Bombshell by Max Collins (pdf ebook reader TXT) 📕

slashed means the killer didn’t need the information you’re sitting on.”

She blinked. “What?”

Harrigan touched her arm. “Agent Munson is correct. The assassin would have broken in here and made you reveal what you knew…”

The woman stiffened. “I would never have told him.”

Harrigan knew an assassin like this would have the information out of her in about ninety seconds, but he said only, “I believe you, but you would have died protecting Marilyn. That the assassin did not bother you means he is already on their trail … that he most likely followed them, wherever they’ve gone.”

The woman’s eyes filled with terror. She stared searchingly at Harrigan for what seemed forever but was in reality about five seconds, during which the State Department agent waved the CIA man back.

“They’re at the amusement park,” she said, finally.

Harrigan frowned in disbelief. “Where in hell?”

“Disneyland.” May Reis swallowed. “Marilyn took Premier Khrushchev to Disneyland—you wouldn’t, so she did… They went in a Buick … a blue rented Buick sedan. Please, Mr. Harrigan … please … make it up to her. Help them.”

Harrigan’s frown deepened, as he turned away from the secretary’s earnest, moist-eyed gaze. Could this be true? It seemed ridiculous to him, although considering Marilyn Monroe was the mastermind here, maybe not…

That was when Sam Krueger blew in. “Jack—that phone’s going to ring in a second … and it’ll be for you!”

“What?”

Krueger planted himself near that front door, hands on hips, smirking. “Pal, it’s the chief of the Anaheim police.”

“Anaheim … ?”

On the end table by the couch, the phone rang.

Harrigan reached for it, hand hovering over the receiver, and looked curiously at Krueger, who snapped, “It’s for you, I said.”

A crisply professional voice on the other end of the line said, “Agent Harrigan, this is Chief Coderoni at Anaheim.” “Yes, sir.” A pause, then: “Mr. Disney asked me to call.”

13 Rocket To The Moon

Hands on his hips, Nikita Khrushchev stood in front of the entrance to Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, gazing up at the façade where a portrait of a frog—in human clothes, hands on his hips—grinned down at him.

This amused Nikita—or, that is, he was amused by the grotesque humorlessness of these odd things that Americans found funny.

In the darkness, Marilyn’s hand touched his. His eyes turned toward the attractive woman; the American fascination with Marilyn Monroe was much easier for him to fathom than a comical toad.

“I think the control box is over there,” she said, nodding toward the inside wall of the castle’s alcove.

She walked him there and, once again, Nikita removed a heavy brown shoe and brought this portable, multi-purpose tool slamming down on the steel box, springing its silver cover, which fell to the sidewalk with a metallic clunk. He peered back over his shoulder at Marilyn, who looked about apprehensively, a hand covering her mouth, as if someone might have heard them.

A jolt of memory froze him for a moment.

He was reminded of Galina, his first wife, that sweet young thing who had stood just so, watching nervously as he broke the lock to a government grain facility during the Ukrainian famine of 1922, so that he could provide food for his family. The children survived; Galina had not.

Nikita touched the girl’s shoulder. “We’re alone here. No need be frightened.”

She smiled and shrugged. “Besides—diplomatic immunity, right?”

“Is right.”

Nikita returned his attention to the metal box and flipped the toggle switch.

Suddenly the small castle was ablaze with lights, and from someplace—he couldn’t tell where exactly—music blared, voices singing slow and low at first, then becoming higher pitched, like a phonograph playing too fast.

What did the words of the strange song mean?

Why were the people singing on their way to nowhere? And not just nowhere, but nowhere “in particular!” English—such a terrible language, so cluttered with the refuse of other languages, no poetry at all.

And besides, what sort of fools go somewhere they don’t know they’re going?

Then, to Nikita’s breathless amazement, double doors flew open—at the right of the alcove—and an automobile came bouncing out, an old-fashioned one … he recognized it, an American Model T, jostling to a stop in front of them, chugging and wheezing like a living thing.

Marilyn, giddy with laughter, shouted above all the noise and clatter. “Come on, Nikkie! Get in!”

“Nikkie! Who is Nikkie?”

“You are, silly!”

And she gave him a nudge with her elbow.

Maybe he was Nikkie, and maybe he was silly, too, because Nikita—though he wasn’t certain he wanted to, and like the singers knew not where he was going—followed her valentine of a bottom up into the two-seater, climbing aboard.

Going nowhere in particular.

Marilyn pulled a metal bar back across their laps.

Nikita was alarmed by the absence in the Model T of a key element in the operation of an automobile; even that teacup had had one! “Where is wheel?” Nikita asked, raising his voice above the chugging and clanking din.

“There is no wheel, silly!”

“With no wheel,” Nikita informed her, patience strained, “we cannot drive car.”

Marilyn gave him a sideways look. “Nikkie, we don’t drive the car … Mr. Toad drives the car. It’s his wild ride, remember?”

He recalled her story about the foolish frog.

“Then this is bad ride,” Nikita concluded. “Frog, he is terrible driver. You yourself say this.”

Giggling, Marilyn slumped down in her seat. “No,” she responded, “this is fun!”

“More of your fun?”

“More of our fun, Nikkie! … Better hang on!”

And the car jumped forward on some kind of track, Nikita clenching the metal bar tightly—and his teeth.

The duo went rattling along toward another set of doors at the other end of the alcove, yet the car made no attempt to slow down. In fact, if anything, the automobile was increasing its speed.

Thinking that Americans had a sense of “fun” as strange as their sense of “humor,” Nikita braced for the crash. But at the last moment, the doors yawned inwardly open, and the car zipped through.

The premier of Russia sighed with relief; his stomach felt funny, like when, as a child, he had gone sliding down a steep, icy,