through the house without hesitating, scanning around for a locked door, sweeping the area with his P14. It felt weird being in there. He wondered if Danny had ever been held captive there. The feeling made him angrier. He stowed it for now and focused on finding Rebecca Rydell. His guess was they’d be keeping her in the basement, and sure enough, the door that led down, by the stairs, was shut. Not only shut, but locked, as someone was desperately hammering against it from the inside and tugging against its handle and yelling. A girl’s voice, confirming Matt’s thinking.
He didn’t veer off to help her. There were at least four of them, and two potentially out of action still left at least two goons to deal with. Matt was easing past the stairs when another guy slipped out of the living room, on his way to help his now-dead colleague in the kitchen. Matt had a flash of recognition from the airfield. He didn’t stop to ponder it. He just lunged sideways and down as the guy from the plane loosed off a couple of rounds that crunched into the walls just as Matt let the big handgun rip. A round caught the guy in the thigh and he jerked backward momentarily, then his leg buckled and he collapsed on top of it. The shooter raised his gun, hoping for another shot. The strength had drained out of him and he looked like he was trying to lift a lead brick. Matt was on bent knees, down low against the wall, in a two-handed stance, and squeezed off two more rounds that took the guy out.
Matt stayed there for a beat. He glanced up the stairs, dismissed the idea that anyone would still be up there, and just stayed where he was and waited, arms outstretched, covering the door, watching the smoke and the flames wafting out from the living room, the screaming and the stomping echoing in his ears. He knew the fourth guy had to come back out if he didn’t want to get barbecued alive. And there was only one way out of that room.
And then he heard them. The sirens, low and grating squawks, distant but closing in. Just when he needed them. He’d told Jabba to call 911 the instant the first petrol bomb exploded, figuring he’d have enough time to storm through the house before the fire engines got there, and thinking they could come in handy if things hadn’t gone according to plan. The sirens grew louder, and he crouched lower, arms tensing up, expecting that the guy inside had heard them and would be needing to make a desperate, Butch-and-Sundance-like breakout. And then he heard something else: glass, shattering furiously, a loud crashing noise, and he understood. The guy had decided to bail through what was left of the bay window.
A stab of panic cut into Matt as he thought about Jabba, out there on his own without a weapon, but they’d parked a couple of houses back and he imagined neighbors were probably stepping out of their houses by now and converging outside the house, alerted by the flames and the gunshots, which would give Jabba some cover.
He waited a beat longer, straining to listen to any telltale noise that contradicted what he thought had happened, then scrambled back to the closed door. Rebecca Rydell—it had to be her—was still banging her fists against the door and shouting.
“Hey! What’s going on? Get me out of here!”
Matt tried the handle, but it was locked. “Step back from the door,” he yelled back. “I need to shoot the lock off.”
He waited a couple of seconds, then shouted, “You back?”
She said, “Yes,” and he fired—once, twice. It more than did the trick. The locks were old and basic, the door frame soft with age. He kicked the door in. Wooden treads led down to a basement where an attractive, tanned girl was cowering against the wall, her face riven with terror.
He extended his arm down toward her, waving her up. “Come on, we’ve got to go,” he hollered over the increasing crackle of the flames. She hesitated for a second, then nodded nervously and rose to her feet.
They stormed out of the house, past the startled faces of a few neighbors, past a fire truck that was swinging into the driveway. Matt peered through the darkness, scanning for the Bonneville, and a stab of dread cut into him as he saw that it