In the pantry, Amity heard a second whump that rattled things in the walls.

A weariness settled through her mind as she thought, Now what? She wasn’t physically weary, because she’d slept soundly for a few hours the previous night in the Bonner house, while her father kept a watch on their bungalow. She didn’t want to be one of those girls, the kind without enough fortitude in the face of adversity. It was always nice, however, in the middle of an epic quest, to have a respite with, say, a kindly retired couple—she having once been a maid to a princess, and he having been a former foundry man who had forged armor for the bravest knights—who would invite you into their cottage in the enchanted forest to share their dinner and then have a pipe and a snifter of brandy by the fire, with two good dogs snoring by the warm hearth. After that convivial evening and a safe sleep in a goose-down bed while the dogs stood guard against witches and warlocks, you were fortified and ready to carry on at any cost.

Instead, what she had was a pantry with canned goods and bags of dried beans that made her want to fart just by looking at them. She was alone and afraid and on the brink of being dispirited.

At least, when she dared to take the wet cloth off her face and breathe without that filter, she found the concentration of gas in the pantry was so low that she didn’t pass out.

After the second whump, the brief weariness lifted from her because unidentifiable sounds like that always meant something was going to happen. Lord knew what. And whether you were weary or not, you’d better be prepared for whatever was coming.

She got to her feet and took two cans of pears from a shelf, intending to throw them at whoever opened the door.

85

According to this Ed Harkenbach, who seemed to have more street smarts and be somewhat more balanced than the Ed who had entrusted Jeffy with his key to everything, the security alarm was nothing to worry about.

“A lot of things change from timeline to timeline,” he said as he led Jeffy along the hallway to Duke Pellafino’s study, “but in those that are at all similar to this world, one of the things you can rely on is that the police will take at least twenty minutes to respond to a security alarm in a private home. We’ll have our guns long before then.”

“How can you be certain Duke has guns?”

Raising his voice above the wailing alarm, Ed said, “How can I be certain the sun will rise in the east and set in the west? He said he was a detective in the Gang Activities Section of the LAPD.”

“He told me, too,” Jeffy said. “But he retired from that.”

“When you spend years putting hard-core sociopaths in prison, many of them MS-13 lunatics from Mexico and points south, psychos who like to behead people and hang others from streetlamps before eviscerating them, who butcher babies for pleasure, you have to figure if one of them gets out of prison, he might come looking for you. To a guy like Duke, retirement doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to your average accountant.”

In Pellafino’s study, as the house alarm continued to shrill, they found a handsome mahogany gun cabinet. The doors were locked, and the glass in them proved to be armored when Ed tried to shatter it with the butt of his pistol.

“Stand back,” the physicist ordered, and with two shots he blew out the lock on the cabinet.

The crash of the shots temporarily half deafened Jeffy, and the screaming alarm seemed to quiet to a mournful wail.

Yanking open drawers in the base of the cabinet, Ed found two handguns, spare magazines, and boxes of ammunition. “A Sig Pro by Sig Sauer. Chambered for forty-caliber Smith and Wesson rounds. Ten-round magazine. Polymer frame but the slide rails are solid pieces of machined steel. Think you can handle it?”

“I’ve practiced a lot with my pistol.”

“This one’s more powerful than yours. Expect some recoil, aim low,” Ed advised as he loaded a magazine and snapped it into the pistol.

Jeffy took the offered Sig Pro. He didn’t want to kill anyone or wound anyone or even point a gun at anyone, but if Falkirk and his goons laid a hand on Amity or Michelle, then he’d do what he had to do. Taking a life in self-defense or to protect the innocent was killing, but it wasn’t murder. If he had to kill people in this world, maybe there would be worlds in which ultimate violence was never required of him.

Ed loaded two spare magazines and passed them to Jeffy. Then from the rack of long guns above the drawers, he chose for himself a 12-gauge pistol-grip pump-action shotgun. He clicked a round into the breach, inserted three more in the magazine tube, and loaded his pockets with shells.

“How,” Jeffy wondered, “does a renowned physicist and bow-tied academic turn himself into a kick-ass gunman?”

“Necessity.”

Ed led the way out of the study and turned left in the hall, heading toward the front of the house.

“Where are we going?” Jeffy asked as he followed.

“Upstairs. When we port back to your timeline, we don’t want to pop into the kitchen if Falkirk is there with ten of his goons.”

Jeffy’s hearing was coming back. The alarm swelled louder.

He said, “What if the house is still full of gas?”

“Then we’ll port out before taking a breath, try again in a couple minutes. But there won’t be gas. The place will be clear. Falkirk meant to hit hard and wrap up the attack fast.”

Ed seemed certain that the assault had involved an aerosol sedative, not a lethal gas, and Jeffy wanted to believe that was the case. After all, he’d breathed it in and survived. But what if he’d inhaled twice instead of once?

The thought of Amity and Michelle dead in that kitchen sent waves of nausea slithering around his stomach again, but it also inspired rage. His spine stiffened and his jaws clenched. The pistol in his right hand felt as if it were a part of him, an extension of his body through which vengeance, if vengeance was justified, would be delivered without hesitation.

As they entered the foyer, Jeffy saw two police officers through the panes of glass in the front door. They were coming up the steps onto the porch. Evidently an ex-cop and friend of the force like Duke warranted a faster response than other citizens.

The cops saw Jeffy and Ed, and the physicist said, “Quick! Up the stairs.”

86

Falkirk and his two subordinates entered the house through the garage, where Lucas Blackridge waited for them. The SWAT specialist had already employed the lock-release gun to disengage the deadbolt in the connecting door.

Although the gassed occupants of the house would be sleeping off the dose they’d been given for another hour, Lucas and his two associates preceded their superior with their weapons drawn.

Nothing pleased John Falkirk half as much as the sight of his enemies—or even people who were merely a nuisance—broken and bloody and dead, preferably soaked in urine because terror rendered them incontinent in the last moments of their lives. This world—to one degree or another all worlds—was a hard proving ground where no one who reached adulthood cared for anyone but himself or herself, where the only truth was that everyone lied, where the only virtues were envy and ruthlessness, where the only goal worth having was the acquisition of power over others, and where the ultimate power was the power of death. Intuitively, everyone knew the darkest reality of human existence, but Falkirk believed that he was one of very few who could admit it even to themselves: Life was a war of all against all, waged with every weapon from lies and slanders to guns, knives, and bombs.

In the kitchen of the Pellafino residence, he was denied the delight of pooled blood and urine-soaked corpses. But he took some pleasure in the sight of Michelle Coltrane slumped unconscious in a chair at the breakfast table and, opposite her, a giant in another chair, a man who must have been Charles Pellafino.

His pleasure was short-lived when he discovered that these two were the only sleepers in the kitchen. Harkenbach, Coltrane, and the snarky girl were gone. They had all been here during the attack. In the Roto-Rooter van, Falkirk had listened to those fools, all five of them, when the timer on the pressurized tank released the clouds of sleep. No one escaped the house. Considering that the reaction time to the sedative was immediate, no one could have made it into another room. Anyway, gas infiltrated the entire house in seconds, so even if the missing three had fled the kitchen, they would have dropped in the downstairs hall. Through the open door, Falkirk could see no one in that passageway.