Aurora(85)

He stood still for a full minute and let his eyes gather whatever bits of light there were in the house. The thin candlelight in the living room became visible around the edges of the kitchen door, which looked as if it swung both ways, like in a restaurant. He moved toward it.

Thom was sweating abundantly. The jacket he’d worn to conceal the gun in his belt was denim, and he’d started to perspire in the humid August night before he’d even stepped out of his car. Now, as he moved across the kitchen, his body tense and stiff, sweat was pouring out of him. He could feel it trickling down the back of his neck, out of his armpits, down his sides, on the backs of his knees, everywhere. He paused at the sink, wondering if he dared to slip the coat off. The real danger, he thought, was his hands—if his palms were wet and his grip on the Glock turned slick, he was afraid he’d drop it or, worse, fire it by accident.

But he’d have to set the gun down to take the coat off, and that was out of the question. He’d live with the sweat. He kept moving to the door to the living room, thinking that this sort of decision had never come up in his planning sessions. He wondered if, rather than spend so much time worrying over the right yoga instructor, he might not have been better off hiring a few former FBI agents to help him with infiltration training drills.

A voice from the living room snapped him back into the moment. It was a man’s voice, soft and deep, and was followed by footsteps. Thom stiffened, the gun in front of him, and pointed it at the door, ready for it to swing open. He didn’t know if he’d have the nerve to fire, if it came to that.

But it didn’t. The voice stopped, so did the footsteps, and the living room was quiet again.

Thom moved forward, covering the last few feet to the swinging door. He stood there, listening for more sounds from the other side. There weren’t any. He bent his right arm in an L-shape, holding the gun pointed at the ceiling, pressed his left palm against the swinging door, and pushed it open an inch and a half.

He turned his head, putting his left eye in the crack in the door. He could see into the living room and had a relatively high degree of confidence that he was not visible, given that the kitchen behind him was completely dark. His vantage point was from behind the sofa, which was about six feet away from him. He counted heads.

There were three people on the couch. On his far left, he could see the side of Aubrey’s face, lit by candlelight from the table. She was one. On the other end of the couch was a teenager he assumed was Rusty’s kid, Scott. His left cheek, dimly visible, looked as though it had taken a recent beating. There was someone seated between them, a bit shorter than Scott, or maybe slumped low on the couch. Thom didn’t know who that was.

Across the room, there were two more people. Rusty was standing at the mantel, leaning back against it. He looked as if he’d aged a decade since Thom saw him last. Seated in a chair in front of the fireplace, facing the couch, was a stout, bald man in a stained white shirt. Thom didn’t know who he was, but from his domineering posture, he guessed he was the ultimate source of the problem here.

No one in the room spoke. They were waiting. For him, Thom supposed.

He counted heads in the room again. Five people total. Aubrey had said there were three intruders. Take away Scott and Aubrey, that left Rusty, the bald man in the chair, and the mystery figure on the couch between Aubrey and Scott. Keeping an eye on them, Thom supposed.

All five were accounted for.

The only weapon in evidence was a kitchen knife, on a side table next to the bald guy in the chair.

Thom took a deep breath. He’d practiced his entrance and what he would say in his mind a hundred times. There were three motions he’d need to make before entering the room, and he had to do them all within the space of a second or two. He reviewed them one last time in his mind. Nothing left now but to do it.

Go.

He flicked the gun’s safety off with his right thumb, racked the slide on the top of the Glock with his left hand, and put his shoulder into the kitchen door, swinging it open wide.

All heads turned.

“Stay exactly where you are,” he said, his voice only quavering slightly.

So far, Thom felt, things had gone exceptionally well. He’d driven across the country, found food and gas on his own, armed himself, detected danger when he spoke to Aubrey, snuck into the house after dark, and come through the door and into the room with a loaded weapon, completely surprising everyone in the place. Really, it could not have gone better.

Except he’d counted wrong. He knew it the moment the three heads on the couch turned to look at him—Aubrey, Scott, and whoever-the-fuck-that-is in the middle. Far from being some criminal mastermind, the third figure, whom he’d assumed was one of the intruders, was a teenage girl. She too looked like she’d taken a couple punches to the face, her eyes showed fear, and her right hand, Thom could now see, was on the cushion, holding Scott’s tightly, their fingers interlaced.

All at once, Thom realized



The girl was not an intruder but a captive,

She was Scott’s girlfriend, who had come to stay with them, which Aubrey had told him about, and, shit, he really needed to listen more carefully when he talked to people,

That left a person unaccounted for,

Which explained the low voice and the footsteps he’d heard moments ago, as if moving across the room,

The swinging dining room door he’d shoved open blocked his view toward the back of the house, which, he remembered now, was where the bathroom was, and