Free Hard Case Crime: Deadly Beloved by Max Allan Collins Page A

bastard and gave him a field-goal kick in the ass.
    The guy went sprawling, hitting the wall, hard, and sliding down to land near the bedroom doorway.
    Dan looked around for his revolver, quickly recovered it, then aimed its short but insistent snout down at the unconscious intruder.
    But the bastard sprang to life, and came up to execute a swift, deft martial arts kick that clipped Dan’s hand and sent the revolver flying again.
    The intruder swung his leg around again, in another skilled kick, only Dan kicked, too, nothing nearly so graceful, just a nice pointed shot that caught the guy in the balls.
    This put the intruder down again, screaming this time.
    “Be the pain, grasshopper,” Dan advised him, then knelt over his victim.
    Within seconds Dan had used plastic-tie handcuffs (he never went anywhere without them, including on dates) to bind the guy’s hands behind him.
    When Dan finally pulled the ski mask off, the moment of potential drama fizzled, because he didn’t recognize the guy, a young-looking but chiseled character who Dan immediately made as ex-military.
    By this time the guy’s screams had dissolved into howls of pain. You could be a Marine or a Green Beret or a Navy Seal, it didn’t matter—a kick in the balls was the great leveler.
    “Nice meeting you, too,” Dan said.
    Then he got back on his cell phone. The intruder was only moaning now, but that still meant Dan had to work a little to get his voice up over it and be heard.
    “Me again, Ms. Tree—got interrupted by a guy lookin’ for a ski lift.”
    “You all right?”
    “Fine. Took several highly skilled martial arts moves to bring this boy down.”
    “Martial arts?”
    “Yeah. First move, kick him in the ass. Second move, kick in the balls. Pretty much all you need to know in the ancient discipline I follow.”
    “Anybody we know?”
    Dan paced as he spoke, watching his captive but keeping a certain distance. “Not from my social circle. Of course, you draw from a wider range of assholes, Ms. Tree, than a clean-cut kid like me.”
    “Want me to call Rafe?”
    “Naw, I’ll do it. Funny thing, Masked Marauder had a chance to leave, but changed his mind and came back for something.”
    “Back for what?”
    Dan paced with purpose now, looking at the floor, seeking the object in question. “Something he brought with him, something small and solid, metal maybe. He threw whatever the hell it was at me, when I got the drop on him and...whoa.”
    “Dan?”
    Dan knelt over something that looked very familiar: a small shiny deco clock radio.
    “Dan?”
    “Hang with me, Ms. Tree.”
    Dan and his cell phone moved quickly to the bedroom and in seconds he was holding the clock radio he’d just recovered up next to its identical twin on the nightstand.
    “We got that rare kinda B & E guy, Ms. Tree,” he said.
    “What rare kind is that?”
    “The kind that brings a replacement along for what he steals....”

SEVEN
    Dan Green and I were in the small, dimly lit observation booth looking through our side of the half-silvered mirror onto the brightly lit interview room where Rafe Valer—in shirt sleeves, loose tie and empty shoulder holster—prowled like he was the one caged.
    Meanwhile, his suspect sat calmly at a small table, on which—like an odd centerpiece—rested a transparent evidence bag holding a metallic deco clock radio. A uniformed officer stood guard in one corner.
    The intruder from the Addwatter apartment, still attired in black but sans his ski mask, stared unknowingly at Dan and me, blank-faced; he’d been stonewalling for the fifteen minutes we’d been watching this.
    His features were a little too bony to be handsome despite light blue eyes; his blond hair was in a military crew; and his age was hard to make—somewhere in the no man’s land between twenty-five and forty. He kept his arms folded and he rarely blinked and eye contact with his interrogator was also rare.
    We did know that his name was Ron Grubb—he