“What?”

“Hurry.”

Michelle, with her injured ankle and in shock from losing her friends, had begged to stay in the house at Number 2, hiding, even in the spider-filled basement, and waiting for the police. Acting like a bit of a princess, she’d resisted heading outside. She couldn’t understand why Brynn felt certain the men would circle back, rather than go on to Route 682.

But Brynn was convinced they would do just that. The drive to the highway was just a trick.

“But why?” the young woman had argued adamantly. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Brynn explained her logic. “From what you told me, I don’t think this was just a random break-in. They’re professional killers. That means they’re going to come after us. They have to. We can identify them. And that means we’re a link to whoever hired them. So they’re doubly desperate to find us. If they don’t, their boss is going to come after them.”

Brynn didn’t, however, tell her that there was another basis for her conclusion: the man named Hart. He wasn’t going away. She’d recalled how confident he’d sounded talking to her in the house. Unemotional and fully prepared to kill her without a second’s hesitation when she showed herself.

Hart reminded her of the surgeon who, in a perfectly even voice, explained how her father had died during exploratory surgery.

More chillingly, though, he reminded Brynn of her ex-husband. Hart’s look was the same as in Keith’s face once when she found him slipping a pistol she didn’t recognize into the lockbox in the bedroom. She’d asked about it and the state trooper had hesitated but confessed to her that fellow officers would sometimes pocket a weapon found at crime scenes, if it wasn’t necessary evidence. They’d collect them. “Just to have,” Keith had explained.

“You mean…you mean, to plant them on a perp-so you can say you shot him in self-defense?”

Her husband hadn’t answered. But he’d glanced at her with a look that was identical to Hart’s in that instant he rose from the foliage, holding his pistol and looking for a target.

There was something else in the glance too, Brynn decided. Admiration?

Maybe.

And a challenge too.

May the best person win…

Assuming the men would return to the house where she and Michelle were hiding, Brynn had set the TV to a shopping network, blocked the door with a dresser and rigged the power cord around the leg. Then she’d found a bottle of ammonia and poured it on the floor, alongside a bucket, to make it look as though she’d set a trap. That would make Hart and his partner wary, thinking she was willing to blind her pursuers-though in reality she would not risk hurting the homeowners or rescue workers later.

They’d grabbed a few other things, which they now carried: weapons. Each woman had a sock containing a billiard ball-like a South American bolo throwing weapon, which Brynn had learned about helping Joey with a project on Argentina for school. They also had Chicago Cutlery knives in their pockets, wrapped in sock scabbards, and Brynn carried a pool cue at the end of which was taped a ten-inch-long Chicago Cutlery carving knife.

Michelle had taken the weapons reluctantly. But Brynn had insisted. And the young woman had grudgingly agreed.

Then they’d slipped into the woods behind the house and turned north, back toward the Feldmans’ place, picking their way carefully through the boggy ground and using logs and rocks as stepping-stones to climb over the streams that ran to the lake.

Now, keeping under cover in the yard of her friends’ house, Michelle was staring south toward the gunshots. She muttered to Brynn, “Why did you want to come back here? We should’ve gone the other way. To the county road. Now we’ve got to go past them to get there.”

“We’re not going that way.”

“What do you mean? It’s the only way to the county road.”

Brynn shook her head. “I was on Six Eighty-two for nearly a half hour and I saw three cars. And that was at rush hour. We’d have to risk walking on the shoulder in the open for who knows how long. They’d find us there for sure.”

“But weren’t there some houses on the highway? We’ll go there. Call nine-one-one.”

“We can’t go to any of them,” Brynn said. “I won’t lead those men to somebody else’s place. I don’t want anybody else hurt.”

Michelle was silent, staring at the Feldmans’ house. “That’s crazy. We have to get out of here.”

“We’re going to get out. Just not the way we came in.”

“Well, why aren’t there more police here?” she snapped. “Why’d you just come here by yourself? The police wouldn’t do it that way in Chicago.” The young woman’s voice was positively surly. Brynn tamped down her irritation. She squinted as she looked past her and pointed.

In the house at 2 Lake View, she could make out two flashlight beams, one upstairs, one on the ground floor. Scanning eerily. The men were both in the house, searching for them.

“Keep an eye on the flashlights. I’m going to look inside. Did Steven have a gun?”

“I have no idea,” Michelle scoffed. “They really weren’t the gun type.”

“Where’s your cell phone?” Brynn asked.

“In my purse, in the kitchen.”

As Brynn sprinted for the porch she glanced back and could see the young woman’s eyes, just visible in the moonlight. Yes, there was a measure of sorrow-that her friends had died. But it was the put-upon expression Brynn sometimes recognized in her son during one of his irritated moments. The expression that asked, Why me? Life just isn’t fair.

“NOTHING.”

Spoken in a whisper.

In the basement of the house at 2 Lake View Drive, Hart nodded, acknowledging the comment by Lewis, who was sweeping his flashlight around a dark storage area, which would have been perfect for hiding in.

And had been pretty much their last hope of finding the women in the house.

Hart was feeling more confident. It was likely that the women were no longer armed, a conclusion he’d come to by default: otherwise they would have lain in wait and shot the men. Still, he’d insisted they use flashlights and not put on the overhead lights.

Once, Hart had seen a movement, spun around and fired. But the target turned out to be just a fleeing rat, its shadow magnified a dozen times. The creature scurried away. Hart was angry with himself for the panicked shot. He’d hurt his injured arm in the maneuver and they’d been temporarily deafened again. Angry too for the loss of control. Sure, it was logical. The sudden motion, jumping toward him, it seemed… Naturally he’d fired.

But excuses always tasted bad in Hart’s mouth. You had nobody to blame but yourself if you cut the plank wrong or planed a bow into a chair leg meant to be straight, or split a dovetail joint.

“Measure twice, cut once,” his father used to say.

They trooped upstairs into the dark kitchen. Hart was looking out the back windows and into the forest, wondering if he was staring right at the women. “Wasted some good minutes searching. That’s why they set up that little scene in the bedroom. Buy time.”

And to blind us. He could smell the ammonia all the way down here, even with the upstairs bedroom door closed.

Then Hart mused, “But where are they? Where would I go, if I was them?”

“The woods? Snuck past us and’re making for the highway?”

Hart agreed. “Yep. That’s what I’d guess. There’s no other way out. They’ll be thinking they can hail a car but there won’t be much traffic this time of night. Hell, there wasn’t much on the way up here. And they’ll have to stick close to the shoulder, out in the open. And that blood on Brynn’s uniform? She’s hurt. Be moving slowly. We’ll spot ’em easy.”

BRYNN MCKENZIE WAS making a fast sweep through the Feldmans’ house. She left the lights out, of course, and searched by feel for weapons and cell phones. She found none.