“Well, you know,” he said. “You told us we were gonna get some more of your special acid, but we were getting bored just sitting around waiting. You said it was only gonna be a little while, and it’s been ages. So we thought we’d come down and see how things were going. I didn’t mean to...”
“We?” Nina said.
Chick shrugged toward the front door. Roscoe and Alex were standing on the porch sharing a joint. Out in the rocky front yard, Dave and Iggy were playing with a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee, missing more often then they caught it. Alex had an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder and gave a little wave, smiling the slow sleepy grin of the perpetually stoned.
“We didn’t want to bug you, man,” Chick said. “But we didn’t want to miss the party either.”
The other band members snickered and elbowed each other, and Walter realized they were all stoned out of their gourds. While he and Bell and Nina had been down here in the small cabin, chewing their nails to the quick with tension, up in the lodge, the band had been getting apocalyptically hammered.
Nina started shooing Chick toward the door.
“I don’t care how bored you are,” she said. “You guys can’t be down here right now. We’re still getting things ready. Now go back up and wait until we...”
“Getting things ready with handcuffs and chloroform?” Some real worry was cutting through Chick’s stoned bemusement. “I thought this was supposed to be some kind of peaceful shamanistic mind-expansion thing, so we could see into...”
He was cut off by a booming megaphone splitting the quiet mountain air, and a voice as deep and loud as the cartoon voice of God.
“This is the FBI,” it said.
Walter knew that phony snake-oil-salesman’s voice. It was Special Agent Dick Latimer.
What the hell is he doing here? How could he have found us?
“The cabin is surrounded,” Latimer said. “Step onto the porch and stay there, keeping your hands where we can see them.”
32
The disembodied order elicited exactly the opposite of the intended effect. It was like firing a shot at a tree full of pigeons. The guys in the band flew every which way at once, their sleepy calm instantly shattered and twisted into pot-fueled paranoia.
Iggy, the drummer, shoved past Nina into the cabin, swearing and hurrying for the bathroom.
“Gotta flush my stash!” he said.
Roscoe and Chick raced back up the path to the lodge. Alex and Oregon Dave ran in the opposite direction, down the gravel road that led to the state highway.
Men in dark suits burst from the bushes and swarmed after them. The door of the cabin slammed open and two agents came in, guns drawn. Walter ducked back into the bedroom, but the two agents ignored him and started to bang on the bathroom door instead.
“Occupado, man!” Iggy yelled from the other side. “Occupado!”
Walter and Bell stared at each other in fear and disbelief.
“How... how did this happen?” Bell asked. “Our note to Iverson was a fake. And even if it wasn’t, the killer got it, right? Not the FBI.”
“He must have realized it was a trap,” Walter said, figuring it out as he said it. “He knew we would be waiting for him, and so he dropped a dime to the feds, so to speak. Telling them we were here, knowing we would have the acid.”
“Well, I’m not sticking around waiting to get arrested,” Nina said, pulling the gun from her purse. “Come on, you two. Put everything in the duffle and let’s go. We’ve got to get to the car.”
“But... but...” Walter stuttered. “But we’re surrounded!”
“They’re busy chasing after the guys in the band,” she insisted. “This is our only chance.”
Walter put the bottle of chloroform aside and then snatched up his photocopies, notes, and Iverson’s file, and stuffed them into the duffle bag. He checked around the room for any other personal items as Bell tossed in the cuffs and sedatives, zipped the bag up, and slung it over his shoulder.
“Right,” she said. “Through the kitchen and out the back. Let’s go.”
“The back? There are FBI agents...”
“I told you, they’ve got their hands full,” she said. “Come on.”
Walter almost forgot the chloroform and grabbed it at the last second before following Nina and Bell out of the bedroom.
She did seem to be right about the agents having their hands full, struggling with the vociferous Iggy inside the tiny bathroom.
“I got nothing, man!” he was shouting. “Nothing! See? There ain’t no call to be hassling a man while he’s on the crapper!”
Walter looked over Nina’s shoulder as she paused at the back door, peering out through the gingham curtains of a nearby window.
“Damn,” she hissed. “Two more out back.”
Walter looked out through the gap in the curtains. In the ambient light cast by the moon, he could see that she was right. Two more figures stood in the back yard, guns drawn, covering the back door. One of them was recognizable as the gray man who had picked up Walter and Bell at the Howard Johnson.
Walter still had the bottle of chloroform in his hand.
“Nina,” he said, holding up the chloroform. “Do you have any nail polish remover in your purse?”
“Acetone?” Her eyes went wide. “Genius!” She fished a small bottle from her purse and handed it over.
“Duct tape!” he called, like a surgeon asking for a scalpel.
Bell pulled out the tape and slapped it into Walter’s hand. Walter tore off a large strip and used it to bind the two bottles together. He loosened the cap on the nail polish remover in the hopes that even if the bottles didn’t break on impact, at least the caps would be knocked off, allowing the two chemicals to mix and react explosively.
The use of chemistry to make weapons flew in the face of his principles, so he’d never actually tried this before.
But theoretically it should work.
“Get the door on three,” Walter said to Bell. “One... Two...” His hands were sweaty, making the bottles slick and difficult to hold. “Three!”
Bell pulled the door open and Walter threw the makeshift bomb out into the back yard. The two agents dove for cover as the bottles came sailing out and plopped down in the center of the yard.
Nothing happened.
The agents got slowly back to their feet, cautiously eyeballing the object. Both bottles were intact but leaking, generating a thready plume of foul-smelling toxic smoke, but no big exciting explosion like the one Walter had hoped for.
“Good try, Walter,” Nina said, hand on his shoulder. “Now get back. Away from the windows.”
Walter did as she suggested as she aimed her gun out through the crack in the door.
“You can’t just shoot FBI agents!” Bell said. “That’s got to be a felony or something!”
“Who says I’m going to shoot any FBI agents?” she replied with a smirk.
She shot the bottle of chloroform.
That did it.
The resulting explosion rattled the old windows in their frames, and bathed the whole back of the cabin in bewitching blue-white light. The sound was flat and hollow, like someone dropping a fifty gallon drum off a skyscraper.
“GO!” Nina shouted. She shouldered the door open, jumped down the back steps, and started running straight for the woods. Bell was right behind her, and as scared as Walter was, he wasn’t about to be left alone.
Out in the scorched yard, the two agents were down on the ground, arms flung up to protect their faces. He couldn’t tell if they’d thrown themselves to the ground on purpose, or had their feet knocked out from under them. There was a large circle of grass burning in the center of the yard, and it looked almost cheerful, like they should gather around it and toast marshmallows. The fire turned their shadows into long leggy monsters as they ran.
They all made it into the trees with no shots fired.