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I had seen so few of these people’s faces that I was tempted to pull off the dead man’s ski mask. I resisted the urge when I thought, irrationally, What will you do if the face is yours?
I didn’t want to step in blood or on a corpse, but the latter was unavoidable because of the dead man’s size and the limitations of my stride. The heel of my right shoe came down on the fingers of his right hand. Fortunately, the contact produced little sound—the faintest squeak of the latex glove stretching under my shoe—and I didn’t stumble, although I almost revealed my presence by saying, Sorry, sir.
Doorways were the worst. When you’re on the hunt, you must clear them properly, low and fast, weapon in a two-hand grip, tracking the muzzle left to right or right to left, depending on the situation, seeking a target. Even fry cooks know that. The two men who had stopped bullets were dressed and armed like professionals who were trained and experienced in making such transitions, and yet they were dead in doorways.
The parlor was poorly lighted by a single lamp with a pleated blue-silk shade, and crowded with heavy Victorian furniture. A pair of chesterfields, wing-back armchairs: things to crouch behind for concealment. No one popped out of hiding to blast away at me, though the metronomic tock-tock-tock of the pendulum in the grandfather clock seemed to be counting off my last seconds.
As in the dining room, the draperies had been drawn shut at all the windows, perhaps to prevent anyone outside from determining the location of the residents.
A wide archway, instead of a door, connected the parlor to the foyer. I found it refreshing to see that no one lay dead on that threshold.
The foyer. Deserted. To the right, the front door was closed. To the left of the archway lay the brightly lighted hall. Opposite the dining room and parlor were three other rooms that I hadn’t explored.
My sense of things was that the action had moved on from the ground floor after the first two men had been shot. I regarded the stairs, hesitating to climb them and leave unsearched rooms behind me.
Overhead, someone said, “Ahwk,” as though violently clearing his throat, and immediately thereafter something thudded to the floor in an upstairs room.
If, as I had every reason to expect, a third dead man had just given up his ghost, the thud wasn’t as loud as it ought to have been. The floors allowed me to walk as quietly as a cat, and they soaked up most of the sound of dead men falling, which suggested that silence favored the Bullocks and that the place had been constructed as both a safe house and a trap.
Cautioning myself that a trap can sometimes spring unexpectedly and catch not the prey but instead the one who set it, I went to the stairs and climbed warily, silently. I glanced back now and then, prepared to discover that I was looking down the barrel of a gun, but I remained alone.
Thirty-one
At the top of the stairs, I looked along a hallway with large paintings on the walls between doorways, of which there were four on each side. No dead guys were tumbled across any of the thresholds.
The first door on the left stood half open, and a lamp glowed in there, but I couldn’t see the entire space, just the foot of a bed and a dresser and a small armchair in a corner. I cleared the doorway and discovered the room unoccupied.
There were an attached bath and a closet, but I didn’t want to investigate them. A hit team didn’t enter a house to hide in closets and behind bathroom doors. An assault required speed and continuous movement—even if, as seemed to be the case here, it started to go wrong.
In the hall again, on my right, the first door stood open wide. Another bedroom. A third large man, dressed like the two downstairs, lying on his back, leaked enough to require that the carpet be replaced. The uniformity of their dress began to seem like stage clothes, costumes, as though they must be members of a weird punk band, musicians who moonlighted as killers.
I won’t go on about how my heart was pounding and my mouth was dry. Been there, described that.
Because there were no shattered mirrors or bullet holes in the walls, no visible damage from any misspent rounds, it appeared that none of the assassins had gotten off a shot. But such incompetence seemed unlikely. I thought I must be missing something, the kind of missed something that would get me shot in the head.
Nevertheless, I moved silently along the hall, toward the second door on the right. A large painting of mountains towering above a lake and splashed through with spectacular light, maybe a print of something by Albert Bierstadt, abruptly disappeared soundlessly up into the wall as if on pneumatic tracks, leaving only the ornate frame. Where the painting had been was now an opening into the room toward which I had been headed. Standing there, aiming a silencer-equipped pistol at my face, Mr. Bullock managed to check himself before he blew me away. He raised his eyebrows and whispered, “Get in here!”
As the painting slid quietly back into place, I stepped to the door, went into another bedroom, and found that Maybelle Bullock was alive, too. She eased the door almost shut, and her husband put a finger to his lips.
I saw that a different painting, perhaps a print of another Bierstadt, hung here, directly behind the one in the hall, and it evidently retracted simultaneously with the other.
Mrs. Bullock held a device I’d never seen before, about the same width as a cell phone and twice as long. A screen occupied the top half, and two rows of buttons were positioned under it. Nothing on the screen but a field of cool blue. She swung it away from the wall that this room shared with the hallway, toward the wall between this room and the next room, as a fairy godmother might gesture with a magic wand and leave the air sparkling in its wake.
On the blue screen, a red form shaped itself out of pixels. Not anything identifiable. Just a shimmering horizontal mass on a field of blue. It twinkled, constantly adjusting around the edges. My guess: We were watching the heat signature of assassin number four as he moved cautiously through the room adjacent to this one.
As Maybelle moved her hand slowly, from
right to left, keeping the red form in the center of the blue screen, tracking it, Deacon stepped to a large painting hung to the left of the bed. This one looked as if it might be a print of something by John Singer Sargent. Deacon aimed the gun at the painting, as if he were an art critic with violent tendencies. His wife pressed a button on the device she held. The artwork vanished up into the wall, leaving only the frame, in which a fourth assassin stood no more than three feet from the muzzle of Mr. Bullock’s pistol. Mr. Bullock fired twice, point-blank, and the hit man dropped out of sight, as if he had stepped through a trap door.
I started to speak, but Mr. Bullock frowned and put a finger to his lips again. Then he put the same finger to his right ear and pressed on something that resembled a hearing aid. I hadn’t noticed it before. A wire ran behind his ear and down his side to an object about the size of a walkie-talkie that was clipped to his belt. He listened for half a minute, pulled the microphone from his ear, and said, “House says no more damn fools inside or out.”
“Who’s House?” I asked, assuming it was a name.
“This here house, son.”
Mrs. Bullock said, “House computer, Oddie. It’s got itself eyes and ears everywhere.”
“Weight sensors, heat sensors, a whole gaggle of sensors,” her husband added.
“So you knew when I got here?”
“We knew,” Mrs. Bullock said, “but we was too busy stayin’ alive to check video and see who you was.”
“Had to figure you for another of them bastards,” Mr. Bullock said. “Sorry if maybe I just about killed you dead.”
“That’s all right, sir.”
“Call me Deke, why don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Thirty-two
While we waited for the clean-up crew, Maybelle Bullock insisted that we have coffee spiked with Bailey’s. We took it in mugs, in the dining room rather than the kitchen, because the dead man lying half in the dining room hadn’t soiled himself while dying, as had the dead man lying half in the kitchen. The air smelled nicer in the dining room. The Bullocks sat side by side, frequently exchanging little smiles that I presumed to be expressions of approval about how each had performed in the crisis. I sat across the table from them.
