As Branwick flipped his pen in her face, he thrust to his feet, seizing the chair to swing it at her, thinking he could take her, shouting, “KIPP, SHE HAS A GUN! KILL THE BITCH!”
Killing another human being would have been impossible if she hadn’t believed in the reality of evil, if she hadn’t encountered it before, if she hadn’t been trained to act reflexively in desperate circumstances. But she knew evil and reacted and shot him in the head point-blank.
His knees buckled, and as Jane rounded the end of the table to get a line of sight on the hallway, his corpse toppled backward into the life that had splashed out on the floor behind him.
9
* * *
JANE AT THE THRESHOLD, pistol in a two-hand grip, eyes on the front sight and the hallway beyond. At the midpoint of that narrow passage, a door stood open that had not been open before. On the left. Across from the study where she had gained entrance to the house. The door to the half bath.
Kipp, whoever Kipp might be, could have crossed the hall into the study, could have gone forward to the living room or the dining room. Could still be in the half bath, playing her for stupid.
Hallways were shooting galleries almost as bad as staircases. And all those doorways to clear.
Better to leave by the patio door, split by the nearest exit. She had no further business here. No confrontation was necessary.
She backed off the hallway, glanced to the left, toward the gray sectional and the TV. If there was another route from the front of the house to the family room, he might come at her that way.
The thunder of running feet overhead. He had gone to the second floor. Now he was coming back. Coming with evident enthusiasm for a fight. A sudden change in the quality of the thunder, a hollow booming: He was bounding down the front stairs.
He must have gone up there for a weapon. He was returning with it, heedless of all risk. He could have fled the house; instead, he raced toward her as if he were a crazed bull and she caped in red.
She stepped to the dinette table, snatched the top page off the notepad, stuffed it into a pocket of her jeans.
The sound of him louder, in the ground-floor hallway now.
Jane turned toward the back door.
The shotgun blast rocked the house. A storm of pellets slashed into the kitchen, the spread constrained by the doorjamb, which spat off splinters. A sleet of lead shattered the glass panes in upper display cabinets, snapped against granite countertops, plinked off the stainless-steel hood above the cooktop.
She would never make it to the back door in time. He was here, she heard him cursing, he seemed insane with rage. He would enter the kitchen shooting.
She dropped to the floor, the table between her and the hallway door. The exit to her left and behind her. Dead man to her right, his remaining features distorted and seeming to be pulled by some black-hole gravity toward the wound where his nose had once been.
Peering under the table, between clusters of chair legs that allowed her no sure shot, she saw a pair of black-and-white man-size designer sneakers cross the threshold, and in the same instant the shotgun roared. The weapon was a pump-action because she heard him chamber the next shell, probably a short-barrel pistol-grip 12-gauge for home defense. The second blast was still echoing through the room, ringing in her ears when he squeezed off the third round, hosing the last section of the kitchen, intending to clear it of opposition, all three loads having cleaved the air at chest height, shattering or pitting everything that didn’t repel the buckshot.
Temporarily half deaf, she saw his fashionably clad feet pivot toward the family room. When he didn’t fire immediately, she knew—or thought she knew—the 12-gauge had a three-round magazine tube.
Jane got to her feet. The guy was a mountain. Had to be the one she’d seen chasing across Ocean Avenue after roller-skating Nona. He stood with his broad back toward her, calculating what family-room furniture someone might be hiding behind, thinking he had cleared the kitchen, not a guy trained at Quantico, his gun savvy learned from bad movies. He was digging spare shells from a pocket of his denim jacket.
From behind, she could have shot him through the heart, if that had been who she was. Instead she backed toward the exit, and though she trod on buckshot and other debris, the giant’s hearing was for the moment compromised, like hers, and loud music issued from the TV again.
He fumbled a shell, and instead of loading the other one in his hand, he stooped to snatch the dropped round from the floor, maybe because he was slow-witted, maybe because he was so big that no one had ever given him a reason to suspect that he was as vulnerable as any child born of a woman.
Jane labored under no illusion that he would fail to be aware of her opening the back door. Her hearing was fast returning, and so was his.
He rose with the dropped shell, and she squeezed off two shots into the ceiling over his head, popping a recessed lighting fixture. Glass and sparks from a shorting wire fell on him, but he also heard the shots, because no silencer fully lived up to its name.
The hulk ducked and half turned and saw her, his eyes lanterns of demented rage. In the heat of the moment, he didn’t compute why she hadn’t shot him instead of the ceiling. He didn’t have a round in the shotgun yet, and he believed himself to be her target, and he scrambled into the family room, putting a section of lower kitchen cabinets between her and him.
Jane fired twice again, into those cabinets, the .45s splitting the wood as if it were balsa, clattering pans and pots inside.
Then she was out, on the patio, gasping lungfuls of cool air, blowing them out hot, running for the west side of the house, into the cover of darkness, such as it was.
If he thought to load only one shell and came fast after her, he wouldn’t have any qualms about shooting her in the back. And if the first blast didn’t kill her, it would take her down and bleed her out, giving him time to load another shell and finish her.
As she passed the two chairs and fountain, and the French door where she had entered the house through the study, halfway along the side of the residence, she thought she felt something on the back of her neck. As if the red dot of a laser-sighting module guaranteed a bullet’s track to sever her spine and lacerate her brainstem. But of course the guy had a shotgun, which didn’t need a laser sight, and anyway you could not feel a laser dot when it marked you. All the training anyone could receive, at Quantico or anywhere else, couldn’t tame the imagination in a crisis.
She reached the front of the house. Fumbled for a breathless moment with the gravity latch on a wrought-iron gate. Shouldered open the gate. Glanced back, saw no one. Glanced toward the front door. He wasn’t there.
Shotgun fire, even contained within the house, would have been loud enough to stir the neighbors from their TVs and computers. If anyone happened to be at a window, Jane shouldn’t be seen running now that she emerged onto the front lawn where pathway lamps and nearby streetlamps cast enough light for a witness to observe some details of a suspect’s appearance. She detached the silencer, pocketed it, holstered the pistol. At a measured pace, she crossed the lawn and followed the sidewalk uphill under trees that whispered above her and trembled leaf shadows across the lamplit sidewalk.
She crossed the street to her Ford Escape and got behind the wheel and closed the door and picked up the binoculars with which she had been studying the house earlier.
If the hulk hadn’t seen Robert Branwick lying dead beyond the kitchen table when he first charged into the kitchen, he had found him by now. Unless he was stupid, he’d realize that the shotgun assault had been impetuous, to say the least, and that he needed to be gone from the premises at something like the speed of light.