Dragon Tears

considering the nature of this perp, they needed a greater advantage than usual, so they had to separate.

Reluctantly, as Harry moved toward the steps and then started up, Connie turned to the door on the right, off the foyer. It had a lever handle. She eased it down with her left hand, revolver in her right and in front of her. Faintest click of the latch. Ease the door inward and to the right.

Nothing for it but to cross the threshold, clearing the doorway as fast as possible, doorways always being the most dangerous, and slipping to the left as she entered, both hands on the gun in front of her, arms straight and locked. Keeping her back to the wall. Straining her eyes to see in the deep darkness, unable to find and use the light switch without giving away the game.

A surprising plenitude of windows in the north and east and west walls—not so many windows on the exterior, were there? — offered only minor relief from the darkness. Vaguely luminous fog pressed against the panes, like cloudy gray water, and she had the queer feeling of being under the sea in a bathysphere.

The room was wrong. Didn’t feel right somehow. She didn’t know what it was that she sensed, what wrongness, but it was there.

Something was also odd about the wall at her back when she brushed against it. Too smooth, cold.

She let go of the gun with her left hand, and felt behind her. Glass. The wall was glass but it wasn’t a window because it was the wall shared with the foyer.

For a moment Connie was confused, thinking frantically because anything inexplicable was frightening under the circumstances. Then she realized it was a mirror. Her fingers slid across a vertical seam, onto another big sheet of glass. Mirrored. Floor to ceiling. Like the south wall of the foyer.

When she looked behind her, at the wall along which she had been slipping so stealthily, she saw reflections of the north-side windows and the fog beyond. No wonder there were more windows than there should have been. The windowless south and west walls were mirrored, so half the windows she saw were only reflections.

And she realized what bothered her about the room. Although she had kept on the move to the left, putting herself at changing angles to the windows, she hadn’t seen silhouettes of any furniture between her and the grayish rectangles of glass. She hadn’t bumped against any piece of furniture set with its back to the south wall either.

Both hands on the gun again, she eased toward the center of the room, wary of knocking something over and drawing attention. But inch by inch, cautious step by step, she became convinced there was nothing in her way.

The room was empty. Mirrored and empty.

As she neared the center, in spite of the unrelenting gloom, she was able to see a dim image of herself to her left. A phantom with her form, moving across the reflection of the fog-gray east-facing window.

Ticktock was not here.

* * *

A chaos of Harrys moved along the upstairs hall, gun-bearing clones in dirty rumpled suits, unshaven faces gray with stubble, tense and scowling. Hundreds, thousands, an uncountable army, they advanced abreast in a single slightly curved line, stretching forever to the left and right. In their mathematical symmetry and perfect choreography, they should have been the apotheosis of order. Even glimpsed with peripheral vision, however, they disoriented Harry, and he could not look directly either left or right without risking dizziness.

Both walls were mirrored floor to ceiling, as were all of the doors to the rooms, creating an illusion of infinity, bouncing his reflection back and forth, reflecting reflections of reflections of reflections.

Harry knew he should check room by room as he advanced, leaving no unexplored territory behind him, from which Ticktock might be able to move in on his back. But the sole light on the second floor was ahead, spilling out of the only open door, and chances were that the bastard who had murdered Ricky Estefan was in that lighted room and no other.

Although he was so tired that his cop instinct had deserted him, trust his reactions to be calm and measured, Harry decided to hell with traditional procedure, go with the flow, ride the wave, and let unexplored rooms at his back. He went directly to the doorway with the light beyond, on his right.

The mirrored wall opposite the open door would give him a look at part of the room before he had to step into the doorway and across the threshold, committing himself. He halted beside the door with his back to the mirrored wall, looking at an angle toward the wedge of the room’s interior that was reflected across the hallway in another length of mirror.

All he could see was a confusion of black planes and angles, different black textures revealed by lamplight, black shapes against black backgrounds, all of it cubistic and strange. No other color. No Ticktock.

Suddenly he realized that, because he was seeing only part of the room, anyone standing in an unrevealed portion of it but looking toward the door might be at such an angle as to see his infinite reflections bouncing from wall to wall.

He stepped into the doorway and crossed the threshold, staying low and moving fast, his revolver held out in front of him with both hands. The hallway carpet did not continue into the bedroom. There was black ceramic tile on the floor instead, against which his shoes made noise, a click-scrape-click, and he froze within three steps, hoping to God he hadn’t been heard.

* * *

Another dark room, much larger than the first, what should have been a living room, off the downstairs hall. More windows on the pearly luminescent fog and more reflections of windows.

Connie had a feel for that special oddness now, and wasted less time there than she had in the den off the foyer. The three walls without windows were mirrored, and there was no furniture.

Multiple reflections of her silhouette kept perfect time with her in the dark reflective surfaces, like ghosts, like other Connies in alternate universes briefly overlapping and barely visible.

Ticktock evidently liked to look at himself.

She would like to get a look at him, too, but in the flesh. Silently she returned to the downstairs hall and moved on.

* * *

The big walk-in pantry off the kitchen was filled with cookies, hard candies, taffy, chocolates of all kinds, caramels, red and black licorice, tins of sweet biscuits and exotic cakes imported from every corner of the world, bags of cheese popcorn, caramel popcorn, potato chips, tortilla chips, cheese-flavored tortilla chips, pretzels, cans of cashews, almonds, peanuts, mixed nuts, and millions of dollars in cash stacked in tight bundles of twenty- and hundred-dollar bills.

While he examined the sweets and salties, trying to make up his mind what he most wanted to eat, what would be the least like a meal of which Grandma Drackman would have approved, Bryan idly picked up a packet of hundred-dollar bills and riffled the crisp edges with one thumb.

He had acquired the cash immediately after he had killed his grandmother, stopping the world with his Greatest and Most Secret Power and wandering at his leisure into all the places where money was kept in large quantities and protected by steel doors and locked gates and alarm systems and armed guards. Taking whatever he wanted, he had laughed at the uniformed fools with all their guns and their somber expressions, who were oblivious of him.

Soon, however, he’d realized that he had little need of money. He could use his powers to take anything, not merely cash, and to alter sales and public records to create extensive legal support for his ownership if he were ever questioned. Besides, if ever he were questioned, he had only to eliminate those idiots who dared to be suspicious of him, and alter their records to insure no further investigation.

He had stopped piling up cash in the pantry, but he still liked to riffle it under his thumb and listen to the crisp flutter, smell it, and play games with it sometimes. It felt so good to know that he was different from other people in this way, too: he was beyond money, beyond concerns related to things material. And it was fun to think that he could be the richest person in the world if he wanted, richer than Rockefellers and Kennedys, could pile up cash to fill room after room, cash and emeralds if he wanted emeralds, diamonds and rubies, anything, anything, like pirates of old in their lairs and surrounded by treasure.

He tossed the packet of currency back on the shelf from which he’d taken it. From the side of the pantry where he kept food, he took down two boxes of Reese’s peanut butter cups and a family-size bag of Hawaiian-style