Hymn by Graham Masterton

Author:Graham Masterton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-05-11T16:55:38+00:00

Fifteen

He was deeply asleep when the door chimes rang. He opened his eyes and for a long moment he couldn’t think where he was, or what had happened to him, or even who he was.

He was lying on a chestnut-brown couch in a large rustic-style living-room. An empty red-wine bottle stood on the glass-topped table close by, with three wine-flecked glasses. On the brick-effect wall above the cabin-style fireplace hung a huge oil painting of Red Indians riding through a blizzard. It was entitled Winter in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

The doorbells chimed again. He sat up, and tried to rub his eyes, but found that his hands were thickly bound in clean bandages, like a boxer. He was wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. He looked around him, and saw his shirt neatly folded over the back of the chestnut-brown armchair opposite. It was only when he heard Kathleen calling from upstairs, ‘Lloyd! Could you get the door please?’ that he remembered exactly where he was.

He tugged on his pants and held them together with one hand because he couldn’t fasten the button with his bandaged fingers. The dark wobbly shape of a man in a blue suit was visible through the hammered glass door. Using his hand like a big white lobster-claw, Lloyd opened the door on the chain and said, ‘Who is it?’

The man turned around. It was Sergeant Houk. A little further away stood Detective Gable, with his hands in his pockets, whistling to himself. In the driveway, parked alongside Lloyd’s burned and scraped BMW, stood Sergeant’s Houk’s Buick, and behind it, a blue-and-white squad car from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, with a pale-faced young deputy sitting in it.

‘Do you mind if we come in, or are we interrupting something?’ asked Sergeant Houk.

Lloyd released the chain. ‘Surprised you knew where to find me.’

‘We didn’t know where to find you, as a matter of fact. We put out a county-wide bulletin for your car last night, and that smart young deputy happened to notice it in Mrs Kerwin’s driveway first thing this morning, and called us. There can’t be too many white BMWs in Southern California with the licence FISHEE.’

As he stepped into the house, he looked back at Lloyd’s car and commented, ‘Pretty beat up, too. Hope you’re not thinking of driving it on the highway in that condition.’

‘I had a slight accident,’ said Lloyd, trying to push the button of his pants through the buttonhole with the heel of his hand.

‘You’re not kidding. Was that how you hurt your hands?’

‘That’s right, burned them. It’s not too serious. More blisters than anything else.’

Sergeant Houk walked into the living-room and looked around at the couch with its scrumpled-up cushions and its dragged-aside blanket, the empty bottle of wine, the three glasses. ‘I didn’t know that you and Mrs Kerwin were old acquaintances,’ he remarked.

‘We’re not. We only met yesterday.’

‘Impolite to ask you how?’

‘Of course not. I went out to the Anza Borrego Desert to look at that burned-out bus, and Mrs Kerwin was there, tying on a wreath, in memory of her husband.

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