You can chalk Sandy up to bugfuck crazy. You’d have moretrouble doing that with Maggie or Cash. There’ve been others.
I fiddled with the lock and key for a bit, my fingers clumsywith booze, made as much noise as if I’d knocked. You want a hint about howbadly screwed up my head was at that point, I got mad at Sandy when I found shehadn’t set the deadbolt or chain on her door, with Kratz back on the prowl inthe dark alleys of our heads.
After about three tries, I opened the door and stepped inside.She wasn’t there. That explained why she hadn’t set the chain. Didn’t explainthe deadbolt, though, and I still felt griped at her for the lapse in security.No, I wasn’t rational.
I poked around a bit, not really searching for anythingbecause I didn’t know what I was searching for. I’d been in Sandy’s place ahundred times before, and didn’t find anything that surprised me this time.Didn’t find anything to connect her to a string of gruesome murders and twobooby-trapped cars. Did find her spare automatic, but not her main gun andbackup and their holsters, which meant she was carrying.
And that made me feel better, stupid drunken fool that I was.I’ve cut way back on the whisky since then, still have a couple of bottles ofthe Ridge vintage left after all this time. Whack me hard enough between theeyes, I can learn from my mistakes.
It just takes pain. Pavlov would be pleased.
I found the bottle I’d passed on to Sandy, she liked the stufftoo, and being an idiot I took another swallow. It’d probably be more accurateto say that the whisky already in my bloodstream recognized an old friend andinvited it to join the party.
I sat down to wait for her, in the living room out of directview of her door, with my SIG in my lap where I wouldn’t need to fumble for it.And then I fell asleep again.
Look, I hadn’t slept well at the hospital the night before,nurses in and out of Nef’s room every hour or so and the recliner hadn’t fit myfat. For that matter, I hadn’t been sleeping much since the case first landedon me — spent a lot of hours walking the midnight streets with bad memories andbits of puzzles jumbled together floating through my head, and damn sure hadn’tslept the night I spent in Nef’s apartment. We had more interesting things todo in bed and out of it than sleep.
And I was drunk. No two ways around it. And maybe I felt justa bit of relief and let-down now that I had the beginning of some answers or atleast a sense that all those pieces didbelong together in the same puzzle. Even bad answers seemed better than noanswers at all.
Anyway, I fell asleep and the next thing I knew was Sandy shakingme by the shoulder. She’d collected the SIG from my lap, a sensible precautioneven if she hadn’t had a troubled conscience. I woke up slow and groggy, lookedup at her, and in my usual brilliant manner said the first thing that fell outof my head, another connection from my dreams.
“It wasn’t Kratz in the park, was it? Just some randommiddle-aged Jew you cast illusions over?”
She hit me.
And that was that for a blank while. If Sandy felt the need tohit someone, she knew how to do it right. My head still hurts just thinking ofit. I woke up again, lying tumbled sideways on her Tabriz rug, with the motherof all hangovers and a sense that I’d done something stupid.
Generally, when I get that sense, I’m right.
It took me a while to figure out where I was, what the stupidwas. Took me longer to realize that she’d just left me there, hadn’t killed me,hadn’t even tied me up. I tried moving and discovered that my leg was stillbroken, the memory of thatpercolating up through the layers of sewage-plant sludge that whisky andconcussion had made of my brain.
You ever try to hoist three hundred pounds off the floor, withone leg in a cast and your crutch out of reach? And with blood clotting aboveyour ear where someone had just smacked you with the barrel-slide of your ownpistol? I could just about read the serial number printed on the inside of myskull.
I finally worked out a combination of a chair and Sandy’scoffee table that gave me enough leverage to get me up on one knee, whence Icould look around and find my crutch propped up in the corner by the kitchen.
I crawled over to it, retrieved it, and finally achievedvertical. You could have filmed the charade for that medical-alert ad, “I’vefallen and I can’t get up.” Maybe I should buy some stock in the company for myretirement plan.
Except that I can’t expect to live long enough to retire.Acting stupid hadn’t killed me, that time. Sooner or later, it will.
I stood there while my heart worked on getting enough blood tomy brain. Sandy hadn’t killed me. She seemed to have left. Only way that madesense, she had loved me in sometwisted fashion.
I tried moving around, checking bedroom and bathroom and all,and only found a couple of things gone. She’d taken her spare gun and a wad ofcash she kept for emergencies — I’d known where she kept it just like she knewwhere I kept mine. She’d taken her binoculars. And her birding books.
She’d left my SIG on the kitchen counter. She hadn’t taken anyclothes. I couldn’t spot signs that she’d even packed a lunch. That told me shehad another apartment set up already. No surprise there. I might or might nothave one of my own. Not saying — just a reminder that paranoia is a survivaltrait.
I searched harder this time, poking into the blind spacesabove closet doors and pulling out drawers to look behind them and feelinginside vents and using my other senses to search for hiding places in the wallsand floors and behind cabinets just like in Ridge’s
