She moved down the stairs one by one. It took her many minutes to get to the first floor. Now it was deadly quiet, like a horror movie without the scary music. Opposite her was the front door. The windows in the rooms on either side were so bright with glare, she couldn't see outside. From where she was curled in terror on the bottom step, it almost looked like that light she'd heard about from heaven. She was quaking with fear. She didn't want to die. She could tell that the top lock on the front door, that unpickable Medeco, was locked; but still she knew she couldn't stop the freight train about to run over her. She was going to die, but not of natural causes like her mother. And Mitch was going to live on for another twenty years, in a wheelchair with his whore pushing him around. It was more than she could bear.

She got up and caught sight of herself in the hall mirror, let out a little scream. Mitch's mistress might be beautiful, but she was a horror, a freak. She didn't recognize the woman in the mirror with the blond hair, the black stitches, and puffy eyes. She wanted to obliterate that face. Her scarf and Marsha's huge sunglasses were on the hall table. She put them on to hide the damage she'd done to herself. Then she remembered the hit man didn't care what she looked like-he was going to kill her anyway. She fell to her knees and crawled down the hall to the kitchen.

She made it to the basement door. That door was locked, too. The garage door had a chain. The chain was still in place. With a sigh of relief she turned around and saw the man peering in through the windowed kitchen door. She screamed. Startled, the man on the other side of the window jumped back. As he turned to flee, his foot caught on one of the many decorative pots she'd left out on the patio before Mitch's incident in preparation for the ritual potting of red geraniums. He stumbled backwards, falling hard on a garden tool with many spikes for breaking up the ground. As he went down, the black thing dropped out of his hand. Now Cassie got a good look at it. It was a camera. Further shocked, she started screaming at him. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she yelled at the window.

The man was down. He didn't move. Cassie thought she detected some blood on the flagstone. Uh-oh, maybe he was hurt. Maybe he'd sue. She stepped closer to the door. She saw the scuffed suede shoes. The baggy pants of a glen plaid suit. The camera on a flagstone. Looked like a good one, an Elph. The hat. A ridiculous hat, a crushed fedora. She couldn't see the man's face.

"Hey you," she said tentatively. Now the phone was ringing again. Cassie ignored it. She opened the door and stepped outside.

"Hey you," she said louder. In the distance she could hear sirens. She always dreaded the sound. It meant bad things, someone's house on fire. Somebody in an accident. She kept her eye on the downed man. "Hey, you all right?"

Suddenly, he held up a bleeding hand and gave her a jaunty little wave. After a second or two, he picked up his head, then his shoulders. He turned over and gingerly got to his feet. On his feet he adjusted the nonexistent creases in his unpressed trousers. He looked around the patio and collected the camera, the hat. His movements were all matter of fact, as if he felt perfectly at ease in the situation and nothing untoward had happened. Finally he turned toward Cassie and slowly looked her over. He did it with frank curiosity, up and down, the way men look at things that interest them. He tilted his head quizzically at the scarf and sunglasses. Finally he cracked a little not-bad smile. It was the smile Cassie had seen yesterday from Mark, but hadn't seen for such a long time before that she didn't recognize it yet as admiration. Her face was so tight, she couldn't adjust her expression. Terror, rage, sorrow, uncertainty-her face couldn't seem to register. Luckily, her voice still knew what to do. "What do you think you're doing here?" she demanded, hands on hips.

"Nothing at all, ma'am, just looking around." The man put the squashed hat back on and saluted with his bleeding hand.

"Looking around?" she said indignantly. "What are you, some kind of Peeping Tom?"

"Oh no, nothing like that." He laughed easily. Not a bad-looking kind of guy. "Are you Mrs. Sales?"

"Yes. Who's asking? Mafia hit man, FBI, CIA?" The sirens got louder and louder, until they were almost deafening. Cassie shifted uneasily from one foot to another. Somebody's house was going up in a puff of smoke.

"No, ma'am. Nothing that sinister. I'm with the IRS," he said with a modest smile. "Do you mind if I come inside for a minute?"

"Ahhh." She hesitated. IRS? What did he want?

He held up his hand to show the cut. "I could use some water."

"Ahhh, we're in a bit of turmoil right now." All those files in the house. All those purchases by the girlfriend. The account in the Bank of the Cayman Islands. Her husband was a crook. Dizziness hit her. She didn't like to lie.

"Oh, don't worry about it. Mess doesn't bother me."

The wailing sirens stopped abruptly. It seemed as if they'd stopped in front of her house. Cassie turned around. A loud voice issued a command from a speaker.

"Police. Please drop your weapon and move slowly to the front of the house. I repeat, police, you are surrounded. Put your hands over your head. There are fifty officers here. You are surrounded."

That's when Cassie realized Aunt Edith must have called the cops, after all. She did the only thing she could think of: She closed the door on the IRS agent and ran inside the house to hide in her closet.

ONLY A FEW MINUTES LATER, Cassie emerged from her closet to see what was going o n. From her new perch in a second-floor window seat she counted four squad cars in the street in front of her house. The doors of the cars were open, and seven uniformed officers crouched behind them, pointing guns at the house. An eighth officer was speaking over the P.A. system in his car, his voice reverberating like thunder in the morning quiet. There was no sign of the IRS agent.

"You are surrounded. Come out with your hands up."

Cassie couldn't understand why the IRS man didn't come out and show himself, talk to them, do something to end this nightmare situation. Then it occurred to her that he wasn't really with the IRS. That was just a lie. He was really a hit man or a robber out to get her, after all. The phone started ringing again. She crawled away from the upstairs hall window where she'd been hiding behind the curtain to answer it in the bedroom.

"Yes, hello," she said impatiently. If it was those Sprint people still trying to get her business after a hundred perfectly polite nos, this time she wouldn't be able to resist screaming at them.

"Oh my God, sweetheart, are you all right?" It wasn't the Sprint people. It was Aunt Edith.

"Aunt Edith, we're in the middle of a shoot-out here. I'll have to call you back," Cassie informed her importantly.

"Did the police come? They gave me such a lot of trouble when I called. They wanted to know what kind of gun the perpetrator had. How would I know something like that?" Edith complained.

"You must have said the right thing. They came," Cassie told her.

"I told them it was a machine gun," Edith said.

"Good job. It was a camera. I hope they don't shoot up the house."

"A camera?"

"Yes, I have to go."

"Don't worry, honey. I'll be over as soon as the cops are gone. I don't want them to run a warrant check on me."

"For God's sake, Edith, don't drive that car! I have so many-oh no-" The line went dead. Cassie groaned. Now she had to worry about Edith driving on top of everything else.

When she got back to the window in the hall, all the cops were getting back in their cars except the one with the microphone. The small thing that looked like a computer mouse dangled against his thigh from the wire attached to his car as he conversed easily with the suddenly reappeared, so-called IRS agent. They were now having such a comfortable conversation, it looked as if they knew each other, had beers together at the Landmark after work.