She waited, listening to Jerry Symonds on the other end of the call. In the Ellis home, where Luke and his parents slept, the DeWalt alarm consoles in the front hall and the kitchen went dark. Michelle got the go-ahead and gave her teammates a thumbs-up. “Okay. All set.”
Robin slung the go-bag, which looked like a medium-sized ladies’ purse, over her shoulder. No interior lights went on when they exited the SUV, which had Minnesota State Patrol plates. They walked single file between the Ellis house and the Destin house next door (where Rolf was also sleeping, perchance to dream of smooching wildly) and entered through the kitchen, Robin first because she had the key.
They paused by the stove. From the go-bag, Robin brought out two compact silencers and three sets of lightweight goggles on elastic straps. The goggles gave their faces an insectile look, but rendered the shadowy kitchen bright. Denny and Robin screwed on the silencers. Michelle led the way through the family room into the front hall, then to the stairs.
They moved slowly but with a fair amount of confidence along the upstairs hall. There was a rug runner to muffle their steps. Denny and Robin stopped outside the first closed door. Michelle continued to the second. She looked back at her partners and tucked the aerosol under her arm so she could raise both hands with the fingers spread: give me ten seconds. Robin nodded and returned a thumbs-up.
Michelle opened the door and entered Luke’s bedroom. The hinges squeaked faintly. The shape in the bed (nothing showing but a tuft of hair) stirred a little, then settled. At two in the morning the kid should have been dead to the world, in the deepest part of his night’s sleep, but he clearly wasn’t. Maybe genius kids didn’t sleep the same as regular ones, who knew? Certainly not Michelle Robertson. There were two posters on the walls, both daylight-visible viewed through the goggles. One was of a skateboarder in full flight, knees bent, arms outstretched, wrists cocked. The other was of the Ramones, a punk group Michelle had listened to way back in middle school. She thought they were all dead now, gone to that great Rockaway Beach in the sky.
She crossed the room, keeping mental count as she did so: Four… five…
On six, her hip struck the kid’s bureau. There was a trophy of some kind on it, and it fell over. The noise it made wasn’t loud, but the kid rolled onto his back and opened his eyes. “Mom?”
“Sure,” Michelle said. “Whatever you want.”
She saw the beginnings of alarm in the boy’s eyes, saw him open his mouth to say something else. She held her breath and triggered the aerosol can two inches from his face. He went out like a light. They always did, and there was never a hangover when they woke up six or eight hours later. Better living through chemistry, Michelle thought, and counted seven… eight… nine.
On ten, Denny and Robin entered Herb and Eileen’s room. The first thing they saw was a problem: the woman wasn’t in bed. The door to the bathroom was open, casting a trapezoid of light on the floor. It was too bright for the goggles. They stripped them off and dropped them. The floor in here was polished hardwood, and the double clack was clearly audible in the silent room.
“Herb?” Low, from the bathroom. “Did you knock over your water glass?”
Robin advanced to the bed, taking her Glock from the waistband of her slacks at the small of her back while Denny walked to the bathroom door, making no attempt to muffle his footfalls. It was too late for that. He stood beside it, gun raised to the side of his face.
The pillow on the woman’s side was still indented from the weight of her head. Robin put it over the man’s face and fired into it. The Glock made a low coughing sound, no more than that, and discharged a little brown smut onto the pillow from its vents.
Eileen came out of the bathroom, looking worried. “Herb? Are you all r—”
She saw Denny. He seized her by the throat, put the Glock to her temple, and pulled the trigger. There was another of those low coughing sounds. She slid to the floor.
Meanwhile, Herb Ellis’s feet were kicking aimlessly, making the coverlet he and his late wife had been sleeping under puff and billow. Robin fired twice more into the pillow, the second shot a bark instead of a cough, the third one even louder.
Denny took the pillow away. “What, did you see The Godfather too many times? Jesus, Robin, his head’s halfway gone. What’s an undertaker supposed to do with that?”
“I got it done, that’s what matters.” The fact was, she didn’t like to look at them when she shot them, the way the light went out of them.
“You need to man up, girl. That third one was loud. Come on.”
They picked up the goggles and went down to the boy’s room. Denny hoisted Luke into his arms—no problem there, the kid didn’t weigh more than ninety pounds—and gave his chin a jerk for the women to go ahead of him. They left the way they had come, through the kitchen. There were no lights on in the adjacent house (even the third shot hadn’t been that loud), and no soundtrack except for the crickets and a faraway siren, maybe all the way over in St. Paul.
Michelle led the way between the two houses, checked the street, and motioned for the others to come ahead. This was the part Denny Williams hated. If some guy with insomnia looked out and saw three people on his neighbor’s lawn at two in the morning, that would be suspicious. If one of them was carrying what looked like a body, that would be very suspicious.
But Wildersmoot Drive—named after some long-gone Twin Cities bigwig—was fast asleep. Robin opened the SUV’s curbside back door, got in, and held out her arms. Denny handed the boy in and she pulled Luke against her, his head lolling on her shoulder. She fumbled for her seatbelt.
“Uck, he’s drooling,” she said.
“Yes, unconscious people do that,” Michelle said, and closed the rear door. She got in the shotgun seat and Denny slid back behind the wheel. Michelle stowed the guns and the aerosol as Denny cruised slowly away from the Ellis house. As they approached the first intersection, Denny put the headlights back on.
“Make the call,” he said.
Michelle punched in the same number. “This is Ruby Red. We have the package, Jerry. Airport ETA in twenty-five minutes. Wake up the system.”
In the Ellis home, the alarms came back on. When the police finally arrived, they would find two dead, one gone, the kid the most logical suspect. He was said to be brilliant, after all, and those were the ones that tended to be a little wonky, weren’t they? A little unstable? They’d ask him when they found him, and finding him was only a matter of time. Kids could run, but even the brilliant ones couldn’t hide.
Not for long.
7
Luke woke up remembering a dream he’d had—not exactly a nightmare, but definitely of the not-so-nice variety. Some strange woman in his room, leaning over his bed with her blond hair hanging around the sides of her face. Sure, whatever you want, she’d said. Like a chick in one of the porno clips he and Rolf sometimes watched.
He sat up, looked around, and at first thought this was another dream. It was his room—same blue wallpaper, same posters, same bureau with his Little League trophy on it—but where was the window? His window looking out at Rolf’s house was gone.
He shut his eyes tight, then sprang them open. No change; the windowless room remained windowless. He considered pinching himself, but that was such a cliché. He popped his fingers against his cheek instead. Everything stayed the same.
Luke got out of bed. His clothes were on the chair, where his mom had put them the night before—underwear, socks, and tee-shirt on the seat, jeans folded over the back. He put them on slowly, looking at where the window should have been, then sat down to put on his sneakers. His initials were on the sides, LE, and that was right, but the middle horizontal stroke of the E was too long, he was sure of it.