The Face

Rubbermaid chamber pots, Fric earlier in the day had claimed this as his deep and special secret place. With Moloch in the house, he now sat powwow-style, legs crossed, in this bubinga bunker, which his guardian angel apparently believed would save him from that eater of children.
        [570] He had been in his hideaway less than two minutes, listening to his heart mimic runaway horses, when he heard something other than the stampede in his chest. Footsteps. Ascending to the gazebo.
        More likely than not, it was Mr. Truman, looking for him. Mr. Truman. Not Moloch. Not a child-eating beast with baby bones in its teeth. Just Mr. Truman.
        On a tour, the footsteps circled the platform, first moving toward the concealed panel, then away. But then toward it again.
        Fric held his breath.
        The footsteps halted. The tongue-and-groove planks creaked overhead as the man above shifted his weight.
        Fric silently poured out the staleness in his lungs, silently eased fresh air in, and held this breath, as well.
        The creaking stopped and was followed by subtle sounds: a faint brushing, a soft scrape, a click.
         Now would be a bad time for an asthma attack.
        Fric almost screamed out loud at himself for being so stupid as to think such a stupid thought at a dangerous time like this. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
        Only in movies did the asthmatic kid or the diabetic kid, or the epileptic kid, suffer a seizure at the worst of all possible moments. Only in movies, not in real life. This was real life or at least something that passed for it.
        Did he feel an itchiness between his shoulders? Spreading to the back of his neck? A real itch would be a sign of an impending asthma attack. An imaginary itch would be a sign that he was a totally lame, lily-livered, hopelessly feeble geek.
        Directly above him, the secret panel slid open.
        He found himself face to face with Moloch, who was evidently smarter than Fric’s guardian angel: a freckle-faced guy with jackal eyes and a big grin. No splinters of baby bones in his teeth.
        [571] Brandishing the six-inch blade that he had requisitioned from Mr. Hachette’s cutlery drawer, Fric warned, “I’ve got a knife.”
        “And I’ve got this,” said Moloch, producing a tiny aerosol can the size of a pepper-spray container. He blasted Fric in the face with a cold stream of stuff that tasted like nutmeg and that smelled like undiluted civet probably smelled.

CHAPTER 93
        
        AT NIGHT, THE CONSERVATORY WAS magically illuminated: every golden nimbus, starry twinkle, and silken scarf of faux moonlight as enchanting as the finest Hollywood wizards of stage lighting could design. After sunset, with the flip of a switch, a mere pocket jungle became this tropical Shangri-la.
        Entering, pistol in a two-hand grip, Ethan didn’t call out to Fric. The blip he’d seen on the motion-sensor display in the library might not have been the boy.
        He was unable to imagine how the estate grounds and then the house could have been penetrated without setting off numerous alarms. But the idea of an intruder getting into Palazzo Rospo astonished him far less than other things he’d witnessed lately.
        The loose pebbles in the decomposed-granite pathways crunched under him, making a stealthy search impossible. He stepped carefully to minimize noise. The tiny, shifting bits of stone provided unstable footing.
        He didn’t like the shadows, either. Shadows, shadows everywhere in layered complexity, calculated for dramatic effect, unnatural and therefore double deceiving.
        Nearing the center of the jungle, Ethan heard a strange sound, [573] thhhup, and then again, thhhup, and heard greenery click-rustle-snap, but he didn’t realize that he was being shot at until the bole of a palm tree took a bullet inches in front of his face, spraying him with flecks of its green tissue.
        He dropped fast and flat. He rolled off the path and crawled through ferns and pittosporum, through mimulus drenched with red-purple flowers, into sheltering gloom where he was grateful for all shadows, natural and not.

        The jakes arrived before the ambulance, and after Hazard briefed them and told them where to send the paramedics, he went upstairs to look after Maxwell Dalton.
        The withered man, more hideously emaciated on third sight than he had appeared to be on first and