Free Serious Crimes (A Willows and Parker Mystery) by Laurence Gough

fifteen feet wide. A fancy double iron gate prevented anyone from getting to the door. The wattage put out by the security floods was bright enough to read a goddamn comic book, had Billy thought to bring one along.
    Billy stepped up to a small window on the right-hand side of the house. The blinds were drawn. All he could see was a faint reflection of his own face.
    He followed a concrete path around the side of the house. No windows, not even one. Security spots placed under the eaves laid overlapping pools of light on the pathway. But the neighbouring house had no side windows either. It was crazy. He was right out there in the open but there was no way anyone could see him because of the lack of windows and the fact that the hedge and concrete wall hid him from the street.
    The path sloped steeply downhill. The house loomed above him. It was a hell of a lot bigger than it looked from the front. He placed the palm of his hand, fingers splayed wide, against the wooden siding. He felt, or at least thought he felt, a barely perceptible vibration — as if the house was a huge sleeping beast.
    He continued down the path, found himself in the backyard. There was a weird effect down at the far end. Steven Spielberg stuff. Pale mist, a soft, curling vapour. Lights dancing in the air. He paused, giving his eyes a few moments to adjust to the gloom. It was a swimming pool. A goddamn heated swimming pool and the dancing lights were the subterranean lights of the pool reflected in a fence made of glass panels.
    Billy raised his eyes, looked beyond the pool. There was nothing out there. No more houses. Just a huge inky black expanse of nothingness and then, miles and miles away, a sweep of tiny glittering lights. He realized the blackness he was staring at was the ocean. Nancy Crown lived right on the water. Jesus! Billy’s mind raced. He tried to calculate how much money it would cost to own a great big slab-sided house on the water. To own waterfront . And a glass garage and a matched pair of Mercedes Benzes and a fat black BMW ragtop. And Christ knows what else. Millions, probably. And he’d dinged her for eighteen bucks and a handful of loose change. With his back to the house, he hunched his shoulders and lit a cigarette. Then he moved past the steaming pool, across thirty feet of electrically-heated slate flagstones to the wind-break of glass at the far end of the yard. The lights of the city, bright and glittering, were off to his right. He pulled hard on the cigarette, sucked smoke deep into his lungs, exhaled slowly. And then glanced down.
    His stomach lurched. The ocean was forty or maybe fifty feet below him, and it was a sheer drop.
    Billy had a thing about heights. Turned his legs to jelly. He moved away from the glass wall, squatted down on his haunches and fought to get his breathing under control.
    The house was three stories high, each level set back from the one below it. There were balconies on all three levels, and through the rising mist from the pool Billy could see matching sets of ghostly white patio furniture on each balcony. Except for the concrete posts and beams that supported the structure, the back of the house was made entirely of huge sheets of plate glass.
    No curtains had been pulled. It looked to Billy as if every light in the joint was burning. The house had an open floor plan, to take advantage of the view. From where he was sitting at the back of the yard, Billy could see most of the ground floor, about half of the second floor and a little bit of the top floor. There was no sign of life anywhere inside the house. No movement and not a sound.
    Despite the three cars parked out front, he had a hunch nobody was home. He tilted his watch towards the house, studied the luminous dials. Almost four o’clock in the morning, all the fucking lights blazing away… Maybe something went wrong with the gas stove and she was in there lying on the kitchen floor, half-dead, dying…
    Billy pictured himself