“Donnie Darko and I just finished a sweep of the rest of this floor,” said Top. “All clear.”

“I’m in the master bedroom. Find me.”

“Copy that.”

And a moment later, the door opened and the two of them came in. Bunny lingered in the doorway to watch the hall. Top came over and looked down at the naked girl. Unlike me, Top is a father, and that makes him a different kind of person. He touched the small, raised lump on her hip where I’d darted her, nodded to himself, took a sheet, and pulled it over her. Then he removed one glove and pressed fingers into her carotid and nodded again.

When he raised his head, I could almost hear his neck muscles creak.

“What’s the play?” he asked in a totally arctic voice.

“Sweep the room for bugs.”

Top produced his device and carefully ran it over all the walls, cabinets, bedposts, and chairs. He flipped over a heavy leather recliner and pointed to a very small and sophisticated bug hidden behind a strut. He left it in place and finished his search, finding another in the wall nearest to an open laptop on a desk. He used a knife to gouge the device out of its hiding place. It had been placed in a tiny pocket of drywall and then lightly plastered and painted over. Wires trailed down to the baseboard, where they were threaded into the power cord for an ornate clock.

“Call it,” he said. “If they’re listening, then they already know we’re here.”

“No alarms going off,” I said.

“Doesn’t mean they don’t know.” He looked at the sleeping girl. “There is no part of this that doesn’t feel hinky. I think we ought to wrap this up and get gone sooner than later.”

“You got that shit right,” I muttered.

I bent over Mitrović. And then I froze. His eyes had changed. Before, they were dark and intense, filled with fear and calculations; now they were different. They seemed to be too wide, for one thing, and although he was looking directly at me, there was an unfocused quality about his stare.

And then he screamed.

To hell with my knife, to hell with a big dog ready to bite his junk off, Mitrović let loose with a massive, high-pitched shriek of total, blind, mad rage. Then he came up off the bed with such astounding speed and power it knocked my knife away and set Ghost tumbling to the floor. There was no preparatory tensing of muscles, no sign that he was going to move. He was suddenly and totally in motion. He leaped from the bed and flung himself at me, driving me backward with astonishing force.

His mouth lunged forward, and his teeth snapped shut on the corner of my Scout glasses, tearing them sideways, obscuring my vision.