The Face

otherwise.
        Stopping beside the sofa, not six feet away, Reynerd said, “You work for the Face, don’t you?”
        At a disadvantage in the armchair, Ethan pretended confusion. “For who?”
        When the hand came out of the bag, it held a gun.
        A licensed private investigator and certified bodyguard, Ethan had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Except in the company of Channing Manheim, when he armed himself as a matter of routine, he seldom bothered to strap on his piece.
        Reynerd’s weapon was a 9-mm pistol.
        This morning, disturbed by the eye in the apple and by the wolfish grin that this man had revealed on the security tape, Ethan had put on his shoulder holster. He hadn’t expected to need a gun, not really, and in fact he’d felt a little silly for packing it without greater provocation. Now he thanked God that he was armed.
        “I don’t understand,” he said, trying to look equally bewildered and afraid.
        “I’ve seen your picture,” Reynerd told him.
        Ethan glanced toward the open door, the hallway beyond.
        “I don’t care who sees or hears,” Reynerd told him. “It’s all over anyhow, isn’t it?”
        “Listen, if my brother George did something to piss you off,” Ethan said, trying to buy a little time.
        Reynerd wasn’t selling. Even as Ethan dropped the notepad and [30] reached for the 9-mm Glock under his jacket, the apple man shot him point-blank in the gut.
        For a moment, Ethan felt no pain, but only for a moment. He rocked back in the chair and gaped at the gush of blood. Then agony.
        He heard the first shot, but he didn’t hear the second. The slug hammered him dead-center in the chest.
        Everything in the black-and-white apartment went black.
        Ethan knew the birds still gathered on the walls, watching him die. He could feel the tension of their wings frozen in flight.
        He heard a dicelike rattle again. Not rain against the window this time. His breath rattling in a broken throat.
        No Christmas.

CHAPTER 3
        
        ETHAN OPENED HIS EYES. Traveling far too fast for a residential street, a cherry-red Ferrari Testarossa exploded past, casting up a plume of dirty water from the puddled pavement.
        Through the side window of the Expedition, the apartment house blurred and tweaked into strange geometry, like a place in a nightmare.
        As if he’d sustained an electrical shock, he twitched violently, and inhaled with the desperation of a drowning man. The air tasted sweet, fresh and sweet and clean. He exhaled explosively.
        No gut wound. No chest wound. His hair wasn’t wet with rain.
        His heart knocked, knocked like a lunatic fist on the padded door of a padded room.
        Never in his life had Ethan Truman experienced a dream of such clarity, such intensity, nor any nightmare so crisply detailed as the experience in Reynerd’s apartment.
        He consulted his wristwatch. If he’d been asleep, he had been dreaming for no more than a minute.
        He couldn’t have explored the convolutions of such an elaborate dream in a mere minute. Impossible.
        [32] Rain washed the last of the murky residue off the glass. Beyond the dripping fronds of the phoenix palms, the apartment house waited, no longer distorted, but now forever strange.
        When he’d leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, the better to formulate his approach to Rolf Reynerd, Ethan had not been in the least sleepy. Or even tired.
        He was certain that he had not taken a one-minute nap. He had not taken a five-second nap, for that matter.
        If the first Ferrari had been a figment of a dream, the second sports car suggested that reality now followed precisely in the path of the nightmare.
        Although his explosive breathing had quieted, his heart clumped with undiminished speed, galloping after reason, which set an even faster pace, steadily receding beyond reach.
        Intuition told him to leave now, to find a Starbucks and have a large cup of coffee. Order a blend strong enough to dissolve the swizzle stick.
        Given time and distance from the event, he would discover the key that unlocked the mystery and allowed understanding. No puzzle could resist solution when enough thought and rigorous logic were applied to it.
        Even though years of police work had taught him to trust his intuition as a baby