LITMIR.BIZ

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and said, “Hey, you’re bleeding.”

      Being polite is not only the right way to respond to people but also the easiest. Life is so filled with unavoidable conflict that I see no reason to promote more confrontations.

      At that moment, however, I happened to be in a rare bad mood. Time was flushing away at a frightening rate, the hour of the gun rapidly drawing near, and I still had no name to hang on Robertson’s collaborator.

      “Do you know you’re bleeding?” he asked.

      “I had a suspicion.”

      “That looks nasty.”

      “My apologies.”

      “What happened to your forehead?”

      “A fork.”

      “A fork?”

      “Yes, sir. I wish I’d been eating with a spoon.”

      “You stabbed yourself with a fork?”

      “It flipped.”

      “Flipped?”

      “The fork.”

      “A flipped fork?”

      “It flicked my forehead.”

      Pausing in the counting of my change, he gave me a narrow look.

      “That’s right,” I said, “A flipped fork flicked my forehead.”

      He decided not to have any further involvement with me. He gave me my change, bagged the items, and returned to the sports pages.

      In the men’s room at the service station next door, I washed my bloody face, cleaned the wound, treated it with Bactine, and applied a compress of paper towels. The punctures and scratches were shallow, and the bleeding soon stopped.

      This wasn’t the first time—nor the last—that I wished my supernatural gift included the power to heal.

      Band-Aid applied, I returned to the Chevy. Sitting behind the wheel, engine running, air-conditioning vents aimed at my face, I chugged cold Pepsi.

      Only bad news on my wristwatch—10:48.

      My muscles ached. My eyes were sore. I felt tired, weak. Maybe my wits hadn’t shifted into low gear, as they seemed to have, but I didn’t like my chances if I had to go one-on-one with Robertson’s kill buddy, who must have enjoyed a better night’s sleep than I had.

      I’d taken two caffeine tablets no more than an hour ago, so I couldn’t justify swilling down two more. Besides, already the acid in my stomach had soured into a corrosive strength sufficient to etch steel, and I had grown simultaneously exhausted and jumpy, which is not a condition conducive to survival.

      Although I had no person—no name, no description—as a focus for my psychic magnetism, I drove at random through Pico Mundo, hoping to be brought to a place of enlightenment.

      The brilliant Mojave day burned at white-hot ferocity. The air itself seemed to be on fire, as if the sun—by speed of light, less than eight and a half minutes from Earth—had gone nova eight minutes ago, giving us nothing more than this dazzling glare as a short warning of our impending bright death.

      Each flare and flicker of light flashing off the windshield seemed to score my eyes. I hadn’t brought my sunglasses. The searing glare soon spawned a headache that made a fork in the brow seem like a tickle by comparison.

      Turning aimlessly from street to street, trusting intuition to guide me, I found myself in Shady Ranch, one of the newer residential developments on the Pico Mundo hills that a decade ago were home to nothing more dangerous than rattlesnakes. Now people lived here, and perhaps one of them was a sociopathic monster plotting mass murder in upper-middle-class suburban comfort.

      Shady Ranch had never been a ranch of any kind; it wasn’t one now, unless you counted houses as a crop. As for shade, these hills enjoyed less of it than most neighborhoods in the heart of town because the trees were far from maturity.

      I parked in my father’s driveway but didn’t at once switch off the engine. I needed time to gather my nerve for this encounter.

      Like those who lived in it, this Mediterranean-style house had little character. Below the red-tile roof, ornament-free planes of beige stucco and glass met at unsurprising angles arrived at less by architectural genius than by the dictates of lot size and shape.

      Leaning closer to a dashboard vent, I closed my eyes against the rush of chilled air. Ghost lights drifted across the backs of my eyelids, retinal memories of the desert glare, strangely soothing for a moment—until the wound in Robertson’s chest rose from deeper memory.

      I switched off the engine, got out of the car, went to the house, and rang my father’s doorbell.

      At this hour in the morning, he was likely to be home. He had never worked a day in his life and seldom rose before nine or ten o’clock.

      My father answered, surprised to see me. “Odd, you didn’t call to say you were coming.”

      “No,” I agreed. “Didn’t call.”

      My father is forty-five, a handsome man with thick hair still more black than silver. He has a lean athletic body of which he is proud to the point of vanity.

      Barefoot, he wore only khaki shorts slung low across his hips. His tan had been assiduously cultivated with oils, enhanced with toners, preserved with lotions.

      “Why have you come?” he asked.

      “I don’t know.”

      “You don’t look well.”

      He retreated one step from the door. He fears illness.

      “I’m not sick,” I assured him. “Just bone tired. No sleep. May I come in?”

      “We weren’t doing much, just finishing breakfast, getting ready to catch some rays.”

      Whether that was an invitation or not, I interpreted it as one, and I crossed the threshold, pulling the door shut behind me.

      “Britney’s in the kitchen,” he said, and led me to the back of the house.

      The blinds were drawn, the rooms layered with sumptuous shadows.

      I’ve seen the place in better light. It’s beautifully furnished. My father has style and loves comfort.

      He inherited a substantial trust fund. A generous monthly check supports a lifestyle that many would envy.

      Although he has much, he yearns for more. He desires to live far better than he does, and he chafes at terms of the trust that require him to live on its earnings and forbid him access to the principal.

      His parents had been wise to settle their estate on him under those terms. If he had been able to get his hands on the principal, he would long ago have been destitute and homeless.

      He is full of get-rich-quick schemes, the latest being the sale of land on the moon. Were he able to manage his own fortune, he would be impatient with a ten- or fifteen-percent return on investment and would plunge great sums on unlikely ventures in hopes of doubling and tripling his money overnight.

      The kitchen is big, with restaurant-quality equipment and every imaginable culinary tool and gadget, though he eats out six or seven nights a week. Maple floor, ship’s-style maple cabinets with rounded corners, granite counters, and stainless-steel appliances contribute to a sleek and yet inviting ambience.

      Britney is sleek, as well, and inviting in a way that makes your skin crawl. When we entered the kitchen, she was standing hipshot at a window, sipping a morning champagne and staring out at sun serpents sinuously flexing across the surface of the swimming pool.

      Her thong bikini was small enough to excite the jaded editors of Hustler, but she wore it well enough to make the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

      She was

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