through the suite, down the cool hallway, and pushed out onto the warmth of the open parking area. It took several seconds for the air-conditioner in the Rover to blast out the heat, and I released the brake and went coasting down the ramp.
I don’t know what it is about Tulsa in the summer, but something stinks. All over town, when the wind is north. I have traveled a lot in backward countries with open sewers, but Tulsa has a very distinctive stink. Like a compound of rotten-egg sulphurous petroleum compounds and just plain raw sewage. Tulsa is a rich and progressive place and they ought to do something about it.
I drove out of town as swiftly as I could because the city smelled a lot like the assignment I had just been offered. Like Africa.
Buy The Skeleton Coast Contract Now!
About the Author
Philip Atlee (1915–1991) was the creator of the long-running Joe Gall Mysteries, which is comprised of twenty-two novels published in the 1960s and 70s. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Atlee wrote several novels and screenplays—including Thunder Road starring Robert Mitchum, and Big Jim McLain starring John Wayne—before producing the series for which he is known. An avid flyer, he was a member of the Flying Tigers before World War II and joined the Marines after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1968 by Philip Atlee
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-6572-6
This edition published in 2021 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
THE JOE GALL MYSTERIES
FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.
Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.
MysteriousPress.com. offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
FOLLOW US:
@emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom
MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
The Mysterious Bookshop, founded in 1979, is located in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. It is the oldest and largest mystery-specialty bookstore in America.
The shop stocks the finest selection of new mystery hardcovers, paperbacks, and periodicals. It also features a superb collection of signed modern first editions, rare and collectable works, and Sherlock Holmes titles. The bookshop issues a free monthly newsletter highlighting its book clubs, new releases, events, and recently acquired books.
58 Warren Street
info@mysteriousbookshop.com
(212) 587-1011
Monday through Saturday
11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
FIND OUT MORE AT:
www.mysteriousbookshop.com
FOLLOW US:
@TheMysterious and Facebook.com/MysteriousBookshop
SUBSCRIBE:
The Mysterious Newsletter
Find a full list of our authors and titles at www.openroadmedia.com
FOLLOW US
@ OpenRoadMedia
Philip Atlee, The Rockabye Contract
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“Possibly. But perhaps I won’t. The dumb bastard got to Saint Louis and decided to cut the butter. Chartered a lightplane and, to practice his sky-diving, jumped into the field beside my house.”
Neal whistled down the line and was silent for several seconds. “That wasn’t smart,” he admitted.
“No,” I said, “it wasn’t. Then after I had frog-marched him into the house, he showed me a contract that was also a crock. It called for me to go after several Vietnam protest groups who have been picketing the Andrade Chemical Company’s Wisconsin plants, where they manufacture napalm. Not only was I supposed to infiltrate these flower-power groups, which is ridiculous if you’ve got a recent snapshot of me, but I was also ordered to stave off several hippie threats to blow up Port Victoria on the West Coast. The town where the Navy stores and ships the napalm.”
“Now, Joe,” said Pearsall calmly. “I knew about the assignment, but I didn’t know it had been given to you. I approved the idea when it came across my desk.”
“Then, old friend, your memory is seriously impaired. On two points. Completely outside of the fact that at my price this would be the most expensive heckling of psychedelic goofs in history, my contract says that I always have the right of refusal, without prejudice. Also, I am never required to accept an assignment inside the States. Not since that stirring fiasco when Asmodeus made assholes out of all of us. Or don’t you remember?”
“I remember it well, Joe. I nearly quit the agency because of it.”
“All right. Don’t send me any more of these fink things like infiltrating the Pot Set. Those people might just be right when they say don’t trust any sonavabitch over thirty years old. And I want no more parachuting couriers.”
“Are you through complaining?” he asked. I thought things over, to check my bottled-up bile.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Okay. I’m sorry about the boy’s heroics, and we’ll put the assignment through to a routine agent. That should have been done in the first place. What number are you calling from?”
I looked at the number on the pay phone and told him.
“Stay there five minutes, please,” he said, and hung up. I stepped out of the booth and lighted a tiny cigar. They are just as dangerous as cigarettes but cause stomach cancer instead of the lung type and thus take longer. Less than three minutes later the lonely suburban phone rang and I stepped back into the booth and palmed the receiver off the hook.
“Yes?”
“I’ll be in Tulsa tomorrow,” Pearsall said briskly. “Three o’clock in the afternoon. Same suite, the one where we met before you made the Mexican trip. Do you remember the number?”
“Yes. Will you bring the potables or shall I buy them?”
“Joe,” he said haughtily, “we don’t buy our booze. Like the ladies from Boston, with their hats, we have our booze.”
“Good to know,” I said, laughing, “Adiocito.”
Chapter Three
The suite in the downtown luxury motel in Tulsa was like scores of others the agency maintained on a year-round basis. Since we were not supposed to operate inside the U.S., I had often wondered how they hid this enormous housekeeping item, but I guess nobody had ever questioned it. I drove my Rover up the oval ramp to the fifth floor, parked it, and pushed through swinging doors into the air-conditioned hallway.
Neal was in the second bedroom of the suite, as he had been the other time, and once again newspapers were strewn all over the room. Although hundreds of people in agency headquarters did nothing else except break down every publication in the world, that wasn’t good enough for Pearsall. He was afraid they would miss something. He claimed that you could learn more about a strange town by pricing used baby carriages in the want ads than by reading the news stories and editorials. And he had once assured me, solemnly, that you could tell how much class a place had by examining the toilet paper for hallmarks.
The big man hadn’t changed much. The balding head was fringed by more gray and his gut was more pronounced, but at several inches over six feet he could carry it. Regarding me over the top of a paper, he looked like an old bulldog who hadn’t made best of show but wasn’t going to be surly about it. His right leg didn’t exist below the scars on the lower thigh, and the complicated prosthesis was propped against a chair, its leather fittings sweat-stained.
He had lost the leg while trying to chivvy a freezing Marine Company back out of the Changjin Reservoir ambush in Korea.
“Colonel,” I said, “you receive just like Marie Antoinette.”
“Frig that chatter, Joseph,” the reclining giant said amiably. “Had you the ordinary decency to bring dancing girls, I would have strapped on the peg and danced all night.”
The maimed bastard was right. Fake leg and all, he had once beaten me at handball, and I was not the softest touch in the world. That was the day I gave that game up. There was ice on the coffee table and two bottles of Black Daniels, so we toasted absent friends. Straight and thoughtfully, because there were a lot of them. After the third drink I mentioned the napalm surveillance assignment, which had been so stupid, and Neal said “Yes, yes” irritably. That he had already stopped up that rathole; it wouldn’t happen again.
We didn’t reminisce long. Our business is a closed and subterranean fraternity and its losses are continuous in this age of undeclared wars. Men like me, and the others controlled by Neal Pearsall, were kept busy justifying the high-minded declarations of our governments. We were nonreasoning malcontents without conscience who had to tidy up diplomacy in the back alleys of the world.
I had been at the business for a long time and was one of its most highly paid practitioners. But the strain and the abnormal relation to ordinary society was always there. My name is Joseph Liam Gall, ex-Marine Major, ex-many-other-things. I held the hidden rank of Brigadier and was high on the Civil Service pay ratings, but that was only part of it. In addition I had well-defined “perks”; these included all expenses and a free call on all military hardware and personnel to operate them when on assignment. I also had the right of refusal on any assignment and did not have to give a reason.
I had joined the agency soon after being invalided out of the Marine Corps toward the last of War Two. Not counting four decorations earned in Pacific combat, I had been awarded three other medals by the agency. These medals, while authentic, were called “jockey-strap” awards, and I would never be able to wear them. The pay was good, however.
We had drink four and I sipped it morosely, staring at the wall machine that brewed chemical coffee. I had had a drink of that ersatz coffee, complete with powdered chemical cream, in this same room just before Neal Pearsall had ordered me to the Fort Worth Federal Hospital. To pick up a deliberate addiction to body drugs. Before the Mexican assignment, where I trapped an ebullient Texas millionaire who was about to be appointed to an important ambassadorial post in the Far East. Because of the monkey grinning on his back, he didn’t make it.
“All right,” I said, and Neal nodded and stubbed out his cigar.
“You know Cairo, Khartoum, and South Africa,” he stated. “You’ve hunted in the Kenya highlands and been to Addis Ababa on assignment for us. That right?”
“You’ve got the files,” I said. “And during the Second World War, while only a zeal-inflamed lad, I ferried new Douglas transports from Natal, South America, to Ascension Island, Lagos, Fort Maidugari, Aden, Masira Island, and Karachi. They were replacements for the China National Airlines on its Himalayan flights.”
I remembered those flights well because they were continuous. CNAC lost 100 percent of its fleet every eleven months. Most of all I remembered the stench of the African stops.
“Good, a bonus,” said Neal. “What we’re going to do is smuggle you into the Congo from the east side. Not only into it but into a jail in Bukavu, where you’ll sweat your guts out. You will be under sentence of death from Mobutu’s Government in Kinshasa.”
“That’s dangerous,” I commented. “Those goddamned simbas eat people. Have I any guarantee that they won’t get loaded on corn beer and eat me? Or shoot me in a forgetful moment?”
“It’s all worked out with Mobutu. His Elite Palace Guard will be in Bukavu solely to protect you. If he doesn’t produce that protection, he forfeits all American aid. And he needs it badly now.”
“I’ll remember that in case I get eaten,” I said. “Why am I to be cast into this stinking Congolese can?”
“There are four white men in it now. Mercenaries who used to work for Tshombe. They were stranded when Colonel Schramme flew the main body of mercenaries out of Kabembe. That’s in Rwanda, just across the border from Bukavu. These four fall guys are also awaiting execution, but you will break out and take two of them with you.”
“And the other two?”
Neal shrugged. “Not involved with us. They’ll have to run for it.”
“Why will I take the other two?”
“Because they are brothers, Altschul and Jorg van der Groot. They were born and raised in Great Namaland, in South-West Africa, and know the Skeleton Coast there intimately. They also have certain other knowledge we need.”
I had another drink, without relish, and stared at the sterile, fake-elegant room in the Tulsa motel. Everything in it had been mass-produced and placed in hundreds of thousands of other fake-elegant rooms. The next question was the big one.
“Why do we need that knowledge?”
“Because, Joseph, they are going to help you find a cache of uncut gemstone alluvial diamonds on that coast. With their help you will transport these diamonds to Bulawayo, in Rhodesia. Without, of course, being detected by the Government of South Africa, which controls South-West Africa.”
I lighted a small cigar, staring at him. The diamond-bearing beaches of South-West Africa were by far the richest source for those gems in the world. Their annual output exceeded that of all the other African fields combined. The beaches had an ice-cold surf, and the Syndicate patroled the area constantly, covering every foot of it by plane, ground transport, and offshore craft.
“Man,” I said slowly, “this must be a pretty big cache.”
“It is,” said Neal. “Nearly eighteen hundred pounds.”
I looked at him in real surprise. “Pounds? Nearly a ton of gemstones?”
“That’s right.”
How many carats could you cut out of 1800 pounds of rough stones? A carat was .2 of a gram. I tried to figure it out in my head but couldn’t.
“Neal,” I asked, “do you know how far it is from that Skeleton Coast to Rhodesia? And what kind of terrain is involved? Are you aware that another country, Botswana, and a little something called the Kalahari Desert, separate these two points?”
“I’m well briefed on it, Joe.”
“And you’d risk my life for a lousy ton of diamonds?”
Pearsall looked at me closely, then fell back on the pillows and began roaring with laughter. His lonely left foot shook from the force of it. I watched him impassively until the convulsion lessened, and he sat up and poured another drink. Wiping the tears from his eyes with a corner of the sheet.
“Yes, Joe,” he admitted. “We would do that. You’re a valuable man, but this cache should produce over three million carats after cutting. That represents a market value of over nine hundred million dollars.” He took another set of blue-backed instructions from the bed table and handed it over.
“You’ll get no more goddamned Christmas cards from me,” I said, rising. “How long have I got to decide?”
“Noon tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll be back in the office by then.”
“I’ll let you know,” I said. He nodded and I walked back through the suite, down the cool hallway, and pushed out onto the warmth of the open parking area. It took several seconds for the air-conditioner in the Rover to blast out the heat, and I released the brake and went coasting down the ramp.
I don’t know what it is about Tulsa in the summer, but something stinks. All over town, when the wind is north. I have traveled a lot in backward countries with open sewers, but Tulsa has a very distinctive stink. Like a compound of rotten-egg sulphurous petroleum compounds and just plain raw sewage. Tulsa is a rich and progressive place and they ought to do something about it.
I drove out of town as swiftly as I could because the city smelled a lot like the assignment I had just been offered. Like Africa.
Buy The Skeleton Coast Contract Now!
About the Author
Philip Atlee (1915–1991) was the creator of the long-running Joe Gall Mysteries, which is comprised of twenty-two novels published in the 1960s and 70s. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Atlee wrote several novels and screenplays—including Thunder Road starring Robert Mitchum, and Big Jim McLain starring John Wayne—before producing the series for which he is known. An avid flyer, he was a member of the Flying Tigers before World War II and joined the Marines after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1968 by Philip Atlee
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-6572-6
This edition published in 2021 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
THE JOE GALL MYSTERIES
FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, founded the Mysterious Press in 1975. Penzler quickly became known for his outstanding selection of mystery, crime, and suspense books, both from his imprint and in his store. The imprint was devoted to printing the best books in these genres, using fine paper and top dust-jacket artists, as well as offering many limited, signed editions.
Now the Mysterious Press has gone digital, publishing ebooks through MysteriousPress.com.
MysteriousPress.com. offers readers essential noir and suspense fiction, hard-boiled crime novels, and the latest thrillers from both debut authors and mystery masters. Discover classics and new voices, all from one legendary source.
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
FOLLOW US:
@emysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom
MysteriousPress.com is one of a select group of publishing partners of Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
The Mysterious Bookshop, founded in 1979, is located in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. It is the oldest and largest mystery-specialty bookstore in America.
The shop stocks the finest selection of new mystery hardcovers, paperbacks, and periodicals. It also features a superb collection of signed modern first editions, rare and collectable works, and Sherlock Holmes titles. The bookshop issues a free monthly newsletter highlighting its book clubs, new releases, events, and recently acquired books.
58 Warren Street
info@mysteriousbookshop.com
(212) 587-1011
Monday through Saturday
11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
FIND OUT MORE AT:
www.mysteriousbookshop.com
FOLLOW US:
@TheMysterious and Facebook.com/MysteriousBookshop
SUBSCRIBE:
The Mysterious Newsletter
Find a full list of our authors and titles at www.openroadmedia.com
FOLLOW US
@ OpenRoadMedia
Philip Atlee, The Rockabye Contract
