“You’re good, Mort. You oughta do stand-up.”
“I’m serious.”
“You’d sound like a water buffalo going through there first. I’ll help you. Lift me up, huh?”
I did. If I hadn’t, she would have chinned herself on the sill and been inside in four seconds anyway.
From inside she reached down and took my hand, then pulled. It felt like I’d caught it in a conveyer belt. She’d braced herself and was lifting at least two-thirds of my weight. I’d known she was one god-awful strong lady, but some things impress more than others.
I came over the sill and piled in as quietly as I could, which was a joke. Inside, a dim greenish glow came from the casino through lace curtains backed with some kind of fabric. We were in the parlor from which Victoria had appeared when I’d last seen her. The parlor was musty and warm, full of angled shadows. It felt like a dangerous place to be, not a good place to turn on a penlight to have a look around, and if Kayla was in the house, it wouldn’t be in here. Across the room, the double doors were open. I could see into the foyer. Outside, the thumping bass rumble of some nimrod kid’s car moved south, rattling windows in their frames.
I eased off the windbreaker, using the idiot-thunder outside to cover the rustle of nylon, then dropped it back out the window to the ground between two shrubs.
As I loosened the gun in its holster, Jeri pulled my head down and put her lips to my ear. “Floor’s gonna creak like a son of a bitch,” she whispered.
“I know. Whole house is like this.”
“Slowly, Mort. Ease your weight down. If it starts to creak, pick another spot.”
Skulking 101. She started off, following her own advice. I went after her. It took two minutes to cross the room to the double doors. The floor wanted to sing an aria. Like she said, it was a sonofabitch.
She stopped in the foyer. “Up, or stay down here?”
I shrugged. How would I know? “Down here, I guess.”
We searched the entire ground floor, slowly. It took half an hour. I didn’t hear a thing from inside except the grumble of the floor under our feet and heart-stopping settling sounds. The house didn’t feel asleep to me. It felt as if it, or people in it, were watching us, waiting.
Heat in the house was oppressive. It had been a hundred degrees that day in Reno, and the house had soaked it up and kept it in. Sweat trickled down my back, drenching my shirt.
We ended up in the foyer again. Jeri looked at me and nodded at the stairs. I nodded back.
She went up first. She was better at this than I was. I placed my feet where hers had been.
It took five minutes to reach the top. My legs were trembling with the effort to move without a sound, like trying to do Swan Lake at one-fiftieth speed.
At the landing Jeri turned and headed down a hallway. I caught the back of her shirt and stopped her. “Winter’s room,” I breathed in her ear, pointing. “Second on the left.”
Again she nodded. She started off again. It was slow, laborious, miserable work in the heat of the house, darker up here on the second floor with its dearth of windows. Kayla could be in any of these rooms—or at a movie, or at a casino catching a late dinner, or home, now, waiting for me in bed.
Jeri eased a door open. Not Winter’s. I handed her the penlight and she switched it on. The light was dazzling. After the darkness it was like a World War II searchlight hunting the Luftwaffe over Great Britain. Sweat bathed my face, got in my eyes.
The light went off. Spots of color swarmed in my vision, fading slowly. Jeri came out, continued down the passageway.
I could tell this wasn’t going to work. Except that I couldn’t tell. Mostly it felt ridiculous, melodramatic, and illegal. But it did have a solid gumshoe feel, nothing like an IRS audit, so that was something.
Jeri crept past Winter’s room, then silently checked out another. We reached the end of the passage where it turned a corner and became stairs up to the third floor and Edna’s room. What else might be up there, I didn’t know. I hadn’t explored earlier. Now I wish I had.
I was going to tell her about Edna’s room when a bolt of pain shot through my back. I let out an involuntary howl and slammed into Jeri, then into a wall. I was pinned there, held by an explosion of pure agony.
“Don’t move, cowboy,” Winter breathed.
* * *
A light came on, the one Winter had turned on days ago, midway down the passage. In its yellow glow, with my face and chest pressed against old dusty wallpaper by the most terrible pain I’d felt in my life, I saw Jeri scramble catlike to her feet. She turned, hands coming up, prepared to maim or kill.
“Don’t,” Winter commanded, and whatever Jeri saw behind me froze her. She didn’t so much as twitch.
Footsteps approached, then Victoria said, “You, girl, get down on the floor now, or he’s dead. You have two seconds.”
The pain in my back was like a red glowing poker. I didn’t know what it was, but it was irresistible. It had me completely immobilized. If I tried to move or back up a tiny fraction of an inch, the pain got worse, much worse. I saw the danger of it in Jeri’s eyes, the way she shrank away.
She quickly sat on the floor.
“Lie down, girl,” Victoria said. “Facedown.”
Jeri did as she was told. I could hardly breathe, the pain was so enormous. Something was lodged in the meat of my back, at least an inch deep, maybe more. Another inch or two and it might find its way into a lung.
Victoria straddled Jeri and clicked handcuffs on her wrists behind her back.
