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“O’Rourke!” The ski mask partially muffled the barked call.
The old man swung in a half Grouch, then jerked as if he’d been punched in the stomach and crumpled to the ground. Rollie hadn’t heard anything but the crunch of gravel under O’Rourke’s boot. Lath came out of the shadows near the yard and approached the man on the ground with caution. Pausing, he looked down on him, took aim and fired again.
Swearing bitterly, Rollie looked away, fighting tears and a churning nausea. He didn’t say a word when Lath climbed into the passenger seat.
“Let’s go. Let’s go!” Lath ripped off the mask, sounding breathless and high all at the same time.
There was no turning back now. If there had been a chance before, there was none now. Recognizing that, Rollie started the engine, a cold anger welling inside.
Back on the highway again, they followed it for a short distance, then turned onto a side road that took them to the Triple C’s seldom-used north gate. The last time they’d tried to snatch the kid, Rollie had been a bundle of nerves. This time he felt nothing. It was as if everything inside him had turned to ice. Hot ice.
He drove straight to the big house and parked behind it, out of sight. In silence, he donned the ski mask and pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves while Lath did the same.
“Got the tape?” Lath asked.
Nodding, Rollie patted the bulge in his jacket’s zipped pocket. Lath jammed a clip in the second automatic, its silencer already attached, and passed it to Rollie, then gathered up his own. At a signaling nod from Lath, he slipped out of the van. Quickly they found the breaker switch and cut the telephone line.
The back door was locked, but the massive front door wasn’t. They stepped inside and closed it carefully behind them. A pulsating silence greeted them, heavy and thick. Lath snapped on his penlight. It lanced the darkness, touched on the rounded back of a sofa in an area directly ahead of them before Lath switched it off.
The living room. According to their mother, the staircase emptied into it. Their rubber-soled sneakers made only a whisper of sound as they crossed the room to the staircase. Lath went first. Rollie followed, wincing when a board creaked under his weight.
At the top of the steps, they paused to listen. But all was quiet. Concentrating on the front section of the house, Lath streaked the penlight over the room doors. One was open a crack. Rollie pointed to it. When he was a kid, his mother had always left the door to his room ajar like that.
Lath nodded, and Rollie wondered if he remembered the same thing. He waited, fingers flexing around the trigger guard, while Lath went to check it out. Within seconds, Lath was motioning him to follow.
It was the kid’s room. Rollie couldn’t believe their luck. Moonlight flooded through the windows, spreading to the boy lying on his stomach. Rollie handed Lath his gun and quickly got the tape out of his pocket, tore off a wide strip of it and moved to the bed.
The kid mumbled a sleepy protest when Rollie turned him over, but he didn’t wake up, not until Rollie slapped the tape over his mouth. He grabbed the slender arms that came up to fight him off, held them easily in one hand and wrapped the tape tightly around them, then went to work on the wildly kicking legs.
Even in sleep, Cat’s hearing was tuned to any sound coming from her son’s bedroom, however faint. She raised up, propping an elbow under her, and struggled to throw off the heaviness of sleep. A muted thump came from Quint’s room.
Pushing aside the covers, she Swung out of bed and reached to turn on the lamp. The knob clicked under her fingers, but no light came on. Alarm shot through her, jolting her fully awake. Fighting panic, Cat picked up the telephone. The line was dead.
Her blood went cold.
She shot off the bed and out of the room, surprising two dark-clad figures near the stairs. One had a wiggling bundle under his arm. It was Quint.
Cat threw herself at them, screaming, “No, you can’t take him! Let him go!”
In her haste to reach Quint, she ran into the first man as he wheeled toward her. With a backward shove of his arm, he hurled her away with a force that slammed her against the wall. Stunned by the impact, Cat stumbled to her knees.
Ty came out of his bedroom. “Hold it—”
There was a loud, spitting sound. At almost the same instant Cat saw Ty spin back into the door and crash to the floor.
“Go, go, go,” an urgent voice whispered.
Feet clumped down the stairs in rapid flight as Cat struggled to her feet, a hand automatically touching the back of her head where the throbbing pain was centered. She started toward the top of the steps, but her father caught her.
“Stay back,” he ordered. “They have guns.”
“They took Quint.”
“Oh, my God, Ty,” Jessy murmured from the far doorway, then called, “He’s been shot.”
“I’m coming.” Chase released Cat to go to his son. “How bad is it?”
“I’m not sure,” Jessy answered. “It’s his shoulder. I can feel where the bullet came out the top of it.”
