Apparently her terror was at last conveyed to the physician, for he did not hesitate or continue to work at cross purposes to her. He grabbed the chair and wheeled it swiftly through a door that connected the examination room to the downstairs hall. Laura and dais followed him along the gloomy corridor, then across a kitchen lit only by the illuminated digital clocks on the oven and microwave oven. The chair thumped over the sill between the kitchen and the back porch, badly jarring the wounded man, but he had been through worse.
Slinging the Uzi over her shoulder and jamming the revolver into her waistband, Laura hurried around Brenkshaw to the bottom of the porch steps. She took hold of the wheelchair from the front, helping him trundle it to the concrete walk below.
She glanced at the areaway between the house and garage, half expecting to see an armed man coming through there already, and she whispered to Brenkshaw, “You’ll have to go with us. They’ll kill you if you stay here, I’m sure they will.”
Again he offered no argument but followed Chris, as the boy led the way down the walk that struck across the rear lawn to the gate in the redwood fence at the back of the long property. Having unslung the Uzi from her shoulder, Laura came last, ready to turn and open fire if she heard a noise from the house behind them.
As Chris reached the gate, it opened in front of him, and a man dressed in black stepped through from the alley, darker than the night around them except for his moon-pale face and white hands, every bit as surprised by them as they were by him. He’d come along the street beside the house and into the alley to cover the place from the back. In his left hand, gleaming darkly, was a submachine gun, not at the ready, but he started to bring it up—Laura could not blow him away, not without cutting her son down as well—but Chris reacted as Henry Takahami had spent months teaching him to react. The boy spun and kicked the assassin’s right arm, knocking the gun out of his grasp—it hit the lawn with a thump and soft clatter—then kicked again at his adversary’s crotch, and with a grunt of pain, the man in black fell backward against the gatepost.
By then Laura had stepped around the wheelchair and interposed herself between Chris and the killer. She reversed the Uzi, raised it overhead, and brought the stock of it down on the assassin’s skull, struck him again with all her might, and he dropped to the lawn, away from the walk, without having had a chance to cry out.
Events were moving fast now, too fast, they were on a downhill ride, and already Chris was going through the gate, so Laura followed, and they surprised a second man in black, eyes like holes in his white face, a vampiric figure, but this one was beyond the reach of a karate kick, so she had to open fire before he could use his own weapon. She shot over Chris’s head, a tightly placed burst that pounded into the assassin’s chest, throat, and neck, virtually decapitating him as it catapulted him backward onto the alley pavement.
Brenkshaw had come through the gate behind them, pushing the wheelchair into the alley, and Laura felt bad about having gotten him into this, but there was no going back now. The back street was narrow, flanked by the fenced yards of houses on both sides, with a few garages and clusters of garbage cans behind each property, poorly revealed by the lamps on the intersecting streets at each end of the block, with no lights of its own.
To Brenkshaw, Laura said, “Wheel him across the alley and down a couple of doors. Find a gate that’s open and get him into somebody else’s yard, out of sight. Chris, you go with them.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll follow you in a second.”
“Mom—”
“Go, Chris!” she said, for the physician had already rolled the wheelchair fifty feet, angling across the alleyway.
As the boy reluctantly followed the doctor, Laura returned to the open redwood gate at the rear of Brenkshaw’s property. She was just in time to see two dark figures scuttle out of the areaway between the house and garage, thirty yards from her, barely visible, noticeable only because they were moving. They ran crouched, one of them heading toward the porch and the other toward the lawn because they didn’t yet know exactly where the trouble was, where the gunfire had come from.