Free Saint/Sinner by Sam Sisavath Page A

his waist. He’d probably already reloaded once, maybe twice. Would he really carry more than two extra magazines? Anything was possible, and right now she had to err on the side of caution. Besides, even if Jerry had used up all of his submachine gun’s ammo, he still had the sidearm. How much spare ammo did he have for that?
    The answer was more than she had.
    She might have sighed out loud, because Lucy, hiding behind the ajar bedroom down the hall from her, moved slightly, the fabric of her pants rustling in the darkness. Allie didn’t look back at her, a little afraid that her own lack of conviction might show on her face and infect the girl.
    Instead, she gripped the Glock tighter and pressed her chest closer—though there wasn’t a whole lot of spaces left—against the second-story floor and peeked through the two balusters in front of her. She was so low to the ground that she could see and smell the dust gathered round the base of the wooden poles even in the pitch-darkness. It had definitely been a while since someone put a Dustbuster to work on this place.
    He was moving slowly from the back of the house to the living room, as if he had all the time in the world. And maybe he did. She had kicked the door in expecting sirens to wail or at least lights on the alarm panel to start blinking. Except there wasn’t any panel on the wall, and nothing blinked. While waiting for Jerry to show up, she had been holding out hope that the house had a silent alarm, with the control panel somewhere else in another part of the residence calling out to the authorities at that very moment.
    Except no one had come. Not even after she had fired two more shots into the dead silent night.
    So maybe Jerry was right. Maybe he did have all night to stalk her, maybe—
    A loud growl from the darkness interrupted the silence.
    Jerry heard it at the same time that she did. He stopped almost directly below her on the first floor and spun around, lifting the MP5SD as he did so.
    She didn’t know why, but something prompted her to jump up to her feet and shout down, “Hey, dickhead!”
    He might have been in the process of pulling the trigger at something down there, but her scream cut through him like a knife, and Jerry instead whirled back around in her direction and opened fire.
    She ducked her head and ran along the length of the second floor as the wall exploded around her, the sound of the submachine gun’s parts spinning sending shivers up and down her spine. She thought she was ready for it; she had seen it at work up close and had even held and used one at the range. But she wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer violence of its thirty rounds, all of which seemed to be coming at her at subsonic speeds.
    She stuck out her hand and fired the Glock blindly down at the living room while shielding her face with her free arm against the chunks of the wall swarming around her. It sounded and felt as if every inch of the second floor was coming apart at the seams and there would be absolutely nothing left when this was over.
    Then, a sharp, ferocious bark broke through the whirring gunfire and the clink-clink-clink of empty brass casings scattering across the tiled first floor. The wall behind her stopped exploding just as Allie reached the head of the stairs. She didn’t so much as stop as she rammed into the wall and didn’t have any more room to keep going.
    She didn’t have to turn her head very far to glimpse Jerry below her, at the same time a rocket of white fur—easily visible against the dark living room—streaked toward him. Jerry reacted much faster than the bigger Jones had at Walter’s house, and instead of trying to shoot the dog, Jerry lifted his submachine gun and swung.
    A sharp yelp filled the house as Apollo was knocked out of the air by the stock of the weapon and landed in a pile of fur on the floor. The dog quickly scrambled to his feet, but despite his breathtaking speed, Apollo wasn’t fast enough. Jerry