Page 78 of One of Us Is Guilty

The tinny sound of recoil from the assault rifles was as fast as a beat on a brass cymbal. After fifteen, maybe twenty seconds, the firing stopped.

Bloch heard boots on gravel, working hard and getting fainter.

One of the men, at least, was headed round the house for the back door.

She turned to Lake, but he was already getting to his feet and heading toward the kitchen. Ducking underneath the spray from the burst pipe, he whipped round, one-eighty, swung to his knees and put his back to the kitchen island. The back door was behind it. Bloch was still lying flat on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, but she pushed herself forward, left ear to the ground, straining to see into the kitchen.

She could just make out the back door. Bloch and Lake had left it open when they’d come in. The first intruder must’ve come round the front and used a side window in the parlor.

She could see Lake, but she was far enough away, with just her head low to the ground and her eyes jutting past the living room doorway, that anyone coming through the back door likely wouldn’t see her. Not through the spray from the ruptured pipe.

Lake looked at her. Nodded.

She nodded back.

They’d worked together long enough to have an unspoken language. Bloch said so little that it had developed faster than usual.

Silently, the back door opened a little farther. A masked man carrying an assault rifle came into the kitchen, sweeping the weapon left and right, checking the corners for targets.

Military trained, thought Bloch.

She nodded to Lake, and kept her eyes on the man at the back door.

Lake scooted onto his belly, wrapped his arm around the kitchen island, until the Glock was pointed in the right direction, and fired three times in tight angles. He couldn’t be sure, but at this distance, one of those quick shots was bound to hit the man standing in that doorway.

One of them did. The round tearing through the side of his boot.

The man dropped and the back of his head hit the floor. He just had time to look up to see Lake, standing over him now, the Glock pointed at his face.

Lake pulled the trigger.

The back of the man’s head hit the floor again.

This time, it would stay there.

Bloch rolled over, looked toward the front of the house.

Listened.

It was so quiet. So dark.

And then the clouds shifted.

Moonlight drifted through the bullet holes in the front of the house. From the living room to the hallway, shafts of light angled through the holes to cast pools of silver on the floor.

And then one of the shafts of light went dark, way over to her left in the living room. Then it lit up again, and another shaft was extinguished, like a candle being blown out. Someone was outside, moving across the front of the house toward the door. Slowly, silently, unaware that the moon was showing their exact position.

The magnum in Bloch’s hand followed the path of the man outside.

Then, to her right, the shafts of moonlight in the hallway were broken.

Two figures converging on the front door.

Bloch felt around on the floor with her left hand.

Picked up Winchester’s Colt.

She held both guns at arm’s length, pointed at the dark spots where the intruders blocked the moonlight. Holding her breath, her arms got closer together, as she kept a bead on each target.