house.
A spray of gunfire erupted as the three of them dove through the open front door.
TWENTY
Gillette slammed the door, crawled to the side, and reached over to shoot the dead bolt through. Bullets tore through the door, sending splinters flying. The beautiful high arched windows shattered, spewing glass shards everywhere. They heard bullets gouging the walls.
“Cover your heads,” Jack yelled, pulling Rachael beneath him. “Gillette, stay down.”
Round after round struck the house. No front window was left unshattered. Rachael struggled to breathe, and finally, Jack leaned up. She yelled over the shots, “Uncle Gillette, how did you know they were here?”
Gillette was panting as he pulled a wooden splinter out of the back of his hand. “There was a break in the perimeter alarm. I wasn’t expecting anyone, so I knew it had to be trouble. Well, malfunctions sometimes happen, but I wasn’t about to take any chances, not with your situation, Rachael.”
Glory be, Jack thought, an alarm. The gunfire stopped for a moment. Jack said, “Both of you stay down, don’t go anywhere near that door or the windows.”
Gillette was already on his hands and knees. “I’ve got weapons upstairs. I’ll get them.”
“All right, but keep down. No marine hotdogging.”
Gillette laughed as he elbow crawled toward the stairs. Another spray of bullets tore through the line of front windows, striking a side wall, shattering a beautiful gilded mirror.
“Don’t you move a muscle, Rachael,” Jack said, elbowing his own way over to the window. At a break in the gunfire, he peered out, law a shadow of movement and returned fire with his Kimber. He had only one extra clip so he had to pace himself.
“They’re destroying this beautiful house,” Rachael said.
Gillette returned to the foyer, bent nearly double, clutching two rifles. He fell to his knees and crawled between two front windows to get to them.
Jack said, “Gillette, do you shoot as well as Rachael?”
“I’m a marine,” he said. “Who do you think taught her?”
“Good point. The two of you keep the guys out front contained. There are more, I know it, and I don’t want them coming in behind us. Back entrances, Gillette?”
“There’s only one back door. In the kitchen.”
“Keep your heads down,” Jack said, and kept low to the floor. He fell the heat of some of the bullets flying over his head on their way to thud into the walls. The gilded mirror finally crashed to the floor, wood and glass flying everywhere.
When Jack was out of the line of fire, he jumped to his feet and ran down the hallway toward the kitchen. He felt a stab of exquisite pain in his thigh, ignored it. He stepped into the kitchen at the exact moment a man came in the back door. Jack fell to his knees and rolled, four bullets stitching the cabinets behind him. He heard one dig into the beautiful marble floor.
And that really made him mad. He came up on his side and yelled, “Hey!”
The man fired again, but he was off by a good foot. Jack shot two rounds, both of them missing. The man was crouched behind the washing machine just inside the back door.
“What are you doing here?” Jack yelled over the pumping gunfire coming from the front of the house.
The man fired off another half-dozen rounds. Jack felt a sharp spear of wood hit his left arm. He gave a huge cry of pain and slammed his Kimber against the floor. He lay there, still and silent.
The man fired again. Then he slowly rose and looked beyond the kitchen table to where Jack lay nearly under one of the kitchen chairs. He took a step, then realized he didn’t see the gun, but it was too late.
Jack reared up and shot him.
The man grabbed his shoulder and sank to his knees. His gun dropped onto the floor and skidded against the wall. He toppled over, moaning. Jack walked to the man, struck the back of his head with the gun butt. One down, but of course there had to be one more. Whoever ordered this wasn’t about to take any more chances with only one shooter. No, this was a full-scale assassination squad. He heard two shooters in the front, and likely there was still one more in the back.
Jack pulled a wallet out of the man’s jacket pocket, then looked at the expanse of green lawn that went back for perhaps thirty feet to the forest, a seemingly impenetrable thick, vibrant green. He looked for movement, shadow play, anything to help him locate the other shooter. Or shooters. He was patient. He waited. Finally he saw a flash of movement. A man was trying to slide between two oak saplings, being careful because he’d heard the shot and the yell. By now he had to realize his partner was down.
The man held something in his hand—not a gun or a rifle. Jack realized he was speaking on a walkie-talkie, telling the team leader one was down in the kitchen. Jack saw the dark blue of his shirt when he shifted forward, probably to get a better look at the house, to try to see him. Big mistake, Jack thought. He lined up the shot and fired, but the man was good. He’d seen Jack’s shadow, seen a whisper of movement, he supposed, and dove to the ground, Jack’s bullet went into a tree and spewed up a whirlwind of leaves.
No way was he going to let that man go back around front to join his team. He stretched his arm up and grabbed an apple from the howl sitting on the breakfast table. He took aim at the trash can container off to his left and threw the apple. It struck hard. He saw the man jerk around, his gun arm swinging smoothly toward the container. Jack stood and fired.
The man didn’t make a sound.
Jack watched him pitch forward out of the forest and onto the grass.
He heard gunfire intensify at the front of the house. He prayed his one civilian and one marine were being careful. He thought the two of them could handle the front. He waited, listened. He was as convinced as he could be that there were no more shooters lurking in the forest. He ran flat out across the backyard, fanning his Kimber, so pumped with adrenaline he could hear his own heart thudding against his chest.
How had they found Slipper Hollow? Not hard, really. With the Internet, nothing was secret for long.
He fell to his knees and checked the man he’d shot. The bullet had gone straight through his heart. He pulled out his wallet, stuck it in with the other one in his pocket. He picked up the fallen walkie-talkie and clicked the speak button. He lowered his voice, crumpled leaves in his left hand to create the impression of static, and prayed. “Hey, it’s not going good here. What do you want me to do?”
“Clay, that you?”
He wasn’t expecting a woman’s voice. “Yeah, it’s me.”
He crumpled more leaves. “Hard to hear you.”
“What about Donley? You said he went in the back and you heard a shot. What happened?”
“He ... got ... clocked.”
“All right, all right, dammit, we’ll have to wait until dark to go in. They’re hillbillies, of course they’ve got weapons, probably coon rifles, so a frontal assault is out. Do you think you can get in the back?”
He rubbed his palm over the receiver. “It’s tough, I ...”
“Clay? Hey, wait, you’re not Clay—”
He heard her cursing, then the walkie-talkie went fuzzy.
Jack quickly began making his way around to the front, in a wide circle, hoping to come in behind the shooters, but truth be told, he wasn’t holding out much hope.
He heard a few more rounds of gunfire, then silence. He pictured the woman and her partner—they were pros, they wouldn’t panic, but they were facing a full-blown screwed-up fiasco. They’d know enough to get out of there fast. Somehow they’d been spotted, and their prey were armed and shooting back. They’d probably believed it would be easy, even though the shooter they’d sent to Par-low was presently residing in Franklin County Hospital. Did they know that? Probably. But what they couldn’t know was that an FBI agent was here with the
If they had a contingency plan, it was shot to hell now. He ran, hunkered down, ignoring the leaves whipping his face, ignoring the pain in his thigh, the blood seeping from the cut in his left arm, and tried to move as quickly and quietly as possible.
He heard something, and stopped on a dime. It sounded like a footstep, a single footstep.
Sunlight speared through the leaves overhead. Silence. Nothing. Then he heard an animal, probably a
