But the idea of an intruder getting

He was unable to imagine how the estate grounds and then the house could have been penetrated without setting off numerous alarms. But the idea of an intruder getting into Palazzo Rospo astonished him far less than other things he’d witnessed lately. The loose pebbles in the decomposed-granite pathways crunched under him, making a stealthy search impossible. He stepped carefully to minimize noise. The tiny, shifting bits of stone provided unstable footing. He didn’t like the shadows, either. Shadows, shadows everywhere in layered complexity, calculated for dramatic effect, unnatural and therefore double deceiving. Nearing the center of the jungle, Ethan heard a strange sound, [573] thhhup, and then again, thhhup, and heard greenery click-rustle-snap, but he didn’t realize that he was being shot at until the bole of a palm tree took a bullet inches in front of his face, spraying him with flecks of its green tissue. He dropped fast and flat. He rolled off the path and crawled through ferns and pittosporum, through mimulus drenched with red-purple flowers, into sheltering gloom where he was grateful for all shadows, natural and not.   The jakes arrived before the ambulance, and after Hazard briefed them and told them where to send the paramedics, he went upstairs to look after Maxwell Dalton. The withered man, more hideously emaciated on third sight than he had appeared to be on first and second, rolled his sunken eyes and grimaced, greatly agitated, struggling to cough up barbed words from his no doubt cracked and bleeding throat. “Easy, easy now,” Hazard said. “Calm down. Everything’s going to be all right now. You’re safe now, Professor.” The hooked edges of the words pained Dalton as he spat them out, but he insisted on saying, “He’s ... coming ... back.” “Good,” Hazard said, grateful to hear the ambulance siren rising in the night beyond the broken window. “We know just what to do with the sick son of a bitch when he shows up.”