Immediately he went along the hall. On his right was a kitchen area. Of course this house wasn’t where the drug dealer lived—he’d have a fancy-assed pad somewhere—so the kitchen wasn’t used in its conventional sense. He saw counters with weighing scales and stacks of polyethylene bags and there were traces of white dust on many of the surfaces. No way any of these guys were going to call for police assistance, not with that amount of evidence lying around.

There was also a guard.

He was a big man with a network of scars all over his face. He looked like he’d been in a fire once over and had suffered greatly. That’s what comes of cooking your own crack, Rickard thought, as he fired at the man. The guy threw himself down behind a counter and returned fire with an old-fashioned Colt revolver. His shots were blind, and Rickard dodged away from the line of fire even as he rushed toward the man. He leaned over the counter and drilled the man full of bullets, watching the man’s eyelids flicker as each round punched holes in his upper body. Then there was no more reaction and the man slumped down.

Rickard left him there and went back out into the hall.

That made three dead inside the house, which meant there had to be more than he’d originally reckoned. None of the men he’d killed looked like anyone who could have snared Alisha’s attention.

The next room he checked was a bedroom. The only thing that told him so was the presence of a stained mattress propped up against a wall. The rest of the room was devoid of home comforts and it seemed to have become a repository for old newspapers and girlie magazines.

On his left a closet door stood open. He glanced inside to insure nobody lurked in the dark space and found it empty. Moving on, he found the door that let outside where he’d clambered up onto the porch. The door wasn’t as heavily fortified as the front door, having only a beam nestled in brackets to hold it firm. He paid it little attention, choosing instead to move immediately to the remaining room. Whoever was inside had fallen silent now, but he guessed that was where he’d find Alisha and her ex-boyfriend.