Triple Witch (26 page)

“Ken Mumford,” Ellie said, “never bullied or muscled.”

39
Flying down the highway on a clear summer night in the back of a pickup truck, you forget about air bags and seat belts. The sky is II enormous, and the stars wheel around like the glass shards in a kaleidoscope until you feel you will fall right up into them.

Wade had one of the cell phones; I had the other. I pressed the COM button on mine.

“Yeah.” He angled his head slightly toward me. “What?”

“Wade, if he catches us I’m going to leave this open, so you can hear what’s happening.”

“Sure, but he’s not going to catch you. I’ve been thinking.”

“And?” I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice.

“Worst case, you’ll create some commotion.”

We’d make a commotion, all right: the kind that gets you tossed in an unmarked grave. This wasn’t Wall Street, where when somebody catches you doing something, they call the Securities and Exchange Commission. This was downeast Maine, where security was
provided by yard dogs, barbed-wire fences, and buckshot.

At least Baxter Willoughby didn’t have any yard dogs.

That I knew of.

“So I figure,” Wade said, “I’ll make a ruckus right up front. Drive up the driveway, tell him my dog jumped out of the truck bed, took off across his property. That way, he hears any unusual noises, he’ll think it’s the dog.”

“Smart. But if you’re there they might not do whatever they are planning for tonight.”

Ellie had called Ned’s house, asking for Ned, and his wife had said Ned was gone and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow: bingo.

“Good thought,” Wade said. “Tell you what, I’ll racket around a while, then tell him I’m giving up, the dog’ll have to find its own way home.”

“Uh-huh. Then, if anything unusual happens, he’ll still think it’s your lost animal. Instead of us two lost animals.”

Wade grinned. “Want to know why I’m doing this, don’t you?”

Ellie looked sideways at him, but said nothing. In the soft glow of the dash lights, her face was implacable.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Ever ridden in a truck bed at night before?”

“No, but what does that have to do with—”

He pulled the truck to the side of the road, saying something to Ellie that I couldn’t hear, then swung into the truck bed with me. Ellie threw the truck in gear—it ground a little, going in; I should have said something to Wade about the transmission, I realized belatedly—and we were moving again.

“Lie down on the floor,” Wade instructed.

I did. He lay down beside me, and I rested my head on his chest. “Look up,” he said.

The night sky filled all of my vision, enormous and
flooded with moonlight. A meteor streaked across it like the flickering slash of a scalpel. There was no wind, just the rush of the air moving on the truck’s sides, the engine noise muted and distant.

“Now,” Wade said, “the way I see it, you made your decision. Ellie wants to do something, wants it bad, you decided to help her. I respect your choice. And I could decide whether to make it a little safer or not. Simple as that.”

Which for Wade it was, unlike in the city where there is always another layer of machination, another motive beneath the ulterior motive. With Wade, what you see is what you get.

“You had to come back here to tell me that?”

He pulled me against him. “No. I wanted to be here with you.”

“Sneaky devil.” Another shooting star streaked through the sky. “I wish I could get things to be that simple with Victor.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve been meaning to say something about that, too. I know what I said about not kowtowing, but I don’t want you to feel you have to go head to head with him just because I—”

“It’s not that. It’s Sam. I don’t want
him
thinking he’s got to do things that aren’t right for him.”

The truck slowed, pulling to a halt under an aspen tree whose leaves shimmered like coins. Wade jumped out and reached up a hand; I hit the ground with both feet, bouncing around a couple of times, overwound with my own energy.

“I’m glad you came,” I told him, keeping my voice low. “All of a sudden I’m really nervous.”

“Nothing wrong with being nervous,” Wade replied. “Trick is, knowing what to be nervous about.”

He looked around, picked out the glimmer of light at the top of the hill: Willoughby’s house.

“Speaking of which, we’re here.”

40
We waited in the shadows at the foot of the long drive while Wade took the truck up. In a moment, a light went on at the garage end of the house, and the sounds of men’s voices floated on the night air, one of them Ned Montague’s.

Which was when I realized what I’d forgotten. But it was too late to worry about that. Ten minutes passed while Wade called and whistled, chasing the nonexistent animal. Then silence.

“Okay. The stage is set.” Wade backed down the driveway again and his face appeared through the driver’s-side window.

“What’d Ned say? He knows you don’t have a dog.”

“Yeah,” Wade whispered back. “And if he had any brains he’d know that if I did, I wouldn’t let it ride in the back of a pickup any more than you would. So I finessed him, said I was trying out a dog I was thinking of buying, it got lost around dusk. Do you know,” he added, “how to make Ned’s eyes gleam?”

“No,” I frowned back, puzzled. “How?”

“Shine a light in his ear,” Wade replied, and drove away to wait. I saw the brake lights glow, and the tail-lights wink out.

And then we were on our own. We picked the worst, brambliest spot full of barberry and raspberry canes that we could find to enter the property, a place where not even a security-systems installer would risk his hide, in case Willoughby had more detector gadgets.

Picking the thorns out of our own hides, we scanned toward the big house. “There,” Ellie pointed, “is the barn. The llamas must be inside.”

“Drat.” The main door of the barn was in the animals’ paddock and brightly floodlit. “How are we going to get in there?”

The idea was to sneak inside and wait for Ned to load the llamas. That way, we could check around the barn and get a view of the truck’s cargo area, too, when
he opened the back of it. But I’d rather have crossed a minefield than that floodlit paddock.

On the other hand, last time I looked, they weren’t lighting up the exercise yards of maximum-security prisons with that much candlepower. The major-league illumination argued strongly for the notion that Willoughby was—or had been—keeping something important in that area.

Ellie marched away from me, striding up the hillside.

“Hey,” I whispered after her, “where are you going? We need to figure out what we’re doing, not just blunder in.”

“I’m not blundering. See that barn?”

“Yes, of course I do,” I answered, exasperated. “It’s got all those lights on it, for heaven’s sake. That’s the problem.”

“It’s the same barn George just disassembled. The quonset. So he could put the shed up. George built that quonset from a kit.”

“Fabulous, but that doesn’t—oh.” I hurried after her.

“Lights around front by the big overhead doors,” she went on. “But that style of building has a hinged door in the back, so you don’t have to open the big doors if you don’t want to, just to go in. And
that
door doesn’t have any lights near it that I can see. It just backs out onto the underbrush. Which probably means,” she finished sadly, “a lot more brambles.”

“Ouch.” I tripped on a root hump left over from Willoughby’s clearing of the cedars, and nearly went flying. “Bad enough he ruins the scenic beauty, he’s got to create a pedestrian hazard?”

“Ssh. Get down.” Ellie crouched suddenly as figures appeared on the porch of the big house: Willoughby and the British fellow, peering down the hill in front of them. In the stillness, their voices carried.

“See anything?” The British guy.

“Not yet. These goddamned locals and their dogs. Hard to say who’s stupider, the people or the animals.”

“Right.”
Roight
. “Humans won’t piss on your leg, though.”

“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.