were safe. Another false alarm.
MR. BALLANTINE ROLLED OVER AND STARED AT THE CEIL-
ing. He was in his early sixties, and sleep had been difficult since the removal of the disc a year and a half ago. He had just dozed off, and was awakened by a sound. Or was it a sound? No place was safe in New Orleans anymore, and he’d paid two thousand dollars for an alarm system six months earlier. Crime was everywhere. They were thinking about moving.
He rolled to one side, and had just closed his eyes when the window crashed. He bolted to the door, turned on the bedroom light, and yelled, “Get up, “Wanda! Get up!” Wanda was reaching for her robe, and Mr. Ballantine was grabbing the shotgun from the closet. The alarm was wailing. They raced down the hall, yelling at each other and flipping on light switches. The glass had scattered throughout the den, and Mr. Ballantine aimed the shotgun at the window as if to prevent another attack. “Call the police!” he barked at her. “911!”
“I know the number!”
“Hurry up!” He tiptoed in his house shoes around the glass, crouching low with the gun as if a burglar had chosen to enter the house through the window. He fought his way to the kitchen, where he punched numbers on a control panel, and the sirens stopped.
LEO HAD JUST RESETTLED INTO HIS GUARD POST NEXT TO
the Spitfire when the crash shattered the stillness. He bit a hole in his tongue as he scrambled to his feet and darted once again to the hedge. A siren screamed briefly, then stopped. A man in a red nightshirt down to his knees was running onto the patio with a shotgun.
Leo crept quickly to the rear door of the garage, lonucci and the Bull were crouched in terror beside the boat. Leo stepped on a rake, and the handle landed on a bag full of aluminum cans. The three stopped breathing. Voices could be heard next door.
“What the hell is it?” lonucci demanded through clenched teeth. He and the Bull were shiny with sweat. Their shirts were stuck to their bodies. Their heads were soaking wet.
“I don’t know,” Leo bristled, spitting blood, inching toward the window facing the hedge that separated the Ballantine property. “Something went through a window, I think. I don’t know. Crazy bastard’s got a shotgun!”
“A what!” lonucci almost shrieked. He and the Bull slowly raised their heads to the window and joined Leo there. The crazy man with the shotgun was stomping around his backyard, yelling at the trees.
Mr. Ballantine was sick of New Orleans and sick of drugs and sick of punks trying to rob and pillage, and he was sick of crime and living in fear like this, and he was just so damned sick of it all, he raised his shotgun and fired once at the trees for good measure. That’ll teach the slimy little bastards that he meant business. Come back to his house, and you’ll leave in a hearse. BOOM!
Mrs. Ballantine stood in the doorway in her pink
robe, and screamed when he fired and wounded tne trees.
The three heads in the garage next door hit the dirt when the shooting started. “Sumbitch is crazy!” Leo screeched. Slowly, they raised their heads again in perfect unison, and at precisely that instant, the first police car pulled into the Ballantine driveway with blue and red lights flashing wildly.
lonucci was the first one out the door, followed by the Bull, then Leo. They were in a huge hurry, but at the same time careful not to attract attention from the idiots next door. They scooted along, close to the ground, dashing from tree to tree, trying desperately to make it to the woods before there was more gunfire. The retreat was orderly.
Mark and Reggie huddled deep in the brush. “You’re crazy,” she kept muttering, and it was not idle talk. She honestly believed that her client was mentally unbalanced. But she hugged him anyway, and they squeezed close together. They didn’t see the three silhouettes scampering along until they crossed through the fence.
“There they are,” Mark whispered, pointing. Not thirty seconds earlier, he had told her to watch the gate.
“Three of them,” he whispered. The three leaped into the underbrush, less than twenty feet from where they were hiding, and disappeared into the woods.
They squeezed closer together. “You’re crazy,” she said again.
“Maybe so. But it’s working.”
The shotgun blast had almost sent Reggie over the edge. She’d been trembling when