steely glitter now sleeved with Frederick Clawson's blood. His face was the twisted mask of scars which was all Nonie Griffiths had left after she carved him up at the end of Machine's Way, and - And there was no one there at all.
The door had swung shut, that was all, the way doors sometimes do. Is that so? the distant part of her mind asked . . . except it was closer now, raising its voice, urgent with fright. It was standing partway open with no problem at all when you came up the stairs. Not wide open, but enough so you could tell it wasn't shut. Now her eyes went back to the beer bottles on the coffee table. One empty. One half-full, with a ring of foam still on the inside of the neck.
The killer had been behind the door when she came in. If she had turned her head she would almost surely have seen him . . . and now she would be dead, too. And while she had been standing here, mesmerized by the colorful remains of Frederick 'Mr
Bigshot' Clawson, he had simply gone out, closing the door behind him. The strength flowed out of her legs and she slipped to her knees with a weird kind of grace, looking like a girl about to take communion. Her mind ran frantically over the same thought, like a gerbil on an exercise wheel: Oh I shouldn't have screamed, he'll come back, oh I shouldn't have screamed, he'll come back, oh I shouldn't have screamed - And then she heard him, the measured thud of his big feet on the hall carpet. Later she became convinced that the goddam Shulmans had turned up their stereo again, and she had mistaken the steady thump of the bass for footsteps, but at that moment she was convinced it was Alexis Machine and he was returning . . . a man so dedicated and so murderous that not even death would stop him.
For the first time in her life, Dodie Eberhart fainted.
She came to less than three minutes later. Her legs would still not support her, so she crawled back down the short apartment hallway to the door with her hair hanging in her face. She thought of opening the door and looking out, but could not bring herself to do it. She turned the thumblock instead, then shot the bolt and clicked the police-bar into its steel foot. Those things done, she sat against the door, gasping, the world a gray blur. She was vaguely aware that she had locked herself in with a mutilated corpse, but that wasn't so bad. It wasn't bad at all, when you considered the alternatives.
Little by little her strength came back and she was able to get to her feet. She slipped around the corner at the end of the hall and then into the kitchen, where the phone was. She kept her eyes averted from what remained of Mr Bigshot, although it was an empty exercise; she would see that mind-photograph in all its hideous clarity for a long time to come. She called the police and when they came she wouldn't let them in until one of them slid his ID
under the door.
'What's your wife's name?' she asked the cop whose laminated badge identified him as Charles F. Toomey, Jr. Her voice was high and quivery, utterly unlike her usual one. Close friends (had she had any) would not have recognized it.
'Stephanie, ma'am,' the voice on the other side of the door replied patiently.
'I can call your station-house and check that, you know!' she nearly shrieked.
'I know you can, Mrs Eberhart,' the voice responded, 'but you'd feel safer quicker if you just let us in, don't you think?'.And because she still recognized the Voice of Cop as easily as she had recognized the Smell of
Bad, she unlocked the door and let Toomey and his partner in. Once they were, Dodie did something else she had never done before: she went into hysterics..
Chapter Seven
Police Business
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