“You can bet on it. Really. Don’t worry. This is just going to be a routine check.”
He went to the furnace, put his heavy tool kit on the floor, and hunkered down. He opened a hinged plate, exposing the furnace’s workings. A ring of brilliant, pulsing flame was visible in there, and it bathed his face in an eerie blue light.
“Well?” she said.
He looked up at her. “This will take me maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“Oh. I thought it was just a simple thing.”
“It’s best to be thorough in a situation like this.”
“By all means, be thorough.”
“Hey, if you’ve got something to do, feel free to go ahead with it. I won’t be needing anything.”
Tina thought of the graphic novel with the man in black on its cover. She was curious about the story out of which that creature had stepped, for she had the peculiar feeling that, in some way, it would be similar to the story of Danny’s death. This was a bizarre notion, and she didn’t know where it had come from, but she couldn’t dispel it.
“Well,” she said, “I was cleaning the back room. If you’re sure—”
“Oh, certainly,” he said. “Go ahead. Don’t let me interrupt your housework.”
She left him there in the shadowy garage, his face painted by shimmering blue light, his eyes gleaming with twin reflections of fire.
Chapter Seventeen
When Elliot refused to move away from the sink to the breakfast table in the far corner of the big kitchen, Bob, the smaller of the two men, hesitated, then reluctantly took a step toward him.
“Wait,” Vince said.
Bob stopped, obviously relieved that his hulking accomplice was going to deal with Elliot.
“Don’t get in my way,” Vince advised. He tucked the sheaf of typewritten questions into his coat pocket. “Let me handle this bastard.”
Bob retreated to the table, and Elliot turned his attention to the larger intruder.
Vince held the pistol in his right hand and made a fist with his left. “You really think you want to tangle with me, little man? Hell, my fist is just about as big as your head. You know what this fist is going to feel like when it hits, little man?”
Elliot had a pretty good idea of what it would feel like, and he was sweating under his arms and in the small of his back, but he didn’t move, and he didn’t respond to the stranger’s taunting.
“It’s going to feel like a freight train ramming straight through you,” Vince said. “So stop being so damn stubborn.”
They were going to great lengths to avoid using violence, which confirmed Elliot’s suspicion that they wanted to leave him unmarked, so that later his body would bear no cuts or bruises incompatible with suicide.
The bear-who-would-be-a-man shambled toward him. “You want to change your mind, be cooperative?”
Elliot held his ground.
“One good punch in the belly,” Vince said, “and you’ll be puking your guts out on your shoes.”
Another step.
“And when you’re done puking your guts out,” Vince said, “I’m going to grab you by your balls and drag you over to the table.”
One more step.
Then the big man stopped.
They were only an arm’s length apart.
Elliot glanced at Bob, who was still standing at the breakfast table, the packet of syringes in his hand.
“Last chance to do it the easy way,” Vince said.
In one smooth lightning-fast movement, Elliot seized the measuring cup into which he had poured four ounces of vinegar a few minutes ago, and he threw the contents in Vince’s face. The big man cried out in surprise and pain, temporarily blinded. Elliot dropped the measuring cup and seized the gun, but Vince reflexively squeezed off a shot that breezed past Elliot’s face and smashed the window behind the sink. Elliot ducked a wild roundhouse punch, stepped in close, still holding on to the pistol that the other man wouldn’t surrender. He swung one arm around, slamming his bent elbow into Vince’s throat. The big man’s head snapped back, and Elliot chopped the exposed Adam’s apple with the flat blade of his hand. He rammed his knee into his adversary’s crotch and tore the gun out of the bear-paw hand as those clutching fingers went slack. Vince bent forward, gagging, and Elliot slammed the butt of the gun against the side of his head, with a sound like stone meeting stone.
Elliot stepped back.
Vince dropped to his knees, then onto his face. He stayed there, tongue-kissing the floor tiles.
The entire battle had taken less than ten seconds.
The big man had been overconfident, certain that his six-inch advantage in height and his extra eighty pounds of muscle made him unbeatable. He had been wrong.
Elliot swung toward the other intruder, pointing the confiscated pistol.
Bob was already out of the kitchen, in the dining room, running toward the front of the house. Evidently he wasn’t carrying a gun, and he was impressed by the speed and ease with which his partner had been taken out of action.
Elliot went after him but was slowed by the dining-room chairs, which the fleeing man had overturned in his wake. In the living room, other furniture was knocked over, and books were strewn on the floor. The route to the entrance foyer was an obstacle course.
By the time Elliot reached the front door and rushed out of the house, Bob had run the length of the driveway and crossed the street. He was climbing into a dark-green, unmarked Chevy sedan. Elliot got to the street in time to watch the Chevy pull away, tires squealing, engine roaring.
He couldn’t get the license number. The plates were smeared with mud.
He hurried back to the house.
The man in the kitchen was still unconscious and would probably remain that way for another ten or fifteen minutes. Elliot checked his pulse and pulled back one of his eyelids. Vince would survive, although he might need hospitalization, and he wouldn’t be able to swallow without pain for days to come.
Elliot went through the thug’s pockets. He found some small change, a comb, a wallet, and the sheaf of papers on which were typed the questions that Elliot had been expected to answer.
He folded the pages and stuffed them into his hip pocket.
Vince’s wallet contained ninety-two dollars, no credit cards, no driver’s license, no identification of any kind. Definitely not FBI. Bureau men carried the proper credentials. Not CIA, either. CIA operatives were loaded with ID, even if it was in a phony name. As far as Elliot was concerned, the absence of ID was more sinister than a collection of patently false papers would have been, because this absolute anonymity smacked of a secret police organization.
Secret police. Such a possibility scared the hell out of Elliot. Not in the good old U.S. of A. Surely not. In China, in the new Russia, in Iran or Iraq — yes. In a South American banana republic — yes. In half the countries in the world, there were secret police, modern gestapos, and citizens lived in fear of a late-night knock on the door. But not in America, damn it.
Even if the government had established a secret police force, however, why was it so anxious to cover up the true facts of Danny’s death? What were they trying to hide about the Sierra tragedy? What really had happened up in those mountains?
Tina.
Suddenly he realized she was in as much danger as he was. If these people were determined to kill him just to stop the exhumation, they would have to kill Tina. In fact, she must be their primary target.
He ran to the kitchen phone, snatched up the handset, and realized that he didn’t know her number. He quickly leafed through the telephone directory. But there was no listing for Christina Evans.