It was a Korth.38 revolver, 120 made in Germany by Waffenfabrik Korth and perhaps the finest handgun in the world, with tolerances unmatched by any other maker… The revolver was one of the weapons she had purchased since the day Jack had been shot, with the consultation of Alma Bryson. She'd spent hours with it on the police firing range. When she picked it up, it felt like a natural extension of her hand.
The size of her arsenal now exceeded Alma's, which sometimes amazed her. More amazing stilclass="underline" she worried that she was not well enough armed for every eventuality.
New laws were soon going into effect, making it more difficult to purchase firearms. She was going to have to weigh the wisdom of spending more of their limited income on defenses they might never need against the possibility that even her worst-case scenarios would prove to be too optimistic.
Once, she would have regarded her current state of mind as a clear-cut case of paranoia. Times had changed. What once had been paranoia was now sober realism.
She didn't like to think about that. It depressed her.
When the night remained suspiciously quiet, she crossed the bedroom to the hall door. She didn't need to turn on any lights. During the past few months, she had spent so many nights restlessly walking through the house that she could now move from room to room in the darkness as swiftly and silently as a cat.
On the wall just inside the bedroom, there was a panel for the alarm system she'd had installed a week after the events at Arkadian's service station. In luminous green letters, the lighted digital monitor strip informed her that all was secure.
It was a perimeter alarm, involving magnetic contacts at every exterior door and window, so she could be confident the noise that awakened her hadn't been made by an intruder already in the premises. Otherwise, a siren would have sounded and a microchip recording of an authoritarian male voice would have announced: You have violated a protected dwelling. Police have been called.
Leave at once.
Barefoot, she stepped into the dark second-floor hallway and moved along to Toby's room. Every evening she made sure both his and her doors were open, so she would hear him if he called to her.
For a few seconds she stood by her son's bed, listening to his soft snoring.
The boy shape beneath the covers was barely visible in the weak ambient light that passed from the city night through the narrow slats of the Levolor blinds. He was dead to the world and couldn't have been the source of the sound that had interrupted her dreams.
Heather returned to the hall. She crept to the stairs and went down to the first floor.
In the cramped den and then in the living room, she eased from window.to window, checking outside for anything suspicious. The quiet street looked so peaceful that it might have been located in a small Midwestern town instead of Los Angeles. No one was up to foul play on the front lawn. No one skulking along the north side of the house, either.
Heather began to think the suspicious sound had been part of a nightmare, after all.
She seldom slept well any more, but usually she remembered her dreams.
They were more often than not about Arkadian's service station, though she'd driven by the place only once, on the day after the shootout.
The dreams were operatic spectacles of bullets and blood and fire, in which Jack was sometimes burned alive, in which she and Toby were often present during the gunplay, one or both of them shot down with Jack, one or both of them afire, and sometimes the well-groomed blond man in the Armani suit knelt beside her where she lay riddled with bullets, put his mouth to her wounds, and drank her blood. The killer was frequently blind, with hollow eye sockets full of roiling flames.
His smile revealed teeth as sharp as the fangs of a viper, and once he said to her, I'm taking Toby down to hell with me-put the little bastard on a leash and use him as a guide dog.
Considering that her remembered nightmares were so bad, how gruesome must be the ones she blocked from memory?
By the time she had circled the living room, returned to the archway, and crossed the hall to the dining room, she decided that her imagination had gotten the better of her. There was no immediate danger. She no longer held the Korth in front of her but held it at her side, with the muzzle aimed at the floor and her finger on the trigger guard rather than on the trigger itself.
The sight of someone outside, moving past a dinningroom window, brought her to full alert again. The drapes were open, but the sheers under them were drawn all the way shut.
Backlit by a streetlamp, the prowler cast a shadow that pierced the glass and rippled across the soft folds of the translucent chiffon. It passed quickly, like the shadow of a night bird, but she suffered no doubt that it had been made by a man.
She hurried into the kitchen. The tile floor was cold under her bare feet.
Another alarm-system control panel was on the wall beside the connecting door to the garage. She punched in the deactivating code.
With Jack in the hospital for an unthinkably long convalescence, herself out of work, and their financial future uncertain, Heather had been hesitant to spend precious savings on a burglar alarm. She had always assumed security systems were for mansions in Bel Air and Beverly Hills, not for middle-class families like theirs. Then she'd.learned that six homes out of the sixteen on their block already relied on high-tech protection.
Now the glowing green letters on the readout strip changed from SECURE to the less comforting READY TO ARM.
She could have set off the alarm, summoning the police. But if she did that, the creeps outside would run. By the time a patrol car arrived, there would be no one to arrest. She was pretty sure she knew what they were-though not who-and what mischief they were up to. She wanted to surprise them and hold them at gunpoint until help arrived.
As she quietly disengaged the dead-bolt lock, opened the door-NOT READY TO ARM, the system warned- and stepped into the garage, she knew she was out of control. Fear should have had her in its thrall. She was afraid, yes, but fear was not what made her heart beat hard and fast. Anger was the engine that drove her. She was infuriated by repeated victimization and determined to make her tormentors pay regardless of the risks.
The concrete floor of the garage was even colder than the kitchen tiles.
She rounded the back end of the nearer car. Stopping between the fenders of the two vehicles, she waited, listened.
The only light came through a series of six-inch-square windows high in the double-wide garage doors: the sickly yellow glow of the streetlamps. The deep shadows seemed contemptuous of it, refusing to withdraw.
There. Whispering outside. Soft footfalls on the service walkway along the south side of the house. Then the telltale hiss for which she'd been waiting.
Bastards.
Heather walked quickly between the cars to the mansize door in the back wall of the garage. The lock had a thumb-turn on the inside. She twisted it slowly, easing the dead bolt out of the striker plate without the clack that it made if opened unthinkingly. She turned the knob, carefully pulled the door inward, and stepped onto the sidewalk behind the house.
The May night was mild. The full moon, well on its westward course, was mostly hidden by an overcast.
She was being irresponsible. She wasn't protecting Toby. If anything, she was putting him in greater jeopardy. Over the top. Out of control. She knew it. Couldn't help it. She'd had enough. Couldn't take any more. Couldn't stop.
To her right lay the covered rear porch, the patio in front of it. The backyard was lit only patchily by what moonlight penetrated the ragged veil of clouds. Tall eucalyptuses, smaller benjaminas, and low shrubs were dappled with lunar silver.
She was on the west side of the house. She moved to her left along the.walkway, toward the south.