Perry, Thomas - Forty Thieves by Perry Thomas

Author:Perry, Thomas [Perry, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802190642
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

15

Nicole Hoyt woke up in the dark. She had an odd feeling that she couldn’t quite identify, because her memory went back only as far as the moment when she had opened her eyes. Before that there was a dream—not a nightmare, just the usual nightly amalgam of frustration and unease. In her dream she had been working somewhere and unable to understand the job, and had to try to hide her inability by performing tasks randomly and appearing busy.

Something else must have caused her to wake. She kept her eyes open and waited for whatever had awakened her to be repeated. Then the memory of the sound came back to her. She had heard a car pull into the driveway and then sit there for a long period of time. She remembered the engine vibrating and the fan making a ticking noise. Finally the car had backed out of the driveway.

Nicole analyzed what was bothering her. People often pulled into driveways to turn around. But this one had sat there for too long. She refined her impression. The driver must have just been pretending he needed to turn around. This was like those times when she had been on the street and seen a stranger turn his head too slowly. He was pretending to have his eyes merely slide across her on the way to somewhere else, but she knew when she saw him that he had been checking her out and she had caught him. The car that had been outside had come here to study the house.

“Ed,” she whispered.

“Huh?”

“There was a car in the driveway just now.”

She spoke very quietly, but Ed was the kind of person who came to instantly, ready to talk rationally or defend himself. She felt the mattress shift as his muscles contracted and his body became tense. He was here, ready. “Is he there now?”

“I think he pulled out, but he was there too long.”

Ed didn’t need further explanation. He skipped ahead to the realization that he was going to investigate. He rose in the dark, silently as a snake uncoiling. She could tell he had already grasped the .45 with the silencer attached that he kept by the bed. He drifted out of the bedroom in the dark, the only sound the faint creak of a floorboard.

Nicole sat up too. She swung her legs off the bed and walked to the wall, where she reached up and took the second silenced .45 pistol off the shelf. She held it diagonally across her body and followed Ed into the living room. Ed had bought the pistols and had their barrels threaded for silencers because they were the perfect weapons for home defense. He had said that if they were bothered by intruders, it would be at night. He wanted to be able to handle the problem without waking any neighbors, and a silencer was a good flash suppressor, so they’d have another advantage. They also had a loaded Benelli semiauto shotgun under the bed, but she decided to leave that where it was.

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