Squeeaak.

The first time, it came so softly into her awareness that she thought she'd imagined it. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them wide, trying to concentrate on the pages in front of her. Then she heard it again. Squeeaak. A cry of sorts, but soft, like the complaint of an unoiled hinge or the cracked leather heel of a shoe. Squeeaak.

"Carmen? Is that you?" Judge Rosemary Klinefelter looked up from the small puddle of golden light that the lamp cast upon her desk, puzzled by the sound that seemed to come from her empty courtroom. The clock had struck nine as she'd begun reading this page, and she would have sworn that her secretary Carmen had left hours ago with the rest of the judicial staff workers. Judge Klinefelter cocked her head to listen again, but the squeaking stopped. Only the distant rumble of an airplane overhead disturbed the silence of the room.

She shook her head and returned her attention to the opinion she was proofing. She was working late tonight, adding her signature to the documents of her last case, trying hard to clear her desk. Tomorrow would be Thanksgiving, and she and her husband Rich were flying to Miami to board a ship that would ultimately deposit them on one of St. Bart's sandy beaches. Smiling, she glanced up at the three framed photographs clustered beneath her lamp -- her daughter Emily unpacking at Penn, her son Mark in his Navy uniform, and Rich, grinning from beneath a hard hat as they broke ground for one of the skyscrapers he'd designed. She rubbed a smudge from his picture and sighed. How wonderful it would be to get away, just she and Rich, with nothing facing them but sapphire blue sky and an aquamarine sea.

Suddenly she jumped. She heard another noise. Not a squeak this time, but a single thump, like a book dropped on a carpeted floor. She frowned. Carmen wouldn't stay past five-thirty unless asked, and asked nicely. Could it be one of her clerks, coming back in for something and trying not to disturb her?

No, she decided, dismissing the chill that crept up her spine. It was probably just the cleaning crew, trying to finish early because of the holiday. Decisively she pushed away from her desk and rose from her chair. She crossed her red-carpeted office in three strides and turned her dead bolt into place, then she tried the heavy brass doorknob, just to make certain her door was locked. It did not budge. Now safe from all disruptions, she could get her own work done.

"You're getting dotty, kiddo," she murmured, suddenly aware of the joggity rhythm of her heart as she brushed a speck of lint off the black judicial gown that hung on the back of the door. "You're way past due for a stretch on the beach."

She recrossed the room and settled back in her chair, wondering if she were being visited by the ghost that reputedly walked this courthouse at night. Boots, they called him. Supposedly the spirit of some maligned bootlegger seeking exoneration for an erroneous murder conviction.

She tried to refocus on her work, but she felt edgy, inadvertently tensed for Boots's next manifestation. The words that she'd written this morning seemed to squirm like small black bugs on the pages, not forming clauses or sentences or anything that made sense.

"Come on, Your Honor," she scolded herself formally, trying to pump herself up. "Just two more pages to proof, then you're out of here. Let the ghost or the cleaning people have the damn courtroom. Beginning tomorrow you can make love all night and have a massage every morning."

This time the letters formed words that made dull but legal sense -- her learned opinion about whether a bank could cancel its own cashier's check. Searching for errors and typos, she scanned down the lines Carmen had typed from her own handwritten notes. Finding none, she turned the page and released the breath that she had been unconsciously holding. Three more paragraphs, then she could sign her name and get out of here. She started reading aloud, hurrying. Finally she came to the last line. She uncapped the heavy Mont Blanc fountain pen she always used to sign her opinions, then she heard the third noise. Not a squeak this time. Or even a thud. This time she heard a series of soft bumps moving from left to right across the courtroom, plaintiff to defendant side. Could they be footsteps, she wondered, staring at the doorknob, waiting for it to turn.

"Okay," she said aloud, suddenly irritated with both the noises and her own nervous Nellie reaction to them. "That's it. I'm calling security."

She picked up the phone and dialed the code that connected her with security. The phone rang four, five, six times, but no one answered. "Probably outside smoking," she muttered as she hung up in disgust.

Annoyed, she picked up her pen and scrawled her name, Rosemary Rogers Klinefelter, with a flourish. The very act gave her courage. After all, she was a federal judge in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, not some nitwit who spooked at ghosts.

She remembered a memo she'd seen on Carmen's desk. The courthouse had experienced a number of cases of vandalism lately. Obscenities spray-painted on the second-floor men's room, files in a clerk's office strewn all over the floor. Everyone assumed the vandals had sneaked in during the day and done their mischief while court was in session. But maybe they broke in at night and did their damage then. Maybe they were just outside the door now, quietly spraying "fuck" and "dickhead" on her hundred-year-old burled walnut paneling.

"Bastards," she cried, all at once furious at the idea of anyone desecrating her courtroom. She reached down and opened the bottom drawer of her desk, fumbling for her revolver. The short-barreled old Colt .32 had been her Aunt Esther's chicken coop gun, but within its limited range, it shot straight and true. She cocked the hammer, fuming. No pimple-faced punks were going to trash her courtroom.

She tiptoed to the door and pressed her ear against the crack. Now she heard nothing except the rapid beating of her own heart. For a moment she wondered if she wasn't just tired: if her imagination hadn't embellished the thousand tiny noises that empty buildings invariably make, but then she decided no, she wasn't. She'd definitely heard three separate, distinct noises that had no business coming from a locked courtroom. She reached for the wall switch and turned off the lights behind her. All she had to do now was open her door and flip the light switch on the other side of the wall. The whole courtroom would be illuminated instantly, and when she caught the little bastards who were spray-painting her walls, she'd train this gun on them until she could get security on the line.

Gripping the revolver tightly in her right hand, she turned the dead bolt. It made a soft click, the door shuddering slightly as the bolt slid out of the lock. Slowly she pulled the door open. The cooler air carried the familiar smell of her courtroom -- a combination of lemon furniture polish and leather-upholstered chairs. Grasping the gun, she took a step forward, peering into the darkness. Moonlight from the tall windows on the left wall cast everything in deep shadow -- the courtroom chairs looked like dark hulks on the other side of the bar. Keeping her eyes straight ahead, she groped for the light switch on the wall. Her left hand fumbled against the plaster. Where was that stupid thing? She'd turned it on and off a million times. The edge of her palm brushed against the fixture. There! She had it! Now she would see what was going on.

Suddenly, though, before she could reach any of the three switches that would set her courtroom ablaze with light, she felt someone grab her right arm, hard. Her attacker forced her wrist backward, almost to the point of snapping; then, with a single ruthless motion, he flicked the gun from her hand. The pistol clattered against the back of the witness stand, then fell somewhere on the dark floor.

"What?" was the only word she could utter before the same someone moved behind her, twisting her arm viciously against her spine. Something banged against the back of her knees, and before she could draw a breath she'd fallen to the carpet. Hands explored all of her now, racing up her fleshy thighs, plucking at her panty hose.

She realized, then, that this was far worse than vandals spraying curses on her walls. She curled her free hand into a claw and tried to swipe at her attacker's eyes, kicking and squirming with all her strength. But the dark figure was strong. He sat down on top of her, pinning her legs beneath him, wrenching her hand so hard, it felt like it was caught in a vise.

"What do you want?" she managed to croak. Surely not her. She was sixty-two, soon to be a grandmother, of sexual interest to no one but her husband.

"To kill well," he whispered.

Judge Rosemary Rogers Klinefelter felt a tiny pinprick on the left side of her neck, then her limbs grew soft and heavy, like loaves of unleavened dough. She watched her attacker move the prosecutor's chair to the center of the room, realizing queasily that she could do nothing to stop whatever this man intended for her. With her body limp as a rag doll's, she felt him push her arms into her own black judicial robe and lift her to the chair.

She thought back to her children when they were young -- her daughter's voice -- musical as a little flute; the sweaty, sweet smell of Mark in her arms. Then she thought of Rich, his arms around her as they sailed on a boat bound west, skimming over the waves, into a luminous and fiery sea. She lingered there a moment, as if to bid farewell, then she began to scream in silence, watching as the young man smiled and unsheathed a long, dark sword that glittered like death in the moonlight.