Dean Koontz - 77 Shadow Street

“What’re you looking for?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve got to be looking for something.”

Logan sighed. “There was a brief failure of cameras last night.”

“That’s big.”

“It’s not big,” Logan said. “It was twenty-three seconds.”

“Somebody maybe pulled a heist.”

“Nobody pulled a heist.”

“Somebody pulled something,” Klick said.

“Nobody pulled anything.”

“Somebody did,” Klick insisted. He’d never been a policeman, only a security guard; but he believed that he possessed a cop’s intuition. “Maybe somebody killed somebody.”

“Nobody was killed.”

“Just because you haven’t found the body yet doesn’t mean it isn’t somewhere in the building for someone to find sometime.”

Logan refused to keep the idiotic conversation alive. He closely and repeatedly reviewed the video of Senator Earl Blandon’s return to the Pendleton the previous night, his time in the elevator, and the third-floor corridors immediately following the dissipation of the blue static.

He was aware of Vernon Klick’s barely repressed frustration at having to share the room with his boss for more than a minute or two. No doubt the freak had a pornographic magazine in his briefcase or a pint of Irish whiskey, or both, and was eager to pleasure himself one way or another.

What kept Logan at his task was a problem with the timing of Earl Blandon’s return to his apartment. The elevator required twenty-one seconds to go from a full stop on the ground floor to a full stop on the third. According to the time-stamped video, camera coverage had been lost four seconds into the elevator’s ascent. Subtract the next seventeen seconds of ascent from the twenty-three seconds of outage. That left only six seconds of blue static during which the man could have stepped out of the elevator, walked the length of the short west-wing corridor on the third floor, turned right into the north corridor, unlocked his door, and entered his apartment.

Like Devon Murphy, Logan knew the telltales of the senator’s drunkenness: the careful posture, the exaggerated poise. The footage of Blandon crossing the lobby left no doubt that he came home in a state of extreme inebriation.

Perhaps a sober man could have walked briskly from the elevator to the door of 3-D and let himself into the apartment in a mere six seconds. In an advanced state of drunkenness, Earl Blandon moved not briskly but at a stately pace, almost with the measured progress of a bride matching her steps to the processional music on her way to the altar. Surely he had needed at least six seconds just to fumble the key from his pocket and insert it successfully into the lock.

“Before I leave for the day,” Logan said, “I’m going to check on one of the third-floor residents.”

Indicating the screen that his boss had been studying, Klick said, “You mean the senator?” When Logan didn’t reply, Klick said, “You think he’s dead?”

“No, I don’t think he’s dead.”

“Then you think he killed somebody?”

“Nobody killed anybody.”

“Somebody killed somebody, I bet, or robbed somebody, or robbed and killed somebody.”

Getting up from his chair, Logan Spangler said, “Vernon, what’s your problem?”

“Me? I don’t have any problem.”

“You have some kind of problem.”

“My only problem is that missing twenty-three seconds.”

“That’s not your problem,” Logan said, “it’s my problem.”

“Well, then you shouldn’t have got me worried about it.”

“There’s nothing to worry about.”

“There is if someone killed or was killed.”

“Work your shift. Follow procedures. Don’t let your imagination run wild,” Logan advised, and left Klick alone to do whatever he did when he was supposed to be on duty.

As Logan pulled the security-room door shut behind him, a rumbling rose seemingly from underfoot, and the Pendleton shuddered. The same thing had happened earlier. Foundation work was under way for a high-rise on the eastern slope of Shadow Hill, which was no doubt the source of the disturbance. He decided to inquire with the city building department after checking on the senator.

11

Apartment 3-F

Mickey Dime left Jerry dead in an armchair in the study. In the kitchen, he washed his hands. He liked the water so hot it stung. The liquid soap made a soothing lather. It smelled like peaches. Peaches were his favorite fruit.

Beyond the window, the sky flashed, flashed. He wished he were outside to feel the air shiver, to enjoy the crisp scent of ozone that lightning left in its wake. Thunder crashed. He felt it in his bones.

He poured a glass of chocolate milk and plated a lemon muffin. The glass was by Baccarat, the plate by Limoges, the fork by Tiffany. He liked the look and feel of them. The muffin was heavily drizzled with icing. He sat at the breakfast table by a window overlooking the courtyard. He ate slowly, savoring the treat.

A lot of sugar made most people hyper, but it calmed Mickey. From the time he was a little kid, his mom said he was different from other people. She wasn’t just bragging. Mickey was different in many ways. For instance, his metabolism was a high-performance machine, like a Ferrari. He could chow down on anything, never gain an ounce.

After the muffin, he enjoyed three Oreos. He pulled the wafers apart and licked off the icing first. His mom had taught him to eat them that way. His mom had taught him so much. He owed everything to her.

Mickey was thirty-five. His mother had died six months earlier. He still missed her.

Even now he could recall the precise chill and the too-soft texture of her cheek when he leaned into the coffin to kiss her. He kissed each of her eyelids, too, and half expected them to flutter open against his lips. But they were stitched shut.

He finished his snack. He rinsed the plate, the glass, the fork. He left them on the drainboard to be washed by the housekeeper, who came twice a week.

For a while he stood at the sink, watching raindrops tap the window. He liked the patterns of rain on glass. He liked the sound.

One of his favorite things was to walk in warm summer rain, in the cold rain of autumn. He owned a getaway cottage in the country, on twelve acres. He liked to sit in the yard, in the fresh-smelling rain, in the nude. He liked to feel a storm washing him with its thousand tongues.

Mickey returned to the study, where Jerry was dead in the armchair. The silencer-equipped .32 pistol had been fired at close range. The bullet pierced the heart. Under the entrance wound, the bloodstain on the white shirt was in the shape of a teardrop, a graceful detail that Mickey appreciated.

Jerry’s suit was beautifully tailored. The pleats in his pants looked as sharp as knife blades. The tight weave of the wool was pleasing when Mickey rubbed a lapel between thumb and forefinger. The shirt and tie appeared to be silk. Mickey liked the smell of silk. But Jerry wore a crisp lime-scented cologne that overwhelmed the subtler fragrance of the fabric.

Since becoming a professional, Mickey never killed a man for free. It was unnatural. Like Picasso giving away a painting. An important part of the sensual experience of murder was counting the money afterward.

The first time he killed, a week after his twentieth birthday, he’d been an amateur. He was fortunate to have gotten away with it. He tried to get a date with this cocktail waitress named Mallory. She turned him down. And she wasn’t nice about it. She humiliated him. He learned everything about her: how she shared a little house with a girlfriend, how her fifteen-year-old sister lived with her. He went in there with a Taser, chemical Mace, and vinyl-strap handcuffs. It was all about sex, and he got plenty. Then he had to kill them, which he discovered was another kind of sex. But it was stupid to kill for sex when you could buy it. Killing for sex instead of just for the pleasure of killing, he was sure to leave DNA behind. Besides, when he was totally hot and in the act, he was out of control and certain to make mistakes, leave clues of other kinds. So even though it had been the best night of his life to that point, he decided never again to kill as an amateur. He was proud of his subsequent self-control.