'Yeah. Be careful.'

Life in Venice was getting better, but there'd been some tough times; still were. Their version of the Neighborhood Watch was a little heavier-duty than most, knowing that the cops would always take a while to get there. Jim would start a calling tree, which would branch out over the surrounding two blocks, and in five minutes there'd be people all over the street.

But she had to get through the five minutes.

Anna had both a handgun and a fish-whacker in the bedroom. There'd be people around, so she went for the whacker, which she kept against the back side of the chest of drawers. On the way, in the dark, she stepped on the T-shirt, picked it up, pulled it over her head. She found the whacker. and heard a windowpane break.

Quietly. Like somebody had put pressure against it to crack it, and then tried to pick out the piecesbut at least one piece had fallen onto the kitchen floor.

Damn them. They'd hurt her house.

Anna went to the stairs, began to creep down. The whacker was made of hickory, looked like a dwarf baseball bat, and was meant to put ocean game fish out of their misery. Creek had drilled out the business end, melted a few ounces of lead sinker on his barbeque grill and poured the lead into the bat. If anyone was hit hard with it, surgery would follow.

At the bottom of the stairs, Anna heard another piece of glass crack. She moved to the open arch between the living room and the kitchen, risked a quick peek. The obscure figure of a man hovered outside the back window, three feet to the right of the door. He'd done something to the window, and had then broken out a piece. As she watched, a hand came through the broken pane, and a needle-thin ray of light played across the inside of the door. He was trying to see the lock.

Even if the posse arrived in the next couple of minutes, she didn't want to be trapped inside the house with some crack-smoked goof. She bunched herself in the arch, eight feet from the door. The hand with the light disappeared, and then, in the near darkness, she saw another movement. He was reaching far inside, trying to get to the deadbolt. She waited until the hand was at the door, then launched herself across the room, one big step with the whacker already swinging, and Whack!

Hit too high, and caught the window frame and the arm at the same time. And as she swung, she screamed, 'Get out!' and raised the whacker again, but the man outside groaned and jerked his arm back through the window, tearing out more glass.

She heard him stop once heavily on the porch, a running step, and then a heavy-duty spotlight caught him from a neighbor's yard across the canal, and someone yelled, 'There he is.'

Anna stepped to the door and flipped on the porch light, and at the same time, someone yelled, 'He's going west,' and someone, from the front of the house, 'There he is, Larry, there he is.'

Anna ran through the house to the front door and out, down the short sidewalk to the streetten yards away, a man in jeans and a black jacket was running away from her, along the edge of the street. He was hurt, she thought: something funny in the jerky way he held his left arm.

Pak Hee Chung, the Korean businessman from across the street, ran out of the front of his house carrying a shotgun, saw Anna and shouted, 'Get back inside,' and then fired the shotgun in the air, a three-foot flame erupting from the gun as the muzzle blast shook the street.

The man in black, now thirty yards away, spun, crouched. Anna shouted, 'Pak, he's got a gun,' just as the man fired, four quick pok-pok-pok-pokshots, and Pak fumbled the shotgun and went down on his stomach.

'Gun,' Anna screamed. 'He's got a gun.'

Hobie ran out of the house behind her and shouted, 'Get out of the way.'

Anna ran back a few steps and turned to look at the man in black, now running again, forty yards, and Hobie opened up with a handgun, five fast shots into the night. The man kept going, turned the corner. There was a flash of lights, another searchlight, somebody screamed, 'Stop or I'll shoot,' and again she heard the pok-pok-pokand a louder bang-bang.

Pak was on his feet again, running down the narrow street, apparently unhurt, and for no apparent reason, fired the shotgun into the air again. Again the lightning flash and the muzzle blast rattling the neighborhood.

Like her dad's twelve-gauge, Anna thought in an instant of abstraction. She found herself on her knees, looking up the street.

Then Hobie was there, next to her in his pajamas, fumbling shells into a revolver. 'Goddamn,' he said excitedly, 'I just shot the shit out of Logan 's garage. Don't tell them it was me, huh? Let them think it was the asshole, Logan 'd like that any way.'

'Yeah.'

Pak ran back, still carrying the shotgun: 'Everybody okay?'

'What happened to the guy?' Anna asked.

'I don't know. Everybody was shooting, nobody got hit. Bet we scared the shit out of him, huh?' He looked back up the street and suddenly laughed wildly, a long scary cackle, and Hobie and Anna looked at each other. This was something new.

Then three more men were running around the corner at the end of the street, one of them carrying a rifle; they stopped when they saw Pak, Hobie and Anna.

'Who's that?' the rifleman shouted.

'Pak and Hobie and Anna,' Hobie yelled back.

'Everybody okay?'

'Yeah.'

'He came back that wayyou see him? He's stuck down Linnie.'

'Didn't see him this way.'

'Get the guys up here, get the guys up here.'

'Better get off the street,' Pak said. 'Anna, lock yourself inside. We'll get a line set up and dig him out of here.'

'Be careful,' Anna said. She looked down at her bare legs. 'I better go put some pants on.'

Pak said, 'You're okay with me,' and jacked another shell into the shot gun and grinned.

Hobie was standing behind Pak and he winked at Anna, while Anna blushed and said, 'I'll be back in a second,' and Pak yelled, 'Get those guys going. we need a skirmish line.'

By the time Anna was dressed, fifteen neighborhood men, a half-dozen women and two cops had walked the street, and found nothing at all. Anna walked with them as they checked again, knocking at every door.

'Like smoke,' Pak said. 'Must've swum the canal.'

When the last house was checked, they gathered at Pak's, wallowing in the scent of testosterone. Pak started a stream of instant coffee coming out of the microwave, and Pop-Tarts from the toaster; Logan, the old Vietnam vet, was saying, 'Like this night in fuckin' Dong Ha, man, pop-pop-pop a fuckin' firefight in the front yard, my garage is all shot to shit.'

He didseem pleased, Anna thought.

The debriefingpartyat Pak's lasted an hour, and everybody went to look at the broken glass on Anna's back porch. The intruder had used masking tape to tape off one pane in the multi-pane window, then used pressure to punch out a hole. Anna made a brief report to the two cops, who seemed more interested in Pak's coffee and Pop-Tarts. Larry Staberg brought his jigsaw and a piece of plywood over, cut out a shape to fill the small broken windowpane, and nailed it in place.

'Pretty much good as new,' he said, as his wife rolled her eyes at Anna.

'Good until I get it fixed,' Anna said. 'Thanks, everyone.'

As the party broke up, Logan said to someone else, as he walked away from Anna, 'When I heard him firing, it sounded like a twenty-two, but the holes in my garage are bigger than that, maybe thirty-eights.' When she heard 'twenty-two,' a small bell dinged in the back of Anna's mind, but she forgot about it on the way upstairs. She wouldn't sleep much during the rest of the night, but as much as she turned the whole episode over in her head, she never put the.22 used by the dark man together with the.22 used on Jason.

Not then.