Free Key to Midnight by Dean Koontz

situation—perhaps the result of a head injury or even psychological trauma. Of course, amnesia didn’t explain where and why she had come up with an alternate past history.
    He looked at his watch: 4:30.
    At six-thirty he would take his nightly stroll through the bustling Gion district to the Moonglow Lounge for drinks and dinner—and for that important conversation with Joanna. He had time for a leisurely soak in the tub, and he looked forward to balancing the steamy heat with sips of cold beer.
    After fetching an ice-cold bottle of Asahi from the softly humming bar refrigerator, he left the drawing room and went halfway across the bedroom before he stopped dead, aware that something was wrong. He surveyed his surroundings, tense, baffled. The chambermaid had straightened the pile of paperbacks, magazines, and newspapers on the dresser, and she’d remade the bed while he’d been gone. The drapes were open; he preferred to keep them drawn. What else? He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary—and certainly nothing sinister. But something was wrong. Call it intuition: He’d experienced it before, and usually he’d found it worth heeding.
    Alex set the bottle of Asahi on the vanity bench and approached the bathroom with caution. He put his left hand against the heavy swinging door, listened, heard nothing, hesitated, then pushed the door inward and stepped quickly across the threshold.
    The late-afternoon sun pierced a frosted window high in one wall, and the bathroom glowed with golden light. He was alone.
    This time his sixth sense had misled him. A false alarm. He felt slightly foolish.
    He was jumpy. And no wonder. Although lunch with Joanna had been immensely enjoyable, the rest of the day had been a grinding emery wheel that had put a sharp edge on his nerves: her irrational flight from the Korean at Nijo Castle; her description of the oft-repeated nightmare; and his growing belief that the unexplained disappearance of Lisa Jean Chelgrin had been an event with powerful causes and effects, with layers of complex and mysterious meaning that went far deeper than anything that he had uncovered or even imagined at the time it had happened. He had a right to be jumpy.
    Alex stripped off his shirt and put it in the laundry bag. He brought a magazine and the bottle of beer from the other room and put them on a low utility table that he had moved next to the bath. He bent down at the tub, turned on the water, adjusted the temperature.
    In the bedroom again, he went to the walk-in closet to choose a suit for the evening. The door was ajar. As Alex pulled it open, a man leapt at him from the darkness beyond. Dorobo. A burglar. The guy was Japanese, short, stocky, muscular, very quick. He swung a fistful of wire shirt hangers. The bristling cluster of hooked ends struck Alex in the face, could have blinded him, and he cried out, but the hangers spared his sight, stung one cheek, and rained around him in a burst of dissonant music.
    Counting on the element of surprise, the stranger tried to push past Alex to the bedroom door, but Alex clutched the guy’s jacket and spun him around. Unbalanced, they fell against the side of the bed, then to the floor, with the intruder on top.
    Alex took a punch in the ribs, another, and a punch in the face. He wasn’t in a good position to use his own fists, but he heaved hard enough to pitch off his assailant.
    The stranger rolled into the vanity bench and knocked it over. Cursing continuously in Japanese, he scrambled to his feet.
    Still on the floor, dazed only for an instant, Alex seized the intruder’s ankle. The stocky man toppled to the floor, kicking as he fell. Alex howled as a kick caught his left elbow. Sharp pain crackled the length of his arm and brought a stinging flood of tears to his eyes.
    The Japanese was on his feet again, moving through the open doorway, into the drawing room, toward the suite’s entrance foyer.
    Blinking away the involuntary tears that blurred his