Mr. Murder (19 page)

With the pistol in one hand and the half-empty can of Coors in the other, shivering more at the memory of what had happened and at the prospect of what lay ahead than because of the icy beer, he went back through the house to the foyer.

The Other was gone.

Marty was so startled, he dropped the Coors. The can rolled behind him, spilling foamy beer on the hardwood floor of the living room. Although the can had slipped out of his grasp so easily, nothing short of hydraulic prybars could have forced him to let go of the gun.

Broken balusters, a section of handrail, and splinters littered the foyer floor. Several Mexican tiles were cracked and chipped from the impact of hard oak and Smith & Wesson steel. No body.

From the moment the double entered Marty’s office, the waking day had drifted into nightmare without the usual prerequisite of sleep. Events had slipped the chains of reality, and his own home had become a dark dreamscape. As surreal as the confrontation had been, he hadn’t seriously doubted its actuality while it had been playing out. And he didn’t doubt it now, either. He hadn’t shot a figment of the mind, been strangled by an illusion, or plunged alone through the gallery railing. Lying incapacitated in the foyer, The Other had been as real as the shattered balustrade still scattered on the tiles.

Alarmed by the possibility that Paige and the girls had been attacked in the street before they had gotten to the Delorios’ house, Marty turned to the front door. It was locked. From the inside. The security chain was in place. The madman hadn’t left the house by that route.

Hadn’t left it at all. How could he, in his condition? Don’t panic. Be calm. Think it through.

Marty would have bet a year of his life that The Other’s catastrophic injuries had been real, not pretense. The bastard’s back
had
been broken. His inability to move more than his head and the fingers of one hand meant his spine probably had been severed, as well, when he had done his gravity dance with the floor.

So where was he?

Not upstairs. Even if his spine hadn’t been damaged, even if he’d escaped quadriplegia, he couldn’t have dragged his battered body up to the second floor during the short time Marty had been in the kitchen.

Opposite the entrance to the living room, a small den opened off the study. The dishwater-gray light of the storm-washed dusk seeped between the open slats of the shutters, illuminating nothing. Marty stepped through the doorway, snapped on the lights. The den was deserted. At the closet, he slid open the mirrored door, but The Other wasn’t hiding in there, either.

Foyer closet. Nothing. Powder bath. Nothing. The deep closet under the stairs. Laundry. Family room. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Marty searched frantically, recklessly, heedless of his safety. He expected to discover his would-be killer nearby and essentially helpless, perhaps even dead, this feeble attempt at escape having depleted the last of the man’s resources.

Instead, in the kitchen, he found the back door standing open to the patio. A gust of cold wind swept in from outside, rattling the cupboard doors. On the rack by the entrance to the garage, Paige’s raincoat billowed with false life.

While Marty had been returning to the foyer via the dining room and living room, The Other had headed for the kitchen by another route. He must have gone along the short hall that led from the foyer past the powder bath and laundry, and then crossed one end of the family room. He couldn’t have crawled that far so quickly. He had been on his feet, perhaps unsteady, but on his feet nonetheless.

No. It wasn’t possible. Okay, maybe the guy didn’t have a severed spine, after all. Maybe not even a fractured spine. But his back
had
to have been broken. He couldn’t simply have sprung to his feet and capered off.

The waking nightmare had displaced reality again. It was time once more to stalk—and be stalked—by something which enjoyed the regenerative powers of a monster in a dream, something which said it had come looking for a life and which seemed fearfully equipped to take it.

Marty stepped through the open door onto the patio.

Renewed fear lifted him to a higher state of awareness in which colors were more intense, odors were more pungent, and sounds were clearer and more refined than ever before. The feeling was akin to the inexpressibly keen sensations of certain childhood and adolescent dreams—especially those in which the dreamer travels the skies as effortlessly as a bird, or experiences sexual communion with a woman of such exquisite form that, later, neither her face nor body can be recalled but only the essential radiance of perfect beauty. Those special dreams seemed not to be fantasies at all but glimpses of a greater and more detailed reality beyond the reality of the waking world. Stepping through the kitchen door, passing out of the warm house into the cold realm of nature, Marty was strangely reminded of the ravishing vividness of those long-forgotten visions, for now he experienced similarly acute sensations, alert to every nuance of what he saw-heard-smelled-touched.

From the thick thatching of bougainvillea overhead, scores of drips and drizzles splashed into puddles as black as oil in the fading light. Upon that liquid blackness floated crimson blossoms in patterns that, though random, seemed consciously mysterious, as portentous and full of meaning as the ancient calligraphy of some long-dead Chinese mystic.

Around the perimeter of the backyard—small and walled, as in most southern California neighborhoods—Indian laurels and clustered eugenias shivered miserably in the brisk wind. Near the northwest corner, the long and tender trailers of a pair of red-gum eucalyptus lashed the air, shedding oblong leaves as smoky-silver as the wings of dragonflies. In the shadows cast by the trees—and behind several of the larger shrubs—were places in which a man could hide.

Marty had no intention of searching there. If his quarry had dragged himself out of the house to cower in a chilly, sodden nest of jasmine and agapanthus, weak from loss of blood—which was most likely the case—finding him was not urgent. It was more important to be sure he was not at that moment escaping unpursued.

Long adapted to dry conditions and accustomed to only the water provided by the sprinkler system, choruses of toads sang from their hidden niches, scores of shrill voices that were usually charming but seemed eerie and threatening now. Above their aria rose the wail of distant but approaching sirens.

If the intruder was trying to get away before the police came, the possible routes of escape were few. He could have climbed one of the property walls, but that seemed unlikely because, regardless of how miraculous his recovery, he simply hadn’t had sufficient time to cross the lawn, push through the shrubs, and clamber into one of the neighbors’ yards.

Marty turned right and ran out from under the dripping patio cover. Soaked to the skin in half a dozen steps, he followed the rear walkway along the house, then hurried past the back of the attached garage.

The downpour had lured snails from moist and shadowy retreats where they usually remained until well after nightfall. Their pale, jellied bodies were stretched most of the way out of their shells, thick feelers questing ahead. Unavoidably, he stepped on a few, smashed them to pulp, and through his mind flashed the superstitious notion that a cosmic entity would at any second crush him underfoot with equal callousness.

When he turned the corner onto the service walkway flanked by a garage wall and eugenia hedge, he expected to see the look-alike limping toward the front of the property. The walkway was deserted. The gate at the end stood half open.

The sirens were much louder by the time Marty sprinted into the driveway in front of the house. He sloshed through a gutter filled with four or five inches of fast-flowing water as cold as the Styx, stepped into the street, looked left and right, but as yet no police cars were in sight.

The Other was nowhere to be seen, either. Marty was alone on the street.

In the next block south, too far off for him to recognize the make and model, a car was speeding away. In spite of the fact that it was moving too fast for weather conditions, he doubted it was driven by the look-alike. He was still hard-pressed to believe the injured man had been able to walk, let alone reach his car and drive away so quickly. Surely they would find the son of a bitch nearby, lying in shrubbery, unconscious or dead. The car turned the corner much too fast; the thin squeal of its protesting tires was audible above the plink, plop, and susurration of the rain. Then it was gone.

From the north, the banshee shriek of sirens abruptly swelled much louder, and Marty turned to see a black-and -white police sedan negotiate that corner almost as fast as the other car had rounded the corner to the south. Revolving red and blue emergency beacons threw bright Frisbees of light through the gray rain and across the blacktop. The siren cut off as the sedan fishtailed to a stop twenty feet from Marty in the center of the street, with stunt-driver dramatics that seemed excessive even under the circumstances.

The siren of a backup cruiser warbled in the distance as the front doors of the first black-and-white flew open. Two uniformed officers came out of the cruiser, staying low, sheltering behind the doors, shouting, “Drop it! Now! Do it! Drop it right now or die, asshole!
Now!”

Marty realized he was still holding the 9mm pistol. The cops knew nothing more than what Paige had told them when she’d called 911, that a man had been shot, so of course they figured
he
was the perp. If he didn’t do exactly what they demanded, and do it fast, they would shoot him and be justified in doing so.

He let the gun fall out of his hand.

It clattered on the pavement.

They ordered him to kick it away from himself. He complied.

As they rose from behind the open car doors, one of the cops shouted, “On the ground, facedown, hands behind your back!”

He knew better than to try to make them understand that he was the victim rather than the perpetrator. They wanted obedience first, explanations later, and if their positions had been reversed he would have expected the same thing of them.

He dropped to his hands and knees, then stretched full length on the street. Even through his shirt, the wet blacktop was so cold that it took his breath away.

Vic and Kathy Delorio’s house was directly across the street from where he was lying, and Marty hoped Charlotte and Emily had been kept away from the front windows. They shouldn’t have to see their father flat on the ground, under the guns of policemen. They were already scared. He remembered their wide-eyed stares when he’d burst into the kitchen with the gun in his hand, and he didn’t want them frightened further.

The cold leached into his bones.

The second siren suddenly grew much louder from one second to the next. He guessed the backup black-and-white had turned a corner to the south and was approaching from that end of the block. The piercing wail was as cold as a sharp icicle in the ear.

With one side of his face to the pavement, blinking rain out of his eyes, he watched the cops approach. They kept their guns drawn. When they tramped through a shallow puddle, the splashes seemed huge from Marty’s perspective.

As they reached him, he said, “It’s okay. I live here. This is my house.” His speech, already raspy, was further distorted by the shivers that wracked him. He worried that he sounded drunk or demented. “This is my house.”

“Just stay down,” one of them said sharply. “Keep your hands behind your back and stay down.”

The other one asked, “You have any ID?”

Shuddering so badly that his teeth chattered, he said, “Yeah, sure, in my wallet.”

Taking no chances, they cuffed him before fishing his wallet out of his hip pocket. The steel bracelets were still warm from the heated air of the patrol car.

He felt exactly as if he were a character in one of his own novels. It was decidedly
not
a good feeling.

The second siren died. Car doors slammed. He heard the crackling static and tinny voices of police-band radios.

“You have any photo ID in here?” asked the cop who had taken his wallet.

Marty rolled his left eye, trying to see something of the man above knee-level. “Yeah, of course, in one of those plastic windows, a driver’s license.”

In his novels, when innocent characters were suspected of crimes they hadn’t committed, they were often worried and afraid. But Marty had never written about the
humiliation
of such an experience. Lying on the frigid blacktop, prone before the police officers, he was mortified as never before in his life, even though he’d done nothing wrong. The situation itself—being in a position of utter submission while regarded with deep suspicion by figures of authority—seemed to trigger some innate guilt, a congenital sense of culpability in some monstrous transgression that couldn’t quite be identified, feelings of shame because he was going to be found out, even though he
knew
there was nothing for which he could be blamed.

“How old is this picture on your license?” asked the cop with his wallet.

“Uh, I don’t know, two years, three.”

“Doesn’t look much like you.”

“You know what DMV photos are like,” Marty said, dismayed to hear more plea than anger in his voice.

“Let him up, it’s all right, he’s my husband, he’s Marty Stillwater,” Paige shouted, evidently hurrying toward them from the Delorios’ house.

Marty couldn’t see her, but her voice gladdened him and restored a sense of reality to the nightmarish moment.

He told himself that everything was going to be all right. The cops would recognize their error, let him up, search the shrubbery around the house and in neighbors’ yards, quickly find the look-alike, and arrive at an explanation for all the weirdness of the past hour.

“He’s my husband,” Paige repeated, much closer now, and Marty could sense the cops staring at her as she approached.