Bombshell Max Collins (best ereader for textbooks .txt) 📖

After another hoist from “Nikkie,” Marilyn pulled herself up through the opening.

“What do we do now?” she whispered down to Nikita, her pretty face visible between the opening in the boards. “I’m not strong enough to pull you up.”

But an idea had already come to him. Quickly he removed his trousers from over his silk pajama bottoms, slipping them over his shoes.

He tossed the tan pants up to her. “Tie these around strong board,” he instructed.

“Oh. I get it.”

Nikita, using the legs of the slacks, began to climb them like a rope, favoring his right arm. Marilyn still was unaware of the razor, which he had tucked in his pajama breast pocket. The board, around which the trousers was wrapped, moaned in protest at his weight, but held.

Soon, inside the spaceship, Nikita was back in his trousers as he and Marilyn stood on a sturdy platform, taking in their surroundings. A wooden stairway, off to one side, rose dizzyingly from one landing to another, all the way to the top.

“Let me see your arm,” Marilyn said. She unbuttoned his pajama shirt and gently pulled it off his massive shoulders.

“Is nothing I tell you,” Nikita said gruffly. But he found her tenderness touching.

“I think the bullet just grazed you,” she said slowly, examining the wound on his upper left arm.

“Yes, as I say, I am winged.”

“But it’s still bleeding.”

She took his silk pajama top and tried to tear off the un-bloodied sleeve to make a bandage; however the material was too slippery to tear, and—she pointed out—probably wouldn’t stay knotted, anyway.

“I know,” she said, letting the silk top fall from her fingers. “We’ll use my shirt… It’s cotton.”

Marilyn unbuttoned her blouse and took it off. She wore nothing underneath.

Embarrassed, Nikita looked away, but the glimpse of her full, perfect breasts would reside forever in his memory.

“Don’t you just hate underwear?” she commented casually. They both were, at the moment, bare-chested. “It’s so unnatural … and I go along with nature.”

Yes she did, he thought, sneaking a sideways peek at those supple white breasts.

Marilyn tore a sleeve from her blouse, then—gently—wound the plaid fabric around and around his arm, tying it snugly.

“There,” she said at last, taking a step back, examining her work, hands on her hips, famous bosom on display. “Is that better?”

“Is wonderful.” A Russian woman would have blushed and covered her naked self. The ones that he knew, anyway.

She slipped back into the now one-sleeved blouse, buttoning but not bothering to knot it this time, letting it hang loose. “Are you ready?”

He blinked.

“To climb, Nikkie?”

“Yes. Yes! To top.”

Marilyn turned toward the wooden stairs. “We should be safe up there.”

Nikita followed her up, pausing briefly at each landing to look out its small circular window. As he climbed, he could see more and more of the amusement park, a sprawling world of rides and buildings and foliage, cloaked in the blue-ivory of the moonlit night.

At the top of the stairs he found Marilyn seated on a platform floor, her back against the curved wall of the cone of the ship. She was trying to look calm, self-composed, this he could tell; but he knew she was still frightened. Nikita settled in next to her, putting his good arm around her protectively, drawing her close to give them both warmth against the chill of the night.

“We’ll be safe here,” she repeated, her voice muffled against his bare chest.

“Yes, here we are safe.”

She yawned. “Oh … sorry. I’m just … so tired…”

“Now you will sleep,” he said.

But he would not. He would stay wide awake. Because as he’d climbed he had seen, out of one tiny window, the Oriental assassin in black, the bastard who had shot at them in Mr. Frog’s castle, coming down a pathway into Tomorrowland.

And in time, the man would find the broken boards on the ground, and discover their hiding place.

So he let the young woman nestle against him and sleep, and he kept guard—razor at the ready.

14 This Happy Place

Within minutes of the disclosure by May Reis in bungalow number seven—and the phone call from the Anaheim police chief, on behalf of Walt Disney—three black sedans streamed out of the Beverly Hills Hotel driveway and onto Sunset Boulevard, little traffic in the pre-dawn morning hours to hinder them, as they sped toward the Santa Monica Freeway.

Each vehicle carried its own swiftly-formed posse of State Department agents, Secret Service men, and Khrushchev’s own guards—minus, of course, the two (deceased) KGB traitors; none had been briefed in detail, although the attempt on the premier’s life was known by all. Jack Harrigan, behind the wheel, with CIA agent Munson on the rider’s side, took the lead, as the sedans chased each other, keeping a reckless pace, along the highway to Disneyland.

Harrigan had left a Secret Service agent he trusted, Chuck Simmons, to stay behind and handle the slain Russians … and to maintain a strict press blackout. While Harrigan had been organizing the interdepartmental posse, FBI Special Agent Sam Krueger—who at the moment was in the sedan just behind Harrigan’s—had dealt on the phone with the Anaheim police, instructing them to be waiting at the gates of the amusement park, to enter only if they heard gunfire, and not to disclose details of the situation to anyone except the top personnel involved on the call itself.

And no sirens!

Among the short list of crucial things Harrigan wanted to avoid was attracting public attention, or springing a leak to the press, or arriving at the scene of a Wild West Show already in progress by some rinky-dink out-in-the-boondocks police force.

As Harrigan swung the sedan, its tires squealing, off the freeway and onto the asphalt road to the park, he could see the round domes of the black and white squad cars flashing red up ahead, streaking the night scarlet.

Harrigan brought his vehicle to a jerking halt in front of the three black-and-whites and one unmarked vehicle parked in a semicircle, noses in but headlights off,