On the flatscreen, CNN’s countdown clock ticked away. 21:34:51… 21:34:50… But she and Wells had their own countdown. She would give Wells exactly one minute to make his move. She hadn’t heard any sirens, so they still had a little time before the police arrived. Ideally, Wells would blink first, come off the roof to attack the house. As long as he was up there, they couldn’t touch him.
If Wells hadn’t moved in sixty — now fifty-five — seconds, she would tell Frankel to grab Witwans and hustle him out the back door and along the north wall of the house to the Mercedes. Gil and his shotgun would lead the way. She would cover the front yard from the living room. They would dare Wells and his friends to stop them. The alleys along the north and south sides of the house were narrow, and the edge of the roof overhung them. Wells would have to perch over the eaves for a shot. He’d have to be accurate. Gil wouldn’t.
Still, she’d rather have him on the ground.
She checked to be sure she had a round chambered and flattened herself beside the front door. As she waited, every cell in her body came to life. The opposite of the depression that had once swallowed her.
She knew she would kill Wells.
At that moment, Wells would have traded what was left of his soul for a CS grenade, or even the homemade Molotov cocktail that had served him in Istanbul. Too bad the devil was serving other clients. Wells didn’t even have the shotgun. He’d left it with Duto, knowing he would need both hands to shimmy up the carport.
After killing the bodyguard, Wells stepped off the roof onto the wall that divided Salome’s house from its southern neighbor. The wall was no wider than a single concrete block, with glass bits embedded in its top, so Wells had to tread carefully. But the wall gave him the chance to move quietly, rather than pounding the roof and giving away his position.
As he tightroped along, he heard Salome yell twice to him. At him. Did she think he’d answer? That she could convince him to throw away his tactical edge by insulting his masculinity? He understood the trick. Still, the words goaded him.
A window was cut into the house’s south wall about halfway down. Through its bare glass, Wells glimpsed an unmade bed. He saw a shadow in the room. He guessed Witwans was down there, but he couldn’t be sure. He kept moving. Six inches past the back right corner of the house, he stopped. The wall on which he stood ran another six feet to the rear lot line, then swung left around the back of the house and left again around its north side. Cracked concrete covered most of the narrow backyard below, creating a patio with all the appeal of an exercise pen in a supermax prison.
Next door, Jacob stopped shouting. He’d done his job. In the silence, Wells listened for sirens, heard none. Yet. Nor any movement inside the house. Salome was playing defense. Probably she figured he was still up front staking out the Mercedes. She hoped he would come down, open himself to a counterattack. He understood. The house had only two obvious entry points, the doors in front and back, both easily covered. But Wells was left with no choice now but to do what Salome wanted. He had to move, and quickly.
The back of the house had two windows that looked out on the patio, one on each side of the back door. Wells inched to his right along the wall. Through the nearer window, he spotted a yellowish Formica countertop and a couple of glasses. Kitchen in back, living room in front.
He craned his head, but he couldn’t see if anyone was inside. The kitchen lights were out, and the sun was hidden behind clouds. Keeping the room in shadow. Then, an answer to a prayer that Wells hadn’t uttered, the sun broke through. Wells caught a glint of light off metal, a shotgun barrel. The man holding it was against the wall a few inches left of the back door.
Just that fast, the sun was gone. The break Wells needed. Now he knew where to aim.
His phone buzzed. He pulled it, found a text from Duto: Where you? Wells decided to take the seconds to respond. Back of house. More men inside.
He shoved away the phone and jumped into the backyard, as far from the wall as he could. He wanted to land close to the door. He could aim and fire the Glock faster than the guy could bring the shotgun around, a life-or-death advantage in a close quarters firefight.
He heard his left foot break almost before he felt the pain, a loud pop as he landed on the concrete and then an electric spike running up his ankle, into his leg. He fell forward and braced himself with his left hand and kept his head and his right hand up. He was not even ten feet away from the door. As the guard spun and tried to bring up the shotgun, Wells fired once, twice, three times, not caring whether the rounds went through the door itself or its center window. Against a 9-millimeter round at close range, a painted plywood door offered no more protection than a piece of cardboard. The wood burst and blood spattered through the sudden holes in the guard’s white short-sleeved shirt. But he was still raising the shotgun.
Wells scrambled forward, toward the house, left of the door. The shotgun blast tore the door off its hinges and echoed off the concrete walls. For a second, Wells couldn’t hear anything at all, and then sound came back bit by bit.
He was squatting with his weight on his right leg, his face pressed to the house’s back wall, maybe two feet to the left of the doorway. His right hand, his gun hand, was closer to the doorway. He leaned over and fired twice for cover and peeked inside. The guard lay on the linoleum kitchen floor, three feet inside, almost close enough for Wells to touch, the shotgun beside him. Blood soaked his shirt from shoulder to waist.
Salome yelled in Hebrew from the front of the house and the guy coughed and tried to answer, but he could manage only a bubble of blood. No saving him. He would be dead in minutes.
Wells fired twice more and reached into the house and grabbed the shotgun by the barrel, its steel slick with blood. The guard’s fingers were still wrapped around the stock, and Wells had to wrench it away. He looked up to see Frankel in the hallway, maybe thirty feet away. Frankel fired three times as Wells spun back to the safety of the wall. One shot smacked the door frame and the second was close enough for Wells to hear it whistle by. The shotgun was a pump-action Remington 870, a 12-gauge. Wells checked the tube magazine, found four shells. He wiped off the blood as best he could and racked a round, the chk-chk as unsubtle a warning as a sidewinder’s rattle. He set the gun aside, hoping he’d bought a few seconds to figure out how badly he’d injured his leg. He turned, putting his back against the wall, and pushed himself up with his good leg, thankful for all the squats he’d forced on himself over the years. When he was standing, he put a feather of pressure on his left leg. The pain flared as he bore down. But Wells could handle pain. The deeper problem was that he couldn’t put weight on the front half of his foot. He’d broken at least one bone, maybe torn the big ligament, too. He couldn’t remember the name but it was the one that always bothered basketball players. Even the light pressure he’d applied caused his foot to rearrange itself in real time, and not for the better. Evolution in reverse.
He’d broken the foot in Afghanistan years before and banged it up again in Istanbul three weeks earlier, but he’d thought he was fully recovered.
Wrong.
He could stand. And he could hobble, if he used his heel and kept all the weight off the front of his foot. But he sure couldn’t run. What do you call a woman with one leg? Eileen.
Lucky he wasn’t in the middle of a gunfight or anything.
Frankel fired twice more from inside the house. He seemed to be moving closer, coming down the hallway. Wells reached across his body, grabbed the shotgun, fired blindly through the door. One shot and one shot only. Even after grabbing the Remington, he was still far too close to black on ammunition for comfort. He had just three rounds in the shotgun, five in the Glock. The pistol had a seventeen-round magazine, but Wells had already fired eleven rounds, four in front and seven back here. He had a plastic bag with loose ammunition in his pocket, but he couldn’t imagine Frankel would give him the time he needed to reload.