That was what I’d been thinking. The fire was at ground level, but the deck was attached to the second floor. We could escape through the glass doors, take the stairs down the side of the house and jump over the flames. If they were too high to do that, we could leap off the deck into the sand. I was confident it would break our fall.
Jeremy was heading for the doors when suddenly I reached for his arm and said, “No.”
“What?”
“That’s the way he wants us to go. It’s the one way out he’s left for us.”
Jeremy looked at me wide-eyed. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying he wants us to go out that door.”
“Who’s he?”
The smell of smoke was getting stronger. The flames surrounding the first floor of the house were casting light into the second-floor windows.
“What’s gonna happen if we go out that way?” Jeremy asked, pointing to the deck.
We get picked off, I thought.
“It’s not safe.”
“It’s not safe to stay here!”
That was true, too.
If this guy Duckworth had warned me about was outside waiting for us to come onto the deck, where would he be?
The boardwalk. The roughly hundred-foot-long raised walkway that led over the grassy area to the beach. It would be the perfect place for someone to wait, rifle trained on the entry to the deck, and take us out, one after the other. A night scope would do the trick, but even without one, we’d be pretty visible. It was a clear night sky, and the fire was doing wonders to light up the surroundings.
“Back downstairs,” I said.
“You knew this was going to happen?” Jeremy asked, trailing me down the steps to the first floor. “That’s why you said we had to go?”
“I got a warning,” I said. “That guy we met. On the beach.”
“What? How did he—”
“Not now.”
We were at the back door. I unlocked it. One hand was on the doorknob, the other on the extinguisher.
“Soon as we get out, run like hell, but stay low, try not to be seen, be quiet. Go to the place next door, the house on the east side, hide someplace, anyplace, wait for me to call when the coast is clear.”
“What about the car?”
“No time. Takes too long to get in, start it. He’ll be on us.” I looked at him, placed a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to be okay.”
He nodded, but he looked far from convinced. Maybe that was because I didn’t look all that convincing.
“You ready?”
Another nod.
I turned the knob, which was hot on this side, and pulled the door open, squeezing the trigger on the extinguisher at the same time, aiming it low at the source. All I had to do was clear us a narrow path. Once we were a foot or two from the building, we wouldn’t have to worry about the flames any more.
Only about taking a bullet.
I doused the ground with foam, smothering the flames in our path. “I’ll go first,” I said.
I stepped out, took a few strides to the Honda and crouched behind the fender. I waved Jeremy forward. He scooted out of the house and joined me by the car. Now we could see just how bad the fire was. The flames were spreading up the walls of the building, some of them licking the eaves of the second floor.
I pointed to the closest neighboring house. “Make yourself scarce.”
Jeremy gave my arm a squeeze and slipped away into the darkness. His feet crunched on the gravel — most of the driveways around here were crushed shells rather than stone — but it couldn’t be heard over the roar of the fire.
I put down the extinguisher and took out the gun, which had been tucked under my belt. Slowly I moved from one end of the car to the other, which afforded me a better view of the boardwalk that led to the beach. I had to blink a few times to focus and adjust my eyes to the darkness.
As I’d suspected, there was someone there. Little more than a dark figure, barely illuminated by the flames. He had something in his hands, and it was aimed in the direction of the deck.
He had to be wondering why it was taking us so long to come out. It didn’t seem likely he’d stay there much longer. After about thirty seconds of watching him, I could sense his impatience. He lowered the weapon, took several steps closer to the beach house. He stopped, cocked his head, studied the place, then took two more steps in my direction.
I grasped my gun in both hands and rested my arms across the top of the trunk to steady my aim. If this were the movies, I’d be able to drop this asshole from here in one shot. But it was dark, my guy was a good seventy feet away, and, standing with his side to me, he presented as a narrow target.
I needed him closer.
He’d gone to a lot of trouble to kill us. I didn’t expect him to give up. But things hadn’t gone as planned, and now he had to be wondering if he’d fucked up. He continued to move slowly toward my location until he was at the top of the set of steps that led down from the boardwalk to the open area between our beach house and the one to the west.
He was only thirty feet away now.
He came around the corner of the house and saw the gap in the flames where the door was. I thought I saw him mouth an obscenity.
I said, “Freeze!”
Sometimes you go with the phrase everyone knows. Of course, when you shout something like that at someone, they move. Maybe not a lot, but it’s a jolt to hear that yelled at you. His body tensed, and he turned in my direction. I could see now that what he’d been carrying was a rifle.
Takes a little longer to raise one of those and aim. It was no six-shooter.
“Don’t even think of it!” I said.
But darned if he didn’t go and think of it anyway.
He went to bring the weapon up into a firing position. I pulled the trigger.
I must have caught him in his left shoulder. He spun hard to the right, stumbled back. But he managed to hold onto the rifle even as he went down to the ground.
I stood, but moved to the center of the car, where my body was at least partly shielded up to my chest. I still had the gun in both hands, my arms extended over the roof of the vehicle.
“Stay down!” I shouted.
He’d landed on his side, had rolled over onto his back, and was struggling to get into a sitting position. I figured I had the better part of four seconds to get to him before he could attempt to line me up in his sights again.
I came around the car and charged. Arms pumping at my sides, gun in my right hand.
He saw me coming, and he had to know he didn’t have time, but it didn’t stop him from trying. He went to swing the rifle in my direction, but before he could, I launched a kick directly at his face.
Got him, too.
His head snapped back and his upper body thudded to the ground. He lost his grip on the rifle. I snatched the weapon, tossed it, and stood over him, my gun aimed squarely at his head. The fire made his sweat-drenched face glow like neon.
It was my first really good look at our would-be assassin. He was about five ten, a hundred and eighty pounds, mid-forties, gray hair cut to within an eighth of an inch of his scalp.
I probably did something approaching a double-take as I asked him, “Where the hell is the other guy?”
By “the other guy,” I meant the man Barry Duckworth had emailed me a picture of.
Cory Calder.
This was not that guy.
Fifty-five
Calder watched the Honda pull in behind the beach house. Saw Pilford and the old guy get out, go into the house.
He scurried after the car as it passed his cabin and hid himself behind a hedge that bordered the road. A good spot for keeping an eye on the place.
He’d been thinking about how to do this.