'Christ.' Harper.

'You hurt?'

'Yeah, I'm shot in the hip,' he groaned. 'Not bad, but it hurts like a sonofabitch.'

'Where is he? Outside?'

'Yeah, I heard the door. He's gone.'

'How about Pam?'

'I don't know. I don't know if he had her.'

'I believed him.'

'Well, if he had her, he didn't take her with him, because he went out of here in a hurry. Christ, we were six feet apart, I just couldn't get the gun around.'

There was light coming into the room from the back, from the room they'd just rushed through. Anna said, 'Move around into the light, stay behind the desk, I gotta look and see how bad it is.'

And at that moment, someone groaned from the other side of the room. The groan was hurt enough, harsh enough, that the hair stood up on Anna's.

Harper whispered, 'Pam.'

Anna groped in her pocket, and found the flashlight had stayed with her through the wild scramble across the yard and into the house. She wrapped her fist around it, and shot the needle of light across the room. She passed over Glass's body the first time, then wondered about the shadow in the corner, and came back to it.

Yes. A body, not a shadow. Anna left Harper, creeping across the office carpet, got to Glass, rolled her. Couldn't see; put her head close to the other woman's ear and said, 'Pamthis is Anna. How bad are you?'

Glass muttered something unintelligible. Anna looked around, trying to think what to do. Had to get her to some light. Finally, afraid that she might be hurting her worse, she tugged and pulled Glass across the carpet. Glass remained inert, sometimes mumbling to herself.

'How bad?' Harper whispered.

'I don't know. We need light.'

'Pull that desk around.'

Anna managed to move one of the desks enough to provide cover from the only window that Judge could see through: and turned on a light.

Pam Glass had been terribly beaten: her nose was broken, her teeth were broken, one cheekbone was wrong, her lips were twice as big as they should be, and the color of fresh liver.

'Aw, Jesus,' Anna said. But she could do nothing about it. 'Let me look at your hip,' she said to Harper. Harper rolled, showed her a bullet hole passing through his jeans in his thigh just below his butt. There was no exit wound.

'Not much blood,' she whispered.

'Yeah, I don't think it's too bad, but Jesus, my leg just doesn't want to work,' he said.

'I'm gonna go look at Daly. Can you cover me?' And for just a tiny sliver of a second she thought how odd it was to be using the language of television cop shows: cover me. What did she know about cover? 'I'll go out on the porch.'

'Yeah. Turn off the light, first. And we gotta try the phones.'

'Daly first.'

Anna hit the light, waited for a second, then went through the door on her stomach while Harper sat in the door, scanning the dark, ready to fire at any sign of a muzzle blast.

But the woman was dead: Anna knew it the moment that she touched her. She was already going cold, and had the peculiar stillness of those who'd gone on. But she grabbed the woman's shirt, and pulled her back through the door.

'Alive?' Harper whispered, as they pulled back.

'No. I don't think so.'

Anna slumped against a wall, and Harper touched the woman. 'No, she's gone.'

'Let's get back to Pam.'

'Let's get the phone.'

Glass's breath was short, harsh, irregular. As Anna knelt over her, she blew a blood bubble, which burst on her blood-crusted lips. Anna said, 'She's in trouble, Jake. We've got to get her to a hospital.'

Harper was already crawling across the office. He groped on top of the desk, found a phone, pulled it down, listened, said 'Shit.'

'What?'

'Dead. He must've pulled wires somewhere. Probably outside the house.'

'We've got to get her out of here,' Anna said urgently. 'We can't wait. JakeI think she's dying.'

Chapter 30

They sat for a moment, huddled over Glass, watching her breathe. Thinking. Anna asked, finally, 'Can you walk?'

'I don't know.' Harper looked around, found a blind spot where he couldn't be seen, pushed himself up on the wall, tested the leg and nearly collapsed.

'Maybebut not very far. I could hop pretty fast.'

'Forget it,' Anna said. Then: 'Here's what we do. We've got to get him talking to us. Anything. Just get him talking. Then we'll know about where he is, which side of the house. Then I'll sneak out the other side, with your car keys. Once I'm away from the house, in the dark, he'll never find me. And he doesn't know where your car is. Once I'm in the car, I'll come crashing up hereI'll get as close to the back porch as I can without wrecking it. That's five feet you'll have to cross. Can you carry Pam that far?'

'Anna.' He was staring at her, unhappy. 'Anna, I can carry her, but, Jesus, that's crazy.'

'Can you think of anything else?'

He looked down at the linoleum, thinking. A few seconds later he said, 'If we can figure out where the phone goes out, and where he is, if they're different, I might be able to patch the wires.'

'Do you know anything about telephones?'

'No, but if he's just cut the wires.'

'I don't know if you can just put them back together,' Anna said. 'Even if we find out where he is, and you can get out, he could move. If you're just lying out there on the ground, messing with wires. you'd be dead. If I ran, it doesn't matter what he does once I'm out of here: he can't catch me.'

'Christ.' He ran his hand through his hair, moved, groaned.

'And if we mess with the wires, and the phones still don't work, we'll have lost the timeand we don't have any time.' She touched Pam, looking across her at Harper.

Harper broke his eyes away for a moment, then shook his head, grinned, put his hand on top of her head and mussed her hair. 'Don't worry about wrecking the car,' he said. 'Fuck the car. Put it right on the porch.'

'Okay.'

'Let me get my back against the wall with Pam. If he tries to come in, I'll light the motherfucker up.'

Anna nodded, grinned back at him, squeezed his good leg: 'It's the only way. Let's see if we can get him talking.'

Anna started, crawling to a window on the back of the house, knocking it out with a chair. The shattering of the glass should attract his attention, if he was still out there. She sat on her heels like a dog baying at the moon, and shouted: 'Steve. What do you want? What do you want?'

Nothing.

Jake had moved to the hallway between the back room and the office. He called softly, 'Nothing here.'

'Steve,' Anna shouted. 'Where are you? What do you want? Are you still there?'

The voice, not far away: 'I'm still here.'

And a second later, a shot: not the pistol any more, a loud crack, and plaster flew from the wall overhead.

'Shit,' Harper yelped. 'He's got a rifle. A big one.'

'Always gotta be killing something around here, putting them out of their misery,' the voice shouted.

He was over toward the garage, or maybe the barn, Anna thought.

'What do you want?'

'I want you dead,' the voice answered. 'But I want to mess with you for a while.'

Another shot, this time into the office.

Anna crawled past Harper, who said, 'We've gotta get better protection. Sooner of later, he'll think about shooting lower, onto the floor, and then we're in trouble. Those goddamn slugs are going halfway through the house. Maybe all the way.'

Anna said, 'Okay,' and crawled into the office. The desks were wooden. Not much help. There was another door off to the left, and she went that way.

'What do you think now, about messing with my head? What do you think now?' Judge screamed, still from the direction of the garage.

'We weren't messing with you,' Harper shouted back. 'How were we messing with you?'