“Couple of kids, Alan. They’d be sloppy.”
“They were sloppy. Sunny picked it up in a second.”
“Still, too neat for kids.”
“Don’t underestimate them, Sam. Merritt’s a kid, too. So far, it hasn’t proved to be much of a defense for her.”
With that, we arrived at the barn.
I admit that I’d barely paid any attention to the structure on the original drive up the hill. After all, the Not So Lazy Seven was a ranch, and the building was designed to look like a barn. But examining it more closely the second time, it was apparent that the barn had been built not to service the ranch or to shelter animals but, instead, for the primary or exclusive purpose of garaging the motor home that Edward Robilio had named Haldeman.
The entry doors to the barn were huge, at least fifteen feet tall, and the double doors to the ersatz hayloft were, on closer examination, an obvious facade. On one side of the building a lower section was attached to the main structure under a long shed roof.
Sunny stood next to a steel door on the shed side and said, “This is where you go in.” She waited. “Craig, I think you still have the keys.”
The cops were hesitating. Sam whispered something to Craig Larsen and Craig nodded twice while he whispered a reply. Lucy walked around to the side of the structure and peered through a dusty window. Sam said, “Alan, why don’t you take Sunny back to your car for a few minutes while we look around. We would like to be certain that none of those missing guns ended up down here.”
I was opening my mouth to reply when I saw an automatic in Sam’s right hand. I had no idea where it had come from. Lucy was almost next to him, and she was pulling a weapon from her purse. Beside her, Craig Larsen was unsnapping his holster.
All in all, it seemed like a good time to be cooperative. I said, “Of course. We’ll be in the car.”
Twenty-three
Once the three cops drew their guns, every solitary second seemed to linger like a summer cold.
Beside me on the passenger seat of my car, Sunny Hasan was breathing deeply through barely parted lips, her expelled air sounding like a breeze whistling through a narrow canyon. Her wide eyes were fixed on the barn door, and she hadn’t said a word to me since she had perched herself primly on the seat. If I gave her a tub of popcorn and a Pepsi she would appear to be somebody’s date caught up in Bruce Willis’s latest extravaganza at the drive-in.
CR-ACK.
My instinct told me that the shot came from the barn, but I was so stunned by the fierceness of the explosion that I couldn’t be sure.
Sunny screamed and turned toward me. Roughly, I forced her head to her knees and threw myself on top of her. I wondered if the cops were wearing bulletproof vests. I thought of Lucy’s Donna Karan and I knew she wasn’t. I thought of little Simon Purdy, and I hoped his daddy was.
My heart jumped as Sam’s voice creased the night. “Down! Everybody down!”
I whispered, “Stay low,” and felt the deep purr of a whimper roll through Sunny’s body.
CR-ACK.
The second shot seemed even closer, so close it rocked the car.
Sunny said, “Oh my God, oh my God, I’m pregnant. Oh my baby, oh my God. My baby. Don’t hurt my baby.”
The Land Cruiser listed to starboard.
Between Sunny’s sobs, I thought I heard the crunch of gravel. I raised my head at the sound of a motor whirring in the barn and saw the tops of the big white doors start to swing outward.
The side door of the shed flew open and Sam ran out in a crouch, rolled once, and came up behind a propane tank with his automatic in his hand. Although the move had been graceful and athletic, the strategy was flawed. Sam, too, recognized immediately that using a tankful of compressed gas as cover in a gunfight might not be advisable, and ducked away. I couldn’t tell where he went.
Lucy covered Craig Larsen as he made a dash out the front doors of the barn and tried to camouflage himself behind a withered pine. Once they were in place, all the cops were quiet, not eager to draw attention to themselves. Their eyes scanned, trying to find a target, trying to find out if they were a target.
I knew they would all have been safer in the barn. They were risking themselves by spreading out. They were doing it for Sunny and me.
The roar of a high-revving engine fractured the silence, and in the confines of the river valley the whining of high RPMs and the melody of quick gear changes echoed as distinctively as heartbeats.
Of the three cops, Sam had the best cover. He was behind a boulder the size of a Volkswagen bug. He called out, “Anybody hurt?”
I said, “No, we’re fine. Scared.”
“See anything?”
“No.”
“Damn.”
Craig Larsen said something into his radio and waited a few long seconds for a garbled reply.
We all held our breath for the next gunshot. Sunny had lowered herself all the way into the footwell and had quieted her mantra to a hollow whisper: “Don’t hurt my baby, don’t hurt my baby, don’t hurt my baby.”
Except for the brightly lit spot where the cars were parked, the night was dark. I realized that Sunny and I were the only well-defined targets and felt, suddenly, as though I were wearing a bull’s-eye on my chest.
As though someone could read my thoughts, the floodlights died on the barn and I felt the darkness as though it were a blanket made of Kevlar. In a voice loud enough to be heard by her colleagues, Lucy said, “That was me. Just wanted to level the playing field.”
Sam said, “Good. Everybody stay down. Stay cool.”
In the distance, the whine of the motorcycle engine cleared the river valley, and the sound evaporated like mist in the sun.
I said, “He shot out my tire. There were two shots. Maybe he did Craig’s, too.”
Larsen broke his silence. “Too risky to check right now. This could be an ambush. Let’s wait for backup. Everybody be patient, keep your eyes open. Backup’s on the way. It won’t be long.”
Long, I decided, is relative.
Crouched over a frantic, pregnant stranger in the cross-fire of a potential shootout, the twelve minutes we waited for the Summit County sheriff to begin to arrive en masse seemed like an incredibly protracted time.
The reinforcements approached gingerly. They parked their vehicles a distance from the barn and scoured the surrounding woods and pastures carefully as they approached the two vehicles that were parked in the clearing in front of the barn.
It took a good twenty-five more minutes before someone yelled, “All clear.”
I sat upright and helped Sunny back onto her seat. She was holding both hands to her womb.
“You all right, Sunny? Is the baby okay?”
She was looking straight out the windshield, nodding rapidly, like a woodpecker attacking an ash.
I said, “Good. It’s over now. You’re both going to be okay.”
She faced me and narrowed her eyes, still nodding. Finally, she said, “Where’s Haldeman?”
I stared into the dark tunnel of the barn. Just then, Lucy flashed the lights back on and revealed a huge empty cavern where the motor coach was supposed to be.
Stupidly, I said, “I don’t know.”
Sam was with the local cops for a good half-hour before he found me struggling to get my damaged tire back in place under the car. He said, “You want some help with that? We spooked them coming here. Damn perps got away on the motorcycle.”
It wasn’t a question but I said, “That’s the way I worked it out, too. Came down the hill without power, rolled away without power. Started the bike down near the gate. What do you mean, you spooked them? Hand me that thing, there.”
“What thing? This thing?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s called a lug wrench,” Sam said. “They were here, in the barn, when we came down. Think they went out a back door as we came in the front.”
“How do you know?”