She blinked. “Excuse me”
“Just wondered if I could have the recipe. I do a bit of cooking around the house-“
“All the cooking,” Judy amended with a smile that stretched her skin drumhead-taut.
“She’s got me well trained.”
“Now don’t start that.”
“Certainly,” Barbara said, breaking into their banter because the brisk, bright voices were giving her a headache. “Charles has a copier in his study. I’ll Xerox the recipe before you go.”
“Mom’s a terrific cook,” Ally said with a radiant smile.
Barbara wished she could take pleasure in the compliment, but it was difficult to concentrate. Her gaze kept straying to the windows as she hunted for a glimpse of movement in the front yard.
Ridiculous, of course. The man she’d seen had been out back.
But how could she be sure there was only one
Professional burglars worked in teams, didn’t they
Teams. Just listen to her. Crazy talk.
She wished the police would come.
11
Through the windows five people were now visible at the table. All present and accounted for.
Cain pocketed his binoculars. Lugging the duffel bag, he crept along the flagstone path and up the steps to the front door.
From one of the bag’s zipped pockets he removed an L-shaped tension wrench and a homemade lock pick fashioned of medium-gauge piano wire.
Silently he slipped the tension wrench into the keyway, applying light pressure to the plug, then slid the pick alongside it and probed for the first of the pin tumblers.
When the pick jostled the pin to the shear line, the plug turned a fraction of a degree.
He advanced the pick to the next pin, then the next. With each success the plug rotated a bit more, its infinitesimal slippage apparent only to his sensitive touch.
When the sixth pin was raised, the plug turned fully and the door was unlocked.
There was a dead bolt, but it was not secured. Cain eased the door ajar, knowing he was screened from the view of the Kents and their guests by the foyer wall.
He could enter at any time.
Dialing the radio’s volume low, he thumbed the transmit button. “Tyler,” he whispered, “report.”
Softly: “We’re in.”
“Blair”
“Us too.”
Tyler and Blair had no proficiency in locksmithing. They had used Lockaid pick guns, customized with sound baffles, to open the side and rear doors.
Cain glanced at his watch.
8:10.
All he had to do was give the order, and the drill they’d practiced so many times would be carried out for real. In exactly sixty seconds, the Kents’ dinner party would suffer the rudest of interruptions.
He hesitated.
It was still not too late to turn back, abort the mission, try again another time.
Gage had been seen. The police quite possibly had been called.
Roughly he bulldozed his apprehensiveness aside. Cops didn’t scare him. He had killed two in his lifetime.
The first was a random hit, done on a dare when he was seventeen. He remembered the startled terror in the patrolman’s eyes as the bullet punched into his skull.
Then just last year, a CHP car had pulled him over on a lonely stretch of Highway 62, east of Twenty-nine Palms. Writing a ticket, the cop had glanced into the back of the van, where a sawed-off Mossberg lay on the floor.
Carrying a firearm was a violation of parole. And the shotgun’s barrel had been trimmed illegally short. The two convictions would send Cain back to prison for a long time.
He had spent half his life incarcerated. Never again.
The cop had just noticed the Mossberg when Cain pulled an airweight .22 from the glove compartment and shot him between the eyes.
For a day or two afterward he’d worried that the man might have run a DMV check on his tags before getting out of the car: standard procedure. But news stories reported that the DMV computer had been down that afternoon, so no trace had been run.
Cops weren’t anything special. Wearing uniforms didn’t make them superheroes. He could kill two more if he had to.
Besides, tonight was his night. He could feel it. Every nerve ending, every corpuscle of blood, sang to him of the future’s bright promise.
He would never have this chance again.
8:11 precisely.
His decision was reached.
Cain lifted the radio and breathed one word.
“Go.”
12
Ally touched her mother’s arm. “Aren’t you going to try any”
Barbara realized she had yet to sample dessert. “Of course.” Mechanically she lifted her fork to her mouth, then swallowed without noticing the taste.
Charles was trying to recover the thread of the Ojai story, still oblivious to the fact that the Danforths had heard it already.
Barbara tuned him out and listened to the house.
Faintly, a whisper of wind chimes.
She heard the faraway notes and shifted in her seat.
The chimes hung in a mobile on the patio. Ordinarily they couldn’t be heard from inside, certainly not from the dining room-unless the back door had been opened.
Absurd.
The sound was carrying on the breeze, that was all. Carrying through the kitchen window.
“So instead of two tickets,” Charles said as the Danforths smiled dutifully, “we had four …”
In the kitchen, the creak of a floorboard.
The noise was low. Barbara couldn’t be certain she’d heard it.
Anyway, houses did that. They settled.
The candle-flame bulbs in the chandelier seemed suddenly too bright, their sparkle painful. She blinked as if in a blaze of light.
“-trying to scalp the damn things, and the match has already started …”
Charles went on talking, the others smiling and eating, and Barbara felt a twitch of rage at them for being oblivious and happy.
She caught Ally looking at her, puzzled apprehension in her serious brown eyes. For her daughter’s sake Barbara swallowed another forkful of tiramisu.
Acid trickled into her belly. She didn’t dare taste the espresso. The strong, hot coffee was sure to make her sick.
Another creak, this one from the rear hallway.
She thought of the wind chimes again, the rear door that would let someone into that hall.
