Doug Allyn - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

Far above, he could just make out the hiss and murmur of voices in subdued debate. The softer, higher voice appeared to be demanding something of the other. Then, after a pause, the rope that led to the surface was released and fell to join Paul and Josh in the pit.

Even as Josh struggled once more to his feet to cry out in consternation, Paul could just make out the silhouette of someone peering down into their tomb. The cold glow of the moon framed the long hair of their executioner, making it shimmer with silver streaks, even as Josh’s lamp captured the flushed face. With a cry, Professor Rais vanished from their sight, and shortly thereafter, the clanking of the metal tripod could be heard as its wreckage was dragged down the slope, and the last evidence of Paul and Josh’s plight was removed.

Josh began to weep, and Paul sat down next to him and placed his arm over his friend’s shoulder, but said nothing. He had hoped to see Vanda one last time, and was dumb with sorrow that she had deprived him of even this final consolation.

Drawn to the only heat remaining in the cave, the serpents washed up against the foot of the boulder upon which the two friends waited in a restless sea of scales, and the largest amongst them reared up from the press of the others questing for purchase. Paul leaned back and closed his eyes, instantly conjuring the familiar vision of Vanda dancing naked but for her Gypsy jewelry beneath a bright, pitiless moon, though this time there lay at her feet the prostrate victims of foreign and merciless gods.

© 2008 by David Dean

An Edgar Allan Poe Award winner, a multiple Shamus Award winner, and a recipient of the PWa’s Lifetime Achievement Award, John Lutz is one of the most esteemed writers in the field. He’s the author of dozens of novels and some two hundred published short stories. His latest thriller, In for the Kill , was published as a paperback original by Pinnacle Books in ’07.

Rose had mud on her nose.

Not a lot, but enough to arouse suspicion. Laker considered telling her about it, but that would be foolish. Instead he pretended to admire the green and yellow tie with the staring-eye pattern.

“Nice,” he said, fondling the tie.

Rose was alarmed. This customer was in his thirties, handsome, with blue eyes and wavy dark hair, and a sort of amused grin that was probably always on his face. His suit was okay, a kind of wrinkled gray blend with a fair amount of wool in it, that had never been touched by a tailor. What alarmed Rose was that he couldn’t really like the tie. And that he seemed so confident, as if he had some big secret.

Rose told herself, so what, everybody has a big secret. Rose was like that.

“Have I got it right,” asked the customer, “all you sell here are ties?”

Together, he and Rose glanced around the tiny downtown shop with its claustrophobically low ceiling and crowded racks of ties. “Not much room to sell anything else,” she said.

She waited, but he didn’t mention that they were the ugliest ties imaginable. Massed as they were, they were a visual assault. Some of them actually hurt the eye

“You want the tie?” Rose asked from behind the counter.

“Sure.”

He dug five ten-dollar bills from his wallet and paid her, watching her tuck the money into the register.

“No change?” he asked.

“Fifty even,” Rose said. “Tax included.”

“A bargain,” said the guy, through his amused smile.

Rose carefully folded the hideous thing and placed it in a bag.

“No receipt?”

“You’ve got the tie,” she told him with her own smile.

“Good point.” He thanked her before she could thank him, then went to the door and opened it, causing the tiny bell above it to tinkle as if sounding a faint alarm. “I’ll tell my friends,” he said, before going back out onto the busy sidewalk.

Rose said for him to be sure to do that, then went behind the curtain to the back room and down the crude wooden steps to where the digging was being done. “I sold a tie,” she said dejectedly.

Donna and Corrine stopped digging. Even dirty, Donna, with her lush, long red hair and big green eyes, looked like a beauty-pageant contestant. Corinne had blond hair, a heart-shaped face, and was attractive, but looked too delicate to be in any kind of contest. Her shovel was smaller than Donna’s. Somehow she hadn’t gotten dirty. All three women were the same age — twenty-one — and attended Pierpont University, but the semester had ended and they weren’t going to classes, so they were working on a summer project. They were robbing a bank.

Specifically, the one directly across the street from the Tie One On Shop, which they’d bought six weeks ago from an eager owner who’d retired to Florida. It had been a small jewelry shop, but the bank robbers had converted it to a tie shop and stocked it with the least appealing merchandise possible, and generally did what they could to discourage customers. They wanted to concentrate on their digging.

The tunnel, which had progressed to about halfway, would run beneath Ninth Avenue, and then beneath the vault of Sixth National Bank, where the plan was for it to make an abrupt upward turn.

“It was bound to happen,” Donna said, removing a work glove and fluffing her hair, done just yesterday by Evander, who wasn’t cheap, “that someone would buy a tie.”

“There was something about the guy who bought it, though,” Rose said. She didn’t look like any kind of beauty contestant. She was short, wiry, had mouse-colored, naturally spiky hair and fierce brown eyes above a turned-up nose. If she’d been born a dog, she’d have been one of those small breeds that strain to wriggle into tunnels to fight and kill burrowing vermin. A good ratter.

“Did he look like a cop?” Corrine asked, her eyes pie-plate wide.

Rose thought about it. “Not honest enough. He looked like he secretly hated the tie, which is something to be said for him.”

“He was cute,” Donna said. “I can tell by the way you describe him.”

“Cute and dangerous,” Rose said.

“Your type,” Donna said.

Rose didn’t argue.

“Selling ties is part of the plan,” Corrine said. “We are in business.”

That was a laugh, because the three of them were from incredibly wealthy families, which was why they could afford a snooty school like Pierpont. They were of an age and nature to resent their wealth and hate their dependence on those families. To rebel. Not uncommon. There were all sorts of ways for young women such as they to revolt and act out; anti-this, anti-that. It seemed to Rose that most of it had all been done. So she’d convinced Donna and Corrine to set aside their causes (No World Dominion, and Alternatives to Eggs) and, with her, rob a bank. It had nothing to do with money. It was exactly the sort of thing people without money did. That was the point. Also, who would suspect them, since their families were fabulously wealthy?

No one, that’s who.

All three agreed that it was a neat thing to do, so here they were, tunneling beneath Ninth Avenue. Each evening Rose would take the subway to where their innocuous-looking gray truck was parked, drive it to the tie shop, then back the vehicle in tight to the rear door for deliveries. Only the truck wasn’t there to make deliveries; it was there to pick up dirt, which was later dumped in New Jersey, which, being the Garden State, could always use dirt.

“It’s not a catastrophe that we sold a tie,” Corrine said brightly.

“That tie,” Rose said, “is a catastrophe.”

“So what’re we gonna do?” Donna asked, leaning fetchingly on her pickax.