Кей Хупер - Hiding in the Shadows

"That makes sense."

"Then it is my fault Dinah's in trouble."

"Dinah's a grown woman with a damned good mind," Kane said after a moment. "Whatever was going on, I doubt she was dragged into it unwillingly."

"What if I didn't tell her everything? What if I took whatever it is they want, and I didn't tell Dinah what I did with it?" She grimaced suddenly and set her wineglass on the table. "Dammit, not knowing what the thing is makes it sound so ridiculous when you talk about it."

"We could always call it the Macguffin," Kane suggested wryly.

"Isn't that a word Hitchcock coined? To name something in a movie that everybody was after?"

He smiled faintly. "Another Hitchcock fan, I see."

"I guess so."

"Well, then, we'll call it the Macguffin until we know what it is."

Faith waited out a long, rolling rumble of thunder.

"I just wish we knew."

"We'll find out." We have to find out. He didn't speak the last words, but he might as well have.

He wouldn't let her help him clear up, and when he was done in the kitchen, he lit a fire in the fireplace.

Faith wandered uneasily to the piano for a few moments and then to a window. The storm was going strong, and the rain was heavy now, blown against the windows by gusty wind in a rattle that told of sleet.

It made her feel very jumpy.

Be careful

That voice again, almost inaudible to her now.

"I think this is going to go on all night," Kane said, watching her as he stood by the fireplace.

Move ... now!

"I think you're right." Baffled by the faint whisper in her mind, by her own tension, Faith winced as a bright flash of lightning illuminated the night, then she turned from the window. "And I don't know why I have this compulsion to stand here and watch when it makes me..."

For an instant, Kane thought it was the crash of thunder that cut off her words, but he saw an expression of puzzlement and then shock twist her features.

Her right hand touched the upper part of her left arm just below the shoulder, and Kane saw scarlet bloom around her fingers.

"Faith..."

"Will you look at that?" She was staring at a mirror directly across the room from where she stood. A cobweb of large cracks radiated from a small hole in the center of the mirror.

With more haste than gentleness, Kane grabbed her and pulled her away from the windows. "Goddammit, somebody's shooting."

"At me?" She sounded only mildly interested.

He sat her down on the couch and pried her fingers away from her arm.

"Let me see."

Her sweatshirt bore two neat, round holes that were clearly entrance and exit points, and made it easy for him to tear the sleeve to expose the wound.

"It's just a scratch. I've always wanted to say that."

Kane had a hunch it was shock rather than courage that kept her voice strong and her words light. But she was right in that the wound was minor, a bloody furrow carved across no more than a couple of inches of the outside of her arm. He had no doubt, however, that it hurt like hell.

He made a pad of his handkerchief and pressed it to the sluggishly bleeding spot, and looked at Faith's pale, calm face.

"Can you hold this in place while I call the police?"

"Of course I can." She did so, then looked at him with amazingly clear eyes. "But I won't go to the hospital."

"Faith, this needs to be looked at."

"I can have Dr. Burnett look at it tomorrow when we go to talk to him," she said calmly. "It'll be fine tonight if you can just clean and bandage it."

"Faith..."

"It doesn't even need stitches. I'm all right, Kane, really."

She shivered suddenly as thunder boomed again. "I just ... I don't want to go out there tonight."

"All right."

He got a blanket and covered her with it before he went to call Richardson. He was careful to stay away from the windows, though he doubted there was any danger. Whoever had been out there was long gone now.

That a shot had been taken on a night like this, with blinding rain making precision impossible, told him the act was a scare tactic, not intended to hit a live target; the bullet had found Faith only by sheer dumb luck. Nothing else made sense.

But that hardly made the situation better.

Kane disinfected and bandaged the wound. She never flinched or made a sound, just sat there and watched him, and for some unaccountable reason her gaze made him feel suddenly clumsy.

"I'm sorry," he said, taping the final piece of gauze into place.

"Why? You didn't shoot me."

Still holding her arm gently between his hands, he looked up to find her smiling faintly. "I can't be flip about this, Faith."

"I see that. Kane, I'm fine. My arm hurts, and I won't be lingering near any windows for a while, but I'm all right."

"You must be one of those people who shine in a crisis."

"You didn't do so bad yourself."

He realized he was compulsively smoothing with his thumbs the tape holding the bandage in place, and forced himself to release her and lean back. "Yeah, well, I'll get the shakes later. And speaking of delayed shock — which do you prefer, whiskey or hot tea?"

"Tea, please."

When Richardson arrived a few minutes later, Faith answered the detective's questions with no visible anxiety. Not that there was much she could tell him.

"I saw the cracked mirror first, and thought how odd it was. Then my arm burned suddenly, but it wasn't until I put my hand over it that I felt the blood. Even then, I didn't immediately realize I'd been shot. I never heard it."

"The storm was right overhead," Kane told his friend. "There was so much noise we couldn't hear the shot or the bullet going through the window and smashing the mirror."

Richardson went over to examine the mirror. "It's gone all the way through and into the wall." He took down the mirror, then produced a penknife and dug into the Sheetrock. Win a very few minutes, he held a misshapen slug.

Even across the room Kane read Richardson's expression. "I guess ballistics are out? No chance of tracing it to a particular gun?"

"I can't even tell what caliber it is, and I doubt the lab will be able to either." He eyed the distance to the window, then went to examine that as well. Like the mirror, the windowpane was marred by a small hole surrounded by a web of cracks.

"Too dark to see much now," he said. "I can come back tomorrow and take a stab at the trajectory, try to figure out where the shooter was. But if he was standing more than a few feet away, he couldn't have hoped to hit what he was aiming at, not in this weather." Kane said, "There's no fire escape, and we're on the fifth floor. Unless he was outside on the balcony — which is possible, if doubtful — he couldn't have been any closer than the apartments on the other side of the courtyard. And that building is a good hundred feet away."

Richardson studied the distance from the hole in the window to the floor, then compared that with the distance between the hole in the wall and the floor.

"Well, he sure as hell didn't shoot upward from ground level, or down from a higher spot. Do those apartments across the courtyard have balconies?"

"Yeah."

"Then we'll look for a vacant or currently unused apartment. I'm willing to bet we'll find one matching the trajectory of the shot. Somebody sat over there watching this place, and when they saw Miss Parker at the window..."

"But I stood there at least a couple of minutes before I moved away," Faith protested. "And it wasn't until then that I was shot."

"Then he was probably trying to scare you, and just got lucky with the shot."

"Lucky," she murmured.

Richardson smiled. "A figure of speech." He looked at Kane. "Did you two do anything today that might have gotten somebody's attention?"