Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (32 page)

“Home is where the heart is,” I said, yanking her hand a little harder than I had to. She followed me sullenly up the walkway, with Eleanor one step back and two bewildered cops trailing behind us.

The porch light was on. When the door opened Ellspeth looked at me glacially and then stared at the cops. “Look down,” I said.

He did, and saw Angel.

“Hello, darling,” he said. Angel said nothing. She was staring at her feet as though the answer to a riddle were written on her Alice in Wonderland shoes.

Ellspeth darted a questioning glance at me.

“All over,” I said.

He dropped to his knees in front of Angel. She looked past him. He took her hand between both of his and said, “Angel.” One of the cops behind me shuffled his feet.

Eleanor put a slender hand between Angel’s shoulder blades and patted her.

Angel drew a deep breath. Without looking at her father she said, “Is Ansel here?”

Chapter 31

I
t was after ten by the time I got to Mrs. Yount’s. With the kitten purring comfortably into my jacket, I trudged through the mud and climbed to the top of the wall that surrounded her awful little garden. I’d dropped Eleanor at home in a kind of monolithic silence.

All the lights inside were turned off, but the television screen was glowing. Mrs. Yount sat silhouetted on the floor on her old fur coat, her back to me, eating something out of a tall box. Crackers, maybe. She was looking at a woman named Linda Evans who was coming down an impossibly long stairway wearing a new fur coat.

“You’re home, baby,” I whispered to the kitten. The kitten didn’t say anything. I gathered my muscles and jumped.

I’d forgotten about the Great Wall of Bottles. I landed on top of it with a deafening, shattering tumult of breaking glass. I scrabbled to keep my balance as bottles rolled back and forth under my feet, and then I fell decisively on my backside. Broken glass bit my rear end through my trousers. To add insult to injury, the kitten began to claw at my stomach.

Inside, Mrs. Yount leapt up from the old fur coat and streaked toward the front of the apartment. She was screaming in some Balkan language. She pulled open a closet door and turned around, holding what looked in the half-light very much like a forty-five.

I cleared the wall in a single bound with the kitten still scrabbling at my viscera with its claws, and landed on my hands and knees in the mud. Behind me, there was a boom, and the sliding glass door was annihilated in a silvery cascade of glass.

Something right in front of my nose turned its body into a startled arc and spit at me. It was Fluffy, pink collar and all.

Fluffy hurtled off toward the front of the building and I heard the glass door sliding unnecessarily open. There couldn’t have been much glass left. Mrs. Yount fired at the stars while I sprinted for the gray Camaro, bent over and keeping close to the ground.

I tossed the kitten roughly onto the front seat and then slid behind the wheel and tried to catch my breath. The kitten sat down calmly, licked one of its forepaws, and began to clean its face. I started to laugh. Mrs. Yount had always said she’d know in her bosom if Fluffy were dead. Two more shots boomed heavenward.

When I’d finished laughing, I drove home with my cat.

Other Books by Timothy Hallinan

The Simeon Grist Series

The Four Last Things (Simeon Grist #1)

live
without…

Critical Acclaim for
The Four Last Things

“Terrific, well-crafted, thoroughly satisfying … updates Raymond Chandler’s vision of life in Los Angeles through Grist’s sardonic, often hilarious observations … leaves one looking forward to Hallinan’s future endeavors.”   (Los Angeles Herald-Tribune)

“It’s rare to find a first novel in the mystery genre that boasts a smoothly plotted story, crisp dialogue, and excellent characterizations … This exciting tale accomplishes all three … The book never falters, sustaining suspense and interest throughout … a sure winner.”  (Booklist)

Hallinan has a genuine ability to write effective prose, engaging repartee, sharp and witty characterizations … this laudable first effort could become a notable series.”  (The Washington Post Book World)

“Wonderful … you gotta love a novel that starts with the hard-drinking private eye sighing about the dame he’s been following.”  (West Coast Review of Books)

“Hallinan neatly maximizes his gift for offbeat characters and clever pacing … Simeon Grist, the sleuth he created, is in a class by himself.”  (Inside Books)

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The Four Last Things
on Kindle by clicking
here
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Everything But the Squeal (Simeon Grist #2)

 Simeon Grist is a private eye and Los Angeles is his city. It’s Raymond Chandler country, especially the parts Grist sees – like the dank underbelly that lies between Santa Monica and Hollywood Boulevards, where all the California dreaming is a nightmare. But beggars and private eyes can’t be too choosy, and Grist is on a new case – one that leads him down the streets of LA and into the dead, dark places of a killer’s heart.

It starts off on Hollywood Boulevard, a street filled with runaways who quickly lose their innocence and sometimes their lives. Missing is a thirteen-year-old from Kansas, Aimee Sorrell, a/k/a Dorothy Gale, who didn’t find Oz over this rainbow. In fact, from the Polaroids her mother got in the mail, Aimee found nothing less than hell – drugs, pornography, and sexual slavery. It is the not-so-pretty pictures, and especially the marks on the girl’s body, that convince Grist to take the Sorrell case and to begin his search among the castoffs and criminals of an all-night diner, a 24-hour magnet for the displaced.

But the trail soon leads him to the city morgue, where the kid on the slab isn’t Aimee, but another runaway with the same kind of marks. Grist knows that there’s more than a pedophile at work here. There’s a child sex-for-sale ring that’s proof positive of the human race’s downhill slide into immorality and perversion. Grist’s problem is finding out who’s running the ring – and getting Aimee back before she’s the next corpse in a refrigerated drawer.

His solution is to enlist the aid of another teen, a pretty, middle-class kid named Jessica, who thinks fun is flirting with a coke dealer ten years too old for her. Jessica needs a lesson in reality, but Grist doesn’t anticipate that taking her along might jeopardize both their lives. For Grist and Jessica are going to find out what happens to the lost children of America when they go looking for love in all the wrong places.

Critical Acclaim for
Everything But the Squeal

“
Squeal
combines high-octane action, baroque violence, humor, and pathos in a self-assured manner that marks Mr. Hallinan as a capable practitioner of the private eye tale.  (Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal)

“… a grimly authentic portrait of L.A.’s sordid subculture.” (Robert Wade, The San Diego Union)

“… a chilling portrait of what life holds for kids who lose their innocence too soon, and we couldn’t have gotten through it if the author weren’t so damned talented.”  (Tom and Enid Schantz, The Purloined Letter)

“There are two ways to explore the Hollywood underground: Drive over the hill and spend a few dangerous days walking Hollywood Boulevard, or read
Everything But the Squeal
, the second Simeon Grist novel by Timothy Hallinan… Grist bears watching: He may turn out to be a modern successor to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.”  (Kate Seago, Los Angeles Daily News)

“Simeon Grist made his debut in
The Four Last Things
, and it was a smashing debut, as I reported in this space last August.  There is apparently no sophomore jinx in the private eye trade, because
Everything But the Squeal
is even better than the first one.”  (Dick Kleiner, The Desert Sun)

“Get a copy of
Everything But the Squeal
, but be prepared to shut off the phone or fax machine; you won’t want to brook any interruptions once you start it.”  (Tom Hatten, KNX Radio, Los Angeles)

“
Everything But the Squeal
is a riveting page-turner … the Simeon Grist books are something special.”  (Jim Huang, The Drood Review)

“… exciting and original … above all, a story with moral as well as mortal consequences.  … They say that the second book in a suspense series is always the hardest to pull off, because a writer tends to use up all of his or her tricks bringing the characters to life.  Hallinan, who seems to have a natural supply of imagination, is a remarkable exception.”  (Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune)

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Everything But The Squeal
on Kindle by clicking
here
.

The Poke Rafferty Series

A Nail Through the Heart (Poke Rafferty #1)

The first of Timothy Hallinan’s Bangkok thrillers introduces Bangkok-based Poke Rafferty, who went to Thailand to write a book and stayed to fall in love — with the country and with the people, especially two of them. Now he’s quit writing offbeat travel guides for the young and terminally bored, and instead is trying to assemble a new family with Rose, the former go-go dancer he wants to marry, and Miaow, the tiny, streetwise urchin he wants to adopt. But trouble in the guise of good intentions comes calling just when everything is beginning to work out. Poke agrees to take in another displaced child, Miaow’s troubled and terrifying friend from the gutter. Then he agrees to help locate a distraught Aussie woman’s missing uncle—and accepts a generous payment to find a blackmailing thief. No longer gliding carelessly across the surface of a culture he doesn’t really understand, suddenly Poke’s plodding through dark and unfamiliar terrain—and everything and everyone he loves is in terrible danger. Hallinan’s first Bangkok thriller won raves both here and in Asia.

Critical Acclaim for
A Nail Through the Heart

“I *highly* recommend A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART, and anything else Hallinan has written.” -
Charlaine Harris, Best-selling author of “True Blood.”

From Publisher’s Weekly:
Brutal torture and equally brutal empathy define this excellent, if sometimes familiar, thriller from Hallinan (The Bone Polisher). Poke Rafferty, a travel writer turned detective, intends to settle down in Bangkok with his ex-prostitute girlfriend, Rose, and a young urchin, Miaow, when Miaow brings her troubled friend Superman into the household. While dealing with this intrusion, Rafferty takes on dual sleuthing assignments to help pay for adopting Miaow. The first case involves finding Australian Claus Ulrich, a hardcore bondage aficionado. When Rafferty meets the powerful and rich Madame Wing while investigating Ulrich’s disappearance, she offers him $30,000 to find an envelope and the Cambodian man who took it. The only catch? If Rafferty opens the envelope, he’ll learn information about Madame Wing that will force her to kill him. Rafferty stumbles through the clues like the foreigner he is, always on the outside looking in. Despite an overly leisurely ending, the rich depictions of Bangkok’s seedy side recall John Burdett’s visceral mysteries.
(July)

From Booklist:
The author of the 1990s Simeon Grist series returns with a compelling new protagonist: American travel writer Poke Rafferty, who is out to right some serious wrongs on the predatory streets of Bangkok. While attempting to adopt a homeless girl, rescue a potentially murderous urchin known as Superman, and build a lasting relationship with the former bar girl he loves, Poke is pulled into two brutal mysteries. One involves a notorious Khmer Rouge torturer, the other a series of child-porn photos. As he doggedly plumbs these ghastly depths, Rafferty matures from a play-it-as-it-lays layabout into a man willing to meet his lover’s culture more than halfway and find his moral compass at a time when the victims can be as guilty as the murderers are innocent. The fact that the referenced pedophile photo series and Phnom Penh torture house both existed heightens the impact of a narrative that’s already deeply felt. If this opens a new series, Hallinan is off to a surefooted start with a supporting cast (including Poke’s precocious, pugnacious, almost-daughter Miaow) well worth getting to know.—
Sennett, Frank

Booksense.com (monthly pick):
“This one of the best novels I have read in years, and it will be a true, long-lasting favorite.”

New York Times Bestselling author John Lescroart:
“Don’t miss your chance to read A Nail Through the Heart before it starts winning all its awards….Every page shimmers with life and light. This is great stuff!”

New York Times bestselling author T. Jefferson Parker:
“A haunting novel…fast, bold, disturbing, and beautifully written. Hallinan is terrific.”

www.reviewingtheevidence.com:
:… a beautiful yet terrifying book that illustrates the humanity and hatred that people show to each other. This novel is well worth reading.”

Barnes & Noble.com:
” To say that this is a must read or a page turner, would be a grave injustice. For these catch phrases are used far too often to be attached to a novel such as this. I highly recommend this novel and anxiously await the second in the series! Happy Reading!”

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A Nail Through the Heart
on Kindle by clicking
here
.

The Fourth Watcher (Poke Rafferty #2)

Travel writer Poke Rafferty is ready to let go of his “Looking for Trouble” series of travel books and settle down in Bangkok with his fiancee, Rose, and his newly adopted daughter, Miaow. But trouble isn’t ready to let go of Poke. Enter the one person Poke least wants to see in the entire world — a person whose emotional hold over Poke is absolute. And with him comes a box of rubies, a wad of fraudulent identity papers and — in pursuit of those things — one of the most dangerous gangsters in China.