Dark Specter (48 page)

A moment later she recognized the boy as Thomas’s new friend, the one who’d just moved into the Wallis house.

“Thomas isn’t home right now,” she said lazily.

But the boy wasn’t listening. He was talking, blurting something out in one long continuous sentence punctuated only by frequent gasps for breath. He must have run over from his house through the backyard, Kristine thought. She rolled up off the lounger, replacing a strap which she had slid down. She still couldn’t figure out what he was saying, but he seemed to be in distress. He backed away as Kristine approached, still gabbling, seemingly on the verge of tears.

“What is it, David?” she asked gently. “What’s the matter?”

Now the tears came, making the boy’s speedy patter even more incomprehensible. Kristine crouched down, making herself look smaller and unthreatening.

“Is something wrong? Where are your mom and dad?”

She’d only spoken to them once, apart from phone calls to arrange for the children to get together. The father was one of Paul Merlowitz’s clients—Paul hadn’t disclosed anything about the case, of course—and had been an English professor. They seemed a pleasant enough couple, although they’d managed to deflect her questions about where they were from and what they were doing in Seattle. Kristine hadn’t insisted. If she had been one of the framers of the Constitution, she would have added “privacy” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

After listening to the boy’s staccato delivery for another few minutes, she finally began to tune in to what he was saying. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, picking out a few phrases here and there, then trying to fit them together. The picture which emerged seemed harmless enough at first. A man had come to the house. He was a friend, or at least someone known to the family. Then David added a few more pieces to the puzzle, and the pattern abruptly became more sinister. The man had hurt his dad. He had started shouting angrily. David had been watching TV. He had got scared and run away. He was afraid the man had come to take him away again.

Kristine didn’t particularly want to butt in on some domestic dispute, but the boy’s terror seemed real enough. Then he added one final, decisive detail.

“He’s got a gun.”

Kristine Kjarstad ran up the steps to the porch.

“Stay here!” she told David. “Don’t leave this yard!”

She raced upstairs to her bedroom and opened the blue chest, painted with elaborate red and yellow designs in traditional Norwegian style, where she kept her issue revolver. It took her a few seconds to load the weapon—she’d seen the results of too many accidents to keep a loaded gun in the house with kids—then rushed downstairs again and out into the sunshine.

The boy was nowhere to be seen. As she hurried along the side of the house, it occurred to her that she might well be making a complete fool of herself. The whole thing could well be some fantasy the boy had dreamed up. Men with guns coming to a private house in broad daylight? Things like that didn’t happen in Wallingford.

She ran across the mangy lawn pitted with weeds and past the unpruned apple tree whose crop had already started to fall and rot. Next door, Mr. Shadegg was tending the immaculate beds of vegetables and herbs which his wife pressed on Kristine continually. He looked up at the figure in the bathing suit running by, revolver in hand.

“Call 911!” Kristine shouted at him. “The Wallis house!”

Mr. Shadegg just stood gaping. Kristine opened the gate in the picket fence and ran on across the Wallis’s yard to the back steps with their ancient stenciled notice
NO PEDDLERS
. It made her think again about the wisdom of what she was doing. If David had made the whole thing up, the story might end up in the papers. People would be coming up to her at Food Giant for months with an ironic glint in their eye.

She went around the side of the house and up the front steps to the porch. The lace curtains were pulled across the window and all she could see was a vague silhouetted figure at the rear of the room. She was about to ring the bell when she heard the sound of a gunshot inside. A man shouted something in a tone of fury. There was a cry of pain.

She tried the door. It was locked. Someone could be injured, even dying. There could be more shooting at any minute. Closing her eyes and saying a swift prayer, Kristine took a step back and hurled herself at the window. It shattered under the impact and she fell into the room, stumbling over some piece of furniture. She quickly recovered her balance and straightened up, grasping the revolver two-handed. Thin seams of blood seeped from her exposed skin, but she didn’t notice the pain, riveted by the scene at the other end of the room. The couple who lived here were kneeling on the floor. They were both handcuffed, and a patch of silvery tape covered the woman’s mouth. A man in some kind of uniform was holding a pistol to her head.

“Police!” Kristine shouted. “Drop it!”

The gunman smiled.

“You shoot, so do I,” he said in a quiet voice. “You might miss. I won’t.”

“There’s no way you can escape!” Kristine rapped out. “I called 911 already. There’ll be a squad car here any second. You haven’t killed anyone yet. Don’t make it worse for yourself.”

The gunman’s smile broadened. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

“Great tits!” he said. “I bet you have a cute ass, too. Even the blood’s kind of a turn-on, tell you the truth.”

Kristine ignored the taunts. She knew she had to take the initiative in the next few seconds or the situation would get out of control. But what was the situation? The setup looked like one of the cases she had been working on before her leave. Was this a copycat, some jealous lover who had read about the Renton case in the papers and decided to borrow the MO?

“Looks like we have a standoff here,” the gunman said, staring at her intently. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll let God decide.”

“God?” echoed Kristine faintly.

“Isn’t that best? After all, we’re only human. We could make a mistake. But God doesn’t make mistakes.”

His tone changed abruptly, from ruminative meditation to rapped-out instructions.

“We both raise our guns so they’re pointing at the ceiling, then break out the cylinder, cover one of the shells and let the rest fall to the floor, engage the cylinder again and spin it. Then we lower our guns at the same time and fire. If nothing happens we try again. Sooner or later one of us will get lucky. God will decide which.”

“No fucking way!” Kristine snarled.

The gunman’s smile vanished. He jammed the pistol against the woman’s skull so hard she winced with pain.

“Five seconds. Four. Three. Two …”

The bound man kneeling on the floor spoke for the first time, a howl of despair.

“For God’s sake!”

“OK, I’ll do it,” Kristine shouted.

She had no choice. Even if she fired now, the gunman would have time to blast the woman’s head apart. This way, he would at least be forced to remove the pistol from his victim’s head. Once he did that the odds would be even, and there was a possibility that Kristine might get a shot at him. But she would only have one chance. She wished she had spent more time on the range.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the man said. “You’re thinking you can maybe get the drop on me while we’re unloading the guns. Well, think again.”

Keeping the pistol rammed up against the kneeling woman’s head, he reached into the black bag lying on the dining table and produced a snub-nosed lump of black metal. Kristine recognized it as a Cobray M-11/9 semiautomatic submachine pistol, long the weapon of choice among drug gangs and other connoisseurs of violence. “Semiautomatic” described the way the weapon came set up, in order to evade the provisions of the 1934 National Firearms Act, but converting it to full auto was simply a matter of sending off for a kit to form the lower receiver frame. After that, the thing was capable of delivering a full clip of thirty-two 9mm pistol bullets in a couple of seconds.

The man laid the Cobray down on the table.

“This is going to stay right here,” he told Kristine. “If you try anything funny, or your buddies come to the door, this house is going to be full of corpses in no time at all.”

Kristine stared right into his eyes. The stinging pain of her lacerations was beginning to tell.

“That’s not fair,” she said. “You could blow me away while I’m unloading.”

The man smiled and shook his head.

“You don’t get it, do you? No
one
seems to get it! I’m not going to try any tricks. I don’t need to. I already know what’s going to happen. As long as you play straight, I won’t touch the automatic.”

In one smooth gesture he whisked the pistol away from the woman’s head and pointed it at Kristine. Her finger tightened instinctively on the trigger, then relaxed. I’m outclassed here, she thought. I could never have done that so quickly. The gunman seemed to have endless reserves of confidence and capability.

“Let’s go!” he said.

Locking eyes with her, he began to raise his pistol in a slow, smooth arc. Kristine found herself doing the same. She had the tunnel vision of the shooter, focused only on what is happening up front, rigid, inflexible, locked into combat.

“Now we’re going to break out the cylinder,” the man said, as though talking to a child.

The two clicks were practically simultaneous.

“Cover one of the shells and let the rest fall to the ground.”

If he tries anything, I can dive behind the chair and take him from there, Kristine thought. But it seemed a faint, weak memory from a previous existence, with no force or relevance to what was happening. She blocked one hole in the cylinder with her thumb and let the other bullets fall to the floor. In the background, she could hear a television blatting away.

“Put it together again and spin the cylinder three times,” the man said.

Kristine obeyed. The man nodded. She had done well, he was pleased with her.

“OK,” he said, “here’s where we play.”

She tightened her hold on the wooden grip of the revolver and started to lower it in time with his, the two guns describing twin parabolas through the still air. Someone was weeping somewhere. It was the kneeling man. She felt irritated with him for disturbing them at this important time.

“I want to play too,” said a voice from the kitchen.

Something flew through the air, striking the gunman in the face. He whirled around to face this new threat. The moment his eyes left Kristine’s, the spell was broken. She pulled the trigger, but the gun just clicked emptily. She was vaguely aware of a shape in the doorway to the right, small and indistinct. The gunman was turning back now, taking aim. Click. Click. Click. Kristine pumped the trigger desperately, all her force in that one finger, aiming for the center of mass in the upper chest area, and then felt rather than heard the gun come to life in her hands, and saw the gunman reel back clutching himself, his mouth open in amazement.

He sagged toward the table, reaching for the Cobray. Kristine rushed him, but there was a sofa blocking her path and she was only halfway there when the automatic went off. Lumps of hot metal flew through the air, striking her in the face and body, and for a moment she thought how easy and painless it was to die. Then she realized that they were the ejected shell casings. The bullets themselves were ripping into the walls and ceiling, having passed through the body of the collapsing gunman.

The clattering stopped as his finger released the trigger. Kristine started trembling all over. She looked at the bound couple, then at the boy standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He was holding the dart gun that her mother had given Thomas. The foam projectile lay on the floor beside the dead gunman.

David looked at his father, then surveyed the scene of carnage with an expression of awe.

“Coo-ul!” he said.

BOOKS BY
M
ICHAEL
D
IBDIN

“Dibdin has a gift for shocking the unshockable reader. He writes the unmentionable calmly and with devastating effect.”

—Ruth Rendell

DEAD LAGOON

In this stylish novel, Michael Dibdin’s urbane and skeptical Italian detective Aurelio Zen returns to his native Venice to search for a vanished American millionaire. The result is a mystery rich in character and deduction, and intensely informed about the history, politics, and manners of its Venetian setting.

Fiction/Crime/0-679-75311-7

THE DYING OF THE LIGHT

The setting in this brilliant and haunting variation on the classic drawing-room murder novel is Eventide Lodge, where guests have gathered for tea. Colonel Weatherby is reading by the fire. Mrs. Hiram Hargreave III is whiling away her time at patience. And Miss Rosemary Travis and her friend, Dorothy, are wondering which of their housemates will be the next to die.

Fiction/Crime/0-679-75310-9

THE LAST SHERLOCK HOLMES STORY

Michael Dibdin pits the sleuth of Baker Street against the Butcher of Whitechapel—the archfiend Jack the Ripper. And in doing so, he gives us a Holmes possessed of greater and more disturbing depths than the one we thought we knew.