“Phone me tomorrow at ten. Be careful.”

“After what happened to Greg” – it had hurt Coltrane to say Greg’s name – “you be careful.”

Taking care was exactly what Coltrane was doing now. After prying the lid off the box of buckshot, he pushed three shells into the slot on the side of the pump-action shotgun. Telling Jennifer to stay behind him, he checked every section of the house, including the vault, even though the intrusion detector gave no indication that anyone had entered. Finally, he returned with Jennifer to the living room and unloaded the shotgun so that he could show her how the weapon worked without any danger that it might go off.

He held up one of the thumb-sized red plastic shells. “This contains gunpowder and hundreds of lead pellets. Depending on what you want to shoot-”

“But I don’t want to shoot anything.”

“-the pellets come in different sizes. The ones in this shell are called buckshot. They’re large, about the size of BBs. When the shell goes off, the pellets spew out the barrel and spread into a thirty-inch pattern.”

“Mitch, you might as well save your breath. I’m not-”

“So as long as you’re aiming in Ilkovic’s general direction, you have a damned good chance of hitting him with one of these. At close range, the pellets would really chew him up. Now, to hold the shotgun-”

Jennifer shook her head forcefully. “I really don’t-”

“See that grip underneath the barrel. Put your left hand there. Then put your right hand here at the thin part of the stock, just behind the trigger guard. Raise the butt of the stock to your shoulder.”

“Mitch, you’re not listening to me.”

“Cradle the stock against the meaty part of your shoulder. Raise the gun and aim along-”

“Will you stop?”

Coltrane looked at her in surprise.

“How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not going near that thing.”

“You’re telling me that if Ilkovic broke in here, you wouldn’t defend yourself?”

“I don’t want to think about it.”

“But what if-”

“Guns scare me to death.”

“I’m not exactly crazy about them, either,” Coltrane said.

“Then how come you know so god-awful much about them?”

Coltrane tried to calm himself. “When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, I met an arms dealer in West Pakistan who smuggled weapons to the Afghans. I crossed the border with him. But not before he insisted I learn about some of his weapons so I could help protect the convoy if there was trouble.”

Jennifer stared.

“Three days later, he was killed in a Soviet gunship attack. The rest of us buried him under rocks and moved on. The photograph of that rock pile and his sons staring at it was reprinted in the New York Times. It was the start of my career.”

“And did you ever have to use any of those weapons?”

Coltrane looked away.

“Did you?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It does.”

“Yes,” Coltrane said, “I had to use some of those weapons.”

Jennifer shuddered. “I feel like I’m in a blizzard. I don’t want to hear any more.”

“Then you shouldn’t have asked.”

Now it was Jennifer’s turn to look away.

“Remember, you had a choice to be on your own, but you insisted on hiding with me.”

“Great,” Jennifer said. “This is something else we can curse Ilkovic for. He’s got us arguing. About guns.”

16

ALTHOUGH THEIR SLEEPING BAGS LAY NEXT TO EACH OTHER, Coltrane felt a disquieting sense that he and Jennifer slept apart. Not that he was able to get much sleep. Preoccupied, he lay awake in the darkness, staring toward the ceiling. He kept thinking of the last thing Jennifer had said to him before emotional exhaustion forced them to lie down. “Hiding with you in this house, I could almost pretend that we’re in a secret, magical place where Ilkovic can’t get to us. But seeing that gun on the floor next to you reminds me that there isn’t any magical place.”

Thinking of all the pain and despair he had photographed, Coltrane quietly agreed. It was yet another reason to curse Ilkovic. After having worked so hard to turn his back on the direction in which his career had been taking him, Coltrane again found himself enmired in bleakness. Street smarts and survival skills that he had hoped never again to use were depressingly familiar. Ilkovic had dragged him back. And for that, and for Daniel and Greg and the tension between Jennifer and himself and his fears about his grandparents, Ilkovic was going to pay.

The silence smothered him. His cheeks felt warm. He had never associated grief with a fever, but now that he thought about it, grief was one of the worst illnesses anybody could suffer. Before he realized what he was doing, he stood, approached the murky stairway, and descended toward the bottom level.

Not bothering to look toward the entrance to the vault, he passed the corridor that separated the vault from the darkroom and reached the French doors that led outside to the pool. The illumination of stars and the moon made glints on the still water. He saw the vague outlines of the nearest shrubs and flowers.

His cheeks feeling warmer, he reached to open one of the doors, to let the night air cool him, and at once stopped himself, remembering that he had to disarm the security system before he went outside. Besides, what if Ilkovic had somehow tracked him here? It would be foolish to expose himself by leaving the house.

And what about Jennifer? What if she woke up and couldn’t find him? All too vividly, he remembered what that dismaying emotion had been like – this morning, when Jennifer had gotten up earlier than he did and he had frantically searched the house, at last discovering that she was outside in the back garden.

“I solved our little mystery. The different numbers. Twenty-five versus thirty,” she had said distractedly.

It had taken him a moment before he understood what she was talking about. “When we paced the inside and the outside of the vault?”

“There’s a door around the side. To a utility area.”

Yes, mystery solved. The missing five feet were easily accounted for, taken up by an area devoted to a water heater and a furnace/air conditioner. It’s amazing how we ignore the obvious, Coltrane thought, glancing behind him toward the corridor that paralleled the vault. It was also amazing how an emotion-ravaged mind sought distractions.

There was something about that utility area… A thought struggled to surface, then sank back into the roiling depths of his subconscious.

He shook his head, unable to clear it. Glancing at the luminous dial on his watch, he saw that the time was ten after two. You need to try to sleep. You’ve got only a day to figure out the details of what to do if Ilkovic follows you from the cemetery on Wednesday.

His hand cramping on the shotgun, Coltrane stepped back from the wall of windows and the glass-paneled door. About to turn to go upstairs to Jennifer, he paused as the thought that had struggled to surface made another attempt.

Something about the utility area.

Yes, it was deep enough to account for the five-foot difference between the inside and the outside of the vault. But what about…

How wide was…

The thought broke free. The utility area doesn’t stretch all the way along that section of the house, he realized. When I looked inside, it was only about eight feet from left to right.

But the vault’s fifteen feet wide. If the utility area takes up eight feet of that, what’s in the remaining seven feet of the strip along that side?

Coltrane’s cheeks became cold, blood draining from them. There wasn’t another door on the outside wall. That meant if there was a seven-by-five-foot area farther along, the only way to get into it would have to be…

Jesus.

It was the first time Coltrane had ever wanted to enter the vault.