nine, but sometime around nine-fifteen or nine-thirty, you can’t see the golf ball anymore.”

“Get there at nine-thirty and hope for the best,” Jane said. “Maybe there’d be some way to lure him out?”

“Like what?”

“Let me think about it.”

HE WENT UP to take a shower, and she thought about it: how to get Davenport outside, with enough certainty that Leslie would buy the idea. Then she sat down and made her list, looked at the list, dropped it in the shredder, and thought about it some more.

Leslie was working on “Cheeseburger in Paradise” when she stepped into his office and brought up the computer. She typed two notes, one a fragment, the other one longer, taken from models on the Internet. When she was done, she put them in the Documents file, signed off, pushed the chair back in place, walked up the stairs, and called through the bathroom door, “I’ve got to run out: I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

The water stopped. “Where’re you going?”

“Down to Wal-Mart,” she said through the door. “We need a couple of baseballs.”

WHEN SHE GOT back home, Leslie was in the living room, sliding the rifle, already loaded, into an olive-drab gun case. He was dressed in a black golf shirt and black slacks.

“God, I hate to throw this thing away,” he said. “We’ll have to, but it’s really a nice piece of machinery.”

“But we have to,” Jane said. She had a plastic bag in her hand, and took out two boxes with baseballs inside.

“Baseballs?”

“You think, being the big jock, that you could hit a house a hundred feet away with a baseball?”

“Hit a house?” Leslie was puzzled.

“Suppose you’re a big-shot cop sitting in your house, and you hear a really loud thump on your front roof, or front side of the house at nine-thirty at night,” Jane said. “Do you send your wife out to take a look?”

Leslie smiled at her. “I can hit a house. And you get smarter all the time.”

“We’re both smart,” Jane said. “Let’s just see if we can stay ahead of Davenport.”

“Wish we’d done this first, instead of that harebrained dog thing,” Leslie said. “You oughta see the holes in my legs.”

“Maybe later.” Jane looked at her watch. “I have to change, and we have to leave soon. Oh God, Leslie, is this the end of it?” That, she thought, was what Jane Austen would have asked.

SHE TURNED to look back at the house when they left. She’d get back tonight, she thought, but then, if the police arrested her, she might not see it for a while. A tear trickled down one cheek, then the other. She wiped them away and Leslie growled, “Don’t pussy out on me.”

“You know how I hate that word,” she said. She wiped her face again. “I’m so scared. We should never have done Bucher. Never have killed at home.”

“We’ll be okay,” Leslie said. He reached over and patted her thigh. “We’ve just got to kill our way out of it.”

“I know,” she said. “It scares me so bad…”

THEY GOT to Davenport’s at nine-fifteen and cruised the neighborhood. Still too light. They went out to a bagel place off Ford Parkway and got a couple of bagels with cream cheese for Leslie. Nine-thirty. There were more people around than they’d expected, riding out the last light of day on the River Boulevard bike trail, and walking dogs on the sidewalk. But the yards were big, and they could park well down the darker side street and still see Davenport’s house, one down beyond the corner house.

There were lights all over Davenport’s house; the family was in.

“I could probably kill him with the baseball from here,” Leslie said, when they rolled into the spot Jane had picked. He had gotten in the backseat at the bagel shop. Now he slipped the rifle out of the case, and sitting with his back to the driver’s side of the car, pointed the rifle through the raised back window at Davenport’s front porch.

“No problem,” he said, looking through the scope. Jane put the yellow plastic ear protectors in her ears. Leslie fiddled with the rifle for a moment, then snapped it back to his shoulder. “No problem. A hundred and fifty feet, if these are hundred-foot lots, less if they’re ninety feet…” His voice was muffled, but still audible.

“God. I’m so scared, Les,” she said, slipping the revolver out of her purse. Checked the streets: nobody in sight. “I’m not sure I can do it.”

“Hey,” Leslie said.