Slow Heat by Lorie O'Clare Page B

stairs toward a closed door. Haley wouldn’t let me set this up in the family room, though, so instead”—he straightened each mannequin then hooked them to wiring in the ceiling—“the dolls are going to fly toward the door at a fairly good speed. You will open the door and fire, and you must take out all four dolls before you have the door all the way open. In other words, if the mannequins make it through the door, you lose.” Then running his hand up the wiring holding one of the mannequins in place, he added drily, “Not to mention, they’ll all get tangled up in the door frame.”
    “Woo hoo!” Ben whooped, rocking up on his heels. “Let the games begin. Mind if I go first?” he asked, and picked up the gun he’d been holding before following King to his garage. He shot a side glance at Micah. “I’ll have more confidence if I don’t already know the exercise has been mastered.”
    Micah didn’t comment. Ben was pretty good with a gun, and he was coming around as a bounty hunter. The kid just didn’t have the same experience under his belt that Micah did. No one did.
    King laughed. “No problem. No one likes being shown up.” He grinned easily at Micah. The man was one hell of a shot. King had been a cop for quite a few years before retiring and opening his private practice. “I’ll get it set up,” he said, and continued hooking the mannequins to heavy wires fixed to the ceiling. “This took most of last night and this morning getting this ready to go,” he explained, looking at Micah. “Marc, my son, and I messed with this setup for hours before we got it right. Or thought we had it right. London, his wife, came out here once we had all the mannequins moving smoothly and informed us we had the door opening the wrong way.”
    As he spoke, he finished hooking the wires, which were threaded through holes drilled in the dolls’ backs to pulleys on the ceiling. Ben stood on the opposite side of the door with both hands on his gun, pointing it at the floor. He watched the door like a hawk, though, as if the dolls might come to life and fly through it before King finished getting them ready.
    It was amazing how full of life the kid was. Ben had been convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, had done time for it, and stood in front of Micah grinning, his face lit up as if he’d just been given a brand-new weapon to play with. Ben wasn’t bitter. He didn’t act betrayed. If anything, it seemed he’d somehow made it through a tragedy unscathed. Most people would be mad at the world for being so terribly wronged.
    Ben almost danced from one foot to the other, waiting to take his turn. Micah turned his attention to the setup, which was pretty elaborate. “Are all four of them going toward the door at the same time? Or will they hit the door one at a time?” he asked, and tried to envision it happening for real.
    “Nope. See, we had to re-create it just the way it happened, especially once London was on to us and learned we were re-creating something she went through.”
    “She wasn’t going to let you pull off the scene and have it any easier than it was for her.”
    “You’ve got it.” King adjusted the wiring on the back of one of the dolls then lowered his hands and looked at Micah. “As soon as London got wind of the fact that we were so incredibly impressed about what she’d done that we wanted to see if we could do it ourselves, she went over the setup with a fine-tooth comb.”
    King backed away and surveyed his work. He looked toward the door leading into the family room at the sound of people approaching. Micah heard the low baritone of a man speaking as several people came down the stairs. Instinctively he turned so his back was to the cement wall as he faced the open door.
    A large man, taller than Micah, suddenly filled the doorway. Micah homed in on a hairline scar that started at the man’s jaw and continued down the side of his neck. It wasn’t overly visible but the ceiling