Let's All Kill Constance (Crumley Mysteries 3)

At two forty-five in the middle of the dark storm, a terrific lightning bolt rammed the earth behind my bungalow. Thunder erupted. Mice died in the walls.

Rattigan leaped upright in bed.

“Save me!” she yelled.

“Constance.” I stared through the dark. “You talking to yourself, God, or me?”

“Whoever’s listening!”

“We all are.”

She lay in my arms.

The telephone rang at three A.M., the hour when all souls die if they need to die.

I lifted the receiver.

“Who’s in bed with you?” Maggie asked from some country with no rains and no storms.

I searched Constance’s suntanned face, with the white skull lost under her summer flesh.

“No one,” I said.

And it was almost true.

Chapter Four

At six in the morning dawn was out there somewhere, but you couldn’t see it for the rain. Lightning still flashed and took pictures of the tide slamming the shore.

An incredibly big lightning bolt struck out in the street and I knew if I reached across the bed, the other side would be empty.

“Constance!”

The front door stood wide like a stage exit, with rain drumming the carpet, and the two phone books, large and small, dropped for me to find.

“Constance,” I said in dismay, and looked around.

At least she put on her dress, I thought.

I telephoned her number. Silence.

I shrugged on my raincoat and trudged up the shoreline, blinded by rain, and stood in front of her Arabian-fortress house, which was brightly lit inside and out.

But no shadows moved anywhere.

“Constance!” I yelled.

The lights stayed on and the silence with it.

A monstrous wave slammed the shore.

I looked for her footprints going out to the tide.

None.

Thank God, I thought. But then, the rain would have erased them.

“All right for you!” I yelled.