Mortal Prey

dead. The other dog took a step back, looking at its dead companion. Before it could do anything else, Rinker killed it.
    The two shots sounded like nothing else but shots. If anyone was at the house a half mile away, the shots might have sounded like popcorn popping. Two light pops in the evening breeze, coming from Baker’s house. She doubted that anyone would be curious.
    On the other hand, there was no point in taking chances. She dragged the dead dogs back to the stake in the middle of the yard and rolled them upright, as though they were sleeping on duty.
    Baker’s back door had another sign: “Forget the Dog, Beware of Owner.” Rinker ignored it, and used the butt of the pistol to knock a hole in the window. She reached through, flipped the bolt, and let herself in.
    Baker had two gun cabinets that she knew of, both of them bolted into the concrete floor in the basement. Neither was really a safe, in the strictest sense, but they wouldn’t be easy to get into, either. Rinker intended to use an ax on the doors, and if that didn’t work…well, bad luck for Baker. She’d wait for him to come home.
    Now she called out: “Anybody home?”
    Nothing but silence. She went to the basement door, turned on the light, and went down the stairs. The two gun safes sat at the far end of the basement; one of them was open an inch. Empty? Unlikely. More likely that Baker just started feeling safe, all these years gone by with no burglaries, the dogs in the yard, his reputation…
    Fuckin’ Baker, she thought. Leaving the door like that was purely laziness. She reached out to pull it open, but with her hand just an inch away, she stopped. Boy, that was convenient, the way the door just hung there. Rinker didn’t believe that life was easy. Something was wrong. She stepped away, looked around, spotted a length of two-by-two propped in a corner. She got it, stood back away from the safe, and eased the door open.
    The shotgun blast nearly killed her—not from the steel shot, but from the shock of it. The gun was behind her, under the stairs. The blast had gone right past her into the gun safe. She staggered back away from it, her legs stinging, her hands at her ears. She was deaf, her head aching, her eyes watering. Her legs hurt. She looked down; her jeans looked okay, but when she lifted the pant legs, she found little stripes of blood trickling down into her socks.
    She left the gun safe and went back upstairs and peeled off the pants in the light of the kitchen. She’d been hit by three pellets, all ricochets, all buried just beneath her skin. She popped them out with her fingertips, found some Band-Aids and a bottle of peroxide in the bathroom, wiped the wounds and bandaged them.
    Fuckin’ Baker. As she worked, the ringing in her ears faded, and she could again hear her feet moving around on the bathroom floor.
    When she was done, she went back downstairs and looked at the now-empty double-barreled shotgun. It had been rigged with a simple wire on a pulley. The wire ran from the safe door, through a hole in the back of the safe to a pulley on the wall, up to the ceiling joists, across another pulley to the stairs, down to the trigger on the shotgun. The trigger itself had the lightest pull she’d ever experienced in a weapon. She was tempted to rig it backward, pointing up the stairs, but hell—it was his house.
    She went back up the stairs, out to the garage, got Baker’s ax, carried it into the basement, and went after the second gun safe. She worked at it methodically, and it took her five minutes, cutting through the front, then using the ax handle to pry a gap in the metal. There were nine rifles in the safe, all with scopes: four bolt-action varmint rifles, two in .22-250 and two in .223; three bolt-actions in larger calibers, a Remington 7mm Magnum, a Steyr .308 and a Winchester .243; plus two semiautos, a Ruger Ranch Rifle in .223 and a military-style AR-15, also in .223. Three gun cases were stacked beside the safes; each could handle two rifles. She packed the three larger calibers, plus the AR-15 and the two .223 bolt-actions, and carried them up to the car. She threw the other three rifles on top of the packed guns, and around them she stacked seventeen boxes of ammunition, two shooters’ sandbags, two packs of paper targets, and a sawhorse with a clamp on the bottom, which was used to hold the targets.
    She didn’t need all the stuff, but couldn’t afford to be selective. Gun thieves wouldn’t