The Bodies Left Behind

woman had shut downagain, sullen and resentful. She limped along more slowly, using a pool cue as a cane.
    Brynn squeezed her arm.
    No response.
    “Come on, Michelle, we have to move faster.”
    The young woman complied but was obviously distraught. She seemed put out. As if she were the only victim here. It reminded her of Joey’s attitude when Brynn insisted he do homework before playing computer games or text-messaging his friends.
    As they neared the house Brynn was reflecting on the dispute she’d had with Michelle back at 2 Lake View after agreeing to put the furnace on.
    But she’d done that simply to trick the men into believing they were hiding out in the house. She’d said to the young woman, “Come on. We’re going back to the Feldmans’ place.”
    “What?”
    “Hurry.”
    Michelle, with her injured ankle and in shock from losing her friends, had begged to stay in the house at Number 2, hiding, even in the spider-filled basement, and waiting for the police. Acting like a bit of a princess, she’d resisted heading outside. She couldn’t understand why Brynn felt certain the men would circle back, rather than go on to Route 682.
    But Brynn was convinced they would do just that. The drive to the highway was just a trick.
    “But why?” the young woman had argued adamantly. “It doesn’t make sense.”
    Brynn explained her logic. “From what you told me,I don’t think this was just a random break-in. They’re professional killers. That means they’re going to come after us. They have to. We can identify them. And that means we’re a link to whoever hired them. So they’re doubly desperate to find us. If they don’t, their boss is going to come after them.”
    Brynn didn’t, however, tell her that there was another basis for her conclusion: the man named Hart. He wasn’t going away. She’d recalled how confident he’d sounded talking to her in the house. Unemotional and fully prepared to kill her without a second’s hesitation when she showed herself.
    Hart reminded her of the surgeon who, in a perfectly even voice, explained how her father had died during exploratory surgery.
    More chillingly, though, he reminded Brynn of her ex-husband. Hart’s look was the same as in Keith’s face once when she found him slipping a pistol she didn’t recognize into the lockbox in the bedroom. She’d asked about it and the state trooper had hesitated but confessed to her that fellow officers would sometimes pocket a weapon found at crime scenes, if it wasn’t necessary evidence. They’d collect them. “Just to have,” Keith had explained.
    “You mean . . . you mean, to plant them on a perp—so you can say you shot him in self-defense?”
    Her husband hadn’t answered. But he’d glanced at her with a look that was identical to Hart’s in that instant he rose from the foliage, holding his pistol and looking for a target.
    There was something else in the glance too, Brynn decided. Admiration?
    Maybe.
    And a challenge too.
    May the best person win. . . .
    Assuming the men would return to the house where she and Michelle were hiding, Brynn had set the TV to a shopping network, blocked the door with a dresser and rigged the power cord around the leg. Then she’d found a bottle of ammonia and poured it on the floor, alongside a bucket, to make it look as though she’d set a trap. That would make Hart and his partner wary, thinking she was willing to blind her pursuers—though in reality she would not risk hurting the homeowners or rescue workers later.
    They’d grabbed a few other things, which they now carried: weapons. Each woman had a sock containing a billiard ball—like a South American bolo throwing weapon, which Brynn had learned about helping Joey with a project on Argentina for school. They also had Chicago Cutlery knives in their pockets, wrapped in sock scabbards, and Brynn carried a pool cue at the end of which was taped a ten-inch-long Chicago Cutlery carving knife.
    Michelle had taken the weapons reluctantly. But Brynn had insisted. And the young woman had grudgingly agreed.
    Then they’d slipped into the woods behind the house and turned north, back toward the Feldmans’ place, picking their way carefully through the boggy ground and using logs and rocks as stepping-stones to climb over the streams that ran to the lake.
    Now, keeping under cover in the yard of her friends’house, Michelle was staring south toward the gunshots. She muttered to Brynn, “Why did you