Neil McMahon - Dead Silver

Her house was dark when we arrived there; neither of us had thought to leave on a light, not realizing we'd be gone so long. With no streetlamps nearby, the yard and surroundings were immersed in gloom, and the silhouette of the old mansion added a Gothic edge. I still felt a touch melodramatic climbing the porch steps with the.45 in my hand, but I was glad to have it. Finding the dead pack rat last night made the possibility of an intruder seem all too real.

I took the key from Renee, opened the door, flicked on the light switch inside, and stood there a few seconds, letting my eyes adjust. I started to step in, intending to take a walk around like we'd done last night.

Just as my foot crossed the threshold, I heard a sound come from the hallway ahead that divided bathroom, kitchen, and back bedrooms-a stealthy rustling, like a small animal might make. Those rats was the first thought that flashed across my mind-the little bastards had gotten in here, too.

Then came a distinct metallic click.

Along with it, the large figure of a man appeared in the hallway entrance, lunging into view from where he'd been hiding behind the wall. All I could grasp in that split-second take was that he was wearing a ski mask and combat fatigues, and that his hands were swinging up to point at me.

I threw myself back against Renee, knocking her out of the way as hard as I could, and tried to shout at her to get the hell out of there. The sound I made came out something like, "Gaaahhh!"

Gunshots exploded from inside the house and splinters from the doorjamb sprayed against my face.

I managed to chamber a round in the.45 and take rough aim at his shape, but I was still off balance and my vision was blurred. As I started pulling the trigger, he dropped into a crouch.

His next shot hit me like a sledgehammer to the right side of my ribs, spinning me around. I tripped over my own clumsy feet, crashed against the porch railing and down to the floor. For a couple of seconds I was too stunned to move. Then I rolled to face the door, forcing my body into position to again take shaky aim.

But the man inside the house had vanished.

I got hold of the porch railing, pulled myself up to my knees, and tried to stand. But Renee was beside me with a hand on my shoulder, firmly holding me in place.

"You just settle down," she said.

"Get out of here, he might still be inside."

"He ran out the back. I saw him."

I stopped struggling against her hand. "You sure?"

"Positive," she said. "And I called the police."

I coughed, or maybe wheezed. "He was running, huh?"

"Shhh."

"Not limping or anything?"

"No. Now shut up, dammit."

She helped ease me down onto my left side, as the first distant cries of sirens came to my ears.

Just about twenty years had passed since the last time I'd opened my eyes in St. Peter's Hospital. While I didn't have any clear memories of that experience, there was still a familiarity this time around-antiseptic smells, equipment hovering over my bed, tubes sticking out of me, and the feeling that my head was duct-taped onto my body.

Then I became aware of a Cheshire cat-like grin, floating in the vague distance across the room. It took me a few seconds to focus on the rest of Madbird around it, leaning against the wall with his arms folded.

"How's it going there, Hawkeye?" he said.

"You're just a bad dream," I muttered, and closed my eyes again.

"Must be the dope they been giving you."

"Have I been here long?"

"Overnight. It's Wednesday morning, about seven-thirty."

Several more seconds passed in silence.

"How many times did I fire?" I asked, with my eyes still closed.

"Four."

"Nothing?"

"I guess you took out a bathroom window and beat up on some plaster. But hey, it ain't all bad-if you'd hurt him, you probably would of got sued or thrown in jail."

"That was my plan all along. Just scare him off."

"Hell, yeah. Thinking on your feet like that, that's where you white guys got it over us. We'd shoot him, and then we'd be fucked."

But Madbird had far more important news than my marksmanship score. He had talked with Gary Varna.

Renee not only called the police while the shooting was going on, she'd stayed on the line and told them that the attacker had run into the woods behind the house. They'd arrived in time to cut off his escape, and found him hiding.

He turned out to be Travis Paulson. And it turned out that Paulson-who had never married, and lived alone-had a longtime hobby, which he'd kept carefully under wraps.

A search of his house revealed a sophisticated photography studio, along with an extensive photo stash of more than twenty women, ranging in age from late teens to forties, all posing nude.

The collection included a duplicate set of the prints of Astrid that we had found in the carriage house. Without doubt, Paulson was the photographer who had originally taken them.

Which went a long way toward explaining his fascination with Astrid's earring. The only other time he had seen it was sexually charged.

In the photos of Astrid, she obviously knew what she was doing and even appeared to be enjoying herself. That also seemed to be the case with most of the other women. But a few told a different story. In these, the models were obviously unconscious-and he was having sex with them.

He was insisting to the police that these encounters were also consensual-that the women had knowingly allowed him to give them a date-rape drug. But the cops knew that was bullshit, and it gave them a lot of leverage.

That was all the information that Madbird had at this point. But it carried a terrible, wonderful implication.

Although Paulson claimed to know nothing about the cache in Professor Callister's study-he insisted that he had given that set of photos to Astrid and never seen them again-the evidence now pointed at him as the one who had planted it there. He admitted that he himself was the photographer; he'd been friendly with Professor Callister and familiar with the layout of the carriage house.

From there, things fell into place. He'd known that Madbird and I had started tearing into the study, and when he saw Renee wearing the earring at the funeral, it was clear that the cache had been discovered. He'd tried to get Renee alone at dinner to find out how serious a threat this was. When she refused, he'd decided he couldn't risk letting it go any further, and he'd lain in wait to stop her.

Travis Paulson had stepped into the limelight as the murderer of Astrid and her lover.

I drifted in and out of sleep after that, occasionally aware of the monitors I was attached to and hospital personnel stopping in to check on me. The wound was a dull throb in my side; it didn't feel much different from broken ribs, although that was probably thanks to painkillers. I got a look at the front of it when a nurse changed the dressing-a ragged little hole where the bullet had entered, surrounded by a blackish purple bruise. The exit wound was worse, but I couldn't see that. Still, it wasn't too serious, she informed me; assuming I was able to get up and take care of myself, I might go home as early as tomorrow.

I drifted in and out of lucidity, too; it came in brief spells before the haze would creep back and put me under again. I recalled getting shot with detached vividness, as if I was watching a movie. I even did some thinking about the events leading up to it, and about where this was headed. And a part of my mind that acted on its own tried to make sense of it all, although I couldn't keep track of that very well.

Long ago, I'd started believing that everybody had a sort of cosmic bank balance where commodities like luck were stored up, and I had no doubt that I'd just made a heavy withdrawal from mine. Paulson's aim had been almost as bad as my own, and he'd used a.40-caliber pistol, popular with cops, which fired a fast powerful round. He'd clipped the lower right side of my chest, splintering ribs both on entry and exit. But the jacketed bullet had passed under my lung, barely grazing it, and had punched straight through instead of blowing out a big chunk like a.357 or my own.45 would have, or glancing off bone and turning inward as lighter ammunition sometimes did.