The Martian Falcon (Lovecraft & Fort) Read Online Free Page B

do?’
    ‘I’ll just have to make damned sure he doesn’t find out it’s me.’
    Penny shook her head again, more emphatically this time. ‘You can’t do it, Charlie, you just can’t!’
    ‘Like I said, angel,’ Fort sighed. ‘I’ve got no choice.’ He looked at his secretary for a long moment. ‘You know, Pen, it occurs to me that you haven’t had a vacation in quite a while. Why don’t you take a couple of weeks off?’
    ‘Oh no you don’t, Charlie Fort!’ cried Penny, jumping to her feet, hugging him and placing a kiss on his cheek. ‘You don’t get rid of me that easily…’
    ‘I’m not trying to get rid of you,’ Fort replied, taking out his handkerchief and fussily wiping her lipstick off his cheek.
    ‘Yes you are! You’re worried about this case, and you want me out of harm’s way. Tell me it isn’t so!’
    Fort held up his hands. ‘Okay, okay! Look, things may get ugly, and I don’t want you here if they do.’
    Penny shook her head. ‘You’re such a hon, Charlie, but I’m not going anywhere.’
    They looked at each other for a long moment.
    ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Penny repeated, her voice quiet and intense, denying even the possibility of further argument.
    Fort lowered his eyes. ‘What would I do without you, Pen?’
    ‘Now, don’t go getting all maudlin on me, Charlie,’ she admonished.
    Fort looked at the lipstick smeared on his handkerchief, folded it carefully and placed it back in his pocket. ‘Any messages?’ he asked.
    ‘Yeah. I took a couple of calls from people answering your ad for an assistant in the Times .’
    ‘And?’
    ‘One sounds promising. He’s not from New York. Sounds like he’s from New England, kind of cultured-sounding, actually. I set up an interview.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘He should be here in an hour.’
    ‘Good. What’s his name?’
    ‘Howard Lovecraft.’
    *
    Fort closed the door to the inner office, went to his desk and sat down heavily. He found himself thinking about Penny, and her late husband, Archer Malone, who had been his partner. When Archer had been killed during their investigation of a Cavorite smuggling ring in the Bronx two years ago, Fort had been there to comfort Penny. It had been a rough time for them both – as rough as times come – but Fort had done all he could to see her through it.
    When Archer was alive, Penny had sometimes joked with Fort that he was the only other man she could ever have seen herself with; there had been a time, maybe a year or so after his death, when she and Fort might have got together. But something stopped them, something which neither of them could define: maybe it was the memory of Archer and the grief which still hovered in the back of Penny’s mind, or maybe it was the nature of Fort’s work and the dangers it involved, and the fear felt by both of them that one day she might find herself alone all over again.
    Whatever the reason, the moments had come and gone until, perhaps taking the hint, they stopped coming altogether.
    Fort looked at the hazy figure moving behind the frosted glass of his office door. He sighed. ‘The road not taken,’ he said very quietly to himself. ‘Had to be that way… had to.’
    He swivelled back and forth in his chair for a minute or so, like a clerk who’d been given some onerous task and was reluctant to buckle down and get started. He checked his watch, even though he knew the time, and gave another sigh, heavy and miserable.
    Suddenly recalling the events of earlier that morning, he took the library index card from his pocket and quickly read the notes he had written following the poltergeist visitation at the drugstore, then stood up and went over to the enormous bank of file cabinets which covered one entire wall of his office. He opened the drawer marked P and placed the index card inside, then opened a larger drawer and withdrew a thick folder, which he carried back to his desk.
    With an hour to go until this Lovecraft