Sole Survivor

Delmann's bedroom, in answer to Lisa's scream, Joe had heard the cookware clinking and softly clanging as he had hurried along the downstairs hall. Coming through the door into the kitchen, he saw the pots and pans swinging like pendulums from their hooks.
        By the time he reached Lisa and saw Georgine's corpse on the floor, the cookware had settled into silence. But what set those items in motion in the first place? Lisa and Georgine were at the far end of the long room, nowhere near the dangling pots.
        Like the flashing green numbers on the digital clock at Charlie Delmann's bedside, like the swelling of flames in the three oil lamps on the kitchen table, this coppery music was important.
        He felt as though a hard rap of insight was about to crack the egg of his ignorance, letting spill a golden liquid understanding.
        Holding his breath, mentally reaching for the elusive connection that would make sense of these things, Joe realized that the shell-cracking insight was receding. He strained to bring it back. Then, maddeningly, it was gone.
        Perhaps none of these things was important: not the oil lamps, not the digital clock, not the jangling cookware. In a world viewed through lenses of paranoia-a pair of distorting spectacles that he had been wearing with good reason for the past day and a half-every falling leaf, every whisper of wind, and every fretwork of shadows was invested with a portentous meaning that, in reality, it did not possess. He was not merely a neutral observer, not merely a reporter this time, but a victim, central to his own story, so maybe he could not trust his journalistic instincts when he saw significance in these small, if admittedly strange, details.
        Along the sidewalk came a tall black kid, college age, wearing shorts and a UCLA T-shirt, gliding on rollerblades. Joe, puzzling over clues that might not be clues at all, paid little attention to the skater, until the kid spun to a stop in front of him and handed him a cellular phone.
        “You'll need this,” said the skater, in a bass voice that would have been pure gold to any fifties' doo-wop group.
        Before Joe could respond, the skater rolled away with powerful pushes of his muscular legs.
        The phone rang in Joe's hand.
        He surveyed the street, searching for the surveillance post from which he was being watched, but it was not obvious.
        The phone rang again, and he answered it. “Yeah?”
        “What's your name?” a man asked.
        “Joe Carpenter.”
        “Who're you waiting for?”
        “I don't know her name.”
        “What do you call her?”
        “Demi.”
        “Walk a block and a half south. Turn right at the corner and keep going until you come to a bookstore. It's still open. Go in, find the biography section.”
        The caller hung up.
        After all, there wasn't going to be a pleasant get-acquainted chat over coffee.
        According to the business hours posted on the glass door, the bookstore closed on Sundays at six o'clock. It was a quarter past six. Through the big display windows, Joe saw that the fluorescent panels toward the front of the store were dark; only a few at the back were lighted, but when he tried the door, it was unlocked.
        Inside, a single clerk waited at the cashiers' counter. He was black, in his late thirties, as small and wiry as a jockey, with a moustache and goatee. Behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes were as large as those of a persistent interrogator in a dream of inquisition.
        “Biographies?” Joe asked.
        Coming out from behind the counter, the clerk pointed to the right rear corner of the store, where light glowed beyond ranks of shadowed shelves.
        As he headed deeper into the maze of books, Joe heard the front door being locked behind him.
        In the biography aisle, another black man was waiting. He was a huge slab of ebony-and appeared capable of being an irresistible force or an immovable object, whichever was required. His face was as placid as that of Buddha, but his eyes were like Kansas windows with views of tornadoes.
        He said, “Assume the position.”
        At once Joe knew he was dealing with a cop or former cop.
        Obediently, he faced a wall of books, spread his legs wide, leaned forward with both hands against the shelves, and stared at the spines of the volumes in front of him. One in