Sorry for the lengthy absence; I've been working on a variety of other projects.
One of the more recent ones has been my entry for National Novel Writing Month - a book I've been allowing to ferment for a while, called The Hero's Knot.
The details are available at my author's blog, here.
I thought, just for giggles, that I'd serialize the thing on this site, first to see if anyone reads my Anuru blog, and second to air the material out. I'm eventually going to publish the whole thing at Kindle and Smashwords, once I've submitted the final draft, and then fleshed it out into a full-length novel.
Anywhere, here's the first piece. Enjoy!
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THE HERO’S KNOT
by D. Alexander Neill
Prologue
The thief had odd-coloured eyes –
and then he didn’t.
That was the extent of the
identification provided by the wild-eyed Securitas rent-a-cop about a half-hour
after the uproar at the Broome Street branch of Delancey Credit. His name was
Quinn, and the rest of his testimony was of a sort seemingly designed to drive
law enforcement officials to despair: average height and build, Caucasian
(maybe), a mop of hair that might have been black or brown or even dirty
blonde, jeans, and a dark jacket. Leather jacket, or denim? Can’t say, officer.
Was he wearing a hat? Can’t say, officer. Gloves? Can’t say. High tops? Cowboy
boots? Glass frigging slippers? Can’t
say, officer. When one of the cops had asked him with a sour smirk whether
the perpetrator had been wearing sunglasses, he’d nearly offered the same reply
before checking himself. The fellow hadn’t been wearing any sunglasses. Of that
much, Quinn was reasonably sure. After all, how else could he have known that
the thief had had eyes of two different, distinct colours?
To be fair, being questioned by a
pair of testy detectives from the NYPD Major Crimes Unit hadn’t done much to
soothe Quinn’s jangled nerves, particularly as they’d hinted at charging him
with a fistful of firearms offences. In the confusion of the moment, after
slamming bodily into the thief and seeing the strange, inexplicable things that
he’d seen, Quinn had drawn his sidearm, a nondescript .38 calibre Colt
revolver, taken careful aim, and put two rounds into the centre of mass of one
of the bank’s potted palms. The first slug was still lodged in the tree’s thick
stem; the second, punching straight through, had shattered a polished panel of
decorative rose quartz just below a clock and above a garbage can.
The flat crack of the bullets and
the sudden whiff of burnt propellant had brought him back to his senses, and
he’d found himself staring at the weapon as though he’d pulled a venomous snake
from his holster. When questioned about the discharge – first by the branch’s
operations manager, and a few minutes later by the two MCU cops – Quinn had
sworn up and down that he’d had the front post site centred on the robber’s
chest before pulling the trigger.
His oath occasioned a glance
between the two constables. The older, and taller, of the two was the first to
respond. “Think maybe we should frisk the ficus?”
“It’s a palm,” the other replied.
“And I don’t think it was carrying.”
In the end, given that the only
casualties had been vegetable and mineral, they let Quinn off with a warning.
Perhaps considering valour the better part of discretion, the bank gave him
three days’ paid vacation. After all, if it had been a robbery, it certainly
wasn’t a major one; after the tills, lockboxes and vault had been verified, all
that was found to be missing was one thousand, three hundred and twenty-one
dollars: the contents of the single deposit drawer behind the business banking
wicket. According to the eyewitnesses to the crime (none of whose descriptions
of the thief was any more fulsome than Quinn’s), the malefactor hadn’t been
anywhere near that end of the branch. Suspicion might have fallen on Marlene
Cleddik, the spinsterly business teller, save for the fact that nearly thirty
years of unimpeachable service had made her synonymous with reliability and
trust.
Which left Delancey with a loss
so picayune that it would cost the bank more in man-hours to investigate the
incident, and the flatfoots of the NYPD MCU with a crime that could not rationally
be described as ‘major, and that they would gladly have handed over to their
brethren in less august sub-units of the force, save for one fact: as a matter
of policy, all bank robberies were deemed major crimes – even robberies where
the amount of money stolen was hardly enough to treat the bank’s staff to a
burger and fries. This meant that they would keep the Delancey robbery on the
same list as the attempt that had been made on the Federal Reserve Depository a
few months early. That had been a real robbery, complete with armoured cars,
machine guns, a recoilless rifle and significant casualties among guards,
patrons and perpetrators alike. This was hardly on the same scale; but it was
of the same kind, and New York’s finest would keep looking for the Delancey
robber.
At least this time they would
have an advantage. None of the hundreds of witnesses at the Depository break-in
had reported a thief with one grass-green eye, and another as blue as ice, that
both suddenly changed to brown. It wasn’t as much money, the two detectives
agreed later on over a beer, but at least this time they had something to go
on.
♦
