But she didn’t see any geese as she moved along the road and that was odd, because lately they’d been out in force, slowing traffic to a crawl, daring the cars to run them down as they took their own sweet time getting out of the metal monsters’ way. Maybe they went somewhere else at night. Or maybe the coyotes were about and the geese had hightailed it elsewhere, not wanting to do battle with them.
All of a sudden she was glad she had Hunter with her. She didn’t know why, couldn’t wrap her mind around it, but she knew the dog would protect her, that that was why he’d been so eager to come along.
“ Good, boy,” she said.
The further they got into the park, the more eerie it became. The lights on the ranger station, club house and museum were out. She could see them from her bedroom window and she’d never been able to pinpoint exactly when they went off. It seemed no matter how late she stayed up reading, they were on when she fell asleep and when she woke, usually before the dawn, they were out.
There was no breeze. No sound. It was as if she were in another world. Her footsteps were silent, the sound seemingly gobbled up in the night, but when she got to the gate behind her house, the hinges creaked to beat the band, sending a screeching fingernails on blackboard sound jackknifing up her spine, chilling the back of her brain.
She stood stone still, listened to the night, trying to hear if other humans were out, wondering if she’d disturbed anyone, but the night stayed quiet. As far as she could tell, her neighbors were all safely snug in their beds, dreaming away.
All of a sudden a cold breeze, coming from the north, chilled her. She turned, looked up. There were clouds in the northern sky. It seemed a storm was coming in. They hadn’t had any snow yet this year. It was due and it looked like it was coming.
She and the dog went through the gate and she screeched it closed, pushing it against the wind, which was strong now and getting stronger.
She went to the back door, the wind at her back and Hunter at her heels. She keyed the lock, was about to open the door, when the dog moved between it and her, waiting for her to open it.
“ No!” she whispered. “You stay here.” She was only going to be inside for a couple minutes tops and she was going to be stealthy and quiet, in case there were watchers out front. The last thing she needed to be doing was chasing a dog around in there.
The dog looked up at her, whined.
“ No, sit!” Though she was whispering, she was firm.
But the dog didn’t sit. He persisted in trying to block her entry. Either that, or he was being insistent on going in first. Either way, Izzy wasn’t having it.
“ I said sit!” She grabbed the fur on both sides of his ghostly white face and pulled him away from the door. She pushed down on his haunches. “Sit!”
The dog did.
“ That’s better.” But when she went back to the door, the dog was there before her, whining.
“ Sit!” she pointed back to where she’d taken the dog. “Now!”
Hunter gave her a baleful look, moved aside, sat.
“ That’s better.” She turned the key, entered into the kitchen, making sure to close the door after herself. She didn’t want the dog sneaking in.
Inside, she went to the stairs, stopped. Something wasn’t right, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. A smell seemed out of place. A hint of mint. An imaginary spider as real as any she’d ever been afraid of crept up her spine, stinging her back with every frozen footfall.
She made herself into a statue, ears attuned to the house, eyes getting used to the dark. She heard not a sound, save her shallow breathing. Her heart was racing, threatening to thump out of her chest. Cold sweat trickled from under her arms. Her hair felt like it was on fire. She wasn’t alone in the house.
Her first instinct was to turn and run back the way she’d come, lead the intruder into Hunter’s jaws. But she fought it. Whoever was in here with her was being silent as granite.
Why?
She strained her ears. Heard nothing and now even that smell of mint seemed to be gone. Could she have imagined it? She inhaled the night. No, it was there. Barely, but it was there. But did that mean there was somebody inside with her?
No, she was sure there was nobody in the house, because if there were, they’d’ve surely struck by now. More than likely somebody had been and gone, leaving his minty smell behind. She wanted to call out, find out for sure, but she resisted the urge.
Instead, she started up the stairs, went straight to her bedroom, then to the closet where she saw that her shoes, which had been neat little soldiers at parade rest on the floor in front of the safe, had been pushed aside. Somebody had been here, had found the safe, not hard to do as it was a two foot square thing on the closet floor. She hadn’t needed to hide it, as she had no jewelry to speak of. She’d only needed it to keep her back up hard drive and important papers safe from a fire. And to keep the guns safe. Her shoes had been in front of it, her winter sweatshirts had been folded on top of it. They too had been thrown aside.
She dropped to the floor, trained the tiny LED flashlight she kept on her keychain at the dial, dialed in the combination. Safe open, she took out a small Ruger. Officially called a lightweight compact pistol or LCP, Izzy had given it the name Elsie Pee. A couple weeks after she’d confiscated it, she’d gone to Shields, just about the largest sporting goods store on Earth, and bought a box of the new Buffalo Bore 380 Auto +P Jacketed Hollow Points. If she was going to have a gun in her safe, she needed to know if she could rely on it if the day ever came, though she never imagined it would.
Izzy wasn’t a fan of hollow points, because of the damage they could do, but she didn’t trust any of the other ammo on the market made for the little gun. She never wanted to fire it, never planned on firing it, but if she ever did, if she ever had to, she wanted to stop whoever she was shooting at and the ninety grain jacketed Hollow Points made by Buffalo Bore would stop any man. Not like the Glock would. That would rip an attacker a new asshole, make him dead fast, but the little Ruger could be carried in a lot of situations where the Glock would be impossible to conceal. Especially with the wallet holster her nephew had made for it.
She put a magazine in the weapon, racked the slide, chambering a round, then she ejected the magazine, slid another round in it, then reinserted it. That gave her seven shots, six in the mag, one in the chamber. Satisfied, she slipped the gun into the wallet holster, stuck her finger through the hole in the center of the holster, fingered the trigger. Perfect. The weapon would look like a wallet in her hip pocket, but instead of money it held seven rounds of hurt.
As she was left handed, she slipped the wallet gun into her left hip pocket. Then she got out the Glock. It was a death making machine, a Glock 23, the official service pistol of the FBI. It held thirteen rounds of 40 caliber ammunition, yet only weighed about two pounds loaded. And though it was just shy of seven inches long, it was too big for her to conceal, unless she had it in the purse, where it would be hard to get at.
As she had with the small Ruger, she chambered a round, giving her fourteen rounds. She was an anti-gun nut, but she wasn’t stupid. Lila Booth was on the warpath, wanting her granddaughter dead and someone, probably Lila, had shot her last night. Plus, there was the problem of her new found youth. People were going to be after that. She needed protection.
Armed, she felt safer. With the Glock in hand and now with her eyes used to the dark, she looked around her closet, her clothes were neatly hung, just as she’d left them. Whoever had broken in either didn’t have the time or wasn’t inclined to rip the place apart in his search for who knows what, but he did think she might have something of value in the safe. Why else clear out the space in front of it? And why clear off the top of it? Had he been planning on carting it away, to open later? A strong man could do it, she supposed, or maybe two, or a man with a dolly. It wasn’t bolted down.
Maybe he wasn’t so strong. Maybe he was coming back with help or with a dolly.
Time to go.
She glanced around her bedroom on the way to the hall and the stairs, saw that it was undisturbed. Did that mean whoever had broken in was good at his craft or that he’d known about the safe and had come right to it?
She was still trying to work it out when she got to the stairs. If the man had known about the safe, how come he hadn’t had the ability to take it away? Was it bad planning? At the bottom of the stairs, she was still working on it when a horrible thought struck her. What if he had come equipped to take the safe? What if he had a
