The Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mysteries!

Then I gradually realized that the ceiling over my face was of plaster — I could see it. And I could feel the clammy sheet clinging to me from my waist downward. The pain in my head was excruciating now; so great that it brought a gasp from me. A gasp — which meant that my lungs were functioning normally.

My hands were like two dead weights as I tried to move them. I tried again and the effort succeeded.

My heart was pounding now, rocketing blood through every artery, bringing a singing sensation through the pain in my head.

It took me perhaps five minutes to sit up. I was dizzy and almost fell from the table. I clung to my senses until the dizziness had passed, pulled my feet around, and felt them drop to the floor. The pain in them, through my toes, was almost unbearable as I tried to stand.

I next took cognizance of my surroundings. The room was bare, the table in its center, two doorways leading from it.

I drew the sheet around me, stood up, and fell to the floor. I spent several gasping moments in a prone position before I was able to clutch at the leg of the table and crawl to my feet again.

Like a baby tottering through its first steps, I made my way to the doorway across the room. It opened into a hallway, and I closed it again. The second door opened into a small washroom. My clothes were there on hangers.

Before I tried to put my clothes on, I looked at myself in the mirror of a medicine cabinet on the wall. I almost retched at the grey-faced man who stared back at me. Blood had run down the side of my head, matting my hair. There was a heavier, uglier clot on my right temple. I bathed it gently in the corner wash basin. It was too sore to stand washing thoroughly, but I got most of the blood off.

I looked again in the mirror. Color was seeping back to my cheeks now. The wound was a nasty gash in the flesh and the bullet had torn its way along the bone, but had not penetrated the skull.

I slipped into my clothes, weak, gasping. I stood a moment before leaving the room, gathering strength. I was seething now with a fierce hatred that sent ripples of heat out through my being. I didn’t know how it had happened. I didn’t know why.

I knew only that I was back in the land of the living. I had returned — to find my murderer!

Gray dawn hung over the alley behind the funeral home. I reached the mouth of the alley. The streets were still deserted except for a passing milkman and a whistling boy with a bag of newspapers slung across his shoulder. Santa Maria was still drugged with sleep. The gulf breeze was cool and fresh across my face. Save for the extreme, blinding pain in my head, I was feeling better by the minute. The last thing I’d done before leaving the washroom had been to find a compress and tape it over my temple.

In my thoughts a plan of action was forming, he must not know that I was after him. Secure in the belief of his success he would be emboldened, until the moment came for me to strike.

Somehow a way must be found to keep hidden my disappearance from the funeral home, the fact that I still lived. That would take some doing. There was one man with the power to swing it. Lew Whitfield.

Normally I could have walked the distance from the funeral home to Lew’s house in ten minutes. Today that movement required a full thirty minutes. I hurried as fast as I could. I knew that my absence from the funeral home might be discovered at any moment and an alarm raised. I passed few people. Dock workers. Fishermen. I got a glance or two from some of them, the kind of glance they might give a man who’s been out all night on a drunk and got in a fight.

I was reeling on my feet when I arrived at Lew’s. His large, old frame house loomed against the red eye of the rising sun like a hulking barn. For three years Lew had promised himself to paint the place next summer.

I walked around the side of the house to his study window. The window was open against the Florida weather, as I had guessed it would be. The screen, however, was locked. My head was spinning, and it took me a few seconds to figure a way out of that. Then I remembered the pen knife in my pocket. I used it to cut a small hole in the screen through which I could slip a finger and throw the hook latch.

I pulled the screen out, crawled over the sill, and collapsed on the floor of Lew’s study. I was going again, back into that nether world of shadows. I clenched my hands and almost screamed aloud. I was slipping — slipping. The shadows were heavier. Sweat broke cold on my forehead. The effort of my exertion had been too much. Over me the shadows came.

The blackout didn’t last long. I woke slowly, blind with that ache in my head. I could hear footsteps moving about overhead. A child came running down the steps outside the door, and from the back of the house I heard Marge Whitfield, “Breakfast!”

I heard the scramble toward the dining room. Then the house was silent as the family ate.

I pulled myself across the floor, up on the leather couch against the wall. I sat down with a deep sigh. Lew’s desk, as cluttered as my own, was across the room from me.