Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Among the Killers of Men

Okay, the left hand is holding the axe. The right hand has the hammer. Let’s do it…Ready?…One…two…THREE!

Gabriel tossed the hammer into the air and grabbed the axe handle with his right hand while simultaneously releasing the handle with his left. The hammer had reached the top of its arc while he was making the exchange and was now plunging downward. Gabriel’s left hand shot out and snatched the hammer out of midair as it fell.

He had to stop and breathe for a moment after that little stunt. Compared to it, hammering the piton into the limestone was easy.

Still using one hand, he unwrapped the rope from his shoulder and stuck an end in his mouth. He gripped it with his teeth, and then dug a carabiner out of a pocket. It was yet another awkward operation to secure the end of the rope to the ’biner with a bowline knot one-handed, but he did it. He then hooked the carabiner into the eye on the exterior end of the piton. The rope was now fixed and safe to use.

Then his cell phone rang.

“What the…?” He looked back at Manny. “You mean to tell me there’s actually service down here?” Gabriel took hold of the rope with one hand and his legs, let go of the axe handle, and hung there, suspended.

The phone rang again.

“You’re not gonna answer that, are you?” Manny asked.

Gabriel hated cell phones the same way he hated most modern technology—but that didn’t stop him from feeling compelled to answer the thing when it rang. He fished it out of his trouser pocket and brought it to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Gabriel?”

“Michael?”

Gabriel immediately pictured his younger brother sitting at his desk back in the luxury of his clean and comfortable New York office. He’d rarely envied his brother his stay-at-home life—but at this moment he came close.

“Are you sitting down?” Michael asked.

Gabriel grimaced. “Not precisely.”

“It’s Lucy, Gabriel.”

The urgency in Michael’s voice gave him pause. Lucy—short for Lucifer—was the youngest sibling in the family. Their imaginative parents had named each child after one of the archangels in the Bible. It didn’t seem to matter to them that their daughter would have to bear the ignominy of her moniker for the rest of her life. In an attempt at kindness, her brothers called her Lucy, but ever since she’d run away from home at age seventeen, she’d taken to calling herself “Cifer” instead. Pronounced like cipher, it made a fine name for the scofflaw computer hacker she’d turned herself into.

“What about Lucy?” Gabriel asked.

“Are you sitting down?”

“ No , Michael, I’m not sitting down! Just tell me!”

“She’s in terrible danger. You need to come back to New York as quickly as you can.”

“How is she in danger?”

“It looks…it looks like she’s been kidnapped.”

He wasn’t sure he’d heard Michael correctly. “Say that again?”

“She’s been kidnapped.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. And there’s a ransom demand.”

“How much do they want?”

“They don’t want money, Gabriel. They want you.”

DON’T MISS THE NEXT EXCITING ADVENTURE OF GABRIEL HUNT!

Enjoy these other Gabriel Hunt adventures:

HUNT AT THE WELL OF ETERNITY

HUNT THROUGH THE CRADLE OF FEAR

HUNT AT WORLD’S END

HUNT BEYOND THE FROZEN FIRE

HUNT THROUGH NAPOLEON’S WEB *

Copyright

A LEISURE BOOK ®

July 2010

Published by

Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

200 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10016

in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

Copyright © 2010 by Winterfall LLC

Cover painting copyright © 2010 by Glen Orbik

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E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0895-8

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

GABRIEL HUNT was created by Charles Ardai and is a trademark of Winterfall LLC.

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