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in through the
window. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not to find that there was
nobody home.
    He got back into his car and tried her on
his cell phone but all he got was the machine and that definitely didn’t relieve him. The gas station, maybe? Arranging
for jumper cables or a tow truck? Could be. He got Kaltzas’s number from
Information but when he tried it the line was busy.
    The anxiety really didn’t hit him until
he reached the roadhouse and saw the side of the road swarming with cops, saw
the jackknifed car and the Jeep and the crime- scene tape and the forensics
team working over the body of a man and then it really hit him when he saw the paramedics wheeling a woman into an
ambulance. Janet? My god , he
thought. He didn’t know why he thought it—the woman could have been anybody—but
it came unbidden and pounded through his blood. He slowed and then stopped even
as the officer waved him on. He flashed his ID. The officer frowned at him anyway.
    “What happened? Accident?”
    “Shooting. One dead. One of ours,
dammit.”
    “The woman?”
    “Girl. Can’t be more’n seventeen.
Concussion, fractures, god knows what else. It’s a helluva mess.”
    He nodded. “Thanks, Officer. Good luck.
Hope you get the bastard.”
    “Bastards,” he said. “Three of them.”
    Alan guessed it was just his night to be
corrected. He pulled out and tried her again on the cell phone.
    “ Leave
a message ,” she said.
     
    * * *
     
    “Vehicle described as a late-model
four-door Buick station wagon, light blue. Suspects are assumed to be armed
and . .
    “Dangerous,” said Emil.
    Billy reached over and flipped off the
police band and pounded once at the steering wheel. “Shit,” he said. “How’d
they make the wagon?” said Ray.
    “The car that passed us by back there.
While Billy was toyin’ with the Man.”
    “Shit!” He pounded the wheel again.
    “Called us in as an accident, probably.
Good citizen. Well hell, we are an
accident. An accident waitin’ to happen!”
    It seemed to break the tension and they
laughed. Broke it for them, anyway, if not exactly for Janet. They were all too
damn matter-of-fact about this. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t normal. And Emil.
Couldn’t anything shake Emil?
    “We’ll just find us another car, that’s
all,” he said. “Meantime we better get off the road awhile.” He turned to
Marion. “You know a place?”
    She looked at Janet.
    “Do I know a place? Hell, yes.”
    She draped her arm over Janet’s shoulders
and gave her a squeeze.
    “ ’Course I do,” she said.
     
    * * *
     
    She’d chosen the house because, unlike
the Justice Building, where every footfall echoed like pistol fire across the marble
floors, where even the walls were polished on a weekly basis, where the air
was processed and always traced with disinfectant, the house was as much of nature as in the midst of it.
Over 120 years old, it stood surrounded by tall untended grass atop a hill at
the end of a two-lane dirt track that wound past a small country graveyard and
an abandoned church of even earlier origin. Its beams were hand-hewn. Both
fireplaces worked. The occasional bat still fluttered upstairs in the attic.
    Her nearest neighbors were over a mile
away. The house was quiet. It was private.
    Now
it was remote.
    “How many phones?” Emil said. He’d walked
in with his gun drawn. He shoved it in his belt.
    “Just the one in the kitchen.”
    “Truth, now.”
    “Just the kitchen.”
    “Ray? You want to take care of that?”
    “Sure.”
    Ray walked into the kitchen, put the
paper bag containing the whiskey down on the counter and the beer in the
refrigerator and unplugged the wall jack. The blinking light on her answering
machine blinked out.
    “Any guns?”
    “No.”
    “You sure?”
    “I’m sure. You want to hide the carving
knives? I promise not to look.”
    Emil smiled. “I just might do that.”
    Billy plopped down in her armchair like a
man after a hard day at