CHAPTER 15
ETHAN HAD TOLD PALOMAR LABORATORIES to analyze his blood for traces of illicit chemicals, in case he?d been drugged without his knowledge. During the events at Reynerd?s apartment house, he had almost seemed to be in an altered state of consciousness.
Now, leaving the steamy bathroom, he felt no less disoriented than when, after being gut shot, he had found himself behind the wheel of the Expedition once more, unharmed.
Whatever had happened-or had only seemed to happen-at the mirror, he no longer entirely trusted his senses. As a consequence, he proceeded with greater caution than before, assuming that yet again things might not be as they appeared to be.
He passed through rooms he?d already searched and then into new territory, arriving at last in the kitchen. Shattered glass sparkled on the breakfast table and littered the floor.
Also on the floor lay the silver picture frame missing from the desk in the study. The photo of Hannah had been stripped out of it.
Whoever had taken the picture had been in too great a hurry to release the four fasteners on the back of the frame, and had instead smashed the glass.
[109] The rear door of the apartment stood open.
Beyond lay a wide hall that served the back of both penthouse units. At the nearer end, an exit sign marked a stairwell. Toward the farther end was a freight elevator big enough to carry refrigerators and large pieces of furniture.
If someone had taken the freight route down, he had already completed his descent. No sound issued from the elevator machinery.
Ethan hurried to the stairs. Opened the fire door. Paused on the threshold, listening.
Groan or moan, or melancholy sigh, or clank of chains: Even a ghost ought to make a sound, but only a cold hollow silence rose out of the stairwell.
He went down quickly, ten flights to the ground floor, then another two flights to the garage. He encountered neither a flesh-and-blood resident nor a spirit.
The scent of sickness and fever sweats, first detected in the elevator, didn?t linger here. Instead, he smelled a faint soapy odor, as if someone fresh from a bath had passed this way. And a trace of spicy aftershave.
Pushing open the steel fire door, stepping into the garage, he heard an engine, smelled exhaust fumes. Of the forty parking stalls, many were empty at this hour on a work day.
Toward the front of the garage, a car backed out of a stall. Ethan recognized Dunny?s midnight-blue Mercedes sedan.
Triggered by remote control, the garage gate was already rising with a steely clack and clatter.
Pistol still in hand, Ethan ran toward the car as it pulled away from him. The gate rose slowly, and the Mercedes had to stop for it. Through the rear window, he could see the silhouette of a man behind the steering wheel, but not clearly enough to make an identification.
Drawing near to the Mercedes, he swung wide of it. He intended to go directly to the driver?s door.
[110] The car shot forward while the barrier continued to rise, before it was fully out of the way. The roof of the Mercedes came within a fraction of an inch of leaving a generous paint sample on the bottom rail of the ascending gate, and raced up the steep exit ramp to the street.
The driver thumbed CLOSE on his remote even as he passed under the gate, which was clattering down again when Ethan reached it. Already the Mercedes had turned out of sight into the street above.
He stood there for a moment, peering through the gate into the gray storm light.
Rainwater streamed down the driveway ramp. Foaming, it vanished through the slots of a drain in the pavement immediately outside the garage.
On that concrete incline, a small lizard, back broken by a car tire, but still alive, struggled gamely against the sluicing water. So persistently did it twitch upward inch by inch that it seemed to believe all its needs could be satisfied and all its injuries healed by some power at the summit.
Not wanting to see the little creature inevitably defeated and washed down to die upon the drain grate, Ethan turned away from the sight of it.
He returned the pistol to his shoulder holster.
He studied his hands. They were trembling.
On the back stairs once more, climbing to the fifth floor, he encountered the lingering soapy smell, the trace of aftershave. This time, he also detected another odor less clean than the first two, elusive but disturbing.
Whatever else he might be, Dunny Whistler was surely a living man, not an animated corpse. Why would one of the walking dead come home to shower, shave, and dress in clean clothes? Absurd.
In the apartment kitchen, Ethan used a DustBuster to vacuum up the fragments of picture-frame glass.
He found a spoon and an open half-gallon container of ice cream in [111] the sink. Apparently, those who were recently resurrected enjoyed chocolate caramel swirl.
He put the ice cream in the freezer and returned the empty picture frame to the study.
In the master bedroom, he stopped short of the bathroom doorway. He had intended to check the mirror once more, to see if it was still misted and if, in the glass, anything moved that shouldn?t be there.
Actively seeking that phantom suddenly seemed to be a bad idea. Instead, he left the apartment, turning off the lights and locking the door behind him.
In the main elevator, as Ethan descended, he thought, For the same reason that the proverbial wolf put on a sheep?s skin to move undetected among the lambs.
That was why one of the walking dead would shower, shave, and put on a good suit.
As the elevator conveyed Ethan to the ground floor, he knew how Alice must have felt in free fall down the rabbit hole.