Net Force

Brigette's doorbell rang. 'Oh, Jesus,' she said.

'Go let him in. Remember, I'll be standing where I can see you and he can't see me. If there are any sudden moves, anything at all, I'll drop you before I do anything else.'

'Okay. I understand.'

Brigette headed for the door.

Here was where it got dangerous. The Selkie didn't think Brigette would do anything stupid — she was betting a lot on that. If it went sour before Genaloni got inside, she had four.22 magazines loaded for the Walther, twenty-four extra rounds, plus the seven in the gun. And the remainder of a box of Stingers in her pants pocket, though if it came to her needing more than thirty-one rounds, she was going to be in deep shit.

'Hey, baby. Come in. My husband just left.'

Genaloni laughed and stepped into the house.

The Selkie moved back out of sight, the pistol held in both hands by her right ear, muzzle pointed at the ceiling.

She now wore surgical gloves, had not touched the pistol or magazines with her bare hands since she'd scrubbed and cleaned them last night. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Adrenaline surged over her in warm rushes.

'I can't get the wire thing off the champagne bottle, Ray. The little round part twisted loose.'

'I'll get it. In the kitchen?'

'Uh-huh. In the ice bucket.' Oh, she was cool. Not a hint of nervousness in her voice.

The Selkie moved into the open closet behind her, smelled the fresh scent of new, unworn dresses that still had the tags on them. She pulled the door almost closed. Genaloni and Brigette walked past her hiding place, never glanced in her direction.

The Selkie stepped out behind them as they entered the kitchen.

'Don't move,' she said.

Genaloni knew what was going down from those two words, and he knew Brigette's part in it. 'Shit. You lousy fucking whore.'

'I'm sorry, Ray, she made me do it! She has a gun!' This was the most excited-sounding Brigette had been all day.

'Hands high and wide, Genaloni.'

He obeyed. 'Can I turn around?'

'Sure.'

He did. When he saw her, he nodded. 'So. You must be the Selkie, right? Why this?'

'You know why. Your people tried to find me. You were told a long time ago that's not allowed.'

He didn't try to lie. 'Shit. They were supposed to be good.'

'Not good enough.'

'All right. So you spotted them. What's the deal? Money? A guarantee we won't try to look for you again?'

She already had the pistol lined up on his right eye. At this range, she didn't need sights. She could point- shoot a marble off a tabletop all day long without scratching the finish, just using the gun and suppressor to index the target.

'How much money are we talking about?'

He grinned, thinking he had her number.

He was wrong.

The pistol's hand-polished action was honed to a crisp three-pound pull for the single-action mode, no creep. The Selkie squeezed the trigger gently. The shot broke like an icicle under her finger. It sounded like an air rifle, a spat! nobody would hear outside this room.

The tiny bullet hit Ray Genaloni in the white of his right eye. He went boneless and fell, his brain shorted out by the lead bouncing around inside his skull.

'Oh, Jesus!' Brigette said. 'Oh, Jesus!'

Because she liked Brigette a little, and because she wasn't a cruel woman, the Selkie said, 'Calm down. You're all right. I'm going now, take it easy — who's that at the door?'

Brigette turned to look.

The Selkie fired twice—spat! spat! — and double-tapped Brigette in the right temple. The blonde fell. She kicked spasmodically as damaged brain connections triggered a last frantic try to run away. It was an instinctive reaction — the mind that had been Brigette wasn't home any longer. And she had checked out thinking she was going to survive this.

The Selkie moved fast. She bent, put two more shots into the back of Brigette's head, then two more in the back of Ray's skull. The gun worked perfectly — she had polished the feed ramp with steel wool until it gleamed like a mirror, then coated it with TW-25B, a fluorocarbon-based military-spec lubricant. She never had a failure to feed, even with the hollowpoint Stingers. She pressed the heel catch on the pistol, pulled the empty magazine out and shoved another magazine home. She put the empty magazine into her pants pocket, racked the slide on the TPH, stripped and chambered a round. Then she changed magazines again, putting a fresh six-rounder into the gun. One up the spout, magazine full. Seven shots on tap.

She looked around. She hadn't left any prints anywhere. The empty cases from the.22 were clean — she'd loaded them fresh from the box while wearing gloves. They could make something from the extractor and firing-pin marks on the brass rimfire empties, but since she was going to dump the gun as soon as she could, that didn't matter. Even if some diver found the piece twenty years from now, there wouldn't be anything to link it to her — she'd bought it clean on the gray market. Too bad. She really liked the Walther, but you didn't keep murder weapons around once they were used. The prisons were full of shooters who got attached to favorite pieces and kept them after they'd cooked somebody with them. Stupid.

She looked down at the bodies. They both had thought they were going to walk away when she'd dropped them, and they'd been effectively dead before they had time to realize any different. There were worse ways to go.

Okay, now the second part.

She moved to the back door, peeped through a gap in the blinds covering the window next to the door. A big man in a gray sweatsuit stood inside the fence, next to the gate. He was smoking a cigarette, and he had a belly pouch drooped heavily over his crotch. That was where he'd have his gun. Good. A belly pouch was a lot slower than a holster.

She needed to get him away from the gate and closer to the backdoor, out of line of sight from the front, in case anybody was looking at him.

She had spent the better part of the day with Brigette.

She could do enough of an imitation of her voice to fool somebody who might have heard it no more than a couple of times.

She took a deep breath. Opened the door. 'Excuse me? Could you come here a second? Ray needs a hand.'

The sweatsuited bodyguard ambled toward the back door. As soon as any view of him from the front was blocked by the house, the Selkie stepped out into the yard.

Sweatsuit frowned. The Selkie wasn't what he expected to see.

His reaction time was pretty good, but his tactics were bad. Instead of ducking his head, bolting and trying to hop the fence, which might possibly have gotten him clear with a couple of small-caliber rounds in the back, he dug for the pistol in his pouch.

The fastest gunslinger who ever lived couldn't move fast enough to outdraw a gun already lined up on him. The reaction time, plus the mechanical time it took to come from the holster — even from a quick-draw rig, he'd need at least a third of a second, even if he was really fast. Coming out of a belly pouch, this guy was going to need two seconds to get his piece on-line, and he didn't have two seconds.

The Selkie squeezed off her first shot before the guy got past the frown. The second and third rounds followed so fast they sounded like one long brap! She tapped him three times in the head, then ran for the back fence before the bodyguard even hit the ground. Her van was on that block, two houses down, to the left, and there weren't any dogs in the neighbor's yard — she had checked.