I’d tied the Gordian knot trying to find the house on Hastings. Now I had to think upside down and backwards just to get loose. It wasn’t all bad; by the time I came to a block that looked familiar I was convinced I’d lost any tail I might have picked up. All the headlights in the rearview mirror either fell too far behind to maintain practical surveillance or turned off the street.
I didn’t know if the party I’d first spotted in my building, and again from my car across the street, even had a vehicle, or if the whole thing was just a byproduct of my overdeveloped sense of awareness. It’s one of the pitfalls of the profession, as potentially dangerous as no awareness at all.
But looking for shadows distracted me from turning over the conversation with Kopernick in my head, and that was a good thing. The more I dwelt on it, the less certain I’d be that: (1) he was just leading me on, letting me think our alliance was genuine to give him more time to scheme with his new employer, or (2) he was on the square, and he had some sense of justice after all. One way seemed like I was too suspicious to recognize a break when it came along, the other like after all these years in the cockpit I was still as green as I was at the start.
It was enough to make me wish I actually had a stalker to keep me occupied.
In any case I was too keyed up to go home, so I made a detour downtown.
I’d left the office before the mail ran. Maybe Publishers Clearing House had come through for me with a thick juicy steak of a check and I could retire to a less miserable climate—the Aleutians, maybe—and a daily pastime that didn’t involve sorting out the lies from the half-truths, treading the high-wire between the crooks who wanted me dead and the cops who wanted me incarcerated, and murky conferences after dark in shells of houses that smelled like rodent musk and cheap cigars.
The atmosphere in my little reception room wasn’t much of an improvement. The building’s cleaning service bought its dusting spray in industrial drums; I kept expecting to see the company’s name on a TV pitch to join a class-action suit for some corrosive disease. Under that was the stale stench of no one getting rich anytime this century either. The small scatter of envelopes under the mail slot in the private office confirmed that: Most of them read THIRD NOTICE. I picked them up, carried them to the desk, and started to file them under the blotting pad with the others. The desk lamp was off and the ambient light coming through the window from streetlamps, neighboring buildings, and traffic two stories down made the shadows in the corners as thick as syrup.
I didn’t get as far as the blotter. A window in a dark room makes an excellent mirror, reflecting a long plank of face with a moustache like an inverted horseshoe. I twisted away from the glass, dropped the mail, and swept up the Magnum, all in the same movement. The owner of the reflection was harder to see in person, but I saw a flash of movement and fired at the thickest part of his body; just fast enough to deflect his own aim. Instead of my head, something hard and heavy struck the big muscle on the side of my neck. Orange and purple light lanced my vision. I staggered, grabbed for the edge of the desk, got it, found focus, and raised the gun again; but there was nothing to shoot at but the wall opposite. I was alone in the room.
The desk was much bigger than I remembered. Reaching across it with my vision dazzled by the revolver flare and the blow and my ears ringing from the echo of the blast, was like crawling home through a fog so thick it made a hundred yards seem like a mile. At length my hand found the base of the lamp, climbed the flexible post to the switch, and twisted it on. I blinked away the tears, and when my pupils caught up with the light I wobbled across to the open door, and across the reception room to the hallway. There I did the policeman’s waltz, pirouetting right and left with the Ruger clasped in both hands.
I was still alone, of course. I was too late even to hear feet hammering the stairs and the street door slamming shut; if a man fleeing the scene of a crime ever bothered with that courtesy.
Holstering the weapon, I started back toward the office, saw a chain of dark spots on the floor. They might have been a trick of shadow. I retreated a step and flipped up the wall switch. In the light from the ceiling fixture, they were glistening red; four pea-size specks leading toward the hallway. I went out there and found six more between the door and the stairs. My sharpshooting skills weren’t as bad as I’d feared; I could still hit a target the size of a man at a distance of three feet.
The Easter eggs continued to come. Re-entering the office, my foot nudged something lying on the threshold. I bent and picked it up: a black nylon gauntlet studded with tiny steel ball bearings. A sap glove. Almost no one ever bothers to put one on; just slapping it across someone’s temple is enough to bring on concussion. It was pure luck I’d moved in time to deflect his aim.
Not that my neck would thank me. The muscle felt hot and big, and it throbbed. I touched it. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I had to snatch hold of the door frame to stay off the floor.
I was sweating like a victim of yellow fever. I reached up to swipe my forehead, stopped short of knocking myself out cold; the hand was the one holding the mail glove.
Leaning against the jamb, I looked at the object with new eyes. It’s a restricted item, like machine guns, blackjacks, and brass knuckles. A private citizen can’t obtain any of them without going through the black market, and the paper trail is hard to avoid, even in our paperless society. Most civilians don’t bother. Only a cop can carry one around without raising suspicion.