Free Hard Case Crime: Deadly Beloved by Max Allan Collins

and a lamp. To Dan, the place looked like a movie set from a weird arty Euro movie and he would not have blamed anybody who went screwy in this cozy crib.
    He slipped out of his sportcoat and tossed it on a chair, exposing his leather shoulder holster with .38 Police Special revolver. Then he began to check around the bedroom with his bug detector, starting with the tufted buttons on the bed’s ivory-color padded headboard.
    He was typically thorough, trying walls, floors, and furniture surfaces, but his meter registered nothing but indifference at every stop.
    He even climbed onto a chair to check the ceiling, and examined its light fixtures with both the meter and his eyes.
    No luck.
    The client’s attorney had given the go-ahead, so Dan began the only logical next step: taking the bedroom apart.
    The mattress was soon off the bed, on the floor to one side, a pile of bedding on the other. His small sharp knife ripped at upholstery and, when he got nowhere, he returned to the mattress and ripped it up, too.
    Next he removed each tufted headboard button, using the knife point to pry all of them apart. Fifteen minutes was devoted to this process, with the end result being a bunch of buttons with their coverings pried off and resting in a pile on the nightstand by the clock radio.
    Before long he was seated on the edge of the bed—actually on its springs—in the middle of a bedroom that no longer lacked character, having been turned into a first-class fucking mess.
    He got out his cell phone and used it.
    “Ms. Tree? Me....Full proctology exam. Zip.”
    “Keep looking.”
    “I can try the living room, but if Mrs. Addwatter heard voices at night? They’d be coming from in here.”
    “Nothing registers on your toys?”
    “If somebody piped voices, wirelessly, to hidden speakers in the bedroom? My bug zapper would only pick ‘em up if they were still transmitting. Which they got no reason to, now.”
    “There have to be speakers. Find them. Use the metal detector.”
    “In a room with this much metal? Anyway, Ms. Tree, those speakers’d be smaller than a gnat’s nuts. I tore this place up—”
    But Dan was interrupted by the sound of a door opening out in the other room.
    “Gotta go,” he whispered.
    And he flipped the cell phone closed and slipped it away.
    Then, quickly, he moved to the bedroom light switch and shut it off.
    Peeking around the edge of the bedroom doorway, Dan could see a male intruder in black, right down to black gloves and ski mask, moving carefully across the living room, which remained dark but for slices of light leaching in through curtained windows.
    In one fluid motion, Dan stepped in and drew the revolver from its shoulder holster.
    “Okay, Zorro,” he said. “Reach for the sky.”
    Only the intruder had an object in one hand, small but not tiny, which he hurled at Dan like a baseball, hitting him in the shoulder, hard, sending the revolver flying.
    Then the intruder was heading for the exit, fast.
    Dan, recovering quick, dashed across the room and threw a flying tackle at the guy, taking him down.
    The intruder twisted as he fell and swung a fist into the side of Dan’s face, dazing him, and Dan’s grip loosened involuntarily, enough so that the guy could scramble and squirm out of it.
    Now the intruder was on his feet and Dan wasn’t, and as Dan started up, the toe of a boot caught him in the stomach, doubling him over in an explosion of pain.
    The guy was heading toward the door, Dan incapacitated enough to pretty much guarantee him a getaway; but then the figure in black did something surprising: he paused, turned and moved quickly past Dan, who was busy trying not to puke from the kick in the gut.
    Still, Dan managed to roll over and see where the guy was headed...
    ...toward the bedroom, it seemed.
    Before getting there, though, the intruder bent to pick up whatever it was he’d tossed at Dan, just a momentary stop, but that was enough, because Dan came up behind the