In an Evil Time

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He sat in the dark Lexus, on the dark street, waiting dry-mouthed for the man he was going to kill. It was twenty of eleven by the radium dial of his watch; he’d been here an hour and still no sign of Rakubian. Habitual, every minute of the bastard’s time jealously budgeted, his weeknight regimen as strict as an army recruit’s... he should have been home long ago.

Hollis shifted position to ease cramped muscles, the pressure in his bladder. In the cold darkness he could hear the beat of his heart, or imagined he could. Steady. Accelerated but steady. One hand lay quiet in his lap, the other resting on the Colt Woodsman on the seat beside him. Palms and underarms sweat-free. Yet the dryness threatened to close his throat, and he could feel his nerves squirming inside him like a nest of night crawlers.

Across the curving, mist-choked street Rakubian’s house loomed black and fuzzy-edged behind its front tangle of yew trees and shrubbery. Small place by St. Francis Wood standards, Spanish style, set well back from the street and well apart from its neighbors. A line of eucalyptus ran along the west side, their elongated shadows thick as unstirred ink. One advantage there. The fog was another. It was dense enough to blur lights and distort shapes, hide him when he crossed to the house and back almost as effectively as it hid him now behind the opaque film of wetness it had laid over the windshield.

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