7 Steps to Midnight Read Free Page B

area. He never paid attention.
    Opening the door on the driver’s side of the Mustang, he looked inside. The cassette and change box was there across the drive-shaft hump. His cassettes: Mahler, Vaughan Williams, Copland, the
Smithsonian History of Jazz
in three cassettes. Any conceptof coincidence was gone. It was his Mustang. And it had been stolen. Taken from the plant and parked in front of his house.
    Which made approximately no sense at all.
    Still, to be certain—
proof and double proof, the only way
, he heard Uncle Harry say—he opened the glove compartment and pulled out the papers inside. A repair bill from Desert Ford, his name printed on it. The registration slip, his name on it. “Well, goddamn,” he muttered.
    What the hell was going on?
    Backing out of the Mustang, he straightened up and closed the door. Quietly. Immediately it struck him; why had he done that? What caution had impelled him? He grimaced with a sound of self-reproach. There has to be a simple explanation for this, he thought.
    He visualized himself a scientist from a fifties science-fiction film uttering those words. He always scoffed when he heard them. Still, there
did
have to be a simple explanation for this. He was in no condition to confront a major enigma at this time of the morning.
    He looked toward the house. It was dark and quiet. Was the car thief lurking in there, peering out between the shutter slats, a carving knife clutched in his…
    “Oh, shit, come on,” he berated himself. First, he had imagined Veering with a carving knife, now, some skulker in his house.
You’re not paranoid, are you?
he thought.
    He walked to the bedroom window and tried to look inside. The drapes were shut. He tried to remember whether he’d left them closed before leaving for work yesterday afternoon. He didn’t, usually. But, of course, he must have.
    He listened at the window. There was no sound. Why should there be? his mind challenged. “No reason,” he muttered a reply.
    He was on the front porch when he realized he didn’t have the key; it was on his car ring and—
    Chris felt a shiver course his back. Where was the car ring, then? If it was in the house, somebody had to have brought it in.
    Reason fought uneasiness. All right, someone took his car andput it in the driveway of his house and put the keys inside and then was driven off by some confederate.
    Who? his mind demanded.
    The front door was locked. No surprise there; he always locked it when he went to work. Still, how was he to get inside now? He frowned at himself for never having thought of it while getting Tensdale’s car and driving here.
    He walked across the lawn and opened the alley gate, moving along the sidewalk. The house was totally dark. No surprise there either. It was always dark when he returned from work.
    He stepped onto the small cement porch by the kitchen door and tried the knob. Locked. Always was; again, no surprise. He stepped off the porch and walked around to the back of the house, to the sliding glass door of the patio. Locked.
    He peered into the darkness of the family room, the kitchen beyond. Now what? He shook the sliding door to see if he could loosen the latch.
    A minute later, he was standing on the front lawn again, staring at his dark, locked house. And now? he thought. Sleep in the Mustang? The Pontiac?
    “Screw that,” he said. He looked around for a rock to break a window. But there were only redwood chips skirting the lawn. Groaning, he walked over to the Mustang and opened the door. Pushing the driver’s seat forward, he leaned into the back and felt behind the seat until his fingers closed on the putter in his golf bag. How long had it been since he’d played golf? The question drifted across his mind. Another lifetime, was the answer. Why the hell had he bought them in the first place? Wilson, he remembered. Wilson had told him it would relax his mind. Sure. And Wilson was probably the guy whose family owned the golf-ball