Leah Hawkins sat in the dark, dirty space beneath the wooden porch. The only light came from the glow of a streetlamp leaking in through the crack where the hatch met the side if the porch, but when she’d moved inward she’d felt spiderwebs against her face.

Leah thought about the situation. She was in a dark place listening to two men admitting to murdering Stella Wizshinski and discussing their plan for murdering Leah too. One of them was stupid and frightened. If he got startled into the realization that Leah had already arrived, he would fire off his whole magazine, imagining every shape on the dark street was an enemy. While all that metal was flying around, the other one, the calm one, was probably capable of killing Leah himself.

Leah crawled a few feet, feeling the way ahead with her hands. She stood with bent knees and touched the boards above her head. She could feel two boards were slightly bent under a weight. She heard a creak as the man sitting in the chair shifted. Leah waited and listened.

“Damn. I got the old lady’s blood on my pants when her neck spurted. I didn’t see it before. How am I going to get that off?”

Leah raised her pistol nearly up to the floorboards and touched the surface with her free hand to determine where the weight was.

“Wash,” said the other man.

Leah fired three rounds up through the porch floor, then stepped quickly to the place where the other man was sitting. She fired three more shots, heard the man’s body thump on the boards as he fell, and fired another round up through the floor to be sure she’d killed him.

She dodged to the hatch and stayed there for a few seconds, but there was no return fire from either man. She opened the hatch, and while she used her sleeve to wipe it for fingerprints, she listened for footsteps of other enemies. When none came, she crawled out and pushed the hatch shut. She walked around to the front, climbed the steps, and saw the two men, one lying almost at the rattan blind lashed to the front railing and the other lying beside the wooden chair near the wall.

Leah squatted, patted down the two men, and took their guns, wallets, telephones, and keys. There was a third phone, and she recognized it as Stella’s. Then she stood and walked down the side of Stella’s house the way she had come. She kept going to the backyard, over the back fence to the neighbor’s, then out to the wider, busier street, and into the bowling alley parking lot to her rental car. She got in and drove.