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      JAMES HADLEY CHASE

      was a pseudonym for Rene Brabazon Raymond. Born in England on Christmas Eve 1906, Chase left home at the age of eighteen and worked at a number of different jobs before he settled on being a writer. With a map and a slang dictionary, Chase wrote his first book, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, in six weeks. It was published in 1939 and became one of the bestselling books of the decade. It was later made into a stage play in London and then into a film in 1948, which was later remade in 1971 by Robert Aldrich as The Grissom Gang. Chase went on to write more than eighty mysteries before his death on February 6, 1985.

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      CHAPTER FOURTEEN

      CHAPTER FIFTEEN

      CHAPTER SIXTEEN

      CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

      CHAPTER ONE

      THE RAT HOLE THEY RENTED me for an office was on the sixth floor of a dilapidated building in the dead-end section of San Luis Beach. From sunrise to dusk the noise of the out-town traffic and the kids yelling at one another in the low-rent tenement strip across the way came through the open window in a continuous blast. As a place to concentrate in, it ranked lower than the mind of a third-rate hoofer in a tank-town vaudeville act.

      That was why I did most of my headwork at night, and for the past five nights I had been alone in the office flexing my brain muscles while I tried to find a way out of the jam. But I was licked and I knew it. There was no way out of this jam. Even at that it took me a couple of brain sessions to reach this conclusion before I decided to cut my losses and quit.

      I arrived at the decision at ten minutes after eleven o’clock on a hot July night exactly eighteen months after I had first come to San Luis Beach. The decision, now it was made, called for a drink, and I was holding up the office bottle in the light to convince myself it was as empty as my trouser pockets when I heard footsteps on the stairs.

      The other offices on my floor and on the floors below were shut for the night. They closed around six o’clock and stayed that way until nine the following morning. I and the office mice had popped into our holes as the footsteps creaked up the stairs. The only visitors I’d had in the past month were the cops. It didn’t seem likely that Lieutenant of the Police Redfern would call at this hour, but you never knew. Redfern did odd things, and he might have thought up an idea of getting rid of me. He liked me no more than he liked a rattlesnake—perhaps even a little less—and if he could run me out of town even at eleven o’clock at night it would be all right with him.

      The footsteps came along the passage. They were in no hurry: slow, measured steps with a lot of weight in them.

      I felt in my vest pocket for a butt, struck a match and lit up. It was my last butt, and I had been saving it up for an occasion like this.

      There was a light in the passage, and it reflected on the frosted panel of my door. The desk lamp made a pool of light on the blotter, but the rest of the rat hole was dark. The panel of light facing me picked up a shadow as big feet came to rest outside my door. The shadow was immense. The shoulders overflowed the lighted panel; on the pumpkinlike head was the kind of hat the cloak-and-dagger boys used to wear when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.

      Fingernails tapped on the panel, the doorknob turned, the door swung open as I shifted the desk lamp.

      The man who stood in the doorway looked as big as a two-ton truck. He was as thick as he was broad, and had a ball-round face, skin tight with hard, pink fat. A black hairline mustache sat below a nose like the beak of an octopus, and little black eyes peered at me over two ridges of fat, like sloes in sugar icing. He might have been fifty, not more. There was the usual breathlessness about him that goes with fat people. The crown of his wide black hat touched the top of the door, and he had to turn his gross body an inch or so to enter the office. An astrakhan collar set off his long, tight-fitting black coat and his feet were encased in immaculately polished shoes, the welts of which seemed a good inch and a half thick.

      “Mr. Jackson?” His voice was hoarse and scratchy and thin. Not the kind of voice you’d

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