“Could you check on Garth for me?” she said, squinting down the path. “He’s all alone out there in the barn, and I feel funny going down there at night. A guy should be checking on him.”

“I don’t want you alone in the house.”

Agnes shook her head. “I’m not alone. Lisa Livia is in there. And you’re right here. Somebody would have to be suicidal to try anything now. Besides, bad things come in threes. I’ve been attacked in there three times already. I’m safe.”

“Yeah, that works,” Shane said.

“The whole town knows you’re here now,” she said. “The place is getting to be like Grand Central Station. I’m not alone anymore. I’m safe.”

He shook his head, but he let her go up to the house alone as he turned toward the path for the barn, and she felt warmed by his concern.

Okay, she thought as she went up the steps, he’s a killer. But he killed for the government, so that was… well, disturbing.

But the thing was, of all the people she knew, the people she trusted most were Joey, Shane, and Lisa Livia, and she trusted Carpenter, too, and he was Shane’s partner. Meanwhile people like chefs and county inspectors were venal and vile and treacherous. So…

Confusing.

She went through the screened porch and into the kitchen and screamed, “OH!” when she saw somebody standing by the basement door, realizing a second later that it was the Venus.

“It’s okay, she’s unarmed,” she told Rhett, who’d jerked awake. He growled and she said, “Humor. Har,” and bent to pat him, and then a movement in the hall doorway caught her eye and she saw a guy with a gun pointed at her and screamed again. Rhett launched himself toward the man, baying, and knocked her to one side as the guy fired, and then the man cursed as Rhett clamped his teeth on his leg, and Agnes flung herself at him, too, trying to keep him from shooting her dog, and he backhanded her, her glasses flying off as she hit the wall, and he shook Rhett off and turned the gun on her. She braced herself for the shots, but when they came, the guy jerked backward as bullets hit him, slamming him through the doorway as he shot wildly at the ceiling, into the hall, and out of sight, glass shattering and the clock gonging, and Shane walking through the kitchen, tiring impassively until there was a click, and even then he kept walking toward the hall, smoothly sliding the empty magazine out of the pistol and slamming another one home.

“You all right?” he said from the doorway to the hall when the noise stopped.

“No,” she said, crawling onto her knees and then getting shakily to her feet to follow him into the hall and stand behind him.

The man was splayed out on the checkerboard tile, his chest splattered with blood, his eyes staring up vacantly. There was a lot of blood and glass and splintered black wood from Brenda’s grandfather clock, which was dead, too.

“I think you got him,” she said, trying for cool and offhand.

“He hit you,” Shane said, and his voice sounded strange.

“Well, he won’t do that again.” Her jaw began to hurt where the guy had slugged her. She put her hand on it. Ice, maybe.

Shane knelt, went through the man’s pockets, pulled out a wallet, opened it, and extracted fifteen brand-new one-hundred-dollar bills.

“Did my price go up?” Agnes asked, still trying for cool. “Is that what I’m worth now?”

“No. The price didn’t go up. You’re worth a lot more than that. This is a food chain.”

“What?”

Shane stood, staring down at the man, his face like it was the first time she’d seen him, completely stonelike, but then he relaxed, and when he spoke again, his voice was almost normal. “Somebody put out a hit on you and hired a shooter, who looked at the target-a woman alone in an old house in the middle of nowhere-and figured anybody could do it. So he kept most of the money and hired this guy to do it for two thousand. And this guy hired Macy for five hundred. So when Macy failed last night, he had to do it.”

“So the guy who hired this guy is going to be showing up tomorrow? It’s going to happen again?” She could hear her voice going up at the end, almost a shriek, and she stepped on it, trying to keep calm.

Shane turned to her. “No. I’m taking this out of the house. Tomorrow, I’ll find the next person in the food chain, and from him, I’ll find out who let the contract, and I will end this.”

He looked huge in the hallway and very certain.

Agnes swallowed. “You can do that.”

“Yes.”

“I’m over any problem I had with your career choice.”

“Good,” he said. “How’s your jaw where he hit you?”

“It hurts.”

“Let’s put some ice on it.”

She looked at the body and the blood thickening on her nice hall tile. “And then we call Carpenter?”

“And then we call Carpenter.”

She nodded, desperately thinking of the good things in her life like Carpenter, who was new, and Garth… “This was the third time.”

“What?”

“Garth,” she said. “Garth wasn’t a bad thing. This was the third bad thing.”

He took a deep breath. “Let’s get some ice, Agnes.”

“Okay,” Agnes said, and went to get the ice.

Shane had watched Agnes to see if she’d come unglued again at the shock of the shooting and the blood, but she’d held it together this time, except for that crazy little blip about the third bad thing, and then another moment when she looked at the Venus in the kitchen and said, with real relief, “She didn’t get hit.” Lisa Livia had come cautiously downstairs to find out what the hell the shooting had been about and had taken the blood in the hall pretty well, but then she was a Fortunato. Carpenter had shown up within fifteen minutes and removed the body from the house within the same amount of time, earning Lisa Livia’s admiration and Agnes’s gratitude, and his gentleness with them both was a lesson in itself, but when the hall was clean and he was gone and Lisa Livia had returned to her bedroom, Shane stopped Agnes from going back to the housekeeper’s room. “No,” he said. “Upstairs. It’stoo damn easy to get you in there.”

Agnes went still for a moment and then called to Rhett and headed for the stairs.

The bedroom on the second floor next door to Lisa Livia’s was larger than the housekeeper’s room, with a door to the back veranda and a good view of the Blood River, a door that also made it more vulnerable to attack from the outside, but anything was better than downstairs. Agnes needed to sleep someplace she’d never been shot at, and Shane figured that ruled out the first floor at Two Rivers completely.

“The bathroom’s here,” Agnes said, opening a door off the bedroom. “The other door’s off the hall, but we can lock it and then it’s like a private bath-”

“Right,” Shane said, watching her carefully. “Why don’t you just relax?”

“Sure,” she said.

“You’ll be safe in here. I’ll make sure of it.”

Agnes nodded, but it wasn’t a very certain nod. Shane went over and ran his hand up her neck and entwined his fingers in her hair, pulling her to his chest. “It will all work out.”

“You sure?” she murmured into his shirt as her arms went around him.

“I promise.” The words were out before Shane realized he said them, and once they were out there, he felt the weight of them. He couldn’t remember the last time he had promised anyone anything. It had always been a job. Shane took a deep breath and Agnes pulled her head back and looked up at him.

“You all right?”

Shane nodded, afraid to speak. Who knew what would come out of his mouth next?

Agnes pulled away and walked over to the door to the veranda and opened it. Shane followed her outside. The only sound was the lap of water on the beach and the creak of the floating dock bobbing in the water. Even the flamingos were quiet.

“I was always safe here,” she said, her voice tight “I mean, I was alone, but it was Keyes. Everybody knew there was nothing to steal. Everybody knew I was Joey’s friend. There was no reason for anybody to hurt me and a lot of reasons for people not to, so I was safe. I was alone but I was…”