It was past midnight. Kelly and Sherlock spoke quietly as they sat in the dark in the small bedroom, both wearing jeans and sweatshirts, since they had no idea if anything would happen. But if it did, neither wanted to get caught in a firefight in her pajamas.
Candle Street was quiet, only the occasional sound of a car driving by. The air in the bedroom was still, with the scent of stale cigar smoke. Kelly waved her hand in front of her nose. “They should have sprayed after they let Butchy Remis stay here. He’s a low-class hood who turned on his bosses. I remember those cigars.”
“Part of the extravagant lifestyle we signed up for at the Bureau,” Sherlock said, stretching. “You could be home in bed. So could I, for that matter. Do you ever regret signing up?”
“I always knew I wanted to be some kind of cop. I’ve got cop blood, as Cal put it, what with a dad and granddad in law enforcement. But I was kind of coasting, not really settled on a major. You’re young and having fun and wondering what life is going to bring to you. Well, one night life brought me two local creeps who thought it would be cool to hassle a student coming out of the library. Maybe they were thinking rape, but they never admitted that. Mrs. Otis, one of the campus security guards at Northwestern, took them both on, arrested them herself. She told me I had to learn to protect myself unless I expected her to trail me around. I signed up for martial-arts training the next day. Turned out both of Mrs. Otis’s sons were FBI agents. She said she wished she’d made the same choice when she was young enough to have the chance.
“We’d have coffee and I met her sons, talked to them about what they did. They were impressive. As I told Cal, one day I woke up and that was it. I’d be in the FBI. Did you join up before you met your husband, Sherlock?”
Sherlock remembered the now-blurred pain, finally at a blessed distance. She said only, “I joined up to catch my sister’s killer, and oddly enough, Dillon and I did. I discovered it was my calling then and never looked back. Did Cal tell you why he became an agent?”
Your sister’s killer? Kelly wanted to know what this was all about, but it was obvious Sherlock didn’t want to give her any specifics. She said, “I know it all had to do with Nine-Eleven and how an eighteen-year-old boy responded to it.”
“Yes, that was a big part of it. He also lost an uncle fighting Al Qaeda after the first Gulf War.”
So he’d told her some, but not about his uncle. He’d been little more than a boy then. “Ah, Sherlock,” she said, “Cal’s not seeing anyone currently, is he?”
“Not unless it just happened. I expect Dillon or I would have heard it floating around the CAU.” She grinned in the dark, even though she knew Kelly couldn’t see it. “The CAU is like a big, clear Olympic pool—even if you try to sink something under the surface, most everyone still sees it.”
“Same in New York. Everyone knows everything about you almost before you do.” She heard Sherlock yawn. “Sounds like you’re ready to hang it up. Think you can sleep?”
“Yes. I only hope I don’t dream about terrorists buzzing around me like rabid wasps.”
“I wonder if you have to get those nasty shots if you get bit by a rabid wasp.”
It didn’t seem like any time had passed at all. One moment Sherlock was deep in a well of sleep and the next moment she was jerked awake by bright floodlights pouring in through the window drapes and loud, piercing gunfire. Several bullets slammed through the window, sending glass shards everywhere; bullets hit the walls, and paint and drywall went flying. Kelly grabbed her and pulled her down between the twin beds. Cal came tearing through the bedroom door, Glock drawn, and quickly flattened himself beside the women. Kelly was on her comm unit. “What’s happening? What’s happening?”
“Stay down. We saw two men creeping around the side of the house. We surprised them and lit them up like the Fourth of July. Now we’ve got a firefight. Stay down!”
Kelly was reaching for her Glock when Cal’s hand came down on top of hers. “Nope, we stay down, Larry’s call.” He tried to tuck both women beneath him, but it didn’t work. There was no way either Kelly or Sherlock were going to lie quietly while the world exploded around them. More glass from the window came flying into the room, raining down on them. Cal reached up, grabbed a couple pillows, and dropped them over their heads. They waited, fighting floods of adrenaline, each wanting to be in the action, not lying between two beds.
“The neighbors must be lighting up nine-one-one,” Kelly said, her voice muffled because Cal’s arm was partially covering her mouth. “Never happened here before. Move your arm before I bite you!”
Suddenly, they heard a man yell, and the gunfire stopped. They waited, and Cal came up to his knees. Kelly’s comm came on: “Larry here. Two men, both down. We got them trying to run out the front. Repeat, they’re down, all is clear.”
Sherlock looked at the digital clock beside the bed. No more than three minutes had passed.
Kelly said into her comm, “Anyone hurt?”
“No, all of us are good.”
“Okay, we’re coming out.”
Kelly turned on the bedroom light. The room was a shambles, drywall all over the floor mixed with shards of glass from the broken windowpanes, the dresser chipped by flying debris and bullet fragments. “Probably sixty rounds sent in here,” Cal said. “Let’s go see what our guys have outside.”
He turned to see Sherlock standing quietly in the bedroom doorway. She wasn’t moving an inch. She turned and placed her finger over her mouth. “Stay here,” she whispered. “I heard something. I’m going to check it out.”
Cal’s blood turned to ice. He whispered, “No, Sherlock, don’t move, I’ll do it,” but she’d already disappeared into the hallway. He heard Kelly rack her Glock. “Let’s go,” she said low, and she and Cal followed Sherlock into the dark hallway. They didn’t hear anything, only Sherlock’s footsteps.
Then there was an ear-shattering blast that shook the house. “Sherlock!” Cal raced down the hall, Kelly on his heels. They ran into the kitchen in time to see a small figure leaping out the window. The kitchen was fast filling with smoke and flames, licking toward the cabinets. Sherlock was scrabbling up on the counter to go out of the kitchen window. The heat was suddenly incredible. Cal yelled, “Sherlock, we’re going out the front. Stay on the kitchen side! Be careful!”
Sherlock dropped to the ground outside the kitchen window and into a yew bush, pushed herself behind it. She yelled, “Larry, it’s Sherlock!” She felt the heat of a bullet pass by her cheek, and flattened herself to the ground, tasting dirt. She yelled again, “Larry, there’s another one, he firebombed the kitchen! I’m pinned down!”
Sherlock elbow-walked around the yew bush, looked carefully past it. She saw a slight figure moving fast to hide behind a skinny oak tree on the far side of the yard, maybe thirty feet away.
She yelled, “Drop your gun and get your hands up. We won’t shoot you. Do it! We have you surrounded, there’s no way out. Your two friends are already shot! Don’t make us shoot you, too!”
The figure’s arm jerked up and fired toward the sound of Sherlock’s voice. The bullet struck the house a few feet above her head. She heard the pounding of FBI feet coming closer, came up on her elbows, fired. There was a yell, and the gun went flying as Larry and four more FBI agents came racing around the side of the house, crouched over, fanning out into the backyard.
“He’s down!”
She saw them approach the moaning figure, guns trained center mass, going to their knees to restrain the terrorist, who was crying and cradling his wrist.
The terrorist stopped crying and looked back toward the madly burning house, casting the inferno’s glow on all of them. Orange flames gushed out toward them, and black smoke ate the oxygen out of the air, making it hard to breathe. The backyard looked like high noon.
“Hey, it’s not a man, it’s a girl!”
Sherlock ran to the fallen girl, who was clutching her hand. She was dressed in black, even her face blackened. She was trying not to cry now, doubtless it was humiliating, but still, tears seeped from beneath her lashes and trailed through the black paint on her face, cutting knifelike tracks. Sherlock knelt down beside her, saw another agent had applied a pressure bandage to the wrist. “You’re going to be all right, lie still. An ambulance is on the way.”
The girl raised dark pain-filled eyes to her face. “It was a trap.”
“Yes, it was a trap,” Sherlock said. She felt Cal’s hand on her shoulder, heard Kelly speaking to the agents. Cal said, “You were sent in to set the bomb, right? Because you’re so small? How’d you get into the kitchen?”
The girl turned her face away and didn’t say anything.
Cal continued: “She didn’t break the kitchen window, we’d have heard her. That window is too small for either of the men to get in, so she was elected. She cut a hole in the kitchen window and wriggled in, set the bomb, right?”
The girl looked up at him, said nothing.
“Her job was to set off the bomb between the kitchen and the living room, say, and then run as fast as she could and climb back out. If the bomb or the fire didn’t kill us, we’d be forced out of the house and her two friends outside would be ready to mow us down.”
“Didn’t work out, did it?” Kelly said, standing over the girl with her legs spread, her arms crossed over her chest.
They heard fire engines and sirens in the distance. Soon, she knew, neighbors would venture out to see what had happened on their quiet street.
Sherlock sat back on her heels, looked at the raging fire. It didn’t matter, a house was just a house, after all.
Everyone had done their job. One terrorist was dead, but two of them were alive, and one of them was this slight girl lying at their feet, cradling her shattered wrist.