She dragged herself up the two rickety porch steps, automatically avoiding the rot-weakened spot on the left of the first tread, and unlocked the double dead bolts on the steel security door she’d installed her first week living here; the walls—just wooden studs, drywall, plywood, and vinyl siding—didn’t provide the same level of security, but statistically, intruders went for the door first. The bars on the windows were not an insurmountable obstacle, either, but they were enough to motivate the casual cat burglar to move on to an easier target. Before she twisted the handle, she rang the doorbell. Three quick jabs that would look like one continuous push to anyone watching. The sound of the Westminster chimes was only slightly muffled by the thin walls. She stepped through the door quickly—holding her breath, just in case. There was no quiet crunch of broken glass, so she exhaled as she shut the door behind her.
The home security was all her own design. The professionals she’d studied in the beginning had their own methods. None of them had her specialized skill set. Neither did the authors of the various novels she used as implausible manuals now. Everything else she had needed to know had been easy to pull up on YouTube. A few parts from an old washing machine, a microcontroller board ordered online, a new doorbell, and a couple of miscellaneous acquisitions, and she had herself a solid booby trap.
She locked the dead bolts behind her and hit the switch closest to the door to turn on the lights. It was set in a panel with two other switches. The middle was a dummy. The third switch, the farthest from the door, was patched into the same low-voltage signal wire as the doorbell. Like that fixture and the door, the panel of switches was newer by decades than anything else in the small front room that was living area, dining room, and kitchen combined.
Everything looked as she’d left it: minimal, cheap furnishings—nothing big enough for an adult to hide behind—empty counters and tabletop, no ornaments or artwork. Sterile. She knew that even with the avocado-and-mustard-vinyl flooring and the popcorn ceiling, it still looked a little like a laboratory.
Maybe the smell was what made it feel like a lab. The room was so scrupulously sanitary, an intruder would probably attribute the pool-supply-store scent to cleaning chemicals. But only if he got inside without triggering her security system. If he triggered the system, he wouldn’t have time to register many details about the room.
The rest of the house was just a small bedroom and bathroom, set in a straight line from the front door to the far wall, nothing in the way to trip her. She turned the light off, saving herself the walk back.
She stumbled through the only door into her bedroom, sleepwalking through the routine. Enough light made it through the mini-blinds—red neon from the gas station across the street—that she left the lamp off. First, she rearranged two of the long feather pillows on top of the double mattress that took up most of the space in the room into the vague shape of a human body. Then the Ziploc bags full of Halloween costume blood were stuffed into the pillowcases; close up, the blood wasn’t very convincing, but the Ziplocs were for an attacker who broke the window, pushed the blinds aside, and shot from that vantage point. He wouldn’t be able to detect the difference in the neon half-light. Next, the head—the mask she’d used was another after-Halloween-sale acquisition, a parody of some political also-ran that had fairly realistic skin coloring. She’d stuffed it to roughly match the size of her own head and sewn a cheap brunette wig into place. Most important, a tiny wire, threaded up between the mattress and box spring, was hidden in the strands of nylon. A matching wire pierced through the pillow the head rested on. She yanked the sheet up, then the blanket, patted it all into shape, then twisted together the frayed ends of the two wires. It was a very tenuous joining. If she touched the head even lightly or jostled the pillow body a bit, the wires would slip silently apart.
She stood back and gave the decoy a once-over through half-closed eyes. It wasn’t her best work, but it did look like someone was asleep in the bed. Even if an intruder didn’t believe it was Chris, he would still have to neutralize the sleeping body before he went on to search for her.
Too tired to change into her pajamas, she just stepped out of her loose jeans. It was enough. She grabbed the fourth pillow and pulled her sleeping bag out from under the bed; they felt bulkier and heavier than usual. She dragged them into the compact bathroom, dumped them in the tub, and did the bare minimum of ablutions. No face-washing tonight, just cleaning the teeth.
The gun and the gas mask were both under the sink, hidden beneath a stack of towels. She pulled the mask over her head and tightened the straps, then clapped her palm over the filter port and inhaled through her nose to check the seal. The mask suctioned to her face just fine. It always did, but she never let familiarity or exhaustion make her skip the safety routine. She moved the gun into the wall-mounted soap dish within easy reach above the bathtub. She didn’t love the gun—she was a decent shot compared with a totally untrained civilian, but not in the same class as a professional. She needed the option, though; someday her enemies were going to figure her system out, and the people coming for her would be in gas masks, too.