Dead Level (26 page)

Well, in addition to not firing the gun, I mean; as the soup began taking hold, my discouragement lessened and righteous anger flowed back in; unfortunately, that left little room for even my usual thin quota of intelligence.

“So … how do we do this?” If I knew Ellie, she’d already been thinking about it, and her reply didn’t disappoint.

“First we put the decking boards on,” she said. “We lay them out as if we were starting to build the floor. And then …” This was the important part, her tone said. “Then … we
don’t nail them down
.”

In reply I stared dumbly. Because, you see, each end of each decking piece has to rest on a floor joist. Otherwise, it’ll fall right through to the ground below. And then you nail them down; if you don’t,
you’ll
fall through, when one of the pieces shifts off the joist board its end rests on.

“Don’t nail them?” I repeated, frowning. “Because …?”

But then it hit me. “Because it’s a trap! He chases us until we catch him?”

“Precisely.” Ellie looked pleased, either because I liked her plan so much or because, by comprehending it, I’d shown that maybe I hadn’t lost quite as many of my marbles as she’d feared.

“He steps on a loose floorboard, it falls, he goes down. At the very least he’ll be immobilized with a leg stuck through the floor. Ellie, that’s great!”

By “go down,” of course, I meant “fall right through the floor entirely” into the latticed-in area below. Whereupon we’d run out there with my gun, which would persuade him to hold still when we told him to do so …

“Great,” I repeated, hauling myself up; the room took only a spin and a half before stopping, which I regarded as a good sign.

“If he’s checked this place out at all”—which no doubt he had—“he knows the deck’s there. And he knows that back door is the only way in.” Because unless he was deaf, he’d heard Ellie nailing the front one shut.

“So what we need to do is
lure
him.” Get him to run up onto that deck, I meant, by making him want to come into the cottage, somehow. And we, of course, would have to be the bait, which was the part of the plan I didn’t like. But I really didn’t see that we had much choice.

Because right now, we were in
his
trap; just a couple of little
varmints, as my mother-in-law, Bella, would’ve put it. And I had a feeling that the next thing on his to-do list was—

—with a muffled crash, another firebomb flew in, breaking another front window and knocking its shade aside as it came; in response, I leapt for one fire extinguisher while Ellie grabbed the other—

—yep. Varmint elimination.

Half an hour later, we’d put out the second fire—if this went on we would soon run out of fire extinguishers, an idea I disliked intensely but there was no help for that, either—and were getting to work.

“Ouch,” Ellie whispered, scrambling up from the ground and dusting herself off in the moonlight.

I squinted down at her. “Gangway,” I whispered back, and joined her by jumping out the back door, too, and by the way, have I mentioned how much I dislike heights?

Also,
descending
from heights. And hard landings.

“Listen,” I said, climbing to my feet; my ears were ringing again, and my head felt like someone had lopped off the top of it and stuffed in some cotton balls. “This thing about
getting
him trapped.”

I scanned the darkness around the cottage for signs of our assailant. But I saw none, and no shotgun blasts or firebombs came out of the bushes at me, either.

So I was guessing he still had his heart set on making all this look accidental somehow. That, or he hadn’t noticed us out here in back of the cottage yet.

“I still don’t quite get how we’re going to …”

I dabbed at something wet on my face. Then I dabbed again and peered at my hand. In the moonlight, something dark smeared it. A
lot
of something. But I understood, or so I thought.

“Don’t worry about it. I hit that bed frame hard, and head wounds always bleed a lot,” I told Ellie, who’d seen the blood, too, and appeared concerned.

I dabbed once more, then got busy trying not to stumble or trip over anything as I located the piles of decking boards I had arranged earlier.

“How are we going to lure him? Is that what you’re asking?” Ellie moved the stepladder over to the deck, then scampered up it to perch on the deck’s edge.

“I don’t know,” she went on. “Run around and make faces at him, maybe, or yell insulting remarks. Anything to get him …”

Mad
. At us; great, I thought. One mistake and our plan could turn us from trappers to trapped, with the extra-attractive additional feature that by then, he’d be royally ticked off at us.
Oh, wonderful
, I grumbled silently.

I touched my head again. The lump was still oozing; that’s all the blood meant, I confidently believed.

“You hand the boards up. I’ll lay them out,” said Ellie very quietly, and held out her hand for the first one.

Which I supplied, and then the next one. And the one after that: bend, stretch, repeat.

The boards weren’t heavy, but there were a lot of them; probably my arms wouldn’t fall off before we were done. But as I thought this, a hot, dark drop fell onto my hand, then another.

“You know, though,” Ellie whispered, taking another decking board from me, “I keep on wondering if maybe we
should
just try sneaking out of here.…”

“Uh-huh. So which way do you want to try getting to the dirt road? Across the clearing in front of the cottage? With him right there in it, or near it?”

I handed her another board. “Or through the woods? In pitch darkness, through muck and brambles, over fallen trees, and …”

Seriously, I’d been out there in that wilderness and it was darned near impenetrable, even in daylight. “Not only that, but if we run …”

Well, he didn’t
want
to shoot us. He’d already pretty much proven
that. But that didn’t mean he
wouldn’t
. If, I mean, we put him in a situation where he felt he had no choice.

“Yeah,” Ellie agreed in a whisper. “You’re right. It’s just that … Hand me another board,” she finished resignedly.

So I did: one more down, another thirty or forty to go.

Or maybe fifty. At least we weren’t getting shot at.

He was waiting, that was all. Until things were the way
he
wanted them … which probably he was nearby busily arranging right this minute.

Not a comforting thought, but those were getting pretty hard to come by in general, weren’t they? So all we could do was try.… Another hot droplet leaked down my face; it tasted like salty copper, and as I brushed it away, I realized:

It wasn’t from the bump on my head. It was a nosebleed.

Still, no big deal, right?

Wrong.

Once upon a time, the devil wore a red suit, had sharp horns and a pitchforked tail, and spent his time scampering around on cloven hooves doing mischief, never happier than when he could tempt you into doing some, too. But now women had taken over, so no devils were needed to make a man’s life miserable.

Or so Dewey Hooper thought to himself as he struggled to eliminate the two females who, if not stopped right here and now, could steal away his hard-won freedom: his dead wife, Marianne, back from the grave to punish him for killing her, and Marianne’s bigmouthed pal, who’d already testified against him once.

There would not, he was absolutely determined, be a second time, and now—after another, much more intense anxiety attack, but never mind that, he told himself shakily—he’d decided just how to make certain of it.

He’d tried the small firebombs, but they hadn’t been enough.
Those damned women had put them out. What he needed was a fire so ferocious and all-consuming that they couldn’t stop it, one that would burn up both their bodies
and
any other pesky evidence of his recent presence.

And as if to reassure him that such a plan really was the answer to his problem, he had the fuel for such a conflagration conveniently at hand: the cottage’s propane tank.

There were, though, still two difficulties with the project. First, the tank
was
full of propane, so wrestling it over uneven ground, terrain studded with granite boulders that the tank could hit hard if you dropped it, was a dicey proposition.

Back in prison when he’d had to move such tanks around the complex on various work details, he’d had it explained to him how tanks under pressure spun around like loose rockets when broken; one of them could take your legs clean off. So he was careful as he maneuvered this one across the graveled clearing, toward the cottage’s front window.

Then there was the stench of the stuff; he didn’t quite know yet how he was going to get around that. The women inside seemed to be staying toward the rear of the building, so he hoped to get a decent amount of propane in there before they smelled it. But he would need luck, too; he hoped his own was still good.

Moments later, though, he found out just how good it still was, even better than he could’ve hoped. Setting the tank under one of the front windows, he wedged it firmly between two granite chunks sticking up out of the ground like gravestones, then risked a peek through the corner of the window where the shade didn’t quite go all the way to the edge.

And got, at first, an awful shock: he couldn’t see them.

Stunned, he scanned the interior, what he could see of it.
Where …?

But then a sound from outside the cabin, through the open back door, sent a spasm of relief through him, followed by a rush of suspicion about what they might be up to. He scuttled downhill on the path
alongside the cottage and peered around the back wall only to find … what the
hell?

They were
doing
something. There in the moonlight, the two of them were fiddling around with some boards … laying out pieces of decking, he saw with disbelief. They were putting a floor onto the latticed framework of a deck that was in the process of being constructed. And … why would they be doing that?

Then, after a moment of puzzling over it, he knew. It was a trap of some kind. All he had to do was avoid it. And that ought to be easy; he had no reason to be going anywhere near that deck.

So—easy-peasy—he simply wouldn’t. He would stay away from it entirely. Smiling at his own cleverness, he inhaled the smell of the fresh lumber they were using. With it came the clean pine smell of the surrounding woods and a pungently mineral-smelling whiff of the nearby lake.

They didn’t know he was so close. From where he stood, he could just shoot them both right now and they’d never even know what hit them.

But if he did, all hope of their deaths escaping criminal investigation was over. No, it was best that they stay occupied here while he went on with his propane plan. That way he could get even more of the gas into the building in secrecy.

Then, as soon as they went back in …

Bang
, he thought happily. They’d have an instant to smell the accumulated gas, but before they could do anything about it—

Oh, his luck was just wonderful tonight, he thought as he made his way quietly back to the clearing where he’d left the rubber hose from the outdoor shower setup. With it in hand, he returned to the propane tank wedged under the window.

But when he tried attaching the tube to the tank, he recalled the other thing that was wrong with cylinders like this one: it had a gauge with a fat, threaded connector on it but no handy-dandy slender nozzle to slide the hose onto.

Instantly his good cheer vanished, replaced by anxious fury as he hunched there among the prickly-branched huckleberry bushes that grew around the boulders. Once more he squinted thwartedly at the black rubber hose in his trembling right hand, then at the tank’s top.

But he wasn’t seeing either of them. Instead the smug face and superior sneer of the prison’s guidance counselor mocked him.

Your problem, Dewey, is that you don’t think ahead. Instead you just roll merrily along
.

Until it all goes bad on you. Again
. Dewey’s fists clenched. It was all he could do not to give the tank a shove … but no.

No.
Look again. Get control of yourself
. The thoughts came with an effort, just as they had when he’d passed on shooting the women where they stood. He hadn’t learned them from the smirking harridan at the prison, either. Instead, they were the only useful advice he’d ever gotten from a cop.

From the Eastport police chief, Bob Arnold, in fact, one time when Dewey was being jailed for—he was pretty sure he recalled this—public intoxication and assault. For no particular reason, on their way to the county lockup, the chief had turned and looked through the perp screen at Dewey, in that piece of junk Eastport used for a squad car.

“Dewey,” the chief had said—he’d known Dewey for a long time by then, having arrested him often—“from now on when you get mad, I want you to stop. Look again at the situation and give yourself a minute to get control of yourself.”

The police chief had turned back to the road ahead. “Can you do that?” he’d asked. “Can you give yourself a chance and do it?”

And of course Dewey had promised that he would, and then had forgotten about it almost at once … until now.
Until tonight
. His shaking hands quieted, his constricted throat opening so he could breathe again.
A minute … control of myself. O-kay …

What the hell, maybe it was worth a try, even if the hated prison counselor lady had said the same.

Thinking this, he looked at the valve clamped to the tank. He’d
unhitched the tank from the cottage’s gas line by first turning the valve off via the big round knob at the top. Then he’d bent the slim metal tubing that carried the propane into the dwelling through a small hole in the wall. He’d bent it back and forth until it broke. That way, no clean cut marks would suggest that the tube had been tampered with; instead, the damage would seem like part of the larger “accident” he was planning.