tatters of the ghillie garment were wet from the rain. Yet there was a large dark area on his right rear side, near his kidney.
I bent down, trying to see in the dim light. Blood. The stains appeared to be blood. I reached for him, trying to see where he was wounded. He moaned as I touched him, tried ineffectually to fend off my hands.
I tore the ghillie suit with both hands, trying to see.
He had been shot. At least twice. Probably while he was in his hide.
His assailant was probably still out there… right now!
My cell phone was in my pocket. The light was too bad to see the numbers. I grabbed the man, hoisted him up over my back and took him into the house, laid him on the couch, ran up the stairs to Grafton’s room.
Jake and Callie came awake as I burst in. “The guy guarding the house tonight has been shot. He’s downstairs on the couch.”
With that I went charging out. I took the stairs three at a time, half expecting to meet the would-be killer in the front room. There was certainly nothing to stop him from coming through the open front door.
No. The living room, kitchen, and porch were empty.
I closed the door, threw the dead bolt, then hurriedly checked he rest of the house.
I paused in the living; room, trying to think. Hunkering down in the house and calling 911 wasn’t an option. Not unless we wanted to end up like the folks at the Greenbrier safe house. There had been only one man on guard duty tonight — and the attacker didn’t know that.
The back door was in the kitchen and led to an outside shower beside the house, a shower screened by an eight-foot board fence.
A man with a knife could merely cut the screen on the porch and come in that way. Or he could be waiting for us to come out. That the killer was still out there was a high probability. His target had to be Mikhail Goncharov, yet he didn’t know how many guards were out there. That was my edge.
I let myself out the back door, half expecting to stop a bullet at any second.
The rain beat at me. The wind was worse than I thought. My hands were shaking and I was breathing a mile a minute.
I didn’t even know where the wounded man’s hide was. Nor that the hunter was there. Or perhaps he was, waiting for someone to come looking.
I crawled on the wet sand around the house and stopped under the porch, where I could see the street.
You need to thinly about this logically, Tommy. The hunter discovered the snake-eater and shot him, but he didn’t know how many guards there were. Even if he did, he didn’t know where the others were. He couldn’t come toward the house until he found and eliminated them. So he was in a position where he could watch and wait until someone revealed himself.
I scanned the houses I could see on the opposite side of the street — the north side — inspected the cars, tried to remember what the houses had looked like on this side of the street, the south side. Most were built on piles and had some kind of skirting between the house and the ground to keep out critters. The hunter could be under any one of them if he found or made a hole in the skirting.
Except for the house on the south side of the street nearest the beach. It had been built too far out, on the dune, and the retreating beach had washed the dune from under it. It stood derelict now on its pilings, the ground floor at least ten feet above the sand. A few more winters or a hurricane would finish it off, cause it to collapse.
There, I thought. In that house or under it. From there he could see Grafton’s front yard and walkway and everything on the street. He could have watched the wounded man crawl toward Grafton’s. If I were him, I would wait there.
The wind was driving the rain in waves. By this time I was soaked and covered with sand… and still barefoot. I had forgotten to put on my shoes.
I watched the rain in the streetlights for a moment longer, scanned everything I could see. Okay, I was delaying the inevitable, trying to screw up my courage. The man inside needed medical attention, and the only way to get it to him was to call an ambulance or take him to the hospital. With a killer out there, neither option looked good.
I took a deep breath, then scurried forward and rounded the end of the fence, and ran into the next yard to the east. When I was completely hidden from that house at the end of the street, I slowed, made my way to the next fence, prepared to do it again.
If he was in or under the derelict home, he must have seen me dart around Grafton’s fence. This time he might be ready.
I went. Fast.
Made it, with a pounding heart. As I rounded the back of this house I decided the third time would be the charm — he’d pop me then. I was only about eighty yards from the place I thought he might be.
Shielded between two houses, I scaled the fence and dropped onto the other side. Got a ton of splinters in my hands and ripped my trousers. Sneaked around the corner of the house and did the fence trick again. Now only one house lay between me and the derelict.
I heard a dog barking in the house beside me. Terrific. Sounded like a small dog, a yapper. If I could hear it, the hunter could, too.
Oh, boy.
I just hoped the householder didn’t call the law and report a prowler. A patrol car in the street was the last thing I wanted.
I used both hands to chin myself on the fence, take a squint over the top. Heard something zing by my head. I knew damn well what it was and let go of the fence as if it were electrified with a thousand volts. A bullet. He had shot at me with some kind of silenced weapon.
I didn’t wait. I rounded the fence and sprinted by the front of the adjoining house in my best imitation of a juking halfback as two more bullets went by like angry bees. I didn’t stop. Kept going, across the sand toward the dark hulking presence of the derelict house as the driving rain pounded on my face.
He fired one more time, and I saw the muzzle flash. It wasn’t much, no more light than a firefly would make, but it was enough. He was in the derelict house, on the second story.
I dove under it and rolled to a stop. Blew on the pistol to clean the sand out of the hammer channel.
Getting into that house was a mistake. He was trapped in there. Unless he killed me.
Trapped unless he had a pal out here. That thought tightened every muscle in me.
In the darkness, amid the rain and wind, I could see nothing that moved. The beach seemed to reflect what little light there was, and it was empty.
I inspected the house above me. How had he gotten in there? The underside of the first floor was ten or eleven feet above the sand. It seemed to consist of joists and wires and plumbing — in the darkness it was hard to tell. There were three entrances to the house that I could see: one off the deck, a back door, and a front door. The problem was that the steps to these entrances were suspended at least six feet in the air. He must have jumped up to one of these sets of stairs, scrambled up, and gone in. Easy enough for me to do, too, except for one thing. He would probably shoot me as I came through the door.
I certainly didn’t want to take that chance. Nor did I need to. With me under the house, he was trapped. If and when he came out, I would see him before he saw me. That would be my edge.
All I needed to do was sit.
I hunkered down behind one of the pillars, which gave me a bit of shelter from the wind and rain.
Minutes passed slowly, and I shivered. My shirt and trousers were wet and plastered to me, and I was wearing more sand than a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. Not much insulation value in sand, I found.
I dialed Jake Grafton on my cell phone. After three wrong numbers I got him. I told him where the killer and I were.
“I can’t get anyone here until morning,” he said. “Can you keep him corked until then?”
“Yeah.”
“Callie is going to take this trooper to the hospital,” Grafton continued. He was the coolest man under pressure I had ever met. He sounded as if he were ordering breakfast at an I HOP. “We’ll put him in the car and she’ll drive away. I’ll come back in the house and stay with Goncharov.”
“Will he stay in the house, you think?”
