Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“What a wonderful dresser,” Temple couldn’t help but exclaim. “It’s a reproduction of those 1930s-style ones.” She ran her hands over the round frame holding the mirror.

“I got it years ago,” Mira said, “at a St. Vincent de Paul’s shop. It was cheap.”

“I’ve always thought,” Temple said, “of these big round mirrors as the moon, setting behind the two pillars of drawers on either side.”

“Goodness.” Mira examined the piece with new eyes. “You’re right, but it’ll always be the harbor of old poison to me now.”

Matt had squatted to pull out the narrow bottom drawer. A battered manila folder was curved to fit into the space. He pulled it out. A sheaf of stiff, folded white typing paper lay inside. The front one opened like a book, showing signs of yellow glue around newspaper headline-size letters.

“We probably shouldn’t handle them,” Temple cautioned, leaning over to look. “The fewer fingerprints for the police, the better.”

“No police.” Mira hung over Matt and the drawer too, wringing her hands.

“YOU GOT CLIFFIE’S CRAP WE WANT IT LADY,” Matt read the crazy-quilt printed letters. “It’s simple,” he added. “If you have anything of Effinger’s, give it to them. Only we need to think up a way so you don’t come in contact with these freakos.”

“That’s just it,” she answered. “I haven’t known what to do, or how. It’s like that man is haunting me. I just can’t get him out of my life, even after death—”

Her head whipped toward the bedroom door.

Someone was fumbling at the front door. Matt had stood and unconsciously turned toward the noise. Now he turned into a pillar of salt.

Temple was riveted too.

Cliff Effinger.

“He’s dead,” Matt mumbled, gazing toward the doorway as if he expected his stepfather’s ghost to stumble in and he needed to do something about it.

“I know. You told me.” Mira’s voice was weary again. “And I may have made a big mistake all over again—”

“So here you all are. Wine steward’s here,” Krys caroled from the doorframe, hoisting a brown paper bag. “Mission accomplished. Just made the closing time. Who wants to pop the cork and celebrate?”

Chapter 11

Collared

Max was still elbowing along the dark air-conditioning vent, preparing to make a last right turn before the final twenty-five-foot crawl.

His knee joints felt swollen and numb. Every foot forward seemed like a yard.

A businesslike clang echoed from the tunnel’s unseen end.

That wasn’t a distant burp down the long-distance line of new venting that had replaced this disused old route. It wasn’t an echo from some workman’s hammer bounced the length of the Goliath’s hidden guts. Too close. No. It was the rasp of the metal vent cover he’d temporarily replaced to hide his incursion. The grille was being wrested away again, and too easily, thanks to his incursion.

He shouldered ahead, faster but still as stealthy as he could manage. Finally his head and shoulders thrust into the freer air flow of the last passage. The cold blood in his inactive legs had spread to his chest.

The faint work-light glow from the mechanical closet should be welcoming him back to the home stretch.

Instead the way ahead was impenetrable black.

Another body was blocking the light.

No such luck it was another dead body in the same ductwork at a different time, as awkward … and sinister as that would be.

A whisper, a soft shift of cloth, promised another intruder had followed Max into the dark ductwork alley.

Memory blast.

His mind flashed back in time to a short blind struggle in the dark at the tunnel’s other end. He’d locked down the windpipe of the man he discovered hiding there long enough to eel his way back out. Maybe long enough that a second visitor who had seen Max’s expedition start and end had then followed in his elbow-crawls and killed the disabled Hedberg.

Someone certainly had seen, or suspected, Max’s current presence. That made his decision to go unarmed iffy even if it confirmed his suspicions. Upper body strength had always been the best weapon in his onstage career and offstage espionage assignments. Now it would have to pull his weakened legs along while handling his unseen enemy and whatever weapon the guy was sure to be carrying.

Max hoped that this wasn’t the same assassin as two years before, and that, if so, he hadn’t upgraded to carrying a gun. Either way, knife or gun, the bad guy had to be using a shoulder holster to keep his hands free for crawling. And the “breast pocket” drawing action necessary to pull it in these close quarters would alert Max before the weapon was out of its sheath.

Max coiled himself into as much of a crouch as the space would allow and kept still. The pressure on his braced toes and stretched hamstrings was a torture Saddam Hussein’s insane son would have been proud to invent.