window strut swept along the thin trunks of the trim shrubbery, sliced down the spaces between the houses, then shot upward to the roofs. Just before it came abreast of his hiding place, Wolf crouched to let it pass, but as he disappeared into the darkness, he retained an image: the spotlight moving along the fronts of the houses illuminated, one after another, bright reflecting signs that read NORTH AMERICAN WATCH—ARMED RESPONSE.
As soon as the car passed, he came up again. He aimed his pistol at the front window of the house across the street and squeezed off a round. There was a faint spitting noise, and he could see that a spiderweb network of cracks had appeared. Pivoting, he shot the back windows of the next four houses, then ducked down to reload. He was satisfied for the moment. No matter how crude an alarm system was, if it was triggered by sound, motion or simply the dislocation of a conductive tape, it would go off when a window broke.
He resisted the impulse to move his wristwatch up to his face in the darkness to time the “armed response.” Now was his time of greatest danger, while the police were still free to run their prearranged tactic unimpeded. He had to hope it would take them a few minutes to analyze the scene at Peter Mantino’s house before they started to sweep the neighborhood on foot. He listened for footsteps or radio voices to reach him, and then heard more engines. There was the squeal of tires at the end of the street in front of him as the North American Watch cars started to arrive.
A voice on a police bullhorn said, “Pull back out of here. This is a crime scene.” But there was no diminution of the sound of engines or dimming of the glare of headlights. “Yeah, you. Get out of here.”
Wolf decided it was essential to see how the competition was faring, so he moved to the gate that led to the front lawn and looked through the crack by the hinges. There were two cars like the one he had stolen, and they had pulled into the driveways of two of the houses whose windows he had shot out. Men in jeans, flannel shirts and sweatshirts were outside the cars now, carrying an odd assortment of handguns and flashlights.
Two of them stood on the lawn across the street, looking skeptically at a policeman who was walking toward them; a third was already at the side of the house, looking over the fence and aiming his flashlight into the back yard.
As Wolf waited for the mix to get as volatile as it needed to be, he glanced behind him toward the Mantino house. In front of it, he could see another North American Watch car pull up in the middle of Andalusia. A large man got out of it, leaving the door open. He already held a heavy, long-barreled revolver in his hand, as though he had driven with it lying on the seat beside him.
Wolf took three deep breaths to ensure that he had expelled all the carbon dioxide he could. It was carbon dioxide in the blood that made the hands shake. He eased his body upward, rested his arm on the top of the fence and fired a single shot.
The policeman on the lawn jerked in pain, let out his breath in a grunt, then crumpled to the ground clutching his calf. The three security guards looked at him in disbelief, then at each other. Finally it seemed to occur to them that the shot had come from somewhere else. They crouched and swept the horizon around them over their gunsights, looking for a target. But the policeman’s partner was still at the microphone in his car. In his panic he left the external amplifier on, and as he shouted into the radio, his message echoed through the empty streets. “Officer down! This is One X ray Twenty-two. Officer down! Need assistance. Officer down!”
Wolf could see the three security guards now, but he couldn’t see the other policeman in the car. He decided to take a chance. He stood up at the fence and shouted at the frightened guards, “Police officer! Drop those guns!” then ducked and ran along the adobe wall across the front of the house. He knew he must be abreast of the police car now, but he stopped and crouched in the corner of the front yard and listened. “You heard the man,” said the lone policeman. “Drop them!”
Wolf decided he had to increase the sense of danger a little more, or they were going to obey and let the solitary cop get control of the situation. He looked back along the house toward Andalusia Street. He could see that the policemen there had heard either the bullhorn or the radio and were moving toward him through the back yards.
He rolled over the wall to the next yard, then aimed a round over their heads and ducked down. They had seen the muzzle flash aimed in their direction and heard the crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier as it passed over them, and they responded as he had hoped. There was the blast of a shotgun, followed by eight pistol shots slamming into the corner of the wall. Then he heard three rapid shots fired from the house across the street and judged it was time.
He sprinted to the front of the next house and moved along the facade, then rolled over the next fence and kept moving. There were other sirens in the distance now, all converging on the quiet neighborhood.
Wolf didn’t dare slow down or look back. He trotted unerringly from one fence to the next, each time hoisting himself up and over the identical adobe enclosures, thankful that the sudden, unseasonable start of fall had made it too cold to leave a dog outside all night. At the end of the block he waited and listened for approaching sirens, but it seemed they had all arrived by then, screeching past him on the other side of the wall as he ran from their destination. He pulled himself over the last fence and walked across the street to the far side of Galisteo.
As he walked northward toward the ancient plaza, he crossed a little bridge over the captive river with concrete banks that sliced across the town. As he did, he noticed that it had the strange quality of magnifying sounds. Far in the distance, he could hear a voice shouting into an electronic amplifier. The voice echoed and broke up, but he knew it was another police bullhorn. He also knew, from the rapid reports of guns, that the untrained North American Watch guards had been too frightened to relinquish their weapons. The heavy firing was the sound of the police reluctantly concluding that the guards, either for this reason or because they had killed Mantino or wounded the policeman, represented a danger to the community.
He hurried on toward La Fonda. Right now there would be crackling, fragrant fires of mesquite and pinon in all the big stone fireplaces, heating the bright, intricately glazed Spanish tiles along the mantels. Lots of Santa Fe natives would pass through for a drink on an evening like this, but some of them would have heard that the police were gathering on Andalusia Street. He would pass by the lighted windows and into the subterranean parking garage without crossing the threshold. By the time he had driven the few blocks to Highway 25, the heater of the little Ford would have warmed his hands as much as a fire.
* * *
“I think this is the second one,” said Elizabeth. “If he wanted Peter Mantino, this is the way he’d do it. I think it’s not over.”
“You’re making a hell of an assumption,” said Richardson. “You’ve got to act as your own censor on this kind of case.”
“I know that,” she answered, her voice close enough to a monotone to serve her purpose.
“You’re feeling frustrated and disappointed that we didn’t get him at the L.A. airport, right?”
“I admit it,” said Elizabeth. “I volunteer it, and waive all right to a jury trial, but—”
“All I’m asking,” Richardson interrupted, “is that you think about it. Is it possible—not certain, but possible— that you see another gunshot homicide of another important man and say it’s the same perpetrator because you want it to be? You want another shot at him.”
Elizabeth’s jaw clenched. “You brought me in here to analyze raw data. My preliminary hypothesis when there are two murders of ranking members of the Balacontano family within two days is that a pure coincidence is unlikely. There. I’ve done my job. Your job as section chief is to decide now, this minute, whether to send an investigator out to Santa Fe to find out what actually happened to Peter Mantino.”
“Are you volunteering?”
Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not calling my bluff, you know; I’d love to. But I just went to California, and I have two children who are expecting me to feed them dinner tonight and still be there when they wake up tomorrow. Have things gotten so bad since I left here that you don’t have any real field men for a case like this?”
Richardson shook his head. “No. I just figured out who to send. Give me a minute on the phone with him, and then I’ll transfer him to you.”
“Who is he?”
“His name’s Jack Hamp.”
Elizabeth turned and walked out of Richardson’s office. She had heard the name before. He could be somebody she had met on another case. No, she had read it at the bottom of some report recently. But the button on her phone was already blinking. She punched it.
