Lynne Heitman - The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

Then came the unmistakable cha-chink of someone chambering a round in a pump-action shotgun. I grabbed Rachel, pulled her behind the desk, and covered my ears against the mighty roar of the blast. Another cha-chink. They were blowing the hinges and would follow that by blowing out the dead bolt, and then there would be nothing standing between them and us.

Somewhere it had registered that they were wearing night-vision goggles, which explained why the first guy had reacted as he had to the high-intensity beam. I reached for Rachel’s hand and put the flashlight in it.

“When they come through the door, flash this at them, but move it around, like this.” I showed her. Keep it away from your head, because they’ll shoot at it.” Her hand was shaking. “It’ll be all right. We’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

I left her there and scrambled across the floor. There wasn’t any better cover than the furniture, so I crouched behind the couch. When the third shot went off, I felt the reverb in my chest. The door crashed in. The red beams came first. I got flat on my belly, aimed for knees and feet, just in case they did have armor on, and fired. One of them went down. I fired at his head until he stopped moving. I popped the clip-I knew I was out-and reached into my pocket for the second one. The shotgun roared again, and a substantial chunk of the back of the couch blew out over my head. Rachel screamed. When I looked up for her, a loud crack sounded. My head snapped back. A stingingly bright light erupted behind my eyes, and I fell backward. The light ruptured, and the pain came with the darkness. I covered my face with my hands and rolled over onto my stomach, wondering in some detached part of myself if I’d been shot through the head.

When I opened my eyes, a figure dressed all in black hovered over me. He wore a black mask and all the gear. He flashed a light in my face, then at a picture in his hand. I was apparently not the one he was looking for, because he took a step back and started to raise his assault rifle. Before he could get his shot off, his body began to convulse. He tried to turn around, but the convulsions began again. When he started to go down, I rolled out of the way. He fell next to me like a redwood.

I felt around for the Glock and found it behind me, but I didn’t need it. Rachel jumped down from the desk and leaned over her prey. I heard a buzz, like a mosquito zapper, and he seized again. She was holding a Taser against his neck. She’d Tasered him.

“Come on,” she said. “Come on. Get up.”

I was wobbly, but I wanted to live. We stepped over the body in the doorway, the one I had shot. On the way by, I reached down for his shotgun. It was a pistol-grip Mossberg. There were a bunch of shells in a pouch Velcroed to his belt. I grabbed it, too.

Out in the hall, I lurched instinctively toward the basement, but Rachel dragged me in the opposite direction to another doorway that led to the garage. When she pulled the door open, I was staring at a monster, a huge black Humvee. Either she had planned for a quick exit, or someone didn’t like backing the thing out of the garage, because it was facing out. She circled around to the driver’s side. The passenger-side door was so close to the wall on my side I could have practically climbed in from inside the house. She started the engine and then must have stepped down on the accelerator by accident. The engine roared in that dark, close space.

“I’m putting up the door. Ready?”

“Wait until I get this thing loaded,” I said, struggling with the Mossberg. “There might be more of them.” My fingers were shaking so badly I kept dropping the big cartridges on the floor in front of me.

“Hurry up!”

It was a nine-shot. I got six in and pumped one into the chamber. Then I powered down the window and braced the barrel on the door ledge, facing forward.

“Go.”

She punched the opener. The door started to lift immediately, and an overhead light snapped on. She put both hands on the wheel and leaned forward. She could barely see over the dashboard, but she had the focus of a pointer ready to go get her bird.

We both watched as the door came up. My forehead was bleeding. I kept wiping the blood out of my eyes. We both had our necks bowed, looking for feet or legs to appear beneath that slowly rising curtain. The Humvee made a lot of noise in that cramped space, and the door was not quiet, either, which was probably why we didn’t hear the man coming through the side door from the house until he was right there.

I tried to swivel the shotgun around, but he was too close. He grabbed the barrel and pushed it straight up with one hand. With the other, he stuck a semiautomatic into the car. I let go of my weapon and went for his. He got a couple of rounds off just as I slammed his arm against the dashboard. The cabin filled with the smoke and the smell and the sound. Rachel was screaming something, and he was trying to pull his arm back. I was kicking at his arm with both feet and feeling around with one hand for the Taser. Out of the blue, his fingers slipped from the grip of the gun, and he started screaming. Rachel had powered up the window and pinned his arm to the ceiling.

“Drive!” I yelled. “Drive! Go!”

She hit the gas, and his masked head whipped around, because he could see what I had seen-that there was about three inches of clearance on his side between the Humvee and the side of the garage doorway. The machine roared out of the gate, and the jamb instantly peeled off our attacker. When he stopped and we kept going, his arm whipped past my head and then disappeared completely. Rachel skidded out into the street. She must have hit the remote again, because as we were pulling away, the garage door was coming down.

WHEN WE GOT BACK TO HARVEY’S, RACHEL NEARLY RAN me over going through the front door. I found her in the kitchen with Harvey, standing next to him with his face in her hands, staring soulfully into his eyes.

“Baby,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you. Are you all right?” Then she kissed his forehead and smiled as she wiped a tear from her eye. If it was a performance, it was a good one. It might also have been a posttrauma realignment of priorities. It was hard to tell with Rachel.

As for Harvey, the way he blushed in her presence made him look more alive than I had seen in ages. He reached up, took her hands in his, and kissed each one. Then he looked at me.

“Oh, my God. What happened?” The alarm on his face told me I must have been a mess.

“I’m all right.” I had a skull-pounding headache, but everything else seemed to be working. “Where’s Bo?”

“After he got your call, he brought more men over. He is showing them the back.”

“Rachel can tell you what happened. I’m going to get cleaned up, and then the three of us have to sit down and talk.” I left the two of them gazing into each other’s eyes.

Bo came upstairs almost immediately. I had washed the blood out of my eyes, found a clean shirt, and just retrieved the first-aid kit from under the sink in the bathroom loosely designated as mine.

“What happened?” he asked, focusing immediately on my most obvious injury, the contusion on my forehead.

“I think I got whacked in the head with the butt of an assault rifle.”

“Let me see.” When he looked behind the damp, bloody washcloth, he seemed concerned but not alarmed. It was the sort of thing that qualified as routine in Bo’s line of work. But his jaw tightened. Violence against women was another of his deeply entrenched rage buttons, and no matter how hard I tried to change his view, he considered me a woman first and a professional colleague second. He put down the toilet seat cover.

“Sit.”