Third Degree

Glass, he thought. Shards of window glass.

A man screamed to Danny’s left. Danny turned and saw Warren on his back, gasping for air and waving his pistol as though having a seizure. His shirt, too, was peppered with blood.

Danny got to his feet and stamped on Warren’s wrist, pinning his gun to the floor. He was about to reach down for the weapon when someone screamed, “Get on the floor! Get down!”

Danny turned and saw what appeared to be a creature from outer space. Clad from head to foot in black ballistic nylon and Kevlar body armor, it had enormous insectlike goggles covering its eyes-

Ray Breen.

“Get out of the way!” Breen shouted, brandishing a submachine gun. “Or I’ll drop you where you stand!”

Danny held up both hands. “He can’t fire! I’m standing on his arm! I’m going to take his weapon!”

“Get out of the way, Major!”

Keeping his left hand aloft, Danny bent and tugged the gun from Shields’s unresisting hand, then tossed it away, into the great room.

Two more figures in black appeared behind Breen, but the TRU commander didn’t lower his weapon. Instead, he moved to his right, angling for a clear shot at Shields. Not knowing what else to do, Danny dropped to his knees and shielded the doctor with his own body.

“Somebody stop him!” he shouted, realizing as he did that Ray Breen was the senior officer in the room. “Get Sheriff Ellis!”

“Get off that bastard!” Ray yelled. “This thing ain’t gonna end but one way!”

Breen’s gun was an MP5, Danny saw, capable of firing eight hundred rounds per minute on automatic. If he pulled that trigger, both Danny and Shields would die.

“Go ahead,” Warren rasped from beneath Danny. “Shoot.”

Breen moved closer, trying to fire around Danny-

“Put the gun down, Ray.”

Danny turned and saw the long gray barrel of Carl Sims’s Remington 700 jutting through a shattered study window. Carl held the rifle almost casually, at waist level, but no one in the room doubted that a bullet fired from it would strike its intended target.

“He killed my brother!” Ray shouted in a voice beyond reason.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” Carl said softly. “But I will.”

Breen studied the sniper’s face, then turned back to Shields and aimed his MP5 past Danny, right at the doctor’s head. Carl didn’t raise his rifle an inch, but when he spoke, something was in his voice that had not been there before. Disdain, Danny thought.

“You’re always asking me how many men I killed over in Iraq. The truth is, I don’t know. But I know this: I’ve killed better men than you.”

The gun in Ray Breen’s hand quivered under the stress of the war raging inside him. After several seconds that held eternity within them, he lowered the weapon to his side. As Danny crawled toward Laurel, Ray lunged forward and drove his boot into Shields’s rib cage with a crack.

Then every light in the house went out.

Chapter 23

Two seconds after the room went black, something knocked Danny’s legs from under him. His tailbone cracked against the floor, but he forgot the pain when a cold pistol barrel invaded the soft flesh between his jawbone and windpipe. He tried to jerk his head back, but a strong hand grabbed his hair and shoved the gun deeper into his neck.

“Get up,” hissed a voice in his ear. “On your feet, or I’ll pull the trigger.”

Danny obeyed.

Shouts of anger and confusion reverberated through the darkness, but the whispering gunman dragged Danny across the room with total assurance. Danny stumbled on something, but his captor held him erect. Night-vision goggles? he wondered. His shoulder brushed a doorjamb as tactical lights arced through the room, and then he passed into cooler air.

“Move to the right.” A knee drove into his back. “Hurry!”

Danny saw light ahead. He thought of crying out, but the gunman read his mind. “Make a sound, I’ll blow your brains all over the hall.”

It was Warren, Danny realized. Of course it was. Who else could it be? But where were they going? Why didn’t Shields just pull the trigger and be done with it?

“Toward the light!” Warren urged, running him up the hall now.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ve got a date with destiny, you lying piece of shit.”

Grant knew he’d waited too long to pull the circuit breaker. But how could his dad expect him to wait in the pantry while everything was happening somewhere else? He’d waited as long as he could stand it, and then-just after he’d sneaked out to find his father-the whole back of the house had blown up. By the time he got back to the pantry, men were yelling and screaming all over the house. But Grant still did what his dad had told him to do and sent blue sparks flying from beneath his hands.

Now he was running through the dark, making for his father’s study. In the great room he collided with something hard-something that shouldn’t have been there. Two strong hands seized his upper arms, and a face like something out of a video game appeared before him, a black-goggled grasshopper’s face lit by the beam of a spotlight shining through the great room windows.

“Get that kid out of here!” someone shouted.

Grant was hauled off his feet, carried out through the garage, and set down in the driveway. It was still raining. The shouts of panicked grown-ups ricocheted through the night. The masked figure looked down at him for a moment, then raced back inside the house. Desperate to learn what had happened to his parents, Grant ran around to the front yard, the last place he’d heard Mr. Danny’s chopper.

The big helicopter straddled the front sidewalk like a futuristic bird that had somehow landed in the present by mistake. Its rotors were still spinning. Grant moved toward it but kept close to the shrubbery so that no other deputies would see him.

As he neared the chopper, he froze. His father and Mr. Danny were crossing the open space between the front door and the helicopter.

“Dad!” Grant shouted. “Mr. Danny! Wait for me! Wait up!”

When he reached the two men, Grant realized that his father hadn’t heard him. He grabbed his dad’s arm, then jerked back as an almost unrecognizable face whipped around and glared at him.

“Grant?” exclaimed his father, as though he’d never expected to see his son again.

“Get out of here, Grant!” said Mr. Danny. “Run!”

“No way! I want to come with you guys!”

“You can’t,” said his father. “You have to stay here, Son.”

“I’m coming,” Grant insisted. “I’m not staying here by myself.”

His father looked down at him with an expression Grant had never seen on his face before. It made Grant want to cry. Then his father yanked open the chopper door and said, “Get in the back, Son. Hurry. Harness yourself in.”

Grant scrambled into the helicopter, a machine that hummed and shook as if it were more alive than he was. Mr. Danny and his father climbed into the front seats, and then Mr. Danny did something and the whining overhead got louder. Grant could feel the rotor blades trying to pull the ship off the ground. His father turned around to say something, but then the front door of the house opened and two of the black-suited men ran out. Both were waving