The Face

pulled loose reluctantly, with bark and screech. He tore the board away from the window and stood it aside, against the wall.
        The pleated drape had been captured between board and window. Although wrinkled and dusty, it was just the thing with which to wipe his fingerprints off the hammer before he dropped it on the floor.
        This was a back bedroom only in the sense that it was farthest from the stairs. Like the master bedroom, it faced the front of the house. Through the window, he could see his sedan parked across the street.
        Returning to the bed, Hazard said, “I came in here on a hunch, without a warrant, and now I’ve got to clean up the situation to save my ass and to be sure we nail Laputa. You understand?”
        “Yes,” Dalton rasped.
        “So what you’re gonna say happened is, he was so sure of your total disability, of your inability to even make a sound anyone could hear outside, that the bastard took that board off this evening just to torment you with the sight of freedom. Can you sell that?”
        On an arid whisper of breath, brittle words scraped and grated from Dalton’s throat. “Laputa said… he’ll kill me… tonight.”
        “All right. Okay. Then it makes a little sense that he might do this.”
        From the nightstand, Hazard snatched up an aerosol can of pine-scented disinfectant. The container felt half full, heavy enough.
        “Next,” he told Dalton, “you have to tell them that you reached way down inside yourself, to your deepest reserves of strength, and somehow you found the will, the energy, the anger necessary to pull this can off the nightstand and to pitch it at that window.”
        [554] “Can do,” Dalton promised shakily, though he looked as if he could do nothing more than blink his eyes.
        “The can smashed through the window and rolled down the porch roof as I was coming up the front walk. I heard you feebly calling for help, so I forced entry.”
        The story sucked. The first officers on the scene would know that it was bogus, but in light of Dalton’s ordeal, this would be a flavor of bogus that they could swallow.
        By the time Laputa found himself in a courtroom, Dalton would have largely recovered, and the jury would not know just how horribly weak he had been on the night of his rescue. Time could give this shabby story enough luster to make it look attractive.
        Shifting his eyes from the open doorway to Hazard , Dalton said anxiously, “Hurry,” as if he feared Laputa’s imminent return.
        Hazard threw the can of disinfectant at the window. The glass shattered with a satisfying crash.

CHAPTER 90
        
        HAVING FURTHER SEARED THE ROOTS OF THE potted palm with his mighty Manheim urine, which he could probably have bottled and sold to his father’s craziest fans, Fric shopped the library shelves for a book, mindful that Mr. Truman had said not to dawdle.
        In case they didn’t make s’mores and sit on the floor telling scary stories, he took the trouble of finding a book that he might actually enjoy reading. He figured that he would be awake most of this long night, and not because he was excited about Christmas Eve coming in just two days. If he didn’t have a book to pass the time, he would go as crazy as Barbra Streisand’s two-headed cat.
        He had just found a novel that looked good when he heard noise overhead: a shimmering, bright music much like the soft ringing of a hundred tiny wind chimes all agitated at once.
        When he looked up at the stained-glass dome, he saw hundreds of pieces of glass break out of the leading and fall toward him.
        No. Not glass. The stained-glass mosaic remained in place across the entire arc of the thirty-foot dome. Shards of color and shadow fell out of the glass without breaking it, fell through it from the night above or maybe from somewhere immeasurably stranger than the night.
        [556] The shards fell slowly, not to the demand of gravity, and as they drifted down they changed color. As they changed color, they tumbled upon one another and fused together. As they fused together, they acquired greater dimension and a form.
        The gathered shards became Mysterious Caller, whom Fric had most recently seen pictured in the Los Angeles Times in the rose room this afternoon, whom he had last encountered life-size in the memorabilia maze the previous night. As the guardian angel had on that occasion