So, rather than try to outguess what forensic scientists might be able to find on her shorts, or underwear, or top, or boots, or gun, or knife, everything she had on when she executed Babington went down the hell hole along with his body. Her best protection was to make sure there was never any evidence to be found.
She sometimes wondered if an archaeologist tens of thousands of years in the future would discover the hell hole and all the remains of predators at the bottom. She could only wonder at what theory they would come up with about what it all meant.
Angela knelt and went through everything Babington had emptied out of his pockets. She tossed the change down the hole. He had nearly five hundred dollars in his wallet. She pulled the cash out. She couldn’t see the point in throwing away cash. She looked through the photos. There was a picture of a boat, and a photo of a middle-aged woman, presumably his wife.
“I just did you a big favor, lady.”
Angela tossed the wallet down the hell hole. She threw his whole four-leaf-clover key ring full of keys down into the darkness. His luck at getting away with the things he did had run out. She stuck her little finger through the key ring with his car keys and remote and set them up on the counter.
After she had thrown everything of no use or potentially incriminating down the abyss, she took the garden hose off the wall and thoroughly washed down the floor to get rid of any trace of blood. The water was freezing cold on her bare feet. She promised herself that after she was finished she would take a hot shower. She also needed the shower to make sure that any speck of blood or brain tissue was washed out of her hair.
After winding the hose back up on the reel at the end of the basement, she took a new pair of boots out of the lower cabinet where she kept a dozen pair. She’d used two pair between Owen and then Babington. She made a mental note to order some more. She pulled out a new knife, in its new sheath, and slipped it into the pocket she had already created between the lining and the leather of the right boot.
Once she had new boots prepared, she took a new Walther P22 out of its box. She tossed the box, with the serial number and the shell inside from the manufacture’s test firing, down the hell hole.
She loaded one new magazine with ten rounds, the second with nine. They were supposed to hold ten rounds, but she had learned over years of practice that the magazines didn’t always feed reliably with ten rounds. If she was just target-practicing, she might load ten rounds. It gave her practice at clearing random jams. But when her life depended on the reliability of the gun and magazines she carried, she loaded those spare magazines with nine rounds.
She shoved a magazine loaded with ten rounds into the gun and cycled the slide to chamber a round, leaving nine in the magazine. Having one chambered and nine in the magazine gave her ten rounds the first time around, and nine thereafter if she needed to reload with a fresh magazine to keep firing.
So far, with the murderers she had killed, she’d never needed a second magazine, but she always carried extras just in case. Her grandfather always told her that you could never have too much ammo.
Naked, holding new boots loaded with a new knife under her left arm, her holster and a few full magazines in her left hand, and her gun in her right hand with her finger along the side of the slide, she went upstairs to take a shower.
As she clicked off the basement light and then the living room light switches with the back of her hand, she heard a car drive up.
Angela froze.
No one ever drove up uninvited past all the no-trespassing signs. She remembered that she had left the cable down after Babington had driven in, so it was always possible that it wasn’t trouble arriving at her door. It could be some innocent visitor looking for directions.
Angela didn’t think she could be that lucky.
She dumped everything she was carrying, except her gun, on the couch. The hall light was still on, but otherwise the place was dark.
She peeked out the door. The beige, four-door Toyota Camry that she knew all too well was just coming to a stop.
Angela held the gun behind her back and stepped out onto the porch, naked.
FORTY-THREE
All four car doors popped open. The two men on the passenger side stepped out first. In the moonlight she could see that it was Juan and Pedro.
Angela, gun in hand, was already in a near trance, the same as when she practiced with her grandfather’s target. She had put thousands of rounds into that steel triangle. Tens of thousands of rounds. Hundreds of thousands of rounds. That triangle haunted her dreams.
An ear-to-ear grin grew on Pedro’s face. “Ah, I see the American whore is naked and eager to—”
She put a round through the center of his face, stopping him cold.
The bullet entered through the soft area of that triangle formed by the points between the two eyes and tip of the nose, the triangle her grandfather had told her about when she was younger and had her practice hitting.
The bullet ricocheted around inside Pedro’s skull, turning his brain to pulp and instantly ceasing all neurological function. He dropped where he stood before he had been able to complete the sentence. The way he went down, it looked as if his bones had dissolved.
Even as Pedro was still falling, Juan pulled a knife and screamed some sort of battle cry in Spanish that she didn’t understand.
He charged for the porch. Angela was in no hurry. Her aim had locked on to him. He was that target, wobbling, moving, swaying.
Angela shot him between the eyes. He fell dead at her feet.
Even as the sounds of the two shots were still ringing through the night air, and the two men were hitting the ground, the other two men realized they were in trouble and slammed their doors shut. The driver threw it into gear and matted the gas pedal. Wheels spinning, the car reeled around, throwing up a cloud of dust as it raced back down the driveway and into the darkness.
Angela didn’t shoot at the escaping car. She didn’t think a .22 bullet would penetrate the metal of the car reliably enough to kill the driver. A shot through glass at an angle would deflect a bullet. She doubted that the small-caliber slug would blow out a spinning tire. Shooting at the car would be little more than random shots in the dark. She didn’t like low-probability shots.
Besides, she didn’t want the shot to be luck. She wanted to look into their eyes when they died. She wanted her face to be the last thing they saw as they knew they were an instant away from death.
Angela’s immediate urge was to go after the two men, but she was naked. By the time she threw on some clothes and grabbed the keys to her truck, she knew they would be long gone and she would be unlikely to find them. It would be a series of choices—left or right—and in the end they would probably be gone.
She would find them, and when she did, she would kill them, just as she had promised that night in that filthy room on the greasy moving pad. They were not going to get away. They had come back to kill her. They were not going to give up. Neither was she.
The most important issue at the moment was the two dead guys in her front yard and the car of the now officially missing Assistant District Attorney John Babington sitting in front of her house.
She believed that she knew generally where she could find the other two men. She thought they were up to something in the old industrial area, so they weren’t likely to leave town. They weren’t going anywhere for now.
She had been out to the deserted industrial area many times, looking for them, so far with no luck. But they were still out there, somewhere. She knew they were. The fact that they had just shown up at her door to finish the job they had started that night proved it. She would find them sooner or later. And if they showed up at her house again, all the better.