Aaron Conners - Tex Murphy 02 Read Free Page A

bottles of rum, gin, and vodka. I was thirsty and nervous, but all I really wanted was to finish the job and get out.
    Eventually, I made my way to the bookcase and looked through it. Many of the volumes were foreign. Unless these were just for show, it looked as though Ching spoke at least English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and probably several other languages I couldn’t identify. The selection of books ranged from The Complete Works of
    Shakespeare to a collection by some guy named Flannery O’Connor. Regrettably, my preferred reading material had always fallen somewhere between Spider-man comics and the back of a Cheerios box. Of the several hundred volumes in the bookcase, I’d read only one - For Whom the Bell Tolls. Well, read was an exaggeration, but I’d seen the movie. Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. Now that was a woman. Women like that had disappeared around the time tube tops and tie-dye became fashionable. What a goddess. I sighed involuntarily. So very lonely.
    I moved to the closed door, which turned out to be the entrance to the bano, the most commonly used Spanish word not directly related to food. There was nothing
    remarkable about the bathroom. To be thorough, I opened the medicine cabinet and casually glanced over the contents. Unlike some people, I’ve never had an interest in inspecting other people’s medicinal and hygienic inventories. It looked like a pretty typical selection, so I closed the cabinet and returned to the living room.
    The last area I checked was the kitchen. A stove, a microwave, a refrigerator, a sink, and a small dinette set were crammed into a space maybe fifteen feet square. Cupboards mounted on the walls circled the perimeter of the room. I took a peek in the refrigerator, but the interior was even more vacuous than the back at my office. After ten minutes, I realized that there was nothing to find in the kitchen.
    I stepped back into the living room, discouraged. I’d searched carefully, but had nothing more than the name of an old client and an unwelcome reminder of my lack of exposure to classic literature. I swung the flashlight beam around, hoping to spot something I’d overlooked, but there didn’t appear to be any container or space large enough to hold the item I was looking for.
    I started moving everything that wasn’t ruggedly attached to a wall and inspecting the areas underneath. Behind an antique-looking oil painting of buxom fruit, I found a small wall safe. Naturally, I was excited, but after experimenting with the dial for some time, I lost interest and returned to my search. There was nothing but wall behind the living room mirrors and paintings. The kitchen didn’t turn up anything, so I moved into the den. After fifteen minutes, I’d come up empty again.
    After I checked the wall behind the last painting, I stopped to consider my options.
    Taking another look at the wall safe, I decided that I’d just have to accept the fact that I would probably never get inside it.
    Then a thought popped into my head. I returned to the living room and examined the layout. The kitchen, living room, and bathroom formed a horseshoe shape around the bookcase. Unless my calculations were way off, there was a rectangle of space about fifteen feet square unaccounted for. I carefully inspected the bookcase, which appeared to have been built directly into the wall. I tried to push it; I might as well have been trying to move my ex-mother-in-law. I briefly considered using brute force, but for all I knew, there might be an alarm of some sort attached to the bookcase itself.
    There was only one thing to do. And it had worked before. I entered the bathroom and removed the towels from a rack on the right wall. I’d bought the laser blade at Radioactive Shack and wondered how much longer I had before it would break.
    Hopefully, it still had a little life in it. Like I’d done in the neighbor’s apartment, I bent down and began to cut through the wall.
    As I