*   *   *

The deadline came.

The deadline passed.

Five more minutes followed it into oblivion.

No sign of Jesse.

Elizabeth was alone. Profoundly alone, existentially alone, as alone as she had ever been in her life: She had no backup, the Mirror was half a continent away, and not even August Kemp could find her unless she radioed him her location. Which she was not prepared to do, at least until this problem was resolved. By her calculation, the City boat that was supposed to carry her and the runners back to Oakland had probably just docked. Within minutes Kemp would get a they’re-not-here call from the foot of Market Street. And several varieties of hell would then break loose.

Not her problem, not right now. She was about to walk into a firefight. The last time Elizabeth had fired a weapon in earnest was when she had taken out the gunman at Futurity Station. Before that, all her targets had been cardboard silhouettes. The men she was about to go up against had learned their skills differently. They had practiced their marksmanship on warm flesh.

On the other hand (or so she told herself), they were ignorant criminals armed with knives and antique revolvers. She had the advantage of superior knowledge, superior armaments, and surprise. She might be able to kill at least a few of them before they had time to put up a unified resistance.

Unfortunately, “killing a few of them” was the only plan she had. If Jesse was still operational, it would help. If not—

She promised herself she’d retreat if the battle became too one-sided. A memory of Gabriella hung in her mind’s eye, Gabriella when she was still a baby, barely old enough to grab the edge of a chair and haul herself upright, tumbling down on her diaper-padded bottom as often as not—Gabriella, she told the memory, I’ll be home soon. Even if it meant leaving Jesse for dead.

But until that choice was forced upon her?

She had work to do.

She remembered the layout of the house from the night she had spent there. A drill sergeant had once told her she had “excellent tactical memory.” Basically, she was facing a house occupied by an unknown number of lethally dangerous men who were expecting to be attacked. Her sole advantage was that they were not expecting to be attacked by a woman. It made a frontal approach possible.

She walked up the drive in plain sight, her Velcro dress covering the borrowed trousers, her ludicrous hat on her head, the calico travel bag clutched in both hands like a purse.

What surprised her was how close she managed to get before anything happened. Had the bad guys failed to post a lookout—were they that confident? Or had Jesse already reduced their numbers? No matter—she was nearly to the front steps when the door opened. Three men stepped onto the veranda, forming a thou-shalt-not-pass scrimmage line in front of her. They were dressed like gamblers, and their body language gave off a smug don’t-fuck-with-me vibe. All were conspicuously armed, though they kept their pistols holstered. The man in the middle said, “What do you want here?”

Elizabeth widened her eyes in mock surprise. “Is Mrs. Hauser at home? Abigail Hauser?”

“She’s indisposed just now. What’s your business with Abigail Hauser?”

“Well, I don’t like to say. But I borrowed money from her last year, a great deal of money—she was very generous—and I’ve come to pay it back.”

Two of the men seemed to find this declaration fantastically funny, judging by their efforts to keep a straight face, but the one in the middle managed to sustain a somber expression. “Well, Mrs. Hauser can’t be disturbed, but I’ll give her the money if you like. Is it in that bag there?”

Behind this banter lurked Elizabeth’s memory of what had happened to Sonny Lau and her knowledge that these men had participated in it. The pretense was bound to fail before long. “Yes,” she said, “it’s here,” reaching into the bag. “And there’s a message that goes with it.”

“All right, then, what’s the message?”

What the bag contained was a Glock with a full clip. “The message is, Sonny Lau says hello.”

She had shot the first two men before the third recovered enough presence of mind to reach for his Colt, and his hand failed to make it as far as the grip before he joined his friends. Then Elizabeth was running around the side of the house with the familiar shooting-range ache in her wrist and her heart doing gymnastics in her chest. She had just killed or critically injured three strangers. Two with wounds to the upper torso, not survivable without immediate medical intervention, and one with a head shot, so obviously deadly that nothing short of divine intervention could repair it. But she couldn’t allow herself to dwell on that.

She had half hoped more of Candy’s henchmen would come boiling out at the sound of gunfire—more easy targets—but that didn’t happen. They were presumably smart enough not make that mistake a second time. And that gave her a fleeting moment to think about what would happen next.

The house was set far enough from the street that the gunfire failed to draw attention, the sound probably muted by hedges and walls or lost on passersby distracted by the Chinatown inferno. So she was still on her own. The calico bag was empty (she had dropped it as soon as she took out the gun), but its other contents were concealed on her body under the fake dress. Which she ought to think about losing, for mobility’s sake, now that it had served its purpose as a distraction. Then maybe a flash-bang through the window she was crouching under, which would create enough chaos for her to circle around to the back. And from there—

She never completed the thought.

She felt the pressure first, a pricking just under her rib cage. She flinched away reflexively and felt a second pressure, an arm encircling her throat, now tightening like a noose, and where had this come from, how could she not have heard or seen the man approaching? A question that ceased to matter as soon as it occurred to her. “Drop your gun,” a voice said, intimately close to her ear, a male voice, unhurried and unafraid. “Right now.”

A voice accustomed to being obeyed. Her fingers opened. The Glock thudded into moist earth.

The pressure under her ribs was the point of a knife. Her head was immobilized but she could see the hand, the hilt, a wedge of steel brighter than the darkness around it. The hand moved slightly; the blade advanced a fraction of an inch. It had already pierced her skin. The pain wasn’t bad. Yet. But she felt a drop of blood trickle down under her layers of clothing. She gasped for breath against the arm that clamped her throat, and the arm tightened.

The voice (and she was almost certain it belonged to Roscoe Candy) whispered, “You’re the one that was with him, aren’t you? You’re Jesse Cullum’s woman.”

She couldn’t get air enough to give him an answer. He seemed not to expect one. The tip of the knife was in her, and now it went a little deeper. Her eyes clouded, some combination of hypoxia and tears, and she thought again of Gabriella, so impossibly far away.

Then the tongue of the knife touched bone, her bottommost rib, sending an electric arc of pain through her body, and her spine arched, driving the knife deeper.

Then, suddenly, the pain relented.

“Come inside,” Roscoe Candy said, “where we can talk.”

*   *   *

Jesse stayed in the lower turret room with his eye to the door after the shooting stopped. Elizabeth, he thought, but there was no way of knowing what she was up to, and although he could charge down the big staircase with guns blazing—he gave it some thought—such a move would likely leave him dead and the hostages in danger. So he bit his lip and watched the corridor for several long, futile minutes, trying to make sense of the agitated voices drifting up from down below.