There was no response, no sound, no feel of presence. Virgil, closest to the door, moved up and pushed it open with the muzzle of his gun. When it was fully open, he reached around the jamb, felt the light switches and turned them on. A conference room — empty.
They continued down the hall, around a corner, turned on more lights. Moving faster now, with the feeling that the building was empty. They turned the last corner, and Virgil said, “Auditorium is straight ahead, on the left.”
They continued, looking for open doors, Shrake now walking backwards, watching their backs, past the burned-out district offices, then into the hallway beyond, to the auditorium door.
Again, with the door and lights: and inside, the auditorium was empty. “No wild geese,” Jenkins said.
“Let’s get into the act,” Virgil said. “If he’s coming, he saw my truck pull around the building. Jenkins, you get up in the top row of seats, on the floor. Shrake, get between those curtain rolls at the back of the stage. Anybody hears movement, snap your fingers at me.”
Jenkins and Shrake set up; Virgil waited, listening, then went to the ladder, which had been left in a corner, and with a little nervous tickle between his shoulder blades, extended it and then set it against a crossbar in the light rack on the ceiling. He fussed over it a bit, giving Laughton a little more time to show, then climbed the ladder.
A couple of pieces of tape hung down from a crossbar where they’d mounted the camera. He muttered, “Anything?”
Shrake said, in a nearly inaudible grunt, “Nope.”
Virgil took a foot off the ladder rung where he was standing, then frowned: a piece of the gaffer’s tape seemed to rise above the rest. He climbed back up, pulled the tape off.
“My goodness.” The memory card was there, stuck under the tape. Kerns must have challenged Bacon while he was on the ladder, and Bacon had popped the card and hidden it under the tape, for Virgil to find.
Virgil, still talking low, said, “All right, guys, we’re not hiding anymore. My good buddy Will Bacon actually did leave the memory card up here, so just point your guns at anything that moves. I’m coming down.”
Virgil could hardly believe the luck — if it was indeed luck, if the card had anything worthwhile on it. Jenkins and Shrake had set up to cover both the stage entrance and the other two corridor entrances, and Virgil rattled down the ladder, and left it standing.
At the bottom, he picked up his own shotgun and said, “Let’s get out of here, but let’s take it easy. We’ve got the memory card, we just need to get it somewhere safe.”
They backed out the same way they’d come in, leaving the lights to burn. At the back door, next to Virgil’s truck, Shrake said, “This would be another obvious spot to ambush you. You had to come out sooner or later.”
Virgil looked out the window at the truck: “Jenkins, you go out first, but don’t go for the doors: just brace yourself up against the front bumper, ready to fire either direction. Then Shrake comes out, and he posts up to the right, and you take the left side. Then I’ll come out around to the left — instead of the driver’s side, I should be okay — and I’ll pop the door and crawl across to the driver’s seat.”
The procedure was fine, and one minute later they were bouncing back around the high school and out to Main Street, feeling a little foolish about all the guns and armor and entry and exit dramatics.
Shrake, from the backseat, said, “Now, if what you got on that chip is what you think you’ve got…”
“Then we’ve got it all,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a Mac program that’ll run the film. We can load it up as soon as we get back to the cabin.”
They were just coming to the turnoff for the cabin when Jenkins said sharply, “Hey, Virgil. Stop! Stop the car!”
Thinking Jenkins had seen something, Virgil yanked the car to the side of the road and asked, “What?”
“We’ve done everything right so far, but… If you really think about it, why would Laughton challenge you in the school? He’d have to creep down all those empty hallways, and if there was a shoot-out, he’d be right there in the middle of town, where everybody could see him coming and going. Same thing about ambushing you at the back door — he doesn’t just have to kill you, he has to find the chip, if you’ve got it. He’d want to get you someplace where he’d have at least a couple of minutes to empty out your pockets. Someplace a little private…”
Virgil looked into the darkness up ahead: “Like the cabin.”
“Like we thought Kerns would do,” Shrake said.
Jenkins said, “Shrake and I found that back way in. What do you say we drive around that way? Just… to take a look.”
“All right by me,” Virgil said.
He waited for a car to pass and then pulled back out on the highway. A bit more than a quarter-mile farther along, Jenkins pointed at a turnoff and said, “There it is — that’s where you go in, there’s a little boat launch just over there.”
There was a truck in the boat launch parking area, and Virgil said, “Well, I’ll be damned. That’s Vike’s truck. Jenkins, you probably just saved your own life.”
“Or yours,” Jenkins said.
“No, I always make you go first,” Virgil said. “I’m going to block his truck in, and then let’s see if we can locate Mr. Laughton back in the weeds.”
“This could be a little delicate,” Jenkins said. “It’s darker than a black cat’s ass in a coal mine, when you get back there.”
“There’s some light around the house,” Shrake said. “We know he’s got to be close to the house — probably around in front, so he’d have a clear shot at the porch when Virgil crosses it.”
Virgil crowded his truck up next to Vike’s until the bumpers touched; the nose of Vike’s truck was nestled in the riverside brush in front of it, and there was no way out. Virgil killed the truck lights, and they got out with their weapons, patting the armor back in place.
Shrake said quietly, “Sound carries along the track, we could hear you talking on your phone in the cabin when we were a hundred yards out. Then maybe a hundred yards in, give or take twenty or so, there’s a low spot that’s full of water — you can go in up to your shins in mud. Stay close behind me, off on the right side of the track, and I’ll get you past that. You can’t see much left or right, but you can see the stars overhead when you’re on the track, so watch the stars.”
Jenkins: “I’ll lead the way in. He’s gotta be out front, I think, or maybe where we set up, off to the side, although that’d be taking a chance. There’ll be some light when we get close, so don’t go waving your arms around, swatting mosquitoes. Just let them bite.”
“And don’t shoot me in the back,” Shrake said.
They started down the track, single file, moving slowly, not so much out of caution as blindness: the black cat/coal mine problem; the strongest sensory input came through their noses, which told them that there were lots of dead carp somewhere close. A hundred yards down the track, Virgil could sense Shrake but not really see him, and then Shrake reached back and pushed him to the right and whispered, “Puddle.”
Mosquitoes were bumping off Virgil’s face and the exposed part of his neck, and he flipped his shirt collar up and followed, keeping the muzzle of his shotgun pointed up and to the left.
They moved on, almost silently, then saw the light from the cabin, yellow against the gray/blue of the night. Virgil walked into Shrake, who’d bumped into Jenkins. Jenkins whispered, “There’s another truck in the driveway. My car, and it looks like a black pickup.”