he saw that cracks webbed some windows, holes pocked a few, and other
panes were missing altogether. The grass was dead, too, as crisp as
ancient paper, and the shrubbery was withered; a seared palm tree leaned
at a precarious angle. The apartment complex was abandoned, awaiting a
wrecking crew.
He came to a set of crumbling concrete stairs at the north end of the
courtyard, glanced back. Whoever… whatever was following him was
still not in sight. Gasping, he climbed to the second-floor balcony and
moved from one apartment to another until he found a door ajar. It was
warped: the hinges were stiff, but they worked without much noise. He
slipped inside, pushing the door shut behind him.
The apartment was a well of shadows, oil-black and pooled deep. Faint
ash-gray light outlined the windows but provided no illumination to the
room.
He listened intently.
The silence and darkness were equal in depth.
Cautiously, Frank inched toward the nearest window, which faced the
balcony and courtyard. Only a few shards of glass remained in the
frame, but lots of fragments crunched and clinked under his feet. He
trod carefully, both to avoid cutting a foot and to make as little noise
as possible.
At the window he halted, listened again.
Stillness.
As if it was the gelded ectoplasm of a slothful ghost, a sluggish
current of cold air slid inward across the few jagged points of the
glass that had not already fallen from the frame.
Frank’s breath steamed in front of his face, pale ribbons of vapor in
the gloom.
The silence remained unbroken for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, a full
minute.
Perhaps he had escaped.
He was just about to turn away from the window when he heard footsteps
outside. At the far end of the courtyard. On the walkway that led in
from the street. Hard-soled shoes rang against the concrete, and each
footfall echoed hollowly off the stucco walls of the surrounding
buildings.
Frank stood motionless and breathed through his mouth, as if the stalker
could be counted on to have the hearing of a jungle cat.
When he entered the courtyard from the entrance walkway, the stranger
halted. After a long pause he began to move again though the
overlapping echoes made sounds deceptive, seemed to be heading slowly
north along the apron of the porch toward the same stairs by which
Frank, himself, had climb to the second floor of the apartment complex.
Each deliberate, metronomic footfall was like the heavy thud of a
headsman’s clock mounted on a guillotine railing, counting off the
seconds until the appointed hour of the blade’s descent.
As IF alive, the Dodge van shrieked with every bullet that tore through
its sheet-metal walls, and the wounds were inflicted not one at a time
but by the score, with such relentless fury, the assault had to involve
at least two machine guns. While Bobby Dakota lay flat on the floor,
trying to catch God’s attention with fervent heaven-directed prayers,
fragments of metal rained down on him. One of the computer screens
imploded, then the other terminal, too, and all the indicator lights
went out, but the interior of the van was not entirely dark; showers of
amber and green and crimson and silver sparks erupted from the damaged
electronic units as one steel jacketed round after another pierced
equipment housings and shattered circuit boards. Glass fell on him,
too, and splinters of plastic, bits of wood, scraps of paper; the air
was filled with a virtual blizzard of debris. But the noise was the
worst of it; in his mind he saw himself sealed inside a great iron drum,
while half a dozen big bikers, stoned on PCP, pounded on the outside of
his prison with tire irons, really huge bikers with massive muscles and
thick necks and coarse peltlike beards and wildly colorful Death’s-head
tattoos on their arms-hell, tattoos on their faces-guys as big as Thor,
the Viking god, but with blazing, psychotic eyes.
Bobby had a vivid imagination. He had always thought that was one of
his best qualities, one of his strengths. But he could not simply
imagine his way out of this mess.
With every passing second, as slugs continued to crash into the van, he