Biegler stepped fearlessly up to the sheriff. "You should have blown the windows and taken him out while you had the chance. Now you've got three hostages instead of two."

Ellis stared back silently, but Danny saw a vein bulging in his neck.

"What do you say, Major?" Biegler asked Danny, his voice edged with mockery. "I say it's time to get the FBI in here. Past time. Old Billy Ray here just proved he hasn't got the sand for this job-"

The sheriff hit Biegler so fast that Danny didn't see his fist cross the s.p.a.ce between them, and so hard that the government agent dropped where he stood and lay motionless on the floor.

"I warned him," Ellis said. "Get him out of here, Trace."

Trace Breen jumped up from the radio and dragged Biegler out of the trailer by his heels, gulping in awe all the way.

"Lock the door when you come back," Ellis ordered.

After Trace had locked the door, the sheriff said, "Ray'll be coming in any second, soon as he calms down. Tell your brother to guard the door and keep Biegler out. I don't want to see that son of a b.i.t.c.h again tonight."

"Biegler or Ray?" Trace asked.

"Biegler!"

Trace nodded and went back to his radio.

Sheriff Ellis led Danny to a corner and spoke softly. "I hate to admit it, but I'm about out of ideas. Do we just wait, or what?"

Danny shook his head. Grant Shields's sudden reappearance had given him a chance he had thought lost moments ago. "Sometimes the best thing is to do nothing, but this isn't one of those times. If things aren't getting better, they're getting worse. You know?"

Ellis nodded. "Agreed."

"I've got one idea, and I want you to seriously consider it."

"I'm listening."

"I want to go into the house. Physically go in and talk to Shields face-to-face."

Ellis stared back in disbelief. "Unarmed, you mean?"

"If I go in with a gun, he's liable to shoot me."

As Ellis's eyes searched his, Danny realized that the sheriff wasn't the middling-dumb country boy that people like Marilyn Stone thought he was.

"I get the feeling I'm missing something," Ellis said. "First off, Shields asks to talk to you-not me, not his lawyer, not his pastor-you. Then he talks to you like you are his pastor. And now you want to walk unarmed into a house where a disturbed man who's probably already murdered one person is holding his family at gun-point. Have I got that right?"

Danny had tried not to think too much about the risks of his plan, but Ellis wasn't going to let him off that easy. He hadn't known himself how he felt until a split second before Ray Breen was going to blow the windows-before the 7.62 millimeter bullet in Carl's rifle would have blasted Warren Shields's laboring heart into mush. After Carl sighted the boy on the roof and Sheriff Ellis turned to Danny for guidance, Danny could easily have said "Go," rather than "Abort." If he had, Shields would be dead now, and Laurel would be a widow. A single woman, free to spend her life with whomever she chose. Danny wanted Laurel more than he'd wanted any woman in his life. But when the power had been given him to possess her-twice now, he realized-he'd been unable to take her. The first time because he wouldn't give up his son to have her; this time because he couldn't live the rest of his life with a decent man's blood on his hands. But something deeper than this had stopped him, something he still couldn't quite pin down. He was trying to unravel the feeling when five sharp bangs rattled the trailer door.

"Open up, d.a.m.n it!" roared a muted voice. "It's me, Ray!"

Trace got up, but the sheriff waved him back to his seat.

"Talk to me, Danny," Ellis urged. "Time's short."

Danny raised his hand to his mouth as though he were about to throw up. The dark epiphany that had begun as he hovered over the backyard had finally revealed itself to him. "Shields wants us to kill him."

Ellis's eyes went wide. "What? You mean...like suicide by cop?"

"Exactly."

"Because of the cancer?"

"I don't know. Yes and no. Deep down, he's a John Wayne type. No matter how bad Shields may want to kill himself, he sees suicide as a coward's way out. I don't think dying of cancer scares him. The pain of it, I mean. It's the indignity. He's too proud for that."

Ellis's eyes seemed focused on something beyond Danny. "I can relate to that. My daddy died of lung cancer, and I watched every minute of it. That's no way to go."

Ray Breen's next bovine bellow shook the aluminum skin of the trailer. "I'm soaking wet, G.o.dd.a.m.n it! Let me in!"

"In a minute!" Ellis roared back. Then his jaw muscles clenched, and he stroked his incipient jowls. "Tell me why I should let you go in that house. What hope have you got?"

"Shields trusts me. I might be able to get close enough to get the gun away from him."

Ellis snorted. "If that's your plan, forget it. That's begging to get killed. Ask any cop."

Danny almost felt emboldened to confide in the sheriff about Laurel. The man had a grasp of the complexities of life; but how far would a Baptist deacon bend the rules?

"What is it?" Ellis asked. "It's come-to-Jesus time, Danny."

Danny almost spoke up, but in the end he decided that revealing the truth meant giving up the only edge he had in the situation-and might result in his being barred from the scene. "I can't put it into words," he said lamely. "But Shields respects me. If I can look him in the eye, man-to-man, I might be able to make him see reason."

"And if you can't?"

"Maybe I can get his wife and kids out."

"You're willing to die for that chance? An outside chance?"

"He won't kill me."

"Why not?"

Danny thought about it. "He doesn't believe he has the right."

Ellis clucked his tongue three times, then turned to Trace Breen, who was watching them warily. "Have you heard anything?"

"Just mumbles and static. They're too far from the windows. You want to try moving the mikes around?"

"Try anything that might work." Ellis turned back to Danny with sudden purpose. "I can't let you do it. Dr. Shields may not be responsible for his actions. I don't just mean he's distraught. That brain tumor may have unhinged the man. He could kill you, no matter what you believe."

Danny shrugged. "I've been in tough spots before."

"That was different. That was for your country."

"This is just as important."

"Not in my view." Ellis looked at his watch, then gave Danny a long, slow look. "Not unless you know something I don't."

"No, sir. You know what I know."

"Then forget it. You stay with me. Trace, let your brother in."

Trace got up and went to the door.

"And tell me the second you hear anything on the mikes."

"You want me to tell Carl to move around front? In case he can get a shot there?"

"Leave Carl where he is."

Ray almost knocked his brother down as he stormed into the trailer, water cascading off the brim of his Stetson. His eyes burned with outrage.

Before he could vent his anger, Ellis said, "Ray, get your best men up to the front door and the pantry door in the garage. We're gonna go in the old-fashioned way, soon as you place your people. I want those hostages out of there."

Breen stared back, the light of satisfaction growing in his eyes. "And Shields?"

"If he poses any threat whatever to your men or to his family, take him out."

Danny's pulse began to hammer in his throat. He raised his hand to his neck as if to somehow slow the racing blood.

Ray looked from the sheriff to him. "Y'all still planning to use the chopper as a diversion?"

"I can't think of a better one," said Ellis. "Move out, Ray."

Breen went out, leaving a trail of muddy boot prints behind him.

"I want to monitor the directional mikes from the chopper," Ellis said. "I want 'em loud and clear, Trace. Make it happen."

"You got it, Sheriff."

"And keep a thermal cam on the kitchen windows." Ellis walked to the door without even looking at Danny. "Let's go, Major. We'll listen from the ground, but I want the rotors spinning."

Ellis disappeared through the door. As Danny moved to follow him, Trace grinned with such malice that Danny stopped. "What is it, Deputy?"

The feral eyes glinted in the dim light. "That f.u.c.ker's dead now."

"Shields?"

"Yep."

"That pleases you?"

"d.a.m.n straight."

"Why?"

Trace picked up a red paper Coca-Cola cup and spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into it. "Chickens coming home to roost. That's why."

"What do you mean by that?"

The yellowish skin above Trace's chin worked around the plug of snuff in his bottom lip. "What do you care?"

"Sounds like you've got a personal problem with Dr. Shields."

"What if I do? From what I seen tonight, I don't think I'm the only one."

The deputy's eyes flashed with glee. Danny almost crossed the little room and grabbed his scrawny neck, but that would only bring questions he'd have to lie to answer. Instead, he wrapped a Sheriff's Department poncho around his shoulders and walked out into the rain.

Carl Sims had been staring so hard at the readout of the thermal-imaging camera that his eyeb.a.l.l.s felt paralyzed. Even for a sniper accustomed to searching terrain through a rifle scope, this was torture. The LCD monitor displayed a full spectrum of colors as it read the heat differentials in front of its supersensitive sensor system. The coolest areas appeared blue; warmer objects looked green; while the hottest targets transitioned from yellow to orange and finally to bright red. The human beings moving behind the window blinds were faint, amorphous blobs of constantly changing color and intensity, amoebas that pulsed, merged, separated, and then vanished altogether, only to reappear in some other place. The rain didn't help matters (the camera had already gone on the blink a couple of times; clearly it did not like moisture), but the air-conditioning inside the house did. With the air cooled to below seventy degrees, the thermal camera could detect just enough contrast to reveal the human beings moving within that air-even with the window blinds interposed between the sensor and its targets.

Carl had never been in such a bad shooting situation. He'd thought he had seen it all in Iraq, but he was wrong. He had shot through high winds, blasting sand, rain, automotive gla.s.s, and even through the water of a swimming pool; he knew exactly how a bullet would behave in each of those situations. He'd shot during the day and he'd shot at night. He'd shot p.r.o.ne, sitting, standing, and from a moving vehicle. He'd killed nine men from distances greater than a thousand yards. But never had he sat a stone's throw from a well-lighted house with his vision totally obscured by window blinds, trying to locate his target on a camera before he could even put his eye to his rifle scope. In Iraq, if he needed thermal-imaging capability, he'd simply switched to a thermal-imaging rifle scope, which gave him the equivalent of X-ray vision, zeroed to put a bullet wherever he wanted it. But this...this was a sniper's nightmare.

He didn't want the pulsing blobs to return to his side of the house. If they did, according to the sheriff's new orders, Carl would have to give the order to blow the windows himself, which meant that he would be guessing which blob was Dr. Shields. After the windows dropped, it would take at least a full second to acquire his target in the Unertl scope and pull the trigger. That was if he was right about which blob was Dr. Shields. If he was wrong, it might take two or three seconds to acquire. The shooting was nothing in this case; target acquisition was everything.

This situation was tailor-made for a commando a.s.sault, not a sniper shot. Delta, the SEALs, Force Recon, the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team-any of those units would have had the Shields family out of there hours ago, and without a single casualty. But none of those units was here tonight. Tonight it was Ray Breen's Weekend Warriors. Carl had trained with the guys out there in the black body armor, and though they might look like commandos, they weren't. Most had the reaction times of an average bowling team, not the Olympic-caliber reflexes of a Delta Force operator. Yet any minute-once Major McDavitt's helicopter lifted into the air again-they were going to crash into that house with guns blazing. The major's earlier words played relentlessly in Carl's head: There's exactly two professional soldiers here tonight, and they're both under this tent. If the sheriff reaches the point of ordering an explosive entry, you are the best hope that Mrs. Shields and her daughter have of surviving this crisis. You alone. Carl closed his eyes and prayed the major could find a way to persuade Dr. Shields to surrender peacefully. Failing that he supposed, he should pray that the red blobs would return to his side of the house. Any other outcome was likely to mean disaster.

Laurel stood on the sink side of the kitchen island, exactly opposite Warren and Beth, as Warren had instructed her to do when he cut the duct tape from her wrists and legs. Beth sat on a barstool with both hands wrapped around a mug of Borden chocolate milk that Warren had heated in the microwave. No one had said much since Beth calmed down, a feat accomplished by prodigious lying on Laurel's part, more fluff about Mommy and Daddy playing a grown-ups' game.

Warren's discussions with Danny seemed to have drained him, or perhaps sleep deprivation was finally taking its toll. Laurel couldn't remember going forty hours without sleep herself, except perhaps during final exams in college, and probably not even then. Warren had done it often as an intern, but that had been years ago. His nerves were stripped bare; the slightest sound made him jump, and he spoke in quick, snappish phrases. She had decided to focus on Beth and to avoid provoking him at any cost.

Earlier, when Danny's helicopter had cranked up and hovered over the backyard, Laurel had felt sure that rescue was imminent. Yet this belief had not brought her joy. Even before she'd received Danny's text message warning her to stay away from the windows, she'd become certain that the price of freedom would be Warren's life. As Warren strode toward one of the great room windows to check out the hovering helicopter, Laurel had steeled herself for the sight of her husband's head being blown apart like JFK's in the Zapruder film, her own personal Technicolor nightmare, one that would haunt her till the day she died. In the end, though, nothing had happened. It was as though they had edged up to the brink of disaster, then pulled back.

Beth slid off her stool and walked over to the table where she'd eaten breakfast thirteen hours before. To Laurel, the memory of that meal was like a glimpse of some other universe, one far removed from the absurd one that contained them now. Warren tracked Beth with his eyes as though about to stop her, but he didn't. Laurel watched her daughter pick up one of Grant's miniature skateboards-Tech Decks, they were called-and start rolling the two-inch-long board across the gla.s.s table. With Beth diverted, Laurel looked across the island at Warren and stared until he had no choice but to make eye contact.

"I'm sorry for everything I've done," she said. "And for everything I haven't done. I want to make things better. Tell me what I can do."

He stared back at her like a man who has forgotten how to speak. His bloodshot eyes roamed her face, perhaps searching for some clue to what had brought them to this pa.s.s. As he worked his jaw and swallowed with obvious effort, she realized that he was severely dehydrated. He hadn't used the bathroom for hours, nor had he drunk anything. The left corner of his mouth was red; she thought she saw the budding vesicles of a fever blister, which he only got when he was under extreme stress.

"Let me get you some water," she offered. "And some ibuprofen, maybe?"

He didn't respond at first. Then he rubbed his mouth and said, "Ice water."

As she turned toward the sink, Beth cried, "Christy! Dad, it's Christy!"

The corgi had disappeared earlier, probably terrified by the thunder of Danny's helicopter, but now she was back, scratching at the doggy door like a starving beggar.

"Can I let her in, Daddy?"

"Not now, honey."

"Please?" Beth pleaded. "Please, please, please, please."

As Laurel filled a tumbler with water from the tap, Warren surprised her by saying, "All right. She probably needs food."

Laurel heard Beth unlatch the pet door, then Christy's claws scratching the planks of the hardwood floor.