He nearly smiled. “I can.”
Her look said, I should have known.
Shaw cut small holes in the curtain at one of the front windows. And one at each side. “Your peepholes. You’re in charge of surveillance.”
She seemed pleased he’d given her the assignment.
He added, “Don’t touch the curtains.”
“Never present,” she replied.
A nod.
Hannah said, “What about the back?”
“Maybe. But that’d expose them to our imaginary rifle.”
She looked out the kitchen window, nodding. “I’d make it a five percent possibility.”
“I think five percent is just about right.”
78
As the cabin’s interior grew dimmer with the lowering sun, Shaw assembled the meager weapons—the knives, the hammer and the paddle. He set them on the coffee table in the living room.
Using the tool, he pounded several bricks from the fireplace. He placed each into a separate pillowcase and tied it closed just beneath the stone. Crude bolos, the Argentinian weighted lasso. He could fling one fairly accurately, making an armed attacker dodge, giving him a chance to get within hand-to-hand combat distance.
Knife-fighting distance too.
He examined the ten-inch blade. The stainless steel was not high carbon. It was cheap and dull.
He pounded another brick out of the fireplace and began whetting the knife.
Hannah glanced back from her surveillance station at the broken fireplace. “Hm. Second house we’ve screwed up today.”
He lifted an amused eyebrow and continued honing. Shaw had always enjoyed sharpening blades. He liked the sound of steel against stone, he liked rendering dull into keen. He finished one and hadjust started on the second, when he heard Parker’s voice from the parlor. Soft.
“Colter? Can I talk to you?”
He said to Hannah, “Keep watch.”
“Got it.”
Shaw walked into the parlor. “You all right?”
“Feeling better. Something to say.”
He pulled a chair close.
“You asked me about November, if there were some gaps I wanted to fill in.”
“You don’t need—”
“I do.” She adjusted the cushion she was using as a pillow to sit up slightly higher. “That night. Jon’s back at the house. Drunk. I’m bloody, lying in the snow beside the pool, my cheek is cracked.”
“I remember.”
Another hesitation. She inhaled deeply, and this was not from the pain in her leg. Then: “Colter? Jon never touched me that night. November. He never touched me.” Her voice caught. She controlled it and continued, “I got his gun. I hit myself in the face a dozen times. Hard. Really hard. I crawled inside the house—left a trail of blood. I called nine-one-one and said he beat me and said he was going to kill me. Two squad cars came right away. Jon had passed out, and I was a bloody mess. They cuffed him and recovered the gun. I told them I got it away and threw it into the bushes.”