some point Sidney Archer would risk turning on a light and the deadly
power of the shotgun would quickly devastate everything in the small
room, including him.
Breathing quietly, he gripped his knife with his good hand, looked
around the confines of the living room and waited. His arm stung
terribly; Scales was far more used to inflicting pain than receiving it.
He listened to Sidney’s footsteps as she proceeded cautiously down the
stairs. He was sure the shotgun was making wide sweeps of the area.
From out of the darkness, he cautiously raised his head an inch or so
above the top of the sofa. His eyes instantly riveted on her. She was
halfway down the stairs. So intent was she on locating her quarry, she
did not see a piece of the bedroom door that had landed on the stairs.
When she unwittingly placed her weight fully on it, the piece slipped
free and both her feet flew out from under her. With a scream, she
tumbled down the stairs, the shotgun smashing against the railing. In
an instant he pounced. As the pair rolled along the hardwood floor, he
pounded her head against it. She kicked furiously against his chest and
ribs with her heavy boots.
Then she twisted away just as he struck savagely with his knife. The
blow missed barely, tearing through the inside of her jacket instead of
her flesh. A white object that had been in Sidney’s pocket was
dislodged from the impact of the blow and floated to the floor.
Sidney managed to grab the shotgun and delivered a terrific blow to
Scales’s face with the butt of the solid Winchester, breaking his nose
and knocking out several front teeth. Stunned, Scales dropped his knife
and fell back for an instant. Then, furious, he wrenched the shotgun
free, turning it on a dazed Sidney Archer. In a panic she hurled
herself several feet away but was still easily in range. His finger
pulled the trigger, but the muzzle remained silent. The fall down the
stairs and the ensuing struggle had jammed the weapon.
Sidney, her head bursting with pain from the earlier blow, desperately
crawled away. With a vicious snarl, Scales threw the useless shotgun
away and stood up, blood streaming down his shirt from his torn mouth
and rearranged nose. He picked up his knife where it had fallen and
advanced with murderous eyes toward Sidney. When he lifted the blade to
strike, Sidney whirled around, the 9mm pointed right at him. A split
second before she fired, however, he exploded into an acrobatic leap
that carried him over the dining room table. She held the trigger down,
throwing the 9mm into full auto maric fire, the Hydra-Shok slugs tracing
an explosive pattern across the wall as she tried desperately to follow
the path of his impromptu flight. Scales hit the polished wood floor
hard, his momentum sending him headlong into the wall. As his torso
whiplashed sideways from the impact with the wall, he crashed into the
legs of an ornate mahogany sideboard. The slender mahogany legs snapped
like matchsticks and the heavy piece collapsed right on top of him,
spewing its contents across the room as drawers flew open from the fall.
Scales did not move after that.
Sidney jumped up, ran through the kitchen, grabbed her purse off the
counter and fled down the stairs to the garage. A minute later the
garage door splintered and erupted outward and the Land Rover careened
through the savaged opening, did a 180-degree spin in the driveway and
disappeared into the snowstorm.
As Sidney looked in her rearview mirror, she saw a pair of headlights.
Her heart skipped a beat as she watched the big Cadillac pull into the
driveway of the house she had just left. The blood drained from her
face. Omigod! Her parents were finally here and the timing could not
have been worse. She swung the truck around, plowing through a
snowdrift, and raced back toward her parents’ house.
Then her problem was suddenly compounded as she caught sight of another
pair of headlights coming down from the direction her parents had come.
She watched in steadily growing fear as the black sedan moved down the