Bailey and Crawford strode past her. Flo grabbed Bailey by the arm in a bid to slow her down but Bailey quickly shook her off.
“Stop,” Daggert told her as he reached into his jacket pocket.
“No! No! You stop! You’ve got no right! You can’t go in that house! You... you need a warrant! I’m ordering you off my property! You get out of here! If you think you can search my house you better have a warrant in your hand!”
“Do I look like someone who worries about paperwork?” said Daggert, who was holding something that looked like a gun, but not quite. “What the heck is that thing?” Flo asked.
“Allow me to demonstrate,” Daggert said, and jammed it into her side.
There was a sound like when a light bulb pops.
Flo went down.
She landed on the gravel driveway on her back, her right leg getting stuck behind her thigh, her left poking out at an odd angle.
She did not move.
Daggert knelt down beside her, touched two fingers to her neck, just under the jaw.
“Was worried I might have set it too high,” he said to himself. “Sweet dreams, Flo.”
He left the woman there on the driveway and followed his two agents into the house.
Twenty-Eight
When Jeff saw Aunt Flo drop to the ground, he had to put a hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.
A huge NOOOOOOOO! was about to burst from his throat as he stood at the second floor window of his aunt’s house, but he managed to hold it in as he jumped back from the window.
Jeff had had a funny feeling about that guy the moment he saw him at the dump. When he asked whether Jeff had seen a dog, he just knew. Chipper had been telling them the truth. He really was on the run, and there really were people looking for him.
Bad, bad people.
Jeff had overheard some of the conversation between his aunt and the man — enough to know they were looking for him and the dog.
He wondered how he’d given himself away. Was it written all over his face, when he’d been asked if he’d seen a dog around the dump? Was he that poor a liar? Or had they been tipped off some other way that the dog—
Whoa, wait a minute.
Chipper’s eyes.
Just before Emily said she had killed the video link, there was this tiny spark in one of Chipper’s eyes. Was it possible? Could the dog’s eyes be cameras? Could they be a kind of window that those people, the ones who’d turned him into a weird hybrid thing, could see through?
If that was true, Jeff believed there was a good chance those people at The Institute had seen him.
Emily, too!
Given what had just happened to Aunt Flo, he knew these people would stop at nothing to get the dog back.
Call the police! a voice inside his head shouted.
Jeff got his thumb in position to hit 9-1-1 on the phone in his hand, then remembered Chipper’s warning about telling Emily’s ex-cop father.
No police. They will know!
These bad guys might be monitoring calls to the police! What had Chipper called them? The White Coats? These guys in the SUV were wearing dark suits, but it wasn’t hard to imagine that they were all working together.
If calling the police wasn’t safe, then what was Jeff going to—
They were heading for the house!
He bolted from his bedroom and was about to run down the stairs and sneak out the back door, but then he heard the front door opening. The stairs led right down to them.
“Crawford, Bailey, you check upstairs,” Jeff heard the lead guy say. “I’ll check down here.”
“Got it, Daggert.”
Daggert.
Jeff slipped across the hall and into Aunt Flo’s bedroom. Her window opened onto a roofed porch. Once on the roof, he could grab one of the tall branches of an overhanging tree, and shimmy down to the ground.
He went to the window, grabbed it by the handles, and tried to lift it up.
It wouldn’t budge.
He could hear two sets of footsteps on the stairs.
He pulled harder, but the window was stuck.
“You take those rooms, Crawford, I’ll take these,” Jeff heard the woman — she had to be Bailey — say. He could tell they were at the top of the stairs.
That was when Jeff noticed the latch on the top of the window was still in the locked position. Idiot! He unlocked it, but there was no time now to open the window and slip out onto the roof without being seen.
Jeff dropped silently to the floor and rolled under his aunt’s bed.
Someone came into the room.
Jeff turned his head towards the door and saw a dirty pair of women’s shoes moving briskly down one side of the bed, then over to the window.
Please don’t look under the bed. Please don’t look under the bed.
The shoes didn’t move for several seconds.
“Nothing over here!” Crawford shouted. It sounded like he was in Jeff’s room across the hall.
“See if there’s a way up into an attic or anything,” Bailey said.
Footsteps back in the hallway. Then, “Yeah! There’s a hatch in the hallway ceiling here!”
The woman moved hurriedly out of the room. That hatch was at the end of the hall, which meant Jeff had time to try the window again without being seen.
Crab-like, he moved out from under the bed, his front covered in matted balls of dust. For a second, he thought that it would only be a matter of time before Aunt Flo ordered him to vacuum under her bed.
Then he thought, Not if she’s dead.
He went to the window and slid it open as far as it would go. He put his left leg out first onto the rooftop, ducked his head under and pulled the rest of his body outside. Stepping as noiselessly as possible — for all he knew, Daggert was standing right below him on the covered porch — he made his way to the corner of the roof, where the branch of a tall oak was within easy reach.
Jeff grabbed it, swung off the roof, legs dangling, and edged his way the six to eight feet to the trunk.
Inside the house, Bailey called out, “Was this window open before?”
Idiot! Jeff cursed himself again. But he had to keep moving.
He reached the trunk and scrambled down to a lower branch below the roofline. There was no outcropping to place his feet on, so he gently swung there.
The woman, louder this time — suggesting to Jeff she had her head sticking out the window — said, “I could have sworn it was closed.” He was glad the leaves on the tree were so thick that they hid him from view.
Muffled, from inside the house, “Are you gonna help me get into this attic or not?”
“Hang on,” she said.
Bailey could just as easily have been saying that to Jeff. He looked down, hoping to find a perch for his feet, but there was nothing there. So he dropped the rest of the way. It was only about eight feet, but real life isn’t like the movies, where spies and superheroes jump off the top of buildings and do a little tuck and roll when they hit the ground and walk away like they’d just stepped off a curb.
When his feet hit the ground he felt the shock go all the way up to his neck, as though his whole body had compressed a couple of inches. He scurried around the other side of the thick-trunked tree and held his breath, thinking that if anyone had seen him, he’d know in two seconds.
When no one came rushing out of the house, he figured they were all still in there. Bailey and Crawford were exploring the attic, and Daggert was probably skulking around the basement, expecting Jeff to be hiding behind the furnace. He moved from one tree to another, tiptoeing along like some cartoon character, then dashed for cover behind a row of shrubs, until he was back to his aunt’s truck.