Lila started moving faster, pulling Izzy along with her as the fog started closing in, blacking out the city lights below.
“ Would you look at that?” Mouledoux stared out into the fog, which was rolling in thick and fast.
“ I better get Manny.” Peeps left the room.
He didn’t know how, but all of a sudden Mouledoux knew Isadora Eisenhower and Lila Booth were coming in through the back. Manny Wayne had said it was impossible, but somehow they were going to do it. Cliff, dogs, electric fence, him and Peeps at the window, it made no never mind. That’s the way they were coming and somehow the fog was aiding them.
Keeping his eyes glued on the back, Mouledoux saw the fog stop just short of the house and he couldn’t shake the thought that it was alive. There was something going on here bigger than Isadora Eisenhower and the Fountain of Youth she’d apparently discovered or stumbled upon, whichever, it made no difference, because her rebirth as a young woman was only a part of a bigger picture that he didn’t want any part of, especially now that he’d learned it was Peeps who’d taken out the lawyer Drake and doctors Jordan and Romero and not Eisenhower. True, she’d obviously done those hospital security guys at her home, but looking at it now he saw that it was probably self defense and Shaffer had had a heart attack, Eisenhower wasn’t responsible for that.
She wasn’t a killer, not if you didn’t count defending your life and Mouledoux didn’t. That being the case, he didn’t have a dog in this fight and that was good, because this was a fight the Waynes, with their Blackwater thugs, concrete foxholes, dogs and firepower were going to lose, because those women had something on their side that Mississippi Bob Mouledoux was afraid of.
What it was, he didn’t have a clue, God, ghosts, extra-terrestrials, some kind of voodoo or mother nature herself, Mouledoux didn’t know, but it was mighty powerful, whatever it was, and though he didn’t believe in any of that stuff, his mama hadn’t raised a dumb boy. He’d been confronted with some pretty compelling evidence that one of the former had a hand in this, or something equally as powerful.
Those women were going to be here any minute and they were going to get those girls upstairs and take them out of here and anybody who tried to stop them was going to get dead and Mississippi Bob Mouledoux didn’t want any part of it.
Chapter Twenty
Izzy hadn’t seen such thick fog in Northern Nevada ever. But as a child, she’d grown up near the beach in Southern California, so she was familiar with fog and the eerie feeling of being caught in it.
Her mind went back to a time when she was fifteen years old. She’d been walking the neighbor’s collie, Skipper. It was a Sunday evening and it had just turned dark. They were crossing the baseball diamond in Jose San Martin Park, when the fog rolled in. It was December, three days before Christmas and the park had been deserted, save for her and the dog. It was as if they were alone in the world. She’d been both frightened and exhilarated.
She’d been cold that night in the fog, enveloped in the clammy wetness of it, afraid because she didn’t know which way to go, exhilarated because she felt like she could do anything she’d wanted out in the middle of centerfield-dance, strip naked, make a fool of herself-and nobody would see, so she’d shucked her clothes and swayed nude to an imaginary song, goosebumps peppering her body, while the dog sat patiently, waiting for the song in her head to end.
And when the song was over, she’d put her clothes back on, gave the dog his head and let him lead her home. That was one of her favorite memories, one she’d revisited often as her cancer had progressed.
Izzy remembered that fog. It was an alien thing.
“ Lila wait,” she said.
“ We’re almost there,“ Lila said. “Just a little further and we’ll be at the top.” They’d been going steadily up hill, not at a very steep grade, but up. And the ledge had widened, so Izzy was feeling safer, even though the snow had started to come down harder, but it had stopped with the fog.
“ This isn’t right,” she said.
“ What?” Lila said.
“ This fog.”
“ It is strange, but it’s a good strange. It’ll give us cover.”
“ No, it’s more than strange. This isn’t like fog. It’s dry, like it’s sucking the moisture right out of the air. That’s the opposite of fog. Fog is wet and fog is cold. It’s not cold anymore. And what happened to the snow?”
“ Izzy, this isn’t the time or place for this. We’ve come here to do a job. Let’s just do it. We’ll sort out all this strange shit after. Okay?”
“ Alright,” Izzy said and again she followed Lila, keeping close, because the fog, or whatever it was, seemed to be getting thicker.
“ We’re here,” Lila said a couple minutes later. Then, “They’re still here, after all this time.”
“ What?”
“ My rebar ladder,” Lila said. “My beau put these in, you know, the guy I was telling you about who helped build the electric fence.” Lila raised a hand overhead, grabbed onto a rung that seemed to be coming out of the cliff face. “It’s only about ten feet up, then we’re at the top and just about in Manny’s backyard.”
“ You weren’t sure this ladder would still be here?”
“ Not a hundred percent, but the odds were pretty good. After all, it was built by a lovesick young man who wanted to see his girl, who was a virtual prisoner in the castle.”
“ The ladder could have been discovered and taken down.”
“ But it wasn’t, when we get to the top, you’ll see why.” Lila put her foot in the bottom rung, started up and was at the top in short order. “Come on.”
“ Right behind you.” Izzy grabbed onto the ladder and a chill rippled through her, her old fear of heights still raising its ugly head, but she fought it off, went up. At the top, Lila reached a hand out. Izzy took it and Lila pulled her up.
She didn’t know what she’d expected, a palatial estate maybe, but not this. She was confronted with a dense forest of tall pines. Now she understood how Lila’s beau was able to build the ladder without getting caught. Wayne’s estate wasn’t here, so there had been no one to catch him.
“ So what now?” Izzy said.
“ Manny’s place is a ten minute hike that way.” Lila pointed into the trees. “He’s secure in the fact that his home can’t be approached from directly below the back, but we’re almost a quarter mile away here and off to the east. He couldn’t secure the whole damn mountain, that’s why the fence.” Lila started into the trees.
Izzy followed and in seconds she was surrounded by the trees and though they were pine trees and though Christmas was just around the corner, the atmosphere was far from festive. In the fog, the trees seemed like ghostly apparitions, reaching out for her as she brushed past them. In another life, she’d’ve been terrified, but after surviving the last couple days, including the ledge out on that cliff, it would take a lot more than a few trees on a foggy night to frighten her.
Ahead, Izzy saw gauzy strings of light penetrating the forest through the fog.
Lila stopped.
“ We’re here,” she said.
They were through the forest and Izzy saw a hazy circle of light up ahead in the fog and she was struck with the thought that she was dead and supposed to go toward it.
“ That’s it?” Izzy said, knowing it was.
“ Yeah,” Lila said. “I thought we’d be belly crawling from here to the fence, then along it to the cliff, trying not to get electrocuted, but with this fog, it’s looking like we can walk right up, invisible to everybody but the dogs.”
“ You hope,” Izzy said.
“ Hope what?”
“ That we don’t get electrocuted.”
