“We’ll be fine. Not to worry.” Fletch closed the Jeep’s door.
Slowly he drove between the blinding headlights of the police cars.
Already Carrie was picking her fingers. “Well, I’m worried. A little bit.”
“About what?” Fletch asked.
Carrie looked toward her rain-streaked plastic window. “Four villains peekin’ out of the bushes at us.”
Fletch said, “Around here we’ve got coyotes, wolves, bobcats, panthers, and snakes.”
“And a bear.” Carrie insisted she ran into a bear between the barns one dark night. She hadn’t lingered to collect evidence it really was a bear.
“You’re not all that afraid of snakes, bobcats, and bears, are you?”
“Animals make sense, Fletch,” Carrie said. “It’s the humans you can’t trust worth a patootie.”
“SHOULD I STAY here?”
“Absolutely not.” Using the four-wheel drive, Fletch had driven up the old dirt timber road at the back of the farm. Lights out, he drove along the top of the hill behind the farmhouse. He stopped just inside the edge of the woods. “These dudes want the Jeep. And they want you. I’d rather you stay with me.”
“You don’t care as much about the Jeep?”
“Not as much. I’m going to let the counties use it, aren’t I?” A few months before, two of the county’s cars had smashed into each other, in a parking lot.
In the hard rain they walked together down the hill just inside the line of trees. Even though they were slipping and sliding on the wet hillside, Carrie took his hand. “Maybe the bobcats will get ‘em,” she said. “Maybe that panther you saw the other night will tear ‘em apart like lettuce leaves.”
“If you don’t hush,” Fletch said, “we might as well be driving up the driveway honking the horn and going in the side door singing ‘Three Coynes in a Barroom.’”
“First time I’ve thought kindly of rattlesnakes,” Carrie said.
When they got just above the house, Fletch said, “You might stay here now. Give me time to case the joint.”
“Here? This is about the place we saw the black wolf go into the woods last fall.”
“You think he’s still here?”
“Might could be.”
“There’s plenty for a wolf to eat out here without taking a snack out of you. It’s the hungry, two-legged variety who think food only grows in refrigerators we need to worry about right now.”
“I don’t have a gun,” Carrie said. “What do I do if the wolf comes by?”
“What you charmin’ Tennesseans always do.”
“What’s that?”
“Say, ‘Hydy, Mister Wolf. How’s your pa?’”
“Which paw will I be askin’ about in this case? Right, left, front, back?”
“If you hush your mouth, at least the humans won’t know you’re here.”
He climbed over the white board fence. Crouching, he circumnavigated the house. He peered through the windows into every room on the first floor. Throughout the house there were baseboard safety lights.
Behind the house, he opened the door to the smokehouse. In the dark, rain pounding on the aluminum roof, he found the pipe end, about six inches long, an inch wide, he had left there that afternoon after making a repair in the pump house.
He placed the white PVC pipe on the walk leading from the side of the house to the barns, just outside the study. It would be visible on the path once the lights in the study were lit.
Then he entered the house through the back door, went from room to room and upstairs turning on lights. He took the handgun from his bathroom closet and loaded it. There was no sensible place to carry it in his sopping shirt and jeans, so he kept it in his right hand.
Openly he went back across the backyard in the rain.
“Okay,” he quietly said over the fence. “You can come out now. All yee, all yee, home be.”
“I’m not here.”
“Oh?” He could not see her in the dark woods.
“A panther carried me off by the foot, all you care.”
Wet blond hair streaming down her face, she climbed over the fence.
“No sign they’ve even been here. Even the porridge hasn’t been touched.”
“Long as they leave my pickled beets alone.”
In the kitchen, Carrie said, “Me for a shower. A warm shower. You too?”
“Guess I’ll wait until you’re finished.”
“Will you come upstairs with me?”
“There are no panthers upstairs. I already looked.”
He got a can of tuna fish out of the cupboard.
She asked, “You hungry?”
“No. Come to think of it, let me go upstairs for the shotgun. Then I’d like you to go into the living room, turn out the lights, and wait for me.”
“Oh.” Wet and cold, she shivered. “The Jeep.”
Leaving Carrie standing alone with the loaded shotgun in a corner of the dark living room, Fletch jogged up the slippery hill. There was no question whatsoever in his mind that if she were confronted with an intruder, Carrie would not only shoot, she would shoot as well as she normally did, which was very well indeed. Without a blink of hesitation, if armed, calmly she would blow the head off anyone who messed with her, or hers. In his years in the southern part of the United States, Fletch had come to know and respect the Southern country woman considerably in this way. Distinctly Carrie was a Southern country woman.
Thinking it would be safer, Fletch drove the Jeep back along the timber road, down to the hardtop road, down it to the driveway, and up it. He left the Jeep in the carport, with the truck and the station wagon.
In the dining room, he said into the dark living room, “If you don’t shoot me, just maybe I’ll live to give you a kiss.”
“What will you give me if I do shoot you?”
“The job of having to dig a big hole somewhere.”
“Are you alone?”
The intelligence of the question impressed him. “Except for Za-Za and Fifi.”
“Don’t joke.”
“I’m alone,” Fletch said.
‘Prove it.”
“All escaped convicts are chickens.”
“Okay.”
In the bedroom, staying nearer to the door to the house than to the bathroom door, so he could hear over the sound of the shower, Fletch pulled off his boots and his wet clothes. He put on his bathrobe.
“All done.” Carrie came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her head.
“Are you going to use the hair dryer?”
“I have to.”
“I’ll wait.”
When she was done, he left her in the bedroom with the handgun and took a quick, warm shower himself.
“Okay.” He put the shotgun on the floor next to Carrie’s side of the bed, away from the bedroom door. “Is this good for you?”
“Fine.”
He changed into fresh jeans, shirt, and running shoes. “I’ll be downstairs.”
“Are you going to sit up all night?”
“Maybe.”
In the kitchen, he picked up the phone and listened. He tried a few numbers.
The phone was dead.
He mixed the tuna fish with chopped onion, celery, and mayonnaise. He lightly toasted two pieces of bread. He put the light toast on a plate, heaped the tuna mix on the toast, and spread Swiss cheese on the tuna. He put the plate into the oven. He did not turn on the oven.
Then he went into the study.
He opened the French door behind his desk.
With his back to the door, he sat at his desk, apparently relaxed.
He slid the handgun under some loose papers on his desk.
Outside, the storm raged. The rain was deafening. The wind moved a paper on his desk. After the warm day, the breeze cooled off the study quickly.
Fletch did not have long to wait.
It was only a few minutes when he felt the small, round object pressed just below his left ear.