The Cornwalls Are Gone (Amy Cornwall #1) - James Patterson Page 0,51

have waited some more. Maybe I should have just tossed a cement block through the rear sliding-glass door. Maybe going in through the front door isn’t the best idea.

Too late.

I’m committed.

The door opens up, and unlike my comrades in the service, who more often than not can practice and re-practice and practice yet again a raid on a compound or a heavily defended house, I’m going in cold, as they say, making up shit as I go along.

I turn to see who’s there, and holy God, it’s one bulky and scary-looking guy. Hispanic, shaved head, tattoos up and down his thick biceps and legs, even on his hairless and muscular chest, and he’s wearing black shorts and a tank top, and now, I’ve got to hit him, now.

“Yes?” he says in accented English. “What do you want?”

My hand quickly goes to my coat pocket and his eyes widen and he steps back, reaching to his side where I see the handle of a pistol, but I’m faster and I come out with the same canister of pepper spray I took from the trooper in Tennessee, and I push forward, aim it right at his face, and thumb the trigger.

A slight hiss.

Nothing happens.

Nothing comes out.

It’s empty!

The guy pauses and then bursts out laughing at me, and I know what’s going through his mind: Silly girl can’t do anything right.

So I punch him hard in the throat, still holding the metal canister in my hand.

He coughs, stumbles back, and I punch him again in the throat, and he lifts both hands to his neck, starts gurgling, his eyes slightly bulging, and I know that my allotted seconds to get this done are sliding away, so I give a good whirl on my left foot, kick out with my right, and catch him behind the near knee.

He tumbles to the floor, damn near making the room shake.

I put the useless canister back into my jacket pocket, pull off one of the strips of silver duct tape I earlier placed on both pant legs, and with a knee to the small of his back, I work quickly to get his wrists bound behind him. I grab the pistol from his waistband, toss it to one corner of the room, and then I tape his bare lower legs, and I’m thinking, Fast, have to go faster, and then I look up and a skinny guy is coming into the room, holding a black leather book with a gold cross on the cover.

We stare at each other for a second.

He ducks back into the kitchen and I get up and move fast, and he’s turning around in the kitchen, spinning, and the book is now a pistol, and he’s bringing it up, shooting at me.

I react within seconds, pulling out my SIG Sauer, remembering the long hours on the range—“Better to get off an imperfect shot than wait to make a perfect shot and get your head blown off”—and my first round misses, the second one catches him in the upper right thigh, and the next one strikes him dead center in the chest.

He falls against the near cabinets, making one door pop open, and dishes and glassware fall out, and his moans and the sound of the shattering glass nearly drown out the bellowing from behind me.

I whirl and the big guy has torn away the strips of duct tape and is grabbing another pistol from under the couch, and he brings up his weapon and I shoot again, and I catch him right in his mouth. He falls right back in a spray of blood and knocks over the television set, increasing its volume, and some sort of Mexican music starts echoing through the house, overpowering the ringing in my ears.

I’m shaking now, and I go forward and grab the big guy’s pistol from the floor, stick it in my waistband, and then retrieve the weapon from the skinny guy in the kitchen, put it in the opposite waistband of my jeans, and I’m panting, trying to get some sort of semblance of calm, because if there’s another gunman in here, he’d have to be as deaf as the biggest bat in the world not to hear all the loud noise coming from this horrid gunfight.

But nobody else is coming at me.

I go up a short hallway, hammer open a door to a bedroom, check under the bed, and then the closet. Lots of piles of smelly clothes and porn magazines. I go to