77 Shadow Street

someone. He watched it close. He liked the sound of the latch clacking into place. A solid, final sound.

He was reminded of the sound of the heavy latches on the steamer trunks in which he had packed the remains of the cocktail waitress named Mallory, her little sister, and her girlfriend. Fifteen years had passed since he’d disposed of those bodies, but that exhilarating night remained as crisp in memory as if those events had occurred earlier this very day. With his enormous willpower, he restricted himself to professional murder, though in his heart still lived the amateur who would have done the same work for the love of it.

Enjoying the faint scent of chlorine, he waited to see if anyone would come back through the door. Maybe the ding of the elevator arriving on station would engage that person’s curiosity. He couldn’t risk a witness who could place him here at this hour.

After maybe half a minute, Mickey turned left and walked to the security room. He opened the door and went inside.

The prick was on duty. Klick the Prick. Even though they were ex-cops, the other guards were all right. This Klick was a smug little prick who always seemed to be scheming at something.

Swiveling in his chair, Klick said, “Suddenly I’m as popular as Justin Timberlake or somebody. What brings you here, Mr. Dime?”

Mickey drew the pistol with the sound suppressor from his shoulder holster.

Eyes wide in terror as Mickey approached, Klick said, “I’ll never tell about the lingerie.”

Mickey shot him point-blank through the heart, twice. When you right away stop the heart pumping, there’s less blood to clean up.

He left the security room and went to the basement equipment room where he had earlier gotten the hand truck. This time, he fetched a thick moving blanket and two of the furniture straps that dangled from a wall rack.

Only when he returned to the security room did he stop to think about what Vernon Klick had said: I’ll never tell about the lingerie.

From the time Mickey had been a little boy, his mother warned him never to trust a man in a uniform. How right she had been.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

In his raincoat, carrying an umbrella, soon to be late meeting his colleague for dinner at Topper’s, Kirby locked his second-floor apartment just as shock waves rolled through the rock on which the Pendleton stood. The blasting contractors on the farther side of Shadow Hill were excavating later than usual. He wondered that anyone would want to pay overtime to build a high-rise in this dreadful economy, but he supposed they anticipated a turnaround a few years down the road.

As he walked briskly toward the west end of the north hall, strains of Chinese opera still lingered in his mind’s ear. Kirby hummed a few bars of a favorite aria.

The neighbors in 2-E, Cheryl and Henry Cordovan, in Europe since the previous Saturday and not scheduled to return for another twelve days, had left their springer spaniel, Biscuit, with their son and his family. Kirby missed the dog. A couple of times a week, when the Cordovans went out to dinner and Kirby intended to eat at home, they left Biscuit with him for a few hours. The spaniel was as cute as a dog could be and excellent company.

Three years previously, he’d had a companion of his own, a black Labrador retriever named Lucy, but cancer had taken her. The loss so devastated Kirby that only recently had he begun to think he might bring a new dog into his life, risking the grief again. Tropical fish were pretty to look at, but they weren’t great company.

Sitting on a comfy sofa with a dog’s head in his lap, rubbing its ears and stroking its head, Kirby could achieve a greater clarity of thought and more breakthroughs in the theory and the technology that made the Ignis Institute a success. A good dog brought with it a profound peace that made the mind soar and encouraged problem solving even more than did music or the graceful spectacle of swimming fish.

For the past three years, he had contributed significant money to all kinds of dog-rescue groups, watched Dogs 101 on Animal Planet, and looked after Biscuit a couple of evenings each week, but now, as he arrived at the north elevator, he made up his mind to get a new companion before Christmas. He often thought that the world would be a better place if dogs were the smartest creatures on the planet and if human beings, with all their pride and desires and hatreds, had never evolved.

When the elevator doors slid open, a tall man in evening clothes exited. He carried himself like royalty at a function of great pomp. Nature had given him a distinguished face with a patrician nose, eyes as blue as pure deep water, a high brow, and snow-white hair.

Kirby stepped back, startled. This stranger’s shirt and face and hair were spattered with fresh blood. “Sir, are you all right? You’ve been hurt.”

The evening clothes were dirty, rumpled, torn in places, as if the man had been in a struggle, perhaps mugged in the street—though he was not rain-soaked. Seeming bewildered, he looked around at the hallway, at the double doors to the Trahern apartment on his left, to the door of the Hawks apartment ahead of him. “What is this place? It’s Belle Vista … yet it isn’t.”

In his voice was more than a note of perplexity, also a tremor of fear and what might have been despair.

On second look, Kirby saw that the noble countenance appeared pale and drawn. Horror crawled in the stricken blue eyes.

“What’s happened to you?” Kirby asked.

“This place … Where is this? How have I gotten here? Where am I?”

Kirby stepped forward to take the bloodied man by one arm, for he seemed wobbly and in need of support.

Before Kirby could touch him, the stranger raised both hands, which were slick with blood. “We almost made it, all untouched,” he muttered, “… and then the spores.”

Retreating again, Kirby said, “Spores?”

“Witness said they were from a benign species, nothing to fear. But he’s part of it all, not to be believed.”