“Yeah, some. It’s cool up to the Roman Empire, then it gets complicated. And boring.”
Colter Shaw couldn’t disagree.
“Can you make some?”
“No lime. It’s only good against moths.”
“Oh, there’s this.” Hannah held up a jar of cayenne pepper. “I got some in my eye once and it was like it was on fire. Can we make pepper spray out of it?”
“Is there a spray bottle?”
There wasn’t.
“Are we going to do a security thing, like with the fishing line?”
“No. We’d be too exposed.”
And what would they do anyway if the Twins tripped an alarm? At Timberwolf, they had real weapons.
Then something across the kitchen caught his eye.
He walked to the sink, where sat a large box of Tide detergent. He picked it up. Thought for a minute. He pulled a juice glass from a cabinet. Then he yanked down a curtain rod, bare of drapery, from above the window in the back door. He said to the girl, “Now I need a pen.”
She ripped through kitchen drawers. “Here’s one.”
“And one last thing. Any rubber bands?”
They found none.
He asked, “How ’bout that thing in your hair?”
“The scrunchy?”
“That’ll do.”
She tugged it off and handed it to him.
Hannah turned and looked at the detergent, pen, glasses and hair tie. “You sure you never saw MacGyver?”
76
“They are inside.”
Desmond asked, “How do you know?”
“Window, right. Curtain moved.”
The man leaned forward, stuck his head out of the bushes.
“Could be.”
“No, it is.” Moll went back to cover. Desmond too.
The men were across a weedy parking area from a brown clapboard cabin. Not having any luck in their search along Route 84, they’d pulled over and checked real estate records. They’d found this cabin on Deep Woods Lake. They had parked a half mile away, off an old logging road on the other side of the hill that faced the place. Moll, an expert at deer and elk sign, had spotted footprints, which led to the cabin.
One foot — Allison’s, Moll thought, by the size, was shuffling. It appeared her daughter was helping her. And he’d spotted blood. Those gunshots earlier.
“They armed?”
Moll shrugged. “Doubt it. Maybe found one inside there. Then again, I would not leave a weapon in a place like that. Too easy to break into.”
The broad, calm lake behind the cabin was dark blue. No other properties were visible around it.
“A trapdoor in the bottom of a Winnebago?” Moll’s voice was rich with disgust. He had no problem assigning blame to Desmond, or anyone else, but he wasn’t above taking responsibility himself. “I should have checked that.”
Desmond was still for a moment. “Who’d know? How could you know?”
Which Moll appreciated.
“So? What do we do?”
“As far as they know, we are somewhere else, probably on the highway. Has to be a back door. Leads to that dock.” Another glance at the complex green and brown surroundings. Thinking where he would set up the blind, if this was a recreational outing. At least on this hunt, he did not have to worry about upwind, downwind. Human noses were useless, unless a triggerman was wearing too much Paco Rabanne.
Desmond asked, “Where the hell is Merritt?”
Moll had checked texts. “On his way.”
“I feel like we’re doing all the work here.”
“Are we getting paid or not?”
Desmond’s lips grew tight in concession.
Moll said, “You circle around, to the back. I go through the front.”
A nod in reply. They drew their pistols and moved out, side by side, crouching, while they used the tall brush for cover. Moll smelled a sour aroma. Stinkweed. A memory from his youth arose, though it attached to nothing more concrete than simply being in the woods.
“Goddamn,” Desmond whispered.
“What?”
“Two grasshoppers spit tobacco on me.”
“I would focus. Can we?”
They paused behind an overgrown hedge.
“Give it five minutes, then pound on the back door. Call ‘Police’ or something. When they turn that way, I can get them from the window. You take anybody who tries to come toward you.”
“I like it,” Desmond said.
“And, remember, we should do Motorcycle Man first.”
77
Once again, Shaw’s percentages didn’t hold up.
The Twins had found the place.
He and Hannah were staring through the curtain in the front window as the pair slowly moved from cover and started toward the cabin, pistols in their hands.
They were approaching through the brush to the right of the house as you faced it. Suit paused and crouched, Jacket continuing on. They were going front and back.
Guns against a canoe paddle, kitchen knives and the latest weapon Shaw had found, a claw hammer.
Suit was going to take the front door, Tan Jacket the rear.
Hannah looked his way and he nodded. She moved aside the curtain over the right front window.
Then:
“Look!” Hannah whispered.
Suit glanced at the tree he was approaching, then the window where the curtain had moved. He froze and dropped quickly, prone, powdering his suit with dirt. In a harsh whisper he called out to his partner, who was about twenty feet in front of him. Jacket seemed confused but then he also dropped to the ground.
Suit glanced again to the window. Hannah moved the curtain again. And the two men quickly crawled back in the direction they’d come until they were under cover of the brush on the other side of the parking lot. From there, they hurried up the hill, using trees for cover and disappearing into the shadows of the late fall afternoon.
“It worked,” Hannah said, peering out and laughing. She squeezed Shaw’s arm.
Tide laundry detergent comes in a distinctive box. With its red and yellow concentric circle logo, it could easily be used as a firearm target by people who’d live in a cabin just like this and not have disposable money for commercial targets or the inclination to drive to a sporting goods store to pick some up.
So when Suit began making his way forward, he noticed the front of the Tide carton Shaw had mounted on the oak. He also would have seen the dozen holes tightly grouped in the center of the “bullseye” — holes that Shaw had made with the pen Hannah had found.
Then Suit’s glance at the house when the curtain moved revealed something else — what could be taken as a rifle mounted with a scope aimed his way from inside the darkened living room through the parted curtain.
So they’d fled — from a gun that was really the kitchen curtain rod on top of which was the juice cup mounted backward with Hannah’s scrunchy, looking for all the world like a rifle barrel and telescopic sight.
The belief that your opponent has weapons can be as effective as weapons themselves.
Hannah had pulled the curtain aside to better watch the retreat.
Shaw said, “No. Back from the window. Never present unless you’ve got to.”
“ ‘Present’?”
“Present yourself as a target.”
“What’re we going to do?”
A careful look out the windows. No sign of the enemy in all the places an enemy would be. “If the deputy doesn’t find us before dark, I’m going to start a fire at the end of the dock. There’ll be patrols for brush fires. They’ll see it. Send somebody.”
“Won’t those two assholes shoot them?”
“No. They’ll know that if the responders don’t call in, there’ll be police and the area’ll be sealed. They’ll figure it’s smarter to leave. Come up with another plan.”