Frank listened for footsteps, but if the stalker was still focused on
him, the hollow heel clicks of his approach were completely muffled by
the walls that now intervened.
He looked out the window again. The dead lawn lay as dry as sand and
twice as brown, offering little cushion.
He dropped the leather flight bag, which landed with a thud. Wincing at
the prospect of the leap, he climbed onto the window ledge, crouching in
the broken-out window, hands braced against the frame, where for a
moment he hesitated.
A gust of wind ruffled his hair and coolly caressed his face. But it
was a normal draft, nothing like the natural whiffs of wind that,
earlier, had been accompanied by the unearthly and unmelodic music of a
distant flute.
Suddenly, behind Frank, a blue flash pulsed out of the living room, down
the hall, and through the doorway. The strange tide of light was
trailed closely by an explosion and a concussion wave that shook the
walls and seemed to churn the air into a more solid substance. The
front door had been blasted to pieces; he heard chunks of it raining
down on the floor of the apartment a couple of rooms away.
He jumped out of the window, landed on his feet. But his knees gave
way, and he fell flat on the dead lawn.
At that same moment a large truck turned the corner. Its cargo bed had
slat sides and a wooden tailgate. The driver smoothly shifted gears and
drove past the apartment house, apparently unaware of Frank.
He scrambled to his feet, plucked the satchel off the barren lawn, and
ran into the street. Having just rounded the corner, the truck was not
moving fast, and Frank managed to grab the tailgate and pull himself up,
one-handed, until he was standing on the rear bumper.
As the truck accelerated, Frank looked back at the decaying apartment
complex. No mysterious blue light glimmered at any of the windows; they
were all as black and empty as the sockets of a skull.
The truck turned right at the next corner, moving away into the sleepy
night.
Exhausted, Frank clung to the tailgate. He would have been able to hold
on better if he had dropped the leather flight bag, but he held fast to
it because he suspected that its contents might help him to learn who he
was and from where he had come and from what he was running.
CUT AND run! Bobby actually thought she would cut and run when trouble
struck-“Get the hell out of here”
cut and run? just because he told her to! If she was an obedient
little wifey, not a full-fledged partner in the agency, not a damned
good investigator in her own right, just a token backup who couldn’t
take the heat when the nice kicked in. Well, to hell with that.
In her mind she could see his lovable face-merry blue eyes pug nose,
smattering of freckles, generous mouth-framed thick honey-gold hair that
was mussed (as was most often the case) like that of a small boy who had
just gotten up from a nap. She wanted to bop his pug nose just hard
enough to make his blue eyes water, so he’d have no doubt how the cut-an
run suggestion annoyed her.
She had been on surveillance behind Decodyne, at the end of the
corporate parking lot, in the deep shadows under a massive Indian
laurel. The moment Bobby signaled trouble she started the Toyota’s
engine. By the time she heard gunfire over the earphones, she had
shifted gears, popped the emergency brake, switched on the headlights,
and jammed the accelerator toward the floor.
At first she kept the headset on, calling Bobby’s name, trying to get an
answer from him, hearing only the most god awful ruckus from his end.
Then the set went dead; she couldn’t hear anything at all, so she pulled
it off and threw it into the back seat.
Cut and run! Damn him!
When she reached the end of the last row in the parking lot she let up
on the accelerator with her right foot, simultaneous tapping the brake