“Can be a good defensible position,” he said.
Parker gave a brief laugh. “You sound like we’re soldiers.”
“Here.” Shaw dug into his backpack and took out a gray plastic pistol case. He opened it and removed a Colt Python. This model, a .357 magnum, was considered the finest revolver ever made. It was competition accurate, and its mechanism operated as smoothly as a fine timepiece’s. This particular one had been given to a young Colter Shaw by his father. It was the same weapon that he’d used to drive an armed intruder off the family’s Compound.
He’d been thirteen.
Shaw offered it to her.
Parker shook her head.
“Take it. Put it in your waistband. It’s a revolver. It won’t go off by accident.”
“No.”
He said firmly, “I might need you to use it.”
In a voice equally stern: “Then you’ll have to think of something else.”
Hannah interrupted the argument, if that’s what the exchange was. “It worked.” Her eyes were on the gun as Shaw slipped it into his own back waistband.
The girl added, “It’s butter beer out of Harry Potter. Or what I imagine it tasted like.”
Shaw said, “We’re going to make this place safer. The odds’re with us, but even a one percent chance of being attacked means you prepare.”
Parker asked, “What do we do?”
“I’ll make an early defense system at the main entry points. The driveway and the lake.”
“The lake?” Parker frowned. “How could they come that way?”
Her daughter made the point Shaw had been about to. “We passed a Walmart. They sell boats.”
Shaw asked the two of them, “Can you cover the windows? Sheets, towels, whatever you can find.” He was nodding at the rustic landscape posters mounted on the walls. “There’ll probably be a toolbox somewhere, with a hammer and nails. It has to be dark. Use two or three layers if you have to.”
Hannah looked around. “How long’re we going to be here?”
“No way of knowing,” Shaw said. “I’ve got food and water in the camper. That’ll last us a week.”
Hannah said enthusiastically, “Oh, there’s a fire pit. We can cook out.”
Shaw said, “No. Too telltale.”
“How about now? Sun’s out.”
“You can smell smoke miles away. We’ll microwave.”
“There could still be smoke.” Hannah was looking at her mother, who confessed to Shaw, “I’m not much of a cook.”
She and her daughter both laughed.
Parker stepped away and began going through closets and kitchen cabinets. She found a small yellow plastic toolbox. She carried it to the dining room table, removed a hammer and a box of picture-hanging brads. The woman set off in search of blankets.
Shaw eyed the contemporary structure. To Hannah he said, “My father was a survivalist.”
Frowning, she seemed to be debating. Then finally asked, “But aren’t they weird? Like... Well, you know, racists?”
“Some, yes, but he wasn’t like that.” Shaw explained briefly about Ashton and the Compound. He then said, “The two fundamental rules of survival are never be without a means of escape, and never be without access to a weapon. So. The first. Escape? What do you think?”
Looking around. “Back door — to the deck. The front door, front windows. Side windows.”
“What’s best?”
She seemed to sense she was being tested but didn’t mind. In fact, she seemed to enjoy the challenge.
“Side,” she said firmly. “You could jump out and run there.” She pointed to the tall yellow and green brush, which was close to the house. “Good place to hide.”
“That’s right.”
“But the windows don’t open.” She glanced around and her eyes settled on the fireplace. “We have to break them out with that thing, the poker.”
“No. It’s too thin. That’d leave shards on the bottom.” Shaw was nodding to the kitchen. “See those cast-iron skillets?” They were hanging from a rack above the island. He walked into the kitchen and returned with two large iron frying pans. These he set under the windows Hannah had indicated. “We can break the glass with them and pound the bottom of the frame to crush the spikes.”
“The guy owns this place?” the girl said with a frown. “He’s not going to be, like, totally happy. You know, breaking his windows, nailing up his blankets.”
“We’ll pay him back.”
Allison Parker walked into the dining room bearing an armful of linens. She dumped them on a couch and surveyed the windows, then opened the packet of brads.
Shaw said, “I’m going to get our security system up outside.”
“Can I help you, Mr. Shaw?”
He glanced at Parker, who nodded.
Shaw asked her for the remote for the rental. She handed it to him.
He said to Hannah, “Let’s get to work.”
59
She’d heard from him.
Colter Shaw had called and said that the search had paid off. Alli and Hannah were safe.
Sonja Nilsson had asked if he wanted any help. He’d told her no; they would be on the run. It would be better to remain in Ferrington and continue to follow up on leads there. He’d hesitated a moment before answering, though. This told her he’d considered her offer.
She concurred with his decision. It was a good idea. A wise idea.
But after what had happened to her, and now feeling crosshairs on her back, Nilsson knew that sometimes you didn’t feel like doing what was good and wise.
You felt like doing something for yourself.
Still, she could be patient. The memory of the kiss remained, the memory of the contours of their bodies fitting together.
She was presently in her Range Rover, driving through the Garden District of Ferrington. She had canvassed around Dorella Muñoz Elizondo’s house, trying to find someone who had seen Merritt around the time he’d received a rubber-slug welcome from the woman.
No luck there.
She was now approaching John Adams High. The young man who’d boosted Merritt’s bait truck was a student here and she hoped a teacher or fellow student might have seen him — and, ideally, seen what his new wheels were.
As often happened, her mind went to her “situation,” as she thought of it.
Crosshairs...
The shot that had killed the target was not distant: eight hundred yards. Nor was it difficult. The day was windless and dry (moisture lumps the air and makes bullets do strange things on their route to kill). A soft pull, a hard recoil and two seconds later, the man stiffened as if under an electric current and dropped, the man who tortured his prisoners, who married children — yes, plural — who mesmerized a cult of foolish, unquestioning and dangerous followers.
An easy day’s work.
And, pre-internet, that would have been that. She’d have gone to other jobs, then retired, started work for a contractor. She might actually have married a man like the fictional sort in the tale she’d originally spun to Colter Shaw. Only kinder, nicer. Maybe someone who was a little like him.
But, that was not to be: thank you World Wide Fucking Web...
Which gave Michael Dean Thomas the opportunity to publish the thousands of pages of files he’d stolen from the Pentagon. Endless bureaucratic prose, dense and dull and remarkable for only one thing: its betrayal of hundreds of hardworking, patriotic individuals.
You just kissed a marked woman...
The Pentagon and other national intelligence officials sent her TARs — “threat appraisal reports.” They said virtually nothing, in effect: “Might be someone on your trail, might not. Just be careful.”