The Crime Writer

Like when I'd awakened to find the slice above my little toe. With a clean bill of mental health, I'd followed my own bloody footprints around the house. Returned to find my boning knife, bearing my own prints, by the bed. Discovered the shattered jar in the sink and ganglioglioma gone spelunking down the disposal. What if I hadn't been gassed with sevoflurane? What if Morton Frankel had never been to my house? What if this was all my writer's mind at work on an elaborate fiction? A more convenient tale, spun for the age-old reason all escapist yarns are?

A memory hit me, fresh as a vision. Genevieve bouncing foot to foot along the cliff's edge above Santa Monica Beach, giggling manically as I shadowed her five feet off. An ingenious blackmail should I be scared? Indifferent? Should I approach? Tourists watching with trepidation, parents shepherding their kids away. We'd gotten into a fight over something monumental taco stand or Korean barbecue and it had erupted as it often did. What's the matter, Drew? I'm embarrassing you? Embarrassment, sure, but also terror that she'd misjudge her footing, resentment at how my hands clutched the air every time she wobbled. At the time I hadn't identified the sensation hiding beneath the others like a buried ember. Rage.

I believe that anyone is capable of anything.

In addition to my own unstable self, I had other nocturnal dangers to offer. Kaden and Delveckio could come calling after all, I still owed them a gun and drag Caroline into the investigation. Morton Frankel could be smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in the alley below, staring up at this window right now.

"I don't trust where I am. I need to get more answers."

"Sorry," she said, "but there's only room for my issues in this relationship."

That drew a smile from me. She threw on a nightgown as I dressed. At the door we kissed. I ran my thumb along the line of one of her scars.

She asked, "What if you get to the end of this road and discover you did do it?"

"I don't know that I could live with myself."

"Drew," she said, "we're generally not given that choice."

Chapter 37

I emerged from sleep calmly and knew the time before I glanced at my nightstand clock: 1:08 a.m. A menacing rumble downstairs. An unusual chill in the air, colder than the house got at night, even in January. I rolled over, rested my hand on the loaded. 22.

The noise ceased, then commenced with renewed energy.

Xena growling.

I threw back the sheets, ran to my closet, and dressed rapidly. Passing the window above the bathtub, I stopped, my breath jerking out of me.

Across the street, beneath the gloomy overhang of the neighbor's carport, a man stood in the ribbed darkness, peering up at my house. He was little more than a black form because of the interplay of competing shadows, it was difficult to gauge even his height.

Morton Frankel, finally come calling?

He stood motionless, the tilt of his head suggesting he was looking up at the very window before me. Could he see me in the darkness behind the glass?

I moved swiftly through my room and eased out onto the catwalk. Peering over the railing, I saw the security rod on the carpet, again dislodged from the slider's track. The sliding door itself I couldn't see, but Xena stood facing it, fur raised in a wolfish bristle along her neck and upper back. A gust rattled the screen door, and an instant later I felt cold air rise to my face.

I slid off the pistol's safety and hurried down the stairs, letting my shoulder whisper along the curved wall to my right. A movement at the front door, toward the top where I'd clumsily covered the shattered inset windows. Beneath the nailed plywood, on the only sliver of exposed packing tape, a slit had been cut. It had been widened to maybe six inches before whoever cut it had realized that the plywood wouldn't allow a hand to snake through and reach the inside lock. Pouched inward, the slit breathed with the wind, a weird sort of acrylic mouth.

I came around the base of the stairs. Xena must have smelled that it was me; she kept her focus on the two-foot gap where the sliding door had been pushed open. Leaves scratched along the back deck, nothing more. I drew even with Xena. Mort hadn't counted on my having a guard dog. In the slider's track, the paint was scraped where the slim jim had been slipped through to pop the security rod out of place.

I opened the screen, stepped out onto the deck, closing Xena inside so I could make silent progress. As before, the side gate clanked. Down the hill a pack of coyotes bayed, closing in on someone's pet. Straight-arming the. 22, I crept around the house, moving in and out of shadow until I reached the street.

Beneath the carport nothing but my neighbor's familiar van and pools of shadow. Was I losing touch? Again? I ran over, checked behind and under the van, then came out and stood in my old spot in the middle of the street. No movement except bobbing branches and fluttering leaves.

And the distant purr of a motor.