by P. J. Tracy
Lee was trying to stand now, fingers hooked around the post to pull himself up. There was an instant of dizziness, then Sharon was next to him, supporting his elbow. "We already decided that was too dangerous. We have another plan."
Lee shook his head with a smile but immediately regretted the motion. He breathed deeply, waiting for the nausea to subside. "I'm sure you do, ladies, but I'd feel a whole lot better if you just sat tight and waited for me to come back with help."
"Oh, for Christ's sake," Grace said, totally disgusted and then infuriated when Lee started to talk again with one of those condescending tones a lot of men still used on women.
"Listen," he said gently. "I know you think trying to walk out of here is hopeless, or you would have done it yourselves. Hell, there's a bunch of boys out there with automatics; that's enough to intimidate anyone. I understand that. But you have to know they're not supermen. There has to be a way past them; you just haven't found it yet. I need to go look. It's my job."
Sharon took a step away from him and tried to keep her voice from shaking. "What do you think you're dealing with here? A bunch of simpering women in long dresses waving white hankies, waiting to be rescued? I had the same training you did; I'm a deputy sheriff and an FBI agent to boot, and as far as the other two go, they're just plain scary. I get the serve-and-protect impulse. I know what you think you have to do and why you think you have to do it. But we did not veto trying to walk out of here because we're intimidated. We vetoed it because it's suicide.
Lee waited a moment before he spoke, responding to that singular male sense that instinctively retreats from the murky, unspoken undercurrents that sometimes pass between women when they've decided that men are idiots. Once they got to this point, trying to talk some sense into them was like beating yourself over the head with a hammer. It was better to just slip away and do what needed to be done, and let them see the right of it later. "I'm going to need my gun," he said quietly.
Grace took a step closer so he could see her eyes. "That's too bad, because we could use another weapon after they kill you."
Lee actually smiled, although no one could see it very well. "Tough lady," he said, then held out his right hand. "Deputy Douglas Lee, Missaqua County Sheriffs Department. I didn't catch your name."
The hand hung there alone for a moment while Grace tried to process the gesture. Tough, maybe. Rude, never. She shifted the Sig to her left hand and gave him the other one. "Grace MacBride."
"Pleased to meet you, Ms. MacBride." His face searched the darkness in the basement. "And the woman I met in the bushes?"
A drawl answered him. "Annie Belinsky. The womanyou attacked in the bushes."
Lee dropped his eyes. "I do need to apologize for that. Never once in my life did I think I would lay violent hands on a lady."
Grace handed him his gun, butt-first, and he slid it into his holster in a smooth, powerful movement. Then he moved toward the door, his gait growing more steady with every stride.
He's huge, Grace thought as his shadowed form passed her. And he seems stronger now, almost whole. Rationally, she knew that just because they were bigger and stronger didn't automatically make men more competent, more capable of accomplishing what a smaller person could not-but sometimes it was a comfort to wish it were thatway. It was part of the male mystique so deeply ingrained in women that you grew up wanting to believe it, even though it didn't make any sense at all. Or maybe there was a God and miracles and truth in biology, and Deputy Lee would find a way out and come back and save them all. Wouldn't that be lovely. Grace closed her eyes.Youthinks of Magozzi that way, too. Even you, with all you've seen and all you know, still want desperately to believe the lie of fairy tales.
Deputy Lee opened the wooden door that led to the concrete stairs, then turned and looked at them, standing there in a pathetic little semicircle, watching him leave. It occurred to him then that he hadn't really seen their faces, not clearly; that he wouldn't recognize one of them on the street; that if he didn't make it back in time and, God forbid, they disappeared forever in this town, he wouldn't even be able to give a description. At least he'd gotten their names.
He gave them a bleak smile. "Well, I guess I'll see you later."
The three women watched in desolate silence as he crept up the steps and slowly raised the slanted storm door on the outside. A slice of fading moonlight came down the stairs and lay a lighter stripe on the black dirt floor in front of their feet. They all stared down at it, listening to the storm door's soft thump as it was closed.
Lee straightened, releasing a long exhale, then looked around carefully. Shadows. Nothing but black, silent shadows everywhere. He had his 9mm back in his hand, safety off, and he could smell the sweat of his own fear. Still, it felt better out here than it had in the clammy basement-better to be moving, to be taking action, than to be hiding and waiting for the bogeyman to come.
And it felt better to be alone again. There was a small twinge of guilt as he realized how glad he was to be away from the women.
He was a short distance into the trees when a small yellow fireburst bloomed in the woods directly ahead. His brain never had time to process the sound or the image that his senses recorded, or even the great pressure of the projectiles that drilled into his body.
For an instant that imitated life, he remained erect, then he toppled backward slowly, his body rigid, like a giant redwood severed from its trunk, reluctantly yielding to gravity.
Back in the basement, all three women closed their eyes at the same time. "Ml6, triple burst," Sharon murmured. "No nine millimeter. He didn't have a chance to shoot back."
GRACE, ANNIE, and Sharon stood immobile in the dark basement for a full minute after they heard the triple burst from the Ml6.
Grace's eyes were fixed on some distant point in the blackness as she remembered how ready she'd been to kill Deputy Lee when he'd been holding Annie in the lilac hedge. Not a quiver of guilt, not a single thought of hesitation, finger tight against the trigger. And then she remembered the big man stretching out his hand to her less than an hour later, and the way that hand had felt in hers."Pleased to meet you, Ms. MacBride." She gave herself that full minute to think of these things. It was all she had to give.
Sharon was scowling at the floor, damning her mother, her upbringing, the religion that had pounded the mantra into her head day after day, year after year, because for the second time this terrible day she was hearing it pop to lite inside her brain and she didn't know how to make it stop.Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. And once again, holy Mary was just sitting up there, watching the innocent and maybe the foolishly brave get killed, and it was such a lie. It was such a goddamned fucking lie, and oh, Lord, she'd never said that word before, never even let it form fully in her thoughts, because that was a sin, and there was no confession for little Sharon Mueller, not now or ever again, and they were innocent, and now they were about to do something foolishly brave, and did that mean they would die, too, with the sin for thinking the f-word so fresh and unforgiven.
Annie was just plain furious, because that was the one emotion she really had a handle on. They told him flat out that he was going to die if he went out there, and the stubborn fool went on ahead and got himself killed anyhow. Sure, she'd been thinking about killing him herself in the lilac hedge, and she'd thought about it again when he'd fluffed out his strutting ruff like some randy grouse hell-bent on beating the shit out of some other randy grouse, but then the bastard had shown his true colors as a good and decent man and apologized. It was a purely mean thing to do. Annie didn't know what to do with sadness.
Grace was the one to break the silence. "We're down to six hours
and ten minutes. We've got to hurry."
The three of them felt their way to a workbench on the stairway wall. Grace and Sharon stooped to pull out the filthy wooden crate under the bench they'd seen earlier, the first time they'd been in this basement. While they were
dragging the thing out into the open, Annie found treasure on top of the workbench and flicked the switch. The old flashlight shot a beam across the floor and startled them all.
"Good find, Annie," Grace said. "You have any pockets in that dress?"
Annie shone her light down on the eight-thousand-dollar ruin and sighed. "I have a bra."
"Same thing. Tuck a couple of these in." She handed her two of the old Coke bottles, and Annie struggled to find a place for them.
"Could probably sell these things for some serious money on eBay."
"The bottles or the boobs?" Sharon asked, and the second the words were out of her mouth, she snapped it shut in horror. Oh, God. Had she really said that? A thousand people were going to die, poor Deputy Lee was already dead, and a minute later, she was making jokes? What kind of a person was she?
Annie had slapped a hand to her mouth to cover the laugh, but it kept squirting through her fingers in little breathy snorts. Not funny, not funny, none of this is funny, she kept telling herself, but once she'd started to laugh, she couldn't seem to stop. It didn't help that Grace was laughing, too. Grace hardly ever laughed. It was scary. "Omigod," Annie gasped. "We're hysterical."
And that made Sharon start laughing, too, because she'd seen hysterical, and this wasn't it. Hysterical was when your mother raced stark-naked through the house, wailing at the top of her lungs, wringing her hands, settling briefly in this chair and that, until finally the chair she chose was the one behind the desk with the big, ugly gun in the center drawer.That was hysterical. And then there was the ten-year-old daughter crouched on the floor, legs scrambling as she tried to push herself into the wall she was leaning against, her mouth open in a silent scream, her eyes fixed on her mother's blood and brains sliding down the plate-glass window behind the desk.That was hysterical, too. But not this.
She took a deep breath that erased everything. Displacement behavior, she remembered, was the body's defense against stress. People laugh at funerals. Cats stop fighting and spontaneously groom themselves. Cats licked, people laughed.
Annie and Grace were letting out the last long, shaky exhales, letting it all go, and then Grace was passing out bottles again, and it was as if the laughter had never happened.
They started upstairs to leave the house by the front door-not outthrough the basement and into the backyard. The perimeter was out there, in the woods but closer than they'd thought. Deputy Lee had proven that. There was less chance that they would be seen with the protection of the buildings between them and the trees.
Grace was in the lead, shining the flashlight down on the risers, making the climb easier.
It's the flashlight, Sharon thought as she followed. Whoever has the flashlight is automatically the leader, as if light was some kind of royal scepter, even more powerful than a gun. Maybe in the Bible, she thought wryly.
In the feverish religion that her mother had practiced, plowshares were mightier than swords, and things like light and goodness and mercy always won out over the lesser weapons, like atomic bombs.God's sword will not be beaten, Sharon. Man's weapons are puny in theface of the Word of God. . ..But in the end, her mother hadn't stuck a Bible in her mouth and blown her brains out, now had she?
"Wait a minute," she whispered, thinking of something as Grace prepared to open the door at the top. "We don't have a lighter, or matches."
"There are matches in the glass display case at the gas station," Grace said.
Christ, Sharon thought. She sees everything. The tiniest detail. And never forgets it. Like a really excellent cop. She saw all the things that you should have seen, drew all the conclusions that you should have drawn, and that's how she knew that this town was wrong before we ever walked into it. You're not just a good cop scared off the street by a bullet in the neck-you were never that good to begin with. And Grace isn't the leader because she's carrying the flashlight- she's the leader because she just is. Something big and dark seemed to open a little in Sharon's head, and her next breath felt like the first one she had taken in a very long time. It almost made her smile.
Grace opened the door to the upstairs and turned off the flashlight, and they were all lost in a black void. They felt their way to the front door and slipped outside. The moon was below the tree line now, and the darkness seemed to have texture, it was so impenetrable. Grace could barely identify shapes more than ten feet distant. This must be what it's like to be blind and deaf, she thought-no sound, no light, no motion, not even a breath of air stirring in the hot, still night.
The hulking outlines of the cafe and gas station were barely visible, but the outside air had that sweet, wet, predawn smell that seems to gather in the last hours before sunrise on a hot summer night. We have to hurry, Grace thought.
They carefully crept across the broken asphalt between the house and the gas station-this was the one place they would be fully exposed to any line of sight from the woods. Once inside the gas station, Grace felt around the display case until she found the matches, tucked them into her jeans pocket, and they all moved into the adjacent garage bay. There were no windows in here; even the narrow back door was solid, and it was safe for Grace to turn on the flashlight.
Ten minutes gone, six hours left.
Grace found a red gas can with a gooseneck nozzle next to the hydraulic lift, checked it and found it nearly full, then swept the walls with the beam of light. "Can't see it."
"Give me the light," Sharon said. "They're usually somewhere near the counter." She found the master switches that turned the pumps on and off under a shelf near the register that held about a decade's worth of dusty Veterans Day poppies. She pushed the two levers to the off position and hoped they worked.
When she came back to the garage bay, she shined the light on Annie and Grace, who were filling the Coke bottles with gas by touch. The smell was cloying in the closed space. Grace looked up at her. "Pumps off?"
"Yes."
"There's a box of disposable rags on the bench behind you. I couldn't find them in the dark."
"Got 'em," Sharon said after a few seconds with the light.
Annie gave up crouching after a few minutes and sat down on the filthy garage floor, fat legs crossed, expertly twisting and stuffing rags into the bottles. "Haven't done this since I tried blow up Cameron DuPuy's BMW convertible sophomore year in Atlanta. Remember, Grace?"
"No. I had nothing to do with it. I wasn't there."
Annie chuckled softly and kept stuffing, and Sharon wished for a moment that she had been there, committing a felony with these two women. Maybe life would have been different then.
When the bottles were ready, they moved out to the pumps. Sharon removed the nozzles and locked them open, watched the trickle of gasoline that remained in the hoses seep out onto the concrete, then stop. The shut-off switches had worked.
Annie started laying a trail of rags from where the nozzles lay on the concrete back to the big garage bay door. Grace followed, soaking the rags with gas from the can. Back inside, they cracked the big garage door, then Grace continued the flammable trail, sloshing gas over cases of motor oil and cans of solvent stored inside the garage. She felt the cold, slimy wetness on her hands as she continued the trail out the back door, through the junked cars behind the station. They piled more rags there, and then all three of them stood, looking down at the pathetic pile of dirty, pale blue.
"No way we are ever going to hit that little bitty pile," Annie said worriedly, glancing over her shoulder at the woods behind them.
"Softball," Sharon murmured. "All-state pitcher, three years in a row."
"Honey." Annie gave her a soft punch in the shoulder. "Way to go."
It was too dark to see her face-they didn't dare use the flashlight out here-but Sharon thought she might have been smiling.
While Grace soaked the pile of rags with gasoline, hoping it wouldn't evaporate too fast, Annie and Sharon collected the Coke-bottle Molotov cocktails from the gas station and carried them back to the edge of the w
oods. The reek of gasoline was in their mouths, their noses, bathing their sinus cavities, and by the time they were finished, it seemed that there was no fresh air left in the world. But they were ready.
Carefully, carefully, but hurrying now, graceless and more daring in their haste, they skittered back to the house, in the front door, and on to the kitchen.
They clustered around the big, old four-burner gas stove, the fumes from the pilot lights mingling with the gasoline stench in their nostrils. Sharon thought it was probably a miracle the three of them didn't just burst into flames.
Grace lifted two heavy skillets off hooks behind the stove and placed them on the burners. "Cast-iron," she murmured. "Makes the best hash browns in the world."
Sharon pulled her one and only spare clip out of her blazer pocket, fingers tight around it, reluctant to let go. God, what were they doing? What if they needed these to save their lives? "Are you sure this is going to work?"
Annie felt for the clip, tugged it away from Sharon, then expertly started ejecting bullets into the two skillets. They made tiny, clinking sounds. "Don't ask me, darlin'. I haven't cooked bullets in years."
Sharon half believed her.
"Lord, we must look like the three witches inMacbeth." Annie turned on the burners, and there was asoft poof as blue flames sprang to life beneath the skillets, warming all the little bullets inside. "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble."
"Let's get the hell out of here," Grace said, glancing at her watch.
Five and a half hours left.
GRACE AND ANNIE waited at the open door of the gas station while Sharon went in with the flashlight to turn the pumps back on. Before she came outside, the sound of liquid hitting concrete broke the silence of the night, and the smell of gas polluted the sweet air.
"Lord, that sounds like it's coming out fast," Annie whispered.
"It's a lot of gas," Grace said. "It's going to hit the woods."
Great, Annie thought. Even if we do manage to get out of here, they'll slap us in Federal prison for setting a forest fire. Unless, of course, we burn to a crisp first.
