I was drifting into sleep on an amber ebb tide of bourbon when a realization hit me like a prizefighter’s right-hook. I flopped out of my Murphy bed, yanked my clothes on, and jumped into my shoes. Eleven minutes later I was climbing out of a cab and making my way into the Cain Building, up to my office. It was late, but with that thought buzzing around inside my skull, sleep was no longer an option.
I had to look at those pictures again. I had to see if I was right.
My key had just touched the lock on my office door when the subtle sounds of movement coming to me through the open transom stopped me still as a department store mannequin. Whoever had been moving around on the other side of the door with the frosted glass window must’ve heard my footsteps on the creaky hardwood floor, because he stopped as quickly as I did. I wasn’t fool enough to let myself think I’d imagined the whole thing. Someone had gotten in all right, and by the continued silence I gathered he was still trying to decide whether or not I’d noticed.
Or maybe I’d jumped to the wrong conclusion—maybe my self-invited guest wasn’t a “he” at all.
In the drawn-out quiet, I took a good look at the lock. No signs that it’d been jimmied. I wished for the cool potent weight of my piece, but the damn thing was locked up in a desk drawer in the inner office; I never carried it unless I was on the job and had a good reason to expect trouble. I sure as hell hadn’t expected any tonight.
My mistake.
Slow as I could, I reached out and gave the knob a twist—or tried to, anyway. Locked.
Damn.
That meant I’d have to use my key after all, and the fella on the other side of that door couldn’t miss hearing the tumblers rattle as they turned back the bolt. I’d give away the last of whatever surprise I had left on my side.
For a second I held back. I thought about getting the cops down here to take care of things, a few of the boys in blue with badges and guns to wave around. But there was no telling what might happen in the time that would take—the nearest phone, other than the one in my office, was a payphone in the lobby. By the time I got down there and made the call and the dispatcher got some patrolmen on the scene, my visitor could easily finish whatever ransacking and robbing he’d come to do and make his getaway down the fire escape. In any case, I had strict orders from my client not to bring the cops into this, and as long as she kept footing the bill, I’d play by her rules. She’d seemed so damned earnest about it, like calling in the regular law might tear open a hole in her life she couldn’t ever patch up again. Hers just wasn’t a trust I could betray, even when common sense said I ought to know better.
I gave myself another second to figure how to proceed. Whoever was on the wrong side of my office door knew I was there, or would know as soon as I slipped the key into the lock. Neither of us was fooling the other one, so I went with the direct approach.
“Okay, friend,” I said, loud, hoping my voice masked the sound of my unbolting the door, “I know you’re inside. I’m gonna count five and then open this door. Then you and I are gonna have a little talk about what you’re doing in my office. Understand?”
I cocked an ear up at the slanting transom, but there was only silence from the other side.
“One,” I said loudly, “two—”
I threw the door open before I ever got to three, slamming myself back against the wall beside the doorframe in case my guest had been waiting for a nicely framed shape to take a few plugs at. No way of knowing if the fella had come packing heat, or if he’d gotten into my desk and was in the mood to get in a little target practice before he went home from this party. The last thing I wanted tonight was to wind up full of holes from my own damn weapon.
But rather than muzzle flash and thundercracks, dead silence rang out from inside.
The fella was either real patient, or gone.
Damn again.
I waited half a minute in the hall, listening. Silence. A full minute passed. Silence. If the fella even had to breathe, I didn’t hear him doing it. Maybe he’d slipped out whatever window he’d crawled in through while I’d been shouting nonsense, hoping to distract him. And maybe not.
There was no way I could avoid making myself a target as I went through the door, but I didn’t see I had any choice. I went in low and fast and flattened myself against a wall, my gaze skittering madly across the darkness, hoping to catch any hint of movement, any out of place shadows framed against the crimson glow winking in the window.
The quiet held, deep and black. I could just about hear my heart beating too hard, and that was all.
I gave a moment’s thought to clicking on the light, but if the fella did have a gun, I’d only make his shot that much easier for him.
Slowly, I straightened up, my vision adjusting to the gloom now. I could make out all the prosaic details of the outer office—Cass’s desk and the battleship-gray filing cabinets standing against the wall, the wooden coat rack in the corner, naked for the moment. The chairs standing where they belonged. And the door to my inner office, standing open on three narrow inches of total black. Which it shouldn’t have been.
I frowned, and felt my hand wander up to scratch that scar, which had come awake itching again.
I waited what must’ve been five minutes—I could just about count it up by the ticking of the clock on the wall beside Cass’s desk. The fella had obviously gone the same way he’d gotten in; nobody could hold still that long without making a single sound.
I turned on the light in the main office, and looked around.
If anything was out of place, I couldn’t spot it. Cass would know for sure, but I figured I could wait until morning to bother her with it. Right then, I was more concerned about what might’ve been done to the inner office.
I slipped inside and turned on the light.
If I’d expected the place to be tossed, I was disappointed. In fact, for a minute I thought my visitor hadn’t touched anything at all, that maybe I’d scared him off before he could get started with whatever fun he’d been planning.
Then I saw the drawers hanging open on my desk like sprung jaws, and the scraps of paper littering the floor. I circled the desk and looked down—and muttered a few choice curses under my breath.
The photos. My visitor had gotten to them and turned them into confetti. I could see a bit of shadow here, a curve of face there, something that might’ve been a hand, something that was probably a bottle.
I gave a grunting laugh. I couldn’t help myself. I’d made a point of stopping by here on the way back from my tête-á-tête with Hally to stash the snapshots away in my desk. Where they would be safe. Now the proof I’d come back at this ungodly hour to get lay at my feet, shredded. I’d delivered it right into the intruder’s hands.
Except—
I stooped, looking closer. A few of the pieces were larger, and one photo had only been torn into rough quarters. Seemed maybe I had interrupted the vandal before he’d had a chance to make good on the job.
I dropped the four corners onto my desk and arranged them like a cheap jigsaw puzzle. It wasn’t one of the better shots, just a collaboration of blurs whose shapes I could only half make out. It was enough, though, to make me feel pretty confident about that insight that’d chased my sleep away for the night.
Still, I had to make sure, so I bent and started sifting through the bigger shreds of the other photos, looking for a scrap of confirmation.
I’d just caught sight of a delicate hand cradling a half-full wineglass, a black stripe on the ring finger, when the lights went out and the door slammed shut behind me. I whirled to face it, blinded by the sudden dark.
The fella hit me from behind.
I never saw him coming, never even heard him. But at least I understood, as I hit the deck, why he’d left the pieces in my trashcan instead of taking them with him. He’d baited a little trap for me and I’d gone and stuck my big foot right in it.
Or maybe the fella was just an idiot who got lucky.
I’m still not sure what the hell he clobbered me with—a sap, a baseball bat, a fist the size of a Christmas ham, could’ve been any of those. All I know is his first shot caught me across the back of the head and set off blazing green fireworks in my skull. I flopped forward onto my knees, struggling to maintain even a scintilla of balance, knowing that if the fella got me down, I might never get up again.
I wobbled, trying to turn to face the man, to at least get a look at him in case I ever had the chance to go hunting for him. Somehow, he hit me from the other side, another brutal, crashing blow. This time he got me right across the orbit of my eye, knocking all the color and most of the light out of the world, bashing my nose with his follow-through for good measure.
Still trying to get up, I flopped onto my back, as if this fella couldn’t finish me off at his convenience. I managed to half-sit, and was rewarded for my effort with a bash to the mouth that snapped my head back against the hardwood. My body went on struggling to get up, but my brain had taken about enough—my consciousness was draining out of my skull in a steady trickle of blood, the darkness becoming uniform and featureless.
Something heavy slammed my ribcage and shoved me hard to the floor. I managed to open my left eye a slit and gaze up at the goon standing on my chest. He stood about sixty feet tall and was made entirely of shadows. And yet I thought I saw something distantly familiar in that fading outline. I couldn’t be sure, though. Under those circumstances, I couldn’t even be sure of my own name.
“You wanna watch where you go stickin’ that fat nose of yours, pal.”
The voice drifting through the haze in my brain sounded thick and dull, with a low animal snarl under the words, like static on a poorly tuned radio station. If I’d ever heard it before, I sure couldn’t place it then. It was hard enough just catching a breath with his solid-granite foot on my ribs.
I think I tried to say something back at him, or maybe I twitched, or inhaled too deep—anyway, I did something that didn’t sit right with him because he lifted that massive foot off my chest and delivered a kick to the soft part of my midsection that sent pain blazing through me all the way to my teeth. I lay there groaning, not able to do much of anything else.
Now the giant crouched down over me, filling the world above me like a towering thunderhead. For an instant, I had the sense someone was there with him, some phantom hovering over his shoulder in the background, a shadow that didn’t belong, and I had the crazy thought, So that’s how he got in—whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. But I only had a second to try to make sense of any of it, then a thick hand grabbed my collar and hauled me up into a reclining position, my arms hanging at my sides as useless as broken twigs. I wished this idiot would finish me off and get it over with, or leave me there to writhe in peace.
No such luck.
“You gonna remember what I said?”
I managed to make a thick gurgling sound neither of us could make any sense of. My guest chose to take it as a negation.
“Maybe I better oughtta leave you a reminder then, huh?” he said, and I saw a sharp metal wink in the bloody neon glow from the sign across the street. When the blade descended toward my half-open left eye, I let go of consciousness and sank into blessed black oblivion.