Free Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 03 by The Angel Gang

her mouth. “Hush, sweetheart.”
    When she opened her eyes, the window beside her glittered with dew. Dim morning lights and shadows through the cedar forest looked subtly glorious. The needles glimmered dark green under the shelves of new snow. They passed a clearing of logged stumps. The ground sparkled as if the whole earth were a black diamond. A wolf with dark bluish fur streaked across the clearing. Wendy smiled in admiration.
    “Get a load of this! One second she bleats, now she’s grinning like a chorus girl. I think we got us a real screwball here, Tersh.”

Chapter Nine
    Twenty minutes out of San Diego, Hickey had realized that chartering a plane might’ve got him home faster. Yet he wasn’t about to backtrack. Besides, the fog was soupy enough so he might’ve wasted the morning finding a plane, even a charter. Had he been called to stand still for an instant, he might’ve turned to ashes. Movement felt like his only salvation.
    As he neared LA, the fog broke. Again he thought about flying. But the nearest airport to his place was an hour off, on the south shore, out highway 50. Anyway, it might be closed on account of the storm. And he’d risk losing hours if he cut across the city to the LA airport or passed the highway 99 merge and tried one of the airports in Burbank or Ventura.
    So he jumped red lights through LA and Hollywood, rolled through stop signs. He clocked eighty topping the hill past Griffith Park. Through the groves of the San Fernando Valley and up and down the Grapevine’s switchbacks, past fire-blackened hills and a half dozen wrecked and abandoned cars, he kept the hand throttle wide open and panned the horizon for cruisers. He only had to back the speed down twice. One patrol car lay hidden behind a boulder, the other in a cluster of oaks. Hickey’s gaze felt so intense he could’ve spotted them through a ridge of granite. His brain seemed supercharged, as though he’d made up for years of lost sleep, only it kept firing arbitrarily until the San Joaquin Valley, when the explosions of fear and anger had quieted enough to let him reason.
    He didn’t figure the kidnappers to be Angelo Paoli’s boys. Not a chance they could’ve gotten up north so fast, at night anyway. Charlie Schwartz might’ve sent some punks directly after lunch. Except, from all Hickey’d seen of the man, Charlie didn’t think that fast. It was hardly brains that’d made him top dog. Meanness was Charlie’s weapon.
    More likely they were hired guns, out of San Francisco or maybe from around the lake. If they were locals, that’d make them fellow employees of his, since his neighbor and boss Harry Poverman had his fist around the Tahoe action.
    He thought of pulling over and calling Poverman but nixed the idea. That’d be like a burglar ringing the doorbell. He sped on until his gas ran dry. From a Sinclair station in Bakersfield, he phoned Leo at the office and got lucky.
    “Another minute, I was gone,” Leo said. “Got any news?”
    “Claire told you, right?”
    “Sure. I hopped in the Packard and blazed up to the motel, just in time to miss you. Had to pay the tab before they’d give me the stuff you left behind.”
    “I paid it up front.”
    “Well, she stiffed us. Where you at?”
    “Bakersfield.”
    “You’re making time, all right. Tom, don’t lose your head, will you?”
    “Anything happens to her and the kid, I’m done.” Hickey wanted to explain how it felt, that if he lost Wendy his soul would flee, leaving nothing but the carcass, the withered heart and vanquished mind. But he choked on the first word.
    “Don’t think about losing her, Tom. Think about next year, you and Wendy on a second honeymoon, taking the kid on a whirlygig at the Pike. Think about how that lousy valley you’re passing through stinks like fertilizer. Think about revenge or anything you please except losing her.”
    Hickey opened his mouth, found it mute. The second attempt he managed a sigh; the third