The last light of day had seemed to take forever to fade. Thom had sat in his car the whole time, running through numerous scenarios in his head, all of them unacceptable. He thought first of the police, but even if he’d been able to get a call through to them, the chances they’d actually show up were slim. There was too much real chaos and bloodshed taking place for them to bother with his suspicions, no matter how well founded they were. And even if they’d agreed to come, from what Thom had heard over the past few months, law enforcement was as much a threat risk as a protector. True or not, it was a chance he couldn’t take. Private security, even if he’d been able to find it, couldn’t be trusted either. He didn’t know them here, they didn’t know him, and the promise of a substantial payday was as likely to incite bad behavior as good.
This was one problem he couldn’t outsource. This was something he’d have to solve himself.
He’d practiced four or five shots with the Glock back on the second level of the parking garage, where he’d been seized with the sudden knowledge that he’d skipped the firearms training courses Brady had arranged for him. It was simple enough, once he found the manual safety release near the upper rear of the gun and learned he needed to chamber a round before the gun would fire. After that, he could pull the trigger as many times as he wanted to shoot. If there were three intruders in the house, that may be a lot. Or maybe, he hoped, the mere presence of the gun, coming in suddenly and from an unexpected part of the house, would be enough for Rusty and whatever lowlife friends of his were with him. Thom would, after all, have the advantage of surprise.
He reached Aubrey’s driveway and ducked low, to avoid being seen through her kitchen window. He slid over to the side of the house and duck-walked beneath the sill. He could see wavering candlelight, faintly, coming from the living room.
He reached the storm doors on the side of the house, slid his hands across them to the middle, and found the biometric lock he’d had installed five years ago. One of the selling points of this unit, he remembered, was the shelf life of the wafer-thin lithium-ion battery inside it, which was guaranteed for ten years at an average temperature of seventy degrees. Given the winters in this part of the country, Thom had cut that estimate in half, which took the battery life down to about five years. He figured the chances it was still live at fifty–fifty.
When he had set up the lock, Thom had programmed in his own fingerprint as the system administrator. His concern, in those days, had been not for a home-invasion scenario but that Rusty, who was already starting to be lost to substances, would become a true threat of some kind. In that situation, Thom wanted to know that he could fly there and get into the house if he needed to.
He’d never shared that detail with Aubrey. Part of being a guardian angel, he’d told himself, is being invisible.
He pressed his thumb on the panel, the screen lit up green, and the lock buzzed. He lifted the door, an inch at a time, desperate not to make a sound. But the hinges squeaked. Thom froze. He held in place until the muscles in his arms started to burn, then lifted the door another two feet, slipped inside the house, and lowered it again.
The walk across the darkened kitchen was excruciating. Thom’s eyes had partially adjusted in the blacked-out basement, but when he reached the top of the stairs and came out into the kitchen, he realized he had almost no memory of the layout of the house. He regretted intensely that he hadn’t visited his sister in her home more than once. He hoped he’d get a chance to correct that one day.
He stood still for a full minute and let his eyes gather whatever bits of light there were in the house. The thin candlelight in the living room became visible around the edges of the kitchen door, which looked as if it swung both ways, like in a restaurant. He moved toward it.
Thom was sweating abundantly. The jacket he’d worn to conceal the gun in his belt was denim, and he’d started to perspire in the humid August night before he’d even stepped out of his car. Now, as he moved across the kitchen, his body tense and stiff, sweat was pouring out of him. He could feel it trickling down the back of his neck, out of his armpits, down his sides, on the backs of his knees, everywhere. He paused at the sink, wondering if he dared to slip the coat off. The real danger, he thought, was his hands—if his palms were wet and his grip on the Glock turned slick, he was afraid he’d drop it or, worse, fire it by accident.
But he’d have to set the gun down to take the coat off, and that was out of the question. He’d live with the sweat. He kept moving to the door to the living room, thinking that this sort of decision had never come up in his planning sessions. He wondered if, rather than spend so much time worrying over the right yoga instructor, he might not have been better off hiring a few former FBI agents to help him with infiltration training drills.