Keith wondered why Billy hadn't gotten a shot off but was glad he hadn't. Probably it had all happened too fast for him to react, or he thought Keith was going to open fire and charge up the stairs in Billy's line of fire. In any case, Baxter was on full alert, Billy was a hundred yards away across the clearing, and Keith was under Baxter's feet, probably not ten feet from him. He would rather have been and should have been on the deck, but Keith was reasonably certain Baxter didn't know he was there. All Keith had to do now was wait until Baxter decided he had to come out with his infrared scope and deal with the problem.
Keith heard a sound and turned toward the dark clearing. It took him a few seconds to realize there was movement out there, then he saw Billy Marlon running toward the house at a high speed.
Damn him. Keith was furious at Billy for not following orders, but Keith never thought Billy Marlon would.
He watched Billy covering the open space very quickly, his rifle at his hip, ready to fire, like an infantryman assaulting an enemy position.
Keith wasn't in a position to cover Marlon, but he tried to motion him to veer off and come under the house. But Billy was intent on his charge to the deck stairs. Billy Marlon wanted Cliff Baxter, and that's all that was on his mind at this moment.
Cliff Baxter quickly took stock of the situation. He had no way of knowing when the dogs had been silenced, and no way of knowing who'd done it, but he had a real good suspect in mind. Without the dogs, he had no early warning and had no idea where Keith Landry was at that moment. He felt a line of sweat form on his forehead and run down his face. Goddamnit.
He was about to cross the room and turn the lamp off when he thought he heard something outside the sound of someone running, getting closer.
Billy Marlon was less than ten feet from the bottom of the staircase and showed no inclination to veer off and join Keith under the deck. Keith had no choice now but to break cover and follow Billy Marlon up the staircase, though what they were going to do up there he didn't know, but he figured Billy would smash the glass door with his rifle butt, and they'd wing it from there.
Keith began moving out from under the deck as Marlon took a long stride four or five feet from the first wooden step. Keith saw too late the four wooden pegs driven into the ground at the base of the staircase. Billy's foot came down on what looked like solid ground, but was a sheet of canvas or plastic, secured at the corners by the pegs and covered with a thin layer of earth.
Keith watched and saw it all as if in slow motion: Billy's surprised look as the ground beneath him gave way and Billy dropping through the earth. Keith expected him to keep falling, like the men did in Vietnam who dropped into a deep punji pit and became impaled on sharpened bamboo shafts. But Marlon stopped at knee height, his feet funneled into the narrow base of the conical hole. Keith heard a sharp metallic snap, followed by the sickening sound of something crunching, followed by Billy's shrill, piercing scream. Keith froze where he was beneath the edge of the deck, a few feet from Billy. The glass door above him slid open.
Baxter heard the bear trap snap shut, followed by the scream, and he slid the door open, letting the screams into the living room. He yelled, "Gotcha! Gotcha!"
The figure at the base of the stairs was thrashing in pain, screaming, but still holding tight to the rifle.
In an instant, Baxter recognized that it wasn't Landry, and he shouted, "Who the hell Marlon! You little shit!" Baxter, still standing inside the doorway, aimed his rifle down at Marlon.
Billy Marlon, still holding his rifle with one hand and writhing in agony, managed to get off a single shot from the hip, as Baxter fired simultaneously. Billy's shot went high and tore into the wood siding above Baxter's head. Baxter's bullet went where it was aimed, through Billy Marlon's heart.
Almost simultaneously, Keith fired three quick shots up and through the wooden planks toward where he guessed Baxter was standing in the doorway.
One shot shattered the glass door, one grazed Baxter's forearm, and the third hit him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him and throwing him back through the open door where he sprawled on the floor.
Annie screamed.
Baxter struggled to his feet, still holding his rifle.
Keith heard Baxter fall on the floor, and Keith charged out from beneath the deck, grabbed the banister post, and swung around over the hole where Billy lay dead. With his pistol aimed at the door, he took the stairs in three strides, and, not seeing Baxter on the floor or anywhere in the dim light of the room, he bounded across the deck and dove through the open door, rolling to his right behind a long sofa, his pistol sweeping the room.
He lay there, looked and listened, but saw no one and heard nothing. The single lamp still shone weakly from somewhere at the far end of the room, casting dark shadows where he lay. The sofa blocked his view of the room toward the fireplace, but he could see the stone chimney rising to the high cathedral ceiling, and noticed the gray wolf head looking across the room from thirty feet away.
He lay on his back, motionless, the pistol still sweeping, controlling his breathing and trying to get a sense of the layout of the big room from what he could see. He was fairly certain he'd hit Baxter, but by the sound of Baxter's heavy crash to the floor, Keith reasoned that Baxter was wearing his body armor and that the round had simply knocked him off his feet, and he'd scrambled away from the door. Baxter might be hurt, Keith thought, but a.38-caliber pistol round that had gone through a plank and hit body armor would not hurt him too badly.
Keith couldn't see much beyond the sofa and the other furniture, so he slid a few feet away toward the wall. His head and eyes continuously swept the room, left to right, as his pistol swept right to left, trusting his peripheral vision and his hearing to cover what was momentarily not in his direct line of sight, and trusting his instinct to snap fire at anything that moved.
Keith didn't know who was going to make the first move, but he was fairly certain that there weren't many moves left on the board now.
Images of Billy Marlon flashed in front of him Billy at the bar in John's Place, Billy asking Keith if he could come along, Billy in the pickup truck on the way up here, Billy sitting with Keith in the dark woods... Billy writhing in agony in that hole. Billy dead.
Keith thought, too, of Annie. He knew she was here, not far away, and she knew he was here in this room.
Keith decided to make the first move, not based on rage or ego, but on the assumption that Baxter knew someone was in the room and that Baxter also knew approximately where that person was, while Keith didn't have a clue as to where Baxter was.
Keith began to rise to one knee, then heard a woman's voice from the direction of the fireplace say, "He's in the far right corner, crouched with a pistol."
Before she even finished, Keith sprang up on one knee, aimed over the back of the sofa, and fired two rounds at Baxter, who had taken cover behind a wooden chest in the corner. Keith fell back behind the sofa and rolled to the right, toward the wall, as two answering rounds ripped through the sofa.
Keith lay still behind an upholstered chair.
In the two seconds it had taken him to fire, he'd caught a glimpse of Annie to his left, kneeling on the floor near the fireplace, naked. He was sure she'd seen him.
Keith was certain that at least one of his rounds had hit Baxter, but again the body armor had saved him. Keith wasn't too happy with the six-shot Smith & Wesson Police Model 10 that Baxter's men used, especially not in this situation where, with one bullet left, he couldn't take a chance and open the cylinder, extract the used casings, and reload chamber by chamber.