Page 54 of The Jackal

Two shots. Shifted. Two more.

The suppressor turned all four into nothing louder than a man coughing into his sleeve. The two of them folded into the wet grass without either one understanding he'd stopped being alive.

I searched them fast. No wallets. No creds. No phones, no radios, no patches. Scrubbed, sterile, cutouts—same as the pair who'd hit the house. Which told me one thing plain: not Bureau. Not honest men. Hired dark, which meant Craine was still keeping his own people clear of the wet work. I put it in the cold room and keyed the radio.

"Patrol's down. Two. Sterile, same as her house. Nobody official."

"Copy." Grim satisfaction in Brock's voice, and under it relief—we hadn't just killed somebody's honest brother. "Craine still hasn't twitched. You're clear to the house."

Max and I crossed the last of the open ground.

He ranged just off my knee, low and silent, head sweeping. I felt him working—the ears, the nose, the whole animal radar of him reaching out into the dark ahead of us. I trust that more than any device Dominion Hall owns. A man can fool a camera. Nobody has ever fooled a good dog.

We came up onto the back porch, an old, wide thing wrapped along the rear of the house. Screen door first, then the door proper. I stood a moment and let us both read the place. Max lifted his nose and tested the air in long, slow pulls. I ran my own version of the same—not a smell, the other thing, the sense that reaches past a wall—and got the low hum I always get off a place with one living man inside it and nothing else I could name.

The porch hinges were a hundred years old and would scream like the dead if I rushed them. So, I didn't rush them. I took the little can from my kit and worked the oil into each hinge, slow, and then I waited. Just stood in the dark and let it soak, let it creep down into the old iron and quiet it, because patience is the cheapest tool I carry and the one that's saved me most. When it had had its minute, I eased the screen open by degrees, an inch to a breath, and it gave without a sound.

The night had gone strange around us.

I want to set this down right, because it mattered, and I didn't heed it the way I should have. It was too quiet. Not the ordinary quiet of a late hour—the other kind. The kind with a held quality to it, a stillness wound tight, like a room full of people all deciding at once not to breathe. The frogs had gone silent down toward the marsh. Even the insects had backed off. There was nothing out there but the small tick of the cooling night and, far off on the main road, some fool in a fast car winding it out through the gears, the sound rising and fading and rising again—the only living thing for a mile that didn't seem to know something was wrong.

The back door of the house was newer—a contractor's lock thrown on during the work. I went to a knee and picked it. It gave the way they do. Then, it opened with that hard click a bolt makes coming back, the sound that is always, every single time, louder than a man expects. It cracked across the still porch like a knuckle popping in a church.

We froze. Both of us. I put my hand flat on Max's shoulder and we held there, breathing, listening, while the sound died into the house and nothing answered it.

"Anything?" I breathed.

"Nothing," Brock said. "He's still down. You're good."

I eased the door open, and we stepped inside.

And Max whined.

Low. Barely there. A thread of sound way down in his chest, and he pressed against my leg as he made it.

I dropped to a knee, right down at his level, put my hand along his jaw, and tried to read him—what is it, what do you see, what's got you. And for the first time since that kennel aisle, I couldn't. The wire between us that had run so clear all day had gone to static. He knew something. He was telling me something. And I could not, for the life of me, make it out.

First mission together, I told myself. Maybe this is just how he goes to work. Maybe every dog's got his own way of saying he doesn't like the dark.

Maybe. I stood. We moved.

Craine was upstairs. I didn't go upstairs.

You clear a house from the bottom, always, no matter how sure you are where the man is, because the man you're sure of isn't the one who kills you. So, I took the downstairs first, room by room, slow, Max sweeping ahead of me, low and tight.

The inside was gutted. They'd taken the grand old house back to its bones to build it up again—plastic sheeting hung in the doorways and breathed in the draft, tools lay where the crews had dropped them at quitting time, a wet-saw and sawhorses and buckets of joint compound, stacks of new drywall leaned against old plaster. Fresh studs stood pale and raw where walls had been opened. Wiring hung loose from junction boxes. The place smelled of sawdust and fresh paint and, under it, the deep, old smell of a house that had stood a century watching men come and go.

And the whole time I moved through it, one question kept surfacing, and I kept pushing it under, and it kept coming back up.

Why here?

It made no sense. A man like Craine, hiding from men like us, had every resource the federal government could hand him. A hotel with a hardened floor and men on the doors. A Bureau safe house wired to the teeth. Instead, he'd picked a half-gutted construction site on a dead naval base—no hard doors, no real security, a patrol of two bored contractors and himself asleep in a bed. It was soft. It was wide open. For a man that careful, it was insane.

Unless it wasn't soft at all. Unless soft was the whole idea.

I felt that thought go past like a cold draft, and I cleared the last of the downstairs, and I did not follow it where it wanted to lead. Brock's voice came steady every ninety seconds. All clear. No chatter. No movement. He's still down. Everything the machine could see said walk up the stairs and take your man.

I found the stairs and went up them the way you climb stairs you don't trust—boots to the outermost edge of every tread, right where the wood meets the stringer and gives the least, weight easing down slow so the old house couldn't call me out. Max came up at my side. Halfway, he whined again.