Fear Nothing

a two-hand grip again, as if I knew what the hell I was doing, imitating Willis and Stallone and Schwarzenegger and Eastwood and Cage from a hundred jump-run-shoot-chase movies, as if I actually believed that they knew what the hell they were doing. I expected to see a hulking figure, demented eyes, an upraised arm, an arcing knife, but I was still alone in the hallway.
        The movement I'd seen was the master-bedroom door being pushed shut from the inside. In the diminishing wedge of light between the moving door and the jamb, a twisted shadow loomed, writhed, shrank. The door fell shut with a solid sound like the closing of a bank vault.
        That room had been deserted when I left it, and no one had come past me since I'd stepped into the hallway. Only the murderer could be in there - and only if he'd returned through the bathroom window from a porch roof where he'd been when I'd discovered Angela's body.
        If the killer was already in the master bedroom again, however, he couldn't also have slipped behind me, moments earlier, to turn on the second-floor lights. So there were two intruders. I was caught between them.
        Go forward or back? Lousy choice. Deep shit either way, and me without rubber boots.
        They would expect me to run for the stairs. But it was safer to do the unexpected, so without hesitation I rushed to the master bedroom door. I didn't bother with the knob, kicked hard, sprung the latch, and pushed inside with the Glock in front of me, ready to squeeze off four or five shots at anything that moved.
        I was alone.
        The nightstand lamp was still lit.
        No bloody footprints stained the carpet, so no one could have re-entered the splattered bathroom from outside and then returned here by that route to close the hall door.
        I checked the bathroom anyway. I left the penlight in my pocket this time, relying on an influx of faint light from the bedroom lamp, because I didn't need - or want - to see all the vivid details again. The casement window remained open. The smell was as repulsive as it had been two minutes ago. The shape slumped against the toilet was Angela. Although she was mercifully veiled in gloom, I could see her mouth gaping as though in amazement, her wide eyes unblinking.
        I turned away and glanced nervously at the open door to the hall. No one had followed me in here.
        Baffled, I retreated to the middle of the bedroom.
        The draft from the bathroom window was not strong enough to have blown the bedroom door shut. Besides, no draft had cast the twisted shadow that I had glimpsed.
        Although the space under the bed might have been large enough to hide a man, he would have been uncomfortably compressed between the floor and the box springs, with frame slats banding his back. Anyway, no one could have squirmed into that hiding place before I'd kicked my way into the room.
        I could see through the open door to the walk-in closet, which obviously did not harbor an intruder. I took a closer look anyway. The penlight revealed an attic access in the closet ceiling. Even if a fold-down ladder was fitted to the back of that trap door, no one could have been spider-quick enough to climb into the attic and pull the ladder after himself in the two or three seconds that I had taken to burst in from the hallway.
        Two draped windows flanked the bed. Both proved to be locked from the inside.
        He hadn't gone out that way, but maybe I could. I wanted to avoid returning to the hall.
        Keeping the bedroom door in view, I tried to open a window. It was painted shut. These were French windows with thick mullions, so I couldn't just break a pane and climb out.
        My back was to the bathroom. Suddenly I felt as though spiders were twitching through the hollows of my spine. In my mind's eye, I saw Angela behind me, not lying by the toilet any longer but risen, red and dripping, eyes as bright and flat as silver coins. I expected to hear the wound bubbling in her throat as she tried to speak.
        When I turned, tingling with dread, she was not behind me, but the hot breath of relief that erupted from me proved how seriously I'd been gripped by this fantastic expectation.
        I was still gripped by it: I expected to hear her thrash to her feet in the bathroom. Already, my anguish over her death had been supplanted by fear for my own life. Angela was no longer a person to me. She