Luckily the stairs were covered in thick shag carpeting, the kind of carpet that had already gone out of fashion when she was a kid, so he didn’t make a sound. Next to the front door the fat solitaire-playing goon slept, his rifle on his lap. Ellen didn’t like guns, which some people thought strange since she was born and had spent all of her life in West Virginia. She’d always hated hunting, and dead deer hanging on the backs of trucks made her queasy and terribly sad. But she knew the gun on the fat man’s lap was something as hard-core as what Steve would have used in Iraq. It looked grotesque, rising and falling on his belly as he snored. Next to him, a small black-and-white monitor mounted to the wall showed a series of live surveillance camera shots: the dirt road outside the fence, illuminated in spotlights, the inside of the fence perimeter, and the outside of the enormous reinforced front door. No one could arrive at El Varón’s by surprise. William looked at her, and she knew what his expression said: Don’t go in the room without me.
