Dead Street

violence or otherwise suspicious circumstances.”

I moved my chair closer to hers and slipped an arm around her shoulder. “Do you remember, Bettie? Do you remember where the floppy discs are?”

“I do. Back in New York.”

They would be.

She was saying, “We’ll have to go there for them. I want to go, too, Jack. I don’t want you leaving me behind again — I don’t think I could stand it.”

“You’ll go. We’ll go.”

“As long... as long as we come back here. Because Sunset Lodge is our home.”

Kinder had been taking it all in. “Should we call ahead? To your pal Sgt. Ross, maybe? The phones are clean — I saw to it this place was swept for bugs just today.”

“No,” I said. “This doesn’t go anywhere past this table, okay, Darris? Nobody but Bettie, me and you need to know those discs still exist.”

I locked eyes with Darris, my expression telling him what my words couldn’t risk in front of Bettie: that if the bad guys knew those floppies were around, they’d be on us like fire ants at a picnic.

As I showed Kinder out, I told him to maintain the surveillance of the house, and he assured me he would.

The lights were mostly out — Bettie didn’t need them and I liked the atmosphere. Anyway, we’d left some lights on next door, in Bettie’s place, to continue the illusion that she still lived there. So when Bettie led me across into the living room, I bumped into an end table. The blind girl was already more used to my place than I was.

We wound up on the sofa and I sat with my arm around her as she curled up beside and against me. In a sport shirt and slacks, I had to shift a bit to get comfortable because t... .45 was still in its holster on my hip, and would stay there for the foreseeable future. Bettie was in white jeans and a pink short-sleeve sweater, the day a little chilly, at least for Florida. The wind off the water was rattling the windows and you could almost remember it was fall in faraway places that weren’t drenched in year-round sunshine.

“Where in New York?” I asked her absently. “The discs, I mean. Back at Dr. Brice’s place?”

She shook her head. “No. I left them with you.”

I stiffened. “You what?”

“The floppies were in my antique desk, the one my grandmother left me. In our apartment, Jack.”

She’d had no close living relatives, and as a kid of twenty-one hadn’t left a will; the handful of personal items had gone to me, by default.

I turned her toward me. Looked right at her and she gazed at me with the empty hazel eyes. “Bettie... that desk is here. It’s upstairs, in the bedroom....”

Now she straightened. “Is... is that the desk in your bedroom?”

The way she near-echoed me might have been funny in other circumstances. Of course Bettie had got to know the lay of the land or anyway of the furniture in my place. But blind and slowly coming out of memory loss, she had no reason to recognize by touch a desk she hadn’t seen in twenty years, even if it was an 18th-century family heirloom.

Still, she was first off the sofa. She went unerringly across the room to the open staircase against the far wall that led up to the master bedroom. I followed. Something about the movement woke Tacos, whose big head craned up to comment by way of a yip.

“Stay,” I told him, and he settled back down on his braided rug.

In seconds we were up the stairs, onto the landing and into the bedroom.

I threw the overhead light switch, which also started the gentle whirl of the ceiling fan. Like the entire house, the place was under-furnished — just Bettie’s old four-poster bed, a nightstand, a chest of drawers and the vintage desk, all among the small load the movers had brought down from the big city.

I moved my swivel chair out of her way, and cleared the bottles off the ornate desk that I’d used for years as a liquor cabinet. Then her fingers began their work.

And those fingers had a memory of their own, finding at once a decorative panel whose fancy carvings disguised a hidden drawer. She had to tug on the chunk of wooden filigree that was a hidden handle a couple of times before it gratingly gave, and screeched open.

Inside was an age-discolored manila envelope, folded over.

She took it out and handed it to me. Within were two floppy discs, the larger size that you don’t see often anymore. My name was on the labels. And a word: IMPORTANT.

“All those years,” I said, my voice a bitter whisper.

“What, Jack?”

I hefted the lightweight envelope and said, “All those years, I had these things — right in my apartment.”

She was shaking her head, her lovely dark hair bouncing off her shoulders. “How could you have known? I didn’t exactly have time to send a message to you, and later when I could have... I couldn’t. Because I couldn’t remember my own identity, let alone the man I loved.”

I hugged her to me. “We need to get out of here right now, doll. We’ll grab Kinder and get to the nearest FBI office, and—”

That was when Tacos got back in the act.

Only it wasn’t a simple yip, but a yapping, echoing up from downstairs. The old racing hound was sounding an alarm.

T... .45 was already in my right hand when I got to the window by the bed and looked out and took in an unusual sight for after dark — an ice cream truck double-parked out front. And I hadn’t ordered anything sweet.

Simultaneously we said to each other, “We have company,” and there was no time to be impressed by how mutually on the same wavelength we were.

And Tacos was keeping at it, the barking vicious now, ringing off the walls and ceiling downstairs.

I swept Bettie along with me to the bedroom’s rear window and looked out across the back yard and between the two houses on our neighboring street, and got a view of another double-parked ice cream truck.

That was when the greyhound’s yapping broke off abruptly. The sudden silence sounded its own alarm, one even more troubling than the barking itself.

“Stay here,” I whispered.

She didn’t argue.

The master bedroom and a sewing room, on the other side of the stairwell, were the only rooms up here on this half a floor. From the landing, I could see nothing of the world below. I paused just long enough to listen for movement, didn’t hear any, then started down the stairs cautiously.

The stairs hugged the wall on one side, and were open onto the big living room on the other. Only two lights were on downstairs, a lamp by the sofa and a ceiling fixture over the kitchen table.

As I descended, I could see the fallen Tacos, sprawled on his braided rug, the side of his head matted with blood. He’d been struck a hard blow and he was unconscious but his bony ribcage was rising and falling. Otherwise the living room and the kitchen beyond it appeared empty.

My den was on the other side of the wall the stairs hugged, under the master bedroom. Beneath the staircase was a bathroom, and a hallway between it and the kitchen led to two guest bedrooms and the laundry room. If intruders were looking for us, they might assume the master bedroom would be downstairs. If they had, I could come up behind them and end this quickly.

That was seeming like a reasonable assumption when a guy in a black stocking-mask and matching wardrobe popped up from where he’d been crouching behind the end table on the far side of the sofa, his form slightly blurred by the light of the lamp, and a silenced shot from a Glock snicked past my ear.

My shot was no snick but an explosion in the open room and then the intruder’s head exploded, too, but silently, except for the splat of bone and brain matter that traveled to a window to land and drip.

I spent maybe half a second wondering if the guy was alone but knowing that two ice cream trucks meant multiple salesmen of death, and another one leaned out from behind where the stove and countertop in the kitchen provided him a good position to crouch and shoot.

But before he could, I blasted twice, and one bullet caught his weapon — another silenced Glock — and the