Sam Marlowe's Arc

Chapter 8 of 14

Sam walked out of the police station with the wooden harbor model under his arm. He had it at last. But the clerk's words still rang in his ears. Someone had posted bail for Knuckles Malone. The ogre was loose again, and he wanted Sam dead. Sam couldn't go home. His office was ash. Every hideout he knew, the mob knew too. He needed a spot no one would think to check, and he needed it in the next hour. He found a payphone and dialed Lysander. "You have the model," his partner said. Not a question. "And nowhere to sit with it. Malone's out. He'll hit every rat hole in the city." "Then don't pick a rat hole." A pause. "Go where he already burned. He won't watch a corpse twice." Sam looked at the wooden model. Lysander was right. Malone had already torched Sam's office. He'd crossed it off his list. Nobody guards a dead building. Sam took the long way to the four-story brownstone. The neon sign still buzzed near the roof, throwing orange light on the scorched stone. The lower floors were black with smoke. The front door hung on one hinge. Sam slipped inside and climbed through the wreck of his own life. Dolly Valentine was already there. She sat on an unburned crate near the window, a flashlight in her lap, his old case files stacked at her feet. His secretary. The one person who'd kept looking when he vanished. She stood when she saw him, and her jaw tightened. "You're alive," she said. "I wasn't sure." "Dolly. You shouldn't be here." "Neither should you. It smells like a fire." She looked at the model under his arm. "That's the thing everyone's killing over." "It is." She didn't reach for it. She reached for a chair instead, dragged it up, and set it steady. "Then sit before you fall down. You look terrible." Sam sat. For the first time in days, no one was hunting him at that exact moment. He set the model on the crate. It was just carved wood, a little harbor with tiny ships. Hard to believe men had died for it. Dolly clicked off her flashlight. "I saved what I could from the files. Your notes. The docks stuff." She said it flat, the way she said everything. "Figured you'd need them." Sam started to thank her. Then he saw her face change. She was looking past him, at the window. Outside, the orange glow of the sign lit up a figure on the street below. Tall. Robed in white. Three eyes turned up toward the burned office. The Mayor stood there, still as a photograph, staring straight at the window where Sam sat with the relic. Dolly's voice dropped. "Sam. Who is that?" Sam didn't answer. He'd hidden from every crook in the city. He had never once thought to hide from the man who built it.