My attention snapped from the woman to the man walking out as bold as a man of steel from the side of the house. He was holding what looked to me like a Glock 18 and he fired off short bursts of bullets directly through the body of the car the two gunmen were behind. The vehicle was no protection and I saw one of the men spin away, shrieking as he clutched at his side. The other man took flight, throwing himself backward and trying to scuttle away across the road. The man with the Glock continued advancing, but he angled his aim at the man behind the fence. The gun stuttered and a stitch pattern of rounds cut through the fence, a right-to-left oblique angle that almost cut the tattooed man in half.

I had no memory of jumping out of the Chrysler and running. Somewhere along the way I’d racked my SIG. I shouted wordlessly and saw the young woman’s face come up. She stared at me, and something in her face made me wonder why I caused her to jerk in fear. Maybe it was the gun in my hand, or more likely it was because I looked so much like the man stalking toward her on the other side of the vehicle. I looked across at him and got a good look at Rickard for the first time.

The word doppelganger went through my mind.

Viewing the photo-fit of the man who’d snatched Imogen Ballard, I’d whimsically thought of him as my evil twin. Now there was no whimsy in it. Luke Rickard did look very much like me. It was enough of a likeness that I’d thought of him as an abomination that I couldn’t suffer to live. If anything the feeling was even stronger in me now and if I could I’d have concentrated on that there and then.

But my first priority was the safety of the young woman.

Rickard looked at me and his eyes went to slits. He smiled coldly, but then he continued his march toward the vehicle. The remaining gunman had made it all the way across the street and it looked like the fight had gone out of him. He went down on his backside, throwing down his gun. His hands came up in a pleading gesture but there wasn’t an ounce of compassion in Rickard. He unloaded a spray of bullets at the man and I saw tatters of his body sifting in the breeze.