Personal

I called back, ‘Get out of here, Bennett. No reason for you to be involved.’

I listened for a reply, but I heard nothing more.

I tried the guest suite’s door. It was unlocked. I stepped inside. I looked around. I had seen similar places in hotels, but smaller. Living accommodations, all self-contained. A short private hallway, a powder room, a kitchenette, a living room, with two bedrooms, one to the left and one to the right, both with their own separate bathrooms. The left-hand bedroom was unoccupied. The right-hand bedroom had Kott’s stuff in it. Of which there wasn’t much. A bedroll and a backpack, Nice had guessed, back in Arkansas, and she had been more or less correct. The bedroll was a sleeping bag, and the backpack was a duffel bag, made of scuffed black leather, full of T-shirts and underwear and ammunition.

The ammunition was all either nine-millimetre Parabellum, or .50-calibre match grade. Big visual difference. The handgun rounds looked small and dainty. Like jewellery. The rifle rounds looked like cannon shells from a combat airplane. The cartridge cases alone were four inches long.

I checked everywhere I could think of, and I didn’t find a handgun.

But I found the rifle.

It was under Kott’s bed, in a custom case. A Barrett Light Fifty, the real deal, more than five feet long, close to thirty pounds scoped and loaded. From Tennessee. The price of a used sedan, right there. I kicked the scope out of alignment, which is all I had time to do, and then I hustled back to the hallway.

The blueprint said I had to walk thirty feet, and turn right, and walk twenty feet, and turn left, into some kind of a three-sided anteroom ahead of the bedroom itself. On the plan it would be called a niche or a nook, no doubt. The bedroom door was in the wall facing the hallway. I kept the Browning in my left hand and the Glock in my right, like an old-time gunfighter in a black and white movie. Not that I believed those old stories. I never met a guy who could aim left and right simultaneously. Not well, anyway. Better to focus on the Glock, like it was the only gun I had, and if the Browning happened to blaze away at the same time, unaimed and unsynchronized, then so much the better. Couldn’t hurt.

I made the first turn. Ahead of me was the feature window. But still a long way away. I was getting better at decoding the funhouse dimensions. I had the Glock aimed hard on the near corner of the anteroom, the equivalent of three baseboards up, which would be four feet six, which would be high on Kott’s chest. At that point I was fifteen feet away, and the ninemillimetre Parabellum was a speedy little bullet. If Kott stepped out, he would be dead about an eightieth of a second later. Plus my reaction time. Which would be very rapid. That was for damn sure.

Kott didn’t step out. I arrived at the anteroom. The bedroom door was closed. Nine feet tall, ten with the frame, rib-high knob.

I heard a woman’s voice behind it.

No words. Inarticulate. Not a scream or a moan, but a kind of frustrated gasp. She wanted to do something, or get something, or reach something, but she couldn’t. But want

was the wrong word. She wasn’t annoyed. She was desperate. She needed to do something, or get something, or reach something.

But she couldn’t.

I stepped back and called over my shoulder, ‘Bennett? You still down there?’

No answer.

Sudden silence in the bedroom.

I stepped to one side, in case he fired through the wood.

He didn’t.

How do you make them come out of there voluntarily? No one knows. No one ever has. Normally I would have stood with my back against the wall and eased the door open, arm’s length and out of sight, but Joey’s doors were too wide for that. So like the neat little guy I was in that new environment, I dodged forward, twisted the knob, kicked the door, dodged back, and aimed.

And fired. And hit John Kott in the centre of the forehead. Except I didn’t. It was a mirror on the side wall. The gunshot roared and silvered glass sheeted down, and then the world went quiet again, and from inside the room Kott said, ‘What happened to forgetting about me and going our separate ways?’

I hadn’t heard his voice for sixteen years, but it was him. The slow Ozark accent, the querulous pitch, the aggrieved tone.

I said, ‘You didn’t answer me.’

‘Not worth answering.’

‘Who is in there with you?’

‘Step inside and take a look.’

I called up the blueprint in my head again. I said, ‘You’re on the second floor of a very tall house. I’m at the only door out. I just fired a gun in London. Five minutes from now you’ll have five thousand cops outside. You’ll survive about three weeks without food. And then what will you do?’

He said, ‘The cops won’t come.’

I said, ‘You think?’

‘Bennett will tell them it was one of his.’

‘What do you know about Bennett?’

‘I know plenty about Bennett.’

‘Who is in there with you?’