Second Shot

Simone opened her door immediately in response to Rosalind’s quiet knock. “Is it safe?” she asked, opening the door a little wider to admit the older woman.

“No,” I said shortly. “Stay inside.”

The door closed again quickly behind them. I turned to Lucas.

‘Anything comes up that stairway that isn’t me,” I said, “hit it.”

“Got it,” he said, flexing his fingers around the lamp.

I edged carefully down the staircase, holding the gun with my arms outstretched. The man with the glasses would not, I knew, have waited around in the house. If he had any sense he would be long gone by now, but I still had to make sure. I did a slow, careful survey of the ground floor, finding the double doors from the dining area out onto the deck slightly ajar.

There was no sign of a forced entry, which meant either our visitors had acquired a key, or the doors had been left unlocked. I closed them and slid the bolts home, as sure as I could be that they’d been bolted up tight when I’d checked them before we’d turned in the night before. Lucas and Rosalind had still been moving around, I remembered, and I berated myself for not coming down and doing another check after I’d heard them come upstairs. I had taken it for granted that for anyone with his kind of military background, securing your location would be a habit ingrained so deep you’d never lose it.

Or maybe it was. Which left all kinds of other unanswered questions, most of which I didn’t want to examine too carefully right then.

I did a quiet pass around the ground floor, then eased down into the basement as well, just in case, but there was nothing amiss down there. Lucas’s storage looked untouched. Not a robbery then. But I already knew that.

Just as I reached the ground floor again, I heard a muffled cry and a tremendous crash from somewhere above me. Then the endless falling splinter sound of glass breaking. I almost didn’t need to scan the stairwell as I ducked past it to know that someone had just taken a dive out of the landing window.

The window looked out onto the half roof that covered the deck surrounding the house. From there it was a relatively short drop to the ground. I pelted for the front door, cursing as I fumbled with the locks and threw the door open.

The darkened figure of a man dropped into view from the roof. He rolled easily through the fall and then lurched away across the drive, running hard.

Even though I knew I shouldn’t, I gave chase. I was barely halfway across the driveway when I heard the roar of an engine in the road, the scrabble of tires on the loose shoulder and the protesting whine of an overstressed transmission.

My stride faltered. No point in continuing a hopeless pursuit when my principal was still not secure. I ran back to the house, slamming home the locks on the front door as I went. I jogged back up the stairs, trying to avoid the worst of the shards of glass that now littered the treads.

The window at the top of the stairs was gone completely, the drapes flapping listlessly in the faint breeze. The frigid air came tumbling into the house like water into a torpedoed ship, rolling down the stairwell as it sought to flood the place from the ground up.

I found Lucas sitting with his back to the stairwell, legs splayed. Rosalind was on her knees in front of him, dabbing at her husband’s bleeding forehead with a hand towel.

“What happened?”

She shot me a dark look. “He got loose,” she gritted out, her voice brimming with a suppressed fury that eventually vented into shrillness. “Greg could have been killed!”

Lucas ducked away from her ministrations the way a horse avoids flies. “I’m OK. Don’t fuss,” he said, blurry, gesturing vaguely to the looped coils of Aquarium man’s erstwhile bonds. “I guess I wasn’t quite watching him as close as I should have been, huh?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, remembering the smug little smile Aquarium man had given me. “I should have made sure it was tight enough to cut his damn circulation off.”

Simone’s door opened and she put her head out again. Why couldn’t the woman just do as she was told…?

“Daddy!” Simone cried when she caught sight of Lucas’s injury. She ran out and knelt in front of him, grasping for his hand.

“I’m fine, honey Don’t you worry,” he said, giving her a reassuring squeeze. “It’s just a scratch. I guess I’m not quite as quick on my feet as I used to be, huh?”

Simone gave him a tremulous smile.

I felt something brush against me and found that Ella had sidled out onto the landing, sucking her thumb, and had ducked under the muzzle of the Beretta to attach herself to my right leg. She was wearing white pajamas with pink ponies on the front and clutching the battered Eeyore so tightly his glass eyes were bulging. I transferred the gun into my other hand and stroked the side of her face. Her skin was warm and very soft. She snuggled harder against me, not speaking.

“What did they want?” Simone asked in a subdued voice.

My hand stilled in Ella’s hair.