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window this time. His breath rattling in a broken throat.
        No Christmas.

CHAPTER 3
        
        ETHAN OPENED HIS EYES. Traveling far too fast for a residential street, a cherry-red Ferrari Testarossa exploded past, casting up a plume of dirty water from the puddled pavement.
        Through the side window of the Expedition, the apartment house blurred and tweaked into strange geometry, like a place in a nightmare.
        As if he’d sustained an electrical shock, he twitched violently, and inhaled with the desperation of a drowning man. The air tasted sweet, fresh and sweet and clean. He exhaled explosively.
        No gut wound. No chest wound. His hair wasn’t wet with rain.
        His heart knocked, knocked like a lunatic fist on the padded door of a padded room.
        Never in his life had Ethan Truman experienced a dream of such clarity, such intensity, nor any nightmare so crisply detailed as the experience in Reynerd’s apartment.
        He consulted his wristwatch. If he’d been asleep, he had been dreaming for no more than a minute.
        He couldn’t have explored the convolutions of such an elaborate dream in a mere minute. Impossible.
        [32] Rain washed the last of the murky residue off the glass. Beyond the dripping fronds of the phoenix palms, the apartment house waited, no longer distorted, but now forever strange.
        When he’d leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, the better to formulate his approach to Rolf Reynerd, Ethan had not been in the least sleepy. Or even tired.
        He was certain that he had not taken a one-minute nap. He had not taken a five-second nap, for that matter.
        If the first Ferrari had been a figment of a dream, the second sports car suggested that reality now followed precisely in the path of the nightmare.
        Although his explosive breathing had quieted, his heart clumped with undiminished speed, galloping after reason, which set an even faster pace, steadily receding beyond reach.
        Intuition told him to leave now, to find a Starbucks and have a large cup of coffee. Order a blend strong enough to dissolve the swizzle stick.
        Given time and distance from the event, he would discover the key that unlocked the mystery and allowed understanding. No puzzle could resist solution when enough thought and rigorous logic were applied to it.
        Even though years of police work had taught him to trust his intuition as a baby trusts its mother, he switched off the engine and got out of the Expedition.
        No argument: Intuition was an essential survival tool. Honesty with himself, however, was more important than heeding intuition. In a spirit of honesty, he had to admit that he wanted to drive away not to find a place and time for quiet reflection, not to engage in Sherlockian deduction, but because fear had him in a pincer grip.
        Fear must never be allowed to win. Surrender to it once, and you were finished as a cop.
        Of course he wasn’t a cop anymore. He had left the force more [33] than a year ago. The work that had given his life meaning while Hannah was alive had meant steadily less to him in the years after her death. He had ceased to believe that he could make a difference in the world. He had wanted to withdraw, to turn his back on the ugly reality of the human condition so evident in the daily work of a homicide detective. Channing Manheim’s world was as far as he could get from reality and still earn a living.
        Although he didn’t carry a badge, although he might not be a cop in any official sense, he remained a cop in essence. We are what we are, no matter what we might wish to be, or pretend to be.
        Hands shoved in the pockets of his leather jacket, shoulders hunched as if the rain were a burden, he dashed across the street to the apartment house.
        Dripping, he entered the foyer. Mexican-tile floor. Elevator. Stairs. As it should be. As it had