Chapter 1 - "HELLO, I Must Be Going."

(Excerpt from DEVLIN'S DEADLINE, volume 1 in the Devlin In Rain City series by Anthony Royka. ALL Rights Reserved)

I'M SNOWBOUND IN a dead man’s cabin not far from Snoqualmie Pass. The hunger, the fear and the cold don’t help these tremors one bit, but thinking about you does.

Even if I wasn’t trapped here, alone and broken, hungry and scribbling at a roll top desk I might soon have to burn to keep warm, I’d be thinking of you.

After all, I’m only twenty-eight and you’re on your way into this weary old world while I just might be bound for an unscheduled exit.

But here's the surprise.

Dying doesn’t scare me as much as the thought of never getting to hold you in my arms, or never getting to tell you Irish ghost stories my Da told me or the folk legends my Spanish Mom used to tell your Uncle Danny and me by candlelight on full-moon nights and rainy winter days.

It would be a tragic thing to never be able to listen as you laugh, first at the silliness, and later, at the sarcastic wit of the Marx Brothers. I think you’d love Harpo’s silent mischief and Chico’s awful Italian accent and Groucho’s mustache and funny walk.

I first saw the boys on Broadway in Animal Crackers in November of 1928. I'd won two cheap-seat matinee tickets in a game of tiddly winks. (Okay, future baby Devlin, you might as well know now that it wasn't tiddly winks.

It was poker.

That's a card game I'll teach you if I make it through these troubles, that is, if your mother lets me.)

Anyway, I didn't get to meet the brothers Marx just then, but I did stumble into them in 1929 when we happened to be on the same train headed west, the Marx Brothers to Hollywood and yours truly, back to Rain City to attend the University of Washington. Then in 1935, the boys hired me as Harpo's body guard while they were in town for a week of live shows. Since then, at Christmas I've received a Christmas card from Harpo and an outrageous, bogus bill for $9.40 from Groucho.

Lately I’ve felt like Captain Spaulding, the character Groucho Marx played in the movie Animal Crackers. He sang:

“Hello, I must be going,
I cannot stay, I came to say, I must be going.
I’m glad I came, but just the same I must be going.”

Not that I'm in a hurry for an exit, mind you, but a chilling snow storm and a killer have other plans for me.

AFTER ALL I’ve only danced in this marathon twenty-eight years, so it would be a shame to leave just now. I’ve got promises to keep and “miles to go before I sleep.”

That’s Robert Frost, a New England poet. Nobody I know in the Great Northwest likes him but me.

I have promised to catch a couple of killers, and I mean to keep that promise.

As my adopted Da, Salty Keyes, used to ask me:

“Devlin be a man of his word?”

Franco Devlin be a man of his word.

Mostly.

BUT HERE'S ANOTHER promise. I'll walk through fire if that will keep me around long enough to meet you, but that might not happen.

The cold, hard fact is that unless I come back as a banshee, at the moment it seems to me there's only the slimmest chance that we'll meet.

We might not meet anywhere at all, except in these pages. Your Uncle Edgar Chutes has promised to cobble together my journals and I'm here , scribbling madly while I wait inside this chilly cabin for a killer, maybe two.

Some of the story I wouldn’t mind your mother leaving out while you’re younger but when you’re old enough, If you’re still willing to wade through these words, you’ll know me well, the good and the bad, at the end!

Father Marcellus, a Jesuit priest I knew back at St. John’s High School in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district used to quote Marcus Aurelius who supposedly said that “In life the three acts are the whole drama.”

I don't know if that's true, but I do promise you this: even if you never meet me in the flesh, you’ll meet me in these pages.

Even better than that, you’ll be pa