Ken Douglas - Death Glitch

“ No,” she said.

“ I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

“ I don’t think-”

A roar that sounded like it came from the bowels of Hell filled the night and from out of nowhere Hunter sprang, grabbing Shaffer by the gun arm, pulling him down. Shaffer tried to fight him off, flaying at the dog with his other hand, but the dog was too strong.

The forty-five went flying, landing on the lawn. Izzy ran for it, grabbed it, then turned toward Shaffer, who was on his back, limp under the dog.

“ Let him go,” Izzy commanded.

Hunter released, growled, stepped back as Izzy went to her knees. Shaffer lay still, eyes wide. His face spoke of a torturous agony.

“ My heart,” he said. Then nothing.

Izzy checked the carotid. No pulse. He was gone.

“ Fuck.”

“ What’s going on?” It was Thelma Prescott, her noisy, old, drunken neighbor. “That man’s hurt!”

Sirens filled the night. Getting louder.

“ Time to go.” Izzy started for the end of the street at a run, the dog at her heels, when a squad car came screeching around the corner, siren blaring.

Izzy stopped, caught in the black and white’s headlight.

Two cops got out of the car, doors open, shielding them as they trained their guns at her.

“ Drop the gun! Drop the gun!” one of them shouted.

“ On the ground, on the ground!” the other one was shouting, too.

Then they vanished.

One second they were there, the next they were not.

“ Come on!” Izzy said to the dog and they took off at a dead run.

Lila Booth parked on Ralston, across the street from a two story yellow house. The university was a couple blocks away and most of the neighborhood looked like it housed students, but a few of the homes looked upscale and this was one of them. According to her tracker, Amy Eisenhower’s vintage Volkswagen was in the garage.

Lila usually tooled around town in a flashy 1966 E Type Jag. She loved her little Darth Vadar black XKE. It was showroom perfect, would do a hundred and fifty without batting an eye, and it was a convertible. But when she was working, she used a bland Crown Vic, the same car preferred by police departments nationwide. It had a big trunk and was reliable and nondescript. The car was, of course, black.

It was 4:00 AM straight up. The sky was overcast and it was cold. A breeze was blowing from the north, promising even more cold to come. Lila loved Reno in the summer, but not so much in the winter. She was well off and usually took long winter vacations to the islands, both the Caribbean and the Hawaiian, but this year she’d stayed home, as Manny was worried about Tucker, afraid his son wasn’t thinking clearly, afraid he was making bad decisions. In short, Manny had been afraid he’d need Lila to clean up after his son.

She’d tried to reassure him that Tucker was a big boy, that he’d had his head screwed on straight. But Manny had insisted she stay close and she owed him, so no tropical sun for her this winter. She’d thought Manny was erring on the side of paranoia, but as it turned out it was caution, not paranoia that Manny was erring on the side of.

She got out of the car, slung her backpack over her shoulder, went to the front door, like she belonged. She was a pro with the picks and the lock surrendered to her expertise in seconds, but even though the doorknob turned, it didn’t open as the door had been bolted shut.

She saw a side gate, used it and at the back door she again tried her picks and again the lock gave up to her and again the door had been bolted from the inside. Damn. People were just a touch too security conscious these days.

Nothing for it but to use a window. But she soon discovered they were barred. Motherfuck. Now what?

The garage. She went to the side door and would wonders never cease, it was unlocked. She stepped inside, saw there was a bolt on the door, but someone had forgotten to throw it. The door had been left unlocked, unbolted. Big mistake.

She eased the door closed after herself, smiled when she saw Amy Eisenhower’s VW and Dr. Eisenhower’s Dodge Raider. Jackpot. She turned her eyes to a red Beemer sports car. Those weren’t cheap. She wondered what the person who owned it did for a living. She also wondered if he or she had just moved in, because there was a ton of stuff stored in new looking cardboard boxes.

Taking her eyes away from the cars and boxes, she saw the door to the house, was afraid for a second it might be locked and bolted, but it wasn’t. The door led into a well appointed kitchen and Lila gasped. Whoever lived here had her stove. The Grand Palais made by La Cornue. Two ovens, one gas, one electric, both with airtight seamless doors. The ovens cooked with radiant heat, Lila knew, because she was a gourmet chef when she wasn’t out killing people. The stove cost over forty thousand dollars. Only a true gourmet would have one. A gourmet with plenty of discretionary cash. This stove was yellow, which matched the kitchen, Lila’s was, of course, black.

Lila decided she had to know whoever owned this stove, man or woman. Like Lila, this person had taste. She hoped Mansfield Wayne wasn’t going to harm this woman. She had to be a woman, Lila decided and she wondered if she had brown eyes, if she was the brown-eyed version of Amy Eisenhower, Manny was so interested in.

With her eyes still on the yellow stove, Lila set her backpack on the kitchen counter by the sink. The sinks were granite and they looked like they were molded into the counter. This lady had class, easily as much as Lila herself, much more than the Waynes, Mansfield and Tucker.

With the backpack open, Lila took out the dart gun, almost regretting what she was about to do. That wasn’t like her. She had no feelings; that’s what made her so good at what she did.

But before she sought out the bedrooms, Lila wanted to learn a little more about this woman. She opened the kitchen cabinets, found Japanese style dishes. In the silverware drawer she found expensive, but tasteful, flatware and several sets of chopsticks. Pots and pans were All-Clad, about the best you could get. Lila was impressed. This was an ideal kitchen.

She was stalling and she knew it. Time to go to work. She went up the stairs. The first bedroom turned out to be a home office, the second was made into a gym with a pretty impressive treadmill. How they’d fit in the room, Lila didn’t know, unless they’d taken it apart and reassembled it. The treadmill faced a wall mounted flat screen. Lila imagined a runner who didn’t like running in the cold, so she ran inside during the winter.

In the third bedroom, she found an unmade bed and that made no sense, because the woman who lived here didn’t seem the type to leave it that way. So why was the bed unmade? She got her answer when she checked the fourth and last bedroom. Two women were asleep in the same bed. Apparently the lady of the unmade bed got a little lonely during the night.

Cousins, that didn’t seem right, but it wasn’t Lila’s job to judge. She was here for a reason. She pulled back the covers without waking the women, found they were both wearing flannel pajamas. She stepped back and shot one of them in the ass. The girl moaned, jerked then lay still. The gun was virtually silent, making not much more noise than popping the top of a Coke can.

Lila reloaded the dart gun, moved around to the other side of the bed, shot the other woman in the rump. She jerked too, but this one stayed silent, didn’t moan.

With the girls drugged, Lila went downstairs. She needed one of the cars in the garage out and hers in. In the kitchen she found a key hook under a cork board. There were two sets of keys on them. One of the sets had an old VW key on it.