The Door to December

that.'
     Dan sighed. 'You think he'll be any happier if you refuse to give me the key and then I have to go smash a window to get in that house?'
     'You wouldn't.'
     'Pick a window.'
     'This is stupid.'
     'Any window.'
     Finally, Padrakis gave him the key. Dan went down the sidewalk, through the gate, to the front door, favoring his weak knee. They must be in for more rain; the knee knew. He unlocked the door and stepped inside.
     He was in a tiny foyer. The living room on his right was dark except for the pale-grayish glow that came through the windows from the distant streetlights. To his left, back through a narrow hall, a lamp was on in a bedroom or study. It hadn't been visible from the street. Wexlersh and Manuello had apparently forgotten to switch it off when they'd finished, which was just like them: They were sloppy.
     He snapped on the hall light, stepped into the darkness on his right, found a lamp, and had a look at the living room first. It was startling. This was a modest house in a modest neighborhood, but it was furnished as though it served as a secret retreat for one of the Rockefellers. The centerpiece of the living room was a gorgeous, twelve-foot-by-twelve foot, three-inch-deep Chinese carpet with a pattern of dragons and cherry blossoms. There were midnineteenthcentury French chairs with hand-carved legs and feet, a matching sofa upholstered in a lush off-white fabric that exactly matched the color of the unpatterned sections of the carpet. Two bronze lamps with intricately worked bases had shades of crystal beads. The large coffee table was unlike anything Dan had seen before: It seemed to be entirely bronze and pewter, with a superbly etched Oriental scene on the top; the upper surface curved around to form the sides, and the sides curved under to form the legs, so that the entire piece seemed fashioned from a single flowing slab. On the walls, the landscape paintings, each ornately framed, looked like the work of a master. In the farthest corner, a period French étagère held a collection of crystal — figures, vases, bowls — and each piece was more beautiful than the one before it.
     The living-room furnishings alone had cost more than the entire modest house. Clearly, Ned Rink had been making a good living as a hired murderer. And he knew just where to put his money. If he had bought a big house in the best neighborhood, the IRS might eventually have noticed and asked how he could afford it, but here he could appear to be in modest circumstances while living in splendor.
     Dan tried to picture Rink in this room. The man had been squat and decidedly ugly. Rink's desire to surround himself with beautiful things was understandable, but sitting here, he would have looked like a roach on a birthday cake.
     Dan noticed there were no mirrors in the living room, remembered there had been none in the foyer, and suspected there would be none anywhere in the house except, of necessity, in the bathroom. He almost felt sorry for Rink, the lover of beauty who couldn't stand to look at himself.
     Fascinated, he went back down the hall to have a look at the rest of the place, heading first for the room where Wexlersh and Manuello had left a light burning. As he stepped through the door, it suddenly occurred to him that maybe the light couldn't be blamed on Wexlersh and Manuello, that maybe someone else was in the house right now, that maybe someone was there illegally in spite of the fact that George Padrakis was watching the front entrance, and at the same time he glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye as he went through the doorway, but it was too late. He turned and saw the butt of a pistol swinging at him. Because he turned into the blow, he took it square on the forehead instead of alongside his skull.
     He went down.
     Hard.
     The overhead light went out.
     He felt as if his skull had been half crushed, but he wasn't unconscious.
     Hearing movement, he realized his assailant was stepping past him toward the door. There was light in the hall, but Dan's vision was blurred, and all he could see was a shapeless form silhouetted by the glow. That silhouette seemed to be gliding up and down and going around in circles at the same time, like a figure on a carousel, and Dan knew his grip on consciousness was tenuous.
     Nevertheless, he heaved forward on