Duto had better get inside before then.
Again Wells caught Salome wrong-footed. She was watching the yard, but the shots came from the back, the kitchen. Three. Then a shotgun blast. She turned and ran, trying for the hallway. But Wells stuck a pistol through the remains of the back door and fired twice more. She skidded into the back wall of the living room to stop herself.
She peeked down the corridor. Gil, the second of the bodyguards she’d brought, lay on the kitchen floor. She couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. “Gil!” she yelled. He turned his head a fraction, but if he spoke she couldn’t hear him.
“Adina,” Frankel said from the bedroom halfway down the hall, just as Wells appeared again in the kitchen doorway.
“Amos, he’s coming for the kitchen—”
Frankel spun out of the bedroom and into the hall and fired as Wells reached down and grabbed the shotgun from Gil’s hands. But Frankel missed, and Wells vanished again. Now Wells had the shotgun and could keep Frankel out of the kitchen. But Frankel had an open shot at the hallway, so he could keep Wells from coming inside. A standoff.
They had to take him down while they knew where he was, before he disappeared again. And Salome saw how.
“We can pin him. You stay, keep shooting, make him think you’re coming down the hall. I go through the window in there”—she nodded at Witwans’s room—“come around the side of the house. The alley’s not even ten meters. He won’t have a chance. I’ll blow his head off.” And once Wells was dead, she and Frankel could grab Witwans and shoot their way out against whoever was outside without worrying that Wells was behind them.
“What if he turns that way?”
“Even better. He’ll run right into me.”
“Unless he figures out what you’re doing and starts shooting around the corner. Then you’ll be the one who’s trapped.”
Five seconds to get through the window, five to get down the alley. Ten in all. “Ten seconds,” Salome said. “Keep him busy back there that long.”
“Let me do it—”
She shook her head. She would kill Wells. No one else.
She fired twice down the hallway toward the kitchen. She pushed past Frankel into the bedroom where Witwans huddled in a corner, his hands over his ears, a seventy-five-year-old child.
“Please,” Witwans yelled in English. “Please.”
She ignored him. A siren sounded somewhere in the distance. Salome pushed up the window, twisted her body into the alley. Ten seconds.
Wells heard Salome and Frankel in the hallway, a low conversation in Hebrew. Making a plan. He wondered if he should try to limp out the alley, but he couldn’t possibly move silently or quickly enough. He was furious with himself, with his body for its betrayal. Would this be where the trip ended for him, boxed in behind this ugly yellow house?
He had come too far. Witwans was too close. He needed one more move. One more.
From inside the house Witwans yelled “Please” twice in English. Like Salome was planning to shoot him. But why would she?
Amos shot three times and Wells chanced a peek around the door. Frankel had crouched at the far end of the hall. He was almost taunting Wells, daring Wells to step in with the shotgun and try for him. Wells knew he wouldn’t have a chance even on two good legs. He would have to expose himself for a decent shot. As soon as he moved, Frankel would light him up.
But where was Salome?
Frankel raised his pistol, fired twice more—
And everything clicked. The conversation. Why Witwans had yelled. Wells had used misdirection against Salome. Now she was doing the same to him. She was coming down the alley while he focused on the doorway.
He couldn’t stay on the wall. She would use the corner for cover and he had no defense. And he couldn’t go for the door. Frankel was waiting. To survive, he needed to give himself an angle to shoot her as she reached the corner.
With his foot wrecked, he had only one play.
He put his weight on his left heel, ignored the screaming in his foot, took one big stride with his right leg toward the rear right corner of the backyard. He planted on his right foot and spun right ninety degrees while his momentum still carried him forward. He pulled up the shotgun just as Salome reached the corner—
She took her last step down the alley, ready to flank him. She wasn’t going to shoot him right away, she wanted him to know what she’d done, how she’d beaten him—
Then she saw him moving, he wasn’t against the wall by the door like she expected, or coming flush around the corner of the house, instead he was lunging for the back corner of the yard, spinning toward her, she needed a moment to understand why, he wanted the angle, he was raising a shotgun to her—
And she swung the pistol around, knowing she was too late, no time to speak, to curse or beg, she screamed a half-note for her death to come—
Her chest exploded, but she felt no pain, and for a moment she thought he might have missed. But then, why was she lying on her back looking at the concrete walls and the clouded sky? Everyone was wrong about dying, the easiest thing in the world. She didn’t even have to move, didn’t fly anywhere, it was the other way, the world and all the sky raced away from her, faster and faster until a single point of light was left at the end of a million-mile tunnel, the tiniest pinprick—
With just one good leg Wells couldn’t handle the Remington’s recoil. It knocked him back and down and the shotgun came out of his hands. He looked up at the doorway to the kitchen and saw Frankel running toward him, raising his pistol, and Wells scrabbled for his own pistol, but he couldn’t find it, he had tucked it in his waist, but the fall must have knocked it out—
And the shots came from the house, one-two-three—
But it was Frankel whose mouth opened in surprise, Frankel whose body arched forward and windmilled down—
Duto.
Wells forced himself to his feet, hobbled toward the corner of the house. The pain was intense, but if he kept the weight on the heel he could move. Salome was dead, a baseball-size hole in the center of her chest, her eyes open in death. Another second and she would have had him. Wells had never killed a woman before. Funny. And funny that he couldn’t think of a better word, a more powerful word for his feelings. But it wasn’t just his weapons that were low on ammunition. Wells was as exhausted as he had ever been. He supposed he ought to close her eyes, but he couldn’t imagine touching her. He left her on her back staring at nothing as Duto appeared in the back door, his mouth open wide. Grinning.
“Thank you? Huh? Maestro?”
Wells wanted to shoot him right there, this man who had just saved his life. Six weeks before, Duto had asked Wells to meet a man in Guatemala City. All this madness had started then. Wells hadn’t wanted to go, but he’d owed Duto a favor, and he’d hated the idea of being in Duto’s debt.
So what did he owe Duto now?
A second siren joined the first. The question would have to wait. “Thank you.”
“The pleasure’s mine. What happened to your leg?”