Power Play

Something else he hadn’t told her. She’d forgotten about Carlos, forgotten he might recognize the voice. Well, that’s why she wrote about football and he was a cop. “Is he still at Quantico?”

“Yeah, in the Jefferson Dormitory. I’ll be visiting him tomorrow. Savich is keeping him there, along with Isabel’s cell phone. If he gets another call on that cell, we may get a chance to trace it in real time. Isabel is still off visiting her aunt in Florida for a week.”

Perry sighed. “I was hoping for more than that by now. This not knowing who—it’s hard.”

“It’s only been three days since the big guns have come in on it.”

She snorted and continued to type. “Big gun—is that really how you see yourself?”

He still didn’t open his eyes. “I mean the Bureau. What would you call me?”

“Me? I’m still not speaking to you.”

Natalie Black’s house

Friday night

Natalie’s heart started to pound. Would the man outside her window hear it? It didn’t matter. She held the gun pointed at the window, her eyes focused on the curtains. It wasn’t fear that surged through her, it was rage. Come on in, you bastard, come to Mama.

The alarm blasted out, piercing, sharp, the pitch of police sirens in Europe, loud enough to shake her nearest neighbors out of a dead sleep.

Natalie jumped out of bed and ran toward the window, threw back the curtains. She saw him climbing down through the branches in the huge oak tree outside her window. She yelled for him to stop and fired once, twice, three times, chipping off bark, but she didn’t hit him.

Hooley and Connie burst into her room. Connie jerked her away from the window and pressed her down onto the floor, covering her. Hooley threw the curtains wide. “He’s down below!” he shouted, and climbed out after him.

Natalie shoved Connie off. “Come on, Connie, we’ve got to help. There’s no danger now, let me up!”

The two women were at the window, watching Hooley as he climbed down from branch to branch and finally hit the ground. He sprinted after a man running full-out toward the distant front of the property, straight to the high stone fence. Hooley was wearing nothing but running shoes and pajama bottoms, his gun in his hand.

“You stay right here, Natalie.” Connie climbed down from branch to branch as Hooley had done, in her dainty pink pajamas with little flowers, her Beretta in her hand.

Natalie had no intention of staying put. She jerked on a pair of sneakers and was in the tree only a few seconds after Connie, carefully navigating the branches until she dropped to the ground. She saw Connie racing after Hooley.

Hooley saw the man some twenty yards ahead grab a rope that hung down over the stone fence. No way, buddy. He fired into the wall and yelled, “Stop right there, bozo! You’re not going anywhere.”

The man stopped. He stayed pressed against the stone fence, breathing hard, holding tight to the thick rope. Hooley came to a stop ten feet away from him and aimed his Beretta center mass.

“Let go of that rope and drop. Now.”

The man let go of the rope and dropped. He landed soft, knees bent. He was wearing a black ski mask over his head, all of his face covered except his eyes. He was dressed in black, supple and stretchy, so he could move and climb easily.

“Now drop your weapon, slowly. Believe me, I will shoot you dead. This close, I won’t miss you, even in the dark.”

The man said, voice low, scratchy, “I don’t have a gun.”

“You’re a lousy liar. Drop the gun.”

Hooley heard Connie running toward them, still some distance behind. He yelled, “Connie, go around and flank him to the right. The clown is lying to me.” In the same instant the man’s hand whipped up and he fired, missed, and Hooley fired back. The bullet slammed into the man’s side, throwing him back against the wall. In a move so fast Hooley would swear he never saw it, the man sent a stiletto blurring through the air that struck him in his chest. Hooley dropped to his knees.

The man grabbed the hanging rope and was nearly to the top of the wall when Connie emptied her magazine at him, but she wasn’t close enough, and she missed as he went over the other side. She heard Natalie panting behind her, and yelled, “See to Hooley. I’m going after him!”

Connie jumped up to grab the rope, but the man was already jerking it up and over the wall. She ran to the gate, punched in the code. Finally, she was able to squeeze through the opening, her gun up and ready, but she didn’t see the man, only the black ground under a black sky, and the taillights of a car speeding away. The rope with its three-pronged anchor lay in the grass beside the wall.