Triple Witch (27 page)

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 olfactory 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.

“Make for the road if you can find it,” I said quietly. “Wade will be coming back, sooner or later.”

“Okay. You know, though,” Ellie added, sounding doubtful, “I don’t think I know which way—”

Damn; me either. In our hurry, we hadn’t paid attention to direction, just taking whichever way looked expedient. Now in the shadows with the branches casting weird, wavery shapes so that the ground beneath our feet seemed to be moving, we’d gotten …

“Lost,” Ellie pronounced unhappily. Up ahead was an avenue of enormous old spruce trees, lining a dirt farm road that once led out from the orchard. The area under the trees was inky black. To the left and right, walls of brambles rose head-high, supported by what at one time had probably been a rail fence.

“I,” Ellie announced, eyeing the darkness under the spruce trees, “do not want to go in there.”

I squinted at the brambles again, but it was clearly a no-go. A couple of thorny barberry bushes was one thing, but that mess barred our way as surely as if the old split-rail beneath it was electrified.

“Me, either,” I said. “But we can’t very well go back. Look at it this way, the farm road probably led to the
main road. So if we follow it that’s where we’ll go, too.”

“I guess,” she said, sighing. “Not,” she added stoutly, “that I’m afraid of the dark.”

Of course not. But the cavern yawning ahead of us was what I imagined Jonah saw, while he was being swallowed by the whale.

“And I don’t think a flashlight is a wise idea,” I went on. “Willoughby and Company are probably still back there somewhere.”

“Not,” said a voice at my shoulder, “exactly.”

The gun barrel’s tip pressed expertly against my temple, cutting off my yelp of surprise.

“Turn very slowly, please.” The voice was the British man’s, dead as ashes and elementally frightening.

Willoughby came out of the darkness and shone his flashlight at me. “Jacobia Tiptree. You came for the shutters, didn’t you? I felt that I recognized you then, but I thought it couldn’t be.”

“You should have paid more attention,” the British guy said.

Willoughby ignored this, his brow knitted. “Don’t I remember, you were an associate with one of the larger … accounting firms? No. Banking? Something, I’m certain of it, in the financial area.”