The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska, #5)(14)

No wonder he couldn’t sleep.

Tic tac tic tac. The sound was relentless.

Then came a sound out of time, out of place. A sound that seemed to come from another part of the house. Downstairs.

He sat up in the bed and strained to listen. They lived in a lovely old established neighborhood. But there were plenty of criminals in the run-down parts of the city. Crime was no longer a rarity in Minneapolis. Lucien blamed Minnesota’s overly generous public assistance programs for ruining the work ethic of the poor minorities.

He’d had a home security system installed years ago. Sondra had the jewelry she had inherited from her mother. He had a valuable collection of Asian antiques he had accumulated over the years, most notably artifacts of generations of samurai and ninja warriors. Had Sondra forgotten to set the alarm after dinner? It was her responsibility. He often worked late in his study, too engrossed to be bothered with household details.

Tic tac tic tac tic tac . . . thump.

Or was it just the wind? There was a shutter loose on one of the study windows. Someone from the handyman service was supposed to have come four days ago to fix it, but it had been banging against the house earlier in the evening. He had snapped at Sondra for hiring the incompetent fools in the first place.

She had originally called them to clean the rain gutters and put on the storm windows. The service was unreliable, its workers rude. Lucien wrote a scathing review of their work on Yelp after the storm window fiasco. The owner promised to rectify the situation in a timely fashion, but they had yet to show up. They were in no hurry to do a job for which they would not get paid. Now the shutter, which they had probably purposely loosened in the first place, would drive him mad the rest of the night with the syncopated combination of bang, thump, together with the tic tac tic tac tic tac of the freezing rain on the windows.

He wasn’t going to get a minute’s sleep, and first thing in the morning he had yet another meeting with Foster, the department chair; the director of undergraduate studies; and Hiroshi Ito, professor emeritus. He needed to be sharp, to present himself at his best. The decision on the head of East Asia studies would be made before the Thanksgiving break. He would go into the meeting with confidence, sure in the knowledge that he had an ace to play that Ken Sato could never trump, but still, he wanted his sleep. He wanted to look as confident as he felt.

Maybe if he closed all the doors between the stairs and the study, the sound would be muffled enough not to bother him. It was on the other side of the house from the master bedroom.

Giving his sleeping wife another resentful glare, he threw the covers back and slipped out of bed. A creature of habit, he put on his dressing gown, adjusting the sleeves of his pajamas so the cuffs showed and tying the belt in a tidy knot. He paused at the head of the stairs, just in front of his pair of eighteenth-century Qing dynasty carved rosewood chairs and the spotlighted Qing period portrait on silk. He paused and listened.

Thump bump, thump bump, thump . . .

Yes, the shutter. After his meeting tomorrow he would take a moment to go on Yelp and write another scathing review of the handyman service.

He made his way down the stairs with the bearing of a king, the amber glow from the tiny art spotlight floating ahead of him, ever dimmer and more diffuse. He didn’t bother turning on a light at the bottom of the stairs. The white of the streetlight at the end of the block came in through the transom above the front door. Turning, he made his way toward the back of the house. His study was just beyond the dining room. He would shut the study door, and shut the heavy pocket doors to the dining room on his way back.

Bang thump . . . bang thump . . . bang thump . . .

The sleet tapping on the windows seemed louder to him down here for some reason. His level of irritation rose as he realized he must have neglected to turn off the lamp in the study. The glow came into the dining room from across the far hallway. The dining room seemed cold and drafty. The diaphanous white curtain at the French doors to the patio drifted into the room, fluttering like a ghost in a movie.

The chill he felt then came from within.

One of the doors stood open a foot or so—just enough for a person to slip inside.

Lucien stood frozen, unable to think, unable to move.

The dark figure came from the direction of his study. A ninja! he thought in astonishment. A silent intruder dressed entirely in black, even the hands covered; even the head was covered in black, only the eyes showing. Eyes looking straight at him, shining black, like an animal’s.

Lucien drew a breath to call out, but no sound came out of his suddenly bone-dry mouth. It felt as if the walls of his throat were stuck together, cutting off his air, as if an unseen hand had him by the neck.

In the next instant, the violence began like a sudden, terrible storm. The ninja came at him, and was on him before he could do more than stagger back and slam into the dining room table. The strength and power of the assailant was overwhelming. He felt like a frail old man, like his bones would snap and crumble to dust beneath the other’s strength.

And they did. His collarbone shattered beneath the first strike. He could raise only one arm up to protect his head, and it went numb as he was struck on the wrist.

The attacker’s fists were like iron, raining down blow after blow. Lucien scrambled to get away, falling toward the open patio door, landing on one knee on the hardwood floor. His kneecap exploded with pain. Even as he tried to crawl for the door, he looked back over his shoulder.