The Dark Tide - The Adrien English Mysteries 5

It began, as a lot of things do, in bed.

Or to be precise, on the living-room sofa where I was uncomfortably dozing.

Somewhere in the distance of a very weird dream about me and a certain ex-LAPD police lieutenant came a faint, persistent scratching. The scratching worked itself into my dream, and I deduced with the vague logic of the unconscious that the cat was sharpening his claws on the antique half-moon table in the hall. Again.

Except…that boneless ball of heat on my abdomen was the cat. And he was sound asleep…

I opened my eyes. It was dark, and it took me a second or two to place myself. Moonlight outlined the pirate bookends on the bookshelf. From where I lay, I could barely make out the motion of the draperies in the warm July breeze in the front room of the flat above Cloak and Dagger Books.

I was home.

There had been a time when I’d thought I would never see home again. But here I was. I had a furry heating pad on my belly, a crick in my neck, and — apparently — a midnight visitor.

My first thought was that Lisa had called Guy, my ex, to look in on me. That furtive scraping wasn’t the sound of a key; it was more like someone trying to…well, pick the lock.

I rolled off the sofa, dislodging the sleeping cat, and staggered to my feet, fighting the dizziness that had dogged me since my heart surgery three weeks earlier. I’d been staying at my mother’s home in the Chatsworth Hills, but I’d checked myself out of the lunatic asylum that afternoon.

If Guy had dropped by, he’d have turned on the light in the shop below. There was no band of light beneath the door. No, what there was, was the occasional flash of illumination as though someone was trying to balance a flashlight.

I wasn’t dreaming. Someone was trying to break in.

I felt my way across the darkened room to the entrance hall. My heart was already beating way too hard and too fast, and I felt a spark of anxiety — the anxiety that was getting to be familiar since my surgery. Was my healing heart up to this kind of strain? Even as I was calculating whether I could get to the Webley in the bedroom closet and load it before the intruder got the door open or whether my best bet was to lock myself in the bedroom and phone the cops, the decision was made for me.

The lock mechanism turned over, the door handle rotated, and the door silently inched out of the frame.

I reacted instinctively, grabbing the rush-bottomed chair in the hall and throwing it with all my strength. “Get the fuck out of here,” I yelled over the racket of the chair clattering into the door and hitting the floor.

And — surprisingly — the intruder did get the fuck out.

Not a dream. Not a misreading of the situation. Someone had tried to break into my living quarters.

I heard the heavy thud of footsteps pounding down the staircase back to the shop, heard something crash below, heard another crash, and, as I tottered to the wall light switch, the slam of a distant door.

What door? Not the side entrance of the shop below, because I knew that particular bang very well, and certainly not the front door behind the security gate. No, it had to have been from the adjacent structure. The bookstore took up one half of a subdivided building that had originally, back in the thirties, housed a small hotel. The other half of the building had gone through a variety of commercial incarnations, none of which had survived more than a year or so, until I’d finally been in a position to buy it myself the previous spring. It was currently in the expensive and noisy process of being renovated, the two halves divided by a wall of thick plastic.

Not thick enough, clearly.

The contractor had assured me the perimeter doors were guarded by “construction locks,” and that it was as safe as it had ever been. Obviously he wasn’t familiar with my history, let alone the history of the building.

I leaned back against the wall, trying to catch my breath and listening. Somewhere down the street I heard an engine roaring into life. Not necessarily my intruder’s getaway car fleeing the scene. This was a nonresidential part of Pasadena, and at night it was very quiet and surprisingly isolated.

There was a time when I’d have intrepidly, Mr. Boy Detective, gone downstairs to see what the damage was. That was four murder investigations, one shooting, and one heart surgery ago. Instead I got the gun from the bedroom closet, loaded it, returned to the front room, where the windows offered a better vantage point, and picked up the phone. The streetlamps cast leopard spots on the empty sidewalk, accentuated the deep shadows between the old buildings. Nothing moved. I recalled a line by Raymond Chandler: “The streets were dark with something more than night.”

Reaction hit me, and I slid down the wall and dialed 911.

I was having trouble catching my breath as I waited — and waited — for the 911 operator, and I hoped to hell I wasn’t having a heart attack. My heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever when I was sixteen. A recent bout of pneumonia had worsened my condition, and I’d been in line for surgery even before getting shot three weeks earlier. Everything was under control now, and according to my cardiologist, I was making terrific progress. The ironic thing about the surgery and the news that I was evidently going to make old bones after all was that I felt mortal in a way that I hadn’t for the last nineteen years.

Tomkins pussyfooted up to delicately head-butt me.

“Hi,” I said.

He blinked his wide, almond-shaped, green-gold eyes at me and meowed. He had a surprisingly quiet meow. Not as annoying as most cats. Not that I was an expert — nor did I plan on becoming one. I was only loaning a fellow bachelor my pad. The cat — kitten, really — was also convalescing. He’d been mauled by a dog three weeks ago. His bounce back was better than mine.

I stroked him absently as he wriggled around and tried to bite my fingers. I guessed there was truth to the wisdom about petting a cat to lower your blood pressure, because I could feel my heart rate slowing, calming — which was pretty good, considering how pissed off I was getting at being kept on hold in the middle of an emergency.

Granted, it wasn’t much of an emergency at this point. My intruder was surely long gone.

I chewed my lip, listened once more to the message advising me to stay on the line and help would soon be with me. Assuming I’d still be alive to take that call.

I hung up and dialed another number. A number I had memorized long ago. A number that seemingly would require acid wash to remove from the memory cells of my brain.

As the phone rang on the other end, I glanced across at the clock on the bookshelf. Three oh three in the morning. Well, here was a test of true friendship.

“Riordan,” Jake managed in a voice like raked gravel.

“Uh…hey.”

“Hey.” I could feel him making the effort to push through the fog of sleep. He rasped, “How are you?”

Pretty civil given the fact that I hadn’t spoken to him for nearly two weeks and was choosing three in the morning to reopen the lines of communication.

I found myself instinctively straining to hear the silence behind him; was someone there with him? I couldn’t hear over the rustle of bed linens.

just now. I think someone tried

could hear the covers tossed

try to break in. He took off,

at

got home

“You’re there alone?”

was out of the question. As though I was far too ill and helpless to be left to my own devices. Jake simply looked at

“Yeah.”

security

“No.”

call it

They

Regardless of how complicated our

more than

up and call 911 again. Stay on the line

said gruffly,

reaction — hit me. One of the weird aftereffects of my surgery. I

* *

The register looked undisturbed. I could see where the bargain-book table had been toppled. Otherwise everything looked pretty much as normal: same comfortable leather club chairs, same wooden fake fireplace, same tall matching walnut bookshelves — strictly mystery and crime novels — same secretive smiles on the pale faces of

open the security gate, which he’d knelt to examine. “You didn’t have to come down.

a second, and then I did. Echoes of the first time we’d met; although met was kind of a polite word for turning up as a suspect in someone’s

down the middle of my chest from open

awkwardly, “Thanks again

He nodded.

we tried to figure out where we stood. He’d resigned from LAPD, come out to his family, and asked his wife for a divorce. But he looked unchanged. Reassuringly unchanged. I think I’d feared… Well, I’m not sure. That he’d be harrowed by regret. For his entire adult life

blond, ruggedly handsome in a trial-by-fire way. He was very lean, all hard muscle and powerful bone. Maybe there was more silver at his temples, but there was a calm in his tawny eyes that I’d never seen

self-conscious. It was weird to think that for the first time in all the time I’d known him there was nothing to keep

didn’t the alarm

“It wasn’t set.”

his dark brows. He opened his mouth. I beat him to it. “We haven’t been setting it while the construction has been

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

alarms. The construction crew usually arrives before we open the shop, and they kept triggering it. So I thought…until

silence said it all — good thing, because I was pretty sure if Jake got started, we’d be there all

come in from the

had been knocked over. “Only the emergency lights were on, and he crashed into that.” I nodded to the fallen bargain table, the landslide of spilled books. “And

the gutted other half of the building. Staring from one side to the other was like peering through murky water. I could barely make out the ladders and scaffolds like the ribs of a mythological beast. I

He

that side of the

weird on that side. A mixture of fresh plaster, new wood, and dust. We picked our way through the hurdles of drop cloths and wooden horses and cement mixers to the door on the far wall.

“Great,” I said bitterly.

the center of the exterior handle. I discerned that it

I nodded.

by contractors on construction sites. They’re all combinated the same, or mostly the same, which means that if someone gets hold of a key, they’ve got

“Better and better.”

it. “As security goes, this is one step above leaving the door standing wide

I swallowed. Nodded.

place and knew no one’s been

said, “It doesn’t look like they

kids prowling around.” Jake didn’t sound

to break into

belief that no one was home. No one has been staying here at night for three weeks, right?

absorbed that. “This might not have been the first time he was prowling around in

“True.”

the plastic wall. Hell, if Warren were hanging

unfair to Natalie; Jake snorted,

I didn’t seem to have much in

glass of the bay window, we watched a

late than never,

two, Jake looked at me. “You okay? You’re

“Adrenaline.”

at the black-and-white. Drew a deep breath. “Why don’t

emotionalism. The smallest things seemed to choke me up. Like this. Jake

very nearly succumbed to blackmail and more to keep that secret, was offering to stand here in my place and talk to

the fact that he was making the offer or that I was ready

“I can handle it.”

met my gaze. “I know you can. I’d like