straight, yet not cure me so much I would be useless to his employer.
I came to the rear of the house and eased over between the shrubs and the wall. Getting as low as I could and still see over the greenery, I eased my head around.
The shrink’s solution, which I thought was sorta neat, was to declare me neurotic but not paranoid. Apparently there’s a very thin, crooked line in the dirt that separates the serious sickos from the rest of us twisted freaks, people like you and me, and mental health pros are the only people who know where that line is. In any event, they pretend to know. We amateurs—
I saw something descending toward my head just in time and jerked it back. A machete! The man wielding it had tried to take my head off!
The force of the downward blow carried the big blade to the ground. The man had swung it so hard he couldn’t stop it. I dropped the ray gun and grabbed at the wrist that held the weapon with my left hand while I drove my right at his neck.
He rolled away and my knuckles smashed into his cheek.
Before I could close, he rolled and came up with the machete ready for another swipe. He looked like an Arab, young, wiry, medium height. I outweighed him by at least thirty pounds and was four or five inches taller. Didn’t matter — with that machete he looked big as King Kong.
He waggled it and stepped to his left to clear the house and shrubs.
If I turned around to retrieve my ray gun, I was going to lose a few body parts. I reached up my sleeve and pulled out the fighting knife.
When he saw it, he charged, swinging the big blade.
That was the wrong move. I went over backward, under the arc of the singing machete, and let his momentum carry him onto the knife. It went up to the hilt in his solar plexus.
Impaled, he tried to draw a breath as his eyes widened. He drew back the machete… and dropped it.
I gave the knife a savage twist, then shoved him off it. He fell over backward, tried to rise, gasping, then fell back.
I hunted around for my ray gun, wasting valuable seconds. Where was it?
Under this juniper. Must have kicked it. I dropped to my knees and retrieved it.
I didn’t know anything about knife wounds, didn’t know what my assailant’s prognosis might be. Was he going to get up, go for help, follow me for another try, or die quietly dreaming of the virgins that awaited him in paradise?
Since I didn’t know, I helped him on his way. I stabbed him in the throat with the knife and jerked it upward, slashing, as I pulled it out. Blood shot all over the place — the sight and smell of it hit me like a hammer. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Probably have to answer for it at the Pearly Gates, if I ever get that far.
I keyed the mike on my headset. “Better call the cavalry. I just got attacked by a raghead.”
“You okay?” Willie asked, worried.
“Yeah. Get Grafton and tell him to step on it.”
I stood over the rapidly dying man, looking around. The grocery van was parked beside Rodet’s Mercedes. Another car was there, an older small Fiat; figured that belonged to the maid or security man. Beside it was a small pickup. The gardener? Hell, for all I know, French upstairs maids drive pickups.
I headed for the dog pens.
When I was fifty feet away, I saw a body lying beside the fence. I slowed. Walked. Before long I saw the corpses of the dogs inside. I couldn’t tell if they had been shot or poisoned, and it didn’t really matter. The man, though, had been hacked with the machete.
I stopped. Looked around at the buildings and the empty windows looking back at me. Could hear the wind sighing in the big pines that shaded the pen.
Where were the people?
“Dead man here by the dog pens,” I said to Willie. “Dogs look dead, too. Grocery van still here.”
“Grafton’s on his way.”
“Don’t know where the people are,” I said to Willie. “Gotta be here someplace.”
“One of them is coming,” Muhammed Nada told the old man. “The infidel warrior, Shannon.”
“The others will be here soon,” Abu Qasim said, and carefully knotted the rope around Marisa. He stepped around the chair that held the sagging corpse of Jean-Paul Arnaud and checked the rope that held Henri Rodet to his chair.
“You have been a brother and father to me,” he said softly to Rodet. “Someday I will welcome you to paradise.”
“It will be soon, I think,” Rodet said.
“Oh, no. You have much to do before that day. Allah will help us both.”
With that, he removed a cloth from his pocket and used it to gag the Frenchman.
“Your precious faith,” Marisa said acidly as her father was tying the knot. “What if you are wrong? What if hell awaits murderers?”
“Don’t blaspheme, woman.”
“Can’t you admit that there is no way to be absolutely certain you are right?”
“With Allah there is no doubt.”
“Only a fool is absolutely certain of anything in this life,” she shot back.
“She may betray us,” Muhammed Nada suggested to Qasim. “One word from her, and all our preparation and suffering will be for nothing.”
Qasim finished the knot behind Rodet’s head and looked at his daughter.
“One word,” Nada repeated.
“He’s right,” Marisa Petrou said, and bowed her head. “Why take the risk? I am tired of living and I loathe you all. Kill me. And explain that crime to God, if you can.”
Rodet made a noise, and Qasim glanced at him. He was shaking his head from side to side.
Abu Qasim walked over to Rodet with the silenced pistol in his hand. The Frenchman closed his eyes. At a distance of three feet, Qasim aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger.
The barn was nearest, so I went to the door, eased it open and looked into the gloom… and saw nothing. Not even a horse. The building was empty. I put on the goggles, flipped them on, turned them to infrared and studied the ceiling. No humans up there, I concluded.
Raising the goggles onto my forehead, I checked the courtyard, then stepped outside. One other barn, the garage, or the house. They had to be in one of them.
I pulled down the goggles and looked. The daylight shining on the walls had warmed them so much the goggles were nearly useless. I played with the contrast control, trying to see something, anything.
Wait! In the garage … on the second floor. The apartment above. A moving shape. At least one.
I pulled up the goggles, checked everything I could see one more time, then trotted for the personnel door of the garage.
I was halfway across when the door opened and a man with a submachine gun stepped out. He didn’t hesitate. God, he was quick! He braced the weapon against his hip and started shooting.
He should have aimed. As the bullets went over my head, I dropped down and squeezed the trigger on the ray gun. The laser shot out.
I kept the trigger down for what seemed like an eternity. When nothing happened, I thought I had had the stroke. This guy might not be a marksman, but he had lots of bullets and it would only take one to do me. Despair and panic welled up in me, and then the lightning flashed and strobed from the weapon in my hand.
The report was almost lost in the thunder of his gun, but the effect on him wasn’t. His back arched and the gun muzzle went up and he fell with the weapon still hammering. I held the trigger down and the lightning pulsed across the thirty feet that separated us.
The lightning stopped about the same time his gun went silent. The pulse lasted maybe half a second, though it sure as hell seemed longer. I could see smoke wisping from the corpse.
“God almighty!” I whispered, stunned.
Mesmerized by the smoke rising from his flesh, I walked over to him. The electrical charge had hit him in the chest, burned a hole in his shirt and cooked his flesh. The smell turned my stomach.
Still standing there like a blithering fool, I glimpsed a motion in the doorway. Another man with a gun.
