The Crime Writer

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.

I listened, but the sound neither rose nor faded.

Keeping to the sidewalk, I moved down the street, the noise growing louder. I made my way past two lots, pausing before the high stucco wall that guarded the corner house's driveway. The wall played with the acoustics; I was unsure if the running car was just behind it or farther along on the intersecting street.

Keeping the pistol raised before me, I leaned around the wall, but the vehicle if it was there was too far back to draw into my line of sight. Holding an inhale, I stepped past the wall onto the dark driveway. The outline of a facing car, maybe ten yards up the long, narrow drive, the windshield an impervious black sheet, exhaust clinging to its rear. The house was up around the bend, set back above a sharp slope. The memory of cigarette smoke tinged the air. To my right, the reliable wall, on my left, a bank of ivy.

Had the driver kept the car running for his return, or was he in there now, watching me?

Vigilant of ambush from the side or behind, I shuffled forward, aiming at the windshield, braced to run. Despite my fear and the cold, I managed to keep the gun steady, the recurrent puffs before my face an indication of how much my breathing had quickened.

A few steps revealed the car to be a Volvo. Dark paint. The license plate had been removed. Another few feet and I'd be able to make out if there was a form in the driver's seat.

The headlights flared, blinding me. The engine roared and the tires squealed, seeking purchase. The Volvo leapt forward. I fired, the bullet punching a hole in the top right corner of the windshield. Bolting left, I got in a step and was airborne when the hood clipped me. I rolled up the edge of the windshield, the driver a passing blur, and flew off the side, landing in the ivy. The Volvo skidded onto the street, through the intersection, and was gone. I lay on my back, panting, a sprinkler head dug into the small of my back. Rats rustled around me through the damp matting. After a time the crickets resumed. The neighborhood remained silent, unimpressed that I'd just fired a shot.

Pulling twigs from my clothes and hair, I again registered that hint of cigarette smoke. Crawling on the driveway, I looked for a hand-rolled butt. To the side, caught on a broad leaf of ivy, was a matchbook. Guess what was printed on its cover?

I found a twig and used it to lift the matchbook so as to preserve any prints. The matches had been used up, but written on the back side of the flap in a familiar block print, an address.

It was an address I'd be unlikely ever to forget.