Page 33 of Close Up

The gunfire has finally ceased but he had been counting the shots. Six in all. Fulton Gage is out of ammunition.

“She’s mine.” Gage’s voice came out of the fog. “She belongs to me. She betrayed me and she will pay for that. But you die first because you’re the reason she left me.”

“She left you because you hurt her.”

“I punished her when she deserved it. She knows that.”

“You’re not only violent, you’re insane,” Nick says. He keeps his voice neutral. Clinical. Stating facts. That was how you manipulated a man like Fulton Gage.

“She made me lose my temper. She pushed and pushed until I snapped.”

“I understand,” Nick says. “You have no self-control.”

“That’s not the way it is. She made me hurt her.”

“So she is more powerful than you? Interesting...”

There is a click. Nick knows that Gage has just discovered that there are no more bullets in his pistol. Now he will panic and make a run for the stairwell.

“You’re out of ammunition, Gage,” Nick says.

Suddenly Patricia is on the roof, too. She isn’t supposed to be there. Gage has her.

“Looks like she dies first, after all,” Gage says.

Now Nick understands the enormity of the miscalculation. Gage is going to throw Patricia off the roof...

Nick awoke from the dream on a sudden shock of acute awareness that told him something was wrong. He did not question the sensation. He had made that mistake a few times early on in his career and again in his nonmarriage. Things had not ended well on any of those previous occasions, so he took such warnings seriously.

It was not enough to be alarmed, however. He required more information.

For a few seconds he lay motionless on Vivian’s sofa. He tried to open all of his senses for clues to the source of whatever it was that had awakened him. Rex had been curled up on the rug in front of the sofa but he was on his feet now, gazing into the deep shadows of the hall.

There were no telltale creaks of the floorboards. No click of a door lock or a draft of cold air indicating an intruder had pried open a window. But something had changed.

Rex whined softly. He glanced at Nick and then turned his attention back to the hallway.

Nick swung his legs over the edge of the sofa, pulled on histrousers, and got to his feet. He ignored the stiffness in his muscles—the sofa was not very large—and then he picked up the gun he had left on the coffee table.

Cautiously, using moonlight as his guide, he made his way through the jumble of equipment cases, cords, and other photography paraphernalia that littered the living room. He told himself he was probably lucky that Vivian had left the couch and the coffee table in the space. Otherwise he would have been sleeping on the floor.

He started down the hall. When he reached Vivian’s door he paused and listened again. Silence.

Rex padded on ahead into the darkened kitchen. The dog was interested in the rear door of the house, not the front entrance. If there was someone out there he was in the backyard.

Nick flattened his back against the wall beside the kitchen window and twitched the shade aside. The porch light was on but the yellow glow of the bulb did not penetrate far into the darkness. The backyard lay in shadows.

Beyond the yard was the wide esplanade that bordered the beach. In the distance, strings of lights illuminated the pier.

Rex lowered his nose and sniffed at the threshold beneath the door. Nick was paying close attention, trying to read the dog’s body language, when he heard the door of Vivian’s room open. A moment later she appeared, a robe wrapped snugly around her. Her feet were clad in a pair of fluffy house slippers.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“Sorry,” he said in equally low tones. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I’m used to being awakened in the middle of the night.”

“Yeah?”

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