Rainbows dazzled her, filling her field of vision, pulsing in sync with the ache in her head. She blinked the colors away and looked more closely at the young man in black.
Blood leaked from his mouth. His eyelids twitched.
Out. Really out.
And she had the gun, and she was safe.
“Congratulations, Officer Robinson.” Her sudden hoarse whisper was startling in the stillness. “You’ve just made your first arrest.”
A laugh hiccupped out of her, and then she lowered her head and her stomach flipped and she was sick on the sand.
Death had been close, very close. She’d nearly ended up like Wald. Nearly said goodbye to the world. Nearly.
Nausea subsided into shudders, racking her body like fever chills. Her teeth chattered, and her shoulders shook.
Trish sat on the beach and hugged herself as best she could, her chained wrists crossed over her heart.
24
“I say we break down the doors.”
Philip Danforth dabbed his split lip with a monogrammed handkerchief. A thread of light filtered through a hairline crack between the closet doors, striping his face. The reek of his sweat was acrid and close.
“That’s absurd,” Charles answered evenly.
“What’s absurd about it If we use our combined strength, we can blow them right off the hinges.”
“Do you have any idea how much noise that would make”
“To hell with the noise.”
“Just wait a minute, Phil.”
“Don’t call me Phil.”
“Philip. Sorry. Listen to me.”
Charles was using his courtroom voice. He had found that juries were more readily persuaded by quiet self- assurance than by inflamed rhetoric. The jury in this case was a panel of two: Judy and Barbara. He would never get through to Philip, but one person alone couldn’t smash open the closet.
“We can’t just say to hell with the noise,” Charles went on in his reasonable way, wishing the close confines didn’t require him to stand so close to Philip, nearly nose to nose. “Five armed men are out there.”
“Woman.” Barbara spoke as if every word were the first note of a scream. “One of them is a woman.”
“All right.” Charles showed no annoyance at the interruption. Never alienate the jury. “Four armed men and one armed woman. If we break out, they’ll hear us and come running.”
“For all we know,” Philip snapped, spraying Charles with a mist of spittle, “they may have left the house by now.”
“With Ally” Barbara sat down suddenly on a wicker hamper. It creaked.
“Philip,” Judy said in quiet reproach.
“Well, no.” Philip softened. “Not with Ally. I just meant they could be gone.”
“But they’re not.” Charles tapped an ear. “Listen.”
From the living room came faint noises: shatter of glass or porcelain, thuds of overturned furniture.
“What are they doing” Judy whispered.
Charles shrugged. “Wrecking the place, it sounds like.”
The low groan came from Barbara.
Philip stared hard at the doors, as if willing them to open, then turned to Charles, about to embark on another line of argument. Before he could, a new sound froze him.
The quick tread of approaching footsteps.
“Maybe they’ve brought Ally.” Barbara’s whisper was as solemn as a prayer.
Rattle of a chain. Flood of light. The bifold doors opened to reveal two ski-masked figures, the gray-eyed man and his female companion, both with guns drawn.
The man spoke. “Mr. Kent, we need your help with the safe.”
Charles blinked. “The safe”
A gloved hand closed over his arm and yanked him forward.
“Where’s my daughter” Barbara screamed.
The closet doors slammed in her face.
Thrust into the brighter light and fresher air of the bedroom’s glare, Charles was momentarily disoriented. He watched, dazed, as the two doorknobs were chained and padlocked.
Then the killers ushered him out of the room, down the hall.
He passed Ally’s bedroom. Through the doorway he saw his daughter seated in her desk chair, wrists bound to the tubular armrest with torn bedding. Her eyes met his.
“Daddy …” She hadn’t called him by that name in years.
The man behind him yanked the door shut. Charles whirled, an angry question riding on his lips, but it died when he looked into those cold gray eyes.
Out of the hallway. Crossing the threshold of the dining area.
Charles stopped short, staring.
He had expected some damage, but this …
The dining table had been upended and broken.
The chandelier cut loose to crash in pieces.
Every painting torn off the walls and savaged, the expensive frames splintered.
Love seat, twin sofas, matching armchairs-slashed, the leather upholstery curling in ribbons to expose gobs of foam stuffing.
In the dining area stood the man who had shot Officer Wald. His mask was off, his suntanned and stubbly face sweaty in the peculiar half-light of the one standing lamp still unbroken.
With robotic efficiency he was removing chinaware from a cabinet and smashing it on the floor. The dishes, priceless, had been in the Ashcroft family for generations.
“Good God,” Charles breathed.
He turned again, intending to register a protest, and the gray-eyed man said, “In the den.” To the woman: “Get back to work. This place still looks way too presentable.”
Presentable, Charles thought numbly as he traversed the living room, shoes crunching glass from a ruined end table. What would it look like when they were done The aftermath of a bomb blast
Nearing the foyer, he noticed absently that the patrolwoman was gone.
Funny. He hadn’t seen her in Ally’s bedroom.
He entered the den. It was his personal retreat, a video screening room. From any of the four plush recliners facing the projection TV he could watch satellite programming or a laser disc. Or he could stack CDs in the sixty- disc player and surround himself in music, his eyes blissfully closed.
No bliss tonight.
In the living room the vandalism continued, the noise redoubled now that the woman had joined in.
The den had not yet been trashed but soon would be. Already the safe had been violated, its contents heaped on the rosewood table near his favorite armchair.
The safe …
Ally must have revealed the combination. So why was he here
He turned as the door of the den clicked shut. The gray-eyed man stood facing him across five yards of deep pile carpet under the slow revolutions of a ceiling fan. He holstered his gun, then casually stripped off his mask.
“Hello, Mr. Kent.”
After all this, Charles was hardly in the mood for pleasantries. “Cain-what the hell”
“Relax.” Cain crossed to the bar and got out a bottle of brandy. “Have a drink … on the house.”
“I can’t go back in there with liquor on my breath.”
