The Good Guy (27 page)

Sixty-Two

H
aving found nothing enlightening in the
dresser drawers, Krait moved toward a promising highboy. Passing a window, he saw Mary on the front lawn.

She ran to the sidewalk, turned right, and fled out of sight, shielded by the street trees. From her left wrist dangled the set of handcuffs.

However she might have gotten free of the chair, she had not engineered her own escape. The fact that no one ran at her side confirmed for Krait the identity of her rescuer. Tim had come home.

Why and how could wait for later. This was not a time for questions but for a final answer to the problem of the mason.

Drawing the Glock from his shoulder rig, Krait quickly crossed the bedroom, hesitated at the open door, and sidled into the upstairs hall.

If Tim had come to the second floor, he would already have found Krait, perhaps would have shot him as he turned away from the window after glimpsing Mary.

Krait could see down the upper flight of stairs to the landing. The lower flight turned out of sight.

Aiming at the landing, he waited for a head to appear, a face to look up and receive a splash of bullets.

Thunders of silence rose from below, the kind of silence that quakes through you and breaks your sweat and promises lightning.

Krait decided that Tim would not come up the stairs without a strategy and proven tactics. He would know the danger of stairwells.

Standing here at the head of the stairs, from what seemed to be an unassailably superior position, Krait sensed that he was also vulnerable. He eased back until he could neither see down the stairs nor be seen from the landing.

He looked along the hall toward the back of the house. Besides the master-bedroom door, five doors waited. One would be a bathroom. Perhaps one was a closet. At most, there were three other bedrooms.

Although Krait had always been a decisive man, he stood for a moment in uncharacteristic indecision.

The silence rose like a drowning flood, though this was
only
silence, not stillness, for through it moved a predator unique in Krait’s experience.

Tim and Pete, on opposite sides of the downstairs hall, staying out of each other’s forward line of fire, toed open doors that were ajar, cleared the spaces beyond, scanned the dining room from the archway, the living room, and came to the stairs.

If the killer believed he had the house to himself, it seemed that he would not be this quiet. Even if he were playing both sides of a game of chess, a pawn would once in a while clatter as it was set off the board; in a game of solitaire, some cards were laid down with a snap.

They had several sets of tactics for taking a stairwell, though they might have been better armed for this job. No matter how often they had ascended guarded stairs in the past, Tim was not keen to make an assault on these. Here were stairs that felt like a
series
of dangerous doors.

With gestures, he indicated to Pete a simple plan of action, and a nod confirmed that the message had been understood. Leaving Pete at the stairs, Tim moved toward the back of the house, from which they had just come.

In the master bedroom, Krait unlocked the double-hung window through which he had seen Mary on the run. He raised the lower sash, which squeaked faintly on waxed tracks.

Over the sill, onto the front-porch roof, he expected a hail of bullets in the back. He stepped immediately sideways, out of the window.

Two cars passed in the street, but the drivers didn’t notice a man with a gun on the Carriers’ porch roof.

Krait went to the edge, looked down, and jumped to clear a row of shrubs, and landed in the grass.

In the living room, Pete snared a decorative pillow from the sofa and a larger seat cushion from an armchair. He returned with them to the foot of the stairs.

Glancing back down the hall, he saw that Tim had already gone out the open back door.

The staircase featured an inlaid carpet runner. He wondered how much the treads creaked.

Still no sound came from the second floor. Maybe the guy felt so sure of himself that he was taking a nap. Maybe he had died of the most conveniently timed heart attack in history.

With the pistol in his right hand, the seat cushion under his left arm, and the throw pillow in his left hand, Pete tried the first step. It didn’t squeak, and neither did the second.

The south end of the back porch was enclosed with a trellis that Tim had long ago built with horizontal two-by-fours and vertical two-by-twos. His mother would not have tolerated quaint lattice.

Joseph’s Coat climbing roses were far from their peak growth this early in the season, but they offered enough thorns to make him glad that his hands were well callused.

The horizontals easily took his weight, and the vertical two-by-twos held even though they protested more than he would have liked.

On the roof, he drew the pistol from under his belt and went to the nearest window. Beyond lay his former bedroom, which he still used when he stayed overnight on holidays or when house-sitting.

The room appeared to be deserted.

As a kid, he had spent countless evenings on this porch roof, lying on his back to study the stars. A fiend for fresh air, he had never locked his bedroom window, and maybe fifteen years ago, the latch had corroded in the open position.

On his most recent overnight visit, his father had still not replaced the latch, so of course he expected now, in the crunch, to find that it had been repaired. But Dad respected tradition, and the unlocked sash slid up with ease.

Like a cat burglar, he entered his bedroom. A couple of creaks lived in the floor, but he knew where they lurked, and he avoided them as he circled the room to the hall door, which was ajar.

He listened for movement, and when he heard none, he pulled the door inward and cautiously looked out. He expected to see the killer toward the front of the house, near the stairs, but the hallway was deserted, too.

Pete stopped halfway up the first flight of stairs and waited. When he felt sure that he’d given Tim enough time to reach the second floor, he tossed the decorative pillow onto the landing.

A nervous gunman might fire at any movement, but no one blew the crap out of the pillow.

He counted to five and threw the much larger cushion, because a nervous gunman, not on edge enough to have fired at the small pillow, might expect a subsequent and larger target to be the charge behind the fake-out. Silence. Maybe this guy wasn’t nervous.

Bedroom to bedroom to closet to bedroom to bath, Tim traveled the upstairs hall, clearing rooms, finding no one.

As he approached the master bedroom, he heard the heavy chair cushion
flump
on the landing. He snatched a decorative pillow from a hallway chair and threw it into the nearby stairwell.

Having worked with Tim enough to be able to interpret the return pillow as an all-clear, Pete came up fast, but quiet and alert, with his pistol at arm’s length, backlit by golden afternoon sunlight streaming through the high round window in the stairwell.

Tim indicated the master bedroom, and they flanked the half-open door, Tim on the side away from the hinges. This was it now, the guy had to be here, so they were in the dead zone.

Push the door wide, through fast, sweep the room with the gun. Move right, Pete to the left, no one on the far side of the bed.

The window open, the draperies limp in the motionless air, not good, the window open, not good, if the guy had been at the window at the wrong moment, when she had crossed the front lawn.

Or it was a ruse. If they went to the window, their backs would be to the master-bathroom door, now ajar, and to the closet door, now closed.

He wanted the window, knew it was the window, but you go by the book for a reason, and the reason is it keeps you alive more often than it gets you killed.

If the guy was gone from the house, hunting her, every second counted, but there were two doors, so the doors first.

Pete took the closet, standing aside, reaching for the knob, throwing it wide, but no fusillade responded. In the closet ceiling, a trap to the attic. Closed as it should be. Anyway, he wouldn’t have gone to the attic.

Tim slammed back the bathroom door, went in fast, small space, just enough light from the curtained window to see there was no one.