"Mom!" she shouted. "Mom where are you?"

"Jenny?" Anna's voice came from the living room. "Are you OK, honey?"

"Mom!" said Jenny, running to Anna. "Somebody shot at us! He kept shooting and shooting!" She wrapped her arms around Anna, sobbing violently.

"Who?" said Anna, hugging her. "Who was shooting at you, honey? Where?"

Jenny was sobbing too hard into Anna's shoulder to answer. Matt entered the living room. "What happened?" Anna asked him. "What's going on?''

"We were in the Grove?" said Matt. "Playing Killer? And I was gonna shoot Jenny? But somebody started shooting at us."

"You mean with a squirt gun?" asked Anna.

"No," said Matt. "It was a gun gun. With bullets."

"Oh my G.o.d!" said Anna, horrified. "Who?"

"We don't know," said Matt. "He was, like, this crazy person."

"Oh my G.o.d!" said Anna, hugging Jenny tighter.

"So we ran away, and we don't know where Andrew is," said Matt. "We came here to call the police."

"OK, right," said Anna, fighting to calm herself. "We'll call the police."

"Can I call my dad first?" asked Matt.

"Right," said Anna, "call your dad, let him know you're here, then we'll call the police."

"Mom," sobbed Jenny, "I was so scared."

"It's OK, honey," said Anna, stroking her daughter's hair. "It's OK. You're home now. You're safe here."

On the street outside, in the front seat of the Lexus, Snake looked in Arthur Herk's wallet to make sure the address on the driver's license-238 Garbanzo-was the house Herk had driven to.

Satisfied, he said, "OK, open it."

Herk punched in the code and the driveway gate slid open. Snake said, "OK, chief, who're we gonna find at home?"

"n.o.body," said Arthur. "I mean, just my wife and her kid."

"That's all? Just women?" Snake knew that a lot of these drug kingpins had henchmen around.

"Far as I know," said Arthur.

"Well, you better be right," said Snake, " 'cause when we go in, I'm gonna have this gun pointin' right at your head. Anybody tries to f.u.c.k with me, your brains is spaghetti on the f.u.c.kin' wall."

"Look," said Arthur, "you don't need to shoot me. You can have whatever you want, OK? Just take it. Anything."

Snake thought about that.

"Your wife," he said. "She good-lookin'?"

Arthur turned and looked right at Snake.

"Very," he said. "And so is her kid."

Buffy moved cautiously through the dark and dripping underground pa.s.sageway, gripping a wooden stake, knowing she had to destroy the hideous creature before it destroyed her. The creature was close by; she could feel it.

Eliot could feel it, too. In the excruciating tension of the moment, he had suspended, temporarily, the chewing of his Cheez-It. The small damp orange square rested uneasily on his tongue.

Buffy saw an opening just ahead to her right, a low, dark hole in the wall. She stopped in front of the opening, peering inside, her eyes unable to penetrate the gloom. But she knew the thing was in there. And she knew she had to go in there after it. Crouching, holding the stake in front of her, she began to edge forward into the darkness, when suddenly ...

BRINNNGG!

Eliot started, spewing a Cheez-It glob onto his shorts.

"d.a.m.n," he said, reaching for the phone. "h.e.l.lo?"

"Dad, somebody shot at us and we gotta call the police," said Matt.

"Matt?" said Eliot. "Are you OK?"

"Yeah but we gotta call the police."

"Where are you?"

"Jenny's house. We drove the Kia here."

"What do you mean, somebody shot at you? You mean with a squirt gun?"

"No! With a gun!"

"Who?"

"Some guy. Andrew ran away and we don't know where he is and I gotta hang up and call the police."

"OK, you call the police and I'll get a cab over there right now."

Eliot hung up, grabbed his wallet, stuck his feet into his flip-flops, and ran out the door, not taking the time to turn off the TV.

The creature lunged out of the darkness and sent Buffy sprawling backward onto the ground. The stake flew from her hand, landing just out of her reach. The creature stood over her, snarling, its gaping, fanged mouth twisted into a grotesque grin of triumph. Things looked very bad for Buffy.

Matt hung up the phone and looked over at Anna and Jenny, who were sitting on the sofa. Anna had her arm around Jenny, who was still crying, but calming down.

"My dad's on his way over," Matt said. "I'll call the police now."

Anna nodded. Matt picked up the phone to dial 911. He had pressed 9 when the front door opened hard, whacking into the wall, the sudden noise causing Jenny to scream. Matt put down the phone to go see who it was.

CHAPTER eight

At the Jolly Jackal, Leo was sweeping up the shattered remains of the TV picture tube, while John was thinking about whether he should call his contact at Penultimate to report what had happened to Arthur Herk. He had just decided the h.e.l.l with it-why go looking for trouble?-when the door opened and two men came in, one tall and one short, both wearing suits. The tall one held out a wallet, flipped open to show a badge.

"FBI," he said. "I'm agent Pat Greer, and this is Agent Alan Seitz."

John shot a quick glance at Leo. They were both thinking the same thing, which was that, the way this evening was turning out, maybe they'd been better off back in Grzkjistan, drinking solvents from barrels.

To Agent Greer, John said, "How I can help FBI?"

"You can tell FBI where the suitcase is," said Greer. He paused a beat, then added, "Ivan."

John stared at him. "My name is John," he said.

"Sure it is," said Greer. "Your name is John, and you're just a hardworking, law-abiding, immigrant small-business man, running this little s.h.i.thole bar where you got no customers."

"Yes," said John.

"Yes indeed," said Greer. "Then you surely will not mind if we take a look in the back room. The one with all the locks."

"You have warrant?" said John.

Greer looked at Seitz and shook his head. "Isn't it heartwarming," he said, "the way a person can come here from another country, with nothing but the shirt on his back and maybe a couple hundred grand he got from selling military weapons he doesn't own, and in just a short time in America, he has embraced our way of life to the point where he wants to know if we got a warrant? Doesn't that just warm the c.o.c.kles of your heart, Agent Seitz?"

"It warms the s.h.i.t out of my c.o.c.kles," said Agent Seitz. "My c.o.c.kles are burnin' up."

Ivan frowned and looked at Leo, who shrugged to indicate that he didn't know what c.o.c.kles were, either.

Greer turned back to John. "Listen, Ivan," he said. "Number one, we already got you. You have not been careful about who you do business with. We got you so good that, if we want, by the time you get out of federal prison, there will be glaciers in Key West, OK? That's number one. Number two is, we don't need a warrant. We're operating under ... what's that thing that we're operating under called again, Agent Seitz?"

"Special Executive Order 768 dash 4," said Seitz.

"That's right," said Greer, "Special Executive Order 768 dash 4, which basically means that, if it's a matter of national security, which this is, we can search wherever we want, and we don't need a warrant. We can send a search party and a Doberman pinscher up your a.s.s if we want, Ivan."

John glanced at Leo, then turned back to Greer. He said, "I want lawyer."

"Did you hear that, Agent Seitz?" said Greer. "He wants a lawyer! As is his right, under our const.i.tution! Which we hold sacred!"

"You want me to shoot him in the forehead?" asked Agent Seitz, producing a pistol from his shoulder holster.

"Not right now," replied Greer. To John, he said, "My partner would like to shoot you in the forehead, which I have absolutely no doubt he could legally do, under Special Executive Order 768 dash 4. Me, I'm thinking it would be better, for all concerned, if you just got out your keys and showed me around that back room, OK?"

John stood still for a moment, then reached for his pocket.

"Easy," said Seitz, not aiming the gun directly at John, but raising it a little.

Slowly, John pulled out a ring of keys.

"Excellent!" said Greer. "That's the spirit of Special Executive Order 768 dash 4! Now let's you and I go see what you got back there. Agent Seitz will stay out here and be ready to render a.s.sistance to Leonid, in case the customer load gets to be too much for him to handle."

Greer and John went down the hallway to the back room. Seitz walked over to the bar, slung one leg over a stool, and pointed his chin in the direction of the shattered TV.

"What happened?" he asked Leo.

"Jerry Springer," said Leo.

"About time," said Seitz.

"What do you think?" said Leonard. "We go in the front?"

He and Henry had followed Arthur Herk's Lexus to 238 Garbanzo. They had watched it go in through the gate; they had pulled over to the curb just past the driveway.

"No," said Henry. "I think we wanna go around the back again."

"With the f.u.c.kin' mosquitoes?" said Leonard. "Chrissakes, why? I mean, we could just go in there, pop our boy, bingbing, we're onna plane to Newark. We ain't gonna have a problem with the guys wearin' panty hose, for chrissakes."

"I wanna see what they're doin'," said Henry. "I wanna know what's in that suitcase. And I wanna make sure we don't have any surprises. Like somebody up a tree." He put the car in gear and started driving around to the side of the property.

Leonard sighed. "We don't shoot somebody soon," he said, "I'm gonna forget how."