PART I
IT’S TOMORROW AGAIN
CHAPTER
1
OH NO, it’s tomorrow again.
It seemed as if I had no sooner fallen asleep than I heard banging in the house. It was loud, as disturbing as a car alarm. Persistent. Trouble too close to home?
“Shit. Dammit,” I whispered into the soft, deep folds of my pillow. “Leave me alone. Let me sleep through the night like a normal person. Go away from here.”
I reached for the lamp and knocked over a couple of books on the table. The General’s Daughter and My American Journey and Snow Falling on Cedars. The mishap jolted me fully awake.
I grabbed my service handgun from a drawer and hurried downstairs, passing the kids’ room on the way. I heard, or thought that I could hear, the sound of their soft breathing inside. I had been reading them Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit the night before. Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.
I clutched the Glock even more tightly in my right hand. The banging stopped. Then started up again. Downstairs.
I glanced at my wristwatch. It was three-thirty in the morning. Jesus, mercy. The witching hour again. The hour I often woke up without any help from outside forces, from things that go BANG, BANG, BANG in the middle of the night.
I continued down the steep, treacherous stairs. Cautious, suspicious. Suddenly, it was quiet all around me.
I made no sound myself. My skin felt electrified in the darkness. This was not the recommended way to start the day, or even the middle of the night. Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: Your father had an accident….
I continued into the kitchen—my gun drawn—where I suddenly saw the source of the banging. The day’s first mystery was solved.
My friend and partner was lurking at the back door like some high-octane version of a neighborhood hugger-mugger.
John Sampson was the noisemaker; he was the trouble in my life; the day’s first disturbance, anyway. All six foot nine, two hundred forty pounds of him. Two-John as he’s sometimes called. Man Mountain.
“There’s been a murder,” he said as I unlocked, unchained, and opened up for him. “This one is a honey, Alex.”
CHAPTER
2
“OH JESUS, JOHN. You know what time it is? You have any concept of time? Please get the hell away from my house. Go home to your own house. Bang on your own door in the middle of the night.”
I groaned and slowly shook my head back and forth, working nasty sleep-kinks out of my neck and shoulders. I wasn’t quite awake yet. Maybe this was all a bad dream that I was having. Maybe Sampson wasn’t on the back porch. Maybe I was still in bed with my pillow-lover. And maybe not.
“It can wait,” I said. “Whatever the hell it is.”
“Oh, but it can’t,” he answered, shaking his head. “Believe me, Sugar, it can’t.”
I heard a creaking noise behind me in the house. I swung around quickly, still a little spooked and jumpy.
My little girl was standing there in the kitchen. Jannie was in her electric-blue-butterfly pajamas, in her bare feet, with a frightened look on her face. The latest addition to our family, a beautiful Abyssinian cat named Rosie, trailed Jannie by a step or two. Rosie had heard the noise downstairs, too.
“What’s the matter?” Jannie asked in a sleepy whisper, rubbing her eyes. “Why are you up so early? It’s something bad, isn’t it, Daddy?”
“Go back to sleep, sweetheart,” I told Jannie in the softest voice I could manage. “It’s nothing,” I had to lie to my little girl. My work had followed me home again. “We’ll go upstairs now, so you can get your beauty sleep.”
I carried her up the stairs, softly nuzzling her cheek on the way, whispering sweet nonsense, dream talk. I tucked her in and checked on my son, Damon. Soon the two of them would be heading off to their respective schools—Damon at Sojourner Truth, Jannie at Union Street. Rosie the cat continually crisscrossed between my legs as I performed my ministrations.
Then I got dressed, and Sampson and I hurried to the early-morning crime scene in his car. We didn’t have far to go.
This one is a honey, Alex.