King Maybe

Zusatztext 43545925 Informationen zum Autor Timothy Hallinan has been nominated for the Edgar! Nero! Shamus! and Macavity awards. He is the author of seventeen widely praised books! including The Fear Artist ! For the Dead ! The Hot Countries ! Crashed ! Little Elvises ! The Fame Thief ! and Herbie’s Game ! which won the 2015 Lefty Award for Best Humorous Mystery. After years of working in the television and music industries! he now writes full-time. He divides his time between California and Thailand. 1 Achy Breaky Heart Bad luck, as my mentor and surrogate father, Herbie Mott, used to say, arrives on the wind. I’d tried without success to track the saying to its origin, but with or without an attribution, it was hard not to think of it as the wind slammed the sides of the house in which I was risking my life to steal something I wouldn’t have bought for a buck-fifty.      But whether I wanted the damn thing or not, there was work to do. I searched for good news and found some. The color looked okay, and that was about half the battle, considering what I’d been sent to swipe.     The little metal penlight gripped between my teeth had a halogen bulb, meaning it put out something very close to natural sunlight, if your idea of “natural” is reading by the illumination of a massively carcinogenic and totally uncontrolled thermonuclear reaction burning seven billion tons of hydrogen every second and perpetually on the verge of exploding, a scant eight light-minutes away.     Out loud to myself, I said, “Oh, cheer up.”     I hated this job like I hadn’t hated anything since the Great Rope Defeat. When I was eight years old, my father, who hadn’t gotten tired of us yet, made me join the Cub Scouts, either to improve my character or to get me out of the house so he could argue with my mother. This was before it was universally decreed that no child should ever be allowed to fail at anything, so we Cub Scouts of that era grew into our Cubness only through passing certain tests. The very first of these, the test that proved that you were a real human boy rather than a skillfully assembled ventriloquist’s dummy, was climbing a rope. A short rope. A short, fat rope.     I couldn’t climb a rope. I still can’t climb a rope, even today, as a relatively mature burglar, despite belonging to a profession whose members might reasonably be assumed to have occasion to scale the occasional rope. And since I never did climb that rope, I never progressed up the ranks of Cubness, and Cub Scouts for me was mainly several years of being photographed in the middle of a group of shorter and shorter children as the kids of my age moved on to knot tying and forest survival and pubic hair and . . . I don’t know, skydiving. Finally, when the Scout troop leader had taken to having me sit in a chair so I didn’t tower over all the kids of my rank, my father gave up on me. A few years later, he left us. I’m not saying the one thing led to the other, but I’m not saying it didn’t either.     Anyway, I hated this job as much as I hated the moments before and after I failed to climb that damn rope.     Putting childhood trauma aside, where it belongs, the color did look good. It’s amazing what you can do these days with the machines that Staples will let you use, right out in the open, in front of God and everyone. I’d gone into the store to copy a tiny, high-definition digital picture—courtesy of Google Images, unwitting accomplice to millions of crooks—of a bald, mild-seeming, bespectacled man, his shoulders wrapped in something that looked like a sheet, gazing benignly down to his right as though he had a kitten in his lap, posed against a background of a slightly brownish rose color. In black type, printed oddly across his chest, was the word service, all caps, in an institutional, uninteresting sans-serif type. Ove...

Product details

• Authors: Timothy Hallinan
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 30.04.2016, delayed
• EAN: 9781616954321
• ISBN: 978-1-61695-432-1
• Series: A Junior Bender Mystery; A Junior Bender Mystery
• Subject: Fiction > Suspense