Mortal Pursuit

32

At the door of Ally’s bedroom, Cain paused to strip off his mask.

The girl had been so eager to see his face. Now she would have the pleasure of seeing it again in the final moment of her life.

He’d told Charles his daughter wouldn’t suffer. It was true. There was no time for a drawn-out encounter of the sort he preferred. He would simply enter the room, thrust the gun under Ally’s chin, and make spatter-art out of her brains. A no-frills hit, slick and professional.

He wadded the mask in his back pocket, then shut his eyes and drew a slow breath, feeling the smooth expansion of his rib cage, the beat of blood in the arteries of his wrists and the veins of his neck.

This was always his way before a kill. In the stillness before violence, he liked to take a moment to sink deep into the awareness of himself, his body, the autonomic functions of his heart and lungs. Though he was not a philosophical man, he found a certain wonder in the knowledge that another human being, as alive as he was, soon would be dead by his hand. No breath, no heartbeat, no movement, no life.

Bodies in motion. Bodies at rest. That was all there was in the universe, or so he’d heard. Tonight a body in motion would be set at rest, that was all-permanently at rest. And the universe would go on, indifferent and aloof.

Ready now, he grasped the doorknob.

It wouldn’t turn.

Locked.

Fear held Ally immobilized, one leg over the windowsill, the other foot planted in her bedroom.

“Shoot him,” she hissed at Trish. “Through the door.”

Trish shook her head. “The others will hear. Can’t get them all.”

The doorknob rattled.

“Go,” Trish breathed.

Ally’s paralysis broke. Twist of her upper body, and she slipped through the window and dropped onto the flower bed bordering the house. She crushed some of her mom’s geraniums and was distantly sorry about it.

Trish climbed after her, drawing the gun.

For a bewildered moment Cain stared at the door, unable to comprehend how it could be locked.

Ally was tied up, wasn’t she

Wasn’t she

Ally streaked across the yard through a tunnel of shadows. The grounds of the estate seemed enormous, bigger than three football fields. She had never imagined the yard was so large.

Trish, directly ahead, glanced back, her face pallid in the starlight, wet ribbons of hair lacing her forehead and cheeks like cracks in a marble bust.

On her right, the pool area blurred past: smear of white concrete, smell of chlorine.

The garden lay directly ahead. Trish led her into it, through high stalks of gladiolus and foxglove and pink cadmium, the plants trampled, the beautiful blooms crushed like so much wastepaper.

Ally thought it was wrong to kill the flowers-shockingly, viciously wrong that any young, healthy, blossoming thing should have to die.

Cain stepped back and delivered a powerful kick to the door, planting his boot just inside the handle. The frame splintered out, and the door flew open under his hand.

He burst inside. Scanned the room.

The desk chair-empty. Window screen-removed.

Gun in hand, he ran to the window, peered out.

In the garden, a patch of luminous white.

Ally in her party dress. A distant, moving target.

He thumbed the pressure switch on the pistol’s grip.

The laser sighting system printed a two-inch circle of reddish orange light on her back.

Cain fired.

Trish glanced over her shoulder a second time and saw a silhouetted figure at the bedroom window.

Flicker of amber light.

The laser.

“Down!”

She pulled Ally to the ground behind a clump of bellflower.

The shot was nearly silent. The bullet’s impact made a soft thud in the trunk of an olive tree.

Impelled by instinct, with no time for thought, Trish spun into a half crouch and lifted the Glock in two hands.

She forgot the laser sight, forgot everything except the trigger and how to use it.

She squeezed off two rounds in the direction of the window.

Cain saw the girl go down, but was she hit or had she merely taken cover

He couldn’t tell, had no chance to think about it, because out of the darkness burst two answering shots.

Bullets smacked into the exterior wall like mailed fists.

What the hell

Cain threw himself clear of the window and snap-rolled into a crouch, his Glock lifted defensively.

Trish had never fired a gun without ear protection. The Glock was unsilenced, the reports shockingly loud.

“Did you get him” Ally’s suntanned shoulders, revealed by the sleeveless dress, shook with inner violence.

Trish barely heard the question over the ringing clamor in her head. “Don’t think so. Come on.”

She started crawling, staying low behind spikes of lupine and lady’s slipper.

“Where to” Ally whispered.

“The gate.”

The splashback of the muzzle flashes had impaired her night vision. She blinked away blue afterimages as she seal-walked infantry style, elbows chewing up divots of spongy earth. The Glock was clutched tight in her right hand, the action hot.

Though the yard was dark, she felt helplessly exposed, as if she were crawling on a lighted stage before an audience of snipers.

The rear gate seemed impossibly far. A lifetime wouldn’t be long enough to reach it.

She kept going, Ally beside her, the elegant white dress streaked with grass stains like muddy tracks of tears.