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“Perfect,” Ethan said, accepting the items.
Reynerd had a dispenser of Scotch tape, as well. “To fix the note on George’s door.” He put the tape on the coffee table.
“Thanks,” Ethan said. “I like the photographs.”
“Birds are all about being free,” Reynerd said.
“I guess they are, aren’t they? The freedom of flight. You take the photos?”
“No. I just collect.”
In one of the prints, a flock of pigeons erupted in a swirl of feathered frenzy from a cobblestone plaza in front of a backdrop of old European buildings. In another, geese flew in formation across a somber sky.
Indicating the black-and-white movie on the TV, Reynerd said, “I was just getting some snacks for the show. You mind … ?”
“Huh? Oh, sure, I’m sorry, forget about me. I’ll jot this down and be gone.”
In one of the pictures, the birds had flown directly at the photographer. The shot presented a close-up montage of overlapping wings, crying beaks, and beady black eyes.
“Potato chips are gonna kill me one day,” Reynerd said as he returned to the kitchen.
“With me it’s ice cream. More of it in my arteries than blood.”
Ethan printed DEAR GEORGE in block letters, then paused as if in thought, and looked around the room.
From the kitchen, Reynerd continued: “They say you can’t ever eat just one potato chip, but I can’t ever eat just one bag.”
Two crows perched on an iron fence. A strop of sunlight laid a sharp edge on their beaks.
White carpet as pristine as winter snow lay wall to wall. The furniture had been upholstered in a black fabric. From a distance, the Formica surface of the dinette table appeared to be black.
Everything in the apartment was black-and-white.
Ethan printed UNCLE HARRY IS DYING and then paused again, as if a simple message taxed his powers of composition.
The movie music, though soft, had a melodramatic flair. A crime picture from the thirties or forties.
Reynerd continued to rummage in kitchen cabinets.
Here, two doves appeared to clash in midflight. There, an owl stared wide-eyed, as if shocked by what it saw.
Outside, wind had returned to the day. A dice-rattle of rain drew Ethan’s attention to the window.
From the kitchen came the distinctive rustle of a foil potato-chip bag.
PLEASE CALL ME, Ethan printed.
Returning to the living room, Reynerd said, “If you’ve got to eat chips, these are the worst because they’re higher in oil.”
Ethan looked up and saw a bag of Hawaiian-style chips. Reynerd had inserted his right hand into the open bag.
The way that the bag gloved the apple man’s hand struck Ethan as wrong. The guy might have been reaching in for some chips, of course; but an oddness of attitude, a tenseness in him, suggested otherwise.
Stopping beside the sofa, not six feet away, Reynerd said, “You work for the Face, don’t you?”
At a disadvantage in the armchair, Ethan pretended confusion. “For who?”
When the hand came out of the bag, it held a gun.
A licensed private investigator and certified bodyguard, Ethan had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Except in the company of Channing Manheim, when he armed himself as a matter of routine, he seldom bothered to strap on his piece.
Reynerd’s weapon was a 9-mm pistol.
This morning, disturbed by the eye in the apple and by the wolfish grin that this man had revealed on the security tape, Ethan had put on his shoulder holster. He hadn’t expected to need a gun, not really, and in fact he’d felt a little silly for packing it without greater provocation. Now he thanked God that he was armed.
“I don’t understand,” he said, trying to look equally bewildered and afraid.
“I’ve seen your picture,” Reynerd told him.
Ethan glanced toward the open door, the hallway beyond.
“I don’t care who sees or hears,” Reynerd told him. “It’s all over anyhow, isn’t it?”
“Listen, if my brother George did something to piss you off,” Ethan said, trying to buy a little time.
Reynerd wasn’t selling. Even as Ethan dropped the notepad and reached for the 9-mm Glock under his jacket, the apple man shot him point-blank in the gut.
For a moment, Ethan felt no pain, but only for a moment. He rocked back in the chair and gaped at the gush of blood. Then agony.
He heard the first shot, but he didn’t hear the second. The slug hammered him dead-center in the chest.
Everything in the black-and-white apartment went black.
Ethan knew the birds still gathered on the walls, watching him die. He could feel the tension of their wings frozen in flight.
He heard a dicelike rattle again. Not rain against the window this time. His breath rattling in a broken throat.
No Christmas.
CHAPTER 3 (#u822957d1-7db0-5eb9-b0ad-9212eb59d834)
ETHAN OPENED HIS EYES.
Traveling far too fast for a residential street, a cherry-red Ferrari Testarossa exploded past, casting up a plume of dirty water from the puddled pavement.
Through the side window of the Expedition, the apartment house blurred and tweaked into strange geometry, like a place in a nightmare.
As if he’d sustained an electrical shock, he twitched violently, and inhaled with the desperation of a drowning man. The air tasted sweet, fresh and sweet and clean. He exhaled explosively.
No gut wound. No chest wound. His hair wasn’t wet with rain.
His heart knocked, knocked like a lunatic fist on the padded door of a padded room.
Never in his life had Ethan Truman experienced a dream of such clarity, such intensity, nor any nightmare so crisply detailed as the experience in Reynerd’s apartment.
He consulted his wristwatch. If he’d been asleep, he had been dreaming for no more than a minute.
He couldn’t have explored the convolutions of such an elaborate dream in a mere minute. Impossible.
Rain washed the last of the murky residue off the glass. Beyond the dripping fronds of the phoenix palms, the apartment house waited, no longer distorted, but now forever strange.
When he’d leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, the better to formulate his approach to Rolf Reynerd, Ethan had not been in the least sleepy. Or even tired.
He was certain that he had not taken a one-minute nap. He had not taken a five-second nap, for that matter.
If the first Ferrari had been a figment of a dream, the second sports car suggested that reality now followed precisely in the path of the nightmare.
Although his explosive breathing had quieted, his heart clumped with undiminished speed, galloping after reason, which set an even faster pace, steadily receding beyond reach.
Intuition told him to leave now, to find a Starbucks and have a large cup of coffee. Order a blend strong enough to dissolve the swizzle stick.
Given time and distance from the event, he would discover the key that unlocked the mystery and allowed understanding. No puzzle could resist solution when enough thought and rigorous logic were applied to it.
Even though years of police work had taught him to trust his intuition as a baby trusts its mother, he switched off the engine and got out of the Expedition.
No argument: Intuition was an essential survival tool. Honesty with himself, however, was more important than heeding intuition. In a spirit of honesty, he had to admit that he wanted to drive away not to find a place and time for quiet reflection, not to engage in Sherlockian deduction, but because fear had him in a pincer grip.
Fear must never be allowed to win. Surrender to it once, and you were finished as a cop.
Of course he wasn’t a cop anymore. He had left the force more than a year ago. The work that had given his life meaning while Hannah was alive had meant steadily less to him in the years after her death. He had ceased to believe that he could make a difference in the world. He had wanted to withdraw, to turn his back on the ugly reality of the human condition so evident in the daily work of a homicide detective. Channing Manheim’s world was as far as he could get from reality and still earn a living.
Although he didn’t carry a badge, although he might not be a cop in any official sense, he remained a cop in essence. We are what we are, no matter what we might wish to be, or pretend to be.
Hands shoved in the pockets of his leather jacket, shoulders hunched as if the rain were a burden, he dashed across the street to the apartment house.
Dripping, he entered the foyer. Mexican-tile floor. Elevator. Stairs. As it should be. As it had been.
Stale with the greasy scent of cooked breakfast meat and pot smoke, the air felt thick, seemed to cloy like mucus in his throat.
Two magazines lay in the tray. On each mailing label was the name George Keesner.
Ethan climbed the stairs. His legs felt weak, and his hands trembled. At the landing, he paused to take a few deep breaths, to knit the raveled fabric of his nerve.
The apartment house lay quiet. No voices muffled by the walls, no music for a melancholy Monday.
He imagined that he heard the faint tick and scrape of crow claws on an iron fence, the flap and rustle of pigeons taking flight, the tick-tick-tick of insistently pecking beaks. In truth, he knew that these were only the many voices of the rain.
Although he could feel the weight of the pistol in his shoulder holster, he reached under his coat and placed his right hand on the weapon to be certain that he had brought it. With one fingertip, he traced the checking on the grip.
He withdrew his hand from under his jacket, leaving the pistol in the holster.
Having collected hair by hair along the back of his head, rain reached a trickling finger down the nape of his neck, teasing a shudder from him.
When Ethan reached the second-floor hallway, he barely glanced at Apartment 2E, where George Keesner would fail to respond to either the bell or a knock, and he went directly to the door of 2B, where he lost his nerve, but only briefly.
The apple man answered the bell almost at once. Tall, strong, self-confident, he didn’t bother engaging the security chain.
He didn’t seem to be in the least surprised to see Ethan again or alive, as if their first encounter had never happened.
“Is Jim here?” Ethan asked.
“You’ve got the wrong apartment,” Reynerd said.
“Jim Briscoe? Really? I’m sure this was his place.”
“I’ve been here more than six months.”
Beyond Reynerd lay a black-and-white room.
“Six months? Has it been that long since I was here?” Ethan sounded false to himself, but he pressed forward. “Yeah, I guess that’s what it’s been, six or seven.”
On the wall opposite the door, an owl stared with immense eyes, in expectation of a gunshot.
Ethan said, “Hey, did Jim leave a forwarding address?”
“I never met the previous tenant.”
The hard shine in Reynerd’s eyes, the quick throbbing in his temple, the tightness at the corners of his mouth this time warned Ethan off.
“Sorry to have bothered you,” he said.
When he heard Reynerd’s television at low volume, the soft roar of the MGM lion, he hesitated no longer and headed directly for the stairs. He realized that he was retreating with suspicious haste, and he tried not to run.
Halfway down the stairs, at the landing, Ethan trusted instinct, turned, looked up, and saw Rolf Reynerd at the head of the stairs, silently watching him. The apple man had in his hand neither a gun nor a bag of potato chips.
Without another word, Ethan descended the last flight to the foyer. Opening the outer door, he glanced back, but Reynerd had not followed him to the lower floor.
Lazy no more, rain chased rain along the street, and cold wind blustered in the palms.
Behind the steering wheel of the Expedition again, Ethan started the engine, locked the doors, switched on the heater.
A strong double coffee at Starbucks no longer seemed adequate. He didn’t know where to go.
Premonition. Precognition. Psychic vision. Clairvoyance. The Twilight Zone Dictionary turned its own pages in the library of his mind, but no possibility that it presented to him seemed to explain his experience.
According to the calendar, winter would not officially arrive for another day, but it entered early in his bones. He contained a coldness unknown in southern California.
He raised his hands to look at them, never having known them to shake like this. His fingers were pale, each nail as entirely white as the crescent at its base.
