ary Lou took comfort in the fact that this house was a fortress.

The security system was on. Windows and doors were all locked. The blinds and shades were pulled. Jim Potter and Eddie Bowen were on guard at the gate, and they’d been told to let no one else in.

The man she knew as Bob Schwegel wasn’t getting anywhere near them.

At least that was what Alyssa Locke had told her when Mary Lou had called and explained what was going on.

“Don’t leave the house,” her ex-husband’s girlfriend had said in her melodious voice. She sounded like someone who reported the news, with a cool authority to her voice that actually helped calm Mary Lou. “You’ll be much safer there than in a motor vehicle.”

Why was it FBI agents didn’t just say car?

Mary Lou had met the woman only a few times. Alyssa Locke was unbelievably beautiful with flawless brown skin and slender hips and big green eyes and sleek, dark hair with reddish tints that just had to come from a bottle. Either that or God deserved to be bitch-slapped for His almighty unfairness to all other women on earth.

It was bad enough that Alyssa had that mouth, with the kind of lush, full lips that white women everywhere tried to copy by getting collagen injections.

And yet Alyssa walked around dressed like a man saying things like “motor vehicle.” Mary Lou had to wonder if Alyssa’s entire cool, reserved, professional demeanor was some kind of twisted turn-on for Sam. She’d spent a lot of sleepless nights wondering about that, jealous as hell.

She’d even found out Alyssa’s cell phone number, but she’d never gotten up the nerve to call her. Until today. Who would’ve thought, even just six or seven months ago, that she’d ever call up Alyssa Locke to ask for her help?

There was probably only one person in the world who could’ve talked her into doing that. And she was sitting here, holding his hand, watching Whitney read another chapter of Alice to Haley and Amanda.

Talk about Wonderland...

“It’s going to be all right,” Ihbraham told her quietly.

“I’m scared they’re going to put me in jail,” she admitted. “Alyssa told me that Sam’s cousin and his wife are meeting us over here, that they’ll make sure Haley’s okay while I’m being questioned, but... Could you go with them? Be with her, too?”

His smile was apologetic. “I’m certain they will wish to question me, as well.”

Because he’d been born in Saudi Arabia. Because he looked the way a terrorist was supposed to look.

“That’s not fair. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“Perhaps I can help give them a description of this man you believe is behind all this trouble. I met him once, you know.”

“I remember,” she said. “But maybe if you left now, they wouldn’t—”

“I’m happy to stay right here,” he said. “More than happy.”

Mary Lou leaned against him. He smelled so good—spicy and warm. “I missed you so much.”

He put his arm around her. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get here faster. All those months in the hospital, I lost clients and it’s taken longer than I’d hoped to get my business back up to speed. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t even have enough room on my credit card to get a plane ticket.”

“I can’t believe you drove all that way.”

“I’m pretty tired.” His fingers were in her hair. His touch was gentle but extremely sensuous. “I find I’m most eager to retire tonight.”

She looked up at him, and although he was smiling, the look in his eyes told her that she’d read his innuendo quite correctly.

“Unless you’d prefer we wait for our first night together until after we’re married,” he murmured.

After...? Mary Lou’s heart nearly stopped. “Did you just ask me to marry you?”

He laughed, but his eyes were so serious. “I thought I wouldn’t ask—just tell. I thought perhaps if I didn’t give you a choice, you wouldn’t think about all your reasons not to marry me. Wherever I go, if there’s trouble, people will look to me.”

Mary Lou felt her eyes fill with tears. “Because they’ll say, Look at that man with his incredibly beautiful wife. Trouble must just follow them around.”

“Did you just tell me yes?”

She nodded. And the lights went out.

“Hey!” Whitney said. It wasn’t dark in there by any means, because sunlight was still coming in from behind the blinds, but she was trying to read.

There was a sound in the distance, like ripping fabric, that Mary Lou had heard before. It was a sound a person could hear only once but then never forget.

“Those are gunshots,” Whitney said, her eyes wide.

The phone rang, lighting up the button that was a direct line to the guardhouse at the gate.

Whitney lunged for it. “Jim! What was that?” She listened. “Who is this? Where’s Jim?” Her face contorted. “Oh, shit.” She held the phone out to Mary Lou. “He says Jim’s dead. He wants to talk to you.”

Mary Lou stood up. Took the phone. “Who is this?” she asked, even though she already knew. It was the man she knew as Bob Schwegel.

“Well, hello, Mary Lou,” he said in his slightly nasal voice.

It was the man who had smuggled guns into the Coronado naval base in the trunk of her car, the man who had murdered her sister.

Mary Lou hung up the phone, punched an outside line, and dialed 911.

“Check the map, would you?” Sam asked Alyssa as they continued to drive along side roads. “Make sure we’re not going too far east.”

“No, we’re okay,” she said, head bent over the map.

She had said exactly nothing in response to his declaration of love.

Sam took it as a good sign, even though “I love you, too,” had been noticeably absent. Truth was, he hadn’t really expected to hear her say that. The real thrill came from the fact that he’d said “love” and she hadn’t said “No way.” She hadn’t accused him of misinterpreting what this was he was feeling.

And she was the one who was talking about Haley as if the three of them would be spending lots of time together.

Alyssa looked up from the map. “You know, it just occurred to me that I never told you that I got my period this morning. We started talking about having a choice and... But that’s what I needed to pick up from the drug store. Tampons. Not that prescription.”

What? “But you said you were right at the point in your cycle—”

“I am,” she said. “I was. But I started bleeding, so—”

Holy fuck. But it was fear that gripped him, not relief. “Are you all right? I didn’t, like, hurt you or something, did I?”

“No.” Alyssa smiled, as if there was something funny about the idea that he might’ve been too rough. “God, no. This actually happened to me before. I go a real long time without having sex, then I have a lot of sex, and my cycle gets all out of whack. I think it’s the result of a hormone overload.” She laughed. “You know, I’ve always kind of thought of you as a hormone overload.”

He wasn’t sure, but it was possible she’d just insulted him. Except her smile was very warm, and that look in her eyes... “Wow,” Sam said. “I’m... man, that’s, um...”

“An enormous relief,” she filled in for him.

But his fear had turned into something else entirely and it wasn’t relief. He glanced at her. “Is it?”

She looked away first, no longer laughing. “Sam, you’re insane if you—”

Her cell phone rang.

“If I what?” he asked.

She shook her head as she answered her phone. “Locke.” She sat forward, her body language shifting to high tension as she listened intently.

“No,” she said, “but call me right back.” She closed her phone, but opened it right away. “We’re getting reports of shots fired in the vicinity of the Turlington estate, and the local police have gotten notification from the security company. Someone inside the house has triggered a silent alarm.”

Fuck! Sam floored it as Alyssa dialed the phone number Mary Lou had given her.

“How could you lose your cell phone?” Mary Lou asked Whitney. She couldn’t believe this was happening.

All of the phone lines from the house had been cut—with exception of the line to the front gate, which was ringing and ringing and ringing.

She’d run down to the front door and pushed the panic button on the alarm system the way Mrs. Downs had shown her when she’d first arrived. The housekeeper had said in her know-it-all manner, “Here’s something that you need to know, but you’ll never need to use.”

Mrs. Downs apparently didn’t know everything.

“I didn’t lose it,” Whitney said. “It’s somewhere in my room. It doesn’t work half the time anyway. Cell service out here sucks dick.”

“Find it anyway!” Mary Lou said. Ihbraham had brought Haley and Amanda into the bathroom, where whatever he was doing was keeping them giggling. Mary Lou had sent them in there. She’d read lots of books where the characters climbed into the bathtub for protection when the shooting started.

When the shooting started...

Lord, that incessantly ringing phone was starting to drive her mad.

Whitney went into Mary Lou’s bedroom instead of down the hall to her own.

“You need to find that phone!” Mary Lou followed her. “If we don’t call and warn them, Alyssa and Sam are going to drive right up to the gate and then they’re going to be just as dead as Jim Potter and— What are you doing?”

Whitney dumped the guns and ammunition from Mary Lou’s beach bag onto the bed. She was lining them up and...

Loading them?

“I’m not going to let terrorists walk in here and just shoot us,” the girl said.

“You know how to use those things?”

Whitney gave Mary Lou a teenager’s “shit, you’re stupid” look as she attached one of those clips to a very deadly looking, very large weapon. “Daddy took me to his firing range for the first time when I was five. I qualified as an expert marksman when I was eleven. In case you haven’t exactly noticed, in this house we worship at the altar of Smith and Wesson.”

“Keep those things away from the girls,” Mary Lou ordered. “But show Ihbraham how to use one. I’ll be back in a sec.”

She was going to find Whitney’s phone if it was the last thing she did.

Noah looked at Claire. “You know, I’m not jealous of Ringo.”

“Really?” she asked. “Not even the ten-year-old in you?”

“Really,” he said. “I wanted to be a SEAL more than anything in the world—right up until the moment I walked into Mrs. Fucci’s English class and started listening to you arguing with her about the importance of rap music in the American cultural experience.”

She laughed, her face lighting up. “You remember that?”

“Yeah. You and Calvin Graham got up and did that rap version of that scene from Romeo and Juliet that was, um—”

“It was pretty awful.”

“No,” he said. “I went home and read the play that night, and I got to the part where Romeo sees Juliet for the first time, and I’m sitting there thinking, Damn. I’ve got the same affliction Romeo’s got. And what am I going to do about this Calvin guy?”

“He was so gay.”

“I didn’t know that then.” It had been Noah’s first day in a new school—his first day in years that Ringo hadn’t been by his side. He’d spent a lot of time those first few weeks worrying about Ringo alone back in Texas, without Noah, without Dot and Walt.

Please God, don’t let Ringo get blindsided by the loss of his family. Don’t let him let Lyle Morgan piss him off. Don’t let him kill Lyle and spend the rest of his life in jail....

Noah should have had more faith. Just the fact that Ringo had opted to remain behind with his mother was proof he was capable of thinking things through and not always reaching for the easiest, most instantly gratifying solution.

He hadn’t realized just how difficult a sacrifice it had been for Ringo to stay in Texas until the summer he came down to visit.

Ringo had hitchhiked the entire way because his father not only wouldn’t give him the money for a bus ticket, but he also wouldn’t let him touch the money Ringo himself had earned, loading trucks after school. That money was for college, or so Roger Senior had insisted.

So Ringo had packed a duffel and walked to the truck stop off Route 20, with only seven dollars in his pocket.

Every year after, Walt sent him the money for a bus ticket. Ringo pretended he took the bus, but Noah knew he still hitched. He used the money to buy presents for them, because he hated showing up empty-handed.

That summer had been wonderful. It was Ringo who had walked up to Claire and said, “My cousin Noah, here, thinks you’re incredibly hot. He’s too much of a fuckhead to tell you that himself. Want to help me drive him crazy and go to a movie with me?”

Noah was standing there, embarrassed as hell, ready to drag Ringo off and beat the crap out of him—right after he cleared up a thing or two. “I didn’t say you were hot,” he told her.

Claire looked at him, her eyebrows raised, like, no?

“I said you were beautiful and smart and funny,” he said, going into freefall just from looking into her eyes, part of himself completely unable to believe he was standing there and talking to her, let alone saying what he was saying, “... and hot.”

Claire didn’t look away from Noah as she’d answered Ringo’s question. “I think I’d rather drive him crazy in other ways.”

Instant hard-on. Of course, he’d been sixteen and it didn’t take much. Still, it was something of a miracle that he and Claire had kept their clothes on—at least most of them—for a full year.

By the end of that first summer Noah was so wrapped up in Claire, he almost didn’t notice when Ringo left.

Except for the fact that Ringo got really quiet those last few days of his visit.

And when Walt and Noah took him to the bus station, he broke down and cried.

All three of them did. People gave them a wide berth—three guys all well over six feet tall, weeping like babies.

“Do you think Ringo and Mary Lou will get back together after this?” Claire asked. “That happens sometimes. People go through a traumatic experience and they try again.”

Noah glanced at her. “You know, I might be tempted to agree, but... I didn’t tell you this before, but this woman—an FBI agent—a sister—she showed up after you left Janine’s house. Alyssa Locke. Ringo introduced her to me as a friend. I almost told her, ‘My cousin thinks you’re hot.’ ”

Claire laughed. “ ‘But he’s too much of a fuckhead to tell you that himself’?”

“Yeah. You should have seen the way he looked at her,” Noah said, pulling up to a stop sign at the end of the road. “And she was looking back at him, too. Do I go right or left here?”

Claire studied the map. “Left. If we’re where I think we are.” She looked up. “Either way, I don’t think it’s too much farther.”

“Mary Lou’s not answering,” Alyssa reported.

“Dial it again,” Sam said.

She did. “Still nothing.

“What’s the status of those choppers? What’s Max’s ETA? What’s our ETA?”

“I’m working on reaching Max,” she reported, juggling the phone and the map. “We’ve got another ten minutes as far as I can tell.”

“Shit-fuck! Noah! Use my cell and call him,” Sam ordered her. “Now, Alyssa, please!” The way he was driving, it was good he was keeping both hands on the wheel. “Tell him not to approach the gate. Jesus, Jesus...”

She took his cell phone from between his legs and hit Redial. Come on, Noah. “Sam, he’s not picking up.” She looked at the phone. “Oh, shit...”

“No,” Sam said. “Don’t say that.”

Alyssa tried her own phone. It, too, was giving her an out-of-range signal.

Sam glanced at her, and she shook her head. “We’ve lost our cell phones.”

“This is Max Bhagat. Connect me to the President.”

“I’m sorry, sir—”

“Wrong answer.” Max didn’t have time for this. He had more than twenty agents—himself included—driving like bats out of hell for the address Alyssa had given them, and another twenty heading toward MacDill Air Force Base, up in Tampa, ETA two minutes, where there were three Navy Seahawks waiting to take them the forty miles they needed to go in about fifteen minutes.

Provided they had the President’s permission to assist in this FBI operation.

“He’s in a meeting with the—”

“Do you know who I am?”

“I’m sorry, I’m new. This is my first day, sir. I’m trying—”

“Connect me to someone who is not new, right now,” Max said, “or this will be your last day.” On earth.

Someone else picked up. “Peterson.”

“This is Max Bhagat—”

“I’ll connect you to the President right away, sir.”

Two seconds, maybe even less, and Allen Bryant picked up. “Max. What’s going on?”

“Sir. I need three Seahawks at MacDill—”

His cell phone beeped and died.

No signal.

Perfect. He’d just hung up on the President of the United States.

Max reached for the radio even as he hit the brakes and skidded to a stop. “This is Max Bhagat. I need trucks with satellite towers moved into this area immediately, over!”

He put his car into reverse and drove backward as fast as he could, engine whining, while he watched his phone, waiting for the signal to return.

“Sir.” Laronda’s voice came over the radio. “We just got a call from Deb Peterson at the White House. Three Seahawk helicopters are standing by, at our disposal.”

Max hit the brakes again, and shifted back into drive. He’d worked hard to establish that kind of trust with the country’s commander in chief. It was gratifying to know all he had to say was “I need...” and President Bryant would deliver.

“We’re working on setting up a direct connection between you and the Army commander,” she continued. “Until we do, do you have any orders for me to relay? Come back.”

“Yeah, tell them to haul ass. And get communications up and working. Alyssa Locke is at least twenty minutes in front of all of us, but that won’t do us any good if she can’t talk to us, over.”

“She’s in a rental car, no radio,” Laronda came back. “We’ve ordered local police to set up roadblocks in the area, but otherwise to wait for us to arrive. I’ll get an unmarked car with a police radio into the vicinity, over.”

“Locke needs to be told to do surveillance, to report, and then to wait for backup. Repeat, tell her to wait for backup. Over.”

“Dream on, sir,” Laronda told him. “Over.”

Mary Lou found Whitney’s cell phone in a pair of jeans at the bottom of her closet.

Thank God, thank God. She pulled it out, opened it, and...

Low battery.

No!

Okay, maybe there was enough to make one call...

Except Mary Lou couldn’t even tell if there was service available. She dialed anyway, but the screen went dark.

Low battery had become no battery.

Whitney’s car had a charger—the kind that could be plugged into the cigarette lighter. The kind that would let the phone be used even while it was charging.

Mary Lou ran back to her apartment, where that frigging phone had finally stopped ringing.

“I found it,” she announced. “I’m going down to the garage to see if—”

Boom!

An explosion rocked the entire house, pushing Mary Lou down onto her butt and breaking the glass in her kitchen windows.

She scrambled to her feet, ran for the bathroom.

Ihbraham was shielding Haley and Amanda with his body. The two little girls were wide-eyed.

“Whitney,” Mary Lou shouted. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” came a return shout. “What the hell was that?”

Out in the living room, the phone started ringing again.

All over the house, the fire alarms started shrieking.

“Okay,” Sam said. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to stop at one of these houses, and you’re going to get out and use their phone and call Noah while—”

“You go on without me?” Alyssa said. “I don’t think so.”

“I know it’s not what you want to do,” he said. “But I’m begging you, Lys. This man is my brother. He has no training, no reason to believe he can’t just drive up to that gate. They are going to kill him—”

“How am I going to call him?” she asked. “If we can’t use our cell phones, he can’t use his, either.”

“Maybe there’s coverage down where he is.”

“We’re moving farther away from civilization,” Alyssa told him. “Just drive.”

Whitney went down to the control panel and turned off the fire alarm, and Mary Lou could once again hear the phone ringing.

“There was some kind of bomb,” Whitney reported as she ran back up the stairs. “The main kitchen’s completely destroyed. If we’d been in the north wing instead of the south...” She looked like Lara Croft Junior, the way she was loaded down with weaponry. For the first time in all of the weeks Mary Lou had lived there, she saw the girl’s resemblance to her father in the hard light in her eyes. “The entire back of the house is on fire.”

Sure enough, thick smoke was already curling through the air.

Lord God, everything was so dry, it was going to go up like a tinderbox.

Whatever a tinderbox was.

“There’s one man out front with a sniper rifle,” Whitney said, “and two in the back, one with an AK-47, one with something else, I can’t tell what. Looks like they’re putting gasoline on the parts of the house that aren’t burning yet. These asswipes want us dead.”

As if a fire would need any kind of help at all in this dry heat.

Mary Lou picked up the phone.

“Here’s the deal,” the man she knew as Bob said before she could even say hello. “You and Rahman walk out the front door right now, and everyone else in the house—including Haley—stays alive.”

Oh, Lord.

“The FBI is on its way,” she said. “If you don’t want them to kill you, you better leave right now!”

“Thanks for the tip, honey,” he said. “I’ll put my men here at the gate on alert.”

No!

“They’re going to be here,” Mary Lou said, praying she was right. “Lots of them. Any minute.”

“Any minute,” he said. “That would be about how long it’s going to take for that house to become completely inescapable. If you and Rahman walk out now—”

Bile burned her throat. “So you can shoot us.”

“Better than burning. Better than watching your daughter burn.”

Mary Lou might’ve done it. If it were just her and Haley, she would have done it. But she would not let him kill Ihbraham. No, sir.

“Go to hell,” she told him, and hung up the phone.

“Perhaps we should move downstairs,” Ihbraham said. He was carrying both Haley and Amanda, and watching her from the door to the bathroom.

Whitney was watching her, too. Everyone was looking to her for what they should do next.

“Yeah,” Mary Lou said. The smoke was thick at the ceiling. “Let’s move downstairs.”

Sam didn’t slow as they went past the drive that led to the Turlingtons’ gatehouse.

“There’s no physical gate, just a guardhouse with one of those flimsy arms blocking the driveway. I saw no cars stopped,” Alyssa reported. “No sign of Noah and Claire, no sign that anything is wrong at all.”

The brush at the side of the road already concealed them from the gatehouse. It was jungle-thick growth, typical of this part of Florida but definitely suffering from the recent lack of rain.

Sam pulled off the road and got out of the car. Jesus, he was wearing a freaking white shirt. He yanked it over his head. Better to be half naked than a flipping neon target. He kicked off his shoes and stripped off his socks, too, preferring bare feet to slipping around in the underbrush.

Alyssa, too, was attempting to cammy-up. She’d opened the trunk and pulled a green T-shirt out of her bag, changing into it right there by the side of the road.

They had one little handgun between them. Sam handed it to Alyssa. It was hers, after all. She gave him a Swiss army knife in exchange.

“Gee, thanks.”

Was that smoke he smelled? He started through the brush. The ground was soggy, parts of it brackish puddles of stinking mud. If not for the drought, this entire area would have been a knee-deep or even hip-deep swamp.

Alyssa followed, slipping her shoulder holster on and securing the weapon. Yeah, jeez, don’t drop that thing here.

But she wanted her hands free for a different reason. She reached down into the thick mud and grabbed several handfuls, smearing the tar-colored substance down his back and arms. “Hold up, white boy,” she said. “I need to get your front.”

“I’m tan,” he said.

“Not tan enough,” she told him, streaking his chest with black and rubbing both his face and hers with the dirt, too. “I like your body just fine without any bullet holes in it, thanks.”

Then they were moving again, this time with her in the front, weapon back in her hand.

“Alyssa—”

“I’ve got the weapon that can do the most damage,” she told him. “I’m on point, unless you can throw that Girl Scout knife faster and farther than a bullet.”

“No,” Sam said. “I wasn’t going to... I just wanted to tell you that I’m glad you’re here.”

They’d reached a chain-link fence.

“And to be careful,” he added as he quickly plucked what looked like a long strand of grass from the surrounding vegetation. He held it against the fence to see if the thing was electrified. But there was no jolt.

“Aha,” she said. “Well, you be careful, too.”

“Always am.”

It was just a regular old fence with a little barbed wire at the top. Pretty flipping ineffective in terms of security.

Both he and Alyssa were over it in a matter of seconds.

And, in moments, there they were. Within sight of the gatehouse.

From this angle, things didn’t look quite so normal. Two bodies—the guards, Sam presumed—had been dragged outside the door. He could see bullet holes in the windows.

The entire building was about the size of a one-car garage. There were windows all around, so you could see clear through it, almost like a ranger station or an air traffic control tower. Anyone inside had a 360-degree view of the surrounding area. And not a whole hell of a lot of cover should an army of terrorists attack.

Sam needed to have a serious talk with the owner of this compound about the clown who had designed his security.

Two men were inside the structure, both of them armed with what looked like some kind of room brooms.

The range on that type of little semiautomatic wasn’t that extensive, but up close it was deadly.

There were quite a few yards of clearing between the brush and the guardhouse—enough so that they would have to step out of hiding in order to get close enough to make Alyssa’s little popgun anything more than an annoyance.

“We need a diversion,” she whispered.

Sam nodded. “Okay. I’ll go back and get the car—”

But she’d started running forward, because—holy fuck—a car already was approaching the gatehouse.

It was—Jesus, no—Noah and Claire.

The smoke was just as bad down on the ground floor.

Both Amanda and Haley were coughing and crying. The heat was incredible.

Ihbraham had filled the bathtub with water and had soaked towels that they all draped over their heads.

“If we opened a window,” he said, “we can get some fresh air.”

“They’re not going to let us anywhere near the windows,” Whitney said.

All three of the men with the guns were out front. Mary Lou hadn’t seen Bob’s golden hair, though. Wherever he was, he was keeping out of sight.

“Let’s get to the garage,” Mary Lou decided. The phone charger was there, in Whitney’s car. Like the girl said, there was no guarantee there would be cell service, but, Lord, they had to try.

Alyssa was up on her feet, weapon out, moving swiftly toward the gatehouse.

She heard more than saw Sam follow—he angled away from her, running hard, shouting at the top of his lungs.

He was trying to draw the gunmen’s fire away from Noah’s car, away from Alyssa, trying to buy her the time she needed to get within range, to aim and shoot.

She kept her eyes on her targets as she squeezed off one shot and then another, but she heard the gunfire and she knew she’d been just a heartbeat too late.

She saw Noah and Claire ducking, she saw her targets punched back and falling.

She saw Sam get hit, too, saw the force of a bullet spin him full around before he slammed into the ground.

“No!” The word was ripped from her, even as she did her job the way she’d been trained and moved toward the gunmen to make sure they weren’t going to pop back up. But she’d taken head shots and no one was going anywhere.

Noah was out of the car, running toward Sam.

Alyssa beat him over there.

“Fuck,” Sam said.

She had never heard a more wonderful word in her entire life. All she could think was Thank God. Thank God he was alive, thank God he was talking, thank God.

“Fuck!” he said again through clenched teeth.

“Ringo!” Noah said, down on his knees beside them. “Holy shit! Holy shit!”

“Give me your shirt,” Alyssa ordered Sam’s cousin, and he stripped off his jacket and his white dress shirt. He had a T-shirt on underneath, and she pointed to it. “That’s even better.”

Sam had been hit in the side of his abdomen. He was bleeding badly, but the entry wound was clean and small, and there was no gaping exit wound in his back. Which was either good news or bad news. Either the bullet that hit him was spent, or it had ricocheted around inside of him, doing serious damage to his internal organs, possibly even hitting his spine.

“Can you move your legs?” Alyssa asked him as Noah gave her his T-shirt. She folded it up and was hesitating to press it against Sam’s wound. She knew from experience how much that was going to hurt.

He answered her by pushing himself onto his hands and knees and then standing up. “Fire,” he said.

She looked up. Whatever was burning was huge. Thick black smoke rolled up into the sky.

Sam took the T-shirt from her and pressed it against himself.

“Fuck!” He staggered slightly, and Alyssa put her arm around him on one side, Noah on the other.

“We need to get him to the hospital,” she said.

“Like hell we do,” Sam countered, shaking them both off. Noah had put his dress shirt back on and draped his tie around his neck, and Sam now pulled the tie off of him. He used it to bind the makeshift bandage into place. “We need to get up to that house. Haley’s probably in there.”

Claire was out of the car now, too.

“That’s not going to stop the bleeding,” Alyssa told Sam.

“It’ll do for now” was his terse reply.

“What the fuck is going on?” Noah asked, sounding remarkably like Sam.

“Are those men dead?” Claire asked.

Noah was staring after Sam, who was heading toward the gatehouse. “And, Jesus, what’s with the bare feet?”

“The bad guys got here first,” Alyssa told them. “Yes, they’re dead, and Sam didn’t want to wear dress shoes in the woods—he was afraid he’d slip.”

“Hey,” Sam shouted from inside the guardhouse, and she dashed over to join him. He had a phone handset to his ear. “There’s a direct phone line to the house. At least that’s what the little label says this is. Everything else is out but... Hey, Mary Lou. Halle-fucking-lujah. It’s Sam. We’ve taken back the gate. What’s your status up there? Where’s the fire? Is Haley all right?”

“There’s no phone line going out?” Alyssa asked as she picked the semiautomatics up off the floor. “Ask if they have a working phone up at the house.”

“Mary Lou, do you have a phone with an outside line?” Sam looked at Alyssa and shook his head no.

“Okay,” she said to Noah and Claire as she went outside, “here’s what we need you to do. Find the nearest neighbor and use their telephone. Call and ask for Max Bhagat or Jules Cassidy. Give them a status report. Tell them we’ve taken the gate, but we’re going to have to leave it unattended so there might be trouble again when they arrive. Tell them there’s a fire at the house—my guess is the tangos are trying to smoke Mary Lou out. Tell them that Sam and I can’t wait for backup.”

She took a pen from her pocket and, using Sam’s technique, took hold of Noah’s arm, writing both Max’s and Jules’s names and phone numbers right on his forearm. He already had this address on his hand, and Alyssa had to smile. “Guess you are Sam’s cousin.”

“We really should take Ringo to the hospital,” Claire said in a very no-nonsense voice as Noah sat down on the ground and took off his shoes.

Alyssa glanced at her. Noah’s wife could have passed as her own sister. Wasn’t that interesting? She wondered inanely if Noah liked chocolate.

“Sam’ll go when he’s ready to go,” she told them. “Wait by the phone for an all clear before you return. Do not come back here until you know it’s safe. You’ve got to promise me that.”

Noah nodded, back on his feet. “That’s not a hard promise to make. Give these to Ringo. They’ve got rubber soles. And promise me you’ll take care of him.”

“If he dies,” Alyssa told them as she took Noah’s shoes, “it’s only going to be because I’ve died, too.”