Plenty of women showed interest in him, and a solid amount of them followed through, either by slipping him their numbers or simply launching a full-on assault. He liked both approaches equally, almost as much as he'd liked the feel on Louisa's eyes on him, but on Wednesday she'd never moved from her end of the sofa, not even when he'd started messing around when she'd reached for popcorn. What would she have done if he'd reached for her hand and kept hold of it? Six shook his head. Why was he even thinking about this? This was nothing more than offering a friendly hand to someone who'd offered him the same courtesy when he'd freaked out on his run.
A black van was parked across the street from Louisa's. The sliding side door was open and the engine was running, but strangely the lights were off. By the illumination of his own headlights, he could see the driver looking nervously toward Louisa's driveway, straining from left to right as if to try to get a better line of sight.
He'd always believed that the best SEALs had the ability to slow time, could somehow absorb thousands of details in a split second, process them, and make a decision in the time it took normal people to blink. The driver of the van spotted him, sat up tall, and reached his hand toward something on the seat next to him.
Six drove past, deliberately missing the entrance to Louisa's curved driveway. While the rational part of his mind told him he was probably blowing this out of all proportion, something about the van and its driver had tripped his senses. After all, if only half of what Louisa had told him was true, the missing sample was dangerous.
Perhaps things had escalated since their earlier conversation, and he wondered whether Lou would have called him if they had. If that van really was a getaway vehicle of some kind, then there were people in Louisa's house, possibly armed. The last thing he wanted to do was make them jumpier. With absolute normalcy, so as not to draw attention to himself, he drove around the corner and parked the truck. He tugged his white T-shirt off over his head and fished around in his gym bag for his black hoodie. Quickly he tugged it over his head and put the hood up to hide his blond hair. Under San Diego's restrictive gun laws, he shouldn't be able to carry the weapon currently tucked in the glove compartment, but there hadn't been a rule yet that he hadn't been able to find his way around. For that he was grateful.
As silently as possible, he jumped out of the truck and snicked the door shut. He didn't bother with the alarm because the beep was loud. Six crept in the shadows toward the house and didn't even think about holstering his weapon. There was nobody out on the street except the idling van driver he wanted to avoid, so he slipped into the neighbor's driveway and assessed a place to cut through. A border garden separated the two properties. Six looked up to the side of the neighbor's house and saw wall-mounted lights with sensors pointed to pertinent spots like access to the rear gate and the main driveway. He didn't want them to come on. Staying low and tight against the shrubs, he headed for a break between the rows of plants, but stopped short of setting foot on Louisa's driveway. The window at the side of the house was open.
The van he'd seen wasn't big, so there couldn't be too many targets inside, but his primary concern was getting to Louisa. He took a quick picture of the van with his phone and then calmly hurried over to her house and pressed himself up against the wall next to the window. If this was a delivery of shoes or flowers or something, he was going to feel like the biggest idiot on the planet, but something in his gut told him this was all wrong. He'd rather scare the shit out of Louisa by expecting the worst than get them both killed by blindly expecting the best.
One thing he'd always been told was that taking a sneak peek was a surefire way to get killed. Nine times out of ten there was somebody waiting with a gun pointing in your direction. But in this instance, it was dark and they'd obviously been careful to not be seen, so they certainly weren't expecting him to creep up behind them like the bogeyman.
Six dropped to his knees below the windowsill and slowly raised his head to peer into the darkened room. To the right, he could hear the television playing as it had the previous night. If Louisa was in there, she was a sitting duck. He heard a scream, but it came from the opposite direction, from the kitchen. He pulled himself through the window and rolled across the floor, coming to a stop in a crouched position, one knee on the floor, gun in both hands pointed straight ahead. Quickly getting to his feet, Six pressed his back against the wall and blocked Louisa's screams out. It would be dangerous for both of them if he gave in to panic. Instead, he slipped around the wall that led in the direction of Louisa's cries. The solid door to the kitchen stood between him and Louisa. The best of his training kicked in as it always did, and he dropped low before pushing the door open and rolling inside. When doors opened, people automatically expected somebody to walk through them, so gunmen would always fire high rather than low.