Hunt at World's End Read online

  Hunt At World’s End

  Gabriel Hunt

  AS TOLD TO NICHOLAS KAUFMANN

  LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

  Strapping the shotgun fully across his back, Gabriel began climbing the statue’s leg, pulling his way up by hooking his fingers and toes into fissures in the stone. Another bullet struck near him. He forced himself to ignore it and keep climbing.

  Moments later he heard Grissom’s voice directly below. “Leave them to me. You get up there and stop him—and bring me those gemstones!”

  DeVoe stuffed the Colt into his belt and started scaling the statue’s other leg. And damn it, the man was fast. Gabriel kept climbing, as quickly as he dared. He was approaching the statue’s outstretched hand, which stood palm-up forty feet off the ground. If he could get to it—

  He reached out for it, but it was still too far. He climbed another few feet and tried again, straining across the gap. He could feel the stone under his fingers…but could he get a solid grip? He clamped down with one hand and prepared to bring the other over—and as he did, his left foot slipped out of the fissure he’d braced it in. Desperately he swung his other arm across, biting down on the rough stone with his fingertips. His other foot slipped from its hold as momentum carried him across, and he found himself dangling from the statue’s hand, the jewel-filled vest pulling heavily on his arm. He tried to swing his legs up. His first try failed—not high enough. As he tried again, he glanced to the side and saw that DeVoe had reached the statue’s hip and was starting to inch his way over toward him…

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Excerpt

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Preview

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  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Gabriel Hunt had taken a lot of punches to the face over the years. He’d come to think of it as an occupational hazard, dealing as he often did with criminals, pirates, gangsters, brawlers and all kinds of thugs who let their fists do the talking, and he usually gave as good as he got. But this time was different. This was the first time the guy throwing the punches was wearing a big, sharp silver ring in the shape of a horned stag’s head.

  The punch stunned him, knocked him back into one of the large elephant tusks flanking the fireplace of the Discoverers League lounge. The tusk wobbled on its base, and Gabriel, feeling wobbly himself, dropped to his knees. Blood trickled along his cheek where the stag’s horns had cut him. He looked up at the slender blond man standing over him in a gray houndstooth blazer and gray slacks. He was wearing a crooked sneer. Glancing at his hand, he wiped a spot of blood off his ring.

  “We can continue this as long as you wish, Mr. Hunt,” he said. “I have nowhere else I need to be. But you see my friends back there? They don’t have as much patience as I do.”

  Behind the blond man, three men clad all in black stood with guns in their hands. One revolver was trained on Wade Boland, the weekend bartender, where he stood behind the bar. The second was pointed at Clyde Harris, a retired cartographer in his seventies who came to the League every Saturday to partake of his two favorite pastimes, drinking and swapping tall tales. He sat on his usual barstool at the end of the counter and stared at the gun unblinking. Neither Wade nor Clyde looked particularly frightened by this turn of events, though they kept their hands dutifully raised above their heads.

  But the third revolver was leveled at Katherine Dunlap, and she was a different story. The willowy redhead sat trembling at the table she’d been sharing with Gabriel before the blond man and his cohorts had stormed in and started waving their guns around. Her fingernails dug into the plush arms of the red leather chair, and her pale green eyes were as wide as soup bowls. It was obvious she’d never had a gun pointed at her before. Gabriel had only met her that morning, on his flight back from Brazil to New York City. Seated next to her in first class, he’d passed the hours answering her questions about his just-completed expedition along the banks of the Amazon, and once they’d landed he’d invited her back to the Discoverers League for a drink. She clearly hadn’t expected their date to end in violence. Of course, neither had he.

  The blond man reached into the inside pocket of his blazer, pulled out a large, well-polished chrome handgun and leveled it at Gabriel. Gabriel eyed the gun unhappily. The three bouncer types he figured he could take even though they were armed. But this man was another matter. Compared to the other three he looked almost scrawny, but he punched like someone had taught him how, and he was holding his gun with a professional’s grip.

  “I don’t have what you’re looking for,” Gabriel said, rubbing his jaw.

  “I want you to think very carefully about what you do next, Mr. Hunt. I’d hate to have to tell my men to start shooting.” The man gestured around the lounge at the bookshelves filled with antique volumes and the display cases of artifacts, many of them fragile, all of them irreplaceable. “These beautiful things might get damaged. Bloodstains, you know. So difficult to wash off.”

  “Gabriel,” Katherine pleaded, her voice shaking.

  The man smiled. “You see? Your friend has a good head on her shoulders. I’m sure she would like it to remain there.”

  Gabriel rose slowly to his feet.

  “No more heroics, Mr. Hunt,” the man cautioned. “And no more lies. I know you were in the Amazon until this morning, and I know you brought the Death’s Head Key back with you. Just hand it over and we’ll go quietly.” He smiled slightly. “Its name notwithstanding, no one has to die over the thing.”

  “Why should I give it to you?” Gabriel asked.

  The blond man cocked his head and knit his brow. “Why? Because I am the man with the gun, Mr. Hunt.”

  “Why do you want it?” Gabriel said. “It’s not that valuable. It’ll fetch maybe five, six grand on the black market, if you’re lucky. It hardly seems worth your time.”

  The blond man stepped nearer. This close, Gabriel got a good look at the man’s eyes and could see the brutality he concealed beneath his veneer of civility. The man opened his mouth to answer, then changed his mind and swung his Magnum, slamming the heavy butt into Gabriel’s jaw. Gabriel’s head snapped back. At least this time he managed to stay on his feet.

  “The key,” the blond man repeated.

  Gabriel narrowed his eyes. He tasted blood and spat red-tinged saliva onto the carpet. “You better hope I never see you again.”

  The man cocked the Magnum. “You will never see anyone again, Mr. Hunt, if you don’t hand over the key.” And when Gabriel failed to do so: “For heaven’s sake, Hunt, what difference does it make to you? What were you planning to do with it, stick it in one of these cases? Photograph it for National Geographic? Give it to the Metropolitan? What a colossal waste. You don’t even know what the key unlocks.”

  “And you do?”

  The blond man leveled the barrel of the Magnum at Gabriel’s forehead and said, “Five.”

  “Tell me,” Gabriel said. “Tell me what the key opens.”

  “Four.”

  “Gabriel, for God�
��s sake,” Clyde muttered from his barstool. “My ice is melting. Just give the man whatever he’s looking for, and I’ll buy you and the lady a round.”

  “Three.”

  The blond man swung the gun to point it at Katherine. Her hands shot up as though they might be able to deflect a bullet. “Two.”

  “Gabriel!”

  “One—”

  “All right,” Gabriel said. “All right. Just…put that thing away.”

  The blond man took the gun off of Katherine and swung it to face Gabriel instead.

  Gabriel unbuttoned his shirt. The Death’s Head Key hung on a leather strap around his neck. He lifted it over his head. The blond man snatched the heavy bronze key with his free hand and held it up, eyeing it with satisfaction.

  No one knew how old the Death’s Head Key was. It had been given its name in 1581 when the explorer Vincenzo de Montoya found it on a trip through Asia and noticed its bow was shaped like a skull, with concavities where the eye sockets might have been and a diamond-shaped groove between them. No one, not even de Montoya, knew what it unlocked—but whatever it was, Gabriel could guess from the look of the thing that it was no simple door. Most keys had a single blade that fit into the keyway of a lock, but the Death’s Head Key had three, one straight and the other two flanking it at forty-five-degree angles. De Montoya had reportedly worn it around his neck as a good luck charm, but it hadn’t kept up its end of the bargain. His luck ran out when he disappeared during an Amazon expedition a few years later, and the Death’s Head Key had been lost with him.

  Lost, until Gabriel found it, still dangling from the broken neck of de Montoya’s skeleton at the bottom of a deep pit in the rain forest.

  Now, watching the blond man stuff the Death’s Head Key in his pocket, Gabriel couldn’t help feeling it was about to become lost once again.

  “Very thoughtful, Mr. Hunt,” the blond man said. “You’ve saved the custodians of this establishment quite a bit of mopping.” He backed slowly toward the lounge door, keeping his gun leveled at Gabriel. “Let’s go,” he said, and the three thugs holstered their revolvers and exited before him. The blond man gave Gabriel a final nod and disappeared through the doorway.

  When he heard the front door open, Gabriel followed at a run, passing Hank, the League’s elderly doorman, where he lay slumped unconscious on the floor.

  In the street outside, a pair of doors slammed on a gunmetal gray Cadillac and it peeled off, tires squealing against the asphalt. Gabriel raced out into the street and ran half a block after them, but they shot through a red light and vanished in the distance.

  Gabriel walked back to the League building and into the lounge, where Wade was already dialing the police from the phone behind the bar. “Button up, young man,” he said, aiming a finger at Gabriel’s chest. “There are women pres—oh, hello, yes, I’d like to report an incident.”

  There was only one woman present, and Gabriel lowered himself into the chair beside her, fuming. For weeks he’d meticulously traced de Montoya’s path through the Amazon, sweating through the jungle heat and all the days of false starts and backtracking, and for what? So the artifact he’d worked so hard to recover could be stolen by some skinny blond thug with bad taste in jewelry?

  He looked up and noticed Katherine was still trembling. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

  She stood slowly and walked to the bar, grabbed the scotch glass out of Clyde’s hand and downed it in a single gulp. Then she returned to the table where Gabriel sat. She put a hand on his arm.

  “So,” she said, and Gabriel could tell she was trying to keep her voice steady. “Does this happen every time you take a girl out for drinks?”

  Gabriel touched the cut on his cheek and winced. “Not every time.”

  Katherine patted his arm. “Don’t call me,” she said. Then she turned and walked out. A moment later they all heard the front door shut.

  “The police are on their way,” Wade said, handing Clyde another scotch. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out two twenty-dollar bills and handed them to Clyde as well. When he saw Gabriel watching the transaction, he said, “We had a bet.”

  Gabriel frowned. “What kind of bet?”

  “I bet Clyde twenty bucks you never lose a fight.”

  “I could have told you otherwise,” Gabriel said. “What’s the other twenty for?”

  “I also bet him that you always get the girl.”

  Gabriel rubbed his sore jaw. “Sorry to disappoint,” he said. “And sorry about…” He waved his hand in a circle, indicating the room’s two overturned chairs, the painting that had been knocked askew, the shattered decanter still in fragments on the floor.

  “How long have we known you, Gabriel?” Clyde asked, sipping his scotch. “We’re used to it by now.”

  Chapter 2

  Gabriel sat on the table in an examining room at Lenox Hill Hospital with the noise from the emergency room seeping in through the closed door. He fidgeted, the stiff paper that covered the table crinkling under his weight. The police officer standing by the door fidgeted too. He tapped his pencil against his notepad like he was marking time.

  “This is ridiculous,” Gabriel said. “I told you I’m fine.”

  “It’s standard procedure following an assault,” the officer said. He was a few inches shorter than Gabriel, maybe five-nine, with curly, close-cropped hair and a thin mustache. The nametag above his badge read jackson. “Most people appreciate being taken to the hospital after they’ve been beaten, slashed and pistol-whipped.”

  Gabriel hated hospitals, especially the strong, antiseptic smell of ammonia that seemed to permeate every square inch of them. It was the same smell he remembered from the hospital in Gibraltar when he’d gone there in the early weeks of 2000 in the hopes of identifying his parents’ remains. Ambrose and Cordelia Hunt had been on a millennium-themed speaking tour of the Mediterranean when their ship disappeared. No visuals, nothing on the radar, just gone. Three days later it had appeared again out of nowhere, not a living soul on board, only the dead bodies of three crew members. Soon after, more bodies began washing ashore—crewmen, passengers, more than three hundred in all—but a dozen or so never did. It had been a bad few weeks, looking at corpse after corpse and not knowing each time whether to hope he wouldn’t recognize it or that he would. In any event, he never did. And nearly a decade later, the smell still got to him, still gave him an uncomfortable feeling of bad news and unfinished business.

  “So this man,” Officer Jackson said, looking at his notes. “About your height, six feet, blond hair, slim build, gray blazer and slacks. And you say he was in charge of the others, the three other men?”

  “That’s right. He gave the orders. The others didn’t talk at all.”

  “Have you ever seen him before?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “No. Never.”

  “Are you sure? It’s easy to forget a face.”

  “I tend to remember the men who hit me.”

  “Have there been a lot?”

  Gabriel rubbed his sore jaw. “One or two.”

  “Well, you say this one knew your name, knew where to find you and knew you were in possession of this…this key he took from you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you think he’s been following you, or what?” “I’ve been out of the country for the past several weeks. I doubt he could have followed me where I was. But someone must have gotten word to him about what I brought back—one of the locals, possibly, or someone on the expedition.”

  Jackson nodded and scribbled in his notepad, though that answer put it well out of his jurisdiction. “There anybody you can think of who might have it in for you?”

  Gabriel sighed. “How much time do you have?”

  The officer flipped his book shut, capped his pen. “Not enough,” he said. “You ever think of changing professions, Mr. Hunt? Maybe something a little safer, like firefighter or undercover narcotics officer?”

  “I’d miss the
flexible hours,” Gabriel said.

  The door opened then, and a woman in green scrubs stepped in. She had straight black hair tied back in a ponytail, deep brown eyes and smooth skin the color of caramel. She clutched a clipboard to her chest and nodded at Officer Jackson. “Can you give us some privacy?”

  Jackson said, “All right. Mr. Hunt, we’re going to put your assailant’s description out there and try to get a lead on him.” He didn’t sound too optimistic. “If you think of anything that might help, call the precinct, okay?”

  “Of course,” Gabriel said.

  Officer Jackson left, closing the door behind him.

  “I’m Dr. Barrow.” The woman scanned the papers on her clipboard. “Gabriel Hunt, is it? Okay, Mr. Hunt, let’s take a look at you. Would you mind taking off your shirt?”

  Gabriel frowned. “Really, Doc, I’m fine. This isn’t necessary.”

  “That’s what they all say. Then one day they collapse in a grocery store and it’s our fault. So. Your shirt.”

  Gabriel unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it off and tossed it onto the empty chair by the door. “I got hit in the face, nowhere else,” he said.

  “You think that can’t put stress on your neck, your windpipe, your heart?” Dr. Barrow took the stethoscope from around her neck, put the buds in her ears and placed the metal disk against his chest. “Breathe for me.”

  Gabriel breathed.

  “Again.” She moved to his other side and he felt the cold metal press against his back. “Once more.”

  He kept breathing and she kept shifting the stethoscope around. Then the metal went away and he felt her finger tracing a line along his shoulder blade. “This looks like a scar from a knife wound,” she said.

  “Yes, well, there’s a reason for that,” Gabriel said.

  “And is this—” she probed a little lower “—from a bullet?”

  “Grapeshot.”

  “And this?” Her finger pressed lightly at the base of his spine.

  “Spear,” Gabriel said.

  “Good lord,” Dr. Barrow said. “I’d say the cut on your cheek is the least of your worries.”