We stare at each other for a second.

He ducks back into the kitchen and I get up and move fast, and he’s turning around in the kitchen, spinning, and the book is now a pistol, and he’s bringing it up, shooting at me.

I react within seconds, pulling out my SIG Sauer, remembering the long hours on the range—“Better to get off an imperfect shot than wait to make a perfect shot and get your head blown off”—and my first round misses, the second one catches him in the upper right thigh, and the next one strikes him dead center in the chest.

He falls against the near cabinets, making one door pop open, and dishes and glassware fall out, and his moans and the sound of the shattering glass nearly drown out the bellowing from behind me.

I whirl and the big guy has torn away the strips of duct tape and is grabbing another pistol from under the couch, and he brings up his weapon and I shoot again, and I catch him right in his mouth. He falls right back in a spray of blood and knocks over the television set, increasing its volume, and some sort of Mexican music starts echoing through the house, overpowering the ringing in my ears.

I’m shaking now, and I go forward and grab the big guy’s pistol from the floor, stick it in my waistband, and then retrieve the weapon from the skinny guy in the kitchen, put it in the opposite waistband of my jeans, and I’m panting, trying to get some sort of semblance of calm, because if there’s another gunman in here, he’d have to be as deaf as the biggest bat in the world not to hear all the loud noise coming from this horrid gunfight.

But nobody else is coming at me.

I go up a short hallway, hammer open a door to a bedroom, check under the bed, and then the closet. Lots of piles of smelly clothes and porn magazines. I go to the other bedroom and it’s a twin of its mate, this time with weight equipment. Again, under the bed, and in the small closet.

Nobody else is here.

CHAPTER 55

THEN I curse myself again for being so thick—thank God I’m not a platoon leader, because I’d probably end up decimating my troops on our first mission—and I go back down the short hallway, kick open the door to the bathroom, and there’s a man, huddled in the bathtub, holding up hands that are shaking like tall grass in the wind.

I recall what the man on the phone said when he called me about the kidnapping of Tom and Denise.

You’ll know him when you see him. He’ll be the one without a weapon.

By God, he’s right.

The man in the bathtub seems to be in his late sixties, early seventies. He’s wearing a two-piece dark-blue suit with a white shirt. His thin white hair is carefully combed, and he has a nicely trimmed white beard.