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.

Something happened just now. I

could hear the covers tossed back, the

to break in.

at the

home late this

“You’re there alone?”

though I was far too ill and helpless to be left to my

“Yeah.”

security alarm go

“No.”

call it

They put

relief. Regardless of how complicated our relationship was — and it was pretty complicated — there was no one I knew who

I guessed said more than I realized

again. Stay on the

gruffly,

reaction — hit me. One of the weird

* * *

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 —

open the security gate, which he’d knelt to examine. “You didn’t have to come down. I’d have gone around to the s —” Jake broke off. He rose and said oddly,

of the first time we’d met; although met was kind of a polite word for turning up as a suspect in someone’s murder

the middle of my chest from open heart surgery. Not that Jake hadn’t seen it when he visited me in

awkwardly, “Thanks again

He nodded.

each other. These last weeks couldn’t have been easy on Jake, and not because I’d asked him to give me a little time, a little space before 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,

as in get the Chiffons over here to sing a chorus. Big, blond, ruggedly handsome in a trial-by-fire

think that for the first time in all the time I’d known him there was nothing to keep us from being together except

asked matter-of-factly, “Why didn’t the alarm go

“It wasn’t set.”

of his dark brows. He opened his mouth. I beat him to it.

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

false alarms. The construction crew usually arrives before we open the shop, and they

— good thing, because I was

he must have come in from

aisles. I pointed out where an endcap had been knocked over. “Only the emergency lights were on, and he crashed into that.” I nodded to the fallen bargain

Dagger Books from 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 directed Jake’s attention to the long five-foot

He sounded

“The contractor told me that that side of the building would be

He stooped, pushing through the slit in the plastic, and I followed him into the darkened other side of the building. It smelled chilly and weird on that side. A mixture of

“Great,” I said bitterly.

center of the exterior handle. I discerned that it was painted, though

I nodded.

They’re all combinated the same, or mostly the same, which means that if someone gets hold of a

“Better and better.”

this is one step above leaving the door

I swallowed. Nodded.

in may have been watching the place and knew no one’s

doesn’t look

around.” Jake didn’t sound convinced, and I knew

break into my flat

agreed. “Again, I think that probably gets back to the mistaken belief that no one was home. No one has been staying here at night for three weeks, right? So

not have been the

“True.”

Natalie would notice the slice in the plastic wall. Hell, if Warren were hanging around, I don’t know if she’d notice the Tasmanian

of unfair to Natalie; Jake snorted, grimly

much in the way of physical resources

stopped. Through the dirty glass of the bay window,

late than never,

looked at me. “You

“Adrenaline.”

a deep breath. “Why don’t you head upstairs? I’ll

to choke me up. Like this. Jake offering to

people to even know we were friends, who had very nearly succumbed to blackmail and more to keep that secret, was offering to stand here in my

stranger: the fact that he was making the offer

“I can handle it.”

know you can. I’d like