Page 5

She smiled sweetly at him, never moving from the doorway. “I won’t.”
He retraced his steps. The door bells jangled overhead as he opened, then shut, the door, remaining inside the store.
While Remi wasn’t exactly a stranger in the kitchen, she often joked that cook was a noun, not a verb.
Come to think of it, he couldn’t recall her ever buying a cookbook, much less searching for one. Definitely not while they were married.
She was in trouble.
Nice time to be without a gun.
Typically, he carried a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, but they were in San Francisco for fun and so he’d left it on their plane.
Now what? Call 911 and hope the police arrived in time?
Not about to risk his wife’s life, he silenced the ringer on his phone, set his hat on the counter, then quietly began opening drawers, searching for something a little more substantial than his small pocketknife to use as a weapon. He found a folding knife with a four-inch blade. He pulled it open, felt it lock. Decent weight, nicely balanced, point intact, probably used to open boxes, judging by the gumminess on the blade’s edge. Now to get back to that room without being discovered.
He slid his hand into his wife’s purse, found a small makeup bag, and took out a compact mirror. Flipping it open, he wiped the powder residue from the mirror with his pants, then edged his way down the aisle, making sure a row of bookshelves was between him and the door to that storeroom.
“You!” a deep voice shouted.
Sam froze.
“Forget the combination again and you die.”
“Forgive me.” Pickering, the bookseller, Sam figured, as he continued down the aisle. “I’m nervous.”
“Please,” Remi said. “There’s no need to wave that gun around.”
“Shut up! You, old man. Get that safe open.”
“I—I’m trying.”
Sam forced himself to breathe evenly. His wife was in that room, and all he wanted to do was rush in there, save her. But his haste could mean her death. A folding knife against a gunman. It was moments like this he was glad for the weapons-and-security training he’d received during his years at DARPA.
When he reac
hed the end of the aisle, he stopped, used the mirror to peer around the corner.
Light spilled from the doorway of the storeroom onto the gray linoleum floor. Sam kept to the edge, careful not to cast a shadow. Holding the mirror out, he angled it to get a visual into the room.
Relief at the sight of his auburn-haired wife, now seated by a cluttered desk, was short-lived as he angled the compact farther and saw the short, swarthy fellow holding a semiauto to the shopkeeper’s back. The two men stood in front of a large floor safe, the shopkeeper turning the dial. If Sam approached from this position, it put Remi between him and the gunman.
He didn’t like the odds. At the moment, he had no other choice.
C’mon, Remi. Turn. See me . . .
He rocked the tiny mirror back and forth so that the light caught her face. Unfortunately, she looked away, leaning toward the desk, as an audible click indicated the safe had unlocked. Pickering pulled open the door, revealing a smooth wooden box large enough to hold two bottles of wine.
The gunman stepped closer to it. “What’s in the box?”
“An old book. Just an antique.”
“Put it on the desk.”
He complied, placing the box on the desk near Remi.
Sam grasped the handle-heavy knife by its blade, stepped into the doorway, aimed, and threw.