The Face

disorder of the world outside. It was instead a desperate denial of just how apocalyptic was the chaos that churned within him.
        By the time that Hazard reached the side of the bed, each breath he drew further sickened him. Weeks’ worth of dried sweats, rancid body oils, and festering bedsores raised a nauseating stench.
        Nevertheless, Hazard gently took hold of the nearer of the [551] stranger’s fragile hands. The man had insufficient strength to lift his arm, and he could barely squeeze his rescuer’s hand in return.
        “It’s all right now. I’m a cop.”
        The stranger regarded him as though he might be a mirage.
        Although instinct had failed Hazard a minute ago in the hall, it served him well now. He was surprised, but then at once not, to hear himself say, “Professor Dalton? Maxwell Dalton?”
        The widening of the withered man’s rheumy eyes confirmed his identification.
        When the prisoner strove to speak, his voice proved to be so thin, so dry, so cracked and reedy, that Hazard had to bend close to puzzle meaning from the words: “Laputa … killed my wife … daughter.”
        “Rachel? Emily?” Hazard asked.
        Dalton squeezed his eyes shut in grief, bit his lower lip, and nodded shakily.
        “I don’t know what he told you, but they’re not dead,” Hazard assured him.
        Dalton’s eyes opened as snap-quick as camera shutters.
        “I saw them only today, at your home,” Hazard continued. “Only a few hours ago. They’re sick with worry about you, but they’ve not been harmed.”
        For a moment the prisoner appeared reluctant to believe this news, as though convinced that it must be yet another cruelty with which he would be tormented. Then he discerned truth in Hazard’s forthright stare. His bony hand tightened slightly on his rescuer’s, and from somewhere his desiccated body found the moisture to flood his eyes with tears.
        As moved as he was nauseated, Hazard examined the dangling infusion bag, the drip line, the cannula inserted in Dalton’s vein. He wanted to strip all this away, for surely none of it was doing the man good. But he was afraid of inadvertently harming Dalton. This had best be left to the paramedics.
        [552] Originally, Hazard had entered the house with the intention of conducting an illegal and clandestine search, after which he would have closed up and gone away to ponder what evidence he found, having left said evidence behind with no slightest proof of his visit. That plan no longer worked. He had to make a 911 call, and quickly.
        Judges existed, however, and not merely a few, who would set Vladimir Laputa free because Dalton had been found during an illegal search, made without warrant or due cause. Furthermore, with Blonde in the Pond still ahead of him, Hazard could afford no censures or disciplinary actions on his Ten Card.
        “I’ll get you out of here,” he promised the prisoner. “But I need a couple minutes.”
        Dalton nodded.
        “I’ll be right back.”
        Reluctantly the withered man let go of his hand.
        At the threshold, about to leave the room, Hazard halted, retreated from the doorway, and drew his handgun. When he ventured into the upstairs hall, he went with caution.
        He remained wary all the way down the stairs, through the ground floor, and into the kitchen. He closed the back door that earlier he had left open as an escape route. He locked it.
        Adjacent to the kitchen was a small laundry room. The door at the end of the laundry opened into the garage.
        No cars stood in the garage. A sodden pile of clothes lay on the concrete floor: the outfit that Laputa had been wearing when he had come home swaggering like a tough guy.
        Here also were good tools in drawers and racked on a pegboard. They were as clean and as obsessively ordered as the Lalique-crystal collection in the living room.
        Hazard selected a claw hammer and raced back upstairs, glad that he had turned on so many lights when he’d first come into the house.
        He was relieved to see that the prisoner was still alive. Dalton [553] appeared to be on the trembling edge of expiration, as if he might slip away at any moment.
        Hazard put his gun on the floor and used the claw hammer to pry nails from one of the thick sheets of particle board with which Laputa had sealed off the windows. They were three-inch spikes and