LITMIR.BIZ

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and slipped it into the pocket of the seat in front of him. Leave it to the airlines to revive Dickens for the Christmas issue. He leaned his forehead against the Plexiglas window and let his attention wander across the moon-lit clouds beyond the big jetliner’s wing.

      Of course it wasn’t Berry, it was Marley. And it wasn’t Richelieu, it was Scrooge. And it wasn’t the Internet, it was the London Stock Exchange.

      But Cletus Berry was dead, dead if not yet buried, dead as a door-nail. And Hobart Lindsey was flying to New York, probably in time for Berry’s funeral and certainly in time to try and find out what had happened to his—to his what?

      Berry had been his fellow employee of International Surety. They’d been room-mates during the orientation seminar when both of them were selected for SPUDS, International Surety’s Special Projects Unit, and Berry had helped Lindsey research a couple of tricky cases. Probably that made them friends, or as close to friends as their positions allowed them to be in the wonderful world of the modern corporation.

      There was still an airline cup of coffee on Lindsey’s tray. He picked it up and sipped. The coffee had been weak and stale to start with. Now it was cold as well. He reached under his seat and pulled out the carrying case with his company-issue laptop computer.

      He looked around for someone to take the coffee away. The flight attendants were decked out in Santa Clause hats. These made a complement to their quasi-naval uniforms. But at the moment there were no flight attendants near Lindsey’s row. The passenger to his left, a seriously overweight teen-ager wearing a Denver Nuggets cap with the bill pointing backwards, had fallen asleep and was wheezing softly with each breath. He wore a sweat-stained tee shirt with a picture of a giant mistletoe on the chest and the motto, Kiss me, it’s Christmas! There was no climbing over him, and Lindsey didn’t want to shake him awake and ask him to let Lindsey reach the aisle.

      Finally Lindsey got rid of the coffee by swallowing it and put the empty cup carefully on the cabin floor. He booted up the computer and opened the file on the murder of his friend.

      There wasn’t much there. Lindsey had showed up at the Special Projects Unit of International Surety, in Denver, as usual that morning. The air was sparkling and the cold didn’t bother him too much. As Mondays went, this one looked pretty good. Lindsey was starting to feel comfortable in his new assignment as Desmond Richelieu’s deputy. Well, less uncomfortable, anyway, than he had been when he first agreed to take the job.

      For once Mrs. Blomquist had motioned Lindsey straight into the Director’s office with no corporate bureaucratic shenanigans to delay him. And for once Richelieu hadn’t been seated behind his desk, his pinstriped suit immaculate and his gold-rimmed glasses reflecting the Colorado sunlight.

      Richelieu had been pacing, and his salt-and-pepper hair had been in disarray.

      He shoved a paper at Lindsey, a print of the morning report from International Surety’s New York regional headquarters, designated in the corporate plan as Manhattan East.

      Special Projects Unit—SPUDS—acted like a private empire within International Surety, but every “detached” SPUDS operative kept up liaison with the local offices of the company. International Surety was as procedure-bound and as paper-heavy as any multinational, but SPUDS agents were freed from the usual corporate structure. They reported directly to Richelieu. The Director ran SPUDS the way his onetime mentor, J. Edgar Hoover, had run the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI was Hoover’s private empire inside the Department of Justice, and SPUDS was Desmond “Ducky” Richelieu’s private empire inside International Surety.

      The toughest cases came to SPUDS, the weirdest cases, and the biggest cases. Hobart Lindsey had handled some of the best—or worst—of them, but now he was on his way to New York to take care of a matter that had rattled his boss’s empire to its foundation.

      Cletus Berry had been found in an alley in Hell’s Kitchen, the old New York slum to the west of the theater district and Times Square. The word had come via KlameNet/Plus from Morris A. Zissler, assistant to the International Surety branch manager, Manhattan East.

      Lindsey took the computer printout and hurried from Richelieu’s imposing suite to his own modest office. He picked up a telephone and called Zissler. From Zissler he got a few details.

      It had been a freezing December morning in New York. A sanitation worker—they used to be garbage men, Lindsey thought—had entered the alley to pick up a load of trash. He found Berry. He called the cops. By the time they arrived at the scene, the body had lain in the freezing sleet long enough that the coroner’s technicians had to chip it out of the ice.

      Not that Berry was alone. With him was one Frankie Fulton, familiarly known as “FF,” in part because those were his initials, but mainly because he was a longtime petty criminal, unsuccessful gambler, and perennial gangster wannabe.

      Early in his career, Frankie had tried to bluff his way to the biggest pot in the biggest poker game he’d ever been in. He was deep in the hole, betting on credit—itself a rarity in Frankie’s circles—and put his all on one five-card hand. When it came time to show, Frankie triumphantly produced a king, nine and eight and three of diamonds, with one corner of a red ten peeping out between the king and the nine.

      Frankie reached for the pot with one hand and for his hat with the other, happily crowing, “Diamond flush.”

      Unfortunately for Frankie, another player had two pairs, one of which was the tens of clubs and diamonds.

      Frankie escaped from that incident with his life, a very badly broken leg that eventually healed but left him walking with a marked limp, and the permanent nickname, “FF.” Frankie “Four Flusher” Fulton, too, had needed to be chipped out of the frozen slush.

      The two men were equally dead.

      “How did they buy it?” Lindsey demanded.

      “Shot.”

      “How?”

      Zissler hummed into the phone. “That’s a little bit odd. Fulton was shot a lot.” He paused and hummed.

      “Come on,” Lindsey urged, “you’ve got to help me.”

      “Well, knee-capped—shot in both knees—that must have hurt like hell. And he was shot in both hands, and in both arms, and finally through the heart.”

      “And no one noticed?”

      “It was sleeting hard last night. And this is New York. People don’t get involved.”

      “You mean nobody heard the shots?”

      “Eleventh Avenue isn’t a great neighborhood, Mr. Lindsey. I don’t guess you know New York, do you?”

      Lindsey could never get used to being called Mister. “No, I don’t.”

      “Well, even in good neighborhoods, people don’t like to get involved. In Hell’s Kitchen—well.…” He stopped speaking. He hummed softly.

      Lindsey wondered how much of Zissler’s humming it would take to get on his nerves. “You’re telling me all about this Fulton person. What’s our interest in him? Did he have a policy with I.S.?”

      “No, Mr. Lindsey, but when two bodies are found together, both of them shot—you see? And the cops knew Frankie Fulton. When they found the bodies and found Cletus Berry’s ID, they called International Surety. I talked to a detective. She knew all about Frankie Fulton. She didn’t know anything about Mr. Berry. She wanted to know about him. I couldn’t tell her much. I knew the guy. I met him a couple of times. That was all.”

      There was a lengthy silence.

      Lindsey said, “You met him? Tell me about that.”

      “Mr. Berry had his own office, he didn’t like to work out of Manhattan East, he just wanted us to pay his bills, get him office supplies. Typical SPUDS big shot. He rented this little place and put a computer and a futon and a microwave in it and made himself a little home-away-from-home. I was up there a couple of times to deliver

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