The Face

the stairs, silently watching him. The apple man had in his hand neither a gun nor a bag of potato chips.
        Without another word, Ethan descended the last flight to the foyer. Opening the outer door, he glanced back, but Reynerd had not followed him to the lower floor.
        Lazy no more, rain chased rain along the street, and cold wind blustered in the palms.
        Behind the steering wheel of the Expedition again, Ethan started the engine, locked the doors, switched on the heater.
        A strong double coffee at Starbucks no longer seemed adequate. He didn’t know where to go.
        Premonition. Precognition. Psychic vision. Clairvoyance. The Twilight Zone Dictionary turned its own pages in the library of his mind, but no possibility that it presented to him seemed to explain his experience.
        According to the calendar, winter would not officially arrive for another day, but it entered early in his bones. He contained a coldness unknown in southern California.
        He raised his hands to look at them, never having known them to shake like this. His fingers were pale, each nail as entirely white as the crescent at its base.
        Neither the paleness nor the tremors troubled Ethan half as much as what he saw beneath the fingernails of his right hand. A dark substance, reddish-black.
        He stared at this material for a long time, reluctant to take steps to determine if it was real or hallucinated.
        Finally he used the thumbnail of his left hand to scrape out a small portion of the matter that was trapped under the nail of his right thumb. The stuff proved slightly moist, gummy.
        Hesitantly, he brought the smear to his nose. He sniffed it once, [36] twice, and though the scent was faint, he didn’t need to smell it again.
        Ethan had blood under all five nails of his right hand. With a certainty seldom given to any man who understood the world to be a most uncertain place, he knew that this would prove to be his own blood.

CHAPTER 4
        
        PALOMAR LABORATORIES IN NORTH Hollywood occupied a sprawling single-story concrete-slab building with such small and widely spaced windows and with such a low and slightly pitched sheet-metal roof that it resembled a bunker in the storm.
        The medical-lab division of Palomar analyzed blood samples, Pap smears, biopsies, and other organic materials. In their industrial division, they performed chemical analyses of every variety for both private-sector and government clients.
        Each year, fans of the Face sent over a quarter of a million pieces of mail to him, mostly in care of his studio, which forwarded weekly batches of this correspondence to the publicity firm that responded to it in the star’s name. Among those letters were gifts, including more than a few homemade foods: cookies, cakes, fudge. Fewer than one in a thousand fans might be sufficiently deranged to send poisoned brownies, but Ethan nevertheless operated on the better-safe-than-sorry principle: All foodstuffs must be disposed of without sampling by anyone.
        Occasionally, when a homemade treat from a fan arrived with a particularly suspicious letter, the edible goodie would not be at once [38] destroyed but would be passed along to Ethan for a closer look. If he suspected contamination, he brought the item here to Palomar to be analyzed.
        When a total stranger could work up sufficient hatred to attempt to poison the Face, Ethan wanted to know that the bastard existed. He subsequently cooperated with authorities in the poisoner’s hometown to bring whatever criminal charges might be sustained in court.
        Now, proceeding first to the public reception lounge, he signed a form authorizing them to draw his blood. Lacking a doctor’s order for tests, he paid cash for the analyses he required.
        He requested a basic DNA profile. “And I want to know if any drugs are present in my body.”
        “What drugs are you taking?” the receptionist asked.
        “Nothing but aspirin. But I want you to test for every possible substance, in case I’ve been drugged without my knowledge.”
        Perhaps in North Hollywood they were accustomed to encounters with full-blown paranoids. The receptionist didn’t roll her eyes, raise an eyebrow, or in any other way appear to be surprised to hear him suggest that he might be the victim of a wicked conspiracy.
        The medical technician who drew his sample was a