along to Toby's room. Every evening she made sure both his and her
doors were open, so she would hear him if he called to her.
For a few seconds she stood by her son's bed, listening to his soft
snoring.
The boy shape beneath the covers was barely visible in the weak ambient
light that passed from the city night through the narrow slats of the
Levolor blinds. He was dead to the world and couldn't have been the
source of the sound that had interrupted her dreams.
Heather returned to the hall. She crept to the stairs and went down to
the first floor.
In the cramped den and then in the living room, she eased from window
to window, checking outside for anything suspicious. The quiet street
looked so peaceful that it might have been located in a small
Midwestern town instead of Los Angeles. No one was up to foul play on
the front lawn. No one skulking along the north side of the house,
either.
Heather began to think the suspicious sound had been part of a
nightmare, after all.
She seldom slept well any more, but usually she remembered her
dreams.
They were more often than not about Arkadian's service station, though
she'd driven by the place only once, on the day after the shootout.
The dreams were operatic spectacles of bullets and blood and fire, in
which Jack was sometimes burned alive, in which she and Toby were often
present during the gunplay, one or both of them shot down with Jack,
one or both of them afire, and sometimes the well-groomed blond man in
the Armani suit knelt beside her where she lay riddled with bullets,
put his mouth to her wounds, and drank her blood. The killer was
frequently blind, with hollow eye sockets full of roiling flames.
His smile revealed teeth as sharp as the fangs of a viper, and once he
said to her, I'm taking Toby down to hell with me--put the little
bastard on a leash and use him as a guide dog.
Considering that her remembered nightmares were so bad, how gruesome
must be the ones she blocked from memory?
By the time she had circled the living room, returned to the archway,
and crossed the hall to the dining room, she decided that her
imagination had gotten the better of her. There was no immediate
danger. She no longer held the Korth in front of her but held it at
her side, with the muzzle aimed at the floor and her finger on the
trigger guard rather than on the trigger itself.
The sight of someone outside, moving past a dinningroom window, brought
her to full alert again. The drapes were open, but the sheers under
them were drawn all the way shut.
Backlit by a streetlamp, the prowler cast a shadow that pierced the
glass and rippled across the soft folds of the translucent chiffon. It
passed quickly, like the shadow of a night bird, but she suffered no
doubt that it had been made by a man.
She hurried into the kitchen. The tile floor was cold under her bare
feet.
