Larson was halfway up the stairs when all the shouting stopped. The sudden change froze him. He became acutely aware of the big-breasted white-porcelain mermaid figurine on a small table at the top of the stairs. She seemed to be looking right at him. Laughing.
Then, ever so slightly, the mermaid rocked side to side, a nearly imperceptible movement. The flooring had moved; and with it, the table; and with it, the figurine. Someone up there was moving toward the stairs.
All these realizations collided in Larson at the same instant, combining to loosen his knees and move the barrel of his Glock slightly to his left. He crouched and raised the weapon. A man appeared at the top of the stairs, already firing.
Larson squeezed off two shots and then intentionally slipped his toes off the stair tread, sliding backward and down the stairs toward cover. White plaster from exploding Sheetrock filled the air like smoke and fell like snow. Larson’s third shot, aimed at the belly, took away most of the man’s knee, and spun him around like a dancer. Hit, the man fired off three more rounds, lost to the walls.
Larson reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped moving. His arm steady, he fired again, but the man was turned, his profile reduced. The porcelain figurine erupted off the table into a thousand floating shards.
A splash of flesh erupted out of the shooter’s back. He buckled forward and collapsed. Then the top stair splintered, as did the fifth stair down.
Larson had not fired either of those shots. Montgomery had given him the wrong head count.
A younger man appeared at the top of the stairs, a black semiautomatic gripped in both hands, arms extended. Eyes squinted nearly shut. Early, early twenties, still with bad acne. Freckles. Reddish hair. He looked like an altar boy, not a killer. Fired a gun like one as well. He’d shot the other one-accidentally, no doubt-while wildly running through a full magazine. His shots continued down the stairs, wood and carpet jumping, debris flying.
Larson dropped him with single round, a gut-shot that staggered him back and pushed him to sitting against the wall by the table where the figurine had been. He stared straight ahead as he slumped to the side and fell still.
Larson moved into the downstairs hall for cover.
“Dr. Markowitz?” he shouted, when he’d regained his breath. “ U.S. marshal. Hello? Dr. Markowitz? I’m coming upstairs. Hands on your head, knees on the floor, or I will shoot! Dr. Markowitz?”
He worked his way slowly up the stairs, his attention committed to the two on the top landing, wondering if either of them had enough left in their tanks to extend the firefight. Two steps later he felt fairly certain the younger guy was dead, and a sense of outright anger flooded him, for he’d felt compelled to defend himself, and the kid had no sense of guns whatsoever.
The first one, the one now folded forward in a pose of contrite prayer, had been gut-shot and was losing blood badly. He was unconscious, though somehow balanced and stuck in this position. Larson reached the landing, kicked the weapons away. One tumbled downstairs, clattering as it landed. He glanced around for a phone. Perhaps they could medevac this one to the mainland.
In searching for the phone, Larson spotted Markowitz, recognizing him even from the back. He shouted to him, “Dr. Markowitz! Hands where I can see them, please.”
It was only then that Larson noticed the small trickle of red below the man’s curly white hair. He recalled the first shooter’s wild shots as Larson had taken out his knee, the sound of bullets penetrating walls. One of those bullets had found Markowitz.
“Dr. Markowitz!”
The old man still had his fingers on the keyboard, but they weren’t moving. He was dead as well. Whatever progress he’d made in decrypting Laena remained to be determined.
Larson quickly but thoroughly searched the house, closet by closet, room by room, in search of Penny. He looked for clues of the girl’s presence in the food stocked, the laundry washed, bath toys, beach toys: anything he could think of-but found no indication of a child. He returned upstairs to Markowitz, hoping for a disk or storage device, but was faced with only the laptop computer beneath the man’s hands. Larson disconnected the laptop and its power supply and took them with him. There would be hell to pay for leaving a shooting-but to remain behind and suffer through a day of statements and inquiry was unthinkable.
As he stole through the night toward the marina, Larson called Montgomery at the Useppa Inn and told him to call every law enforcement agency he could. And an air ambulance. Larson left behind the carnage, but not its aftershock. For along with Markowitz, Larson realized he’d lost his connection to the Romeros, and with it his best and perhaps only chance of finding Penny alive.