June glanced again at the clock on the wall. It was two in the morning. Where the hell were Peter and Lewis? She wasn’t the kind of girlfriend that wanted to know where her boyfriend was at all times, but an illegal gun buy qualified as special circumstances. Too much could go wrong.
Knowing he’d have his burner silenced if he was in the middle of something, she sent a text. “Where r u?”
The reply came immediately. “Almost back. All good.”
She went to the living room and pulled aside one of the curtains to peer out at the street. No headlights yet. The rain was coming down in buckets.
She opened the front door and walked onto the small porch, her breath steaming in the cool night air. She’d always liked the sound of a heavy rain. It rattled on the porch roof and pummeled the rhododendrons in the yard. Fat droplets splashed off the wet pavement like a river learning to levitate.
Then her eye caught a faint movement across the street, where a good-sized madrone tree grew. The unpruned branches hung low, the glossy green leaves blocking out the streetlights, leaving a deep shadow below. Beside the trunk with the distinctive peeling bark, she saw a faint pale flash. She focused harder. It was a face, now fading from view as its owner eased himself deeper into the darkness.
She felt abruptly cold. What kind of freakazoid would stand out in the rain at two o’clock in the fucking morning?
Oh, she thought. That kind of freakazoid. The kind that might arrange for the death of a journalist and her daughter. Somehow Circuit Rider, or someone connected to him, had found Stella’s house.
Trying to look casual, she glanced left and right, hoping for Peter’s headlights and seeing none. The street was empty of parked cars. If the freakazoid had a ride nearby, she didn’t see it. She backed inside, closed and locked the door, then worked her way to the kitchen, turning off lights as she went. Hoping he’d think she was going to bed.
Peter had told her about Stella’s pistol. She went into the darkened office, pulled it from the drawer, and checked the magazine. The SIG was bigger than the .22 target pistols she practiced with at the range, but it fit her hand well enough.
She had waterproof trail shoes on her feet. Her gray raincoat was hanging on a hook. She put it on, unlocked the back door, and stepped out into the darkness.
If she’d learned anything from Peter, it was that the best defense was a good offense.
Fuck you, freakazoid.
KT was her friend.
—
The madrone tree was across from the driveway apron, so June walked the other direction, around the rear of the house toward the privacy fence blocking the back yard from the neighbor’s driveway. She’d been a rock climber since she was a teenager, so the six-foot fence was no obstacle, even one-handed. She held the SIG ready in the other.
Staying close to the house, she crept toward the street, sheltered from the rain by the roof overhang. If he hadn’t moved, she’d be hidden from his position until she cleared the big evergreen rhododendron bushes by the porch, when she’d be fifty or sixty feet away from him.
At fifty feet, she could put nine rounds into the center circle of a target.
She wouldn’t shoot first. She wasn’t an assassin. Besides, it might just be a local perv or an insomniac walking his dog. If that was the case, she’d tell him to put his hands up and step out where she could see him, and wait for Peter and Lewis.
But if he pointed a gun at her, she’d put a bullet in him.
She scanned ahead and to her left, knowing he might have relocated, but she didn’t see him. There were other plantings to shelter him on either side of the madrone. Or he could have crossed the street and was now tucked behind the rhododendrons, waiting for her.
She felt her heart beat, the blood pulsing through her veins. She’d always been an adrenaline junkie, but she never would have donesomething like this before meeting Peter. She’d have hidden under a desk and hoped the freakazoid would go away. But her adventures with Peter had sparked something in her. Not fearlessness or aggression, but a powerful desire to take ownership of her life and safety in a whole new way.
She approached the corner of the house. He wasn’t behind the bushes.
A wash of light came up the street, followed by the sound of tires on wet pavement and a big engine softened by the rain. Peter’s Tahoe. Shit. She stepped out past the big bush with her weapon at the ready, still looking for the freakazoid, hoping Peter and Lewis would recognize her when the headlights caught her.
The Tahoe turned to enter the driveway, then braked abruptly. Peter popped out of the driver’s seat, a pistol in his hand. “What’s the problem?”
She gestured with the SIG. “A man behind that tree. Watching the house.”
Peter pivoted immediately toward the madrone and began to approach it, gun up and ready. She did the same. She heard the passenger door close and knew Lewis was with them, too.
Behind the tree, the darkness shifted. There was a faint liquid shimmer as the fractured rays of the streetlight caught something, the retreating wet surface of a hooded jacket.
“Don’t move,” Peter shouted.
The shimmer broke and ran for the space between the neighbors’ houses.
