Illegal Alien

228 Pages·1999·0.75 MB·English

by  Tucker Mike

ILLEGAL ALIEN

MIKE TUCKER AND ROBERT PERRY
Dedicated to the memory of
Howard Tucker,
father and friend
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1

'London, England, November 1940. Three months in this
dumb assed country and not a sniff of a case. I wish I'd never
shipped out of Chicago... except I had to. Too many people in
Chicago wanted me out of the way permanently. A new start
in an old country. Figured I could clean up in sleepy old
England. I was wrong. The hoods are too slow and the cops
are too fast. Its all smalltime. All the real crooked talent is
away fighting the Nazi or running blackmarket eggs in from
Suffolk.'
Cody McBride pulled back the edge of the blackout
curtain, an stared out over the rooftops of East London.
Below him the city was dark and empty. He scowled. This
was not how a city ought to be. He was used to people,
noise, and bright lights. Now all the noise and light came from
the bombers overhead, and the gunners trying to shoot them
down.
In the distance he could see tracer fire arcing into the
night sky the glow of fires. The city was dying just as surely
as its people and McBride hated it. He craned his neck round
to catch glimpse of St Paul's Cathedral, silhouetted against
the glowing night sky. How long before that became no more
than another pile of rubble in a London street? He was
amazed that it had weathered this blitz as long as it had it
stood out like a beacon He hoped it survived. Too many
landmarks were being erased from the face of London.
He glanced at the stack of newspapers piled under the
window The Lurker. Somehow in the middle of all this chaos
some fruitcake had taken it upon himself to start carving
people up. A real psycho. The Limehouse Lurker, the press
had dubbed him He'd left a trail of disembowelled,
disembodied, and generally messy corpses scattered around
East London for the past two months. He was even
managing to grab headlines from the Luftwaffe. It was
strange, McBride thought: even when death was raining
indiscriminately from the skies every night, the Lurker had still
managed to spread panic among the population. Give death
a human face and somehow it all becomes so much more
horrific. The police hadn't come close to catching him: Cody
McBride hadn't even tried. That would be a coup to catch the
Limehouse Lurker. McBride laughed to himself. How could
anyone solve anything when the Nazis kept bombing the
crime scenes?
His attention shifted to the paintwork that read CODY
MCBRIDE PRIVATE DETECTIVE across the top of the
glass. The paintwork was already beginning to peel, even
though it was barely three weeks old. It seemed that it wasn't
only the criminal talent that was away fighting the Nazis.
He let the curtain swing back and contemplated his
darkened office. Even by his standards it was sparse. A
couple of large filing cabinets stood against one wall, a
freestanding safe against another. A couple of trench coats
and a hat hung on a stand in the corner, next to an old table
with an even older typewriter on it. In front of him was his
desk, a large walnut affair, bare save for an ink blotter, a
telephone, a bottle of whisky and his shoes. The shoes were
full of his feet; the bottle was empty.
He took a long, deep drink of the whisky in his hand,
swilled the last mouthful around in the bottom of the glass,
and leaned back in his creaky old swivel chair. He really
shouldn't be here during an air raid. He should be in the
shelters with everybody else. He had watched as the streams
of people made their way across the street while the sirens
had droned out their warning cry; watched as, one by one,
the lights of the city had been extinguished. Staring down at
the tide of people, he had shut off his own light, pulled the
blackout curtain, and proceeded to get drunk.
At first he had complied with the regulations, sleeping on
tube platforms and stairways as the Germans bombed seven
bells out of London, but the oppressive atmosphere, the
proximity to people who were slowly having all the hope
drained out of them, had proved more than McBride could
stand. As the weeks had gone by, he had found himself
spending more and more air raids in his fourthfloor office with
a bottle of whisky. He knew that he was risking his life. He
didn't care. This, at least, was life on his terms, a personal
game of Russian roulette with Hitler and the Luftwaffe. He
had always lived a solitary life. It seemed fitting that, if he was
to die, it should be a solitary death.
He pulled a packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes from his
pocket and lit one. As he watched the smoke curl towards his
office ceiling he rattled the packet. Two left. If he lived
through the night he would have to head over to O'Rourke's
or Mama's Bar and restock. He inhaled deeply a taste of
home. He thought back to what he had left behind. Not much
if truth be told. A good string of enemies and a good string of
failed relationships. McBride had never been good with the
opposite sex. A lot of women had liked him, but very few had
loved him. The relationships that had got started rarely lasted
long and never ended well.
He could still see the look on Delores's face as he had
boarded the boat for England. She was one of the few who
had genuinely cared for him. If he'd asked, she would have
married him there and then. She'd been a client of his. He
had helped clear her father's name in a nasty little blackmail
scandal. He could have left Chicago far behind him and
settled down with a good job in her father's company it had
been offered. Instead he had run, though few people would
accuse him of taking the easy way out. He had thought that
he'd be safe in England, but 'safe' was a relative term. When
this onslaught had started, two months ago, McBride couldn't
have been in a worse place.
He had come over on the pretence of joining the
Volunteer Ambulance Corps, but had made inroads with the
local criminal fraternity almost as soon as the boat had
docked at Southampton. Within days he had been able to set
up his business in East London. The old Jew he rented the
rooms from had been less than happy to discover that there
would be a private detective in the building, but McBride's
money was as good as anyone else's.
The dull crump of an explosion, much closer than before,
pulled McBride from his reverie. He swung his feet from his
desk and drained the last of the whisky from his glass,
crossing to the safe. With a practised hand he spun the dial
back and forth until the door opened with a satisfying clunk.
Inside stood another, full, bottle of whisky, a soda siphon and
four cutcrystal glasses. The glasses were expensive; the
whisky wasn't.
McBride put the cheap tumbler that he had been drinking
from on the top of the safe, reached inside and pulled out one
of the fancy glasses and the bottle. Cracking the seal, he
poured himself a very large drink. The glasses had been a
birthday present from Delores, and the only thing that he had
brought with him from America. He took another deep drag
on his cigarette and crossed over to the window, twitching the
curtain back and contemplating the deadly firework display
being played out in the sky in front of him.
He held the glass of whisky up to one eye, watching the
lights of conflict through the cut crystal, turning death and
destruction into a miniature kaleidoscope in his hand. In his
drunken state, McBride found the lights almost hypnotic, and
felt his eyes becoming heavy.
A searing flash brought him back to his senses and he
snatched the glass away from his face, spilling whisky down
the front of his shirt. Cursing loudly, McBride rubbed at his
dazzled eyes, desperately searching for the source of the
flash. In the night sky, amid the tracer fire and smoke, a
brilliant ball of light plummeted into the tangle of nearby
buildings with an impact that shook the windows of the small
office.
McBride placed the empty whisky glass on the table,
watching as the brilliant glow slowly faded amid the rubble.
'Holy Mother...' Suddenly sober, McBride snatched his
trench coat and fedora from the hat stand and dashed from
his office, vainly trying to remove some of the whisky from his
sodden shirt with a piece torn from the blotter on the desk.
He hurried out into the street, discarding the
whiskysoaked blotting paper. in the gutter, and desperately
tried to regain his bearings. A voice from up the street made
him start.
'Put that blasted light out! This is supposed to be a
blackout. Do you want them to drop one on you?' In the
distance an ARP warden was shouting through the letter box
of a terraced house. McBride hurried over to him, pulling his
trench coat tight against the chill of the November night.
The ARP warden, a stocky man in his sixties with a
handlebar moustache, straightened up as McBride crossed
the street. 'You shouldn't be out here. The all clear hasn't
been sounded. Why aren't you in a shelter?'
McBride didn't have time to argue. 'Did you see that thing
up there?'
'What?'
'In the sky. Something glowing.'
The warden gave McBride a longsuffering look. He
sniffed. 'You've been drinking, haven't you?' He pulled a
notebook and pencil out of his jacket. 'I'm going to have to
take your name.'
McBride shook his head vigorously. 'Listen, Something
has come down. I think it fell a couple of blocks away?'
The warden harrumphed, loudly. 'Don't be ridiculous,
man. If a bomb had gone off I'd have heard it. And the name
isn't Jack, it's Potter. Colonel T.P. Potter, retired.'
McBride's patience was beginning to wear thin. 'It wasn't
a goddamn bomb.'
Potter prodded McBride in the chest. 'I've got quite
enough to deal with without pranksters like you causing
trouble. Now, what's your name?' A light was suddenly visible
in one of the houses, as someone pulled back a curtain to
investigate the noises in the street. The warden was off like a
dog after a rabbit.
'Put that damn light out. Do you want me to report you?'
Cursing, McBride tried to reorientate himself. The thing
had come down to the east of St Paul's. 'Watling Street,' he
muttered under his breath. 'Must be near Watling Street.' He
headed off through the deserted streets, trying to ignore the
rattle of gunfire and the distant noise of explosions, aware
that his nightly game of Russian roulette had become a little
more dangerous than he had banked on.
His progress through the city was slow; there was too
much bomb damage that had yet to be cleared away. As he
approached the area where he had seen the ball of light
come down he had to skirt around several small fires.
McBride was unsure whether or not the damage he was
walking through was the result of the object's impact.
He stopped, his eye caught by a pulsing glow on the far
side of a row of bombedout terraced houses. Cautiously, he
began to pick his way through the rubble. He passed a child's
crib with a slate roofing tile embedded in it. He felt sick to his
stomach, unsure whether to take it as a memorial to a tragic
death, or a shrine to a miraculous escape. Deciding that
there was too much blackness in his life, he opted for the
latter and continued his unsteady progress through the
shattered house.
He reached what would have been the kitchen and
peered up over the halfdemolished wall. There, in the rubble
before him, was a sphere, about eight foot in diameter,
glowing softly with an inner light. Several fires burnt around it,
and bricks and timbers sporadically clattered down from the
building in whose side it had embedded itself.