House of Secrets - v4 Read Free Page B

pole deftly, catching it just at the base.
    In ten seconds he was on the back patio.
    Through the sliding glass door he could now see what he had been hearing. His breath was pouring furiously from his nostrils like that of an enraged dragon as he tried the door. It was locked. The ghostlike figures on the bed didn’t seem to notice a damn thing except themselves.
    The
crash
of the horseshoe pole breaking through the glass changed all that.
    Smallwood brought the iron rod down on the glass door in a swift series of blows, sweeping it in a circular motion to snap away the hanging shards. Joy was screaming. The two bodies scrambled in place, kicking the white sheets into a pile.
    Smallwood reached inside the broken glass to flip the lock. Jerking the door open, he charged forward, the iron bar lifted over his head. His naked targets were stranded on the bed. Joy the Disappointment and some irrelevant quivering dark-haired man.
    Robert Smallwood had never felt more alive or more important than he did as his arm — itself feeling long and liquid and, in such a peculiar way, sublime — began its powerful descent.
    He hoped the stars were watching.
     
     
     

 
     
    “ H oly Josef!”
    Dimitri Bulakov’s beer bottle fell from the bedside table and glug-glug-glugged its contents onto the floor.
    “Child of Jesus,” Dimitri muttered, lurching closer to the laptop. His hands went to the headset, pressing the miniature speakers hard to his ears.
    The laptop showed a split screen. Earlier in the day, Dimitri Bulakov had planted three fiber-optic cameras in the bedroom of the house atop the nearby hill. Two of the slender devices were located in the brass casing on the overhead fan, spaced in such a fashion that should one of the fan blades come to a stop beneath one camera, the second camera would still have a clear view of the bed below. The third filament had been run along the power cord leading from the wall outlet to the bedside clock radio and secured against the bottom of the appliance by good old-fashioned chewing gum, Dimitri’s proud marriage of high and low tech. He had learned this trick at the last full-time job he had held, that is if two and a half months could be considered full-time. Dimitri Bulakov knew electronics, but what he did not know was cooperation and playing well with others. It was the temper thing, and the drinking thing. One thing or another. Often both.
    The bedside filament also collected the audio. Both the images and audio routed wirelessly through a feeder MacBook that Dimitri had hidden under the shoes on the floor in the bedroom’s closet, and from there to Dimitri’s laptop in Room 5 of the Sunset Motel, half a mile’s distance away. With a sequence of keystrokes, Dimitri could bring to his screen either the image of the entire bed as seen from the overhead fan locations, or the tight bedside close-up on the pair of pillows. Or both images at once — hence the split screen.
    This was the configuration on Dimitri’s monitor — on the left side, two pale bodies as seen from above, contorting, and the woman’s face on the right side — when the jarring sound of breaking glass abruptly sounded. The woman’s screams assaulted Dimitri’s eardrums as the couple on the bed swiftly separated. A figure moved into the frame of the overhead shot.
    Which was when Dimitri’s beer bottle fell.
    The figure could have been a bear, it seemed so large. A white blur bled across the screen as limbs and torsos scrambled crablike up against the wall. Dimitri watched as the naked man lurched toward the intruder. But the intruder swung his arm, and the man pitched sideways and fell from the bed. The woman’s screams intensified.
    “No! Please! Robbie! No!”
    The intruder was holding something long and thin in his hand. In the dreamlike image on the screen, it looked to Dimitri like a wand. With a
crack
that Dimitri could plainly hear, the weapon landed on the woman’s face. Her screams died