“No,” Shorty said.
“Shut up, then. Save your breath to cool your porridge.”
“Sorry,” he said. He stood at the door for a moment. Then he went through. He was sore from sitting, with his butt on one kind of cold tile, and his back on another. He lay down on the bed and stared up through the dark at the ceiling. Somewhere there was a camera. He couldn’t see it. The plaster was smooth all over. So it was in the light fixture or the smoke alarm. Had to be. Probably not the light fixture. Too hot, surely. Secret spy cameras were presumably delicate. Circuit boards, and tiny transmitters.
So it was in the smoke alarm. He stared at it. He imagined it staring back at him. He imagined smashing it with a hammer. He imagined fragments raining down. He imagined the hammer still in his hand. What would he smash next?
He got up off the bed again and went back in the bathroom. He closed the door. He set the faucet running in the sink. Patty watched him from her spot on the floor. He bent down low, close to her ear, and he spoke in a whisper. He said, “I was thinking, suppose I had a hammer, what would I do?”
“Nail up a sheet,” she whispered back.
“I meant after that,” he said.
“What after that?”
“I would come in here. This is the back of the building. All the action is at the front. The bullshit with the blind, and people looking in. Maybe no one is watching the back. The wall is nothing but a skin of tile, then half an inch of wall board, then a six-inch void between the studs, maybe packed with insulation, plus maybe a vapor barrier, and then cedar siding nailed on sixteen-inch centers.”
“So?”
“If I had a hammer I would bust my way through. We could walk away.”
“Through the wall?”
“A proper demolition crew could do it in a second. That would be routine.”
“Then it’s a shame you don’t have a hammer.”
“I figure we could use the suitcase on the tile. Like a battering ram. We could swing it, with the new rope handle. Like one, two, three. I bet the tile would come off all in a sheet. Then I could kick the rest of the way through.”
“You can’t kick through cedar siding.”
“Don’t need to,” Shorty said. “All I need is to pop it off the studs from the inside, where it’s nailed on. With sudden outward force. Which should be easy enough. Then it would fall away by itself. All I would need to actually kick my way through would be the wall board. Which should also be easy enough. That stuff ain’t strong.”
“How wide of a gap would there be?”
“I think about fourteen inches, effectively. We could step through sideways.”
“With the suitcase?”
“Something we got to accept,” Shorty said. “We need to be realistic. The suitcase stays here until we capture a vehicle.”
Patty said nothing for a moment.
Then she whispered, “Capture a what?”
“Some of these guys peering in the window must have driven here. Which means there must be cars in the lot now. Or maybe they all got picked up in a Mercedes SUV. In which case it’s still out there, neatly parked somewhere, all warmed up and ready to go. If we can’t find it, no matter, because there are plenty more in the barn. Which ain’t far away. I bet all the keys are hanging up on a neat little board.”
“So first we destroy their property and then we steal their car.”
“You bet your ass we do.”
“This feels as crazy as the quad-bike thing.”
“The quad-bike thing wasn’t crazy. It worked perfectly. You know that. We saw it working perfectly, every minute, beginning to end. It was something else that didn’t work perfectly. We didn’t know they had cameras and microphones. We didn’t know they were cheating.”
“Just theoretically,” Patty said. “How long would it take to kick through a wall?”
“Not long, if we kept the hole a limited size. If we kept it low down to the ground. If we were prepared to crawl out, hands and knees.”
“How long in minutes?”
Shorty closed his eyes. He visualized. Eight kicks, six with the toe, to crack the wall board in strategic locations, and then two mighty blows with the flat of the sole, to punch it all out. Call it eight seconds overall. Plus then time to tear the insulation out, handful after handful, a blur, like a dog digging up a treasure. Call it another eight seconds. Or ten. Call it twelve seconds, to be on the safe side. So far a total of twenty. But then came the siding. Popping it off the studs would not be easy. It was fixed on with big nails shot out of a gun. Heavy blows would be required. The problem was the angle of attack. He would have to direct low karate-style kicks through a narrow opening. Kind of sideways and downward. Not practical. Hard to develop maximum power. Better to lie on his back. A downward stamping motion would translate to maximum outward force. Over and over again. Eight times at least.
He said, “One minute, maybe.”
She said, “That’s pretty good.”
“If the tile comes off all in a sheet.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“We would have to bust off every piece separately. Just to get to the wall board in the first place. Then from that point onward it would be a minute. Except probably two, because by then we would be tired, from busting off the tile.”
“How long altogether?”
Shorty said, “Just hope it comes off all in a sheet.”
She said, “Are we really going to do this?”
“I vote yes.”
“When?”
“I say right now. We could run straight for a quad-bike. Might be better than a car. We could ride it through the trees. They wouldn’t be able to follow.”
“Except on another quad-bike. They have eight more.”
“We would have a head start.”
“Do you know how to drive a quad-bike?”
“How hard can it be?”
Patty was quiet another long moment.
“One step at a time,” she said. “First we’ll test the suitcase on the tile. We’ll see if it comes off all in a sheet. If it does, then we can go ahead and make a final decision. If it doesn’t, we can go ahead and forget it anyway.”
Shorty opened the bathroom door and glanced across the room at the suitcase. It was still where he had put it down, all those hours before. After he had watched Karel drive away in the tow truck.
He whispered, “They’ll see me get it. Because of the camera.”
“They don’t know what’s in it,” Patty whispered back. “We’re allowed to take our own stuff in the bathroom, surely. We might need it. We might choose to sleep in here, what with people looking in the window all the time. That would be perfectly natural.”
Shorty paused. He nodded. He went to get the suitcase. Cool as a cucumber. Perfectly natural. He strolled over, and hefted it up, and strolled back. He put it down, and closed the door. Then he breathed out and flapped his hand to ease the pain in his palm.
They picked their spot. To the left of the sink. A blank patch of wall. No outlets. Therefore no hidden cables inside to snarl things up. No pipes inside, either. The water came and went all in one place, on the other side of the room. Perfect. Plain sailing.
They pulled and shoved the suitcase until it was in position. They stood facing each other, with the case between them. They bent down over it, and they grabbed the rope with all four hands. They lifted the case, six inches off the floor, to clear the baseboard at the bottom of the wall. They moved away a step, and they set the suitcase swinging, gently, back and forth, back and forth. It was a big sturdy item. Very old. A plywood shell, covered in heavy leather, with reinforcements on the corners. They perfected their rhythm. They let the weight do the work. On each swing they made one arm short and one arm long, to keep the suitcase exactly level, like a piston, so its blunt end would hit the wall square on.