“Consider it your last compliment,” Barker said.
Footsteps approached, boots crunching into pebbles. Teach had chosen a rental house with a gravel driveway—the stones announced feet or tires with a growl.
“They want Teach alive,” Barker said. “So cooperate and she doesn’t get hurt.”
Too much information, Pilgrim thought. “What about me?” he asked.
“You’re dead,” Barker said and Teach rushed him, drawing the gun’s aim. Barker hesitated for a fraction of a second, not wanting to shoot her, obeying his orders. Teach rammed into Barker, catching him in the door frame. Pilgrim seized the gun from Barker’s hand in a swift downward wrench that broke Barker’s wrist with a sickening crack.
Barker screamed and dropped to his knees.
Teach took the gun from Pilgrim and moved into the den. Their guns were gone, hidden by Barker. She locked the back door. “Three more guns, upstairs closet,” Teach said.
Pilgrim ran up the stairs. In a closet, he found two semiautomatic pistols and a rifle. A crash boomed downstairs, glass breaking, a door being knocked loose from its frame. He grabbed the rifle and barreled a third of the way down the stairs. He saw chaos.
Barker still lay splayed on the floor, face contorted in pain.
Teach squeezed off a shot at the first man through the door but missed by a fraction of an inch. Before she could fire again, a dark-haired bruiser of a thug struck her in the arm with the butt of his rifle. She lost the gun and he grabbed Teach as she staggered backward, then shoved her out the door, following her.
Two other men covered the room with semis. Pilgrim raised the rifle, tried to angle the awkward shot past the railing.
Barker screamed, “On the stairs!”
The men spun the guns toward him and opened fire.
The railing splintered around Pilgrim as he retreated upstairs. Blood wet his temple, cut by the flying debris. He reached the second floor, covered the stairs with the rifle, and backed up next to the window. He peered through the glass.
As he dragged her across the yard, Teach struggled against her captor, hitting a well-placed blow to his throat. But he had a hundred pounds and twenty fewer years on her, and with a jackhammer backhand he knocked her into the scrub. She fell like a stringless puppet to the rain-wet lawn.
Silence below. Not a cry from Barker, no feet slamming on the stairs. The men in the house were waiting him out.
Pilgrim watched the bruiser throw an unconscious Teach over his shoulder and start a hard run toward the oak thickets behind the house.
Pilgrim shattered the window with the rifle butt, took careful aim, and fired. The bruiser jerked and fell, he and Teach crashing to the grass. Pilgrim knew he should turn his eyes back to the staircase, to the immediate threat in the house, but he kept his gaze locked on Teach.
He heard an angry bellow from downstairs.
Get up. Run, he willed her.
She didn’t move. Jesus, maybe he’d hit her. The idea iced his heart. He didn’t see blood on her, but the way she lay slumped, blocked by the bruiser, he couldn’t see her clearly.
He heard a barked, angry half curse, half command. “You can hold a gun in one hand, can’t you, idiot?”—in rapid, heavily accented English, the leader must be talking to Barker—then “Position yourselves, wait for the dog to panic.” Spoken in Arabic. First an ex-IRA sniper and now these assholes. It was an international gathering to kill him. He swallowed past the thick dryness in his mouth and a peculiar serenity filled him and he thought: You guys made a really long trip to die.
He glanced around the room. The only furnishings were a table and an office chair, not much for cover.
He calculated how long it would take him to get down the stairs if both men turned away from the stairwell, toward the window. Not long enough, not running. He moved to the lip of the floor, checked the stairs. Empty. That meant Barker and the two gunmen were taking cover, waiting for him to expose himself on the trapped boundary of the stairs, where his options were limited. They, on the other hand, had an entire room in which to move and catch him in their cross fire.
He returned to the window and saw Teach’s chest rise in a hitch of breathing. She was okay, just out. But two men emerged from the dense grove of oaks and ran toward her. If he fired at them, the three men waiting below would know he was aiming out the window, busy with multiple targets, not at the stairs. In moments the trio would rush upstairs and obliterate him with the semis.
Stalemate.
One of the men, with hair dyed blond and waxed into spikes, threw Teach, still unconscious, over his shoulder. He raised high a pistol, nestled the barrel against her head, where twigs tangled in her graying hair. Pilgrim understood. Fire at us, she dies. The man turned and ran awkwardly, Teach bouncing on his shoulder. The second man, wearing gaudy wraparound sunglasses, covered their retreat into the woods. They left the dead bruiser in the grass.