Aurora(84)

“I’m sorry that happened,” Thom said. He shifted his eyes toward the living room and inclined his chin, silently asking her if there were others inside.

Aubrey nodded in answer. But out loud, she continued their conversation. “I’m pretty pissed at you, Thom,” Aubrey said. “You never should have sent him, and you probably never should have sent so much money in the first place.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Did you bring the money Rusty asked for?”

“I did.” He held up a single finger to her, mouthing a silent question: one?

Aubrey shook her head no. He held up two fingers, another question. She shook her head no again and looked him up and down. “Where is it?”

“I had to keep it somewhere safe,” Thom said. “It’s nearby.”

He held up three fingers and, finally, Aubrey nodded.

“Well, then you’d better go get it,” she said. “He could come back at any time.”

“OK. I can be back in a couple hours.”

“Please hurry,” Aubrey said, and stepped back. She swung the door, holding eye contact with him until the last possible moment.

The door clicked shut, and he heard the dead bolt turn.

Thom hesitated, listening, but heard nothing more from inside. He turned, walked down the steps, and moved off down the sidewalk.

He thought, as he rounded the corner at the end of the block, that nothing in his life had even remotely prepared him for what he was going to do next.



Forty-five minutes later, night had fallen. There was a half-moon, enough to see by, but barely. Thom was grateful for the lack of street or house lights as he crept back around the corner and moved toward Aubrey’s house. He stayed out of the street, crossing as close to the other houses as he dared. Far enough away to not be seen from a window but close enough to be lost in the shadows.

The last light of day had seemed to take forever to fade. Thom had sat in his car the whole time, running through numerous scenarios in his head, all of them unacceptable. He thought first of the police, but even if he’d been able to get a call through to them, the chances they’d actually show up were slim. There was too much real chaos and bloodshed taking place for them to bother with his suspicions, no matter how well founded they were. And even if they’d agreed to come, from what Thom had heard over the past few months, law enforcement was as much a threat risk as a protector. True or not, it was a chance he couldn’t take. Private security, even if he’d been able to find it, couldn’t be trusted either. He didn’t know them here, they didn’t know him, and the promise of a substantial payday was as likely to incite bad behavior as good.

This was one problem he couldn’t outsource. This was something he’d have to solve himself.

He’d practiced four or five shots with the Glock back on the second level of the parking garage, where he’d been seized with the sudden knowledge that he’d skipped the firearms training courses Brady had arranged for him. It was simple enough, once he found the manual safety release near the upper rear of the gun and learned he needed to chamber a round before the gun would fire. After that, he could pull the trigger as many times as he wanted to shoot. If there were three intruders in the house, that may be a lot. Or maybe, he hoped, the mere presence of the gun, coming in suddenly and from an unexpected part of the house, would be enough for Rusty and whatever lowlife friends of his were with him. Thom would, after all, have the advantage of surprise.

He reached Aubrey’s driveway and ducked low, to avoid being seen through her kitchen window. He slid over to the side of the house and duck-walked beneath the sill. He could see wavering candlelight, faintly, coming from the living room.

He reached the storm doors on the side of the house, slid his hands across them to the middle, and found the biometric lock he’d had installed five years ago. One of the selling points of this unit, he remembered, was the shelf life of the wafer-thin lithium-ion battery inside it, which was guaranteed for ten years at an average temperature of seventy degrees. Given the winters in this part of the country, Thom had cut that estimate in half, which took the battery life down to about five years. He figured the chances it was still live at fifty–fifty.

When he had set up the lock, Thom had programmed in his own fingerprint as the system administrator. His concern, in those days, had been not for a home-invasion scenario but that Rusty, who was already starting to be lost to substances, would become a true threat of some kind. In that situation, Thom wanted to know that he could fly there and get into the house if he needed to.

He’d never shared that detail with Aubrey. Part of being a guardian angel, he’d told himself, is being invisible.

He pressed his thumb on the panel, the screen lit up green, and the lock buzzed. He lifted the door, an inch at a time, desperate not to make a sound. But the hinges squeaked. Thom froze. He held in place until the muscles in his arms started to burn, then lifted the door another two feet, slipped inside the house, and lowered it again.



The walk across the darkened kitchen was excruciating. Thom’s eyes had partially adjusted in the blacked-out basement, but when he reached the top of the stairs and came out into the kitchen, he realized he had almost no memory of the layout of the house. He regretted intensely that he hadn’t visited his sister in her home more than once. He hoped he’d get a chance to correct that one day.