It would be a fine place to fish. Cold, clear, expansive.
He thought of Sonja Nilsson.
We took pike and bass mostly. Some muskie...
Shaw pulled the Winnebago to a spot behind the house and killed the engine. He climbed out. Inhaling deeply. Smelling, almost tasting, air rich with leaf and mud and water and decaying vegetation.
Parker and Hannah, in the gold Kia, arrived a moment later. She parked beside the camper. Shaw gestured for them to wait. He walked to the front door and punched in the key code Villaine had given him. The lock clicked and, hand near his weapon, he pushed the door open.
In a few minutes he’d cleared the homey three-bedroom placeand walked onto the porch to join the other two. They carried their belongings inside. There wasn’t much: a shopping bag, backpacks and gym bags.
They all stepped inside and Shaw closed the door.
Hannah wasn’t feeling well; the last few miles of the road from Route 84 meandered in sharp curves. She walked to the couch, whose cushion covers featured a Native American design in red and black, and dropped onto it, her head back.
“It’ll pass,” her mother said.
“No, it won’t. I’m going to puke.” She moaned, with a touch of teenage drama.
Itwouldpass, but there were a few more debilitating conditions than nausea. Shaw didn’t want her to feel bad, of course, but he also needed them both aware and present. No distractions. This was a good safe house. But they weren’t invisible.
Shaw walked into the kitchen and looked through the cabinets. He found what he was looking for and dumped some powdered ginger into a pan, added water and boiled the concoction for a few minutes. He strained it through a coffee filter into a mug and dumped in two generous spoonfuls of sugar, then stirred. He handed it to the girl.
She stared uncertainly. “Um, thanks. But...”
“Try it.”
The girl took a tentative sip. Then another.
Shaw left her and joined Parker, who had returned to the porch, looking out over the field. He walked to the back, collected his own backpack from the camper and returned. The lot was about seven or eight acres of grass and sedge, in which grew a few solitary oaks and hawthorns and maples. About two hundred yards from the house was a row of trees running parallel to the road that had led them here.
“Can be a good defensible position,” he said.
Parker gave a brief laugh. “You sound like we’re soldiers.”
“Here.” Shaw dug into his backpack and took out a gray plastic pistol case. He opened it and removed a Colt Python. This model, a .357 magnum, was considered the finest revolver ever made. It was competition accurate, and its mechanism operated as smoothly as a fine timepiece’s. This particular one had been given to a young Colter Shaw by his father. It was the same weapon that he’d used to drive an armed intruder off the family’s Compound.
He’d been thirteen.
Shaw offered it to her.
Parker shook her head.
“Take it. Put it in your waistband. It’s a revolver. It won’t go off by accident.”
“No.”
He said firmly, “I might need you to use it.”
In a voice equally stern: “Then you’ll have to think of something else.”
Hannah interrupted the argument, if that’s what the exchange was. “It worked.” Her eyes were on the gun as Shaw slipped it into his own back waistband.
The girl added, “It’s butter beer out of Harry Potter. Or what I imagine it tasted like.”
Shaw said, “We’re going to make this place safer. The odds’re with us, but even a one percent chance of being attacked means you prepare.”
Parker asked, “What do we do?”