The back of her neck, cold, prickled with tiny hairs.
Someone was here, inside the house. More than one of them.
She knew it.
With irrational certainty she knew it.
“Did you hear that”
The voice surprised her because it was her own. She hadn’t realized she was speaking.
Charles glanced at her, irritated at having the Ojai anecdote spoiled twice. “Hear what”
“A noise.” She wanted to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t work. “I thought … in the hall …”
Philip pushed back his chair with alcoholic bravado and immediately started to rise. Charles waved him back down.
“Don’t trouble yourself, Phil. Barb’s got sort of an overactive fantasy life.”
Barbara stiffened. “Fantasy life”
“Of course, it may be merely a twisted plea for attention.”
“Not from you.”
Ally was looking down at her plate, intoning in a small voice, “Please don’t. Don’t fight.”
Only Barbara heard, but the soft, plaintive words cut like glass.
“What kind of noise” Judy leaned forward, worry hunching her bony shoulders. “Someone in the house Is that what you mean”
Barbara hesitated. Suddenly her fears seemed embarrassingly insubstantial.
Maybe Charles was right. Maybe she was imagining all of it.
Certainly she’d proved her father wrong. She hadn’t behaved at all like a level-headed pragmatist.
“I guess I did get a bit carried away,” she said without conviction.
Charles nodded vehemently. “Carried away. Exactly. That’s what I’ve been telling you.”
He lifted his fork with wounded dignity.
“So if we all could just settle down and finish our dessert …”
The first masked figure came up fast out of the foyer, and Barbara had time to wonder what he was doing there when she’d heard sounds from the back of the house, and then two more intruders burst in from the rear hall and another pair from the kitchen, all of them armed, black pistols gleaming in gloved hands.
A napkin drifted to the floor in a flutter of white. Judy Danforth was out of her seat, screaming. The nearest intruder hit her, hard. Crack of knuckles against her jaw, her cry silenced as she fell into her chair, Philip rising belligerently, shouting a righteous objection. A second gunman delivered a palm heel strike to the side of Philip’s neck-a hard, fleshy whap, the sound of pounded meat in a butcher shop, a welt blooming on Philip’s neck, soon to be a purple bruise, and Philip sat down, stunned and blinking and looking as if he were about to vomit.
Irrelevantly it occurred to Barbara that none of the intruders had yet spoken a word.
The table was surrounded with impossible speed, like a jump cut in a movie. The chandelier bulbs cast orange glints on the pistols, tiger-striping the jet black frames and silencer tubes.
Ally gripped the fringe of the tablecloth, the damask stretched taut. Barbara reached out, patted Ally’s hand.
The terror she felt was less for herself than for her daughter. Her own life was over. Well, she could accept that. She was forty-three, hardly old, but she’d had time anyway, she’d had years.
But Ally, only fifteen-why, fifteen was nothing, it wasn’t even a start.
She gazed blankly at the men ringing the table, big men, muscular under their clothes . except for one who was shorter, almost lithe.
With a distant, anachronistic sense of shock, Barbara made out twin hills of breasts half concealed in folds of crinkled nylon. A woman.
But women don’t do this, she thought, scandalized, while a remote part of herself mocked her own navet.
All five of them wore identical costumes, black jumpsuits or sweatsuits, something like that, sleek and nonreflective. Mouthless ski masks hooded them, leaving only their eyes visible, shiny in the dark surround.
Charles stared straight ahead, his gaze fixed on nothing.
Ally began to whimper, a dismal mewling noise.
Judy hiccupped a moan, the prelude to another scream and perhaps more violence.
And the man from the foyer lifted his pistol and fired one shot into the beamed ceiling.
Despite the silencer, the gun’s discharge made an audible crack. Wood chips from the rafters pattered on the floral centerpiece. A cartridge casing, ejected by the slide’s recoil, rolled across the tablecloth and came to rest at the edge of Ally’s plate.
The room froze.
For some timeless interval there was no movement, no sound save Charles’s ragged breathing and Ally’s low sobs.
Almost casually the man checked his watch. “Eight-twelve.”
His voice, slightly muffled by the mask, was harsh and gravelly. In his curt nod of satisfaction he conveyed an air of command.
Barbara thought these people might be terrorists. Terrorists in her house.
And terrorists were zealots, fanatics-no bargaining with people like that. They killed for vengeance and salvation, killed women, children. Ally .
Tramp of boots.
The man who’d fired the shot was rounding the table, each heavy footfall imprinting deep tread marks in the carpet’s thick pile.
Directly before Barbara he stopped. The gray eyes in the ski mask’s slits fastened on her.
Her heart twisted.
“Who did you call” he asked.
On the margin of her vision she saw Charles go pale.
She didn’t answer. She sat rigid, her spine and shoulder blades pressing deep into the spindles of the chair.
He stepped closer, and though she couldn’t see his mouth, she could sense his feral smile.
The gun lifted. “Who did you call, Mrs. Kent”
He knew her name. She wondered why she feared him more because of that.
Her chest rose, fell. She stared down the black hole of the silencer tube, and it stared back, a lidless eye.
“No one,” she whispered. “A friend.”
“Bullshit.”
“Just a friend, I had a question about a recipe-“
“Who did you call”
Barbara shut her eyes and gave up all hope of life.
“The police,” she answered almost calmly.
“Oh, Jesus Christ …”
It wasn’t the gunman who’d spoken. It was Charles and, incredibly, he sounded angry.
She looked past the gun and saw her husband glaring at her, his eyes unnaturally large, his cheeks unnaturally white.
He always had hated to lose an argument.
“Damn it, Barbara.” Charles swallowed, nearly choking on speech. “I thought we agreed-“
“That no one could penetrate the perimeter” This was funny. She coughed out a broken laugh. “Well, I hate to be obvious about this, dear … but it looks as if somebody did.”
13
Headlights splashed on a wrought-iron gate.
“Some spread, huh” Wald smiled. “And no noisy neighbors.”
Trish didn’t answer. She peered into the darkness beyond the gate, her pulse ticking in her ears.
