Chapter 4
T
he van eased to a stop at the curb in front of the apartment house in the lower-middle-class neighborhood. The dark November night had settled down hours earlier. The Laundromat next door, along with the other businesses along the block, would have been closed by this hour even if it hadn't been Thanksgiving.
Habib Jabara considered Thanksgiving a sin against Allah, like all the other American holidays, most of which had their roots in pagan superstition.
In the months he had been here, he had studied a great deal about America, its people, their customs, their holidays. He wanted to know as much about his enemiesâAllah's enemiesâas possible, so it would be that much easier to destroy them.
Of course, in doing so one had to be careful not to allow those Western ways to pollute one's soul. Habib was convinced he had been successful in that. The Chicago Bears sweatshirt he wore was merely a disguise. He had never seen an American football game, although he was familiar with their obsession with the sport.
But when he wore the sweatshirt, people saw only a clean-cut young man who was a fan of “Da Bears,” so their eyes passed right over him and they never paused to think that his fondest wish might be to see all of them die screaming in agony.
A few of them, of course, might take heed of his dark skin, hair, and eyes, and wonder about his ethnicity, but there were plenty of his people here in this country already, with more coming all the time, urged on by Americans who congratulated themselves on their “tolerance,” never stopping to think that they might be inviting in their own destruction.
And there was no getting around itâHabib looked like a kid who ought to be bagging groceries at the local supermarket.
Mahmoud Assouri, behind the wheel of the van, grunted and said, “This is where he lives.”
Assouri was ten years older than Habib, stockier, swarthier, and generally more threatening-looking. That actually came in handy because people tended to watch him more closely and ignore his younger companion. If they were going to be suspicious of anybody, it was Assouri.
“He doesn't have a roommate, you said?” Habib asked. “No girlfriend who might be staying over?”
Assouri shrugged and said, “No roommate. I can't say for sure whether he might have gotten lucky down at the pub.”
The older man was an interesting blend. He had been in the United States for eight years and most of the time sounded like an American, but he had also spent several years in England before that and occasionally a British word or expression cropped up in his speech, like “pub.”
“Well, if there's a girl up there with him, that's her bad luck,” Habib said. He opened the passenger door and stepped out of the van. “Come on.”
Chapter 5
A
aron Ellis's eyes never stopped moving. That was a habit he had acquired all the way back in juvie, not that many years time-wise but an eternity in the way it seemed to him. He hadn't spent half his life behind bars, but he hadn't missed it by much.
You couldn't afford to not pay attention in prison. As much as possible, you had to watch in all directions, all the time, because you never knew where or when trouble would come at you. Even in juvenile corrections, there were plenty of guys who wanted to mess you upâor worse.
It hadn't taken long for Aaron to learn to be alert. The guys who tried something failed to take him by surprise, so they lost any advantage they might have had.
Aaron was just a medium-size guy, not some muscle-bound hulk, but he fought like a berserker when he had to. Living with the old man had taught him that. Every stint inside he'd done, he had come out relatively undamaged.
At least physically.
Mentally, he wasn't so sure. A lot of the time these days, he worried that he was going crazy.
He jumped at the slightest sound. He kept seeing things from the corner of his eye, but when he turned his head to look, there was nothing there. He heard laughter, and sometimes crying, from empty rooms.
He slowed down as he drove through the suburban neighborhood. On the lawns in front of several of the houses on this block, kids were playing football. One of them overthrew a pass, and the ball bounced into the street, causing Aaron to brake as another kid dashed after it. The little punk scooped up the ball, waved at Aaron, and ran back to the game.
He cursed bitterly as he drove on. Why were all these people around? It was Thanksgiving. Weren't people supposed to go over the river and through the woods to freakin' Grandma's house on Thanksgiving?
Traditionally, holidays were a good time for guys like him to find empty houses to burglarize. This year it looked like everybody had stayed home.
Or maybe these were freakin' grandma's houses in this neighborhood, so the rest of the family had come here. That would be just his luck, Aaron thought.
He hadn't wanted to go back to burglarizing houses. When he'd gotten out of juvie he had sworn he would never do anything to get sent back there or anywhere else like that, but it hadn't taken him long to see that nothing had changed while he was inside.
The old man was still a jerk who liked to get drunk and knock his wife and kids around. Aaron's friends still stayed high on weed or crack or booze. His school was still a crumbling hellhole that wasn't much better than a prison itself. The temptationsâdrugs, stealing, fightingâwere still too much. All the vows he'd sworn to go straight were soon forgotten.
Since then, going in and out of the system for various offenses, he'd realized that there was no point in making such promises to himself or anybody else. There was a good reason prison gates were known as revolving doors.
Last time inside, though, an utter weariness had gripped him, so that he felt like he was three or four times older than he really was. He'd seen some of them, the old cons who had spent most of their lives behind bars and didn't really know what it was like to breathe free air anymore, and he'd decided it was time to grow up and break that pattern.
He wasn't a kid anymore. He was twenty-two years old, after all. Almost twenty-three.
But then his little sister Jennie, who was a senior in high school, got an early acceptance to college. Nobody in the family had ever gone to college, but she was smart. Really smart.
Aaron didn't see how that was possible, since she had come from the same parents he did and he knew he was dumb as dirt, but it was true. She could do it, could succeed and make something of herself, if she got the chance. She thought she had a pretty good shot at some partial scholarships.
But that wasn't going to be enough. Not hardly.
She deserved the break, and Aaron was going to do whatever he could to see that she got it, even if it meant going back on his word to himself.
Besides, he was already sort of in debt to the guy who had fronted him the weed he and Henry had been smoking a few days earlier, and that dude had a bad reputation when it came to guys who didn't pay what they owed, so Aaron figured if he could bust into a few places, find some good stuff to hock...
Well, two birds, one stone, right?
All he had to do was get over these damn nerves.
And
find a place that looked like nobody was home.
Wait a minute, he thought as he eyed a house on the left side of the street. No kids on the lawn, no cars in the driveway, all the curtains closed. When you broke into enough houses, you developed an instinct about which ones were safe and which ones weren't. This one
felt
safe to Aaron.
Best of all, it backed up to a concrete-lined drainage ditch, and on the other side of the ditch was the alley behind a strip shopping center where all the businesses were closed today.
That was one reason Aaron had chosen this street. He could park in the alley, out of easy sight from the surrounding streets, cross the drainage ditch, and get into the backyards of the houses. Most of them had wooden fences around them, so that would give him even more concealment.
He counted the houses until the end of the block so he'd know which one was his target, then turned left at the intersection and left again into the alley behind the shopping center. A moment later he was sliding down the ditch's sloping concrete side.
It hadn't rained in a while, so the ditch was dry except for a few puddles here and there. Quite a few leaves had drifted into it. They crackled under his feet as he crossed the bottom.
Getting up the other side was easy enough. The wooden fence had a back gate in it. He took a screwdriver with a thick, heavy shaft from his pocket and worked it into the gap between the fence and the gate. When he got it in the right position, he leaned on the tool, putting enough strength and weight into it to pull the screws holding the lock's hasp out of the wood. They barely made any noise as they came loose, certainly not enough to be heard over the football games playing on TVs in most of the houses along here.
Before swinging the gate open, Aaron put his eye to the gap and looked around the backyard as best he could. No dog was in sight. Not even a doghouse. That was good. He pushed the gate back, stepped into the yard.
The back door had a chain on it, but he kicked it open anyway. He stepped inside, feeling that little shiver go through him, the knowledge he was somewhere he didn't belong. It was a good feeling and a bad one at the same time.
He looked around. It was on the dim side in the house, but there was enough light for him to see that he was in a kitchen. Probably nothing in here worth stealing. If he had time, he'd take a quick look around on his way out.
He was about to head for the living room when he heard a squeaking noise from his left. He glanced in that direction and instinctively crouched and stiffened as he caught a glimpse of movement in the gloom of a hallway. Slowly, a grotesque shape rolled closer to him.
It wasn't so grotesque as it came closer and Aaron made out the details. It was just a guy in a wheelchair. Kind of sickening, though, because he was old, with just a couple of tufts of white hair sticking up from his bald scalp, and twisted up like he couldn't sit straight.
The old man had had a stroke, Aaron realized. The left side of his face hung down like melting wax. A string of drool hung from that corner of his mouth. The wheelchair was motorized, and the control was mounted on its left arm. The old man had a hand like a chicken claw hooked around it, pushing on it so the chair moved slowly forward.
As soon as Aaron realized somebody else was in the house, his pulse had kicked into high gear. Now, as he saw that it wasn't anything to be worried about, he relaxed a little. He held up both hands, palms out, and said, “Hey, old-timer, just take it easy. I won't hurt youâ”
“Damn right . . . you won't,” the old man wheezed from that crooked mouth. His right hand and arm looked like they hadn't been affected by the stroke as he raised them and pointed a heavy, silver-plated revolver with a long barrel at Aaron. “Get outta . . . my house . . . you little punk.”
Aaron's eyes widened. He stood there frozen for a split-second, considering his options. He could rush the old man and try to take the gun away from him. The revolver might not even be loaded, and it might not work if it was. And could the old guy really see well enough to shoot him?
It wasn't worth risking his life to find out, Aaron decided.
He turned and bolted for the door between the kitchen and the dining room.
The gun went off behind him, so loud it was like a giant had clapped his hands against Aaron's ears. He yelled in a combination of shock, pain, and fear but kept moving. He hadn't felt a bullet hit him, so he knew the old man had missed.
The gun blasted again as Aaron reached the door between the kitchen and dining room. Splinters flew from the jamb.
Aaron knew if he had charged the wheelchair, the old man would have blown a big hole right through him.
He sprinted through the kitchen, out the back door, and across the yard. He expected to hear the gun go off again at any moment, but it didn't. That wheelchair had been moving so slowly the old man probably hadn't reached a spot where he could draw a bead on him again. But he might, so Aaron didn't slow down.
He went through the broken gate, slid down the side of the drainage ditch, charged across and up the other side, and ran to his car. He fumbled the keys into the ignition, started the old rattletrap, and gunned along the alley.
When he came out at the far end of the shopping center, he slowed down a little, pulled out onto the street, and headed away from the neighborhood.
His hands were clamped hard around the steering wheel because he knew that if he let go of it, they would start to shake. This wasn't the first time in his life he'd been shot at, but it had been a while. Maybe he really had lost his nerve. The way he'd been seeing and hearing things that weren't there lately, he wouldn't doubt it for a second.
“Screw it,” he said out loud. “No more jobs today.” He still wanted to get some money for Jennie's college, and he still needed to pay off that guy he owed, but he would worry about that tomorrow.
Tomorrow . . . Black Friday, he had heard people call it. The day after Thanksgiving, when all the stores had sales and people crowded into them.
Maybe that was just what he needed: a crowd. With a bunch of people around him, whatever phantoms were pursuing him couldn't get to him, could they? Normally, he didn't like crowds, but right now he sensed that was exactly what he needed to get his mind off everything.
“Screw it,” he said again. “I'll just go to the mall tomorrow.”
Chapter 6
S
ister Angela DiNardo wiped some drool off Pete McCracken's chin and said, “My, you certainly had yourself some excitement tonight, Peter.”
“Too much excitement,” the uniformed cop with the '70s-style mustache said. His belly bulged against the blue shirt he wore. “You can't go around shootin' off guns in a neighborhood like this. You got everybody for a couple of blocks all stirred up, like a war was fixin' to break out.”
“It was . . . a home invasion,” Pete said, fighting for breath as usual. Since the stroke, his left lung didn't work correctly, so the right one had to take up the slackâand it was ninety years old like the rest of him. “I got a right to . . . defend my property.”
“Sure you do, old-timer, but not with a cannon like that.” The cop nodded toward the Ruger Redhawk. 44 Magnum revolver that he'd placed on the table in an evidence bag.
“It worked . . . didn't it? Damn little weasel . . . took off runnin' . . . like the devil was after him.” Pete glanced at Sister Angela. “Sorry, Sister.”
“That's all right, Peter,” she told him. “I know you're upset about what happened.”
“I'm just upset I missed the little shâI mean ... the sonuva . . . the . . . the . . .”
His voice trailed off into a frustrated growl, as he couldn't come up with any way to describe the kid who had broken into his house without using profanity. Sister Angela wasn't a stickler about such things, but he knew she was disappointed in him when he cussed. He didn't like letting her down.
For one thing, he depended on her. She came around nearly every day to check on him. She took him to the grocery store and helped him handle any other errands that needed done, and when he didn't feel up to that, she took care of those chores herself and delivered the groceries to him.
That semblance of independence was important to him. He wanted to be able to stay here in his own house for as long as possible. He knew that if they ever stuck him in one of those damn
homes
, he wouldn't last a month.
Home. That was a stupid name for them, when they were anything but.
For another thing, he had a rule about not making good-looking young women mad at him. Sister Angela had that dark-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned Italian beauty, like that Sophia Loren and Gina Lollabrigida in those movies he'd watched fifty years ago.
Or Claudia Cardinale. Pete sighed. Claudia Cardinale, now there was a woman!
Sure, Sister Angela was a nun, but they didn't wear those habits that covered everything up anymore, and she was a hot number. He supposed it might be a little sacrilegious for him to think of her like that, but at his age he couldn't do anything but look, and anyway, he wasn't sure he'd ever believed what the priests said about lusting in your heart being as bad as doing the real thing.
If that really was true, then hell was surely full up by now, and there wouldn't be any room for him!
“You say the guy kicked the back door open?” the cop asked as he looked at the damaged door.
“Yeah. I heard the crash . . . and came in here . . . to see what was up.”
“You had the gun with you?”
“I keep it . . . with me . . . nearly all . . . the time. Never know . . . when you'll need it.”
“No offense, Mister . . . uh . . .” The cop consulted the notebook where he'd written down Pete's name. “No offense, Mr. McCracken, but a fella your age, you don't need a gun. Period.”
“If I hadn't had it . . . that kid would'a killed me.”
“I don't thinkâ”
“I got a good look . . . at his face. I could'a . . . identified him in court. I would have . . . too . . . if I'd ever had the chance. Yeah, he would'a . . . killed me . . . to shut me up . . . if I hadn't had the gun.”
“You're in illegal possession of a firearm,” the cop said stubbornly. “You got no Firearm Owners Identification Card. I got to confiscate this weapon.”
“Are you going to arrest him?” Sister Angela asked anxiously. “You can see for yourself, Mr. McCracken is really in no shape to be arrested.”
“What?” The cop shook his head. “No, I'm not gonna arrest him. I'll just file a report. It'll be up to the DA to decide what to do about the case.”
“Put me in jail,” Pete said, mustering as much defiance as he could. “See if I . . . care.”
Sister Angela rested a hand on his shoulder and said solemnly, “Nobody's going to put you in jail, Peter. I'm not going to let that happen.”
“Well . . .” The cop scratched at his jaw and frowned in thought. “I've got your statement, Mr. McCracken. I'll file a report, and we'll go from there.”
“You gonna look for . . . that punk who tried to . . . rob me?”
“He could be fifty miles away by now. But I've got the description you gave me, and we'll circulate itâ”
“Not gonna do . . . squat . . . in other words.” The pause he had to take to drag in a breath had given him a chance to come up with a suitable substitute for what he'd almost said.
“I'll file a report,” the cop said yet again, like something a priest repeated several times during Mass. He sounded exasperated now. “You'll need to get this back door fixed, and the gate in your fence, too.”
“How is he supposed to do that on Thanksgiving Day night?” Sister Angela demanded. “Nobody's working today.”
“Not my problem, Sister. Helping people, that's more in your line of work.”
He picked up the bagged and tagged revolver, gave them both a curt nod, and, walking out of the kitchen, headed back toward the front of the house.
“I'll let myself out,” he added over his shoulder.
When the front door had closed behind the cop, Sister Angela said, “Ooh, I am so mad right now.”
“Not . . . at me . . . I hope,” Pete said.
Quickly, she shook her head.
“No, of course not. I don't care what that officer said, you didn't do anything wrong.”
“I don't have a permit . . . for that gun.”
“Well, technically that may not be legal, but as far as I'm concerned, you earned the right to do whatever you please as long as you don't hurt anyone else. You helped save this country. In fact, you helped save the entire world.”
Pete liked hearing that. Not many people seemed to remember those things anymore. World War II was ancient history. He said proudly, “I did . . . didn't I?”
Of course he hadn't done it alone. He'd had a few million other GIs giving him a hand, spread out all the way from the South Pacific to Berlin.
But he'd been there, too, from the bloody, screaming hell of Normandy to the frozen hell of Bastogneâ“Nuts! ”âto those god-awful concentration camps they'd liberated that truly were hell on earth. He'd seen an ocean of blood spilled and had added to it himself in more than one battle. He'd been just a raw, eighteen-year-old recruit on June 6, 1944, when he went ashore on Omaha Beach, and a seasoned veteran of nineteen when the war in Europe ended less than a year later.
By then, his eyes were a lot older than that when you looked into them. A thousand years older.
But when it was over, he'd come home and got on with his life, like most of the guys who had been overseas with him. He had worked, married, raised a family, seen his kids move away, buried his wife, married again, buried that wife as well, and kept on keepin' on until the stroke meant that he couldn't anymore.
These days, sure, he was just playing out the hand he'd been dealt and waiting for the game to be over. He knew that, but even so, he was damned if he was going to let some punk bust into his place and steal his stuff and maybe try to kill him.
Life might not be what it once was, but anybody who tried to take it from him was gonna get a fight.
His thoughts had wandered off. They did that a lot these days. Sister Angela was talking again. He forced his attention back onto her and heard her say, “. . . guest room, all right, Peter?”
“What? I'm sorry.”
She smiled, never losing her patience with him.
“I said I'd stay in the guest room tonight, so you won't be here alone.”
“I'm used to . . . bein' alone.”
“Yes, but we won't be able to get that door repaired until tomorrow, and you don't need to be here by yourself.”
Yeah, like a twenty-six-year-old nun who weighed maybe 110 pounds was gonna be much help in a fight, he thought.
He shook his head stubbornly and said, “No, you . . . go on home. I'll be . . . fine.”
“You're sure?”
“I'm . . . positive.” He tried to make his tone firm enough that she'd know there was no use arguing with him.
“Well . . . all right. I might be able to fix the doorknob enough to keep the door shut for tonight,” she went on, “and we can prop a chair under it for added security. Then tomorrow morning I'll call someone to repair it and the gate.”
“It'll be . . . expensive.”
“Don't worry about that. I can take care of it if I need to.”
“I thought nuns were . . . poor.”
“Well, it's true that I'm not rich in anything except faith and friendship, but we're not as poverty-stricken as people always think we are.”
“I guess . . . I appreciate it, then, Sister . . . everything you're doin' for me.”
“I'm happy to do it. Will you be all right while I try to fix up the door?”
“Yeah. I guess I'll . . . watch some TV . . . or something.”
“All right.” As he started out of the kitchen, she added, “You know, I was planning on doing some shopping tomorrow. Would you feel up to going with me? I know you enjoy a little outing now and then.”
“Yeah, I suppose . . . I could do that.”
“It's settled, then . . . depending on when someone can come to work on the door, of course.” Impulsively, she came over to him, bent down, and kissed him on top of the head. “Don't worry about a thing, Peter. I'll take good care of you.”
“Thanks,” he rasped. This was the first time a pretty girl had kissed him in, Lord, he couldn't remember when. Nun or no nun, he wasn't going to complain.
She was wrong about one thing, though, he thought. He got hold of the knob on the chair's left arm and pushed it forward, then to the left so that the slowly rolling chair went into the hall instead of the living room. He went back to his bedroom and stopped the chair beside the dresser.
With his good arm and hand, he opened the top drawer and reached into it, sliding his hand under the pile of underwear until his fingers closed around cool metal. The side of his mouth that still worked curved upward in a grin.
That damn cop might have taken the Ruger with him, but Pete still had the Browning Hi-Power. Sister Angela's heart might be in the right place, but if there was ever any real trouble to be dealt with, a few well-placed 9mm rounds would be a hell of a lot more effective.
“Heh,” Pete said happily as he looked at the semi-automatic pistol. They would just see who was gonna take care of who.