When Diane Hines left work the next evening she drove to her apartment. She had been sleeping in Dick Stahl’s condominium for six days now and was delighted to be there, but what she was doing wasn’t exactly living with him. Their relationship was still like a date that never ended, just got interrupted every day during their shift, and then resumed at night. Most of her clothes and her other belongings were still at her apartment in Sherman Oaks, and her mail, usually just bills, was still delivered there.
She stepped into the foyer of her building, a creamy white-and-yellow place that looked like a lemon meringue pie, climbed the three steps to a small landing, unlocked the room where the mailboxes were, and entered. The mail system was a good one, because the only access to the room was by using an apartment key. It would be very difficult for a mail thief to follow a tenant into the lobby and then into the mail room too.
Diane unlocked her box, took out the stack of mail, dropped the newsprint ads into the trash barrel, and shuffled through the envelopes as she relocked the door. For a year after college she had been a dealer in Las Vegas working at the blackjack tables. Her dexterity with cards and envelopes still made her fingers feel good, but she had found that the glamour of staying up late under the glittering chandeliers of a casino faded quickly. The job never changed, and when she realized that all she was doing was trading her share of sunlight for money, she quit and drove to Los Angeles.
She slipped the envelopes into her overnight bag and went to the stairs. She was a believer in incidental exercise. She never took an elevator if she could use the stairs, never sat when she could stand, never drove when she could walk. In the six days since she had unexpectedly found herself drawn to Dick Stahl she had found little time for the kind of physical training she had been doing since the academy. She wondered if she could get Dick to run with her. He obviously was used to getting exercise somewhere.
As she completed her quick survey of the mail, it occurred to her once again that she could easily have let the mail age in the mailbox for another week. She always paid each bill within a day or two, but every bill she ever got was due, at the earliest, three weeks later.
On the third floor she walked along the quiet carpeted hallway and tried to remind herself of the things she wanted to pick up while she was here. Maybe she would do a quick load of laundry while she wrote checks for her bills. Then she could mail them on the way home—no, she corrected herself, on the way to Dick’s. This was home. She opened her apartment door and flipped the switch on the wall.
The light didn’t go on. She was not going to elevate this discovery into an emergency, but she was not going to step farther into the apartment, either. She had a flashlight app on her phone, so she turned it on. The room looked as she remembered it. She turned the phone toward the doorknob and the frame. There was no indication that anyone had been in her apartment. But she still felt odd, and then she realized what was bothering her.
Most times when she had turned on a lightbulb and it had burned out, it happened right then. It had given a pop, sometimes a flash as its filament burned up and the current couldn’t complete its circuit anymore. It was only when she had lived with other people—her family, her roommates, or someone—that she hadn’t seen and heard the end of each bulb. This was because someone else had done it already, and usually that person was on the way to find a replacement. There was nobody else here. Or there wasn’t supposed to be anyone.
Diane needed more intense light. She reached into her purse and grasped her Glock 17. Over the years she had fired it only during training and monthly requalifying, but it had a special flashlight mount under the barrel, and she carried it in her purse with the flashlight attached. She turned it on. The beam of light was powerful and narrow. She swept the living room quickly, moving the circular beam around the room. Things looked just as she remembered.
There were no visible electrical devices that she had not bought and placed here. There were no boxes or bags that she didn’t own. There were no new lines of insulated cord, no trip wires, no glowing electric eye beams. She turned her flashlight on the sideboard where she kept her big flashlight. She bent to study the floor as she stepped toward it, moving her weapon’s flashlight beam up and down in front of her to search for thin wires, side to side to spot any sign of unevenness in the surface to indicate a pressure pad switch under the carpet. All was clear.
She slowly pivoted on the carpet and ran her flashlight around the room again, holding it on anything that might have changed, anything that might hide part of a firing circuit.
And then she realized that there was one thing she had not looked at, and it was exactly the sort of place where a bomber might hide an antipersonnel weapon. She lifted her pistol toward the light fixture on the ceiling. A bomber might make sure the light wouldn’t go on. He might have predicted that as soon as she noticed the light didn’t work, she would no longer think of that circuit as existing. Without a working bulb, it was useless, so there was no reason to think about it. In her mind it would cease to exist.
The powerful flashlight beam on her weapon settled on the frosted glass dome of the ceiling light. She didn’t see the round shape of the bulb inside. There was no bulb at all. She backed up to try to shine the light into the side of the frosted dome.
Something inside the glass dome of the light fixture suddenly gave off a small dull flash, and kept flashing rapidly. She knew what it was—a small metal piece was spinning in the dome. She would never have seen it without the powerful light, but now the metal spinner was reflecting the light as it spun. A bomber had put in a fuze that worked like the ones in some aerial bombs, and wired it into the light circuit. The propeller-like metal spinner was turning and moving up a threaded tube until a striker lined up with the initiator and released the spring to trip it.
The device had probably been spinning since she’d switched on the light. She looked back at the apartment door and saw she had strayed too far inside. The dome was practically above the doorway, and she saw that the spinner had nearly reached the top. She dashed into the dining room, dived forward on her belly, and rolled to the side to get under the big, heavy maple sideboard. Facedown against the wall, she opened her mouth and clapped her hands over her ears. She spent an instant thinking he had been clever to place the mechanism under the bomb, because when the explosion blasted downward, it would obliterate the fuse and the initiator, turning them into shrapnel along with the glass, and driving them through her skin and into her body.
The air turned to an invisible hammer, a noise so loud it was felt rather than heard pounded downward into the apartment, and Diane Hines stopped thinking.