Elevator of Doom E-Book

Cora Buhlert

• Herausgeber: Cora Buhlert
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

New York City, 1936: The Radcliffe, a luxury apartment building on Central Park West, is terrorised by a string of burglaries. The police suspect an insider, but there is no hard evidence, because the burglar comes and goes like a ghost.

At first glance, it seems like a simple enough job for Richard Blakemore, the masked crimefighter known only as the Silencer. Stake out the Radcliffe, nab the burglar and be back in time for dinner with Constance, his beautiful fiancée.

But even small-time criminals can fight back. And such a fight can quickly get out of hand, once Richard steps into the elevator of doom…

This is a novelette of 7600 words or approx. 22 print pages in the Silencer series, but may be read as a standalone.

Leseprobe

Elevator of Doom

by Cora Buhlert

Bremen, Germany

Copyright © 2013 by Cora Buhlert

All rights reserved.

Cover image © PhilCold, Dreamstime

Pegasus Pulp Publications

Mittelstraße 12

28816 Stuhr

Germany

www.pegasus-pulp.com

Elevator of Doom

A look over his shoulder in all directions to make sure that no one was watching, then the masked vigilante only known as the Silencer positioned himself parallel to the ornate façade of the Radcliffe building. From underneath his long black coat, he drew a gun of an uncommon design, a gun that looked almost like a crossbow. He aimed upwards, as if to shoot pigeons from the sky, and fired.

A thin but incredibly strong cord shot out of the barrel. At its end was a grappling hook which fasted itself securely around one of the stylised gargoyles guarding the roof of the Radcliffe.

The Silencer tugged at the rope, testing whether it was securely anchored. Then he began to haul himself upwards. Halfway up the façade he paused, ostensibly to check whether anyone had spotted him, but in truth because scaling the outside of a skyscraper was hard work. And at thirty-six, Richard Blakemore, the man behind the featureless steel mask of the Silencer, was no longer as young as he had once been. The full truth was that he needed a break to catch his breath.

He looked up to gauge how far he still had to go. Another fifteen storeys or so. Why, of why, did Norma Manning’s employer have to live in a penthouse apartment on the top floor of the Radcliffe?

Norma Manning was an old school friend of Richard’s fiancée Constance. Over coffee Norma had told Constance about a string of burglaries at the Radcliffe. Money, jewels, silverware, paintings and other trinkets of value all went missing mysteriously. The burglaries had been executed professionally. No sign of violent entry, no fingerprints, no evidence, no witnesses. What was more, the burglar seemed intimately familiar with the routines of the inhabitants of the Radcliffe, for the burglaries only happened when the inhabitants of the respective apartments were not at home. The police suspected an inside job. They had a string of suspects, all of them people who lived and worked at the Radcliffe, but no real leads.

One of those suspects was Norma Manning. Widowed much too young and left destitute, Norma had taken the post of a paid companion to one Mrs. McCreary, an elderly lady of great wealth and a foul temper. When the mysterious burglar hit Mrs. McCreary’s apartment, helping himself to some samples of her jewellery and silverware, suspicion had fallen on Norma. She’d been cleared, eventually, but not without experiencing a great deal of anguish about losing her job and finding herself out of the streets or perhaps even in prison.

Richard didn’t know whether Norma had come to Constance merely because she needed a sympathetic ear or because she knew that Constance had certain “connections” to those who fought crime, both on the side of the law and outside it. After all, it was widely known that Constance was friends with police officers and engaged to a crime writer, a man who served as the unofficial biographer (well, autobiographer) of the Silencer, the masked vigilante who patrolled the streets of the city by night to fight the scourge of crime. But whatever Norma’s reasons might have been, Constance had told Richard about the burglaries at the Radcliffe and together they had come up with a plan to trap the burglar.

The plan was simple enough. It involved a particularly valuable diamond necklace of Mrs. McCreary’s that the burglar had missed, since the necklace was at the jeweller’s for cleaning during the week of the break-in. But now Norma Manning was to pick up the necklace from the jeweller’s on behalf of her employer, a fact she just happened to let drop in front of everybody who worked at the Radcliffe. Just as Norma also happened to mention that both she and Mrs. McCreary would be having dinner with Norma’s good friend Constance that very evening.

The last bit of the story was correct, for Norma and Mrs. McCreary really were dining with Constance tonight. The rest was complete bunk, however. There was no diamond necklace, never had been. But as a bait for the burglar, it would be irresistible.

The fact that everybody who lived or worked at the Radcliffe was a suspect was also the reason why Richard had decided to climb up the façade rather than take the more direct route. Because it was only via the windows that he could enter the building unseen by all those who worked or lived here.