Free What Comes Around: An Alex Hawke Novella (Alex Hawke Novels) by Ted Bell Page A

fingers to his carotid artery, just to make sure.
    No pulse.
    The rogue was finally dead.

 
    C HAPTER 15
    “ H ULLO, A MBROSE,” HAWKE said, answering his mobile a few moments later.
    “Well, since it appears to be you on the phone, one can only deduce that you survived the encounter.”
    “Excellent deduction, Constable. One of your best.”
    “Do you require any assistance, by chance?”
    “That would be nice. Where are you? Enjoying a quiet pipe by the fireside somewhere?”
    “Hardly. I’m standing about twenty feet outside what used to be your front door, waiting in the pouring rain for all the shooting to die down in there.”
    “Ah, you’re here, then. Well. Do come in, won’t you? Doors open, as you can see,” Hawke said. “Meet me at the Monkey Bar, will you? We would seem to owe ourselves a libation, some sort of restorative, I suppose. What’s your pleasure, old warrior?”
    “A gin and bitters should do nicely. Boodles, if you have it.”
    “I certainly do.”
    “What about the deceased?”
    “Oh, I don’t think he’ll be having anything this evening. He’s moved on.”
    “Ah. Well, good work, Alex. On my way inside now. I’ll see you at the bar.”
    “Cheerio, then.”
    “Cheerio.”
    Hawke looked down at the corpse at his feet. Brass cartridges glittered everywhere on the tile floor. He used one bare foot to roll the man over onto his back, saw one dead black eye staring blindly back at him.
    “I should have killed you that night in Tangiers, Payne,” he said. “I could have done with one less funeral in Maine, you miserable bastard.”.
    He found Ambrose standing behind the bar, his cold pipe jammed into one corner of his mouth, pouring a healthy dollop of rum into Hawke’s favorite tumbler. Congreve smiled as he poured. “The ambrosial nectar of the gods,” he said.
    “Indeed.”
    “What shall we drink to?” Congreve asked, raising his glass of gin.
    “Let’s see,” Hawke mused.
    He plucked one of the cigarettes from a silver stirrup cup on the bar, lit up, and thought about it a second before speaking.
    “Absent friends and dead enemies?” Hawke said.
    And that was the end of it.

 
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    P RO LOGUE
    L ORD A LEXANDER H AWKE rose with the dawn.
    A shadowy gloom pervaded the gilded coffers of his high-ceilinged bedchamber. He lifted his arms high above his head and stretched mightily, extending his long naked body full length, feeling his muscles and tendons come alive, one by one. Then he wiggled his toes twice for luck and sat straight up beneath the dark blue needlepoint canopy tented above his four bedposts.
    His head ached; his lips were dry, and he tried to swallow. Difficult. His mouth felt, perhaps, like that of some ancient Gila monster standing in the middle of the Mojave Desert on a flat rock in the noonday sun. That tequila nightcap, perhaps? Ah, yes, that was it. A dram too far.
    Fully awake now, he needed light. There was a discreet control pad on the wall above his bedside table and he reached over to press a pearly button.
    A soft whir was followed by the rustle of heavy silk. As the brocade draperies on the many tall French windows drew apart, a soft rosy light began to bloom within the room. Beyond his windows, he saw the red-gold sun perched on the dark rim of the earth. He turned his face toward the sunlight and smiled.
    It was going to be another beautiful day.
    Beyond his windows lay his walled gardens. Most had been designed by the famous eighteenth-century landscape architect Lancelot Brown. He was a man known to history as “Capability” Brown because the talented and clever Brown slyly told all his potential clients that only their particular estates had the “great capability” to realize his genius.
    Beyond the gardens, a tangle of meadows circumscribed by dry stone walls. Then endless forests, temporarily clothed in a light haze of spring green.