Death Angel (19 page)

“Maybe Carrie Carlson went over to Nordquists’ for a visit. It’s on the next block, she could have walked over. You know, the wives keeping each other company while their husbands are working late at the lab.”

“It’s a pretty story, even though I don’t believe it. We better check the Nordquist place anyway, in case someone is making a clean sweep of the INL wives.”

They crossed to the front door.

Jack indicated the umbrella holder with the three canes. One of ebony, one of mahogany, and one of Swedish blond wood. “Carlson gets around okay on both legs with no trouble, so it must be Carrie who uses a cane.”

Hickman nodded. “She walks with a limp. Left leg. She broke it years ago in Africa and it was never set right.”

“I didn’t know. When I saw her, she was sitting in Sylvia Nordquist’s car the whole time and didn’t get out,” Jack said. “Not very likely for her to go out for a stroll on a hot Saturday night, is it?”

“She gets around pretty good on that bum leg of hers. Better than most women—or men for that matter—do on two good legs. She’s athletic, gutsy, and determined.”

“Good—she may need it.”

They went outside. Something nudged Jack Bauer again mentally, a sense of incompleteness as though he had forgotten something important. What it was he didn’t know, but it had been prompted by the sight of the canes. He couldn’t remember it, though.

He and Hickman crossed the street, angling toward number 97.

Ross sat outside on the front steps, fanning himself with his hat. He stood up when he saw the others coming. “Miz Carlson?” he asked.

Hickman shook his head. “Not home. We’re going to check on the Nordquist place.”

“Try phoning, it’s quicker.”

Jack shook his head. “You can’t see what’s happening at the other end of a phone. I prefer the personal touch.”

“Colony Court’s the next block over. You can get there quicker by cutting through the backyard,” Ross said.

Jack Bauer and Hickman rounded the left front corner of the house. A strip of land lay between number 97 and 99. They followed it. Ross stood on the lawn with hands on hips, watching them go.

A line of trees marked the boundary of Parkhurst’s backyard. The glow from the house lights blurred, fading into shadowed gloom. Smoke haze hid stars and moon.

The trees had been planted in recent years. They were young, tall, and slender; there was plenty of space between them.

Jack and Hickman went between two trees, entering the backyard of a Colony Court residence. A swimming pool took up much of the space. A waist-high chain-link fence bordered the long blue rectangle. The pool was not in use
but was well lit to discourage trespassers. A humid haze hung over the water’s surface. The smell of chlorine was heavy in the air, heavier than the smell of burning from the firestorm.

Beyond the pool stood a house. It was tall, bulky, with a mansard roof. “Nordquist’s,” Hickman said. “We’ll go around to the front.”

The house was not only tall but long, too. The houses on Colony Court were bigger and occupied larger pieces of property than those of Meadow Lane. Meadow Lane was a through street but this was not. It was a dead end but here they called it a cul-de-sac.

It was shaped like a lollipop, with a long broad drive terminating in a circular court. The Nordquist residence fronted the court.

Jack and Hickman neared the front corner of the house. There was the sound of a car motor running. Idling.

From inside the house a thin scream sounded.

11:05
P.M
. MDT
19 Colony Court, Shady Grove

How had such an easy score suddenly turned so sour? Maxie Arnot didn’t know and didn’t care. All he knew was that the big house had turned into a shooting gallery and that he wanted out. His ticket out was fourteen-year-old Kendra Nordquist.

Arnot was of medium height, pudgy, with brown curly hair, a potato face, and a pug nose. The girl was barefoot, but even so she was several inches taller than he was.

She was slender, long-legged, and coltish, with long brown hair and a fine-featured face turned a stark mask of fear. She’d been sleeping in her bed only minutes ago. Now Arnot was using her as a human shield.

He stood on the ground floor of the grand hall with his
back to the front door, holding Kendra in front of him. Her back was to him. His left arm circled her waist, holding her pressed tight close against him. She was a skinny little thing and didn’t provide much cover. His right hand held a gun to her head.

The job should have been a pushover: grab the woman and her daughter and take them to the hideout. Three of the gang had been tabbed by Pardee for the task: Arnot, Wade, and Cisco, violent professionals all. Arnot was a shooter, Wade a veteran housebreaker and burglar, and Cisco the wheelman for the getaway car.

A spotter had relayed inside information about the score, which Pardee passed along to the trio. It looked like a swell setup. The house had servants, a maid and a cook, but neither of them lived in and both had gone to their own homes hours ago. The mister was working late at the lab, his wife and daughter were home alone.

A Shady Grove locale meant burglar alarms but that was why Wade was along; breaking and entering was a specialty of his and he was skilled at neutralizing such home protection devices.

Shady Grove was outside Los Alamos city limits and fell under the jurisdiction of the Country Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff Buck Bender made sure that the residents of this wealthy and influential suburb got plenty of police protection.

The firestorm had upset all that. The department’s deputies were stretched thin trying to deal with the chaos of the big blaze. They already had their hands full coping with the wave of violence and murder that had erupted during this day and was still continuing well into the night.

That was a break for Arnot, Wade, and Cisco. The prowl cars that routinely patrolled the neighborhood had been pulled off to cover areas closer to the fire.

The house was on Colony Court. The would-be abduc
tors didn’t like that so well. The court was a dead end with only one way in and out. The car was loaded with heavy firepower, assault rifles and a machine gun. Arnot and Wade were thugs with no compunctions about shooting it out with police if it came to that. As wheelman, Cisco’s primary responsibility was to drive the car and get them clear no matter what, but he could shoot, too, if he had to.

The machine was a stolen car that had been worked over by the gang’s mechanics to make sure it was in fine working order. It was a dark-colored job with a powerful motor. A pair of stolen license plates had been slapped on it fore and aft to further muddy the waters.

It rolled into Colony Court at the appointed hour. Smoke haze from the fire deepened the welcome darkness between the big, well-lit houses.

Cisco parked the car between two houses in a zone of shadows, in a place where he had a clear sightline on number 19’s white-columned front. He killed the lights but kept the motor running. The motor was always kept running on a job; nobody wanted to risk their getaway on a car with a balky engine that for some reason or another wouldn’t start. The mechanics had tuned up the car so it idled with a low, thrumming purr.

Arnot and Wade got out. They left the heavy firepower in the car. Handguns would be enough for this part of the job.

The smell of burning was in the air. The duo approached the house from the side, crossing a patioed terrace to a set of French doors. Wade took out his kit of burglar’s tools and went to work. Arnot served as lookout.

There was excitement in breaking into such a big, fine house as this, an adrenaline rush that was a high. This must be how a champion thoroughbred felt at the starting gate waiting for the bell to go off and the race begin, Arnot told himself. As he always did at the start of a job.

Wade had a neat little handheld electronic gizmo that he
patched into the burglar alarm’s circuitry, which prevented its sensors from detecting an interruption in the current flow and triggering the alert. With the home protection system neutralized, it was child’s play to pick the lock on the French doors. He could have just kicked them open but to do so would have offended the technician in Wade.

Then the doors were open and he and Arnot went inside. The interior was coolly air-conditioned.

The home invaders had a pretty good idea of the layout thanks to the information supplied by Pardee’s tipster. They were in a kind of salon or drawing room, a wide, expansive space. The lights were off but an archway on the left let in plenty of light for them to see their way. A grand staircase made an elegant curve as it wound its way along a wall to the second floor. The steps were covered with rose-colored carpeting.

The invaders climbed the stairs, Wade leading. Arnot was close behind, quivering with excitement. They paused on the second-floor landing.

A long hallway stretched to the rear of the house. Rooms lay on either side of the hall. Whoever fingered the job had stated that the woman’s bedroom was on the right front side of the hall and the girl’s was farther back along the corridor on the left.

A doorway opened on the right-hand side of the hall a half-dozen paces from the landing. From it came television sounds.

Wade started toward it with a spring in his step. Arnot lingered behind, absently licking his lips.

Sylvia Nordquist and her husband had separate bedrooms. Hers was something of a suite, featuring lots of mirrors and a big bed. A smell of cigarette smoke mixed with a mélange of aromatic scents emanating from various bottles of perfumes, lotions, powders, and creams on the vanity table.

She was sitting up in bed. Plush pillows were heaped against the headboard, cushioning her as they propped up her back. Mounted on the wall opposite her was a big flat-screen TV. She wasn’t really watching the program; she had it on for background. It was some bright, chatty home decorating show. She was avoiding all the local channels. They kept interrupting the regular shows with bulletins and updates about the firestorm.

The fire was a big bore. She was sick of it already. No matter how it raged, it would never reach Shady Grove, which was high on the Hill, so there was no worry on that score.

It had already proved inconvenient. She’d planned to visit with a few select friends this evening, to go out for dinner and then drinks afterward. Just because Glen was going to be working at the lab all night was no reason for her to be stuck in the house on a Saturday night. Quite the contrary, in fact.

But her friends had had to cancel due to the difficulty of traveling even in the areas far from the fire, because of all the detours, closed roads, and whatnot. So she’d stayed home instead.

She hoped that the fire wouldn’t cause Ironwood to halt the tests and close down early. If there was anything more drearily boring than spending the evening at home, it was spending it with Glen.

She was leafing through a glossy fashion magazine, looking at the pictures. Several similar magazines and some high-line mail-order catalogs lay on the bed beside her. A glass of brandy and an ashtray crowded with the stubs of half-smoked cigarettes stood on a night table on her right.

The doorway to the hall was to the left of the wall-mounted flat-screen TV. Sylvia became aware of a figure looming in the doorway. Her heart sank. Glen already? She’d hoped to be fast asleep by the time he came home.

She looked up from her magazine, frowning as she glanced over the top of the page at the door.

Wade grinned at her.

Sylvia Nordquist screamed.

Wade stopped grinning.

He rushed into the room, crossing to the bed. He clapped a hand over Sylvia’s mouth, silencing her. “Shut up,” he said.

Her eyes were wide and staring. He waved the gun in front of her face to let her have a look at it. She didn’t even see it. She was paralyzed with mind-numbing fright.

She had stopped screaming, though.

“That’s better,” Wade said. He was grinning again.

In the hallway, a light was switched on in a room on the left-hand side of the corridor. Kendra Nordquist came running out of the room to see what was the matter.

She cried out, “Mom—”

Arnot was waiting for her. She ran right into him. His gun was stuffed into the top of his pants, freeing both hands. He didn’t need a gun for this kind of action. He hooked an arm around the girl’s waist, halting her in mid-stride and lifting her off her feet.

She was just a kid, a skinny kid; she couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds or so. He handled her like a sack of grain, scooping her up and throwing her facedown over his shoulder. He turned around and started carrying her toward the landing.

Wade stepped into the hall, holding Sylvia Nordquist by the wrist, yanking her after him. She staggered, stiff-legged. She saw Arnot carrying off her daughter. She cried, “Oh god no!”

Wade turned on her. “Do like you’re told and you’ll both stay alive,” he said.

Arnot went down the winding staircase, toting the girl. He showed no sign of physical strain. The way he felt, he
could have carried the girl to China. He was pumped up on an adrenaline high. He reached the bottom of the stairs.

Things started popping. Gunfire sounded on the upper landing. Wade was hit from behind by three slugs. They drilled him in the upper back between the shoulder blades. His body bowed forward in a convex curve. His eyebrows lifted in an expression of surprise.

He let go of his grip on Sylvia Nordquist’s wrist and clasped both hands to his chest, one hand still holding his gun. Sylvia Nordquist fell backward and to the side on the landing.

Wade took a step forward. He couldn’t find the next tread below and catapulted into empty space. There wasn’t enough left of him to negotiate the descent of a staircase. Not in the usual manner, anyway.

Fumbling feet and legs got all tangled up and he pitched forward, taking a spectacular headfirst tumble down the stairs. His body thumping, bumping, and crashing all the way down.

Along the way he suffered a broken neck but that was strictly academic. He was already dead from the shots. He landed in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, slapping against the marble floor with a loud wet thud.

Arnot was temporarily stupefied. When he first heard the shots, he had thought that Wade had done something stupid, like maybe the woman had scratched his face or something, and in a fit of rage he’d pulled the trigger on her.

These things happened sometimes; they couldn’t be helped. The girl was still alive and unharmed so the job wouldn’t be a total loss, it would be a halfway success.

Wade’s ass would be in a sling with Pardee—a bad place to be—but that was Wade’s lookout. Arnot had done his job, he was in the clear.

Then he looked up and saw Wade come tumbling down
the stairs to land almost at his feet. Wade’s head was pitched at a crazy angle and his open bulging eyes seemed to be staring Arnot in the face. Arnot said, “What the hell—?”

Upstairs, a man appeared on the landing, holding a smoking gun. It was Hickman. He’d climbed the back stairs and come racing down the hallway in time to shoot down Wade.

Arnot slung the girl off his shoulder and set her down on her feet, holding on to her with one arm while he hauled his gun out of the top of his pants.

Hickman stood at the edge of the landing, leaning over the top rail of the banister to point his gun down into the front hall. “FBI—freeze!”

Sylvia Nordquist lay sprawled nearby. One bare leg was folded underneath her, the other was extended straight out. Her palms were pressed flat into the deep-pile carpet, raising her upper body, holding it upright. She reached out one hand toward Hickman, crying, “My daughter!”

“Stay down, ma’am,” he said, not looking at her. He ducked as Arnot pointed the gun at him and fired.

Arnot held the girl in front of him as a shield, backing away toward the front door while he blasted away at Hickman. Hickman went down on one knee, gun hand reaching between the banister rails. He didn’t have a clear shot at Arnot; the girl was in the way.

Sylvia Nordquist whimpered, started crawling on her hands and knees toward Hickman.

Arnot held the gun to Kendra’s head, muzzle pressed against her temple. “Back off!” he called up to Hickman.

“Put down your weapon and let the girl go,” Hickman said.

Arnot barked a mirthless laugh, then told Hickman what he could do with himself.

“Throw down your gun or I’ll kill her,” Arnot shouted.

Sylvia Nordquist shrieked.

“Then I’ll kill you sure,” Hickman said.

Arnot believed him but was unimpressed. He had the whip hand. He had the girl.

“I’ll be dead and she’ll be dead and what’ll that get you? You ain’t gonna shoot. It’s a standoff,” he said. The hell of it was, he was right.

All this time he’d been moving backward, carrying the girl along with him. He bumped his back against the front door. “Let her go and I’ll let you go,” Hickman offered.

Arnot smirked. “Sure.”

“You have my word on it.”

Arnot told Hickman what he could do with his word. Sylvia Nordquist was behind Hickman, at his feet. She begged him to save her daughter, her pleas shrilling into hysteria. She grabbed hold of his leg, trying to pull herself up.

Arnot threw the bolts on the front door, unlocking it. “Stay where you are or she dies.”

Now came the payoff. If the law was outside in force, he’d really be in a tight spot. He guessed they weren’t. Otherwise they would have come crashing in by now.