The Mystery Megapack

I work when I could steal? Why settle down to some humdrum uncongenial billet, when excitement, romance, danger and a decent living were all going begging together? Of course it’s very wrong, but we can’t all be moralists, and the distribution of wealth is very wrong to begin with. Besides, you’re not at it all the time. I’m sick of quoting Gilbert’s lines to myself, but they’re profoundly true. I only wonder if you’ll like the life as much as I do!”
    “Like it?” I cried out. “Not I! It’s no life for me. Once is enough!”
    “You wouldn’t give me a hand another time?”
    “Don’t ask me, Raffles. Don’t ask me, for God’s sake!”
    “Yet you said you would do anything for me! You asked me to name my crime! But I knew at the time you didn’t mean it; you didn’t go back on me tonight, and that ought to satisfy me, goodness knows! I suppose I’m ungrateful, and unreasonable, and all that. I ought to let it end at this. But you’re the very man for me, Bunny, the—very—man! Just think how we got through tonight. Not a scratch—not a hitch! There’s nothing very terrible in it, you see; there never would be, while we worked together.”
    He was standing in front of me with a hand on either shoulder; he was smiling as he knew so well how to smile. I turned on my heel, planted my elbows on the chimney-piece, and my burning head between my hands. Next instant a still heartier hand had fallen on my back.
    “All right, my boy! You are quite right and I’m worse than wrong. I’ll never ask it again. Go, if you want to, and come again about mid-day for the cash. There was no bargain; but, of course, I’ll get you out of your scrape—especially after the way you’ve stood by me tonight.”
    I was round again with my blood on fire.
    “I’ll do it again,” I said, through my teeth.
    He shook his head. “Not you,” he said, smiling quite good-humoredly on my insane enthusiasm.
    “I will,” I cried with an oath. “I’ll lend you a hand as often as you like! What does it matter now? I’ve been in it once. I’ll be in it again. I’ve gone to the devil anyhow. I can’t go back, and wouldn’t if I could. Nothing matters another rap! When you want me, I’m your man!”
    And that is how Raffles and I joined felonious forces on the Ides of March.

PINPRICK, by Skadi meic Beorh
    A wee girl with two pinpricks for a nose smiled at me through her narrow mansion window, her big black eyes glistening like carrion beetles in the morning sunshine. Her fingers and the stone sill where she stood were smeared with fresh blood. She had killed something, but her features showed a lunacy that would send her to relatives if what she had slain was human, and give her a slap on the wrist if ’twas only her dog.
    It turned out to be human—and ’twas my lot in life to be hired by the butler, a Mr. Renault, as the child’s personal coachman. My first assignment was, the following morning, to drive Charlotte from her home in Rathmines, Dublin through the Wicklow Mountains to her uncle’s manor in Corsillagh. It would be a long day’s journey forcing us to pass through Gleann na Gruagh , a gloomy glen haunted by highwaymen and other denizens of low social esteem. Under no circumstance whatever was I to allow her to exit the four-in-hand (her privy needs while traveling to be met with a chamber pot). I dozed an hour at most that night, my mind unable to extricate itself from wondering who the babe had axed to death that sunny morn.
    * * * *
    As one may imagine, when we reached the darkest portion of the glen we were indeed waylaid and told to stand and deliver, for ’twas our money or our lives. Charlotte swung open the door of the coach and smiled, and the masked highwaymen smiled with their eyes, taken aback at her sweetness. She then drew two flintlocks and slew them who had hailed us so boldly, a ball entering an eye socket of one, the breast of the other.
    “Pinprick!” I said. “Get back in! Quickly! They were not the only two cutthroats living here!”
    “I like that you call me ‘Pinprick,’ Mister Coachman,” she said as she swung herself back into her seat and slammed the door shut. “I have a crossbow and full quiver, Mister Coachman. What do you have up there?”
    “Nothing to your concern,” I replied as I snapped the reins so hard all four horses whinnied in anger. I figured now why I had been sent on the precarious journey alone. No need for extra servants when not