Maybe not.
Stryker kept a file of all his more recent manuscripts. A big filing cabinet in his study at home. Sometimes he worked there at night — when he was pushed by a deadline, or really caught up in something.
Russ hauled himself to his feet. A picture was taking shape. Stryker, due at a friend’s home for dinner, knowing he wouldn’t be back until late. But too interested in his new chapter to leave the material in his office. Instead he brings his notes home and works on the manuscript until time to leave. Had anyone thought to check his study?
Someone would soon — if they hadn’t already. Climbing the stairs to his bedroom, Russ fumbled through his dresser. There it was — in a box crammed mostly with cufflinks, tie-tacs and spare keys. The key to his house that Stryker had given him once when the author left for several months knocking about Mexico.
A look of angry resolve on his black-stubbled jaw, Mandarin snatched up the key and stalked to the garage. The battery was low in the old GTO that he’d kept because it had been Alicia’s favorite car, but the engine caught at the last moment. With an echo of throaty exhaust, he backed out of the garage.
His plans were only half formulated, as he carefully steered the rumbling Pontiac through the downtown streets. He meant to check Stryker’s study immediately, however. If the chapter manuscripts were there, he’d take it to read, and Brooke Hamilton could go to hell. And if he didn’t find the manuscript— maybe that would be because somebody had already broken into the house. A horrid grin twisted Mandarin’s face. He’d like for that to be the case. Like to show the evidence to Saunders, place charges against Brooke Hamilton for stealing from a dead man.
It was past 11, and traffic was thinning out — for which Russ was grateful. With far more caution than was his custom, he overcame his impatience and made the short drive out Lyons View Pike without mishap.
He turned into the empty drive and cut his lights. Stryker’s house, an old brick farmhouse laid out in a T, hunched dark beneath huge white pines. The windows were black against the brick from the front; the remainder of the house was shadowed by the looming pines from what little moonlight the clouds hadn’t kept.
Mandarin remembered a flashlight in the glove compartment and dug it out. The beam was yellow and weak, but enough to see by. Suspiciously he played the light across the front of the house. Seeing nothing untoward, he started around back.
The front of the house was two storeys and contained living quarters. Like the stem of a T, the rear section came out perpendicularly from the rest — a single-storey wing that housed kitchen and storage. A side porch came off from one side of the kitchen wing, where Stryker and Russ had spent many a summer evening, slouched in wooden rockers and with something cold to drink.
Having seen nothing out of the ordinary, Russ crossed the unscreened porch to the kitchen door, jabbed his key at the lock. As he fumbled for the knob, the door nudged open.
Mandarin brought up his flashlight. The old-fashioned latch had been forced.
He breathed a silent curse. Stealthily he pushed open the door, stepped inside.
Thunder spat flame from across the room. Russ pitched backward onto the porch, and the flame burst across his skull.
She was the most beautiful, and at the same time the most frightening, woman Mandarin had ever seen. She danced in a whirl of blue, how could his heart forget? Blue were the skies, and blue were her eyes, just like the blue skirt she wore…
And she whispered to him as she waltzed, and the things she whispered to him were beautiful, and Mandarin wanted to hear more, even though her whispers terrified him.
And the more she danced and whispered and sang, the worse his vertigo became, and he was dizzy and falling, and he was clutching at her blue skirt to keep from falling, and she kept dancing away from him, and he cried out to her to come back…
He didn’t understand…
But he had to understand…
“Come back!” he screamed. His voice was a tortured rasp.
The blue light became a lance of blue flame, searing his brain. And her hands of coldest ice pierced through him and seized upon his soul, and the blue lady was drawing him away, pulling him through the darkness…
Dimly, through the haze of throbbing pain, Mandarin became aware of the man bending over him.
Gritting his teeth, he forced his eyes to focus. It was hard. A bright beam of light bored into his face.
“Christ! He’s coming around, Sid!”
The light swept away.
Mandarin struggled to rise — groaned and fell back. Bright flashes of pain rippled from the numbing ache of his skull.
“Just stay put, buddy. Jesus! We thought you were…”
Russ’s vision was clearing. Blotchy green afterimages swam across his eyes. But he saw the patrolman’s uniform, and the rising wave of panic subsided.
“Neighbor says she knows who he is, Hardin.” The other voice drifted from farther away. “He’s a friend of the guy who owned this place. Drops by every week or so.”
Russ dully recognized the floor of Stryker’s side porch spread out around him. It was damp and sticky. He could hear a woman’s voice speaking from the kitchen, though he couldn’t follow her words.
“I think the bullet must’ve just grazed the top his forehead,” the first man called out. “There’s blood all over the back of his head, but it looks like he just busted his scalp open falling back against the post here. You’re one lucky hard-headed bastard, buddy.”
His partner was examining Russ’s billfold. “Name’s Dr Russell Mandarin. He’s that shrink friend of Lieutenant Saunders, I think. Hope that’s the ambulance I hear coming. He’s been out a damn long time.”
“I’m all right,” protested Mandarin without conviction. He tried again to rise, made it to his knees. The porch seemed to whirl and pitch. He shut his eyes hard and waited.
An arm steadied his shoulder. “Maybe you better stay down, buddy. You got blood leaking all across the back of your head.” Doggedly Mandarin got his feet under him, lurched onto a porch rocker. The chair almost tipped, then steadied. With careful fingers he touched his forehead, found pain there. His hair was clotted with blood. Squinting across the narrow porch, Russ saw the support post opposite the back door. He remembered a gunshot, and falling backward. He must have bashed his head against the oak pillar.
“Dr Mandarin? Are you all right?”
Russ recognized Mrs Lieberman, Stryker’s closest neighbor. Russ had often kidded Stryker that the widow had designs on him, and Stryker would always reply that only a cad tells.
“I heard that loud old car of yours turn into Mr Stryker’s driveway,” she was saying. “And then I heard a shot. I thought it must be a gang of burglars, and so I called the police.”
“And it’s good you did, ma’am. They might have finished the job on your friend here otherwise.”
The one called Hardin looked down the driveway. “Here’s the ambulance — and our back-up, now that we don’t need it.”
“I think I heard them miss the turn-off twice,” his partner replied.
“What’s happening?” Mandarin asked, recovering enough to become aware of his situation.
“You been shot, Doc, but you’re going to be all right now.”
“Shot?”
“Reckon you busted in on whoever it was that’d broke into the house. Can’t see that anything’s taken, but the place is sure a mess.”
Saunders was waiting for him when Mandarin got out of x-ray. Russ had insisted on viewing the films himself, after making enough of a scene that the radiologist seemed a little disappointed to find no evidence of fracture or subdural. Russ let them wheel him back down to the ER, where a nervous resident began to patch him up.