Bullets hit the car like hammers.Ethan dragged Sophia over the seat and threw her into the back. He fell in after her. Glass rained on their heads."Stay down!" Ethan shouted."I am down!" Sophia screamed."Lower!""I'm on the floor, you idiot! I can't get lower unless you bury me!"Another round tore through the roof. A fourth smashed the side mirror. Somebody up on the ramp was laughing again."Is this Gerald?" Ethan asked."No!""Is this your father?""Don't be stupid!""Is this another one of your little tests, Sophia?""Ethan, look at me!"He looked.Her face was white. Blood was drying on her chin. But her eyes were steady, and her voice was cold and clear."I swear on my mother's grave," Sophia said. "I have nothing to do with this. If I wanted you dead, you would be dead already. I'm a Morgan. We don't miss.""That's comforting.""It's true.""Then who wants us dead tonight?""I don't know," Sophia said. "But I'm very sorry they picked tonight. I'm wearing the wrong shoes."E

THE HIDEOUT, THE HILLSGerald Cole fanned the photographs across the table like a poker hand.He could not stop looking at them. Sophia Morgan on the floor. Ethan on top of her. Her torn dress. Her bleeding mouth. Thirty photos of the proudest woman in the city looking like a street girl after a fight."Dean," Gerald hissed, through the wires in his jaw."Yes, Chairman?""We print them tomorrow.""Sir, with respect.""Front page. Every paper. Every website.""Chairman, no."Gerald's good eye swung round like a gun."No?""Not yet," Rourke said, quickly. He pressed a hand to his taped ribs and tried to look wise. "Think about it, sir. If we print today, the story lasts one week. Then everyone forgets. The Morgans hire a lawyer. They say the pictures are fake. They say it was a robbery. And we've used our best bullet.""So?""So we keep it. In a drawer. And we wait.""For what?""For the day she hurts us," Rourke said. "Then we show her the drawer."Gerald stared at him. Slowly, a thin

THE STEPS OF CENTRAL POLICE HEADQUARTERSEthan stood at the bottom of the stairs and did not move.The rain had stopped. The sky was turning from black to grey. The man and the woman were still kneeling on the wet stone, with the photograph of a little girl pressed between them.Ethan looked at the photograph. He looked at the mother's face. He wanted to say something. He did not know what.Then the great stone doors swung open.Chief Augustine Pell came down the steps in his shirt sleeves, with no hat, no jacket and no escort. His moustache was wet. His eyes were red. He looked like a man who had slept in his chair."Mr. Tilley," Pell said. "Mrs. Tilley. Please. Get up.""Chief," Raymond Tilley whispered."Get up, sir. Please. Not on the stone.""We will not go until you find her.""Then I will kneel with you," Pell said, and, to the horror of the young constable, he got down on one knee in the wet."Chief!" the constable gasped."Be quiet, Barnes.""Sir, your trousers.""I have othe

THE SITTING ROOM, ELM GROVE"Hold his hand, Marcus.""Mr. Ethan, I can't.""You can.""I'm a baker.""I know." Ethan's voice was gentle. "And tonight I need you to be a man who holds a hand. That's all. You don't have to look."Marcus Hale stood very still in the corner of the room. His face was the colour of dough. He was looking at the red carpet and the broken glasses and the little man in the chair, sobbing and bleeding with his cheek hanging open.He thought of the girl with the bunches in her hair. He thought of his own daughter, peeping round the bakery door with flour on her nose.He walked forward. He took Leonard Fisk's right hand in both of his and held it flat against the arm of the chair."Good man," Ethan said."No," Fisk wept. "No, no, no, please.""Last chance.""I can't tell you!""Then I'll go slowly."He knelt. He took one toothpick out of the jar. He held it up to the lamp and turned it between his fingers, calmly, the way a man looks at a pencil before he draws."

THE OLD QUARRY ROADEthan dropped the briefcase lid, and his right hand came out from under his jacket holding a black pistol that nobody in the quarry had seen him draw.Two shots cracked so close together they sounded like one, and the heavy man in the leather jacket screamed and fell back against the van with his gun spinning away across the gravel, clutching a hand that was no longer shaped like a hand.Before the echo had died, a second pistol appeared in Ethan's left hand, small and flat and hidden at the small of his back the whole time, and he turned without any hurry and fired twice more, once at the boy with the rifle and once at the man in the cab.The rifle clattered to the stones, the boy howled and folded over his own wrist, and in the passenger seat Moss grunted through his teeth and stared down at his shattered fingers and the pistol that lay in the footwell beyond his reach.It had taken less than three seconds."Now!" Ethan shouted.The quarry exploded with movement,