by Sarah Graves
“Dog won’t either, if I see it.”
“Fancy a bit o’ bull’s-eye practice, eh?” The British fellow laughed unpleasantly.
Smack! The concussive report of a gunshot rang out, some small-caliber weapon by the sound of it, followed by a vivid, ker-whanging ricochet. I’d never heard that sound before except in the movies; Willoughby’s potshot had hit a granite outcropping.
“Criminy,” I breathed. “He’s taking target practice on us!”
“No, he’s not. Stay down.”
“Thought I spotted him,” Willoughby said. “But maybe not.”
“What’re you going to tell the poor fellow, then, when ’e comes back looking for ’is animal?”
A sound of Willoughby’s contemptuous breath through pursed lips. “By morning he’ll have forgotten it. These types have no …” He searched for the phrase. “No continuity of thought.”
These types. For a heartbeat, I thought about shooting back, then remembered again that I hadn’t brought the pistol or the Bisley with me. It was among the many reasons this jaunt made me nervous.
But as Wade had sagely pointed out, creeping onto somebody’s property to snoop around is one thing; doing it while carrying a concealed weapon is another. And while I was reasonably sure we could evade Willoughby, I was equally sure that if I were caught trespassing and carrying a concealed weapon I wouldn’t evade Bob Arnold.
I hadn’t known Willoughby would be shooting.
“Look,” Ellie whispered. “They’re going inside.”
The men on the porch peered into the night one last time, then went into the house. The British man’s whinnying laugh hung in the night air, then faded until the darkness was silent again.
“Come on.” Ellie scuttled forward.
Ned’s truck was parked alongside the house, near the garage, when we reached the back of the quonset. Here a litter of empty feed sacks, scraps of straw, and plastic buckets made an obstacle course of the last few yards between us and the metal structure.
“Try the door,” Ellie whispered when we had made it through, and I reached out to, then drew back at the last instant.
“If it were me, I’d alarm this door,” I said.
Just then, the truck started up and began backing toward the quonset, on a dirt track that ran alongside the fenced field past the house. From inside the barn came uneasy rustling sounds, as the animals heard the truck and knew it was coming for them.
“Damn. I don’t see any wires and even if I did, pulling them would surely be enough to set the alarm off.”
“Never mind,” said Ellie. “We’ll let Ned get us in there.”
Pulling the brim of the watch cap over her face, she revealed the eye, nose, and mouth-holes cut into the headgear while I gazed at her in astonishment.
“I saw this on TV, once,” she said, thrusting another cap at me. “Put this on, and do what I do.”
“I don’t think seeing it on TV really qualifies us to—”
“Ssh.” She gestured sharply at me. “Here he comes.”
Oh, for pete’s sake. I pulled the cap down and crept forward. Montague was slowly backing the truck the last hundred feet or so, its tires jouncing in the rutted tracks previous trips had made. He set the parking brake, leaving the vehicle running, and got out to fiddle with a keypad on the front of the building, to one side of the overhead door.
A faint beep signaled the disarming of the intruder alarm, after which Montague raised the door. Peeking around the corner, I saw a ramp inside; it was how the animals got from floor level up into the cargo box of the truck.
“Now,” Ellie whispered, “get ready.”
Ned got into the truck again, and let off the hand brake.
“Go,” Ellie urged, and rushed ahead of me, keeping low to avoid being spotted in Montague’s passenger-side mirror, slipping through the narrowing space between the truck’s rear bumper and the door opening, and vanishing into the darkness of the building, away from the truck’s backup lights.
“Criminy.” She was lithe as an eel, but I wasn’t nearly so graceful. Planting my foot on the approaching rear bumper I lunged up and vaulted clumsily over it, landing in a heap on what turned out to be the llamas’ communal dung pile.
Fortunately, animals who eat top-grade chow pellets produce output nearly equal in refinement to their input. Or so I managed to console myself as Ellie grabbed my shoulder, yanking me out of sight just as Montague’s face appeared in the door opening.
At the rear of the building, the animals clustered unhappily. One spat halfheartedly and bleated as I shouldered past him, but it was only saliva, not the truly ghastly, unbelievably odiferous stuff they began aiming at Montague, when he approached them.
“Hey,” he protested. “Come on, you guys, you know me.”
Another llama spat horridly, curling his lip back afterwards in distaste.
“Aw, come on.” Ned sounded disgusted, now, as well he might. Truly, it made your eyes water, just being within sniffing range.
“It’s not like I’m gonna torture you. Look, I got your water in there, I got the walls all fixed up with wet rags, keep you nice and cool, and there’s plenty of fresh air. You know I take care of you, ’cause Willoughby would shoot me if I don’t. We’re just going for another ride.”
As he spoke, he kept moving toward the rear of the quonset. Ellie and I crouched behind some bales of straw. Grudgingly, the llamas began moving toward the ramp leading into the cargo box.
“That’s right, get along,” Montague urged them.
His soothing tone might have made me believe that whatever else he was—lazy, easily discouraged, chronically morose, and not precisely a full-fledged genius—Ned was at least a decent guy around animals. Then I peeked up over a straw bale and got a look at his face: tautly grimacing, like a man who really wanted to punch something, but didn’t dare.
Ned finished getting the animals into the truck. Then came the thunk of the cargo box doors closing, and the heavy metallic slide of the bolt slamming home. And then …
Nothing. Ned’s footsteps did not go away as we expected. The overhead doors didn’t close. He just stood there.
Listening.
Almost immediately, though, his footsteps sounded once again in the quonset. I could feel him peering into corners, his sullen little mind having picked up on something.
The dung pile I’d landed in. Maybe it didn’t look right to him. Or maybe the atmosphere in the quonset wasn’t the same; not just animals. He wasn’t brilliant, but he sensed it—something different, something wrong.
And then Ned Montague must have just thought oh, the hell with it. The truck door slammed. The truck pulled away a little, stopped, and he came back to pull down the overhead. I heard the faint beep-beep of the keypad for the alarm system, as the code keystrokes armed it again.
At last the truck departed, its engine growing fainter as the vehicle made its way across the pasture, down the long drive, and out onto the paved road. We waited until the sound disappeared.
“Interesting,” Ellie whispered.
“Yeah. Really.” I snapped on one of the flashlights. “You get a look inside that cargo box?”
She nodded. “Water buckets, wet rags. Nothing else. I’m not sure,” she added, “what that means.”
I pulled out the cell phone, called Wade.
“Montague’s coming. We’re okay, here. Do me a favor? Follow him for a while, see if he stops anywhere, puts something else in that cargo box?”
“You got it.” He broke the connection.
“Maybe,” Ellie mused frowningly, “he had it in the cab.”
I shook my head. “Not enough room. A bale of marijuana, for instance, means a bale.” I thumped a straw bale for emphasis. “A load of cocaine or heroin wouldn’t take up so much space, I guess. He could have packed it in the body of the vehicle, or hidden it on the underside, somehow.”
I took a deep breath of the now-fetid air inside the quonset building. With the overhead closed, the olfac
tory result of the llamas’ antagonism was mind-bendingly disgusting.
“But we found all that money on Crow Island,” I went on. “And that, to me, means somebody is moving more weight.”
I stood up, feeling my muscles crimp. “But we didn’t spot it, and I’ve got a strong notion it’s not in here.”
Briskly, Ellie produced a large jackknife from her satchel. She cut the twine holding the hay bales together, one bale after another, plunging her hand into the center of each.
“Nothing.” She scanned the quonset interior, sending the beam of her flashlight along floor, walls, and rafters. “And nowhere else, it looks like, to hide anything substantial. You think we bothered him, somehow? Something’s here, and we’re just not seeing it, but he picked up on something that made him feel sort of …”
“Hinky,” I supplied. “Yeah, I know he was getting a funny hit off this place at the end, there. Nothing wrong with old Nedley’s nerve endings—he definitely sensed something. Bottom line,” I finished, “I think Ned is too lazy to follow his instincts.”
Or we’d have been facing Baxter Willoughby and his buddy, by now. I kicked the remains of the dung pile: nothing beneath. “But he was on his way out of here by then. If he was loading anything, he’d have loaded it already.”
The straw was pretty fresh, and so was the animals’ water. Berenice Waugh was probably responsible for that; her interest had put Willoughby on notice that he’d better be good or the pet police would be making unscheduled visits, disrupting his newly assumed gentleman-farmer habits and in general annoying him more than somewhat.
I looked around again, aiming the flashlight for the edge of a trapdoor, or a compartment hidden in the quonset structure; nothing. “And I don’t think he’ll stop anywhere, either. I wanted Wade following, to rule that out. But Willoughby wouldn’t risk keeping a stash of something important anywhere but here, where he can keep an eye on it, until it’s in final transit.”
Ellie sat on one of the hay bales. “And Ned,” she agreed, “wouldn’t want to be loading it anywhere else, either. Crow Island was one thing—except for us, I’ll bet no one but Tim or Ken has been out there in at least a year, other than just to pick Tim up or drop him off, with dog supplies. But with a warehouse over here on the mainland you run the risk of someone seeing you.”
I thought about Willoughby, the way he had moved money around like some sort of evil magician, staying one step ahead of the SEC until it took a person like me, somebody who was bonehead stubborn and had a mean streak—who but for the grace of God, in fact, would be as bad as he was—to ferret him out. By the time I had him, I’d admired the guy nearly as much as I’d despised him; Willoughby was one slick son of a bitch.
“But if Willoughby and Ned aren’t doing anything along those lines,” Ellie went on, “why is Ned driving those llamas to New York?”
“We don’t know, yet.” I kept peering at the quonset, examining its solid construction. Small windows pierced its arching sides, which were sheets of heavy-gauge metal bolted together at intervals. “But we’re going to.”
The windows, fortunately located out of view of the house, allowed ventilation for the llamas, although at the moment it was not nearly as much ventilation as I would have enjoyed. Hurricane Andrew, for instance, would have freshened things sufficiently. Each window opening was covered with heavy steel mesh fastened from the outside, probably with more rivets. The locked rear door was steel, in a tempered-steel doorframe, and the overhead door was bolted.
Just to top things off, Wade was miles away, and the low-battery indicator on my cell phone had chosen this moment to start blinking. I tried it; nothing.
“Well,” I said, rubbing my hands together cheerfully to cover my despair. “Interesting situation, here.”
“You mean, Ned not loading any contraband?” Ellie asked.
“No,” I replied patiently. “I mean being in a steel building with locked, reinforced doors, and the doors have alarms on them.”
If Montague keying in the re-arm command hadn’t confirmed it, those wires coming in through the wall right along the doorjamb would have. I aimed my flashlight beam at the color-coded strands. In a high-security facility like a bank, a cash-courier’s central dispatch or a brokerage house, the wires would have been shielded, but Willoughby’s paranoia hadn’t extended that far.
Just far enough to cause us a steaming heap of trouble. “That television show you watched happen to demonstrate how the heroes got out?”
“Hmm. I think they went to a commercial at that point.”
“Wonderful. Any ideas?”
She thought. “Yes. We need to make the alarms go off.”
“Are you out of your mind? If that happens, Willoughby and his buddy will come down here and … oh, right. Okay.”
She began pulling straw bales apart. “Here, help me spread this out, here. We need to be ready when it happens.”
“What if Willoughby notices the straw isn’t baled up?”
“He won’t,” Ellie replied confidently. “If he’s the kind of guy I think he is, he doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the animal-care details. He’s probably got people for that, right?”
We finished pulling the bales apart. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be. Roll your cap down over your face.”
She grabbed a fistful of colored wires. “Here goes nothing.” Then she cut them with a swipe of that big jackknife.
Somehow I expected pandemonium: bells, sirens, and flashing strobes. But nothing happened. We dove for the straw piles, buried ourselves hastily, and lay there in silence.
“Do you think it’s working?” Ellie shifted uncomfortably in the straw. “Oof, this stuff is itchy.”
“It’s working. And keep still. That itch is nothing compared to the rash you’ll get if he finds us.”
She quieted obediently. Moments later, hurried footsteps and men’s voices sounded outside. Cursing and fumbling followed.
Then the overhead door rumbled heavily open. I squinched my eyes down hard into narrow slits, in case Willoughby’s flashlight beam reflected in them. Big lights glared on.
“That idiot,” Willoughby snarled, stomping around angrily. “He must have screwed up the alarm somehow.”
“I dunno,” the British fellow replied. “They are supposed to be rather foolproof. Or so the manufacturers attest.”
“The manufacturers,” Willoughby shot back, “have never met a fool like Montague. The flunky I had doing the boat trips turned out not to have a driver’s license, and when I found out I made him find someone who did: Montague. On the plus side, however, Montague is just stupid and cowardly enough not to try anything.”
“Like making off with a bit of the shipment?”
“Yes. Just like that. Fortunately, our friend Mr. Montague is more cowardly than greedy.”
“How,” the British voice asked, “are you going to replace the bigger bit you’ve lost? Bosses aren’t going to be happy with that news, you know. Not happy at all.”
“I realize that,” Willoughby snarled. “Don’t worry about it.”
His boots thudded nearer, stopping a few inches from my face. “I’ve got it all figured out. It’s why Montague is making another trip, tonight.”
Keep talking, I thought at him, but he didn’t. I couldn’t see if he was still holding the gun he’d fired earlier, either. But probably he was. After all, he was out here checking on an alarm.
Still, it was now or never. I hadn’t known what kind of chance we might get, and this was the best we could hope for. So I reached out with both hands, grabbed his ankles, and pulled.
“Now!” I hissed at Ellie, jumping up at the same moment as Willoughby hit the floor hard on his shoulder blades.
“Unnh,” he groaned painfully as the two of us erupted from the straw heap.
“My word,” the British fellow breathed, but I had to hand it to him; instead of backing off in surprise, he stepped forward, trying to block us.
�
��Say, just a moment,” he began officiously, holding up a hand in the manner of a proper British bobby, trying to direct traffic out in front of the Albert Hall.
His eyes, though, were blankly murderous, and suddenly I was much more frightened of him than of Willoughby, gun or no gun.
“In your dreams, bozo,” Ellie said, and charged at him, putting her head down and butting him in the midsection so hard, I was willing to bet his long-dead ancestors felt it.
His head snapped back, his arms flew out sideways, his body doubled over, and his legs collapsed as he crumpled to the floor in a moaning, incapacitated heap.
I found it all deeply satisfying, but I didn’t get to savor it for long. Just then a gun went off—in the quonset it sounded enormous—and another ricochet whanged off the overhead door.
Which is how I learned that no matter how fast you are running, you can always run faster. Hurtling over tree stumps, vaulting granite outcroppings, I tore downhill through a night so moonlit it looked coated with quicksilver, hearing Ellie ahead of me and waiting for the painful inevitable.
He couldn’t be that bad a shot, could he?
But no shot came. We reached the bottom of the property and darted across the road into the comparative darkness of an old apple orchard, thick with hanging branches and tangled bittersweet vine. Improbably, there was nothing but silence from behind us.
“Keep moving,” I said, unwilling to believe that Willoughby would give up so easily.
“Do you see them?” Winded, Ellie forged ahead of me through long grass and thickets.
I glanced back. There must have been light panels somewhere near the quonset; the outside of the house, the barn area, and the entire length of driveway were now all lit up like an airport.
Nothing moved on the property. “You don’t suppose he went in and called Arnold, do you? To report trespassers?”
“Uh-uh. I don’t think he knows who we are. He didn’t get much of a look at us, and in the masks—”
“Right. And that’s what he wants. To know who got in there so he can find out why.”
We kept slogging as fast as we could, but not running full tilt anymore; the trees made it too dark for that.