Thirty-one
At the top of the stairs, I looked along a hallway with large paintings on the walls between doorways, of which there were four on each side. No dead guys were tumbled across any of the thresholds.
The first door on the left stood half open, and a lamp glowed in there, but I couldn’t see the entire space, just the foot of a bed and a dresser and a small armchair in a corner. I cleared the doorway and discovered the room unoccupied.
There were an attached bath and a closet, but I didn’t want to investigate them. A hit team didn’t enter a house to hide in closets and behind bathroom doors. An assault required speed and continuous movement—even if, as seemed to be the case here, it started to go wrong.
In the hall again, on my right, the first door stood open wide. Another bedroom. A third large man, dressed like the two downstairs, lying on his back, leaked enough to require that the carpet be replaced. The uniformity of their dress began to seem like stage clothes, costumes, as though they must be members of a weird punk band, musicians who moonlighted as killers.
I won’t go on about how my heart was pounding and my mouth was dry. Been there, described that.
Because there were no shattered mirrors or bullet holes in the walls, no visible damage from any misspent rounds, it appeared that none of the assassins had gotten off a shot. But such incompetence seemed unlikely. I thought I must be missing something, the kind of missed something that would get me shot in the head.
Nevertheless, I moved silently along the hall, toward the second door on the right. A large painting of mountains towering above a lake and splashed through with spectacular light, maybe a print of something by Albert Bierstadt, abruptly disappeared soundlessly up into the wall as if on pneumatic tracks, leaving only the ornate frame. Where the painting had been was now an opening into the room toward which I had been headed. Standing there, aiming a silencer-equipped pistol at my face, Mr. Bullock managed to check himself before he blew me away. He raised his eyebrows and whispered, “Get in here!”
As the painting slid quietly back into place, I stepped to the door, went into another bedroom, and found that Maybelle Bullock was alive, too. She eased the door almost shut, and her husband put a finger to his lips.
I saw that a different painting, perhaps a print of another Bierstadt, hung here, directly behind the one in the hall, and it evidently retracted simultaneously with the other.
Mrs. Bullock held a device I’d never seen before, about the same width as a cell phone and twice as long. A screen occupied the top half, and two rows of buttons were positioned under it. Nothing on the screen but a field of cool blue. She swung it away from the wall that this room shared with the hallway, toward the wall between this room and the next room, as a fairy godmother might gesture with a magic wand and leave the air sparkling in its wake.
On the blue screen, a red form shaped itself out of pixels. Not anything identifiable. Just a shimmering horizontal mass on a field of blue. It twinkled, constantly adjusting around the edges. My guess: We were watching the heat signature of assassin number four as he moved cautiously through the room adjacent to this one.
As Maybelle moved her hand slowly, from right to left, keeping the red form in the center of the blue screen, tracking it, Deacon stepped to a large painting hung to the left of the bed. This one looked as if it might be a print of something by John Singer Sargent. Deacon aimed the gun at the painting, as if he were an art critic with violent tendencies. His wife pressed a button on the device she held. The artwork vanished up into the wall, leaving only the frame, in which a fourth assassin stood no more than three feet from the muzzle of Mr. Bullock’s pistol. Mr. Bullock fired twice, point-blank, and the hit man dropped out of sight, as if he had stepped through a trap door.
I started to speak, but Mr. Bullock frowned and put a finger to his lips again. Then he put the same finger to his right ear and pressed on something that resembled a hearing aid. I hadn’t noticed it before. A wire ran behind his ear and down his side to an object about the size of a walkie-talkie that was clipped to his belt. He listened for half a minute, pulled the microphone from his ear, and said, “House says no more damn fools inside or out.”
“Who’s House?” I asked, assuming it was a name.
“This here house, son.”
Mrs. Bullock said, “House computer, Oddie. It’s got itself eyes and ears everywhere.”
“Weight sensors, heat sensors, a whole gaggle of sensors,” her husband added.
“So you knew when I got here?”
“We knew,” Mrs. Bullock said, “but we was too busy stayin’ alive to check video and see who you was.”
“Had to figure you for another of them bastards,” Mr. Bullock said. “Sorry if maybe I just about killed you dead.”
“That’s all right, sir.”
“Call me Deke, why don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”