“Who is Bluebeard?”
“The cray-cray who built it and lives in it. But he’s gone a lot. He’s gone now. He took off with his friends in two SUVs just after you guys arrived, so that was also weird.”
The garage door opened across the street. As the black SUVs rolled down the driveway, Scout opened her own garage doors. In ten seconds the team was across the street and in the safety of another garage. Scout hit the remote and the doors rolled down.
Nada stood.
“Where are you going?” Scout asked.
“To join my team,” Nada said.
“They can’t handle a curling iron?”
Nada considered that. Sometimes the Fireflies went into the deadliest creatures or things and sometimes it was like they’d simply bounced into something and gotten stuck. A curling iron didn’t strike him as a particularly deadly event, although the burn on Scout’s head was not to be discounted. She was lucky the Firefly hadn’t shot enough juice through her to kill her.
The earpiece crackled on the team net.
“Nada?” Moms asked.
“I’m keeping front security,” Nada said. “We’ve got four more Fireflies free, don’t forget.”
“I don’t forget.” Moms’s voice was a bit harsher than normal.
“Tell me about Bluebeard and the house,” Nada asked Scout.
“I’ve rarely seen him,” Scout said. “Just his SUVs, with tinted windows, right into the garage and out. Like you guys. He doesn’t have a mailbox, which is kind of weird, too. I told my parents and they told me to mind my own biz. I even told the dummy who runs the security thing and he told me Bluebeard paid his fees just like everyone else, more in fact, so pretty much the same. When they were building it, I saw them put in, at night, a safe room deep in the basement, except I don’t think it’s a safe room. And I also saw them unload a couple of really big safes, which is just plain weird.”
“Safes?” Nada stared at the dormer windows along the second floor and could swear he saw the silhouettes of gun mounts inside. He scanned the yard and noted small mounds around several struggling trees that didn’t seem to be getting much attention. The landscaping was very different from all the other houses on the street. Switching from considering a house in a gated community to a firebase inside a larger defensive complex, Nada could swear those mounds were laid out with a perfect firing pattern for a series of Claymore mines. If they went off, anything on that lawn would be sprayed with hundreds of small steel ball bearings. A perfect kill zone.
“Did you see who put in the bushes?” Nada asked.
“The shrubbery?” Scout said. “Nope. People here make some weird demands, but who plants shrubbery in the middle of the night or when no one is around?”
Scout pulled a crumpled pack of smokes out of her pants and lit up, just before Nada yanked it away.
“You’re too young to smoke.”
“When is old enough?” Scout shot back. “It hasn’t been ten hours since you killed my neighbor’s dog. And you’re looking at a minefield over there, aren’t you? I saw the people he hired to put in the shrubbery.”
“Why did you lie to me?”
“Because no one ever believes me.” Scout said it simply. “They were the ones you hire off the corner at the gas station, not landscapers. And they did a lousy job, but they put in those bushes—”
“Shrubbery,” Nada interrupted, and she laughed before continuing.
“In the middle of the day in the exact spots where he had little stakes with red flags on them. I’ve lived here long enough that the placement made no sense from an aesthetic point of view. So I watched that night, and old Bluebeard crept out in the dark and he buried things in each of the mounds at the base of each.”
“Claymore mines most likely,” Nada said.
“You really think he put mines in?” Scout was surprised. “Even I started doubting me. ’Cause that’s real cray-cray.”
“Why do you call him Bluebeard?”
“Why not? Not like we’ve ever been formally introduced.”
Nada pulled two bent cigarettes from the pack and lit both, handing one to Scout.
“For Chrissakes, Nada.” Moms stood in the doorway.
“Did you get it?” Scout asked.
“We got it.”
“Did you destroy my bathroom?”
Moms grimaced. “There was some damage, but we’ll have Support here in less than an hour to fix it just like new.”
Scout smiled once more, transforming her into someone almost charming. “Why ask for the moon when we have the stars.”
That brought the hint of a smile to Moms’s face. “All right. If she knows this place as well as she knows her movies, she’s an Asset.”
“What’s the movie?” Nada asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Moms said.
“Now, Voyager,” Eagle announced over the net, because Eagle always had to fill the information void.
Moms tugged on the skirt once more.
“The skirt’s not too short,” Scout said. “You’re too tall for it. Doctor Cray-Cray was like five-six.”
“Got an extra cigarette?” Moms asked, sitting on the other side of Scout on the bench. “Kirk got himself a little burned, but nothing bad. New guys always screw something up on their first Firefly mission.”
Nada shook one almost bent in two out of the pack. He carefully rolled it between callused palms, lit it, then handed it to Moms.
“Two down. Four to go,” Moms said. Then she took a deep drag as the garage door opened and the team shot across the street and disappeared into the other house.
“Do I get paid?” Scout asked. “’Cause I really, really need a job, ’cause I figure I have to buy a new curling iron, you know? I’m so tired of babysitting.”
“People let you watch their kids?” Moms asked.
Nada took a last puff on the cig and then field-stripped it. “I’d let her watch my kids.”
“You don’t have kids,” Moms said.
“I’d let her watch Zoey,” Nada said.
“From what you’ve said of Zoey, she and Scout would get along just fine,” Moms said.
“Do I get a gun?” Scout asked, and Nada and Moms said in stereo: “No!”
CHAPTER 15
Ivar was suspended in the golden glow emanating from the mainframe computer. He had no idea how long he’d been like this, but he’d already peed in his pants. Except that had happened when the golden glow initially pulsed out and wrapped around him. He was facing the steel door, because he’d been running for it as the glow expanded.
Thus he saw the door slowly swing open. The silhouette of a man was in the dark hallway outside. He had a gun in his hand, a very big gun.
The man stepped into the room and Ivar saw his face.
That was bad.
The man looked past Ivar, toward the mainframe. He stepped forward. Ivar wanted to yell, warn him not to, but he couldn’t speak.
The man stepped into the golden glow, but instead of being frozen in place like Ivar was, his body shivered, as if getting a jolt of energy. The man opened his mouth, wide, very wide, and inhaled. Ivar could swear that he was sucking in the golden glow.
CHAPTER 16
Ms. Jones’s desk was getting disturbingly cluttered as Pitr placed objects on it in order. She knew the Nightstalkers thought her some sort of obsessive-compulsive about having a clean desk. Some thought she wasn’t even real, and they were correct in a way, since sometimes she really wasn’t in that chair in the office when they thought she was. None knew about Pitr, who entered and left through her private chambers behind the steel behind her desk, hidden in the shadows and never when the team was in the Den. She spent most of her time in the bed when she wasn’t talking to Moms and/or Nada or in-briefing a new member in her chambers. Even sitting was exhausting. On the really bad days she just used the holographic projector.