favor.
The Homicide specialist kept shaking his head sadly. “I can’t spare the personnel to put a twenty-four-hour watch on her. Professor. Not short-handed the way we are around Christmas. Not without more proof she’s really in danger. I like the lady, I think she was totally honest with us, and I know she’s scared half to death, but—”
“But she’s paranoid?” Loren broke in. “Like all the dissidents in the Sixties and Seventies who thought the government was persecuting them? Look, suppose she’s right the way they were right?”
“Then you’ve got Val Tremaine to protect her,” Krauzer said, “and we both know they don’t come better.” He gave Loren a bleak but knowing smile. “Go on, get out of here with your harem, and have a merry Christmas. Call me if something should happen.”
If something should happen...
He decided to let Val sleep at the apartment and take Donna shopping so that he and his unexpected guests could have some sort of Christmas. After weaving through downtown streets in a crazy-quilt pattern to throw off any possible followers, he swung the VW onto the Interstate and drove out to the tri-leveled Cherrywood Mall. On the day before Christmas there was more safety among the crowds of frantic last-minute shoppers than behind fortress walls.
The excursion seemed to take Donna out of herself, erase some of the hunted look from her eyes. It was after four and their arms were full of brightly wrapped packages when they slipped into a dark quiet bar on the mall’s third level.
“Feeling better?” Loren asked as they sipped Alexanders.
“Much.” She smiled hesitantly in the dimness. “Mr. Mensing. these are the happiest few hours I’ve had since, well, since last year. I can never repay you. You’ve even made me begin to feel different about everything that’s happened to me.”
“Different how?”
“I’ve decided it wasn’t just blind chance that I didn’t go in the car with Chuck and Cindy that day and that the man next to me was shot and not me. I think I’m meant to live awhile yet. And. oh. God. there’s so much I’ve got to do after the holidays to put my life back in order. The house is a hopeless mess and the tires on my car are getting bald and I need a new will—Chuck and I had mutual wills, we each left everything to the other—and, you know, I may start dating again.” She looked into her glass and then into Loren’s eyes. “You’re, ah, not available, right?”
“I’m honestly not sure,” Loren said. “Val and I have been out of touch for months and we’ve been sort of preoccupied since she got in this morning.” He paused, blinked behind his glasses, bewildered as he habitually was by the thought that any young woman could find a bear-bodied, unaggressive, overly learned intellectual in his late thirties even slightly desirable. “But look. However that turns out, I’m your friend. Val and I both are.”
“To friendship,” she said as they touched glasses. “To a new life.”
It was the strangest Christmas Eve he’d ever spent. To an outsider it would have seemed that an exotic fantasy had become real—a man and two lovely women, a high-rise well stocked with food and drink. As night fell and with it fresh snow, Loren made a bowl of hot mulled wine and played the new recording of the Dvorak Piano Quintet No. 5 that he’d bought as his Christmas present to himself. Later he turned on the radio to an FM station and they listened to traditional carols as he gave Val and Donna the gifts he’d purchased at Cherrywood. Their squeals of delight warmed him more than the wine.
Part of him felt relaxed and at peace and part of him stayed alert like an animal in fear of predators. But as midnight approached he found it harder and harder to believe there was danger. Not with the snow outside turning to ice as it fell, not behind the deadbolt and chain lock in a haven twenty stories high.
A little after 12:30 they exchanged good-night kisses and Loren surrendered his bedroom to the women. When they’d closed the door behind them he made a last ritual concession to security by tugging the massive blue couch over against the front door before arranging its cushions on the living-room rug in a makeshift bed.
He was fitting a spare sheet over the couch cushions when Val came back, her blonde hair falling soft and loose over the shoulders of the floor-length caftan he’d given her for Christmas. She smiled and helped him smooth the sheets. “Now you’ll sleep better,” she said. “I feel like a toad kicking you out of your bed on Christmas Eve.”
“Can’t be helped. Donna’s asleep?”
“Out like a light. You were right to serve decaffeinated coffee.” She sat on a sheet-draped cushion. “And thanks to that nap I had before the sergeant dropped by, I’m not tired in the least—”
“Sergeant?” Loren asked. He was suddenly alert.
Her face dropped slightly. “Oh, rats, I wasn’t supposed to tell you. Lieutenant Krauzer sent a man over this afternoon just in case Donna was in danger. He came while you were shopping, showed me his ID, looked this place over, and set up a stakeout in 20-B, the vacant apartment across the hall. He said not to tell you and Donna so you’d act natural and not scare any suspects away. But it’s good to know Sergeant Holt is standing guard.”
Loren leaped to his feet. “Sergeant
“Gene Holt, Lieutenant Krauzer’s assistant. He’s been in 20-B since midafternoon. The couple that lives there is in Florida—”
“Describe him.” Loren’s face was white, and wet fear crawled down his spine.
“A tall man in his middle thirties, thin face, cleft chin. He wears glasses and blinks a lot as if his eyes were weak.”
In that moment Loren saw the shape of the nightmare. “That’s it,” he muttered. and stood there frozen with understanding. He could hear clocks ticking, the night stirrings of the building, the plock-plock of icy snow falling on the outdoor furniture on his balcony. Every sound was magnified now, transformed into menace.
Val shook his shoulders, fear twisting her own face. “Loren, what in God’s name is the matter?”
“Sergeant Gene Holt.” Loren told her, “is a woman. And now I know who Weak Eyes is too.”
“He had a badge and identification!” she protested.
“And if you know the right document forger you can have stuff like that made to order while you wait.” He pushed her aside, headed for the phone on a stand in the corner. “I’m calling Krauzer and getting some real cops here.”
The phone exploded into sound before he’d crossed the room and he jumped as if shot. A second ring, a third. He picked it up as if it were a cobra, forced it to his ear. Silence. Then a voice, smooth, low, calm. “Unfortunately. Professor, I can’t let you call for reinforcements,” it said.
Loren slammed the phone down, held it in its cradle for a count of ten, then lifted the handset. He didn’t hear a dial tone. He punched the hook furiously. Still no dial tone. He whirled to Val. “Him.” he whispered. “He must have planted a bug here while he was pretending to check the place out for security. He heard every word we said all evening and was just waiting for all of us to go to bed. We can’t phone outside—he’s tying up the line by keeping the phone in 20-B off the hook.”
“We can phone for help from one of the other apartments on this floor!”
“We can’t. 20-C moved out when the building converted to condo and 20-D’s out of town. Besides, he’s at the front door of 20-B. If you try to go out in the hall he’s got you.”
“Let’s get out on the balcony and scream for help!”
“Who’d hear us in that storm?”
Val swung around, raced down the inner hall to the bedroom. Loren knew why. To throw on street clothes and get her gun. If she’d brought one with her. Loren hadn’t asked.
The phone shrilled again. Loren stared at it as if hypnotized. He let it ring six times, nine. Over the rings he heard Donna’s sobs of terror from the bedroom. Oh, God, if only it were Krauzer on the other end, or Belford the F. B. I. man. or anyone in the world except Weak Eyes, anyone Loren could ask to call the police! On the twelfth ring he picked up the receiver.
“Mensing.” the low calm voice said, “I have just placed a charge of plastic explosive on the outside of your door. You have two minutes to take down that barricade I heard you put up and send Donna across the hall. Do that and you and Tremaine live.”
Loren slammed the phone down. Val in a dark gray jumpsuit ran back into the living room. There was no gun in her hand. Loren almost cried out with frustration. “Donna’s in your closet,” she whispered. “I pushed the dresser against the door.”
Loren nodded, held her close, and spoke feverishly into her ear. Time slipped away into nothingness. Val went
