“If not, we may want to install one,” Henderson said, faint amusement in his voice.
“If we have to deal with kids, you’re the specialist.”
“Okay.” He leaned forward. “Is that the street?”
It was. Conall slowed and put on the turn signal, even though he hadn’t passed another car in the past five minutes.
The road was gravel and made perilous by potholes. Conall drove at the pace of a crawl. The shocks were none too good on this aging Chevy Suburban, borrowed from the fleet of seized vehicles kept for occasions when agents wanted to be inconspicuous. Conall had been assured that, belying the appearance of dents and a few pockets of rust, there was plenty of power under the hood if he needed it.
A small grunt escaped Henderson when the right front wheel descended with a clunk into a particularly deep crater. “Why the hell isn’t this road paved?”
“It’s private. Only five houses on it.” Conall had counted the mailboxes out at the corner. “Too expensive to pave, even if the residents could all agree to share the cost.”
“The least they could do is fill the damn holes.”
Conall didn’t bother to explain what a headache it could be for residents to coordinate on even such a relatively modest project. A couple of the households might be short on bucks; the home-owners closest to the county road might not feel their share should be equal. Probably the only vehicles that used the road belonged to home-owners or visitors; kids would have to catch the school bus out at the main road, and obviously the post office had declined to deliver off the pavement. Probably even garbage cans had to be hauled out to the main road for pickup.
Which gave him the idea that, once he knew what day was garbage pickup, he’d wander out here and investigate the neighbor’s cans. If they were smart, they wouldn’t be careless enough to dump anything but kitchen garbage and the like in their cans, but you never knew. Crooks were often stupid, a fact for which law enforcement personnel gave frequent thanks.
Last driveway on the right, his directions had said. No house number was displayed at the head of the driveway he turned down. Scruffy woods initially screened the house from view; alders, vine maples, a scattering of larger firs and cedars, scraggly blackberries and lower growing salal. At least there were no potholes here, instead a pair of beaten earth tracks separated by a grassy hump.
They came out of the woods to see fenced pasture and, ahead, a white-painted farmhouse that probably dated to the 1920s or 1930s. Red and white beef cattle grazed the pasture on one side of the driveway, while on the other side a fat, shaggy Shetland pony and a sway-backed horse of well-used vintage lifted their heads from the grass to gaze with mild interest at the passing Suburban.
As they neared, Conall could see that the house had two full stories with a dormered attic to boot. Several of the wood-framed, small-paned, sash windows on the first floor boasted window boxes filled with bright pink and fuchsia geraniums. The wide, covered front porch with a railing looked welcoming.
The one outbuilding, probably a barn in its past, apparently served now as garage. The double doors stood open and he could see what he thought was a Subaru station wagon in the shadowy interior.
The setup was good, he reflected; they’d been lucky to find a neighbor willing to cooperate with a surveillance team, and even luckier given that this one and only suitable house happened to have an unused attic that offered a perfect vantage point. Still, he studied the facade nervously, half expecting children to swarm out like killer bees from a hive. God, he hoped there wouldn’t be babies squalling all night. Although babies might be preferable to kids of an age to be curious.
No one, adult or child, swarmed out. Or even peered. Lace curtains didn’t twitch.
“This woman expecting us?” Conall asked.
“So I’m told.” Henderson glanced at his watch. “It’s nap time.”
“Is that like the eye of the hurricane?”
His partner’s raw-boned face split into a grin. “That’s one way to describe it.”
They parked beside the barn and pulled out a duffel bag each before starting across the yard to the house. They could come back later for their equipment.