second blast from the firing chamber blew sideways hard enough from the cylinder to blast paint chips off the door frame in the hall where he stood.
If that didn’t make them duck, nothing would.
Even with his ears ringing from the shots, he heard: “Holy shit! He’s got a fucking cannon in there! Get down!”
He assumed they had both the front and back covered, and there was only one way out. He ran to the bedroom and jerked open the door to his closet. He had a moment of regret when he looked at all the stuff he’d have to leave behind, but that’s all he had time for, that brief moment. He could buy new stuff if he got away. If not, he wouldn’t need it anyway. He’d either be dead or on his way up the river for a long damn time.
How had they found him? Only one way he could see—the same way they had known to set a trap at the Army base. Somebody had ratted him out, and there was only one person who could have done it.
Why? Had she gotten spooked over something and wanted to throw him to the wolves so they wouldn’t follow her? Had that business with the terrorist’s brother rattled her? She seemed so cool and so smart, he’d never figured on that. Was she getting greedy now that the payout was getting closer?
And how stupid did she think he was, that he wouldn’t eventually figure it out that she’d given him up?
Unless maybe the reason they had hung back at the base, and weren’t storming in here like gangbusters, was because she’d told them something else? Like maybe he was suicidal? She didn’t want him alive and talking, did she?
Crap. What a screwup this was.
There were D.C. cops, FBI, and at least a couple goddamn Net Force logos out front, all of them armed, some with subguns, some with LTL beanbag guns and tasers. He had to assume there were that many of them in the backyard, too. They wanted him alive, obviously, the way they were waving those beanbaggers and electrical shockers, but once he’d cooked off a few more rounds from the honker, they’d rethink that. If it was him leading the assault and somebody coughed as loud as the BMF at him? The take-him-alive plan would be right out, and it’d be into just shoot the bastard first chance, and game over.
One against eight. Not good odds, even if he’d had the element of surprise—and he sure as hell didn’t have that.
He had one chance, and it wasn’t much. His only hope was that he had rattled them before they had a chance to get everybody into position. If not, he was probably a dead man, because he wasn’t going to just give up.
The trapdoor to the crawl space was in the floor of the closet. He jerked it up, grabbed the flashlight hung on the nail on the back wall, and dropped into the opening. They’d find the door eventually, but it was covered with carpet to match the closet’s floor, and he tugged it back into place. It would take them a few minutes to get into the house and realize he wasn’t there. A few more minutes to find the crawl space, if he was lucky.
After hearing his gun, nobody would want to be the first guy through the door, just in case he was sitting there maybe wanting to go out in a blaze of glory and see how many he could take with him.
The crawl space was just that, less than a meter high, and he dropped prone and started ass and elbows and knees working. He’d done a modification to the house when he’d rented it, built an exit to the side that opened up in the narrow corridor that had once been a dog run. There was even an old doghouse there, and Carruth had taken out one wall of it and shoved it against the side of the house, to cover the trapdoor leading to the yard.
The place was dirty, full of spiderwebs and God knew what other bugs, but that wasn’t high on his list of worries at the moment.
He came out inside the doghouse, which was big enough to hold a St. Bernard. He looked out through the door, didn’t see anybody in the backyard looking his way, and that was because there was a wooden gate to the dog run and it was closed and padlocked. That would change soon. They’d be watching the back door, checking windows, and looking at the gate to the dog run. With a six-foot-high fence running down the side of the yard, they’d figure they’d see him if he hopped it. Sooner or later, though, somebody would get a bolt-cutter for the locked gate and come to check the side of the house.
He had to hurry.
The fence between his house and the next-door neighbor was a two-meter-tall wooden privacy deal. Fortunately, the neighbor had cats and not a dog, and didn’t know that Carruth had dug a hole under the fence, covered it with a thin sheet of Masonite, and spread bark dust over the top on both sides, so it looked just like the rest of the ground. His next-door neighbor wasn’t big on yard work; his side of the fence was thick with weeds, which was good—he had never notice the disguised pit.
He lifted the edge of the doghouse up, reached across the half a meter, and grabbed the edge of the Masonite, pulling it toward himself. A certain amount of the bark dust scraped off the other side and fell into the hole, but there was enough room, even for a big man in a hurry, to wiggle into the hole and undulate underneath the fence. He moved.
He had a bad moment when the back of his belt snagged on the wood, but he jerked free and came out into the neighbor’s yard. He couldn’t cover the hole from this side, but by the time they found it, it shouldn’t matter.
He stayed crouched low and duck-walked along the side of the neighbor’s house. They had a TV going inside, with what sounded like a ball game of some kind on.
Once he rounded the corner and started away from the fence, Carruth came up some and started to sprint. If the fence didn’t hide him from view, he was screwed; there wasn’t any real cover in this backyard, a couple of short bushes and thin-trunked trees, nothing to hide behind until he got to the other side.
He ran, hard. Passed a sliding glass door and caught a quick glimpse of his neighbor and his two teenaged boys watching the big-screen television. He didn’t think they saw him, but that didn’t matter, there wasn’t anything he could do but run.
Well, if they screwed up on this, maybe they would screw up on other stuff. He could hope.
He rounded the corner, ran toward the fence on the other side of the house, and launched himself over the top in a high-speed high jump, not the Fosbury Flop, but with both hands on a four-by-four post and a sideways vault.
He cleared the fence, hit, fell, rolled up, and kept going.
This neighbor did have a dog, a yappy little Pomeranian that went into a conniption. Fortunately, it was inside the house, and not likely anybody on the street would hear it.
He made it across the yard and hopped the next fence. Banged his left knee hard when he didn’t lift it quite high enough, but cleared it and damned near came down in the next neighbor’s swimming pool. It was covered for the season, but that would have been a bitch to get out of had he stepped onto the plastic cover.
The next fence was the last—this was the corner lot. Carruth ran around the pool to it, stopped, stood on his toes, and peeped over it.
Traffic on the street, but nobody standing around in urban camo with weapons he could see. He’d have to chance it.
He made ready to climb up and over.
“Hey! What are you doing?!”
He turned, and saw the house’s owner, a short, florid, fat man in a sweat suit, standing there with a garden hose, washing down a barbecue grill.
Carruth’s gun was in his holster and hidden under his thin Windbreaker, but if he cooked the guy, he might as well go out front and jump up and down to attract the cops. They’d hear the shot half a mile away.
“Chasing a guy broke into my house!” Carruth said. “Better stay inside, he’s got a knife! Cops are on the way!”
He hopped over the fence.
The fat guy washing his grill stared. He knew Carruth to look at, and while he hadn’t seen a burglar running around back here with a knife, it was the kind of thing that he’d have to think about for a while. If there
