“I know my role, Michael,” she said and then slipped back out into the juniper bushes.
When you’re planning an ambush, it’s also important to know where everyone is going to be shooting from, should the situation demand such action, so that the ambush doesn’t turn into a friendly-fire incident. As soon as the Ghouls busted into the house, Fiona would come in behind them while we roared in from the backyard.
Inside the house, we had set up a few obstacles- large pieces of furniture-and surprises-the feral cats-to ensure that we would find ourselves in an L formation and that the Ghouls would be disoriented. We’d funnel the Ghouls into the long leg of the L, directly in front of Sam and me, and up against a make-shift wall we’d built with furniture, so that instead of being able to slip into the kitchen, they would instead be pinned. Fiona would be on the short leg of the L, at a right angle to us. We’d be shooting the Ghouls head-on, Fiona would be shooting them in the side of the head or the back.
It was a brutal thing to consider, but then ambushing someone isn’t about rose petals and whale songs. We had two core advantages working in our favor: We were trained and our goal was not to kill anyone, much to Fiona’s disappointment.
Sam and I rolled up to the open sliding door, our front wheels just an inch from the thick shag carpeting that must have been fashionable at some point in the past, but not a past I readily recalled.
It took a few more minutes, but we finally heard the Ghouls approaching. The Camaro they drove had an engine that sounded like someone choking to death on a bag of glass. Fiona texted: They’ve parked behind the wagon. Examining the car. Just cut the tires.
“Look alive,” I said to Sam and then texted Fiona: Guns?
Fiona texted three words back: Bats, hammers, knives.
All that meant was that they hadn’t yet pulled out their guns. You don’t go to kill someone without a gun, usually. Beating someone to death, or stabbing them, leaves a lot of evidence around. But then, of course, if they actually needed the stuff Bruce had taken, perhaps their goal was not to kill him now, only to torture him until he gave them back their money and property.
Coming up the walk now.
We’d locked the front door, but I knew that wasn’t a deterrent, especially since the front door was equipped with a lovely, decorative, frosted tempered-glass inlay, which to criminals is like leaving a plate of cookies and a note that says, “Come on in!” on the front porch. Unlike regular glass, tempered glass won’t break into huge, artery-cutting shards when it’s smashed. Instead, it shatters into oval-shaped pebbles. It’s also five time harder than regular glass, which is great if you’re worried about grandchildren running into and slicing their heads off but doesn’t really take into account bikers with bats, hammers and knives.
Fiona texted: They’re duct-taping the glass.
Duct tape usually makes you smart. And while no one could reasonably compare anyone in a biker gang to one of the generation’s guiding intellectual lights, they knew crime.
Or at least they knew how to break glass quietly.
Taping off the section of glass you’re interested in breaking will dull the sound of the breaking glass. Instead of a shatter break, the glass will receive a concussion break, so that the glass will spider out from the center point, but only the center point will be broken straight through. When executed correctly, the broken glass will stick to the duct tape and all your cosmopolitan criminal will need to do is remove the tape and there, as if by the magic of criminal ingenuity, will appear a hole.
Unless, of course, you’re an idiot and you duct-tape the glass and instead of hitting it just enough to break the small section, you hit it so hard that you put your entire bat through the window and crush the whole plate, thus completely counteracting the intelligence of using duct tape in the first place. There was a loud crash of breaking glass, followed by another text from Fiona: Idiots.
A dog began barking a few doors down. But since most of the people in the neighborhood had been asleep since about eight fifteen-if you eat dinner at four thirty, you tend to go to bed pretty early-and most of them probably took their hearing aids out at night, no one even bothered to yell at the dog to be quiet, never mind popping outside to find out why two bikers were breaking into the Grossman house.
Fiona texted one last time: They’re going in.
I counted to fifteen and then heard the sound I was hoping for: “Ah!” A minor shriek of fear and surprise. Followed by: “Uh!” The sound of fear and surprise is an evolutionary caution for humans-it’s the easiest sound for us to discern, even in a crowded room. Frighten a human and other humans will know immediately. When you’re about to ambush someone, it’s the first thing you hope to hear, as it puts you at an immediate-and involuntary- advantage. You’re not afraid. They are.
“Did you see that?” one of the men managed to get out. He was trying to whisper, but whispering when you’re afraid is nearly impossible. Unless you are speaking directly into someone’s ear and can thus modulate your voice down below the normal decibel level we can easily perceive, whispering tends not to work.
A normal whisper, in a controlled environment, where your emotions aren’t heightened, is thirty decibels.
A whisper of fear?
You might as well use a bullhorn.
“What the hell is that? A dog?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a big rat.”
“Man, no one said anything about animals.”
I heard the sounds of cracking glass as the men traversed the entry hall looking for the switch, heading directly in the path of the living room.
As soon as their shadows fell into the living room, Sam and I kicked into gear, thundering the choppers into the house, filling the small home with light and violent noise. The two men screamed-or at least they appeared to scream, since we couldn’t hear them over the engine noise-and dropped their bats as they attempted to jump away and cover up.
It’s only natural.
If you suddenly see a motorcycle charging toward you, particularly inside an enclosed space, after already being frightened by wild animals, you’re going to forget just how tough you are.
Sam and I pinned the two Ghouls up against the wall of the kitchen, our front wheels coming to a stop right above their knees. If we’d wanted to, we could’ve gunned our engines at any point and broken their legs.
But that was probably the least of the men’s worries, since Sam and I both had our guns pointed directly at their heads, too. Fi came walking up with her shotgun.
“Hello, boys,” she said. She was about ten feet from the two men. From that distance, if she shot one of them in the head, it was likely the bullet would sail straight through and hit the other guy, too.
They didn’t say anything.
“How is Clete doing?” she asked.
13
When you’re in the business of information, it’s important to be able to identify messengers. In the spy world, this means that you can spot the one person in the crowd who is waiting for you to walk up and say, “The eagle has landed.”
In the human body, those messengers are hormones. Just like spies, they are dispersed into the community- in this case, the bloodstream-to be funneled toward the appropriate targets in order to provide necessary information. The first hormone ever identified was adrenaline. This happened in 1901. By 1904, adrenaline was being synthesized in the laboratory for medical use, as in counteracting anaphylactic shock.
When it occurs naturally in the body, adrenaline dilates blood vessels and air passages, which increases muscle performance and mental acuity for short periods of time.
As in, for instance, the brief period of time it took Fiona to beat the living crap out of Clete.
When you don’t use your adrenaline in an appropriate amount of time-as in what was happening to the two Ghouls pinned to the wall inside the Grossman home-you might find yourself feeling nauseous, shaky and disoriented.
