The following is the beginning of the entry in the Rocky Stone notebooks, dated April 20, 1949:
It was hot. Cold sweat dried on my forehead, leaving it cracked and dusty, but there was still a ring of perspiration that lingered at the band of my hat. They placed me in a wooden chair. I could move my hands a little, but my legs couldn't move an inch. The sun burned my eyes in their sockets even though I had yet to open them.
“There he is,” said a man's voice, one with a smile in it.
I forced myself to take a look. There was plenty to see. The sunlight came from a series of windows running along the top of the room and my face was positioned right in the line of fire. It was a basement, filled with stacks of chairs and odds and ends. Ropes at the back of my chair connected it to a thick metal pole in the center of the room. Another chair sat five feet away, and two black-gloved hands clutched it from behind. The pinky on the left hand remained straight and I knew who I was up against. A hood from Los Diablos, sent straight from Max Blank. They call him Nine Knuckles.
I looked at his doughy, round face. You would expect to see a friendly mug like his on a favorite uncle.
“Who tipped you to come here?”
I said nothing. I shifted around a bit and checked the ropes around my wrists. They were frayed, not the best for a job like this, and a bit of work at it might be enough to get me free. Nine Knuckles didn't like me ignoring him and he slapped my hat off and pulled my head to the side by my hair.
“You don't have much time,” he hissed. “Blank's given me a deadline and I plan on keeping it. You've got fifteen minutes before I take you apart, get me?”
“Leave him,” said another voice. A female one.
Nine Knuckles pushed my head angrily and released it from his grip. I straightened up and caught sight of the speaker: Gloria Hallward. She dressed professionally when she wasn't masquerading. She wore a sharp blue jacket with silver buttons and a matching skirt. Nine Knuckles growled something in her ear and walked off. She had a seat across from me and studied my eyes.
“Mr. Blank called me a week ago, when Marjorie Gomer left him,” she stated, and as she did, she looked over her shoulder to see where her companion had gone. “He had reason to believe she would come here.”
“Don't tell him anything!”
She threw her eyes at him again and crossed her legs. At the same time, she rested her hands on her knee, dropped one wrist on top of the other and began to move them back and forth in a slow, sawing motion. I got the hint and did what she did, and after five strokes the ropes came loose.
“All right,” I said. “I'll talk.” Nine Knuckles wandered back into the room and I looked right at him. “But I'll only talk to you.”
Gloria nodded at me and disappeared into the darkness.
He scratched at the side of his nose with his frozen pinky and thought about it. Good thing for me he wasn't hired to do the thinking, because I needed him to be the sitting duck he was. I knew he'd go right back to the place we were when we were interrupted. I knew he'd pull my head off to the side and he'd yell in my ear. And when he did that very thing, I knew he was too close to see my hand reach behind his own head. It was almost too easy. I pulled my body off to the right and he followed. My hand tightened on his neck and guided his forehead to the metal pole. His skull landed with a frightening clank and he fell limp to the ground, out cold.
Gloria returned as I ripped at the ropes around my legs. She began to help and I pushed her away. “You want to tell me what this is all about?”
“I couldn't just set you free,” she replied. “Blank would get suspicious. I had to make it look like you escaped. I need help on this one.”
As I pulled my left leg out of the trap I looked down at Nine Knuckles and wondered if I'd be joining him down there some day. “Why do you need me? Couldn't your boy do the job?”
She threw the ropes away in a fury. “I don't like it when somebody tells me how to do my business. I've never met Max Blank face-to-face, but when I do, he's getting a sock in the jaw.”
“I'd think twice. Take it from the man who knows.”
I stood up and she gave me a smile. “There. All better. Now we've got to find Mitch.”
A laugh fell out of me as we made our way through the maze of junk to a set of concrete steps at the back. I figured Mitch she made him up to throw me off the trail. “So who is this guy? A long-lost brother?”
Gloria winced. “Afraid not. Mitch is her husband.”
Can this be true? Was Marjorie already married? Tune in next week along the ever-popular inter-net for The Lost Love, part 10
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