But she couldn't help it. She loved him, though she dared not say it. His wrath could strike like lightning and leave ashes in its wake.
Jack rubbed her belly, and he looked at Akitta. "Watch the backyard." Akitta nodded and went to do it. "Gary! You walk to the Laundromat and back. Take a couple of dollars and get some change in the machine." The Laundromat was two blocks away, in the opposite direction of Carazella's. Mary knew Jack was setting up a defensive perimeter. Gary walked out into the still, humid evening, and the smell of somebody's burgers on a grill drifted into the house. A dog barked in the distance, two more answering across the neighborhood.
Jack stood at the front window, working his knuckles. He said, "I don't hear Frodo."
James Xavier Toombs looked up from his haiku, his pipe in his mouth, and a small puff of blue smoke left his lips.
"Frodo." Jack's voice was low and hushed. "How come Frodo's not barking?"
Frodo was a stumpy little white mutt, the pet of the Giangello family two doors down the street. The Giangellos called him Caesar, but Jack had named him Frodo because of the dog's massive hairy paws. Frodo's bark was distinctive, a deep, throaty woof that started up with the regularity of a machine whenever any other dogs barked in the neighborhood. Jack looked at the other Storm Fronters. His tongue flicked out, lizardlike, to skim his lower lip. "Frodo's quiet," he said. "How come?"
No one spoke. There was electricity in the room, the pizzas forgotten. Mary had stopped rocking, her hands gripped on the armrests. James Xavier Toombs returned the book of haiku to the well-stocked bookshelf. He removed a thick red volume titled Democracy in Crisis. He opened it and took his.45 automatic from the hollowed-out book. There was a crisp click as he checked the ammo clip. James Xavier Toombs, a man of few words, said, "Trouble."
Mary stood up, and the baby moved inside her as if it, too, were readying for action. "I'll go upstairs and keep watch," she said as she picked up a couple of slices of pizza and walked toward the stairs. Bedelia Morse took her revolver and went to the back to watch the northeastern corner of the house, Sancho took the southwestern corner, and Toombs and Lord Jack stayed in the front room. Mary checked on Edward and Janette; neither one had seen anything remotely suspicious. Then Mary settled herself in the small bedroom overlooking the street, and she sat in a chair near the window with the lights off. The lights were also off in the house directly across Elderman, but that was nothing unusual. The old couple who lived there, the Steinfelds, were in bed by seven o'clock, and it was after eight. Mr. Steinfeld had emphysema, and his wife suffered from a bad bladder and had to wear adult-sized diapers. Changing diapers was a task that would be in Mary's future. She figured it wouldn't be so bad once she got used to it. Besides, it would be Jack's child, and so perfect he'd probably pop out toilet trained. Right, she thought as she smiled faintly in the dark. Dream on.
CinCin returned with her newspaper. No pigs, she told Jack. Everything was quiet.
"Did you see anybody on the street?" he asked her, and when she said no he told her to go upstairs to the armory and get Edward and Janette to help her start loading up the guns and ammo. As a precaution, they were going to leave the house and go upstate for a few days.
Gary came back, a pocketful of change in his purple tie-dyed jeans. No problems, he said.
"Nothing different?" Jack prodded. "Nothing at all?"
Gary shrugged. "Panhandler was parked on the ground in front of the Laundromat, and he asked me for a hit on the way in. I gave him a quarter coming out."
"Had you ever seen the dude before?"
"Nope. It's no big deal, man. He was just a panhandler."
"You know the old lady who runs that place," Jack reminded him. "You ever remember that stiff old bitch letting a panhandler set up shop in her front door?"
Gary thought about it. "No," he said. "I don't."
At nine forty-two, CinCin reported an unmarked, beat-up panel truck cruising slowly through the back alley. About half an hour later, Akitta thought he heard the metallic noise of a voice on a radio, but he wasn't sure where it was coming from. Toward eleven, Mary was still sitting in her chair in the dark when she thought she saw a movement in one of the black upstairs windows of the Steinfeld house. She leaned forward, her heart beating harder. Did something move over there, or not? She waited, watching, as the seconds ticked into minutes.
She saw it.
A tiny red circle, flaring in the dark and then ebbing again.
A cigarette, she thought. Somebody was smoking a cigarette.
In a house where an old man had emphysema, somebody was smoking.
Mary stood up. "Jack?" she called. Her voice trembled, and the sound shamed her. "Jack?"
A floodlight hit the house with such suddenness that it stole Mary's breath. She could feel its heat on her, and she dodged away from the window. A second floodlight came on, and a third, the first aimed from the Steinfeld house and the others from houses on either side of number 1105. "Shit!" she heard Edward cry out. There was the noise of somebody racing up the stairs, and other bodies flinging themselves to the floor. A few seconds later the lights in the house went out: one of the Storm Fronters had hit the fusebox.
The sound that Mary had dreaded for years finally came: the amplified voice of a pig through an electric bullhorn. "Attention, occupants of 1105 Elderman! This is the FBI! Come out into the light with your hands behind your heads! I repeat, come out into the light! If you follow my directions, nobody'll get hurt!"
Jack burst into the room, carrying a flashlight and an Uzi submachine gun. "Fuckers have ringed us! Must've cleared the fucking houses and we didn't even know it! Come on, load up!"
In the armory, guns were loaded and passed around by flashlight. Mary took an automatic and returned to the bedroom window. Janette joined her, carrying a shotgun and with three hand grenades clipped to her belt. The bullhorn squawked again: "We don't want bloodshed! Jack Gardiner, do you hear me?" The downstairs telephone began to ring; it ended when Jack ripped it off its wire. "Jack Gardiner! Give yourself and the others up! There's no point in getting anyone hurt!"
How they'd been nailed, Mary didn't know. She would find out, months later, that the pigs had evacuated the surrounding structures and been watching the house for five hours. The incident with the pig car had happened because the overeager Linden cop who'd been trailing Edward and Janette had wanted to see a Storm Fronter at close range. AH Mary knew, as the floodlights blazed and her brothers and sisters crouched down and took aim, was that the eve of destruction had finally arrived.
James Xavier Toombs shot out the first floodlight. Gary hit the second, but before the third could be shot out the pigs switched on their auxiliary lights and opened fire on the green house.
Bullets tore through the walls, ricocheting off pipes and whining over their heads. "No surrender!" Lord Jack roared over the noise. "No surrender!" Akitta repeated. "No surrender!" CinCin Omara echoed. "No surrender!" Mary heard herself shout, and Janette's voice was lost in the hell of Storm Front guns bellowing their death cries. The pigs were firing, too, and in a matter of seconds every window in the green house was shattered, the air a razormist of flying glass. Janette's shotgun boomed, and Mary fired shot after shot at the window where she'd seen the glow of a pig's cigarette. In the scant lull between fusillades, Mary heard the crackle of radios and the shouts of pigs. Downstairs, someone was screaming: Gary Leister, shot through the chest and writhing in a pool of blood. Janette was pumping shells into the shotgun and blasting as fast as she could, the spent cartridges flying into the air. She stopped to pull a grenade from her belt, and she yanked its pin and stood up to toss it at the house across the street. The grenade bounced up under a car parked at the curb, and in the next second the vehicle was lifted up on a gout of fire and crashed over on its side, burning gasoline streaking across the pavement. By the flickering light, the pigshadows darted and ran. Mary shot at one of them, saw him stagger and fall onto the Steinfelds' front porch.