The Face

Laputa. Or Hector X. Only the night came face to face with him, cold and wet.
        [565] He stepped onto the front porch. As far as he could see, the sound of shattering glass hadn’t brought curious neighbors outside.
        Someone might be watching at a window. He’d taken bigger risks.
        On the porch were several potted plants. He picked a small one.
        After waiting for a car to splash past in the street, he threw the ten-pound terra-cotta pot, with plant, through one of the living-room windows. The consequent crash-clink-clatter of exploding and falling glass ought to have attracted attention in the most mind-your-own-damn-business neighborhood.
        He drew his gun and used the butt to smash out a few stubborn shards still bristling from the sash. Then he climbed inside through the window, thrusting aside the drapes, knocking over a pedestal and a vase, blundering as though he had never been in the Laputa house before.
        He had his story now. In answer to the cry for help that had come through the broken bedroom window, he had rung the bell, pounded on the door. When he received no response, he broke a window, went upstairs, and found Maxwell Dalton.
        This concoction had the texture not of smooth sweet truth but of a cow pie; however, it was his cow pie, and he was going to serve it with enthusiasm.
        After returning to the front porch by the more conventional route of the door, in consideration of Dalton’s perilous condition, Hazard used his cell phone to call 911. He gave the dispatcher his badge number and explained the situation. “I need paramedics and some jakes here sooner than soon.” As an afterthought he said, “Jakes are uniformed officers.”
        “I know,” she said.
        “I’m sorry,” he said.
        “That’s all right,” she said.
        “I need a CSU-”
        “I know,” she said.
        “I’m sorry,” he said.
        [566] “Are you new, Detective?”
        “I’m forty-one,” he said, immediately realizing that his reply qualified for a stupidity commendation.
        “I mean new to Robbery/Homicide,” she said.
        “No, ma’am. I’ve been washed so many times I shouldn’t have any color left.”
        This was, however, his first case involving a ghost, or whatever the hell Dunny Whistler might be when he could shape your dreams and disappear into a mirror. This was also his first involving a phone call from a dead hit man, and his first involving a perp who starved and tortured a victim while keeping him alive on an IV drip.
        Some days you thought you had seen everything. This wasn’t one of them.
        Having concluded the 911 call, he darted across the street in the rain, to his department sedan. He stowed the Lockaid lock-release gun under the driver’s seat.
        By the time he returned to the front porch, he heard approaching sirens.

        Coming through the library door, Ethan saw the creased and tattered photograph on the floor. Hannah. The same picture that had once stood on the desk in Dunny’s apartment, that had been torn out of the silver frame.
        The disappearance of the string of little bells from Ethan’s desk suggested that Dunny had been in Palazzo Rospo. The e-mails from Devonshire, Yorn, and Hachette had supported what the missing bells suggested. As far as Ethan was concerned, this photo qualified as hard proof.
        Dead, stone-solid-perfect dead, according to Dr. O’Brien at Our Lady of Angels, Dunny remained at large in the world, but with powers that defied reason and that defined a supernatural entity.
        [567] He had been in Palazzo Rospo.
        He was here now.
        Ethan wouldn’t have believed in a walking dead man if he hadn’t been shot point-blank in the gut, hadn’t died and been resurrected, if he hadn’t been trashed by a PT Cruiser and a truck, hadn’t been on his feet again an instant after his second death. He himself wasn’t a ghost, but after the events of the past two days, he could believe in a ghost, all right, and in lots of things to which previously he had given no credence.
        Maybe Dunny wasn’t a ghost, either. He might be something else for which Ethan had no name.
        Whatever Dunny proved to be, he was no longer merely a man. His motives, therefore, couldn’t be identified either by the process of deduction or by the intuition on which a cop relied.
        Nevertheless, Ethan sensed now that his