66.
In susan’s spare room, where I stood, with the louvers closed, the silence merged with the darkness, so that each seemed more intense than it otherwise would have. The dim nocturnal glow of streetlamps, moon, and stars drifted in through the glass panels in the front door, and made things faintly visible in the hallway. But Hawk, ten feet away from me in Susan’s offi ce, was perfectly invisible.
The darkness was thick and close.
I was holding a sawed-off baseball bat. A Manny Ramirez model. I kept my 9mm Browning on my hip, with a full magazine and a round in the chamber. No sound came from upstairs where Chollo waited with Vinnie. No sound came from Susan’s office where Hawk waited with his big .44 Mag in a shoulder holster, holding a sawed-off, twelve-gauge doublebarreled shotgun. I went to the front window and looked out through the shutter. Nothing moved on the street. No traffic. No cars with the headlights on and the heater going while the driver listened to late-night radio in the warm car. No couples coming home from a late party, holding hands, looking forward to intimacy. The quiet was stifl ing.
From the back of the house came the faint sound of glass breaking. It wasn’t much. They’d probably taped it fi rst. Then more silence. Then maybe the hint of a latch being turned, a door being opened. Then silence again. Then, suddenly, a dim movement in the front hall. One man, carrying a handgun, dressed in black, his face blackened. He went to the front door and unlatched the safety bar and opened the door. Two more men came in. One had an Uzi. They too were all in black. The two men started silently up the front stairs. The first man, the man who had let them in, checked to see that the door was unlocked and then closed it and turned and started to follow the other two past me where I stood in the spare room. I stepped out behind him as he passed and brought the sawed-off baseball bat down on his gun hand. He yelped softly and the gun clattered on the front hall floor. The noise was shockingly loud. The men on the stairs turned. I grabbed my guy by the hair and yanked him into the spare room. The man with the Uzi sprayed the hallway with bullets. As soon as he stopped shooting, Hawk stepped out of Susan’s office and killed both men with the shotgun.
In the offi ce I had my man on the fl oor with my knee on his chest and the muzzle of the Browning pressed hard against the bridge of his nose. Hawk dropped the shotgun, took out his handgun, and went up the front stairs past the two dead men without making a sound.
On the floor in the spare room, my guy was perfectly still, disoriented, probably, from the suddenness of his situation. For several moments there was no sound. Then there was a rattle of gunfire from upstairs. Then there was nothing. Then there was the sound of footsteps on the front stairs, and Hawk’s voice.
“We got one too,” Hawk said.