Firebreak

and difficult than anything they'd ever done to him before.

He was so groggy from the pill that they'd been there almost an hour, prying, prodding, making a mess in every room they searched, before he realized what this had to be. It was because Brad had been released. They were telling him, stay away from your old partner, stay away from the guy you tried to kill. They never mentioned Brad's name, and neither did Lloyd, but that was what it was all about.

Thank God he hadn't kept the gun. When Parker had made him clean up, after he'd been so stupid as to shoot that man in the face, he'd thought at first he might keep the gun, hide it somewhere, but then decided he wasn't somebody who should trust himself with a gun. So he'd stuffed it inside the tarp that held the body, and gun and body went together over that bridge into the river. Right now he was very relieved he'd made that choice, because this search of the house was thorough. They would have found the gun. And then he would never have been out of jail again, his entire life.

But they didn't find the computer, the Web access. They never did, and they never would, because he'd made it look so convincingly like something else. He had that tiny victory, at least.

What they did accomplish, though, that they'd never accomplished before, was at last to break his confidence that he would ever someday climb out of this mess. When he asked one of the plainclothesmen, near the end, 'Why are you doing this?' the man smirked at him, and said, 'Because we can.'

'That's no reason.'

'We don't need a reason,' the plainclothesman told him. 'You're our hobby, Lloyd, and we'll come around and play anytime we want.'

The pill had worn off by the time they left, at four in the morning. The pill had worn off, and so had his belief that he could go on being Larry Lloyd, that somewhere down the line he would return to the life and the self that had once been his. They weren't going to let him. They were never going to let him.

4:12 a.m., the computer told him, when he clicked it on. He went directly into the American Airlines computer, as he'd done more than once before, and made it give him a first-class ticket on tomorrow afternoon's flight from Boston's Logan Airport to Lambert in St. Louis, in the name of Larry Perkins. Months ago, he'd persuaded the Department of Motor Vehicles computer in Boston to give him a driver's license in that name, which he would show at the ticket counter at Logan tomorrow.

4:27 a.m., the computer told him, when he shut it down, disassembled it, trashed it so that no one would ever know what it had been or what it had known and done. Quickly he moved through the house, taking only what he felt he absolutely needed. He had a lot to do, and very little time to do it in.

5:03 read the dashboard clock on his old Honda Accord when he started it up and drove out of his house for the last time.

11:00 a.m. Lloyd remembered George Carew's house, remembered being shown around it, remembered visiting three or four times back when they were all still supposedly friends.

The place was set near the apex of a high triangle of land that jutted eastward out over Cape Ann. An electric fence stretched across the base of the triangle, a quarter mile east of the nearest coastal road. George owned all the land from road to cliff, but had only cleared the triangle, leaving the pine-and-laurel woods intact over the rest of the property, with a narrow gravel access road through it.

There was no way to get through from the front unobserved and unobstructed. That left the approach from the sea.

There was no real beach in that area, merely a sloping rock face covered with stones and pebbles that rose up from the water to meet the boulder-and-dirt cliff face. The cliff wasn't vertical, but steep, with irregular setbacks. Scrub trees clutched to the steep slope, sometimes blown away in ocean storms. George had planned to give himself ocean access with a series of staircases down from the house, but Lloyd doubted he'd done it. George's relationship with nature was as observer, through a window, not as participant, running up and down outside staircases.

A mile farther north of George's property, a seafood restaurant had been built, where the land was much nearer sea level and the coastal road had swung in close to the cape. Lloyd left the Honda in the parking lot there and walked south along the shoreline, over the rough shifting surface of loose pebbles. It was hard going, but the tide was mostly out, so he had a wide enough swath of fairly level ground to make his way along.

When he reached George's triangle, the house was invisible from below, but he knew where it was. And no, as he'd expected, the staircases had not been built.

Lloyd wasn't a very physical type himself, but he could do it when he had to. He looked to see where the slope was least steep, with the most setbacks, and with enough trees to hold on to on the way up, and started to climb.

It was about sixty feet up, about as tall as a six-story building, but the climb was much steeper than any staircase. Several times he had to pull himself upward, clinging with both hands to the rough hard trunk of a scraggy pine, and three times he had to pause at a relatively flat spot to sit awhile, pant, wait for the trembling in his arms and legs to ease.

But at last he was there. He straightened, holding to two shrubs, and could just look over the lip of the land across manicured lawn to the hulking dark stone house. No one was in sight.

The top few feet were the steepest, and the lawn itself had no handholds for him, so at first he couldn't make the transition, and looking down from here was making him dizzy. Heart pounding, he crab-sidled to the right until he found a place where jutting teeth of stone and the grayed stumps of two small trees cut away by George's gardener to improve the view gave him footholds so he could crawl up and over the edge, chest on the stubbly November grass as he pulled himself along by his elbows.

He didn't stand. The house was about twenty feet away, its many windows glittering in the late-morning sun. For anybody in the house, that sun would make it harder to see outside right now, but if he were to stand up he'd still be very noticeable.

On all fours, he crawled over to the house, stood at last against its rough stone, and moved around it to the left. As he remembered it, the kitchens—there were two—were around on this side, with the delivery entrance.

Yes. The doors here were all massive and dark, new made to look old, imported from Scotland. With strong security across the front of the property, and the cliff and ocean at the rear, there was no reason to lock any of the doors here by day, so Lloyd just opened this one and walked in.