She looked at the clock. Ten minutes past two in the morning.
A few months ago, she would have attributed her apprehension to some
frightening an unremembered dream, and she would have rolled over and
gone back to sleep.
Not any more.
She had fallen asleep atop the covers. Now she didn't have to
disentangle herself from the blankets before getting out of bed.
For weeks, she had been sleeping in sweat-suits instead of her usual
T-shirt and panties. Even in pyjamas, she would have felt too
vulnerable. Sweats were comfortable enough in bed, and she was dressed
for trouble if something happened in the middle of the night.
Like now.
In spite of the continued silence, she picked up the gun from the
nightstand.
It was a Korth .38 revolver, 120 made in Germany by Waffenfabrik Korth
and perhaps the finest handgun in the world, with tolerances unmatched
by any other maker.
The revolver was one of the weapons she had purchased since the day
Jack had been shot, with the consultation of Alma Bryson. She'd spent
hours with it on the police firing range. When she picked it up, it
felt like a natural extension of her hand.
The size of her arsenal now exceeded Alma's, which sometimes amazed
her. More amazing still: she worried that she was not well enough
armed for every eventuality.
New laws were soon going into effect, making it more difficult to
purchase firearms. She was going to have to weigh the wisdom of
spending more of their limited income on defenses they might never need
against the possibility that even her worst-case scenarios would prove
to be too optimistic.
Once, she would have regarded her current state of mind as a clear-cut
case of paranoia. Times had changed. What once had been paranoia was
now sober realism.
She didn't like to think about that. It depressed her.
When the night remained suspiciously quiet, she crossed the bedroom to
the hall door. She didn't need to turn on any lights. During the past
few months, she had spent so many nights restlessly walking through the
house that she could now move from room to room in the darkness as
swiftly and silently as a cat.
On the wall just inside the bedroom, there was a panel for the alarm
system she'd had installed a week after the events at Arkadian's
service station. In luminous green letters, the lighted digital
monitor strip informed her that all was secure.
It was a perimeter alarm, involving magnetic contacts at every exterior
door and window, so she could be confident the noise that awakened her
hadn't been made by an intruder already in the premises. Otherwise, a
siren would have sounded and a microchip recording of an authoritarian
male voice would have announced: You have violated a protected
dwelling. Police have been called.
Leave at once.
Barefoot, she stepped into the dark second-floor hallway and moved
