Dead Street

She took it out and handed it to me. Within were two floppy discs, the larger size that you don’t see often anymore. My name was on the labels. And a word: IMPORTANT.

“All those years,” I said, my voice a bitter whisper.

“What, Jack?”

I hefted the lightweight envelope and said, “All those years, I had these things — right in my apartment.”

She was shaking her head, her lovely dark hair bouncing off her shoulders. “How could you have known? I didn’t exactly have time to send a message to you, and later when I could have... I couldn’t. Because I couldn’t remember my own identity, let alone the man I loved.”

I hugged her to me. “We need to get out of here right now, doll. We’ll grab Kinder and get to the nearest FBI office, and—”

That was when Tacos got back in the act.

Only it wasn’t a simple yip, but a yapping, echoing up from downstairs. The old racing hound was sounding an alarm.

T... .45 was already in my right hand when I got to the window by the bed and looked out and took in an unusual sight for after dark — an ice cream truck double-parked out front. And I hadn’t ordered anything sweet.

Simultaneously we said to each other, “We have company,” and there was no time to be impressed by how mutually on the same wavelength we were.

And Tacos was keeping at it, the barking vicious now, ringing off the walls and ceiling downstairs.

I swept Bettie along with me to the bedroom’s rear window and looked out across the back yard and between the two houses on our neighboring street, and got a view of another double-parked ice cream truck.

That was when the greyhound’s yapping broke off abruptly. The sudden silence sounded its own alarm, one even more troubling than the barking itself.

“Stay here,” I whispered.

She didn’t argue.

The master bedroom and a sewing room, on the other side of the stairwell, were the only rooms up here on this half a floor. From the landing, I could see nothing of the world below. I paused just long enough to listen for movement, didn’t hear any, then started down the stairs cautiously.

The stairs hugged the wall on one side, and were open onto the big living room on the other. Only two lights were on downstairs, a lamp by the sofa and a ceiling fixture over the kitchen table.

As I descended, I could see the fallen Tacos, sprawled on his braided rug, the side of his head matted with blood. He’d been struck a hard blow and he was unconscious but his bony ribcage was rising and falling. Otherwise the living room and the kitchen beyond it appeared empty.

My den was on the other side of the wall the stairs hugged, under the master bedroom. Beneath the staircase was a bathroom, and a hallway between it and the kitchen led to two guest bedrooms and the laundry room. If intruders were looking for us, they might assume the master bedroom would be downstairs. If they had, I could come up behind them and end this quickly.

That was seeming like a reasonable assumption when a guy in a black stocking-mask and matching wardrobe popped up from where he’d been crouching behind the end table on the far side of the sofa, his form slightly blurred by the light of the lamp, and a silenced shot from a Glock snicked past my ear.

My shot was no snick but an explosion in the open room and then the intruder’s head exploded, too, but silently, except for the splat of bone and brain matter that traveled to a window to land and drip.

I spent maybe half a second wondering if the guy was alone but knowing that two ice cream trucks meant multiple salesmen of death, and another one leaned out from behind where the stove and countertop in the kitchen provided him a good position to crouch and shoot.

But before he could, I blasted twice, and one bullet caught his weapon — another silenced Glock — and the other took off some fingers and their little stumps were geysering and he was screaming and when pain and reflex brought him to his feet, my head shot put him out of his misery and brightened up the kitchen cabinets behind him with splashes of red.

When the third black stocking-masked house guest leapt from the doorway of my den, I ducked and two slugs from another noise-suppressed Glock dug holes in the wood, and I lost my balance and came bump-bump-bumping on my rump down the stairs, firing as did, taking out railing posts but not the intruder, who ducked back in my den, while I hit hard on the little landing, where the stairs took their small four-step jog into the living room.

I’d barely hit up against the railings, including several ... .45 had already splintered, when he popped back out and was below me a little and yet right on me, pointing that Glock up at me, but I kicked through the remaining railings and caught him on the chin and sent him back hard against the wall, his Glock popping out of his hand and flying somewhere.