Even though the shot gunned Samaritan reeled back from the broken sidelight, he didn’t scream in pain. He wasn’t a man any more. Pain meant nothing to him.
Her voice hollow and strange in the shivery echo of the blast, Del shouted, ‘No, Tommy, no, this place is just a trap! Come on!’
With tremendous force, the fat man slammed into the door again. The deadbolt skreeked against the striker plate, and the squeal of shearing metal rose from the tortured hinges, and wood splintered with a dry cracking sound.
Reluctantly Tommy had to admit that this was not the South China Sea and that their inhuman adversary was not as vulnerable as a mere Thai pirate.
The fat man hit the door again. It would not hold much longer.
Tommy followed Del across the dark living room, able to see her only because she was silhouetted against the wall of glass that faced the harbour lights. Even in the gloom, she knew the place well enough to avoid the furniture.
One of the large sliding glass doors was already open when they reached it. Apparently, Scootie had rolled it aside, because he was waiting for them on the patio.
Tommy wondered how the dog, even as clever as he was, could have managed that feat. Then he heard the front door crash open at the other end of the house, and that frightful sound knocked all of the curiosity out of him.
For some reason, Tommy had thought that Del intended to escape by water, across the harbour to the far shore. But the back-glow from the pier light that shone on her rain-soaked flag was bright enough to reveal that no boat was tied at her private dock. In the empty slip was only rain-stippled black water.
‘This way,’ she said, hurrying not toward the harbour but to the left across the patio.
Then he expected her to turn left once more into the service way between her house and the one next door, go out to the street again, to the Honda, and try to split before the Samaritan found them. But when she didn’t choose that route, he understood why she avoided it. The passage was narrow, flanked by the two houses, with a gate at the far end; once they had entered it, their options would have been dangerously limited.
The homes along the harbour were set close together on narrow lots, because the land on which they stood was enormously valuable. To preserve the multimillion dollar views, the property lines between neighbours’ patios and backyards were delineated neither by high walls nor by dense masses of foliage, but by low shrubs, or planter boxes, or fences only two to three feet high.
Scootie bounded over a foot-high planter wall that overflowed with vine geraniums. Del and Tommy fol-lowed him onto the brick patio of the neighbouring Cape Cod-style house.
A security lamp on the nearby dock revealed cushion-less teak outdoor furniture left to weather through the winter, terra-cotta pots full of stalk primrose, and a massive built-in barbecue centre now covered with a tailored vinyl rain shield.
They leaped over a low plum-thorn hedge that delin-eated another property line, squished through a muddy flower bed, crossed another patio behind a stone and mahogany house that seemed inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, and clambered over more plum-thorn that snagged at the legs of Tommy’s jeans, pricked through his socks to puncture the skin at his ankles.
As they headed west along the peninsula, sprinting past the back of a brooding Spanish colonial home with deep balconies on three levels, a formidable dog penned in a narrow run between houses began to bark savagely at them and throw itself against a restraining gate. The hound sounded as eager to rend and kill as any German shepherd or Doberman ever trained by the Gestapo’s. Ahead, still more barking arose from other dogs anticipating their approach.
Tommy didn’t dare look back, for fear that the Samaritan was at his heels. In his mind’s eye, he could see five fat fingers, as pale and cold as those of a corpse, reaching toward him, inches from the nape of his neck.
Behind a three-story ultramodern house that was all angled glass and polished-limestone cladding, blinding banks of floodlights came on, evidently triggered by motion detectors in a security system that was more aggressive than anything protecting the other houses. The shock of this sudden glare caused Tommy to stum-ble, but he kept his balance and maintained his grip on the shotgun. Gasping for breath, he plunged forward, with Del, across a massive cast-stone balustrade onto the unlighted patio of a Mediterranean-style house, where a TV glowed in the family room and where a startled old man peered out at them as they raced past.
The night seemed to be filled with uncountable barking dogs, all close but out of sight, as though they were falling with the rain, coming down through the black sky, soon to land in packs on all sides.
Three houses beyond the ultramodern pile with the floodlamps, the beam of a big flashlight suddenly speared out of the darkness and the rain, fixing on Del.
The man behind the light shouted, ‘Stop right there!’
Without any cry of warning, another guy erupted from the gloom and blindsided Tommy, as if they were pro-fessional football players and this were the Superbowl.
They both skidded and went down on the slick concrete decking, and Tommy landed so hard that his breath was knocked out of him. He rolled into some patio chairs that tumbled over with a tubular-steel ringing. Stars swarmed behind his eyes, and he cracked his left elbow squarely on the ulnar nerve - the ill-named funny bone - sending a disabling painful tingle the length of his arm.
To the man with the flashlight, Del Payne said, ‘Back off, you asshole, I’ve got a gun, back off, back off!’
Tommy realized that he had dropped the Mossberg. In spite of the numbing pain in his left arm, wheezing noisily as he struggled to get some air into his lungs, he pushed onto his hands and knees. He was desperate to find the weapon.
The foolhardy tackler was sprawled facedown, groan-ing, apparently in even worse shape than Tommy. As far as Tommy was concerned, the stupid son of a bitch deserved to have a broken leg, two broken legs, and maybe a skull fracture for good measure. At first he had assumed that the men were cops, but they hadn’t identified themselves as policemen, and now he realized that they evidently lived here and fancied themselves to be natural-born heroes ready to take on a pair of fleeing burglars.
As Tommy crawled past the groaning man, he heard Del say, ‘Get that damn light out of my eyes right now, or I’ll shoot it out and take you with it.’
The other would-be hero’s courage wavered, and so did his flashlight.
By a stroke of luck, the nervous beam quivered across the patio, revealing the shotgun.
Tommy crawled to the Mossberg.
The man who’d tackled him had managed to sit up. He was spitting out something - possibly teeth - and cursing.
Clutching at another patio table, Tommy pulled him-self to his feet just as Scootie began to bark loudly, urgently.
Tommy glanced to the east and saw the fat man two properties away, silhouetted against the bright backdrop of the floodlamps at the ultramodern house. As the Samaritan raced toward them, leaping a low fence into the property next door, he was no longer the least bit clumsy but as graceful as a panther in spite of his size, his raincoat billowing like a cape behind him.
Snarling fiercely, Scootie moved to intercept the fat man.
‘Scootie, no!’ Del shouted.
Assuming a shooter’s stance as naturally as if she had been born with a gun in her hands, she opened fire with the Desert Eagle when the Samaritan cleared a hedge and splashed onto this patio, where they were apparently going to be forced to make their last stand. She squeezed off three rounds with what seemed to be calm delibera-tion. The evenly timed explosions were so thunderous that Tommy thought the recoil of the powerful handgun would knock her flat, but she stood tall.
She was an excellent shot, and all three rounds appeared to hit their target. With the first boom, the Samaritan stopped as if he’d run head-on into a brick wall, and with the second boom, he was half lifted off his feet and sent staggering backward, and with the third, he spun and swayed and almost fell.