“Give it five minutes, then pound on the back door. Call ‘Police’ or something. When they turn that way, I can get them from the window. You take anybody who tries to come toward you.”
“I like it,” Desmond said.
“And, remember, we should do Motorcycle Man first.”
77
Once again, Shaw’s percentages didn’t hold up.
The Twins had found the place.
He and Hannah were staring through the curtain in the front window as the pair slowly moved from cover and started toward the cabin, pistols in their hands.
They were approaching through the brush to the right of the house as you faced it. Suit paused and crouched, Jacket continuing on. They were going front and back.
Guns against a canoe paddle, kitchen knives and the latest weapon Shaw had found, a claw hammer.
Suit was going to take the front door, Tan Jacket the rear.
Hannah looked his way and he nodded. She moved aside the curtain over the right front window.
Then:
“Look!” Hannah whispered.
Suit glanced at the tree he was approaching, then the window where the curtain had moved. He froze and dropped quickly, prone, powdering his suit with dirt. In a harsh whisper he called out to his partner, who was about twenty feet in front of him. Jacket seemed confused but then he also dropped to the ground.
Suit glanced again to the window. Hannah moved the curtain again. And the two men quickly crawled back in the direction they’d come until they were under cover of the brush on the other side of the parking lot. From there, they hurried up the hill, using trees for cover and disappearing into the shadows of the late fall afternoon.
“It worked,” Hannah said, peering out and laughing. She squeezed Shaw’s arm.
Tide laundry detergent comes in a distinctive box. With its red and yellow concentric circle logo, it could easily be used as a firearm target by people who’d live in a cabin just like this and not have disposable money for commercial targets or the inclination to drive to a sporting goods store to pick some up.
So when Suit began making his way forward, he noticed the front of the Tide carton Shaw had mounted on the oak. He also would have seen the dozen holes tightly grouped in the center of the “bullseye”—holes that Shaw had made with the pen Hannah had found.
Then Suit’s glance at the house when the curtain moved revealed something else—what could be taken as a rifle mounted with a scope aimed his way from inside the darkened living room through the parted curtain.
So they’d fled—from a gun that was really the kitchen curtain rod on top of which was the juice cup mounted backward with Hannah’s scrunchy, looking for all the world like a rifle barrel and telescopic sight.
Thebeliefthat your opponent has weapons can be as effective as weapons themselves.
Hannah had pulled the curtain aside to better watch the retreat.
Shaw said, “No. Back from the window. Never present unless you’ve got to.”
“ ‘Present’?”
“Present yourself as a target.”
“What’re we going to do?”
A careful look out the windows. No sign of the enemy in all the places an enemy would be. “If the deputy doesn’t find us before dark, I’m going to start a fire at the end of the dock. There’ll be patrols for brush fires. They’ll see it. Send somebody.”
“Won’t those two assholes shoot them?”
“No. They’ll know that if the responders don’t call in, there’ll be police and the area’ll be sealed. They’ll figure it’s smarter to leave. Come up with another plan.”
She frowned. “But, we don’t have matches. Like, can you start a fire?”