The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [9]
Instead, he waited, rooted in place, and witnessed just the reverse. As the guard reached the top step, Mel swung his leg out, low and hard, and caught the man’s left shin with his instep, causing him to pivot off balance and tumble headlong back down the stairs in a thunderous, rolling clatter.
Abandoning Ellis, Mel ran after his victim, jumping two steps at a time to keep up, and arrived at the bottom almost simultaneously. There, as Ellis watched, he crouched by the inert body, his fist raised to finish the job.
He needn’t have worried. The body lay limp as a corpse. Slowly, Mel lowered his hand and rested his fingers against the watchman’s carotid pulse. A few seconds later, clearly satisfied, he rose, rejoined Ellis at double time, and said in a normal voice, “Move it. We’re wasting time.”
Ellis didn’t move. “You kill him?”
Mel had taken hold of the box’s other end. “No, I didn’t kill him. He’s just out. C’mon. Grab on. We gotta go.”
Reluctantly, Ellis obeyed, following Mel down the stairs and past the motionless guard, noticing the slight but regular movement of the latter’s chest.
“Jesus, Mel,” he murmured, so softly not even his intended listener overheard.
To the left of the ground-floor landing was a short hallway leading to an enormous two-story basketball court / meeting hall combination, complete with National Guard flags and banners, ghostly in its gloomy silence. If ever there was a moment for all the lights to come on and a phalanx of armed and angry soldiers to materialize from nowhere, this was it for Ellis.
But nothing happened. To cover their tracks, Mel paused to lock the window he’d jimmied earlier to get them in, and then gently pushed the panic bar on the metal door beside it to bring them out onto a small steel-mesh loading dock. There, a short flight of steps led to the parking lot that circled the armory like an asphalt doughnut.
Mel did this fluidly, without pause, leading Ellis in ten seconds to where they ended up crouching in the shadows beside a parked car.
“You okay?” Mel asked, surprising Ellis, who couldn’t recall when or if he’d ever displayed such concern.
“Yeah,” he stammered. “Good.”
“Then move your butt. You’re draggin’.”
Mel rose, fast for a big man, and jogged across the lot, with Ellis doing his best to keep up. At the far end, parked under the trees and facing the street, were Nancy and the pickup.
They tossed the box into the truck and piled into the cab as Nancy keyed the ignition and began pulling out, waiting to turn on the lights until she had reached the road.
“Cool and easy, babe,” Mel warned her. “Cool and easy.”
Chapter 3
It wasn’t until a few days later that Joe Gunther visited Linda Rubinstein. After he left Doug Matthews at the Michelle Fisher house outside Wilmington—or the house where Fisher had chosen to die, as her disgruntled landlord and pseudo father-in-law would probably have put it—it was late, and he hadn’t seen any lights on at the address Matthews had given him.
He remained officially uninvolved—there was still no reason to think Fisher’s death wasn’t natural, especially since the ME’s report remained pending. But he felt compelled by curiosity to pursue what angles he had available. Doug had left the metaphorical door open, after all. It could even be argued that by reinterviewing Rubinstein, Joe was merely acting on his colleague’s veiled request.
Matthews had summed up Rubinstein as a transplanted urbanite and ex-RN who had given up the rat race to concentrate on her art, whatever that was. As a result, Joe had initially expected her address to be either a new house or a yuppified remodeling job, complete with slate roof and shingle siding. Thanks to his initial drive-by, however, he already knew to expect something far less predictable. The place where he now stopped was a true dump—sagging porch, iffy metal roof, peeling clapboards. There was even the