Read The Face for Free Online Page B

been.
        Stale with the greasy scent of cooked breakfast meat and pot smoke, the air felt thick, seemed to cloy like mucus in his throat.
        Two magazines lay in the tray. On each mailing label was the name George Keesner.
        Ethan climbed the stairs. His legs felt weak, and his hands trembled. At the landing, he paused to take a few deep breaths, to knit the raveled fabric of his nerve.
        The apartment house lay quiet. No voices muffled by the walls, no music for a melancholy Monday.
        He imagined that he heard the faint tick and scrape of crow claws on an iron fence, the flap and rustle of pigeons taking flight, the tick-tick-tick of insistently pecking beaks, in truth, he knew that these were only the many voices of the rain.
        Although he could feel the weight of the pistol in his shoulder holster, he reached under his coat and placed his right hand on the weapon to be certain that he had brought it. With one fingertip, he traced the checking on the grip.
        [34] He withdrew his hand from under his jacket, leaving the pistol in the holster.
        Having collected hair by hair along the back of his head, rain reached a trickling finger down the nape of his neck, teasing a shudder from him.
        When Ethan reached the second-floor hallway, he barely glanced at Apartment 2E, where George Keesner would fail to respond to either the bell or a knock, and he went directly to the door of 2B, where he lost his nerve, but only briefly.
        The apple man answered the bell almost at once. Tall, strong, self-confident, he didn’t bother engaging the security chain.
        He didn’t seem to be in the least surprised to see Ethan again or alive, as if their first encounter had never happened.
        “Is Jim here?” Ethan asked.
        “You’ve got the wrong apartment,” Reynerd said.
        “Jim Briscoe? Really? I’m sure this was his place.”
        “I’ve been here more than six months.”
        Beyond Reynerd lay a black-and-white room.
        “Six months? Has it been that long since I was here?” Ethan sounded false to himself, but he pressed forward. “Yeah, I guess that’s what it’s been, six or seven.”
        On the wall opposite the door, an owl stared with immense eyes, in expectation of a gunshot.
        Ethan said, “Hey, did Jim leave a forwarding address?”
        “I never met the previous tenant.”
        The hard shine in Reynerd’s eyes, the quick throbbing in his temple, the tightness at the corners of his mouth this time warned Ethan off.
        “Sorry to have bothered you,” he said.
        When he heard Reynerd’s television at low volume, the soft roar of the MGM lion, he hesitated no longer and headed directly for the stairs. He realized that he was retreating with suspicious haste, and he tried not to run.
        [35] Halfway down the stairs, at the landing, Ethan trusted instinct, turned, looked up, and saw Rolf Reynerd at the head of the stairs, silently watching him. The apple man had in his hand neither a gun nor a bag of potato chips.
        Without another word, Ethan descended the last flight to the foyer. Opening the outer door, he glanced back, but Reynerd had not followed him to the lower floor.
        Lazy no more, rain chased rain along the street, and cold wind blustered in the palms.
        Behind the steering wheel of the Expedition again, Ethan started the engine, locked the doors, switched on the heater.
        A strong double coffee at Starbucks no longer seemed adequate. He didn’t know where to go.
        Premonition. Precognition. Psychic vision. Clairvoyance. The Twilight Zone Dictionary turned its own pages in the library of his mind, but no possibility that it presented to him seemed to explain his experience.
        According to the calendar, winter would not officially arrive for another day, but it entered early in his bones. He contained a coldness unknown in southern