“MacGyver.”
“What?”
She said, “It was a TV show. This guy I went out with for a while? He liked it. So we binged. The hero made these things, like bombs, out of everyday stuff.”
“Not air freshener.”
“Oh.” She gave a shrug and returned to searching.
Shaw wedged a kitchen chair under the back doorknob and took its mate to the front, did the same. Off the dining room he looked through a utility closet. He found a canoe paddle. It would make a functional club. He set it on the kitchen table, along with two butcher knives, one ten inches, the other twelve.
“What about this?” Hannah asked, pulling a plastic bag from under the sink.
He smelled naphtha.
“Mothballs. If we had any quicklime we could make Greek fire.”
“What’s that?”
“The ancient Greeks used it like a flamethrower. You study history?”
“Yeah, some. It’s cool up to the Roman Empire, then it gets complicated. And boring.”
Colter Shaw couldn’t disagree.
“Can you make some?”
“No lime. It’s only good against moths.”
“Oh, there’s this.” Hannah held up a jar of cayenne pepper. “I got some in my eye once and it was like it was on fire. Can we make pepper spray out of it?”
“Is there a spray bottle?”
There wasn’t.
“Are we going to do a security thing, like with the fishing line?”
“No. We’d be too exposed.”
And what would they do anyway if the Twins tripped an alarm? At Timberwolf, they had real weapons.
Then something across the kitchen caught his eye.
He walked to the sink, where sat a large box of Tide detergent. He picked it up. Thought for a minute. He pulled a juice glass from a cabinet. Then he yanked down a curtain rod, bare of drapery, from above the window in the back door. He said to the girl, “Now I need a pen.”
She ripped through kitchen drawers. “Here’s one.”
“And one last thing. Any rubber bands?”
They found none.
He asked, “How ’bout that thing in your hair?”
“The scrunchy?”
“That’ll do.”
She tugged it off and handed it to him.