Thirty
The pantry door stood open on darkness. I assumed that if anyone had been waiting in there, he would already have shot me.
The swinging door between the kitchen and the downstairs hallway was blocked half open by a large dead man—not Deacon Bullock—lying facedown across the threshold, dressed in black sneakers, black jeans, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t describe what a dead man was wearing any more than I would describe the design on a ten-dollar bill that I used to buy a burger and fries. But in this case, the hombre’s outfit was important because he was clearly dressed like an assassin. And then there were the ski mask and the latex gloves.
Professional killers, sent to clean out one of their enemy’s safe houses, would expect resistance. This guy wouldn’t have come alone to do such dangerous work, and in fact his team probably would have numbered three or four.
Two interior doors led out of the kitchen, and the second opened into the dining room. To avoid the dead man and the soup of bodily fluids in which he sprawled, I preferred to stay out of the bright hallway. I eased open the swinging door to a dining room that was dimly revealed by the crystal chandelier hanging in the center of that space. The fixture had been adjusted to a low setting, and in the faint light, the table appeared to be intended not for serving a meal, but for conducting a séance.
Earlier, during my stay in this house, I hadn’t noticed the uncanny silence with which doors moved on hinges and with which the floors received each footstep. For all the noise I made, I might as well have been a ghost.
A half-open door on the left led to the hallway. Another at the far end connected to the parlor, which I knew because Deacon Bullock had brought me this way from the kitchen when he had first taken me upstairs to see my room.
Another sizable dead man lay across the threshold between the dining room and parlor. He and the first stiff were dressed alike in every detail. He hadn’t purged bowels and bladder in his death throes, as had the other guy, but he still lay in a bit of a mess. His head was turned sideways. Through one of the holes in the ski mask, a fixed eye stared into another world. Just beyond his reaching hand, on the floor of the next room, lay a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor.
I had seen so few of these people’s faces that I was tempted to pull off the dead man’s ski mask. I resisted the urge when I thought, irrationally, What will you do if the face is yours?
I didn’t want to step in blood or on a corpse, but the latter was unavoidable because of the dead man’s size and the limitations of my stride. The heel of my right shoe came down on the fingers of his right hand. Fortunately, the contact produced little sound—the faintest squeak of the latex glove stretching under my shoe—and I didn’t stumble, although I almost revealed my presence by saying, Sorry, sir.
Doorways were the worst. When you’re on the hunt, you must clear them properly, low and fast, weapon in a two-hand grip, tracking the muzzle left to right or right to left, depending on the situation, seeking a target. Even fry cooks know that. The two men who had stopped bullets were dressed and armed like professionals who were trained and experienced in making such transitions, and yet they were dead in doorways.
The parlor was poorly lighted by a single lamp with a pleated blue-silk shade, and crowded with heavy Victorian furniture. A pair of chesterfields, wing-back armchairs: things to crouch behind for concealment. No one popped out of hiding to blast away at me, though the metronomic tock-tock-tock of the pendulum in the grandfather clock seemed to be counting off my last seconds.
As in the dining room, the draperies had been drawn shut at all the windows, perhaps to prevent anyone outside from determining the location of the residents.
A wide archway, instead of a door, connected the parlor to the foyer. I found it refreshing to see that no one lay dead on that threshold.
The foyer. Deserted. To the right, the front door was closed. To the left of the archway lay the brightly lighted hall. Opposite the dining room and parlor were three other rooms that I hadn’t explored.
My sense of things was that the action had moved on from the ground floor after the first two men had been shot. I regarded the stairs, hesitating to climb them and leave unsearched rooms behind me.
Overhead, someone said, “Ahwk,” as though violently clearing his throat, and immediately thereafter something thudded to the floor in an upstairs room.
If, as I had every reason to expect, a third dead man had just given up his ghost, the thud wasn’t as loud as it ought to have been. The floors allowed me to walk as quietly as a cat, and they soaked up most of the sound of dead men falling, which suggested that silence favored the Bullocks and that the place had been constructed as both a safe house and a trap.
Cautioning myself that a trap can sometimes spring unexpectedly and catch not the prey but instead the one who set it, I went to the stairs and climbed warily, silently. I glanced back now and then, prepared to discover that I was looking down the barrel of a gun, but I remained alone.