A noise woke me.

Not much of a noise, but enough of one to tell me I wasn’t alone in the house. The convincing thing was the dead silence that followed that little bump-in-the-night, an unnatural silence, and I found myself holding my breath, much as the intruder downstairs must have been.

I sat up in bed, leaned over toward the window, parted the curtains, and looked out. Looked down. It had snowed today, the season’s first snowfall; and the cold late November day had turned into a dark, even colder night. The ground was covered with a good five inches of white, and the footprints showed.

That was when I first consciously realized the. 38 was in my hand. I’d been keeping the gun under the pillow on the side of the bed that hadn’t been getting much use lately. Neither had the gun, outside of my carrying it around with me all the time, like some sort of goddamn. 38 caliber security blanket.

But all blankets were tossed aside now, and I was sitting up in bed, and the gun in my hand wasn’t a symbol any more, not just something to make me feel comfortable. No.

It was something to kill people with.

People like the two men who were invading my lake home at this very moment. Right now there was only one of them in the house, but another man was outside, backing the first guy up. No doubt of that. That was standard, a team of two, but that didn’t bother me. They wouldn’t be coming in together.

Which was nice, because it’s easier to kill people one at a time. Two-on-one may be okay in basketball, but not in this game.

I didn’t make any noise getting out of bed. Three and a half months of practice had made me good. The guy downstairs was good, too, I supposed, but he wasn’t that good; he hadn’t lived here like I had, he didn’t know this place other than maybe from photographs or an afternoon prowl he and his partner may have made sometime when I was away. And I’m always gone in the afternoon. So it would have been easy.