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Kat trudged in, eyeing her workbook. ‘How annoying is long division? I mean, if they’re teaching us to be smart, wouldn’t smart people just use a calculat-’ She looked up, her eyes pronounced behind the red frames of her glasses. ‘Why do you have a gun? That’s a gun, right? I mean, a gun in our kitchen? Is something wrong? Have you ever shot it? Can I hold it?’

‘Go back to your room,’ Annabel managed. ‘Give us a moment here.’

Kat backed away, eyes on the Smith & Wesson.

Annabel turned to Mike. ‘And there you have it.’ She slid off the counter, turned down the stovetop heat, and eyed the lesson plan splayed in the cookbook stand, her feminine scrawl brightening the page margins. She was the only person he knew who could study and prep puttanesca simultaneously.

The phone rang. Mike snatched up the cordless.

Hank sounded burned out. ‘I can’t get anything on a Dodge or a William being at the award ceremony, but that’s to be expected.’ He cleared his throat, which turned into a coughing fit. ‘Now, listen, there’s something I gotta lay out for you here.’

Mike found the pause as unnerving as the tension in Hank’s voice. ‘What?’

Annabel turned, and he drew her toward him, turning the phone so they could both hear.

‘Well, I don’t know what,’ Hank said. ‘Yet. I called my hook at the sheriff’s, and it seems there’s some kind of alert out on you.’

‘Alert? What does that mean?’

‘Don’t know. But your name’s been flagged.’

‘Flagged for what?’ Mike’s voice was rising.

‘I already told you. I don’t have those answers.’ A deep rasp of a breath. ‘Look, this could be local, limited to L.A. County Sheriff’s. Or it could be some other agency that’s monitoring anything around your name, that wants to be informed if you have any run-ins.’

Mike thought of Elzey and Markovic’s hushed conversation in the back office after she’d gotten off the phone, and how they’d come back out gunning for him.

‘Like who? The FBI? CIA?’ Mike choked out a laugh. ‘How widespread is it? I mean, every station?’

‘I can’t get more just yet,’ Hank said. ‘Everyone’s being a bit coy. Obviously, it’s classified. I gotta massage this thing, nibble at the edges, come in at the right angle. Gimme a day or two.’

‘Is there any agency that doesn’t have me flagged?’ Mike asked.

‘I’m sure there are plenty. Agencies – and individual stations within agencies – are understaffed and overworked. So unless you went to sleepaway camp in the rugged northwest of Pakistan, it’s not like you’re at the top of morning roll call. We don’t know the extent of this thing, but there’s no reason to assume you’ve become public enemy numero uno.’

‘What if we need help?’

‘Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Until we determine how widespread the alert is and who put it out, how can you know who to trust?’

Mike swallowed dryly. ‘And if Dodge and William make another move in the meantime?’

‘From what I can read at this point, I wouldn’t count on the authorities lending you a friendly ear.’

He signed off, and Mike and Annabel stared at each other.

Annabel reached down, took the revolver from Mike’s hand. She raised it clumsily, waiting, her gaze steady. He exhaled a heavy breath, moved forward, and shaped her hands properly around the grip.

Chapter 18

The laundry room’s back door had the weakest exterior lock, a dated Schlage that required only a half-diamond pick, a medium-torsion wrench, and a ninety-second attention span. With gloved hands, Dodge jiggled at it quietly. It yielded, and he stepped from night into the dull glow of the house. The old-fashioned wall clock above the dryer showed 9:27. Pocketing the tools, he moved forward into the kitchen, his size-fourteen feet surprisingly silent across the linoleum.

Mike Wingate’s head and upper torso were tucked under the sink, tools spread out on a grease-stained bath mat beside his sprawling legs. He was banging away at the U-pipe with a hammer. Dodge glided past him, drifting within a yard or so of his bare feet. Without breaking stride, he plucked a flat, magnetized digital recorder from the top of the refrigerator, where he’d hidden it days earlier. Continuing into the hall, he passed the girl in her room, her back to the open door. She was hunched over her desk, chewing a pencil, and said, ‘Mom, long division sucks,’ to him without glancing up from her work.

He ducked into the bathroom farther up the hall and locked the door. From the back pocket of his cargo pants, he withdrew a Fujitsu tablet computer, a Japan-only model the size of a checkbook; Boss Man spared no expense when it came to matters such as these. Ducking to accommodate the sloped ceiling, Dodge set up the miniature laptop at the edge of the square pedestal sink and plugged the digital recorder into a port. Within seconds the download was complete.

The doorknob behind him twisted, the jangle pronounced in the small space. Then the wife said, ‘Oh, you’re in there. Sorry, honey. Brush your teeth and get ready for bed.’

Dodge didn’t tense. His broad, flat features betrayed nothing. He kept on with his preparations.

As the footsteps padded away, Dodge tugged on a pair of clamp headphones and clicked ‘play.’ A sound graph came up on screen, charting every noise with a green flare, stretched out like a spiky caterpillar. He nudged the tracking button along a little ways to test sound.

Katherine’s voice: ‘Don’t be mad at me. It’s not like I said, “What can I do to bug Mom today? Oh – I know. I’ll get head lice.”’

Dodge popped open a search window, typed in, KEY.

High-pitched noise scribbled in his ears. And then the wife spoke, the search feature elevating the volume on the last syllable of her sentence: ‘Stay still, monKEY.’

Dodge clicked Find Again. More chipmunk babble and then, ‘I got a text from your cell asking me where the safe-deposit KEY was.’ Dodge waited, and then a feminine voice replied, ‘In the tissue box in your nightstand. I wouldn’t ask that.’ The time stamp was from earlier today, shortly after they’d sent Mike the sham text message.

Dodge folded up the equipment, distributed it to various pockets, and pressed his ear to the door. From the kitchen he heard tool meet metal again, and he stepped out into the hall and headed down to the master bedroom.

The bathroom door was cracked, the shower running. As he passed the open slice of doorway, he saw the flesh-colored outline of Annabel, blurry behind the steam-clouded glass. He opened the nightstand drawer. Inside, a Kleenex box encased in a plastic decorative cover. He reached through the slit, fingers digging around the tissue. Nothing. He lifted the plastic cover, and there, taped to the underside, was the safe-deposit key. He wiggled it free, pulled a similar-looking key from his pocket, and wormed the replacement into the spot beneath the bubbled strip of Scotch tape.

As he eased the cover back down, a glint in the rear of the drawer caught his eye. He pulled the drawer all the way out. A Smith & Wesson.357. Using only one hand, he removed it, thumbed the lever to release the wheel, and flicked it, setting it spinning. Cocking his head, he stared down the sights. His lips twitched in a sneer.

The water stopped. The shower door creaked open. He tilted his wrist, the wheel clicking home, and set the revolver back beside the new cellophane-wrapped package of bullets. When he closed the drawer, it made a soft thump.

‘Babe, you about done with that sink?’

Dodge made an agreeable noise in his throat.

‘Man, this steam.’ Her hand tapped against the bathroom door, and it swung open another foot or two.

Standing a few feet to the hinge side, out of view, he withdrew a ball-peen hammer from the deep thigh pocket of his cargo shorts. He waited, but she did not appear.

Moisture wafted across his face as he took a step out in front of the open door. Annabel was doubled over, twisting her wet hair into a towel, her eyes on the floor. He swiveled back, his face affectless, and walked out of the