Mortal Pursuit

6

Crouching low, Cain approached the bay window of the living room.

From twenty yards away he could hear the faint murmur of conversation and the clink of tableware, broken abruptly by a woman’s high-pitched laughter, brief and stabbing like a scream.

Sound carried easily here, in the mountain stillness. He hoped the others had the sound suppressors tightly screwed to the gun barrels, hoped they remembered his admonition to economize on gunfire. Even the best silencer was only partially effective, and then for no more than three or four shots.

The Kent house was the only residence within miles. Still, he was taking no chances.

Though he had never been on the property before, he knew the estate intimately, could visualize every detail of its layout. The house, five thousand square feet on a fenced acre, was a Mediterranean ranch, facing south, with a detached garage to the west.

A paved path between the garage and the house led through the spacious, parklike backyard to a rear gate, then down to a lakeside dock a quarter-mile below. The path and gate were wide enough to accommodate a car, should the Kents wish to tow one of their sport boats into town for service.

Rich people. The wife was, anyway. She’d inherited her money, and hubby had married it.

Now they had all this, while Cain had spent half his life in one prison or another, busted for conning or stealing only a fraction of what the Kents had obtained with no effort at all.

Life was a bitch.

But tonight, for once, Cain meant to make that bitch put out for him.

The front yard was landscaped in rosebushes and jacaranda trees. Cain crept past tangled drifts of roses, avoiding the clutches of their thorns.

As he neared the windows, he seal-walked on his elbows, dragging his lower body. He remembered crawling this way in an alley in San Bernardino to surprise a careless man lying in ambush for him, a man who died in a gurgle of froth.

It was a hard world, kill or be killed, and Cain had learned hardness and made hardness part of him, and he had survived.

Five yards from the front of the house, he ditched the duffel bag behind a bush, then withdrew a folded pair of Tasco binoculars from his side pocket and lifted his head.

The front windows, open to admit the night air, looked in on the spacious living room and attached dining area. Only three people sat at the dining table: the daughter and two dinner guests. Charles and Barbara Kent were out of the room, perhaps busying themselves with coffee and dessert.

Cain wondered what dinner had been like. Better than prison food, he guessed. And the beds in this house-more comfortable than the bunks in a twelve-by-twelve cell.

He took out his ProCom transceiver and activated channel three.

“Mr. and Mrs. Kent are off the scope. Who’s acquired them”

There was no risk in using names over the air. Under ideal conditions the transceiver’s maximum range was only four miles. Though the Kents’ nearest neighbors and the occasional passing car would be within reach of the signal, the odds of anyone other than Cain and his associates monitoring this particular frequency were infinitesimally small.

“I’ve got them.” That was Gage. “They’re in the kitchen.”

Cain tipped the binoculars again. At the rear of the dining area he could see the kitchen doorway, but the kitchen itself, in the back of the house, was cut off from view.

“Keep watching,” he said. “Let me know when the room is clear.”

“Right…. There’s one more thing.”

Cain waited, knowing from Gage’s tentativeness that the news wasn’t good.

“I, uh, I might’ve been spotted.”

Cain held his voice steady. “How”

“Kitchen window. I think the wife got a look at me. She turned on a light.”

“God damn it.”

Never should have let the kid tag along. A goddamned sixteen-year-old, zits on his face, a whining baby—

Calm. Stay calm.

“Can she see you now” Cain breathed.

“I’m hunkered down behind the gazebo.”

“Stay there.” Under the mask, a single droplet of sweat, like a cold fingertip, traced a meandering course from Cain’s hairline to his chin. “And pray you didn’t fuck this up.”