aware of Elizabeth Waring. He had rented a house on her block so he could watch her and decide whether or not to kill her. The second time had been a couple of weeks ago, when he had come back to the country and could think of nobody else he still knew who would be intimately familiar with the current hierarchy of the Balacontano family. Before he had gone in, he had studied every house and parked car, every spot where a shadow might be hiding an enemy.
He turned into her neighborhood four blocks from the house and approached it by driving in narrowing circles. The place looked about the same as it had weeks ago, but the hour was much later now. It was after two A.M., and all of the neighborhood windows were dark. The garages were closed and the only cars that were out on the street were the ones that didn't fit in the two-car garages.
He prepared to park and walk a bit, but he noticed something that didn't feel right to him. It was a big SUV with tinted windows. It was parked at the curb on the street behind Elizabeth Waring's house. It was exactly the spot he'd chosen when he'd come to talk to her weeks ago. It had given him a straight, sheltered path from here to there, over a stone wall that was easy to climb, then a stroll along the outer edge of her neighbor's lawn to a low fence into Elizabeth Waring's back yard, and then to the house.
He drove one more block and parked his rental car, then walked back to take a closer look. There had not been a vehicle like this when he'd been here the last time. It was almost certainly the car of a stranger to the neighborhood. He knelt to look at the license plate. It had some deep gouges in its paint, the worst of them around the brand-new set of bolts and nuts that held the plate. The plate was definitely stolen from another vehicle. He looked at the rear door. The lock was held in place by something on the inside, probably tape. It had been hammered out so the door could be opened.
He knew the safest thing to do would be to walk back to his rental car and leave. But he had come to Washington to hunt them, and here they were. He might be able to kill them before they had a chance to kill him. He walked around the SUV trying to see in the tinted windows, looking for anything left inside that might help him.
He supposed they would be set up in an ambush around the outside of Elizabeth Waring's house, like the man who had tried to kill him in Pasadena outside Lazaretti's house. He went to the low fence, looked and listened, then rolled over the fence, squatted in the deep shadow, and listened while he looked for the shape of a person.
There was nobody in this yard, so he began to move. He lingered in shadows and moved slowly, then stopped, staying still, keeping his body low. When he stopped, he kept his body in a crouch that might suggest to the eye 'shrub,' but never in a shape that suggested 'man.'
He stretched and compressed time, giving himself several minutes to sense movement, then quickly melting into a deeper darkness when he found it. When he was across the neighbor's yard, he entered Elizabeth's by going over the fence. There were lights on in the back of the house on both floors.
His heart began to beat more strongly, but he held back his eagerness. They weren't waiting for him outside. They were inside, hoping to get him when he came to the door. It was a solid, cautious way to take him. He would knock or ring a bell, they assumed, and they could open the door or shoot him through a window.
They had made a mistake and assumed that he had some kind of personal relationship with Elizabeth Waring. Maybe they had even gone into the house in the middle of the night, believing that they might surprise him in her room. He supposed that when the others had seen him at her hotel, it had given them a distorted idea of their history.
Why they had made the mistake was probably not important. The thing for him to think about was making sure it was a fatal mistake. He had a perfect chance tonight to get these people.
As he made his way to the back wall of the house, he could feel the tension of the moment. The muscles of his legs, arms, back, and stomach tightened, his breathing grew deeper to load his blood with oxygen. It was the old, welcome feeling again, the one he'd first experienced when he was a boy going out to kill with Eddie. On the first few jobs, there had been such fear and elation that it was almost impossible to separate one from the other. His mind had been activated the same way as his body-more blood pumping through his brain so he thought faster and could see things in sharper, brighter relief. It had seemed to him that he could feel the surfaces he looked at long before he touched them.
After those nights, the feeling had returned to him often. Tonight he felt it again, and it made him feel strong and quick and eager. He stood at the side of the sliding door at the back of the living room and looked in. He couldn't see anybody inside. The alarm system keypad was beside the front door, and he could just see it from here. The little lights on the keypad were off. The shooters must have shut it off somehow to get in. He could see into the dining room from here. One of the chairs at the dining room table had been moved out of line. Behind it there was a pool of blood on the light hardwood floor. Had they killed her already? No. There wasn't enough blood for a bullet wound or stabbing, and far too little for anything fatal.
They must have hit her or knocked her to the floor. It was that kind of blood. They hadn't killed her yet. They were probably trying to get her to say where he was going to be next or force her to get him to come here. He hoped she'd had the presence of mind to lie and buy herself some time. If she did, he still might be able to keep her alive if he moved efficiently and made no mistakes.
He reached into his pocket for his knife, opened it, and slid the four-inch blade between the latch and its receptacle to open the latch, then put away the knife and reached into his coat pocket for the small, flat pistol. He'd had the intention of buying a couple of spare magazines for the gun before he tried to use it, but things had happened too quickly. He slid open the door, stepped inside into the living room, and closed it again. He stood with his back against the wall, his body partially concealed by a baby grand piano.
He stood still. The gun was in his right hand, but not aimed. He simply held it pointed to his right because moving his right hand to his left was milliseconds faster than moving it to the right, and his aim would be surer. His left hand touched the wall so he could feel vibrations, and he let his eyes stare into space so anything that entered any part of his vision would be visible to him. He yawned silently so his ears were clear and listened.
Time passed, but he kept no count of the minutes, only tried to hear and feel where people were in the house. He heard and felt the sound of someone heavy walking above him near the back of the house, and a second later, someone else a few feet to the left. Waring's daughter had to be under a hundred pounds and the son was tall, but thin. And kids didn't wear hard-soled shoes like that at this hour. Waring was maybe a hundred and twenty, so it wasn't her either.
It was two men, both upstairs but at least ten or fifteen feet apart, maybe in different rooms at the moment. Were they searching the place? For what? Maybe Waring and her kids weren't even home. The thought made him feel a tentative optimism, but then he heard Elizabeth Waring's voice.
It was a low 'Uh, unh. No. Stop.' It came from a nearby room. 'Stop, please! I already told you what I know!'
Schaeffer was already moving toward her voice. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the little office off the kitchen. He kept the gun ready. There were three of them, two upstairs, probably guarding the kids. This one was downstairs with Waring.
He came to the doorway and took in the scene. The man had light, thinning hair so Schaeffer could see his pink bald spot from there as the man straddled Waring on the floor. He was in the process of tearing Waring's clothes off. He had already gotten her top off and had her bra around her waist and had her black sweatpants down to her knees, so with her pale, sun-deprived skin she looked like a classical statue that had been broken. He could tell from her eyes that she could see him.
As he stepped forward, she showed a burst of energy and tried to immobilize the man's arms by throwing hers around him in a bear hug. Two more steps and Schaeffer was there. He wrenched the man's head around to the left to break his neck, then pushed him off Waring.
Elizabeth was shaking and wide-eyed, with blood running down in streaks from her broken nose and her split lip, but he put his head close to hers and whispered. 'Are there two more of them upstairs with your kids?'
She nodded. 'Yes. Two.' She pulled up her sweatpants, and he turned and picked up her T-shirt from the floor where the man must have tossed it. Then he handed it to her.
He stood, pulled out his pistol, and moved toward the door.
'Wait,' she whispered. 'I have a gun in the laundry room.'
'Where's that?'
'Stay here.' He could see she had a hard time getting to her feet. He could tell her arms and legs were tired from wrestling her vastly stronger opponent. But she went to the door, and he noticed that she was barefoot. She
