repository of old and poorly maintained maintenance equipment plus a lot
of stuff that was just plain junk, rusting buckets, tattered brooms,
ragged, motheaten mops, a broken outdoor vacuum cleaner, several
motel-room chairs with broken legs or torn upholstery, which the
previous owners had intended to repair and put back into service, scraps
of lumber, coils of wire and coiled hoses, a bathroom sink, spare brass
sprinkler heads spilling from an overturned cardboard box, one cotton
gardening glove lying palm up like a severed hand, cans of paint and
lacquer, their contents almost surely thickened and dried beyond
usefulness. This trash was piled along the walls, scattered over
portions of the floor, and stacked precariously in the loft.
Just as he unlocked the dead bolt on the side door of the garage, before
he actually opened the door, Whitney heard a rattling in the garage
behind him. The noise was short-lived, in fact, it stopped even as he
turned to see what it was.
Frowning, he let his gaze travel over the piles of junk, the Mercedes,
the gas furnace in the far corner, the sagging workbench, and the
hot-water heater. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.
He listened.
The only sounds were the many voices of the wind in the eaves and the
rain on the roof.
He turned away from the door, walked slowly to the car, circled it, but
found nothing that could have caused the noise.
SOME LOVE THING THAT 5 THE DARK Whitney left the manager’s apartment at
the Golden Sand Inn by way of the rear door of the kitchen. It opened
into a dusty garage where, earlier, they had put the black Mercedes.
Now the 560 S.E.L stood in small puddles of rainwater that had dripped
from it. His own car was outside, in the serviceway behind the motel.
Turning to Rachael, who stood on the threshold between kitchen and
garage, Whitney said, “You lock this door behind me and sit tight.
I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ve got to get the Wildcard
file in order. That’ll keep me busy.”
He had no trouble understanding why Ben had fallen so hard for her.
Even as disheveled as she was, pale with exhaustion and worry, Rachael
was gorgeous. But her beauty was not her only attribute. She was
caring, perceptie, smart, and tough-not a common mix of qualities.
“Ben will probably show up before I do,” he assured 35
Maybe one of the piles ofjunk had shifted under its own weightr had
been disturbed by a rat. He would not be surprised to discover that the
moldering old building was rat-infested, though he had not previously
seen evidence of such an infestation. The trash was piled so
haphazardly that he could not discern if it was all in the same position
as it had been a moment ago.
He returned to the door again, took one last look around, then went out
into the storm.
Even as the wind-harried rain slashed at him, he belatedly realized what
he had heard in the garage, someone trying to pull open the big rear
door from outside. But it was an electric door that could not be
operated manually while in its automatic mode, and was therefore secure
against prowlers. Whoever had tried it must have realized, at once,
that he could not get in that way, which explained why the rattling had
lasted only a moment.
Whitney limped warily toward the corner of the garage and the serviceway
beyond it to see if anyone was still there. The rain was falling hard,
making a crisp sound on the walk, a sloppier sound on the earth,
spilling off the corner of the roof where the downspout was missing. All
that wet noise effectively masked his own footsteps, as it would mask
the activities of anyone behind the garage, and though he listened
intently to the night, he did not at first hear anything unusual. He
took six or eight steps, pausing twice to listen, before the patter and
susurration of the rain was cut by a frightening noise.
Behind him. It was partly a hiss like escaping steam, partly a thin