68

            Once Cutty was inside the house, he drew his pistol.

            Music thundered from upstairs, making the floor, walls, and windows vibrate.  The devil’s music.   

            He swept through the first level.  The house was dusty and cluttered, decorated with old upholstered furniture and soiled carpeting spotted with cigarette burns.  It reeked of cigarette smoke, and faintly of marijuana, too. 

            This home was an incubator of iniquity, a womb of the wicked. 

            Little wonder that Thorne had grown up there.

            After proving the first floor vacant, he ascended the staircase, raking his glance over the framed photographs assembled along the wall.  Hell-bound sinners, all of them.  No one who feared God would live in such a spiritually vapid house.

            Upstairs, all of the doors were ajar, except the one at the end.  The satanic music came from behind the door.

            The knob turned when he twisted it.  He didn’t worry about the occupant detecting the sound of his entry.  The music of the damned was so explosively loud it would have prevented one from hearing the Judgment Day trumpets.

            Inside, a thin teenager sat at a desktop computer, hammering away on the keyboard, his back to the door.  He didn’t even hear Cutty crossing the trash-strewn room.

            But the kid certainly felt the gun that Cutty placed at the back of his head.