Mortal Pursuit

by Brian Harper

  “The Ashcroft place.” He frowned to himself.

  Trish replaced the microphone and waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, she asked the obvious question. “Is that where we’re going”

  Wald nodded. “Actually I’m the only one who still calls it by that name. It’s been the Kent place ever since Charles Kent became man of the house. Maybe sixteen, seventeen years ago.”

  “Where is it”

  “Way up in the mountains.”

  As if to punctuate the thought, Wald veered onto a branching road that came out of nowhere, a two-lane rural route twisting northwest into the foothills.

  “Lake there,” he added. “Most of the area around it is woods. State park and a picnic area. Mr. and Mrs. Kent’s house is the only residence. Only one for miles.”

  “Isolated.”

  “Very. Twenty-five hundred Skylark is the end of the world.”

  Half hidden in stands of pine, trailers and mobile homes swept past. The Chevy’s high beams carved twin funnels out of the dark, illuminating a double yellow line to the left, a smear of guardrail to the right. Ruts bounced the sedan on its shocks.

  “Why’d Lou think we needed backup” Trish asked.

  “On a prowler call it’s not a bad idea to have more than one unit on hand.”

  “So why’d we turn it down”

  “Because the alarm wasn’t tripped. Caller just saw a dark shape. Could be anything. Out in the boonies, like where we’re headed now, nine times out of ten it’s a raccoon. They grow pretty damn big out there, and they prowl at night.”

  “I see.” Her voice caught on the second word.

  Wald gave her another, sharper look. “Nervous”

  She wanted to deny it, but after all, he was her training officer, and she had to be honest with him.

  Even so, she hedged a little in her answer. “Sort of.”

  “You should be.”

  “I thought it was probably a raccoon.”

  “Nine times out of ten, I said. But there’s always that tenth time. That’s when you need to be fully alert.”

  “I’m real alert right now.”

  “Good.”

  The Chevy barreled higher into the mountains. Through the open windows the warm night rushed in. It was the final weekend in August, but in southern California summer lingered to the end of October. The worst heat was still to come.

  Trish watched the last homes melt away, and then there was only a dark blur of trees.

  “How much farther” she asked.

  “Three, four miles.”

  At this speed, no time at all.

  The wire mesh partition behind her rattled loosely. On a switchback curve her shoulder harness locked, exerting brief, painful pressure on her right breast until the strap disengaged.

  She swallowed, wishing her mouth weren’t so dry.

  Nervous Sure. Frightened, even.

  But below her fear she was conscious of a not-unpleasant thrill of adrenaline.

  This was what she’d wanted, after all. This was why she’d sweated and trained, why she’d endured long days and sore muscles and relentless hectoring-to wear a blue uniform, to charge into danger in response to a distress call in the night.

  She only hoped …

  Hoped she wouldn’t …

  “You get over it.” Wald’s voice startled her.

  “What”

  “Opening night jitters. You get over it.”

  She tried a smile of her own. “I thought it was good to be scared.”

  “There are two kinds of fear. Fear of what might happen-and fear of how you might screw up. You get over the second kind.”

  How you might screw up. That was it, all right. That was the real fear coiling in her stomach and stopping her breath.

  Trish wondered how Wald had known about that, how he’d been able to get inside her head and dissect her feelings.

  Then she realized he must have trained a dozen probationers just like her, as raw and green as she was.

  And once, long ago, Wald had been a rookie cop himself, answering his first priority call. Funny how she hadn’t ever thought of him that way.

  “It’s just …” She hesitated. But remember: honesty. “It’s just that I’ve never really been tested.”

  “You’ll hold up fine. Officer Robinson.”

  Trish sat tensely in her seat, fingering her holster strap, and hoped Pete Wald was right.

  10

  Barbara rejoined the others in the dining area, serving tiramisu. Her entrance inadvertently disrupted the humorous climax of Charles’s Ojai tennis story. She saw him suppress a frown.

  The Danforths made the usual appreciative comments as she dished out dessert from the sideboard. Phliip was a former college athlete, his paunch spreading in middle age, his florid face further inflamed by those five whiskey sours Ally had mentioned. His wife was attractive but desperately thin, her arms like tanned bones, her face revealing too much of the skull beneath. She spent hours at a fitness club and never ate anything.

  As if to prove the point, Judy Danforth risked only a birdlike nibble of tiramisu. “Barbara, this is delicious.” She had said the same about the filet mignon, although she’d consumed less than half of the six-ounce cut.

  Barbara nodded her thanks, a false smile fixed on her lips, while she seated herself across from Charles.

  The 911 operator had said a patrol unit would respond as soon as possible, but what did that mean Five minutes An hour

  Discreetly she checked her watch. 8:10. Realistically she couldn’t expect a response time of less than ten minutes. The house was secluded, after all.

  Secluded-bad word to think of right now.

  “Barbara”

  Her head tilted up, and she saw Philip regarding her with a quizzical smile. Vaguely she was aware that he had said something she missed.

  She blinked. “Excuse me”

  “Just wondered if I could have the recipe. I do a bit of cooking around the house-“

  “All the cooking,” Judy amended with a smile that stretched her skin drumhead-taut.

  “She’s got me well trained.”

  “Now don’t start that.”

  “Certainly,” Barbara said, breaking into their banter because the brisk, bright voices were giving her a headache. “Charles has a copier in his study. I’ll Xerox the recipe before you go.”

  “Mom’s a terrific cook,” Ally said with a radiant smile.

  Barbara wished she could take pleasure in the compliment, but it was difficult to concentrate. Her gaze kept straying to the windows as she hunted for a glimpse of movement in the front yard.

  Ridiculous, of course. The man she’d seen had been out back.

  But how could she be sure there was only one

  Professional burglars worked in teams, didn’t they

  Teams. Just listen to her. Crazy talk.

  She wished the police would come.

  11

  Through the windows five people were now visible at the table. All present and accounted for.

  Cain pocketed his binoculars. Lugging the duffel bag, he crept along the flagstone path and up the steps to the front door.

  From one of the bag’s zipped pockets he removed an L-shaped tension wrench and a homemade lock pick fashioned of medium-gauge piano wire.

  Silently he slipped the tension wrench into the keyway, applying light pressure to the plug, then slid the pick alongside it and probed for the first of the pin tumblers.

  When the pick jostled the pin to the shear line, the plug turned a fraction of a degree.

  He advanced the pick to the next pin, then the next. With each success the plug rotated a bit more, its infinitesimal slippage apparent only to his sensitive touch.

  When the sixth pin was raised, the plug turned fully and the door was unlocked.

  There was a dead bolt, but it was not secured. Cain eased the door ajar, knowing he was screened from the view of the Kents and their guests by the foyer wall.
r />   He could enter at any time.

  Dialing the radio’s volume low, he thumbed the transmit button. “Tyler,” he whispered, “report.”

  Softly: “We’re in.”

  “Blair”

  “Us too.”

  Tyler and Blair had no proficiency in locksmithing. They had used Lockaid pick guns, customized with sound baffles, to open the side and rear doors.

  Cain glanced at his watch.

  8:10.

  All he had to do was give the order, and the drill they’d practiced so many times would be carried out for real. In exactly sixty seconds, the Kents’ dinner party would suffer the rudest of interruptions.

  He hesitated.

  It was still not too late to turn back, abort the mission, try again another time.

  Gage had been seen. The police quite possibly had been called.

  Roughly he bulldozed his apprehensiveness aside. Cops didn’t scare him. He had killed two in his lifetime.

  The first was a random hit, done on a dare when he was seventeen. He remembered the startled terror in the patrolman’s eyes as the bullet punched into his skull.

  Then just last year, a CHP car had pulled him over on a lonely stretch of Highway 62, east of Twenty-nine Palms. Writing a ticket, the cop had glanced into the back of the van, where a sawed-off Mossberg lay on the floor.

  Carrying a firearm was a violation of parole. And the shotgun’s barrel had been trimmed illegally short. The two convictions would send Cain back to prison for a long time.

  He had spent half his life incarcerated. Never again.

  The cop had just noticed the Mossberg when Cain pulled an airweight .22 from the glove compartment and shot him between the eyes.

  For a day or two afterward he’d worried that the man might have run a DMV check on his tags before getting out of the car: standard procedure. But news stories reported that the DMV computer had been down that afternoon, so no trace had been run.

  Cops weren’t anything special. Wearing uniforms didn’t make them superheroes. He could kill two more if he had to.

  Besides, tonight was his night. He could feel it. Every nerve ending, every corpuscle of blood, sang to him of the future’s bright promise.

  He would never have this chance again.

  8:11 precisely.

  His decision was reached.

  Cain lifted the radio and breathed one word.

  “Go.”

  12

  Ally touched her mother’s arm. “Aren’t you going to try any”

  Barbara realized she had yet to sample dessert. “Of course.” Mechanically she lifted her fork to her mouth, then swallowed without noticing the taste.

  Charles was trying to recover the thread of the Ojai story, still oblivious to the fact that the Danforths had heard it already.

  Barbara tuned him out and listened to the house.

  Faintly, a whisper of wind chimes.

  She heard the faraway notes and shifted in her seat.

  The chimes hung in a mobile on the patio. Ordinarily they couldn’t be heard from inside, certainly not from the dining room-unless the back door had been opened.

  Absurd.

  The sound was carrying on the breeze, that was all. Carrying through the kitchen window.

  “So instead of two tickets,” Charles said as the Danforths smiled dutifully, “we had four …”

  In the kitchen, the creak of a floorboard.

  The noise was low. Barbara couldn’t be certain she’d heard it.

  Anyway, houses did that. They settled.

  The candle-flame bulbs in the chandelier seemed suddenly too bright, their sparkle painful. She blinked as if in a blaze of light.

  “-trying to scalp the damn things, and the match has already started …”

  Charles went on talking, the others smiling and eating, and Barbara felt a twitch of rage at them for being oblivious and happy.

  She caught Ally looking at her, puzzled apprehension in her serious brown eyes. For her daughter’s sake Barbara swallowed another forkful of tiramisu.

  Acid trickled into her belly. She didn’t dare taste the espresso. The strong, hot coffee was sure to make her sick.

  Another creak, this one from the rear hallway.

  She thought of the wind chimes again, the rear door that would let someone into that hall.

  The back of her neck, cold, prickled with tiny hairs.

  Someone was here, inside the house. More than one of them.

  She knew it.

  With irrational certainty she knew it.

  “Did you hear that”

  The voice surprised her because it was her own. She hadn’t realized she was speaking.

  Charles glanced at her, irritated at having the Ojai anecdote spoiled twice. “Hear what”

  “A noise.” She wanted to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t work. “I thought … in the hall …”

  Philip pushed back his chair with alcoholic bravado and immediately started to rise. Charles waved him back down.

  “Don’t trouble yourself, Phil. Barb’s got sort of an overactive fantasy life.”

  Barbara stiffened. “Fantasy life”

  “Of course, it may be merely a twisted plea for attention.”

  “Not from you.”

  Ally was looking down at her plate, intoning in a small voice, “Please don’t. Don’t fight.”

  Only Barbara heard, but the soft, plaintive words cut like glass.

  “What kind of noise” Judy leaned forward, worry hunching her bony shoulders. “Someone in the house Is that what you mean”

  Barbara hesitated. Suddenly her fears seemed embarrassingly insubstantial.

  Maybe Charles was right. Maybe she was imagining all of it.

  Certainly she’d proved her father wrong. She hadn’t behaved at all like a level-headed pragmatist.

  “I guess I did get a bit carried away,” she said without conviction.

  Charles nodded vehemently. “Carried away. Exactly. That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

  He lifted his fork with wounded dignity.

  “So if we all could just settle down and finish our dessert …”

  The first masked figure came up fast out of the foyer, and Barbara had time to wonder what he was doing there when she’d heard sounds from the back of the house, and then two more intruders burst in from the rear hall and another pair from the kitchen, all of them armed, black pistols gleaming in gloved hands.

  A napkin drifted to the floor in a flutter of white. Judy Danforth was out of her seat, screaming. The nearest intruder hit her, hard. Crack of knuckles against her jaw, her cry silenced as she fell into her chair, Philip rising belligerently, shouting a righteous objection. A second gunman delivered a palm heel strike to the side of Philip’s neck-a hard, fleshy whap, the sound of pounded meat in a butcher shop, a welt blooming on Philip’s neck, soon to be a purple bruise, and Philip sat down, stunned and blinking and looking as if he were about to vomit.

  Irrelevantly it occurred to Barbara that none of the intruders had yet spoken a word.

  The table was surrounded with impossible speed, like a jump cut in a movie. The chandelier bulbs cast orange glints on the pistols, tiger-striping the jet black frames and silencer tubes.

  Ally gripped the fringe of the tablecloth, the damask stretched taut. Barbara reached out, patted Ally’s hand.

  The terror she felt was less for herself than for her daughter. Her own life was over. Well, she could accept that. She was forty-three, hardly old, but she’d had time anyway, she’d had years.

  But Ally, only fifteen-why, fifteen was nothing, it wasn’t even a start.

  She gazed blankly at the men ringing the table, big men, muscular under their clothes . except for one who was shorter, almost lithe.

  With a distant, anachronistic sense of shock, Barbara made out twin hills of breasts half concealed in folds of crinkled nylon. A woman.

  But women don’t do this, she thought, scandalized, while a remote part of he
rself mocked her own navet.

  All five of them wore identical costumes, black jumpsuits or sweatsuits, something like that, sleek and nonreflective. Mouthless ski masks hooded them, leaving only their eyes visible, shiny in the dark surround.

  Charles stared straight ahead, his gaze fixed on nothing.

  Ally began to whimper, a dismal mewling noise.

  Judy hiccupped a moan, the prelude to another scream and perhaps more violence.

  And the man from the foyer lifted his pistol and fired one shot into the beamed ceiling.

  Despite the silencer, the gun’s discharge made an audible crack. Wood chips from the rafters pattered on the floral centerpiece. A cartridge casing, ejected by the slide’s recoil, rolled across the tablecloth and came to rest at the edge of Ally’s plate.

  The room froze.

  For some timeless interval there was no movement, no sound save Charles’s ragged breathing and Ally’s low sobs.

  Almost casually the man checked his watch. “Eight-twelve.”

  His voice, slightly muffled by the mask, was harsh and gravelly. In his curt nod of satisfaction he conveyed an air of command.

  Barbara thought these people might be terrorists. Terrorists in her house.

  And terrorists were zealots, fanatics-no bargaining with people like that. They killed for vengeance and salvation, killed women, children. Ally .

  Tramp of boots.

  The man who’d fired the shot was rounding the table, each heavy footfall imprinting deep tread marks in the carpet’s thick pile.

  Directly before Barbara he stopped. The gray eyes in the ski mask’s slits fastened on her.

  Her heart twisted.

  “Who did you call” he asked.

  On the margin of her vision she saw Charles go pale.

  She didn’t answer. She sat rigid, her spine and shoulder blades pressing deep into the spindles of the chair.

  He stepped closer, and though she couldn’t see his mouth, she could sense his feral smile.

  The gun lifted. “Who did you call, Mrs. Kent”

  He knew her name. She wondered why she feared him more because of that.

  Her chest rose, fell. She stared down the black hole of the silencer tube, and it stared back, a lidless eye.