Fully Loaded Thrillers - Crouch Blake (онлайн книга без TXT) 📗

Daphne took up the knife again, continued cutting the banana.

Letty spotted the clock on the microwave. “I can prove it to you. It’s 10:11. In exactly four minutes, your husband will call you. He’ll tell you he can’t find his wallet. He’ll ask you to go upstairs to your bedroom and check in his bedside table. If he calls, will you believe me?”

Daphne glanced at the microwave clock, then back at Letty. Honest to God fear in her eyes for the first time. A solemn, crushing focus. She nodded. The eggs burning.

“How will he reach you?” Letty asked. “Landline? Cell?”

“My iPhone.”

“Can we take the Beamer in the driveway?”

“I’m not leaving with you.”

“You don’t understand. By the time your husband calls you, it’ll be too late. The point of the phone call is to get you upstairs so Arnold can break in.”

“You want to leave right now?”

“This second.”

Daphne moved the pan to a cold burner and turned off the gas. They walked back down the hall, past a wall adorned with family and individual portraits and a collage of photographs—grinning babies and toddlers.

In the foyer, Daphne plucked a set of keys from a ceramic bowl beside a coat rack and opened the front door. The yard brilliant with strands of light that passed through the trees and struck the lawn in splashes of green.

Ten steps from the silver Beamer, Letty grabbed Daphne’s arm and spun her around with a hard jerk.

“Ouch.”

“Back inside.”

“Why?”

“There’s a car parked halfway up your driveway behind the rhododendron.”

They went back up the steps.

“You have the house key?” Letty asked.

Crossed the porch, Daphne struggling with the keys as they arrived at the door, finally sliding the right one into the deadbolt. Back into the house and Daphne shut the wide oak door after them, relocked the deadbolt, the doorknob, the chain.

“I should check the back door,” Daphne said.

“It doesn’t matter. He has a key and Chase left a window open. You have a gun in the house?”

Daphne nodded.

“Show me.”

Daphne ran up the staircase, Letty kicking off her heels as she followed. By the top of the stairs, her pulse had become a thumping in her temples—exertion and panic. They turned down a hallway, passed an office, a bright-white studio filled with sunlight and tedious acrylic paintings of mountain scenes, then two children’s bedrooms that emanated the frozen perfection of unlived-in space. At the end of the hall, French doors opened into a master suite built in the shape of an octagon, the walls rising to a vaulted ceiling that was punctured with skylights.

Chirping crickets stopped them both. Daphne withdrew her iPhone from the pocket of her robe and forced a smile that managed to bleed through into her voice.

“Hi, Honey… …no, it’s fine… …upstairs… …sure.” Daphne stepped into a walk-in closet, hit the lights. Letty lingered in the doorway, watched her reach through a wall of suits, emerging a moment later with a pump-action shotgun.

She mouthed, “Loaded?”

Daphne nodded. “Chase, it’s not in here. Want me to check downstairs?” Letty took the gun from Daphne. “All right,” Daphne said. “You two have fun.”

Letty whispered, “Call Nine-one-one,” and while Daphne dialed, Letty flicked off the safety and racked a shell into the chamber. She peered around the corner, down the hall. The house stood silent. She moved out of the closet and into a lavish master bath the size of her apartment, the tile cool on her bare feet.

Garden tub. Immense stone shower with a chrome fixture a foot in diameter. Long countertops cut from Italian granite.

Letty opened the glass shower door and cranked the handle. Preheated water rained down. The glass steamed. She returned to the bedroom, shutting the door behind her, found Daphne standing just inside the closet.

“Why’d you run the shower?” she whispered.

“Are the police coming?”

“Yes.”

Letty killed the lights. “Go crouch down in the corner behind those dresses and turn your phone off.” As Daphne retreated into the darkness, Letty pulled the door closed and padded out into the hall, making her way between the easels in the studio to the big windows that overlooked the front yard.

The car in the driveway hadn’t moved. A black 4Runner. Empty.

She walked out into the hall, straining to pick out the whine of approaching sirens.

Had the central heat been running, it would’ve completely escaped her notice, and even in the perfect silence she still nearly missed it—just around the corner and several feet down, the faintest groan of hardwood fibers bowing under the weight of a footstep.

Letty backpedaled into the studio and stepped behind the open door.

Through the crack, she eyed the hall.

Arnold appeared without a sound, wearing blue jeans and a fleece pullover. For a second, she thought there must be something wrong with his hands, their paleness. Latex gloves. Navy socks with strips of rubber gripping kept his footfalls absolutely silent and he moved slowly and with great precision down the hall, a black pistol at his side that had been fitted with a long suppressor.

Arnold stopped in the doorway of the master suite.

Waited a full minute.

Nothing but the white noise of the shower.

In the time it took Letty to step out from behind the door and peek into the hall, Arnold had disappeared.

She held the shotgun at waist-level and started toward the master suite. The half-speed fog of her hangover was replaced with a throbbing vigilance and a metal taste in the back of her throat that had come only a handful of times in her life—fights in prison, the three occasions she’d faced a judge to be sentenced, her father’s funeral.

She entered the master suite again. Steam poured out of the bathroom and Arnold stood in the doorway with his back to her. She felt lightheaded and weak, unable to summon her voice just yet, not fully committed to the idea of being in this moment.

Arnold walked into the steamy bathroom and Letty edged farther into the room, past the unmade bed and the stair climber, the shotgun trained on Arnold’s back through the open doorway, slightly obscured in the mist.

“You have a shotgun pointed at your back.”

He flinched at the sound of her voice. “Don’t turn around. Don’t move. Drop the gun.” Arnold didn’t move, but he didn’t drop the gun either. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’ll tell you again.” It clattered on the tile. “Kick it away from you.” The gun slid across the floor, coming to rest against the cabinets under the sink. Letty closed the distance between them, now standing in the bathroom doorway, close enough to smell the remnants of his cologne. “Keep your hands out in front of you and turn around.” When he saw her, his eyes betrayed only a glimmer of surprise. “Sit down, Arnold.” He sat at the base of the shower as Letty stepped into the bathroom, clouds of mist swirling between them.

He said, “What are you, a cop?”

“I was in your room yesterday afternoon when you and Chase came in. I hid in the closet. Heard everything you said.”

“So you’re a thief. That means we can work this out.”

“How’s that?”

“Can I get something out of my pocket?”

“Slowly.”

He reached into his fleece jacket, withdrew a set of keys, let them jingle. “The 4Runner’s new. There’s a briefcase with twenty-five thousand in cash in the front seat.”

“I know about the briefcase.”

“I can just go home. That’s a good score for you Letty. Bet you never had a payday like that.”

“And you go back to doing what you do?”

He smiled, shook his head. “The people I work for…if they want someone dead, that person’s going to die. It’s their will that causes it to happen. Not mine. They pull the trigger. I’m just the bullet. The damage. And I’m not the only bullet. So really, Letty. Why get yourself tangled up in this? You’re a thief, a tweaker. You been to prison?”